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 »

Guide to the Cosmos, gold, New Scientist

Monday, January 11th, 2010

As of today, I’m on a podcast! Check out “Guide to the Cosmos,” a podcast hosted by Dr. Robert Piccioni, at www.guidetothecosmos.com. It was actually Christmas Eve Day when we recorded this interview over the phone, and it’s a two-parter. The first part, in today’s episode, is about water on the moon, and I talk all about the recent discoveries by Chandrayaan-1 and LCROSS. The second part is about the origin of the moon, and that part of the interview will air in February.

The audio part of the podcast is actually on a different site, called WebTalkRadio. You can go to their main site, www.webtalkradio.net, and then look for “Guide to the Cosmos” under the “Show podcasts” tab. But I’ll make it easy for you and give you a direct link. Dr. Piccioni also puts some images up on his own website to go with the podcast, which you can look at here as you listen to the interview.

When I recorded the interview I did not know which images he was going to have up on his website, so I wasn’t able to refer to them directly. Let me fill in that gap here. Image #1 shows the impact plume from LCROSS’s crash into the Cabeus crater.

Cabeus impact plume

This cloud of debris was not visible from Earth. The photo was taken from the “shepherding satellite” that passed directly overhead and crashed into the moon 4 minutes later. The spectrometers on the shepherding satellite analyzed both the absorbed and emitted light from this cloud to look for traces of water and other compounds. Image #2 is just a pretty picture of the full moon, nothing else. The LCROSS impact happened way down at the bottom of that picture, in the bumpy area around the south pole. Image #3 is a “wiggly line” from the ultraviolet and visible spectrometer.

Spectrum showing sodium emission line plus something interesting

Interestingly, this is not the data set that Tony Colaprete, the main project scientist, has talked about the most. Unlike the near infrared spectrometer, whose readings they understand pretty well and which show definitive evidence of water, the UV/VIS spectrum requires more interpretation and they are just beginning to work on it. The peak on the right is actually not water but sodium. (This emission band looks yellow to the naked eye, and explains why a sodium lamp is yellow. See this Wikipedia entry to read more about it.)

You can also see two shorter peaks on the left that have not been identified yet. At the AGU meeting in December, Tony said they think that one of them could be gold! Yes, gold on the moon. You read about it here first.

Back in the days before Apollo went to the moon, there was a slightly kooky scientist named Tommy Gold who said that the moon was covered by a layer of dust so deep that any spacecraft that landed on the moon would just sink into it and never be seen again. Fortunately, this didn’t turn out to be the case, but for a while NASA had to take the possibility seriously, and his hypothetical surface layer became known as “Gold dust.” But now lunar gold dust may take on a whole new meaning!

I did not report on this earlier (“LCROSS Strikes Gold!”) because they really don’t know what the peaks are yet, and so Tony’s comment was at least partly meant in jest. If they ever get more serious about it, I’ll be sure to let you know.

Last month I wrote an article for New Scientist online about the moon sessions at the AGU meeting, called “Are We Looking in the Wrong Places for Water on the Moon?” This was a very ticklish article to write, but I was happy with it in the end. Basically, the story is that one of the instruments on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been seeing lots of indications of water in places where it isn’t supposed to be.

LCROSS went to a permanently shadowed crater because that is where theory says that lunar water, if it exists, should concentrate. It went to Cabeus, in particular, because that is where the Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector (LEND) on LRO saw the highest concentrations of water. But what’s interesting, and controversial, is that LEND has seen no correlation so far between permanent shadowing and hydrogen deposits! There are other regions with just as much water as Cabeus that aren’t in shadow.

What made the article ticklish to write is that there are some people who frankly don’t believe the LEND data yet. I tried to hint at this without pouring oil onto the fire. But there are three groups–one in Russia, two in the U.S.–who are working on the LEND data and they all are saying pretty much the same thing. You can’t just ignore this fact and pretend it isn’t there, while at the same time singing the praises of LCROSS and the LRO camera and the other experiments on LRO. That’s why I felt it was important to write this article, even if the jury is still out on what the results mean.

