Obama’s Speech — Some Cheers, Some Jeers

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

Today President Obama gave a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, announcing his new plan for space exploration in the 21st century. When I first started reading about this upcoming speech a day or so ago, I was a little bit surprised because it didn’t sound as if there were very many new ingredients in it, and yet the press was treating it as news. I guess the point is that this was his first time talking about the space program in public, so that makes it news.

Anyway, many points of the plan were already announced in February:

• Cancellation of the Constellation Program that was originally intended to take astronauts back to the moon by 2020
• Ending the space shuttle program this year or early 2011
• Continuing funding for the International Space Station through 2020
• Increasing NASA’s budget by $6 billion over 5 years (considerably less than the $3 billion per year increase that the Augustine Commission concluded was necessary to keep our human spaceflight program moving toward its goals)
• An increased commitment to robotic spaceflight, including precursor missions to the moon, asteroids, etc.
• Supporting (and in fact depending on) the fledgling commercial launch industry to get us into low earth orbit for the next few years

As far as I could tell, there were two new wrinkles announced today (although they were already leaked to the press earlier this week):

• The Orion crew exploration vehicle, originally part of the Constellation Program, is revived in scaled-back form as an escape vehicle for the space station.
• Work will continue on designing a new heavy-lift rocket with an earlier target date for “finalizing the design,” no later than 2015. (Previously it was 2017 or later.)

The first ingredient sounds to me like a sop to supporters of the Constellation Program, so that we have something to show for the money we spent on Orion. It sounds like converting a Porsche into a garbage truck. When I expressed this opinion to my wife, though, she said, “Well, if you’re going to have an escape pod, wouldn’t you rather have it be a Porsche escape pod?” Point taken.

The second ingredient was also part of the Constellation Program; there was going to be both a heavy-launch vehicle (to ferry heavy stuff into orbit, like the Orion and the moon lander) and a lighter rocket to launch the people. A heavy-launch vehicle is also needed if you want to take the much longer trip to Mars. Obama wants us to refocus our attention on sending humans to Mars, so this part of his plan makes a certain amount of sense. Also, though I’m not anything close to an expert on rocket technology, it seems to me that it’s not too likely that the private sector could build the heavy-launch rocket. Something this big hasn’t been done before (except maybe the Saturn V?) and it will probably take more resources than space companies can command. So it makes sense to take this out of their hands, and have them just focus on the lighter rocket to take humans to orbit.

The rest of the speech was mostly words, not specific commitments, but here are a few things that caught my attention.

First, he said, “after decades of neglect, we will increase investment — right away — in other groundbreaking technologies that will allow astronauts to reach space sooner and more often, to travel farther and faster for less cost, and to live and work in space for longer periods of time more safely… How do we shield astronauts from radiation on longer missions? How do we harness resources on distant worlds? How do we supply spacecraft with energy needed for those far-reaching journeys?” (my italics)

The last two parts should definitely involve going back to the moon, to prospect more thoroughly for water that can be separated into oxygen and hydrogen, for use as rocket fuel. So even if the moon is not a target in Obama’s new agenda, it is still an enabler.

Now here’s a line that made me groan:

“Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before.” (my italics)

This was a total “He doesn’t get it” moment for me. As I’ve said before, saying that we’ve seen the moon, just because we have been to six places, fairly close together, on the near side, is like saying you’ve seen the Grand Canyon just because you’ve been to the visitor’s center of the Grand Canyon. Or it’s like going to the Mojave Desert and saying that you don’t need to go the Grand Canyon, because it will just be more of the same. Whatever. The moon is a big and varied place, and we haven’t explored most of it.

Here’s a line that made me cheer:

“Fifty years after the creation of NASA, our goal is no longer just a destination to reach. Our goal is the capacity for people to work and learn and operate and live safely beyond the Earth for extended periods of time, ultimately in ways that are more sustainable and even indefinite.”

Now that part sounds very much like what Paul Spudis has been preaching in his blog. A reorientation away from “sortie missions” and toward sustaining a permanent presence in space, based on the concept of a sustainable space economy.

All in all, there are some good points and some disappointing things in Obama’s plan, but of course in the real world you can’t have everything. The support for robotic missions will be really good for scientists. The human spaceflight program still looks a bit muddled; I don’t think it will satisfy Obama’s critics.

