(15)

Whilst I am working a private contractor cyber-defence job for a large financial conference, it seems apropos to summarise some recent intel from Janes.

The DOD is selling two THAAD missile interceptor batteries to the United Arab Emirates, This is the first international sale. I wonder who they are defending against..

US chooses Super Tucano for Afghan Air Force
Sierra Nevada and Embraer have been selected to deliver A-29 Super Tucano's the Afghan Air Force (AAF) and 15 more for the USAF. This is also interesting because Sierra Nevada is developing the DreamChaser orbital space plane.

The Saudi's are buying 84 new F-15SA Eagle's with Raytheon's APG-63(V)3 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, a digital electronic warfare system (DEWS) and a Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System (JHMCS). I wonder who they are defending against...

General Atomics has the contract for Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) configurations for the UK's Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier programme. Mass Drivers as we call them in the space business, are a key technology for lunar industry.

The US Missile Defense Agency has selected Boeing to oversee the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system in a multibillion dollar sustainment effort. This system will defend the US against a rogue state attacks. At the same time a bunch of orders were placed at the end of 2011 as noted here and above. Raytheon's SM-3 was also in the mix. On the downside, the Boeing 747-400F carrying the YAL-1 Airborne Laser Testbed (ALTB) is being mothballed as the development has been terminated.

The Indian Navy has gone nuclear with the Akula-class (Project 971) nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) now in its hands on a 10 year lease from the Russians. The 9,246 tonne (dived) INS Chakra (ex- Nerpa ) recently finished sea trials three years behind schedule.

(29)

This is not good... according to the BBC there may have been 69 Patriot missiles caught in a cargo ship in Finland.

This is bad. Really, really bad.

(5)

Here is an interesting article over at the Wall Street Journal about how Microsoft's Paul Allen is faring with his own space venture. Rand Simberg weighs in.

All this private sector space stuff reminds me of this marvellously entertaining book by Victor Koman, although I agreed with an old American friend of mine that the book jacket design was a bit poor.

I hope Dale Amon doesn't mind my writing about his chosen specialist subject!

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The National Space Society and the International Academy of Astronautics held a press conference at the National Press Club yesterday to announce stunning advances in the systems design of Space Based Solar Power satellites.

John Mankins has been working on a modular solar power station architecture for a number of years. Instead of a big, all up construction project, there are mass produced small modules that begin paying for themselves almost immediately.

His concept could be flying in 10 years. Rather than assume a system has to look like the concept drawings from the 1970's, he completely rethought it using modern technology. The result is a module that can launch on an existing rocket and immediately make itself useful by delivering power to anywhere on earth it is needed. On its own one module is not going to power a city, but it might power a small remote facility or supply emergency power to a team at a disaster area. As cash-flow or investment capital allows, more identical units can be launched. They may be used separately... or they might be joined up like robotic Lego blocks to form larger and larger structures, generating larger and larger amounts of energy for Earth-Based usage.

Take a look at the IAA report.

The video is now available.

(6)

Via CityAM, here is an interesting article about the UK's own space industry. It is bigger than might be supposed from first glance.

(Thanks to my good friend Tim Evans, over at the Adam Smith Institute and the Cobden Centre, for the pointer).

BTW, one of the big places for registering space-related companies these days is the Isle of Man. No doubt, in centuries to come, the Tranzis will be trying to shut down tax havens in outer space.

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“One curious and unintended consequence of the aeroplane ban [on smoking] was that airlines began to save money by changing the air in the cabin less frequently. Traditionally, this was done every two minutes and old air was never recirculated, but with no tobacco smoke to draw attention to the quality of air, the carriers reduced air changes to once every twenty minutes. This led to a musty aroma on board and, according to a report in The Lancet, contributed to the appearance of Deep Vein Thrombosis, a disease unknown in airline passengers until the 1990s.”

Page 163 of Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: A history of anti-smoking. By Christopher Snowdon.

Entirely selfishly, I am delighted that I travel in a smoke-free airline industry, although it is a shame that this change came about through the coercion of the state and not in reaction to consumer choice via a market. After all, there are many irritations involved in flying that might be amenable to a market solution, if it was available, such as screaming young children or patronising and idiotic flight attendants.

(8)

Virginia Postrel, over at her Deep Glamour blog, has interesting brief thoughts about how British Airways is attempting to revive its image by being glamorous. The video linked into here has shots of BA aircraft past and present, including that ultimate piece of aviation coolness, Concorde. The new billboard ads I see on the side of the London Underground go for this sort of feel, too. But as always with glamour, the trick is being able to achieve a certain willing suspension of disbelief, rather in the way that, as Postrel has noted elsewhere, people regarded Barack Obama as a glamorous politician. (So was JFK, unlike, say, Eisenhower, Truman or even Ronald Reagan, despite the latter's Hollywood back-story).

BA is not the only airline to try for the glamour approach in its marketing. The new adverts by Virgin go for a slightly more raucous, fun-fun-fun! approach and it makes me wonder how some feminists must think of it as the ads are full of young, sexy-looking women in killer heels, slinky red uniforms and so on, while the pilots and other crew are all winking in a naughty fashion at the camera. The message seems to be: "Fly Virgin and you might just get away with a hangover or a phone number!" On the positive side, it certainly seems to be at odds with the neo-puritan killjoy mood of the moment, so kudos to Sir Richard Branson for that.

And these thoughts take us to the collision between the desire to project hopes and dreams onto something (an airline or a politician or actor) and the reality. Consider how the vacuous Obama sound-bite "Hope and Change" has now become an ironic tagline for many an Instapundit post, for example. And Postrel has given several talks, including this one at TED, about the glamour issue more broadly. (She also has a book coming out.)

