You guys have prob­a­bly seen the reports about this, but we just wanted you to know where to go to get the straight gouge. NASA has a pretty amaz­ing site ded­i­cated to this mis­sion. Check it out.

What do we think — water, yes or no?

And I have dibs on “Moon Bomb” as the name of my next band.

– Ward

Trouble brew­ing?

Lawmakers warned this week that esca­lat­ing ten­sions with Russia may leave the U.S. with­out ready trans­port to the ISS after NASA retires the space shut­tle fleet in 2010.
The space agency does not expect the shuttle’s replace­ment, the Orionan Apollo-​​like craft being devel­oped as part of the Constellation pro­gramto be ready to fly until 2015. NASA’s plan was for the interim was to use Russian Soyuz craft to send up crew and cargo to the $100 bil­lion station.

How awk­ward would it be if the Russian relief showed up in 2010 and left the American on board? Kind of hard to ask Russia for a hitch to space while you’re actively run­ning logis­tics to their Georgian ene­mies.
It’s an inter­est­ing sce­nario to wargame out: If Ivan refuses to send up American astro­nauts and sticks to a Russia-​​only crew, does that mean that they’d be guilty of the first doc­u­mented case of space hijack­ing?
That said, Russia will prob­a­bly honor the agree­ment. They’ll want to avoid the nat­ural influx of fund­ing Congress would send to NASA to fast track Orion or keep the shut­tles run­ning for 5 more years.
Lucrative busi­ness, spacelift.
–John Noonan

Elon Musk is one of the gut­si­est entre­pre­neurs in the world. After mak­ing a pile from his share of PayPal which he co-​​founded Elon decided he wanted to do some­thing no new com­pany has done, build a new launch vehi­cle from scratch and then sell it.

A dogged and gifted sales­man, he sold the Air Force on the idea. They were being pushed hard by Congress to come up with a cheaper and sim­pler rocket to lift small– and medium-​​sized satel­lites into orbit, and Elon had a work­able solu­tion risky, but workable.

But the third try which analy­sis of past launch pro­grams indi­cate was cru­cial since pro­grams that dont have a suc­cess­ful launch in the first three rarely suc­ceed was pretty much an unmit­i­gated fail­ure, no mat­ter how adeptly Elon tries to spin it. The launch from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific went well but the sec­ond stage did not sep­a­rate correctly.

Even Jim Armor, for­mer head of the National Security Space Office and a devout sup­porter of Operationally Responsive Space, now says he would not approve launch of any national secu­rity pay­load atop a Falcon launch sys­tem unless Elon gets two suc­cess­ful and suc­ces­sive launches under his belt.

Armor, now an inde­pen­dent con­sul­tant, con­fessed to being dis­heart­ened by the lat­est SpaceX failure.

What a heart­breaker, he said when I reached him on the phone. He said Elon must accept that his com­pa­nys sys­tems engi­neer­ing skills are just not up to the task of putting together sev­eral rocket stages and get­ting them to work. As far as bring­ing it together in a stack Elon has been hum­bled by rocket sci­ence, Armor said. If I were him I would stop try­ing to do it by myself and would seek some out­side expertise.”

Read the rest of this story and get the lat­est update at DoD Buzz.

– Colin Clark

The U.S. Army plans to build and launch into orbit a con­stel­la­tion of satel­lites for the first time in roughly 50 years. And it plans to build the clus­ter of eight minia­ture com­mu­ni­ca­tions satel­lites within as lit­tle as nine months, defense offi­cials told Military​.com.

The roughly $5 mil­lion effort is part of the Army’s com­mit­ment to what is known as Operationally Responsive Space. The joint pro­gram, based at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., was cre­ated in May 2007 after years of vig­or­ous prod­ding by Congress to get the U.S. mil­i­tary to change how it con­ceives of, builds and flies satellites. 

For the Army, this is “a pathfinder project to ful­fill an urgent need for beyond line of sight com­mu­ni­ca­tions capa­bil­ity,” said James Lee, chief of strat­egy and pol­icy for Space and Missile Defense Command in Huntsville, Ala. 

Lee’s office set up a task force in March to decide how the Army should tackle the deploy­ment of space assets. And the money for the service’s satel­lite effort is com­ing from Army cof­fers, Lee added. 

The require­ment for the bantam-​​weight sats — which mea­sure about 30 inches square and weigh around five pounds — was gen­er­ated by a com­bat­ant com­man­der whom Lee declined to iden­tify. But you can get some idea who it is by the mis­sion he described for the so-​​called “cubesats.“ 

The satel­lites should pro­vide com­mu­ni­ca­tions for Army units below the brigade level oper­at­ing in parts of the world where the mil­i­tary has no cur­rent secure satel­lite com­mu­ni­ca­tions, such as Africa, Lee explained.

(more…)

From this morning’s front page at Military​.com.

The threat from an adversary’s use of space is more than just zap­ping a satel­lite out of sky. It could be as mun­dane as grab­bing an up-​​to-​​date recon­nais­sance image from a free Web site. 