It’s interesting to see that the Apollo astronauts themselves are split. One Apollo 11 astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, was there to lend his support (although there was some joking among the news commentators about whether he was wearing his Dancing With the Stars shoes!). His companion on Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong, signed a letter (with Gene Cernan and Jim Lovell of Apollo 17 and Apollo 13) saying that they were afraid the Obama strategy was the beginning of a “slide to mediocrity” for NASA.

I would say that it all depends on the follow-through. Will Obama continue to devote attention to rebuilding NASA, changing its culture, and refocusing it on sustainable exploration? If so, then maybe the human spaceflight program will end up better, and today’s speech will be seen as a bold step forward. On the other hand, if Obama gives a 26-minute speech and then lets NASA go on its rudderless way, then I’d have to agree with Neil Armstrong.

Posted in Future exploration, NASA, Science | 3 Comments »

There is No Santa Claus; Is There an Enterprise?

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

For months we’ve been waiting to hear what the Obama administration response would be to the Augustine Commission report on the future of NASA’s manned space flight program. Now it looks as if we have our answer, and it ain’t pretty.

The Augustine Commission outlined four possible directions for NASA. The last two were called “Flexible Path” and “Moon First.” The first two could be called “Moon Never” (though the report used different names). The commission further argued that in order to have a human space program that our country could be proud of, NASA’s budget would have to be augmented by about $3 billion per year.

As reported here and here and many other places, it looks as if President Obama has now placed his bets on the more ambitious of the two versions of “Moon Never.” Here is what I wrote about this option in my post from September:

Moon Never, ISS on Life Support. Slightly more palatable, this option also abandons hope for sending humans beyond low Earth orbit, but it at least acknowledges that it would be a disgrace to build a space station for 25 years, operate it for 5 years, and then torpedo it. The Augustine committee said that we can keep the ISS going to 2020 by developing a smaller heavy-launch rocket and relying on commercial companies to generate cheaper alternatives for launching humans into orbit.

This pretty much describes what I have read about the proposal Obama is going to send to Congress, although we can now paint in a few more details. There is some talk that the space budget will increase by $1 billion per year (not $3 billion per year). In early January, the word was that this money was going to go to NASA but now looks as if it might go in part toward incentives for private companies to build launch solutions. Obama is definitely scuttling the Constellation program and its associated rocket, the Ares I-X. This is a bridge-burning move. Even if we changed our minds and wanted to send astronauts to the moon by 2020, or even the mid-2020s, without Constellation we wouldn’t have the hardware to get them there.

Of course I am disappointed by this decision. However, it was not the least bit surprising. In today’s economy, with talk of a budget freeze on discretionary spending, where was Obama going to find $3 billion? I consider some of the online criticism of his decision to be disingenuous; I suspect that many of his critics would have jumped on him, perhaps even harder, if he had chosen to ask Congress for another $3 billion per year for NASA.

I’m disappointed that Obama didn’t take more seriously the commission’s finding that NASA needed this money to have any kind of credible manned flight program. It wasn’t really a choice between $18 billion and $21 billion. It was a choice between $18 billion flushed down the toilet, or $21 billion producing tangible results.

I’m disappointed also that there was no acknowledgement of the fact that, after the discoveries this fall concerning lunar water, the moon is actually an interesting destination again. Even if we concede that short-term financial considerations prevent us from having a viable human spaceflight program for a few years, a leader who was truly committed to space would outline a long-term strategy and a rationale that would include sustainable presence in space as its #1 objective. The best arguments I have seen in that direction are the ones on Paul Spudis’s blog. When you make that the rationale, the moon becomes a required destination, not an optional one.

However, I do see some reason for optimism in Obama’s decision, bleak as it may seem. It really does mark a break with the past. Gone is the pretense that NASA can do everything. Until now, there was always the hope that there was a Santa Claus, that the U.S. government or taxpayers would somehow step in and make NASA’s wishes come true. It’s possible that this was in some way holding back the efforts of private companies and investors to think creatively about what they could accomplish in space.

Now, there is no other game in town. We will only get as far in space as international partners and private companies, such as SpaceX, can take us. Lovers of free enterprise should be delighted; this is a chance to show that entrepreneurs can be better at “the vision thing” than presidents. For the near future, it seems, we are hitching our wagon to a starship named Enterprise.

I personally have some doubts. I’m not sure that space exploration companies are ready to walk on their own two feet. But we are going to find out, one way or the other.

A metaphor for the future of human spaceflight?

(Image from www.startrek.com.)