This issue of aviation glamour reminds of something I wrote a while ago about the movie, The Aviator, based on the life of Howard Hughes. He played a huge part in the airline industry, of course. And here is another chance for me to talk about Aerotropolis, a fascinating book about aviation and the modern world.

(3)

I have been intending to do a long article on SpaceX and their plans but the combination of consulting to eat and pay the bar tab and of trying to get funding for my own New Space business has been keeping me too occupied for a lengthy and well researched article. Fortunately, the National Space Society finally finished its internal deliberations and is now solidly and publicly backing the commercial space approach to exploration. (No industry insiders were harmed in the making of this film... er policy.)

With policy in place, an updated version of an excellent article on SpaceX, what they are doing, where they are going and what it all means has been published. John Strickland did an excellent job on it. Read it!

(3)

This is a rush item. Go there right now if you read this as soon as it goes up:

SpaceX CEO & CTO Elon Musk will discuss the future of human spaceflight in advance of SpaceX's planned flight later this year to the International Space Station, the first private mission to the ISS for NASA, at a National Press Club luncheon today at 1pm EST. Reusability is key to the dramatic cost savings that will enable advancements in human exploration of space. The Dragon spacecraft is fully reusable and SpaceX is working toward the goal of delivering the world’s first fully reusable launch vehicle.

Click here to watch the discussion live

Try the animation here for a peek at SpaceX’s future plans.

This post from the National Space Society links to the animation and gives information on Elon's talk. What he is attempting is breathtaking and awesomely difficult, a task worthy of free Americans.

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I have been following news on China's supposed near monopoly on rare earth elements for some time now and reports like this one seem to bear out my opinion that things will settle out quickly. There are other projects around the world which can produce these important high technology elements. They have only been kept out of production because the Chinese were selling at prices lower than Western production could support.

So the good news is, we got materials at low prices from the Chinese for years and created new wealth from them. And the other good news is, their attempt to extract a windfall profit is likely to fall on its face. And even better news is that one of the important new mines will be in Nebraska so even if the National Socialist Republic of California pushes prices from the old mines there into a range that keeps them closed, we will still be pulling them out of the ground in one of the Free States.

(11)

Strange is it not? We get some small backing of commercial procurement of space services from the current NASA administration and what do Republican's do? Why they back the same old Socialist space approach that came into being to match the Russian Socialist model in the Moon race.

Then they try to hang the monstrosity of a super heavy lift vehicle on NASA... but this time around the parentage is quite clear. Certain Senators designed this vehicle, or at least set the parameters. NASA did not even want the thing, or at least the people at the top did not. (Admittedly, there are a lot of folk in the lower hierarchy and at the Centers who have lived their lives in a 'government knows best' cocoon and who think the solution to every problem in exploration is a bigger rocket.)

The current system is an utter bollocks. The Senate insisted NASA come up with a design; and behind the scenes it was made clear that it must contain solid rocket engines made in Utah. It also includes features that ensure an ongoing standing army to service it in Florida and crowds of workers for Tennessee and Texas...

It will never fly. The sole and single purpose of this vehicle is to employ people in those States. When the unbearable cost of this ridiculous Senatorial design becomes apparent to all, it will be cancelled. There will then be hearings, hand wringing... and they will try to foist a 'new' program on us to keep the pork barrel jobs going.

This frankenstein will cost $30B over its life cycle. It will fly every only once in every one or two years; it will require a standing army that will be training and working and getting paid in the mean timel; it will cost perhaps $2B per flight; it will suck up most of a declining NASA budget at the expense of everything else; and it will not take a human being into space until 2021.

Yes, folks, this is your Senate at work. Not NASA... this time at least.

(4)

With great effort our Samizdatista spies in the US Senate have uncovered the deepest secrets of the Senator/Rocket Scientists plans for a $30B Super Heavy Jobs Lifter!

Senate Rocket Scientists plans unveiled!
Montage and Gimping: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

(4)

Bongo expresses joy at his NASA aided escape from Earth and the evil Petans.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Backstory: The dinner speech by NASA Administrator General Bolden at our NSS conference in Chicago in May 2010 was briefly (about 10 seconds) interrupted by some little twit from PETA who was carried bodily to the ballroom door. We did not press charges. Her complaint? NASA was going to put some monkeys through the same things that people will be going through on a trip to Mars.

So, I am striking a blow to open the stars for all Primate-kind! Arise Primates of Earth! You have nothing to lose but 1G and your Petan chains!

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According to a Jane's newsletter, the UK is at least studying the idea of going to sea with a carrier more in line with its naval heritage than the little ones it has been living with for some decades:

UK launches carrier conversion studies. The UK's Aircraft Carrier Alliance (ACA) - comprising BAE Systems, Babcock, Thales and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) - has commenced an incremental 18-month Conversion Development Phase (CDP) to explore options for the adaptation of at least one of its Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers to a 'cats and traps' configuration to enable the operation of the F-35C Carrier Variant (CV) of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). Seed funding of about GBP5 million (USD8 million) is covering activity through to the end of October, with further contracts to be let in the near future to the ACA and the MoD-led Naval Design Partnering (NDP) team

For those unfamiliar with fleet carriers, the UK and many other nations have been building ships with decks that tilt upward so the airplane has more time to gain speed as it falls off the end of the carrier in full afterburner. This avoids the need for the complex catapult operations but has the downside that it cannot launch heavier aircraft, something which severely limits its force projection capabilities.

I should also note that the UK invented the carrier aircraft catapult, along with many other features we consider synonymous with US super-carriers.

(4)

I have been reading this book, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, by Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda, and it is full of gems. We take the ability to order a book or other item online and have it delivered in days for granted, and perhaps tend to forget how much we have got used to this unless, that is, such services are disrupted by things such as security clampdowns or Icelandic volcanic eruptions.