That’s a sce­nario a top Air Force offi­cial is try­ing to counter as more coun­tries push their own com­mer­cial pay­loads into the high­est fron­tier. With the easy access to free online imagery ser­vices such as Google Earth and Yahoo Maps, and other paid sites, mil­i­tary offi­cials are wor­ried an enemy might gain vital intel­li­gence on U.S. and allied mil­i­tary posi­tions anony­mously and with lit­tle investment.

“It could be as sim­ple as how is it that an adver­sary gets an image off of Google Earth that could some­how threaten American lives or inter­ests,” said Lt. Gen. Michael Hamel, who man­ages space and mis­sile sys­tems devel­op­ment for the Air Force. “That is an exam­ple of a space threat that we may face in the future,” 

(more…)

Here’s an inter­est­ing story ripped from the head­lines at Military​.com. I’m intrigued by this idea and I’m won­der­ing if some of our more informed read­ers out there can add some light to this subject.

BALI, Indonesia — While great nations fret­ted over coal, oil and global warm­ing, one of the small­est at the U.N. cli­mate con­fer­ence was look­ing toward the heav­ens for its energy. 

The annual meeting’s cor­ri­dors can be a sound­ing board for unlikely “solu­tions” to cli­mate change — from fill­ing the skies with soot to block the sun, to cul­ti­vat­ing oceans of sea­weed to absorb the atmosphere’s heat-​​trapping car­bon dioxide. 

Unlike other ideas, how­ever, one this year had an influ­en­tial backer, the Pentagon, which is inves­ti­gat­ing whether space-​​based solar power — beam­ing energy down from satel­lites — will pro­vide “afford­able, clean, safe, reli­able, sus­tain­able and expand­able energy for mankind.“ 

Tommy Remengesau Jr. is inter­ested, too. “We’d like to look at it,” said the pres­i­dent of the tiny west­ern Pacific nation of Palau.

(more…)

Moderate tem­per­a­tures, nearly per­pet­ual sun­shine, flat land­ing areas and sub­ter­ranean resources make the rim of the Shackleton Crater — sit­u­ated within the solar system’s largest impact crater — an ideal loca­tion for a lunar home­stead, down near the moon’s south pole. NASA hopes to send the first pio­neers there by 2020.

“Hardscrabble” was what future pres­i­dent Ulysses S. Grant named his ram­shackle home­stead on the pre-​​Civil War Missouri fron­tier. That might be an apt title for NASA’s planned lunar out­post, for its res­i­dents will find the moon a harsh place to set­tle. Survival will depend on their abil­ity to evade microm­e­te­oroids, extract oxy­gen from rocks and even, like Grant, grow wheat.

The space agency announced its strat­egy to return to the moon last December. Instead of emu­lat­ing the series of six Apollo land­ings, it chose as its ini­tial goal the estab­lish­ment of a sin­gle lunar out­post. Using the new crew explo­ration vehi­cle, Orion, NASA plans to send four astro­nauts to the moon as early as 2020 (“Mission: Moon,” March ’07). Eventually, four-​​man crews will rotate home every six months. Their goal will be to live off the land, extend sci­en­tific explo­ration and prac­tice for an even­tual leap to Mars.

The moon, says NASA, is the place to get our space-​​suited hands dirty. “The lunar base is part of an over­all plan that has legs, that makes sense,” says Wendell Mendell, chief of the Office of Lunar and Planetary Exploration at Johnson Space Center. “We’re mov­ing the human species out into the solar system.”

Learn how NASA plans to build a Moon colony at Military​.com.

– Christian

High-​​altitude bal­loons, filmy bags of helium float­ing at alti­tudes that no known air­plane can sus­tain, have attracted increas­ing atten­tion as the US Air Force has looked at “near space” — above air traf­fic, with long lines of sight — as an oper­at­ing regime. One snag: bal­loons go whither the wind blows, pay­load and all.

A USAF-​​sponsored project to deal with that prob­lem, Talon Topper, has been under way for sev­eral years, and a crit­i­cal demon­stra­tion has just been dis­closed. Contractor Near Space Corporation — based in Oregon — has suc­cess­fully tested a Payload Return Vehicle (PRV), a rad­i­cal lifting-​​body glider that can safely descend from very high alti­tudes to a con­trolled land­ing, return­ing an instru­ment pack­age to a desired location.

Alert read­ers will instantly rec­og­nize the PRV for what it is — a close rel­a­tive of the Facetmobile, the all-​​flat-​​surface per­sonal air­craft designed and test-​​flown by Barnaby Wainfan, who is employed in civil­ian life as as an ace aero­dy­nam­i­cist at Northrop Grumman.

Important aspects of the design include the abil­ity to stay under con­trol in a Mach 0.98 dive (don’t try that with a con­ven­tional glider design), very light weight (use­ful for some­thing car­ried by a bal­loon) and a shape that read­ily accom­mo­dates large pay­loads and anten­nas. It also has a very low stalling speed for easy and safe recov­ery. Faceting is not there for stealth but to make the air­craft easy to build.

See the entire entry from Aviation Week’s Ares blog at Military​.com.

– Christian

The folks over at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments released a new report late last week on the U.S. efforts to develop space-​​based weaponry.