In a blog I think I can be more adventurous than I can in print, so I’ll hazard a guess as to what it might mean. The LCROSS results are hinting that there is way more water than you can produce by bombarding the moon’s surface with the solar wind–some of the water has to be from meteoroids or comets. LEND can see beneath the surface, and Igor Mitrofanov, the principal investigator for LEND, says that he thinks they are seeing deposits of hydrogen that lie beneath the surface, covered by a layer of dry soil. Putting two and two together, I think that the water is delivered by meteoroids/comets, and is then buried by some process we don’t understand yet (or maybe it’s just in a sufficiently thick layer to begin with?). Once it’s buried, it doesn’t need a permanently shadowed crater to keep it from evaporating. Sure, it might be associated with a permanently shadowed crater, but really any crater will do. Or maybe even something that isn’t a crater! One of the most puzzling things about the LEND data was that one of the hydrogen deposits seemed to be on one side of a mountain range. But maybe that makes sense, if the mountain range was created by the meteoroid/comet impact.

Well, this is just my feeble amateur speculation. The specialists will, of course, hash it out and either come up with an explanation, or agree to disagree. One thing that’s pretty certain is that there is a lot we don’t know yet.

Tags: Chandrayaan-1, hydrogen, LCROSS, LEND, lunar origin, New Scientist, podcast, Robert Piccioni, Thomas Gold, water, WebTalkRadio
Posted in Media, Meetings, Missions, NASA, Science, websites | 2 Comments »

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 »

Water on the Moon — Bring your Buckets!

Friday, November 13th, 2009

As usual, the LCROSS press conference had a lot of Power Point slides, but probably the most memorable thing about it was an empty 2-gallon industrial bucket. Tony Colaprete, the lead scientist for the mission, said: “I’m here today to tell you that yes, indeed, we found water on the moon, and we didn’t just find a little, but we found a significant amount.” Then he held up the bucket. ”In the 20-30 meter wide impact crater that LCROSS made, we found about a dozen of these 2-gallon buckets. And that is probably a lower bound.”

Let me back up and give a little bit of context. Earlier missions, Clementine and Lunar Prospector, had found evidence for water ice but no direct proof. This year, three different missions simultaneously reported proof of water ice, because they detected not just the spectral signature of hydrogen (H) but also the hydroxyl molecule (OH). [It doesn't take too much knowledge of chemistry to see that hydrogen, H, plus hydroxyl, OH, equals water, HOH.] Not only that, the hydroxyl comes and goes over the course of a lunar day, which suggests that there is some chemistry going on at the moon’s surface. Carle Pieters, the principal investigator for the Chandrayaan-1 mission’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, estimated that you could get a liter of water from a football field-sized area of the moon’s surface. This was exciting news, but as a reality check, it still makes the moon drier than Earth’s driest desert.

LCROSS has found an oasis in the desert. It was targeted for a specific crater near the south pole, Cabeus, where remote sensors had detected a high concentration of hydrogen. It excavated a 30-meter crater, only a third the size of a football field. Within that region, it dug up not just a liter of water, but 100 liters. Again, for context, one reporter asked Colaprete how this compares with Earth’s driest deserts. He said, “If you stand on that beach [the sandy spot where LCROSS impacted], I can say that it is wetter than some deserts on Earth.”

Does this contradict the Chandrayaan-1 findings? Of course not. It just re-emphasizes how little we know. Chandrayaan-1′s measurements were taken over a broad swath of the moon. By comparison, LCROSS is just looking at a tiny pinprick on the surface. Also, Chandrayaan-1 was measuring only the water that is right at the surface, up to a few microns deep. On the other hand, LCROSS excavated to several meters below the surface. To me that was one of the most exciting things about LCROSS; unlike measurements from orbit, it really sees what is underground. (However, it turns out that I was not entirely correct when I thought that LCROSS would be the first mission to do this. Radar measurements can penetrate one or two meters. Chandrayaan-1 carried a radar instrument on board, but those results have not been published yet. When they do get published, Paul Spudis promises me that they will be good.)

