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To no one’s great surprise, on Monday President Obama canceled the Man on the Moon program started by his predecessor Present Bush the younger. It always looked like a forlorn hope. Common comments were that it was under funded and motivated by the wrong impulses. Some very uncharitable persons suggested it was more about getting some good vibes by appealing to public pride in past achievements to counter adverse vibes from other directions.
In its place President Obama has directed NASA to develop a more focused and creative cost effective interplanetary explorations strategy.
Some have said the decision is long over due and that the previous plan was sub optimal. It has for instance been recently suggested that a better plan would be to aim for the colonization of one of the moons of Mars as a first step in the extensive exploration of Mars which seems generally regarded as the next major step in man’s further exploration of the solar system.
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Probably not many of us lie awake nights pondering how we can be sure our GPS positions are firmly related to reality. It just is enormously reassuring to have that machine telling us where we are. Because it is presented via flashing lights and after much button pushing we are inclined to take its accuracy for granted. Well mostly it is very accurate and a marvel of technology it is too. But when one stops to consider there are some technical difficulties which have been very ingeniously addressed. When you are a photon of electromagnetic radiation or a molecule vibrating in space and time as you go about your business, the Earth, rather than being a solid stable reference point, is a shifting plate of vibrating Blancmange. Not even once does a position on or in the earth trace out the same path. The surface of the Earth is perpetually vibrating and quivering and the centre of rotation of the earth is never the same from one moment to the next when one gets close to serious accuracy. Tides, thermal expansion, Nutation, the influence of the moon, relativistic effects due to the alterations in the earths orbital speed all mean we have to look outside the solar system for a base line to refer orbital motions to in order that we have a base line to reference our measuments to. First it was a collection of fixed stars but they too move. Now there is a new and improved base line. Called the ICRF2, this new map uses observations of about 3,000 quasars with the Very Long Baseline Interferometer (VLBI). Sort of does put it all into perspective.

The VLBI is a special network of radio telescopes from all over the world that together have the resolving power of a telescope thousands of miles in diameter. (Though quasars burn intensely brightly, their enormous distance makes them too faint to locate accurately with a conventional optical telescope.)

The new quasar observations were able to reduce the uncertainties in the quasar positions to angles as small as 40 microarcseconds — about the thickness of a 0.7-millimeter mechanical pencil lead in Los Angeles as viewed from Washington, D.C. This uncertainty is five times better than the original ICRF.
http://www.livescience.com/space/091103-st-gps-quasars.html

Today NASA’s ARES I rocket was successfully launched down range from Cape Canaveral. No pictures yet.  Given the shadows hanging over NASA’s plans this shot simply had to be perfect, and it was. The US manned space program should now go ahead. More tomorrow, a bit late from my coordinates !…..

The NASA Constellation program is a manned spaceflight project continuing that tradition as the Shuttle program comes to an end. The program includes two boosters, the ARES 1 and the ARES V. The ARES I will be used to get the astronauts into orbit, the ARES V is the heavy lifter to get all the equipment for assembly in orbit for the manned missions to the moon and beyond. That is space shuttle ATLANTIS in the background.

Here is a picture to give you the idea.

The ARES-IX booster is the first major asset to be flight tested, launch scheduled  for Tuesday October 27. That was the date for the Saturn V first flight in 1961. Maybe there is something symbolic in this choice, but there is more, the White House could conceivably curtail or even cancel the whole project, depending on Obama’s expert Augustine commitee report, delivered last week. See the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee releases its Final Report NASA press release. This report is a serious effort 18 months in preparation by a star-studded team. Ominously, the executive summary starts with these words…

The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources. Space operations are among the most demanding and unforgiving pursuits ever undertaken by humans. It really is rocket science. Space operations become all the more difficult when means do not match aspirations. Such is the case today.

The committee have invited comments on the Nasa website, just follow the links to FaceBook and Twitter and the rest set out on that page. If the faux rocket scientists of Wall Street can be bailed out, why not the true scientists. Please have your say.