Here's a couple of paragraphs:

“Despite its handicaps, LAX has been the catalyst for the city’s metamorphosis into America’s premier trade entrepôt over the last 30 years. It was during those decades that the industrial fulcrum of California first shifted north – out of the hangars of Hughes Aircraft and into Silicon Valley – and then west, all the way to China. We have LAX to thank for our iPhones and iPods being `designed by Apple in California, assembled in China,’ as they advertise on their backs. Not just Apple, but every Valley company that began life combining transistors there – think Intel, Hewlett Packard, Sun, and Cisco – long ago began outsourcing work from its messy, depreciating factories to ones across the Pacific. Now they wait for airborne freighers to land in Los Angeles with the first samples of their latest holiday smash in the hold.”

“Anyone lucky enough to have hitched a ride aboard a freighter or been taken under the wings of the `freight dogs’ who pilot them could tell ou enough stories to pass the eighteen hours to LA from Singapore. At any given moment, there are aloft `incomprehensible quantities of the mundane,’ in the words of one such witness: 160,000 pounds of roses leaving Amsterdam, 25,000 wiring harnesses bound for auto plants around the Detroit, or 5,000 pounds of Grand Theft Auto games inbound for LAX. Another writer babysat a stableful of horses in transit between O’Hare and Tokyo, including a dozen Appaloosas bound for a Hokkaido ranch. One pilot recounted the tale of a mysterious ice chest, insured for millions, which he later learned was the vessel for the first HIV drug cocktail.”

(19)

This article at the Economist (Paul Marks, please switch channels now! Ed) is getting a lot of attention. It argues that the F-35 fighter of the US is likely to be the last manned fighter to be developed, even though manned fighter jets will probably remain in use for a quite a long while yet. The future is about drones, due to reasons of cost, rising sophistication and efficiency.

Here are some paragraphs:

"What horrified the senators most was not the cost of buying F-35s but the cost of operating and supporting them: $1 trillion over the plane’s lifetime. Mr McCain described that estimate as “jaw-dropping”. The Pentagon guesses that it will cost a third more to run the F-35 than the aircraft it is replacing. Ashton Carter, the defence-acquisition chief, calls this “unacceptable and unaffordable”, and vows to trim it. A sceptical Mr McCain says he wants the Pentagon to examine alternatives to the F-35, should Mr Carter not succeed."

"How worried should Lockheed Martin be? The F-35 is the biggest biscuit in its barrel, by far. And it is not only Mr McCain who is seeking to knock a few chocolate chips out of it. The bipartisan fiscal responsibility and reform commission appointed by Mr Obama last year said that not all military aircraft need to be stealthy. It suggested cancelling the STOVL version of the F-35 and cutting the rest of its order by half, while buying cheaper F-16s and F-18s to keep numbers up. If America decided it could live with such a “high-low” mix, foreign customers might follow suit."

"The danger for Lockheed Martin is that if orders start to tumble, the F-35 could go into a death spiral. The fewer planes governments order, the more each one will cost and the less attractive the F-35 will be. This happened to the even more sophisticated and expensive F-22. By cutting its order from 750 to 183, the Pentagon helped to drive the programme cost per aircraft of the F-22 up from $149m to $342m."

Oh well, it appears that all those young men and even women hoping to be the next Chuck Yeager will be disappointed. The era of the "fighter ace" may be drawing to an end. Somehow, telling a girl in a bar that you fly a drone remotely from a shed in Nevada does not sound quite so cool as saying that you fly Lightnings or F-16s. But then again, as our own Dale Amon might point out, if you want serious aviation action and adventure, then commercial space flight is where the fun is.

As I have referenced before, this book by PW Singer is essential reading for how technological developments in the current age are shaping military spending and warfare. From a libertarian point of view, it might be nice to hope that this would lead to a dramatic reduction in costs. The figures produced in the Economist's report are, indeed, shocking.

(20)

I have suggested a number of times over the years that Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are aiming for Mars. While not the first article backing this up, this one is the latest:

Men to Mars from Vandenberg? (Source: Independent) As NASA puts to rest its 30-year-old space shuttle program, a private space transportation company is accelerating space travel with a new launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base. SpaceX discussed its plans to replace the existing Titan IV launcher with a new launch pad for the Falcon Heavy ­ which, upon completion, will become the world’s largest launch vehicle by a factor of two.

In the long term, SpaceX’s development of the Falcon Heavy fits into its mission “to make human life multiplanetary” by sending “large numbers of people” to Mars. Although Musk acknowledges that a mission to Mars may not be achievable for many years, he said the company is committed to “going to go as far and as fast as we can” toward achieving its ambitious goal. (7/15)

Tallyho!!!

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The last shuttle mission has begun... and Richard Branson announced he will be starting commercial flights next year:

Sir Richard Branson said that the reason he established Virgin Galactic was because he ‘got sick sick of waiting for NASA.’ He confirmed that space flights for the public will commence in ’10 to 15 months.’ Another endeavour after this milestone will be to launch ‘a 2 to 3 hour London to Australia flight’ via space.

If you add to this the not very far away cargo flights of the SpaceX Dragon capsule, followed by manned flights of same; the scheduled launch of the Bigelow space station in 2014; and the first flights of the SpaceX Heavy around the same time... not to mention things that XCOR, Masten, Armadillo, Boeing, Reaction Engines, Sierra Nevada and others are up to... we live in a very exciting time.

The last flight of the Space Shuttle signals the beginning of the Space Age.

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All that I know so far is here. There are a lot of possible different problems one can imagine a large defense contractor attacking with a quantum computer but any thing I say will be a wild guess.

What matters is.... they are here and we have begun computing across parallel universes if one believes that particular interpretation of quantum strangeness.