So basically, we now have one data point where we had zero before. We know that at one particular location, we have found an oasis. It remains to be seen exactly how concentrated the water ice is there, how heterogeneous it is, how hard it is to find other areas with lots of water, how deeply it is buried, etc. Not only that, there is a whole new suite of questions: How does water get to the moon? Once it’s there, how does it get transported to the poles? There are lots of theories, and at this point absolutely no way to choose among them.

What we have here is the appearance, in less than two months (since Pieters’ paper), of a whole new field of science that didn’t exist before: lunar hydrology. The next step, of course, will be for the LCROSS team to continue analyzing their data and nail down the concentration of water at their impact site. Also, LRO (the Lunar Reconnaissance Observer) will continue making large-scale observations  to figure out where else on the moon we might find water. But then, if we’re really serious about following up on this discovery, the next step needs to be a lunar rover (or even several of them) to poke around these permanently shadowed craters and start answering the questions in the previous paragraph.

There was one other very interesting thing mentioned at the press conference, which Colaprete was clearly eager to say more about but he just doesn’t have the data yet. LCROSS found lots of other volatile elements in the debris plume and/or the vapor cloud released by the impact. These may include:

• carbon dioxide
• methane
• methanol
• ethanol
• ammonia
• other organic molecules

The case for these is not as clear yet as the case for water. Colaprete said that it is absolutely certain that some of them are present, but they can’t yet pin down which ones and in what amounts. The science team is going to continue working hard to answer those questions, but they felt that the detection of water was so clear and of such overriding importance that they voted to go public with it now (instead of waiting another month, as per the original plan). But still, stay tuned for news about these other volatile compounds, because this story ain’t over yet.

Tags: buckets, carbon dioxide, Carle Pieters, Chandrayaan-1, hydrology, LCROSS, LRO, methane, oasis, Paul Spudis, Tony Colaprete, volatile compounds, water
Posted in Media, Missions, NASA, Science | No Comments »

LCROSS Results Tomorrow

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

Last month the LCROSS satellite crashed into a crater near the Moon’s south pole, in an experiment designed to look for water ice. At that time the principal investigator, Tony Colaprete, said that they would probably announce the results from the mission within two months. Well, they’ve beaten that timeline by a month. Tomorrow there will be a press conference at NASA Ames at 9:00 am Pacific time (12 noon Eastern time) to announce the first findings.

As I wrote in my previous post, the LCROSS impact was sort of a dud from the point of view of public relations.  It was not possible to see the debris plume from an amateur telescope, as the mission planners had hoped. Nevertheless, the instruments on the spacecraft definitely did see the debris. Thus, from an engineering point of view, the mission was a success. They landed the spacecraft where they wanted to land it and they got data.

So that leaves one more question: Was the mission a success scientifically? And in particular, did they find water? That’s the question that I am almost certain will be answered, one way or another, tomorrow. And of course it is the most important question from the viewpoint of future exploration of the moon.

I don’t have any inside information, but Tony Colaprete did say this in an e-mail to me a couple weeks ago: “We have a wonderful data set … It amazes me a little more each and every day.” Read into those tea leaves whatever you will!

In related news, Colaprete and other members of the LCROSS and LRO missions are going to present their early results next week in Houston, at the annual meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group. Of course the press conference tomorrow will cover anything really big and important, but I’m sure there will be many more details and more discussion at the Houston meeting.

Fortunately, New Scientist has commissioned me to write an article about the status of the lunar water question, taking into account all the results that have been announced this year, from Kaguya to Chandrayaan-1 to LRO and LCROSS. I will attend the Houston meeting, and this will give me a chance to do lots of interviews.