Tags: Augustine Commission, Barack Obama, disappointment, Flexible Path, reality, sustainability, the vision thing
Posted in Arrive, Future exploration, Media, NASA, Popular culture | 1 Comment »

More from the AGU: Pink Moon, White Mountains

Friday, December 18th, 2009

My last two posts were about the American Geophysical Union meeting, held this week in San Francisco. The meeting is now over, but I’m not done writing about it yet — not by a long shot!

In 1971, Nick Drake recorded a song called “Pink Moon” that became a posthumous hit in 1999 when it appeared in a Volkswagen commercial. Now it turns out that he was really on to something. On Wednesday afternoon, Carle Pieters, the lead scientist for the Moon Mineralogy Mapper on Chandrayaan-1, the Indian spacecraft that circled the moon for ten months, talked about her discovery of a new, magnesium-rich pink spinel.

Well, okay, it isn’t really a pink moon. But if you go to the moon’s far side and land your spacecraft on the edge of the Moscoviense basin — a very attractive place, with one of the few maria on the moon’s far side — she says that you can dig up all the pink spinel that you want.

Because we have never landed anything on the moon’s far side — human, robot, or other — we’ll have to wait a while to find out if she is right. The evidence from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M-cubed for short) is a very distinctive spectrum, with no absorption at 1 micron and a “whopping” (Pieters’ technical term) absorption band at 2 microns, that is totally unlike any other known moon rocks but a very good match for pink spinel measured in the laboratory.

Jessica Sunshine also talked about spinel, but hers is very dark, not pink, and is probably mostly chromite. M-cubed found this deposit — also previously unknown — at only one place on the near side of the moon, a region called Sinus Aestuum. Why only there? Dunno. How much is there? Dunno. But this would be a great spot to explore once we start sending robots or astronauts back to the moon. (2015? 2020? 2100? Never?)

The good thing, and the bad thing, about both of these talks is that they were just good ol’ talks about rocks, the sort of things that geologists like to talk about when the press isn’t watching. Lest we forget, M-cubed was not really intended to look for water ice. The whole business about water was really an unexpected bonus. If they had really expected to see water, they would have made the spectrometer sensitive out to 3.6 microns. (3 microns is enough to see the peak absorption bands of hydroxyl and water at 2.7 and 2.8, but not the full spectra.)

Neither Pieters’ nor Sunshine’s findings are going to make headlines, but they are good examples of a scientific instrument doing what it was meant to do, and finding new stuff. The take-home message for non-geologists is just that the moon is not a homogeneous place; it has stuff we haven’t seen before and it most likely has stuff we haven’t even thought of yet. The other message is that all of these discoveries allow us to piece together a few more puzzle pieces to understand lunar geology.

In the case of the spinel, Larry Taylor explained in his talk how these deposits were probably formed by secondary intrusions of magma into the anorthosite layer at the top of the lunar magma ocean. In her final talk, Pieters also mentioned the magma ocean, which is believed to have encircled the moon immediately after its formation by a giant impact. She said that M-cubed found a “massive amount” of anorthosite in the Inner Rook Mountains in Mare Orientale, which she described as “very strong evidence for the magma ocean hypothesis.”

This comment made me sit up in surprise. I tend to think of the magma ocean as a done deal; I wrote about it in my book as one of the major discoveries, perhaps the major discovery, of the Apollo missions. Why would you care about proving something you already know?

The reason is that in science, nothing is ever really a done deal. A hypothesis may eventually become a theory, and it may become conventional wisdom, but you always want to collect new data and look for new evidence. The magma ocean hypothesis is based on a few anorthositic dust samples and anorthositic rocks collected by the Apollo astronauts. Until now, we hadn’t really seen any large-scale structures made of anorthosite. Now we have seen a whole mountain range of the stuff, or at least Pieters thinks we have, from orbit. The next thing to do is send a geologist there and see if she is right. Do we have any volunteers to go and look for Carle Pieters’s white mountain range?

Tags: anorthosite, Carle Pieters, Chandrayaan-1, Jessica Sunshine, Larry Taylor, lunar magma ocean, Mare Orientale, Moon Mineralogy Mapper, Moscoviense, Sinus Aestuum, spinel
Posted in Future exploration, Media, Meetings, Missions, Science | 1 Comment »

Naked Astronauts, etc.

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Sometimes the best questions are facetious.

This morning I was attending the moon sessions at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. One of the talks was by Justin Kasper, who works on the cosmic ray detection experiment (CRaTER) on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. After his talk, one of the audience members (Mark Robinson of the LRO Camera team) asked what have to be the most unexpected questions of the meeting:

“So, is an astronaut’s suit dangerous? In a theoretical sense, would it be better for an astronaut to go naked?”