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There have been three Chinooks with US markings circling overhead above my house in London for quite some time now, and for a moment I thought that maybe the rapture was at hand and they were here to air lift me off to heaven... or wherever else it is that rotorheads go when they kick off for the last time.

Actually a place with large helicopters perpetually circling overhead fits my preconception of 'heaven' rather well, so maybe the world *did* end as I was certainly watching them in complete rapture.

Result!

Hello? Is there anyone else out there?

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I ran across this interesting tit-bit today:

US probably used classified helo in Bin Laden operation The US military may have operated a hitherto undisclosed classified helicopter type in its recent raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. Images of the wreckage of a helicopter that reportedly crashed during the operation, apparently due to an undisclosed technical malfunction, do not conform to any types that are known to be in service with the US military or in development

This was in a Jane's newsletter teaser so this is the total information I have available at this moment. Has anyone else heard any interesting rumors?

(9)

In light of the recent killing of OBL and the use by the military of drones and other surveillance gizmos to track down where the villain was hiding out, it is worth noting that these pilot-less aircraft are not just in the hands of military people. You can get some pretty sophisticated ones via the regular commercial market, a fact that is both beguiling for aviation enthusiasts and modellists, and presumably, a bit of a concern for the military who want to keep the airspace all to itself.

Chris Anderson, head honcho at Wired, the techno magazine, has his own website devoted to the whole business of building and using the things. Anderson, of course, is also author of The Long Tail, one of those books that I need to read again.

On a related theme regarding drones, robots and high-tech in war and defence, here is another reference to a book by PW Singer, that I blogged about the other day in a piece about sea piracy.

(2)

Aerospace America, a publication of the AIAA, had a number of interesting items this month.

After 20 years of manoeuvring by corrupt politicians and lobbyists, none of whom gave a damn about the country, we finally have a solid contract out for a new aircraft refuelling fleet. The existing fleet is mostly based on the Boeing 707 of the 1950's...

The NanoSail D2 payload, which failed to deploy in November... suddenly deployed. Needless to say the engineers involved are rather ecstatic. Now we will get some data back on using solar sails in space. It is about time.

An old friend of mine, Scott Pace, now director of the GWU Space Policy Institute argued the Republican Space Socialist line in an interview. From another source (Rand Simberg) I have heard that another old friend, Jim Muncy, who is a long time Republican Conservative spoke of how the role reversal of the parties on capitalist space development caused his head to explode. Jim started off his career working for Newt Gingrich as a staffer and in the Reagan White House under Presidential Science Advisor George Keyworth.

Another item mentioned as an aside that the vaunted Chinese high speed rail system was thrown together by using substandard rail bedding on long stretches which will now have a very limited lifetime. Left unsaid is that this will probably lead to some very spectacular crashes and mass casualties followed by show trials of the people who were pushed to complete their state assigned quotas...

From other news sources: a company in Mojave has come up with a replacement for Hydrazine that is 5% the cost, so nontoxic you can pour it on the ground and I believe even has a better ISP... Look Ma, no bunny suits!

(16)

For those of you who did not watch it, or possibly for some of those who did but are not familiar with the issues, Elon has just blown the launch industry as we know it to smithereens.

Falcon Heavy is bigger than I thought. It is 53 metric tons to LEO, for about $100M per launch. Elon expects to fire off 10 Heavy's and 10 F9's per year from Cape Canaveral by mid decade, but can hold the price per pound on an FH to $1000/pound at as low a rate as 4 FH/year. They will be launching twice the payload for one third the cost of the largest commercial rockets presently available (the Delta 4 for example).

SpaceX is currently producing 50-60 Merlin engines per year, which is more than all other engines built in the US per year; when they are flying the new rocket they will be producing 400 of a more capabile Merlin 1d per year, which will be more than all other engines produced on the planet.

The rocket is designed to exceed all current NASA standards for man-rating, with 40% margin above expected flight loads. They will have the capability to launch a Dragon capsule on a lunar loop mission with a single FH. The Dragon capsule will be deep space capable so they are a long way towards taking over the exploration of space from the fossil-space industry.

The first launch will occur perhaps in 2013 (I had trouble hearing him) with no customer satellite, although someone might come forward later to take a cut rate flight.

These are heady and exciting times we live in.

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SpaceX is announcing today that they will be building the next larger vehicle after the Falcon 9, a Falcon Heavy with a lift of about 32 metric tons to low orbit and the ability to put most commercial communications sats into geosynchronous orbit. This puts them into the lift capacity range of the current top end Delta, Atlas and Ariane vehicles and at a price of $96M will have a rather significant impact on the current marketplace.

I have heard unsubstantiated rumors (I have not had time to dig further yet) that SpaceX may already have a customer signed up. We will all know shortly as the official press conference will be streamed live at 11:20am Eastern Time.

This comes hot on the heels of one of the most incompetent reports (from Aerospace Corp) to hit the aerospace sector in a long time. The report claims that private commercial space will be more expensive than government programs and does so by using a model that is so divorced from reality that one wonders what they were smoking and where you can buy some.

Note: The Aerospace report is demolished here if you are interested.

ED: The Aerospace document seems to have been pulled. If anyone can find it again, the title is: "The Financial Feasibility and a Reliability Based Acquisition Approach for Commercial Crew - Presentation to Administrator Bolden", John Skratt, The Aerospace Corporation. Perhaps it became too much of an embarrassment...

ED: I have a copy of the Aerospace document for you now.

(32)

I have for many years used Continental Airlines for most of my travel as I have found them reasonable and relatively easy to deal with. They always worked with me to solve problems and I never had any complaints about their service. I was a bit worried when United merged but at first it did not seem to cause any problems.