I think we are now at a crossroads in lunar exploration. We’ve gotten a big influx of new data this year, with tantalizing signs that there is more water than we expected on the moon. Now is the time for planning the next steps. Do we shrug our shoulders? Do we invest $3 billion more into the NASA manned flight program, as the Augustine Commission suggested? Do we plan new robotic missions? If so, what should they do?

Lots of questions. Hopefully I’ll find out a few answers, starting tomorrow.

Tags: Houston, LCROSS, LEAG, New Scientist, Tony Colaprete, water
Posted in Media, Missions, NASA, Science | No Comments »

Craters in the Dark …

Friday, October 9th, 2009

The moon has two new craters in it today, courtesy of NASA and the LCROSS mission. Along with hundreds of thousands of other people, I got up before 4:00 this morning to watch the live coverage of the impact. It was … well, anticlimactic. But I’ll get to that below.

It gave me an amazing sense of deja vu to see live coverage, from a NASA spacecraft, of the moon getting larger and larger. It’s been only 37 years since the last time … Welcome back, moon! Nice to see you again!

Impact site is below and to the left of the prominent crater (center). NASA photo.

Of course, this was very different from the Apollo missions. The difference was especially apparent when the second spacecraft (the “shepherding satellite”) hit the moon. There was no astronaut saying from the moon, “Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Instead, we got the flight controller saying from a control room in Mountain View, California, “Flight shepherding spacecraft impact, stations report LOS [loss of signal]. Last tracking at 11:35:35.054 seconds.” And then, that was it. From the operational point of view, the mission was over. The controllers got up, exchanged high fives, and started milling about the control room. If this had been a manned mission, or even a soft landing of a robotic mission, the work would be just beginning. It was weird for it to be over so abruptly.

Just a few seconds earlier, there was an interesting comment from the science control room: “We confirm thermal signature of the crater over mid-IR camera.” For anyone wanting live, real-time science, this was it. As the chief scientist, Tony Colaprete, explained later in the press conference, the infrared camera saw a distinct bright spot, a little over a pixel wide, that was the hot, newly formed crater from the Centaur rocket impact. He was clearly jazzed about this detection, which they weren’t sure that they were going to be able to make. The ultraviolet spectrometers also got excellent readouts that should contain lots of information about the material that was thrown up by the impact. But Colaprete wouldn’t say, or even speculate, what they have seen yet. The main thing he wanted to emphasize was that the instruments worked and they got the data they wanted.

The press conference was kind of interesting to watch because it was clear that the story the media found interesting was exactly the opposite of the spin that NASA would like to put on the landing. None of the four speakers mentioned this, but it was clearly written on one of the slides taken from an Earth-based telescope: No plume detected.

Reporters are trained, of course, to look for the elephant in the room that nobody is talking about. They homed in on what Tony Colaprete, Jennifer Heldmann and Michael Wargo weren’t saying — the fact that none of the ground-based telescopes were reporting any visual evidence of the impact. I really think that the scientists should have acknowledged this up front. A lot of the publicity and a lot of the planning of the mission was built around the premise that the debris plume would be visible from Earth, certainly through the big professional telescopes in California and Hawaii, but even through a 10-12 inch amateur telescope. But it wasn’t. I think that the reporters were right to question the scientists on why no plume was seen (yet) and what this might mean.

However, though “no plume” might be the big news story at the moment, it is very far from the end of the story. The scientific work of the mission is just beginning. The press conference was held two hours after impact. But the more relevant time frames are two days (the time that will be spent with the full science team at NASA-Ames collecting data), two weeks (when they will meet again and start drawing their initial conclusions), and two months (when they are likely to make a public announcement of the results). Tony Colaprete and Michael Wargo made the following very important points:

1. It is not clear yet that the plume wasn’t detected. Further image processing could reveal that it was there, but fainter than expected. “Gray on black,” as Wargo said.
2. Even if the plume wasn’t detected, the crater was detected, and it was about the expected size. Its thermal signal will give a lot of information about what was at the impact site.
3. Colaprete kept coming back over and over to the point that “spectra are where the science is at.” The spectrometers are more sensitive than the cameras, and they tell you what the chemicals are that you are looking at. For the most part the readout is not instant (although Colaprete did talk about a clear sodium line).
4. Finally, Wargo reminded the reporters that this was an experiment. An experiment, by definition, is something whose result you don’t know in advance. You might have a prediction or a theory, but until you do the experiment you just aren’t sure what is going to happen. So the plume was smaller or darker or less dramatic than expected. That will still tell us something.

