Thank goodness for the Baikonur Cosmodrome (I just love how that rolls off the tongue).

Well, if your SLBM goes haywire and leads the Nords to think aliens are attacking, why not take a hard left turn and ram an asteroid?

If the rumblings of Russia’s space agencies are true, it looks like they’re planning to spool up the Proton rockets and blast the Bejeezus out of poor Apophis, a diminutive comsic rock scheduled for an Earth flyby in 2029. But NASA doesn’t think there’s much chance the asteroid will hit terra firma, AP reports.

When the 270-meter (885-foot) asteroid was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated its chances of smashing into Earth in its first flyby, in 2029, at 1-in-37.

Further studies have ruled out the possibility of an impact in 2029, when the asteroid is expected to come no closer than 18,300 miles (29,450 kilometers) from Earth’s surface, but they indicated a small possibility of a hit on subsequent encounters.

NASA had put the chances that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 as 1-in-45,000. In October, after researchers recalculated the asteroid’s path, the agency changed its estimate to 1-in-250,000.

A few years ago space experts feared Apophis would come perilously close to Earth, making it a Level 1 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale (thanks Wikipedia), but dropped it off the scale after further calculations in 2006.

By the way, Apophis is the Greek word for the Egyptian demon who tries to eat the god Ra.

Makes me kind of want to rent Armageddon again and plan out my End of Days festivities. Or maybe, all us cynics are wrong and the Russkies really will save the Earth.

“People’s lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people,” Russia’s space agency chief Anatoly Perminov said.

– Christian

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

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.

The only services available in those regions come from commercial vendors, he said, and they’re often not American-owned.

In addition to providing needed communications links, the effort would also help build the Army’s overall space capabilities, Lee said.

“We feel it’s important to have experience at an engineering level to build space capabilities, even if it’s a simple as a cubesat,” he said. Army engineers will work alongside designers from a Huntsville-based company called MilTec, which will build the first six satellites. Space and Missile Defense Command will build the last two.

“We believe we have the expertise but many of our scientists don’t have hands-on experience,” Lee said.

All eight satellites will be launched together, either on a Minotaur or Falcon rocket. Minotaur, a four-stage solid fuel rocket that uses decommissioned Minuteman missile rocket motors, is built by Orbital Sciences Corp. The Falcon 1 is built by PayPal millionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX Company.

The Minotaur has flown seven times and the Falcon has launched twice but has not successfully lofted a payload into orbit.

The satellites will fly either in a swarm or will be flown in a loose formation. And Lee said the Army wants members of its space cadre to do the flying.

A senior Defense Department official who tracks space programs was supportive of the Army’s plans, calling the move “great news.” And in a sign of just how much the Air Force has dominated space systems and operations, the official noted that, “a little competition never hurt anyone.”

And Lee was careful to avoid offense: “We don’t really want to replace the Navy or the Air Force.” But with today’s strategic realities, and the limited resources currently available in orbit, the Army wants to make sure it plays its part.

– Colin Clark

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,”

Hamel told Military reporters at a March 11 breakfast meeting in Washington he is pressuring domestic licensing authorities to force satellite imagery providers to reduce the resolution of their images in areas where American troops are engaged, or to delay their image feed so that an adversary can’t get up-to-the-minute information on U.S. and allied military moves.

Most free online imaging tools block the resolution of their satellite photos in sensitive regions, though sometimes detailed information does slip through. On March 7, the head of the Northern Command banned Google Earth photo teams from U.S. military installations after one group shot panoramic images of Fort Sam Houston in Texas for the company’s “Street View” component.

Google officials quickly pulled the images from its Google Earth site and apologized for the incident, saying it wasn’t their policy to photo military bases.

That’s the kind of slip up that worries space managers like Hamel.

“We want our aerospace industry to be at the cutting edge of commercial providers” for imagery, Hamel explained. “We also want to make sure that the kind of information that can get out into the public domain and used is not going to threaten our legitimate security interests.”

“We’d like to have U.S. companies that are at the forefront of this such that we could … ensure that there is not data of greater currency than what we believe would be militarily acceptable.

But international commercial operators who aren’t beholden to any U.S. laws might balk at protecting America’s security interests in the face of cold hard cash. So Hamel hopes to either beat them into space and edge them out of the neighborhood, or cajole them into sticking to the American licensing standards.

“It’s part of our national interest to ensure that we set the conditions not only for U.S. companies but also set some of the norms in terms of how systems on an international or allied basis are used,” he added.