Now, the penny has dropped. I have been extending my travel here in the US and have changed the return date 6 times. Suddenly they have decided my ticket is 'not changeable' and the 6 people who have done so in the past 'were in error'. I actually do not believe this is the case. What I believe has happened is that the unfriendly skies have now taken hold and these people are totally bureaucratic and have no concept of working with their customers.

This does not bode well for the merged company. If they can leave a long time, loyal customer stranded, I suspect they are going to make many, many enemies amongst their potential customer base.

If I had their stock right now, I'd sell.

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This is not going to be your usual Samizdata article, if there is indeed any thing usual about articles on Samizdata. However, I strongly suspect his will be the first mission study ever published here, and I should know since I am responsible for most of the space blather around these parts.

I recently got my hands on an interesting NASA study for a deep space manned spaceship called the Nautilus. The more I have thought about the concepts behind the power points, the more excited I have become as to the possibilities... for a private Mars mission.

The NASA design study is interesting because if I were a many times over billionaire or consortium of billionaires, I could buy the majority of the vehicle today using hardware that is flight tested or is an incremental advance on such commercial goods. Nearly everything else one would need will be in that category by the end of the decade, with the exception of two important components. More on that later.

The Nautilus Deep space ship concept.
Image: NASA

To build this for a reasonable price we must avoid R&D where ever possible; we must avoid shaving pounds or adding efficiency or elegance for the sake of doing so. Given that criteria, I want to buy:

• A keel made out of one or more ISS truss segments. The only changes are the number and location of various attachment points.
• A set of Bigelow Aerospace Habs used for cargo holds lining the keel.
• A rotating joint good for many years of operation in vacuum.
• A rather largish ion engine with its fuel tanks and plumbing.
• A toroidal habitation module made out of specially designed Bigelow Habs.
• A Masten Aerospace or Armadillo Aerospace lander for Mars orbit operations.

In addition I will need:

• A consortium of one or more super rich space addicts who want to go to Mars and between them can come up with $5-10 Billion. I know of several whom I believe are already thinking ahead like this. Between them, there may already be enough money to do this in 2020-2025, given the expected commercial developments in this decade.
• Cargo capacity to LEO. This can be supplied by a lot of SpaceX Falcon 9's launches or a much smaller number of Falcon 10's
• Personnel capacity to LEO. Either the Boeing CST-100 or the SpaceX Dragon will suffice and there is a wide selection of existing boosters to put them on. There will probably be Virgin Galactic and XCOR space planes available by then, but I am being more conservative than that.
• Assembly shack. I need a place for the people to work while they put the spaceship together from the parts launched to orbit. We can either use the Bigelow Aerospace commercial facility which will be there already, or if we like to keep to ourselves, we can buy a single hab of our own.
• An orbital fuel depot. This is nonessential but nice. If we can simply store fuel near our construction hab, then ops become much more flexible. We can also make a buck or yen by selling fuel to NASA, DOD or to anyone else, private or government, who wants to drop in for a fill up and clean windshield. Even if it only defrays part of its costs, that is a net good.
• A space taxi. It can be a Dragon or a CST-100. It's primary mission usage will be to deliver the crew to and from the vehicle when it is outside of the Van Allen Belts. It will need a throttle-able booster attached to it. I know lots of folk with very reliable throttle-able engines using propellants with reasonable shelf lives. That means we fore go the 'joys' of LH2 storage and handling.

There are a bunch of questions which need answers and most of them already have reasonable ones.

QUESTION: There is no large ion or similar High ISP/Low thrust engine on the drawing boards. No one in the private sector will have a reason to build one for at least a decade.

ANSWER: We need NASA to development and prove out the engine.

QUESTION: No one has ever built a large, low friction, long life rotating joint for use in a vacuum and micro-gravity or low G acceleration environment.

ANSWER: It would be helpful if NASA tested a rotating inflatable Hab attached to the ISS. There is even a docking port free upon which to install it. Now it is true, that if NASA does the project the internecine warfare between centers and their Senatorial and Congressional Patrons against NASA HQ will turn a good idea into an internal development product that will not be built. But they may try and the fall out might be those few bits we actually need from them. There are actually good people there who are trying to pass the baton to the private sector and are engaged in trench warfare against the Jobz'n'Pork crowd who do not give a damn about the country so long as they are re-elected.

QUESTION: Low thrust engines mean spending a long time in the high radiation environments of the Van Allen Belts.

ANSWER: We let the vehicle spiral out from the construction orbit under low acceleration without the crew on board. When it is clear of the danger zone, we ship the crew out in the space taxi to rendezvous with the mother ship. We can either take the taxi along with us or let it do a burn to let it return to LEO. That depends on variables well beyond what I am willing to look at right now.

QUESTION: Deep space travel raises the probability of getting hit by the full force of a solar storm during the trip.

ANSWER: We let the large Bigelow habitats we are using for storage double as storm cellars. If one or two of them have 6 feet or so of water with a small camping space in the center, the crew can go there to tough it out for 24 hours if necessary.

QUESTION: Crew will not be able to stand up after years in zero gravity!

ANSWER: The crew will be under artificial gravity for nearly the entire trip. That is why we have the rotating hab. So, there is no bone and muscle mass loss problem. Neither of these is as bad as some try to convince you anyway. These days, after many months in orbit, Russian astronauts have been known to get out of their capsule and hike to the nearest farm house...

QUESTION: We do not have much in the way of CELSS technology (Closed Ecological Life Support Systems) and what we have is not very reliable yet.