So the press conference was an interesting clash of cultures. The media like pretty pictures, big explosions, and dramatic discoveries. They don’t like to wait. The scientists, as Jennifer Heldmann said, like “squiggly lines” (like the output of a spectrometer). They understand the value of patience and gathering all the evidence before you reach a conclusion.

If you want to know whether LCROSS saw water ice on the moon, your best bet is to stay tuned. The answer is likely to come out at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in December, in San Francisco. I’ll be there!

P.S. Maybe I was wrong about the media spin being different from the NASA spin. Here’s a mainstream media article that barely mentions the lack of a visible plume.

Tags: anticlimax, deja vu, ice, impact, LCROSS, plume, science culture, spectrometer, squiggly lines
Posted in Media, Missions, NASA, Science | 1 Comment »

Need $3 Billion, Please

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Yesterday the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee, also known as the Augustine Committee, released its report on the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program. Although I’ve read some criticism of their report online, I think the criticism is all of the “Shoot the messenger” variety. The committee did its job really well.

The report sets out some basic and unpleasant truths that people have been averting their eyes from for a long time. It also laid out five reasonable scenarios for how NASA can move ahead. Even though this was not a decision-making committee, it did actually rule out a scenario that was unrealistic, which I thought was quite an accomplishment. The committee has provided in clear language the basis for the true decision-makers to make a decision. Now we’ll see if our leaders can step up to the plate — or, to use a more appropriate sports analogy since we have an ex-basketball player in the White House, we’ll see if they can sink the winning 3-pointer with the clock running out.

Here are four options that the committee has said are feasible, plus the one that it said was not feasible at this time. (The report actually split option 3 into two sub-options.) Some of the names are theirs, and some are mine.

1) Moon Never, aka Napoleon’s Retreat. In this scenario, NASA continues with both its current budget and current objectives, which are incompatible. The shuttle is mothballed in 2011. The International Space Station is ditched into the Pacific Ocean in 2016. We continue spending money for a moon program that will never happen: “There are insufficient funds to develop the lunar lander and lunar surface systems until well into the 2030s, if ever,” the report says. This option is basically a full-fledged retreat from manned space exploration, with a fig leaf of ongoing research to cover our embarrassment.

Don’t laugh. This is probably the most likely option. Napoleon didn’t want to retreat from Russia, but he did.

2) 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. A slightly larger fig leaf.

3) Moon First. The committee says that we can keep on track for returning to the moon in the mid-2020s (not 2020 any more) if NASA’s budget is increased by $3 billion per year, plus reasonable cost of living increases thereafter.  “At this budget level, both the Moon First strategy and the Flexible Path strategies begin human exploration on a reasonable, though hardly aggressive, timetable. The Committee believes an exploration program that will be a source of pride for the nation requires resources at such a level,” the report says. Again there are various options based on how big a launch vehicle we want and how much help we can expect from commercial space services.

4) Flexible Path. This option includes lunar fly-bys, visits to Lagrange points (which are the gateways to low-energy transportation to many other places in the solar system), near-Earth objects (such as asteroids), and eventually Earth’s moon or the moons of Mars. The committee clearly likes this option because it is new and different from what has gone before, but it does not actually endorse the Flexible Path over Moon First.

5) Finally, it’s notable that the report rules out the Mars First option, even though it had visible and outspoken advocates, such as Buzz Aldrin. “The Committee finds that Mars is the ultimate destination for human exploration; but it is not the best first destination.” Translation: We can’t do it yet. In spite of what Apollo did in the 1960s, you can’t just leapfrog over two or three generations of technology. (Apollo did leapfrog a generation or so, but only with an extraordinary outlay of money — and I don’t think anyone except Aldrin believes that can happen again.)