The long and the short of it is that Steve Kosiak, their prin­ci­ple bud­get ana­lyst and author of the report, believes at this point space-​​based mis­sile defense and space-​​based anti-​​satellite sys­tems are too expen­sive for their rel­a­tive effectiveness.

A con­stel­la­tion of space-​​based weapons designed to defend the United States against an attack with inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­siles (ICBMs) would be extremely costly to acquire and sup­port. Moreover, at least based on the tech­nol­ogy likely to be avail­able over the next twenty years, such a sys­tem would prob­a­bly not prove to be a cost-​​effective invest­ment, espe­cially when mea­sured against the cost to a poten­tial adver­sary of defeat­ing such a system.

Second, while space-​​based weapons intended to strike terrestrial-​​based tar­gets could, in some cases, cost sub­stan­tially less to acquire and sup­port than space-​​based bal­lis­tic mis­sile defense sys­tems, such weapons would likely prove more costlyand, in some instances, far more cost­lythan com­pa­ra­bly effec­tive terrestrial-​​based alternatives.

Third, while space-​​based ASAT weapons would also gen­er­ally be less costly to acquire and sup­port than space-​​based bal­lis­tic mis­sile defense sys­tems, there does not appear to be a com­pelling need, on either cost or effec­tive­ness grounds, to acquire a ded­i­cated space-​​based ASAT capa­bil­i­tyin part, because the US mil­i­tary already pos­sesses or is acquir­ing a range of terrestrial-​​based weapons with sig­nif­i­cant inher­ent ASAT capabilities.

Fourth, space-​​based defen­sive (body­guard) satel­lites would, to a great extent, be indis­tin­guish­able from space-​​based ASAT weapons. Thus, such sys­tems would likely have sim­i­lar costs. In addi­tion, their deploy­ment would pre­sum­ably have sim­i­lar impli­ca­tions for spark­ing or accel­er­at­ing an arms race in space. These weapons would also be inca­pable of pro­tect­ing against some of the ASAT threats most likely to emerge in com­ing years. A more effec­tive and cost-​​effective approach might be to rely on a range of pas­sive coun­ter­mea­sures. Strengthening US space sur­veil­lance and track­ing capa­bil­i­ties could also offer an impor­tant means of improv­ing the secu­rity of US satellites.

Fifth, although space-​​based weapons designed to strike terrestrial-​​based tar­gets, con­duct ASAT attacks, or inter­cept enemy ASAT weapons appear to be nei­ther nec­es­sary, nor, gen­er­ally, as cost effec­tive as terrestrial-​​based alter­na­tives, in a few instance­sun­like space-​​based bal­lis­tic mis­sile defense sys­tem­s­they appear to be rel­a­tively afford­able and may even rep­re­sent cost-​​effective options. In these cases, non-​​budgetary con­sid­er­a­tions, such the per­ceived strate­gic impor­tance of the capa­bil­ity and the poten­tial arms race impli­ca­tions of mov­ing ahead with such a sys­tem, will have to play the dom­i­nant role in shap­ing pro­gram­matic and pol­icy choices.

What he does advo­cate is some mix of decoy satel­lites, high-​​altitude drones that mimic satel­lite capa­bil­i­ties and the rejig­ger­ing of ground-​​based ICBM inter­cep­tors to an ASAT role.

Ultimately … the most cost-​​effective means of pro­tect­ing US satel­lite capa­bil­i­ties may be to rely on a range of pas­sive coun­ter­mea­sures, such as decoys, and terrestrial-​​based alter­na­tives, such unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles (UAVs). … Strengthening US space sur­veil­lance and track­ing capa­bil­i­ties offers an impor­tant means of improv­ing the secu­rity of US satel­lites.

I tend to believe that space weapons will be increas­ingly impor­tant given the U.S. reliance on satel­lites for every­thing from nav­i­ga­tion to com­mu­ni­ca­tions. But I like the idea that the U.S. can exploit vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in anti-​​satellite weaponry and weak­nesses with­out break­ing the bank, coun­ter­ing one coun­trys pro­pa­ganda win with a quiet so what?

– Christian

MIT astro­nau­tics pro­fes­sor Dava Newman tries on her custom-​​fitted BioSuit, designed for explo­ration and work on Mars. The pat­tern of thick, semi-​​elastic poly­mer threads forms a sup­port struc­ture to counter the low pres­sure of other planets.

Until recently, astro­nauts rarely wor­ried about what to wear — a stan­dard gas-​​pressurized space­suit was the only choice. But nav­i­gat­ing Mars in a bulky 300-​​pound setup would be like doing gym­nas­tics in a suit of armor. “They’re not going there to sit in the habi­tat,” says Newman. “They’ll have to work five to seven days a week.”

Newman has designed an alter­na­tive with enough flex­i­bil­ity to get the job done. Partially inspired by giraffe anatomy — the tall beasts use tight leg skin to help reg­u­late blood pres­sure — the BioSuit relies on mechan­i­cal coun­ter­pres­sure instead of gas pres­sure. Every suit must be tai­lored to squeeze its owner.

– Popular Mechanics