ANSWER: We make the ship bigger and add more Bigelow Habs for stores and simply don't worry ourselves about it. It is not as if we were using a high thrust/low ISP engine that burns Olympic swimming pools of LH2 and LOX per second. We aren't. There is a cost but we are building a pure ship of space. Size is not a big issue. Also, some areas of CELSS probably will be sufficiently advanced by then. Water recycling is coming along nicely. O2 use is reasonably efficient even on ISS which does scrubbing to remove CO2 but not actual recycling of the CO2 to O2. We can live without that. As to food, its a small crew and the Bigelow Habs are, well, BIG. So what if our storm shelter on the way back depends on the worlds biggest bag of... well you know what I mean.

QUESTION: We do not have the technology to land crew and take off again from Mars.

ANSWERS: We are not going to land on Mars. Only a national government is going to have the R&D funds to build the needed vehicle by then because there is no commercial need for a vehicle of those specs. A future very large version of a Masten or Armadillo lander might serve; our winged designs from XCOR and Scaled Composites won't do it because no one has ever built an aircraft that can land and takeoff with pressures equivalent to perhaps 100,000 feet [off the top of my head and very possible wrong]. So we stay with landers "like God and Robert Heinlein intended" that land and take off on a pillar of fire. If Jeff thinks otherwise, I would not be bent out of shape to be proven wrong if he has a Mars Lynx concept in his future plans.

So if we are not landing, then why bother? Simple. We have to start some where and that somewhere is most likely Phobos. It may even have the ices from which we can replace some of our O2 for breathing and fuel for a lander. And with the very low G environment there, I suspect the *existing* Masten or Armadillo landers could do it. Since they will both be flying people by mid decade, their vehicles will be well tested in a more difficult environment by then. I will let Dave or John drop by and comment if they wish. Maybe they think they could get down to the surface and back already. I doubt it, but they are the experts on their future plans.

QUESTION: We don't have the aerobraking technology to slow down the returning spaceship!

ANSWER: We do not need aerobraking on return. We will just spiral in on a low continuous thrust and the crew will either get picked up by a taxi outside the Van Allen Belts or will use the one they took along with them, assuming they did not leave it on Phobos for future local Mars orbital and inter-moon exploration ops.

QUESTION: SpaceX does not have the funds to develop the Falcon 10 and its F-1 class engine right now.

ANSWER: It would be helpful if SpaceX was told to put its money where its mouth is and build the Falcon 10 for "less than $2.5B, in 5 years, on a firm fixed price contract basis." That way NASA gets an HLV that will cost a fraction of what the Communist Design Bureaus want to charge on their Cost Plus contracts and it will actually be designed to be commercially viable, ie be manufacturable without a standing army and launchable by a dozen rocket geeks with laptop computers. Elon will eventually find a way to fund his big engine, we will get this someday anyway.

There are design issues, and some high risk items which need to be retired before such a plan could move forward:

(1) It would take a number of iterations to work out the mass budget, fuel budgets, consumables budget and such and then feed them back in to redesign the ship, which changes the structures budget, which changes the fuel budget and the engine sizing. I believe this is an engineering exercise. It is a matter of sizing things and selecting components from the existing set of Space Operations Lego Blocks. However, until the study is done and the various budgets reach closure I can only say that I think it will work, but only if done with a commercial mindset. A good engineer "can build for a dollar what any damn fool can build for ten" as Robert Anson Heinlein succinctly put it. Unfortunately we seem to often be lacking in Heinlein trained engineers in the aerospace field. This is why many New Space companies hire folk from outside that field.

(2) I have some concerns about the rotating Hab. Any frictional forces are going to start spinning up the keel, which will put a twisting moment on it for which it was not really designed, at least not to my knowledge. Also, since I am assuming a constant low acceleration, say .1 or .01 G or even less, there is a small but finite force vector against the 'bottom side' collar of the joint. This is bound to cause wear over 2-4 years of continuous operations.

The moments can be canceled out to some extent if we had two counter rotating Habs. That also eliminates the gyroscopic effect, which may be a good or a bad thing depending... the cancellation could mean that a mid-course flip would not require a spin down; but it also means that you lose the high directional stability of one spinning mass plus the ability to do some torquing of direction by applying tipping forces to get whole ship orientation changes. It's a trade space that someone will have to look at.

Now, the mission itself!

The off the shelf components are purchased and stock piled at the launch facility, most likely Spaceport Florida at the old Cape Canaveral military pads. Or they may buy up some of the no longer needed facilities at KSC, perhaps even the VAB (Vertical Assembly Building) and the Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF).

Optionally a small Bigelow Hab is launched and inflated in the construction orbit. Otherwise we rent space from Bigelow on his commercial space station for about $10M/Year/Astronaut.

We send the initial complement of riggers and construction workers to the construction site using the most economical means available, whether CST-100, Dragon, SpaceShip3 or Lynx 3. For now we will assume the Dragon/Falcon 9 since it is already flight tested and cost effectiveness is known to be good.

We carry out a a series of cargo launches using the most economical cargo rockets available, whether HLV or MLV, to deliver the parts to orbit. We will assume a Falcon 10 is available by then, but we could just as well launch a larger number of Falcon 9 heavies and gain much of the cost back in the economy of scale.

The spaceship is assembled and fully tested in orbit, then it is taken on a short shakedown cruise, perhaps to ISS and back. Once commissioned, it is sent on its way in an unmanned configuration, doing a slow low thrust spiral out of the Earth's gravity well and through the Van Allen Belts.

When it is out of the belts, if full system checks show all is well, the ship is certified for interplanetary flight. If there are minor electronics faults due to radiation, the necessary spares are prepared; if the damage is major, the ship can be ordered to spiral back to the construction shack where it can be fixed and a solution worked out.