In light of the report, the U.S. government has two big decisions to make. The main one is: Do we want a manned space program or do we want a public relations agency? I think that if the question were posed to most Americans in that form, they would rather spend $21 billion for a bona fide human flight program with clearly stated and achievable objectives, rather than spend $18 billion for public relations and for plans on the drawing board that will never be achieved. To come up with those $3 billion, especially in these economic times and in this political climate, would be Obama’s version of hitting a 3-point shot at the buzzer.

The subsidiary question, which is nevertheless important, is: After we have made our choice, what is our strategy? If we can’t afford a manned space program beyond low Earth orbit, we have to decide on which fig leaf to cover up our failure with.

If we can scrape up $3 billion, do we opt for Moon First or the Flexible Path? The question is important because the choice will affect how and whether you can sell this option to the public.

The Flexible Path would give Obama more of a chance to put his own stamp on the space program, rather than following in Bush’s footsteps. I would think that would be very attractive to him. However, as Paul Spudis argues in his blog, the benefit of Moon First is that you are building infrastructure. You don’t have to stake your case on inspiring the public, part of which has never been enthusiastic about the space program anyway. You can work on uninspiring but nevertheless achievable goals, with a long-term aim of making space economically relevant. If you are trying to extend human presence to a new realm, one-time sorties won’t do it; eventually you have to set up a base or a colony. The moon is the only place for that in the near future or even the medium future.

As you can see, I think that Moon First is a little bit more sensible. But I completely acknowledge that I am biased because this is a moon blog. If the Flexible Path is the only way to sell a $3 billion increase to the American public, then I would be glad to support that instead.

Finally, let’s talk about that $3 billion. How much of a burden is it, really? A look at the history of NASA’s budget on Wikipedia is really eye-opening. As a percentage of the Federal budget, NASA’s budget is lower than it has ever been since John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960. We are talking the talk of doing great, ambitious things, but we are not walking the walk.

If we miraculously find $3 billion more for NASA, that will raise its percentage of the Federal budget from 0.52 percent to 0.60 percent. Such extravagance! Such profligacy! Would this take us back to the days of Apollo? Hardly. It would take us all the way back to the days  of 2008, the last time NASA represented 0.60 percent of the budget. By comparison, during the buildup to Apollo, NASA’s budget peaked at 5.5 percent of the Federal budget, or ten times as much as today.

So, all things considered, I really don’t think that $3 billion is too much to ask. In fact, I hope that the experts will scrutinize the full report, when it is released, to make sure that we understand that $3 billion figure and make sure that it will really do the job. If so, Obama and Congress should sign off on it gladly, because they are getting a bargain.

I’d like to end on a humorous note. Once a week, I drive senior citizens to doctors’ appointments. Today’s passenger, Lloyd, is a little bit hard of hearing but compensates for it with a great sense of humor. For example, I overheard his nurse asking him today, “Have there been any signs of bleeding lately?” To which he replied, “Signs of breathing? No, no signs of breathing!”

While we were in the waiting room Lloyd was reading a newspaper and came to a headline about the Augustine report: “NASA Told U.S. Can’t Pay for New Moon Flight.” He joked, “New moon flight? Why, there’s a new moon every month!”

Posted in Just for Fun, Media, Missions, NASA | 3 Comments »

Direct from the Moon

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Besides the History Channel episode, “The Day the Moon Was Gone,” which I wrote about in my last post, another TV show about the moon aired recently on the National Geographic Channel. It’s called “Direct from the Moon,” and it was broadcast on August 23. Unfortunately, the National Geographic website is remarkably uninformative about future showings, so I can’t tell you when your next chance to see it will be.