Before I tell you the answer, let me tell you why the question is not as crazy as it seems.

Kasper had just reported on the most unexpected finding so far by the cosmic ray experiment. It was supposed to measure how much radiation on the moon is coming from outer space (cosmic rays) and the sun (mostly protons from the solar wind). But they have found that the moon itself is a significant source of radiation.

In open space, CRaTER counted about 33 cosmic rays per second. (By the way, that’s an unusually high number. The sun is currently in one of the most quiet phases ever recorded in its magnetic cycle, which means that it is not doing as good a job as usual of blocking cosmic rays from outside the solar system.) When LRO got into lunar orbit, about 50 kilometers above the surface, the count dropped to 22 cosmic rays per second. Sounds great — you’re safer on the moon than in outer space.

But here’s the catch. If you’re on the moon, the moon ought to block half the cosmic rays coming from outer space! Even if you’re orbiting 50 kilometers above the moon, the moon should still block about 14 out of 33 cosmic rays, letting only 19 through. Because CRaTER is recording 22 per second, the remainder of the radiation (3 events per second) must be coming from the moon!

At this point, they can’t be sure why, but Kasper conjectured that this radiation is produced by cosmic rays that hit the surface, smash up an atomic nucleus, and re-radiate back into space.

What does this have to do with space suits? Well, your space suit contains lots of heavy atomic nuclei for the cosmic rays to smash into. So if you’re an astronaut, you’re going to be exposed to some radiation emanating from your space suit, for the same reason. That’s why Robinson asked his question.

Now really we don’t recommend future astronauts to do the full moon-ty. There are good reasons for wearing a space suit, such as the inconvenient fact that humans need air to breathe. However, Kasper did say that we should think carefully about what we make space suits out of. Are some materials better at absorbing cosmic rays than others? It’s also relevant for building shelters on the moon. “The results suggest that building a wall is a little more helpful than building an umbrella,” he said.

Actually, this comment was facetious too, because a flimsy umbrella isn’t going to help you much against cosmic rays. In an interview last week, Jack Burns of the University of Colorado, a science advisor for NASA, told me that one of the best defenses against cosmic rays is actually a tank of water. (That is one more reason why discovering water on the moon is important.)

Tags: AGU, cosmic rays, full monty, LRO, radiation, sun
Posted in Future exploration, Just for Fun, Meetings, NASA, Science | 1 Comment »

LEAG Conference, part 2

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

While the LEAG meeting in Houston last week featured lots of exciting new results from LCROSS and LRO, it also provided an opportunity for discussion about the future of lunar exploration, human spaceflight, and NASA. The main theme of the meeting was sustainability: If and when humans return to the moon, how do they do so in a sustainable way?

One point that everyone (as far as I could tell) agreed on is that the Apollo model is not sustainable. By “the Apollo model” I mean what the lunar scientists like to call “sorties.” You build an enormous rocket, you take everything you need with you, you leave all of your junk there and you never use it again.

An alternative approach would be incremental or cumulative. You would probably start with several robotic precursor missions that would establish where your key resources are, and perform technology demos. Can we extract oxygen from lunar rocks? Can we extract water from lunar soils? Can we control lunar dust so that it doesn’t get into everything and cause all of our machines to break down? Can we safeguard astronauts from radiation?

If we find satisfactory answers to these questions, then we can build a base on the moon, although another possibility would be a base at the L1 point (or Lagrange point) where Earth’s gravity and the moon’s gravity cancel each other out. The things that you need to bring from Earth are brought a little bit at a time, somewhat like the way that we built the International Space Station. You don’t just go there, use your stuff once, and leave it. You need to re-use as much as you can. And finally, if there is anything that you can produce onsite, you do it. That primarily means (at this stage of the discussion) water, atmosphere, food, and propellant.

What I’ve just said may seem obvious, but it was surprisingly non-obvious for a very long time. Those of us who lived through the Apollo era were very surprised when the trips to the moon stopped. A lot has been written about the possible reasons: the public’s apathy, the Cold War politics that went into the moon race, the Vietnam War that sapped the American budget, etc. But maybe it had to happen. The whole approach was unsustainable.

Even now, many people still want to reproduce the Apollo model as we prepare for missions to Mars. This was the chief criticism that I heard of the Augustine Commission report. The “Flexible Path” option, many people felt, was just “Apollo on steroids,” traveling to more places with one-shot missions instead of building up the infrastructure for a sustainable presence in space.