When the ship gets an AOK, the Mars crew boards a Dragon capsule with a restartable booster and takes a fast flight through the radiation belts to join their space ship in high orbit. The taxi may either return to LEO or be kept on the spaceship if the mass budget allows. It may be a useful thing to have in Mars orbit so we will assume it stays. The crew takes its own good time checking out systems. If there are serious problems found, they can abort by using the taxi to return to LEO and then the spaceship can be commanded to spiral back as well. If the crew finds the ship is go, they light the engines again and start the long climb towards Mars.

If a system breaks down while underway, they use stored spares to fix it or else they make do if it is not a critical system.

The ship accelerates for as long as necessary to place it on the planned orbit to Mars. This may or may not require acceleration all the way to the turn over point.

At some point in the flight deceleration must begin so that the ship can spiral into Mars orbit near Phobos. The engine is shut down; the ship does a back flip; then the engine is fired up again. Depending on the architecture, the rotating Hab may or may not need to be de-spun for the flip. I am assuming we are good enough at physics to not need to de-spin.

The ship goes into orbit around Phobos. This does not take a great deal of effort as the gravitational field of Phobos is rather small.

The Bigelow Habs used for consumables storage on the way out which are now empty are taken to the surface of Phobos to be used as the start of a permanent base. This may be tricky, but the gravity is so low that it may not be all that difficult. Someone will have to look at it. In fact, the people who build the landers might even be reading this, or will as soon as I tell them I have posted it! As for exploration, we can use the Masten/Armadillo landers for crew.

We can either use the entire mother-ship to explore Deimos or we can send a volunteer or two in the Dragon taxi.

When we are done with planting our instruments on the moons and staking our property rights claims to reasonable areas around the nascent base, we fire up the engine again and spiral out of the Martian gravity well. We then replay the mission in reverse... When we get close to Earth, a Dragon taxi is sent out to pick up the crew and give them a quick trip through the Van Allen Belts.

The crew come back to the construction shack/Bigelow commercial station and are there interviewed by the lucky journalists from Samizdata and other major publications of the 2020's before taking the scheduled Virgin Galactic or XCOR Space Lines trip back to the surface for their reunions with family and friends, their ticker tape parade through Time Square and their huge bonus checks from the private Mars exploration consortium.

Since we have built infrastructure, this need not be a one off. More of these craft can be built and each additional one becomes cheaper, better and more reliable because it is incrementally improved by commercially minded engineers. Each trip leaves more and more infrastructure in Mars orbit.

Over the period of a decade the cost-effective commercial Martian manned surface ops hardware is developed. Surface ops slowly build up as well until a tipping point is reached.

The club of Billionaires who did it go down in the history books and their names will be remembered for thousands of years. They can't take the Billions with them, but they can guarantee they will be remembered for as long as any human being has ever been remembered. What better reason for spending your fortune could there possibly be?

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Many congrats to the samizdatista;s at XCOR Aerospace on their new contract. They have been quite busy selling the Lynx suborbital space-plane, what with the wet leasing offers and the KLM frequent flyer miles deal. A sale of 6 flights to Southwest Research Institute is definitely a good start to a hopefully long and profitable life for the Lynx line.

So come on guys, please don't stick me on that test flight! I know you should make me prove I trusted the numbers that came out of that simulation code! Please don toss me in that briar patch Br'er Greason! ;-)

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We have a fair number of aviation and photography enthusiasts at this blog and readership, so here is a nice little "two for the price of one", courtesy of that haven of wackiness, Boing Boing.

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“If you wanted to fly and there were no supervisory authority in the airline industry and no regulations enforcing safety standards, you would be very reluctant to fly fledgling airlines. You would prefer the established ones that had the track record and the reputation. So a complete lack of safety regulations in the airline industry would favour established firms, making the entry of new ones impossible and killing competition and consumer choice.”

Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales, from page X (in the Roman numeral segment) of “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists.” Published in 2003.

This is an interesting defence of government-imposed safety standards. I am not wholly convinced by this line of argument; it is, for sure, an interesting way of trying to show how government regulation actually stimulates rather than restricts entry into a particular line of business.

My take is that if a fledgling airline, say “Ultra-Cheap Airlines Inc.,” can persuade investors and others to get it started in business with a few aircraft and so on, then the staff on the aircraft – such as the pilots – will not set foot into an aircraft if they fear that safety has been compromised, or if the aircraft are poorly maintained. Pilots are not usually self-destructive, as far as I can tell. In fact, a debutant airline business would bend over backwards to show customers that it had set high standards, get consumer watchdog organisations and other certification providers to give it a “seal of approval”. What the authors of the quote don’t seem to understand is how the “established” airlines got to be in that positions in the first place. Presumably, they had to start by persuading a highly nervous customer base that flight was safe, or at least, not lethal.

And of course, if the standards imposed by regulators are particularly onerous, then it is hard to see how a small business operating a few aircraft could afford to compete with the big boys. Regulations are a form of barrier to entry, much in the same way that extensive licensing of doctors is designed, quite deliberately, to regulate the number of people working as physicians.

This book is generally pretty good, however; it is interesting to read this book alongside the Martin Hutchinson/Kevin Dowd book about financial markets that I quoted the other day.

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We are in to the last half hour of the countdown for flight two. This time there is a real Dragon capsule, a vehicle which will be tested in orbit and then put through a re-entry, the first to be done by a private venture. This is a difficult sequence and even partial success is a major step forward. It is the second flight of a designed from the ground up launch vehicle; the first flight of a pressurized capsule that will someday be manned; and the first re-entry and recovery for the capsule.

It is a lot to accomplish and I will be reporting on what I see.

0854: The are proceeding to terminal count with no holds. Terminal count is when all of the interesting things happen. Preumably they have polled all of the key people for launch go. Terminal count will start in 1 minutes at t-10 min.