The show is mostly about the Japanese Kaguya mission, which ended on June 10, about a week before NASA’s LRO and LCROSS missions lifted off. I was very glad to see an hour-long special about Kaguya, which I think did not receive nearly enough publicity here in the U.S. It’s easy to understand why. First, the mission was Japanese, and so the whole national-pride factor is missing (for American publications and readers). Second, the Japanese are very modest. And third, the Japanese speak Japanese, which means that it’s not always so easy for English speakers to understand what they have done.

Planetary scientists, however, certainly did appreciate how special the Kaguya mission was. When I went to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston in 2008, the Kaguya team had set up a giant high-definition TV in the lobby that played a continuous loop of images from the HDTV camera on the Kaguya spacecraft. For most of the scientists at the meeting this was their first chance to see the Kaguya images, and they were absolutely blown away. It was like flying over the moon in the Apollo command module, only better because you had a wider field of view. One planetary scientist told me that he could teach an entire course of geology (or selenology) just based on the images that Kaguya was acquiring.

However, for a long time only a few bits and pieces of the HDTV videos were available to the general public — an earthrise here, an earthset there. (The Kaguya team evidently learned a lesson from the Apollo program: Earthlings really like to see pictures of Earth from the moon.) So I was really looking forward to an hour-long special that includes some of the best video from Kaguya.

The imagery of Tycho crater is probably the most spectacular sequence in “Direct from the Moon.” The HDTV camera team has now compiled the 3-dimensional data in such a way that you can swoop down through the crater and turn this way and that, as if you were in an airplane. This greatly improves the 3-dimensional effect of the images. Now, as you head over the rim of Tycho, you can see that it is in fact a huge cliff face. (According to the voice-over it is higher than the cliffs at the Grand Canyon). You gain a new respect for the immensity of this crater (which is only medium-sized by lunar standards) and the enormous impact that produced it.

It’s interesting that Tycho is comparable in age and size to the impact structure underneath the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico (the Chicxulub crater) that is believed to be where the dinosaur-killing asteroid hit Earth. Here are their vital statistics:

AGE: Chicxulub — 65 million years, Tycho — 108 million years

WIDTH: Chicxulub — 112 miles, Tycho — 52 miles

VISIBILITY: Chicxulub — buried under nearly a kilometer of sediment, Tycho — brightest crater on the moon, easily visible with the naked eye, with rays that extend almost a quarter of the way around the moon.

MEGAFAUNA KILLED BY IMPACT: Chicxulub — Dinosaurs and 70 percent of other species (though some paleontologists disagree), Tycho — None (Our lunar space defense shield worked!)

But I digress. Back to “Direct from the Moon.” Besides the stunning camera footage, the other thing I really enjoyed about this program was the chance to find out about some of Kaguya’s science results. I heard about three things that were new to me:

• On the far side of the moon, Kaguya mapped out regions of lower density, the reverse of the near side where there are several “mascons” or regions of higher mass density.
• Kaguya identified 40 places on the moon where we might find orange soil, similar to the orange soil that was found by Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt. This soil has recently been shown to contain trace amounts of water.
• By comparing crater sizes to asteroid sizes, Kaguya confirmed that the most likely source for the Late Heavy Bombardment, which produced most of the moon’s craters and large basins, was the asteroid belt (not comets).

There were several other things I liked about the program. It included some interviews with Apollo astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmitt. Aldrin is everywhere these days — he is the one astronaut who has most thoroughly embraced his role as an advocate for space travel. But this was the first time I had seen an interview of Schmitt, the only geologist to go to the moon. I also liked the great CGI animations of the giant impact and the accretion of the moon from the impact debris. I also liked the animation explaining why the near side of the moon has a disproportionate amount of denser material, while the far side has more than its share of lighter material.

A disappointment in the program was that the Japanese scientists got very little screen time and generally came off as rather bland and emotionless. However, there was one exception, a guy named Noriyuki Namiki of Kyushu University. When he was talking about the discovery of the lighter regions on the far side, he said something that sounded very much like the favorite expression of Hiro (on the TV show “Heroes”): “Yata!” (“All right!”) Since I know only about ten words of Japanese, it was cool to hear something that I understood right away!