Every so often there is a buzz that someone has made a stunning break through in the Physical Sciences and achieve something wondrous. Antigravity, a space warp, cold fusion, action at a distance or some such. There are persistent rumors that people who know better than us are seriously researching exotic physics and indeed physics is become so bizarre that it would take a really arrogant person (such as the English scientists who declared the end of Physics after Newton had enunciated his laws of motion) to say any of these things are really truly impossible. There is a sort of suspicion that if we can’t go through the problem maybe we can go round it.
The latest example of this is the so called Emdrive developed initially by a small English company SPR (Satellite Propulsion research) Ltd The developer Roger Shawyer has good credentials and does not seem a lunatic but that has not stopped a lot of people some of them very well qualified themselves responding to a recent article in New Scientist with a mixture of scorn outrage and the scientific version of frothing at the mouth. This is because the claim if true will transform space travel and given that the Chinese have taken up the idea ahead of the rest of the space faring world it will see the Chinese with a healthy lead in a radical new development.
The Chinese team has purchased rights to part of the process and claims to have verified the theory and made progress with its practical application since June 2007. The team headed by Professor Yuan at Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) in Xi’an is building a thruster based on Shawyer’s theories scheduled to be completed by end of this year.
The device that has sparked their interest is an engine that generates thrust purely from electromagnetic radiation – microwaves to be precise – by exploiting the strange properties of relativity. It has no moving parts, and releases no exhaust or noxious emissions. Potentially, it could pack the punch of a rocket in a box the size of a suitcase. It could one day replace the engines on almost any spacecraft. More advanced versions might allow cars to lift from the ground and hover. It could even lead to aircraft that will not need wings at all. One can’t help thinking that it sounds too good to be true.
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LCROSS Lunar Impact
7:31 a.m. EDT/4:31 a.m. PDT
Friday Oct. 9

Earth’s closest neighbor is holding a secret. In 1999, hints of that secret were revealed in the form of concentrated hydrogen signatures detected in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles by NASA’s Lunar Prospector. These readings may be an indication of lunar water and could have far-reaching implications as humans expand exploration past low-Earth orbit. The Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission is seeking a definitive answer.

In April 2006, NASA selected the LCROSS proposal for a low-cost, fast-track companion mission to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The main LCROSS mission objective is to confirm the presence or absence of water ice in a permanently shadowed crater near a lunar polar region.

LCROSS launched with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on June 18, 2009 at 2:32 p.m. PDT. The LCROSS shepherding spacecraft and the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage rocket executed a fly-by of the moon on June 23, 2009 (LCROSS lunar swingby video stream coverage) and entered into an elongated Earth orbit to position LCROSS for impact on a lunar pole. On final approach, the shepherding spacecraft and Centaur will separate. The Centaur will act as a heavy impactor to create a debris plume that will rise above the lunar surface. Projected impact at the lunar South Pole is currently: Oct 9, 2009 at 4:30 a.m. PDT. Following four minutes behind, the shepherding spacecraft will fly through the debris plume, collecting and relaying data back to Earth before impacting the lunar surface and creating a second debris plume.

The debris plumes are expected to be visible from Earth- and space-based telescopes 10-to-12 inches and larger.

The LCROSS science payload consists of two near-infrared spectrometers, a visible light spectrometer, two mid-infrared cameras, two near-infrared cameras, a visible camera and a visible radiometer. The LCROSS instruments were selected to provide mission scientists with multiple complimentary views of the debris plume created by the Centaur impact.

As the ejecta rises above the target crater’s rim and is exposed to sunlight, any water-ice, hydrocarbons or organics will vaporize and break down into their basic components. These components primarily will be monitored by the visible and infrared spectrometers. The near-infrared and mid-infrared cameras will determine the total amount and distribution of water in the debris plume. The spacecraft’s visible camera will track the impact location and the behavior of the debris plume while the visible radiometer will measure the flash created by the Centaur impact.

NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., is overseeing the development of the LCROSS mission with its spacecraft and integration partner, Northrop Grumman, Redondo Beach, Calif. LCROSS is a fast-paced, low-cost, mission that will leverage some existing NASA systems, commercial-off-the-shelf components, the spacecraft expertise of Northrop Grumman and experience gained during the Lunar Prospector Mission in 1999. Ames is managing the mission, conducting mission operations, and developing the payload instruments, while Northrop Grumman designed and is building the spacecraft for this innovative mission. Ames mission scientists will spearhead the data analysis.

In the near term one stage to orbit is seeming progressively more likely as the low (relatively) cost option for space travel but for the student of speculation there are some really exciting prospects in the more distant future.
Some of the mooted projects are space towers in which orbiting stations suspend elevators to the surface and others include self suspending orbital rings, space fountains and maglev launching loops.

Current mega structures such as the Oresund bridge which connects Sweden to Denmark and is about 18 miles long, the Viaduc de Millau Bridge in the South of France 8000 ft and the Rion Antirion cable bridge in Greece is over 7000 ft long are dwarfed by the proposed structures. In the case of the orbital loop launcher, for optimal functioning the loop is to be 5000 km long and move at about 14 km/sec. It is hard to imaging that anything so immense could be planned and built but then there is also the tendency for whatever is possible to come to pass.

One of the hard to answer questions is why would any one bother? Two answers come to mind. Money and Prestige. If there is money in it the capitalists will do it. If there is prestige in it maybe as the century moves on some of the superpowers will see it as the war equivalent which will establish their premier place. Perhaps the first example of this is the plan announced by Shuichi Ono, chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association in Sept 2008 to built an orbital tower.

More theoretically if humanity is tied to earth forever it is more or less certainly doomed by Asteroid impact or solar evolution and so if society is to survive and humanity is to persist such structures must sooner or later be built. There is also the fact that it would be such fun.

Single stage to orbit (SSTO) is the way to go for cheaper space travel but so far it has defeated the available technology. Basically the reason for needing multiple stages is that carrying all the mass of a rocket into orbit makes the process inefficient and costly. With multiple stages mass can be dropped as the fuel in it is used. The problem with multiple stages is that re-using stages is difficult because they obviously have to be retrieved in one piece and without salt water damage if they are to be reused and there is obvious waste if they are expended. Despite the existance of some wayout plans for vastly more efficient techniques such as Space Towers which will lower an elevator down from orbit and Launch Fountains which would use a stream of projectiles to suspend structures in space, the near term technique of choice seems to be the use of air breathing engines for the initial boost to something like mach 5 after which an efficient rocket provides the remaining boost into orbit.
The suggestion that the SSTO is a step closer comes with claims by Reaction Engines Limited a British company to have under development a new form of hybrid engine which does not have the drawbacks of earlier planned hybrid strategies. They predict economically viable SSTO could be with us by 2012 Read more…

OSHKOSH, Wis. — Aviation lovers can get their first look at an airplane designed to launch spaceships at an experimental aircraft show in Wisconsin.

Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft is scheduled to arrive at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture gathering in Oshkosh on Monday.

WhiteKnightTwo is designed to carry a spaceship into the upper atmosphere. The spacecraft would then launch from the plane at 50,000 feet and soar into space.

Virgin Group’s billionaire chairman, Sir Richard Branson, hopes to use the system to offer private space rides. Each trip will cost a traveler $200,000.

Company officials say 300 seats have already been sold. Each spaceflight — up and back down without circling the Earth — will include about five minutes of weightlessness.
from http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gLL4Pcu9xZVrUwUKfXpl1UenWKJgD99MTIQ82

Technical problems are degrading the accuracy of signals from the last GPS satellite launched by the Pentagon, sparking concerns among U.S. military and aerospace industry officials that the next generation of the widely used satellites could face similar troubles.

The Air Force’s Southern California space acquisition center on Tuesday announced that a Global Positioning System satellite, manufactured by Lockheed Martin Corp. and launched in March, is experiencing performance problems in orbit. It hasn’t become part of the “operational constellation” of more than two dozen other GPS satellites, and is slated to undergo a battery of tests expected to stretch through October to try to resolve the problems, according to an Air Force news release. Read more…