Though U.S. officials and military brass can try to strong-arm other countries into going America’s way, the rapid increase in demand for information that was once the only accessible by governments and the tools to deliver that data means the risk will only increase.

“We’re seeing a significant growth in both civil and commercial remote sensing capabilities … in this country and with friends and in various other nations are actively developing and fielding capabilities,” Hamel said. “It wasn’t too many years ago that what would have been our cutting edge reconnaissance capability, now are commercially purchasable products.

– Christian

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.

The Defense Department this October quietly issued a 75-page study conducted for its National Security Space Office concluding that space power — collection of energy by vast arrays of solar panels aboard mammoth satellites — offers a potential energy source for global U.S. military operations.

It could be done with today’s technology, experts say. But the prohibitive cost of lifting thousands of tons of equipment into space makes it uneconomical.

That’s where Palau, a scattering of islands and 20,000 islanders, comes in.

In September, American entrepreneur Kevin Reed proposed at the 58th International Astronautical Congress in Hyderabad, India, that Palau’s uninhabited Helen Island would be an ideal spot for a small demonstration project, a 260-foot-diameter “rectifying antenna,” or rectenna, to take in 1 megawatt of power transmitted earthward by a satellite orbiting 300 miles above Earth.

That’s enough electricity to power 1,000 homes, but on that empty island the project would “be intended to show its safety for everywhere else,” Reed said in a telephone interview from California.

Reed said he expects his U.S.-Swiss-German consortium to begin manufacturing the necessary ultralight solar panels within two years, and to attract financial support from manufacturers wanting to show how their technology — launch vehicles, satellites, transmission technology — could make such a system work. He estimates project costs at $800 million and completion as early as 2012.

At the U.N. climate conference here this month, a Reed partner discussed the idea with the Palauans, who Reed said could benefit from beamed-down energy if the project is expanded to populated areas.

“We are keen on alternative energy,” Palau’s Remengesau said. “And if this is something that can benefit Palau, I’m sure we’d like to look at it.”

Space power has been explored since the 1960s by NASA and the Japanese and European space agencies, based on the fundamental fact that solar energy is eight times more powerful in outer space than it is after passing through Earth’s atmosphere.

The energy captured by space-based photovoltaic arrays would be converted into microwaves for transmission to Earth, where it would be transformed into direct-current electricity.

Low-orbiting satellites, as proposed for Palau, would pass over once every 90 minutes or so, transmitting power to a rectenna for perhaps five minutes, requiring long-term battery storage or immediate use — for example, in recharging electric automobiles via built-in rectennas.

Most studies have focused instead on geostationary satellites, those whose orbit 22,300 miles above the Earth keeps them over a single location, to which they would transmit a continuous flow of power.

The scale of that vision is enormous: One NASA study visualized solar-panel arrays 3 by 6 miles in size, transmitting power to similarly sized rectennas on Earth.

Each such mega-orbiter might produce 5 gigawatts of power, more than twice the output of a Hoover Dam.

But how safe would those beams be?

Patrick Collins of Japan’s Azabu University, who participated in Japanese government studies of space power, said a lower-power beam, because of its breadth, might be no more powerful than the energy emanating from a microwave oven’s door. The beams from giant satellites would likely require precautionary no-go zones for aircraft and people on the ground, he said.

Rising oil costs and fears of global warming will lead more people to look seriously at space power, boosters believe.

“The climate change implications are pretty clear. You can get basically unlimited carbon-free power from this,” said Mark Hopkins, senior vice president of the National Space Society in Washington.

“You just have to find a way to make it cost-effective.”

Advocates say the U.S. and other governments must invest in developing lower-cost space-launch vehicles. “It is imperative that this work for ‘drilling up’ vs. drilling down for energy security begins immediately,” concludes October’s Pentagon report.

Some seem to hear the call. The European Space Agency has scheduled a conference on space-based solar power for next Feb. 29. Space Island Group, another entrepreneurial U.S. endeavor, reports “very positive” discussions with a European utility and the Indian government about buying future power from satellite systems.

To Robert N. Schock, an expert on future energy with the U.N.‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, space power doesn’t look like science fiction.

The panel’s 2007 reports didn’t address space power’s potential, Schock explained, because his team’s time horizon didn’t extend beyond 2030. But, he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised at the beginning of the next century to see significant power utilized on Earth from space — and maybe sooner.“

– Christian

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