In general, I was struck by the difference in tone between the National Geographic program and the History Channel series I have appeared on twice, “The Universe.” It showed me that popular science on TV doesn’t have to be sensationalized and enhanced by dizzying and eye-straining graphics. The National Geographic producers were willing to let the science and the scientists tell the story. I think that the History Channel must be aiming at a younger, hipper audience that might be turned off by a traditional documentary. But on the National Geographic Channel, at least, the art of the traditional documentary is alive and well.

Posted in Media, Missions, Science | 2 Comments »

Who Flung the Moon?

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

I did, that’s who! And on national TV, no less. But let me back up and tell the story from the beginning.

As regular readers of this blog know, I recorded an interview in June for a program on the History Channel called “The Universe.” Here are links to my previous blog posts about the interview:

• History Channel, Part 1
• History Channel, Part 2
• History Channel and “This Week’s Finds”
• History Channel Appearance — Next Tuesday!

The episode, called, “The Day the Moon was Gone,” debuted Tuesday night. Kay and I both thought that this was one of the best episodes of “The Universe” that we have seen. In my previous posts, I expressed some apprehension — about errors of fact that seemed to be creeping into the script, and about the general tendency of the program to exaggerate things. However, I am happy to report that most of the concerns I had did not materialize.

There were lots of good things about the episode. I was very interested to hear what the other scientists would say, and I thought that for the most part they had interesting ideas, including some that I would never have thought of myself. I really enjoyed seeing Bill Hartmann again. Everything he says just sounds so cogent and well thought-out. To me, he has the same sort of avuncular, “That’s the way it is,” presence that Walter Cronkite did.

I got quite a bit more camera time than I expected, and that was nice in a vain sort of way. The coolest thing was that they added some CGI effects to a couple of my clips. One time, when I was explaining tidal friction, I made some hand gestures to pantomime the moon moving outward from Earth. They dubbed in a little moon graphic to move along with my hands, so that it looked as if I was swinging the moon around in a circle and then flinging it away. What a feeling of omnipotence! I told Kay, “I should have called my blog, ‘Who Flung the Moon’!”

Other good points about the program: The pacing was not as frenetic as some episodes of “The Universe.” There was much less repetition than there often is. Most, though not all, of the topics were presented in logical sequence. Fundamentally, I think the concept worked. And that was a surprise to me.

When I first heard about the topic, a program about how Earth would be different if we had no moon, I was very skeptical. How, I wondered, could scientists answer a question with a fundamentally unscientific premise? The moon cannot disappear. So in some sense, you can make any statement you want, and no one can really prove or disprove it.

Nevertheless, I think that the episode worked because it got the scientists to think in unfamiliar and unexpected ways about the moon, and to bring out facts that they knew that maybe the average person doesn’t. Case in point: When I tell you that the solar tide is about 1/2 the size of the lunar tide, you yawn and say who cares? But when I tell you that if the moon went away you would suddenly have a huge tsunami as the water redistributes itself, all of a sudden it’s kind of interesting.

There was one minor disappointment for me. The narration did, on three or four occasions, try to argue that the giant impact that formed the moon is also responsible for Earth’s plate tectonics. I have previously discussed in this blog why I do not think that conclusion is correct. However, in the context of the whole episode it really was not that big a deal. I think that 95 percent of the audience probably did not even notice or care. I’m afraid that I lectured Adrian, the director, on this point so many times that by the end I was sounding pedantic even to myself. So I’m letting it go. Don’t let it spoil your enjoyment of the episode!

If you missed “The Day the Moon was Gone,” according to the History Channel website the episode will air again on September 8 at 8:00 Eastern time. I suspect it will also air at least a couple more times this week, but the website did not have those times listed.

Tags: giant impact, History Channel, interview, tides, Universe, William Hartmann
Posted in Media, Science | 1 Comment »