I suppose I should name some names here. Paul Spudis is an especially passionate advocate of the idea that we must think about sustainability when we return to space. I wish I could just copy his whole presentation here, but that would not be very original. He said, “The goal is not to excite the public. The public must see the value in lunar exploration, which is different from making it exciting.” He took issue with the Augustine Commission’s conclusion that the ultimate destination (their words) is Mars. “The goal of returning to the moon is to become a spacefaring species,” he said. I think this is a great mission statement. Mars is not the ultimate goal; the ultimate is to be able to go wherever we want. Spudis would build up that capability on the moon.

Also, Igor Mitrofanov gave a perspective from the Russian space agency: “We will support missions to the moon if we will go there forever. Then we will participate as a nation.” He compared the moon to a new continent: “The first explorers looked for a place for a settlement, a bay, a harbor,” he said. Obviously he is arguing for a base approach rather than a sortie approach.

Many participants in the meeting said that sustainability would have to mean economic viability. Paul Spudis, as usual, formulated the question nicely, by listing three stages of lunar exploration: Arrive, Survive, Thrive. So far we have shown that we can Arrive. The next step is Survival — showing that we can stay for a long time on the moon — but ultimately the point of the whole exercise is to Thrive.

Both Spudis and Bob Wegeng, of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, drew analogies with the development of railroads in the 19th century. I went to lunch with Wegeng, who exposited at length about the railroads and told me some things that I did not know before. In school (in the U.S., at least), we all hear about the golden spike that completed the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. It’s part of our national mythology, just as much as the moon landing 100 years later. But that railroad went bankrupt several times, in spite of all of its government support!

The first economically successful transcontinental railroad, according to Wegeng, was the Great Northern Railway, built by James Jerome Hill. Wikipedia says it  was ”the first transcontinental built without public money and … one of the few transcontinental railroads not to go bankrupt.” Hill built up the Great Northern’s customer base by selling homesteads to farmers along the railroad route and even building industrial plants that would be served by his railroad.

If we want to learn from this example, it suggests that we will Thrive on the moon when a mega-corporation comes along, led by one person with vision, which does not just focus on the transportation technology but constructs a whole econosphere on the moon.

Who could that mega-corporation be? Not the current aerospace companies; they are too much like the government-backed railroads that failed. What about Google? I don’t know. It seems a little bit outside of their skill set, but they do have the vision. All things considered, the vision is probably more important than the skills or the capital, which can always be acquired on the way.

Anyway, getting back to the LEAG meeting, the one presentation that really looked at the moon from an economic point of view was by Brad Blair, a mining engineer who also works with the Canadian Space Agency. His paper was actually out of date — he presented an economic analysis of investing in the moon that he published back in 2002 or 2003. He analyzed five different scenarios, and in the last, ridiculously optimistic scenario he showed a possible return on investment in the range of $3 to $4 billion. I think the importance of his study lies not so much in the specific numbers or conclusions but in the methodology. I think his work needs to be updated for the decade of the 2010s. The discussion of lunar exploration has been completely dominated so far by scientists and engineers, but at some point some economists need to get involved.

Finally, in the discussion of sustainability, there were some interesting points made about public opinion. Spudis calls it the “50-50-50 problem”: public support for NASA has hovered around 50 percent for and 50 percent against for 50 years. And that includes the supposed heyday of NASA when we were racing to beat the Russians to the moon. Even back then, there were a lot of people who didn’t see the point, and argued that the money would be better spent solving problems on Earth. Public support for NASA has never been significantly more than 60 percent or less than 40 percent.

Spudis’ point was that if our justification for exploring space is “inspiring the public,” then we will never succeed. We need to go beyond inspiration to providing economic value.

At the same time, someone (I’m not sure who) pointed out from the audience that 50 percent support is not really a bad thing. Politicians are glad to have 50 percent, because it means they can be re-elected. Popular support for a lot of our public institutions runs a good deal lower than 50 percent. So instead of asking what NASA is doing wrong, perhaps we should advertise the fact that they are doing something right. Message to politicians: If you invest money in NASA, about half of the population will support you, as they have now for half a century.

The big unknown, at this moment, is whether any politicians are listening … especially the ones that matter, who live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Tags: Apollo, Augustine Commission, base, Economy, James Jerome Hill, LEAG, Paul Spudis, Politics, railroads, resources, sustainability
Posted in Arrive, Future exploration, Meetings, NASA, Survive, Thrive | 6 Comments »