0856. Terminal automatic sequence is running...

0859. T-7. Chill down progressing. All going well.

0900. Chill down complete.

0903. The rocket is in terminal account. They have gone to a terminal count abort. They are safing it now.

0904. This is not unusual. The engineers will check out the reason for the abort and possibly correct it within this launch window or delay until later today. They have several possible windows today. They will probably recycle to at least t -10 if things can be cleared. Second launch window will be the next option.

0915. The time has recycled to t-13. No word yet as to the reason for the abort. Could be just a minor item that is out of bounds or a too tight constraint. This happens nearly every time. They detect things on their rocket that I doubt anyone else does and have an automation level that is far beyond the competition.

0920. The next open slot is 10:36 to 10:45 Eastern time. That is 15:36 to 15:45 UTC (GMT). No word from the engineers yet.

0934. Back channel info is that it was a problem with the range telemetry and they are fairly sure they know the source of the problem. They had a similar issue on Flight 1, although I do not have enough information to say whether it is exactly the same issue or not. Everyone is currently showing a retry in the next slot, although nothing official has come out yet.

0936: It is official. Retry in about an hour. Sounds like it was a problem in the link to the ordinance on board. Whether that was destruct or other is not clear to me yet.

0948. Okay, they've given detail publicly now. It was a false abort on the telemetry monitoring the self destruct explosives. A correction has been made to their database and they will proceed with the countdown at the next TDRSS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System) window in a bit under one hour.

1022. They are polling the net prior to restarting the count. at t-13.

1033. Polling for restart of terminal count... everything looking good so far. Prechill in progress.

1038, Chill down complete, Now they go to internal power in preparation for lowering the umbilical tower...

1052. Dragon is in orbit!

1054. My post mortem. The launch was nearly flawless. They have definitely got their control equations down pat this time as the roll attitude was rock steady from lift off through orbital insertion. Staging was perfect. No sign of any impingement of the separating 1st stage with the 2nd stage engine. The have again demonstrated capabilities that I do not believe anyone else has, with their automated sequencing, their ability to detect and abort on problems and then to analyze and retry without weeping and wailing and burning of midnight oil. The one day delay from Tuesday to today was due to a factor that would have scrubbed other vehicles for days if not longer. That delay was due to cracks in the expander extension. They simply removed it for this flight. When a rocket goes upwards the external pressure falls to zero and changes the way the jet expands. For vacuum operations you need a longer expansion nozzle to extract the most energy out of the hot gases. For this flight they did not need that wee bit extra so they did without it.

The Dragon capsule is now due to orbit the Earth 2-3 times before they do the re-entry. I will keep my ears open for the results. I am also going to be listening to find out of the first stage comes down in a recoverable condition this time. It is Elon's long term goal to be able to recycle stages to bring costs down even further but so far there has been little success there. They will get to it... it is far less important than the goals they have reached.

All in all, this has been a very good day for commercial space.

1216. A little bit more post mortem. One glitch that has been noted, not a particularly big one and one that happens on other rockets as well, was a bit of a fireball from the umbilical during liftoff. This was caused by drainage of fuel left in the hoses. Some thought it was a pretty good size fireball. It would not be notable except that this is only the second flight so everyone was a bit nervous about anomalies. The Dragon capsule is in orbit and is exercising its Draco thrusters and being put through its paces. Re-entry will be in 2-3 hours, somewhere off the coast of Mexico I believe. There have been no reports yet on the splash down of the first stage. Telemetry on it lasted fairly long this time so it may have remained intact through its re-entry this time. I'll pass on anything else I pick up over the next few hours. Personally, I think I'm going to go out and celebrate with a large coffee.

1402. I'm just back from a coffee and doing a bit of obligatory work... while I was away the capsule re-entered and parachuted into the Pacific. All flight parameters were nominal for human space flight. The only item still to be ticked off is the recovery of the first stage from the Atlantic. I have seen nothing yet as to whether it survived its return. I will let you know when I find out. The new age has dawned. Private manned orbital activity is now possible although a couple years away. SpaceX is running an aggressive but prudent test program and will not fly people until the F9 is a few more flights up the learning curve. They may also (for NASA use) be required to use an rocket escape tower on the capsule.

1443. What with all the excitement due to the main event, I completely forgot to mention that they *also* released several small payloads, 'CubeSats' for paying customers. So this was not only an Engineering test, it was also a commercial (although high risk) flight.

1507. I am still catching up with things. Just to let you know: the capsule was on floats within 35 minutes of the drogue chute deployment. That tells you the re-entry was right on target. Great work SpaceX!

Dragon Capsule after splashdown in the Pacific.
Photo: rcvd by Gwyne Shotwell's mobile phone from the Pacific, with thanks to SpaceX

1545. Elon Musk just announced another surprise. After separation from the capsule, they relit the 2nd stage engine and sent it into an orbit with an 11,000 km apogee. Now is that cool or what?!! Elon has also said that in the future the Dragon capsule will land propulsively and be ready for turn around and re-use. The heat shield was barely touched... it was designed to handle lunar and martian return re-entries. They have confirmed that it would take the worst case... as an alternative to the Orion. Unconfirmed: Gwynne Shotwell says the landing was within 800m of the target point.

1600. Elon has said that NASA said if all went well, the next flight might be allowed to do prox-ops at the space station. Everything went smashingly on this flight, so there is a high probability the next Dragon will go to ISS. First stage re-entry gave them a lot of data, but was not successful. Elons says it will come eventually... this is a long term goal that they are approaching incrementally. No one has ever done it before with a liquid first stage. It might take 2-3 years to beat this one down.

1608. If you are on line right now, you can watch the press conference here

1658. The Press conference is over and I am about to call it a day on this live blog and attempt to do some work. There is one other item that Elon stated which has to be repeated. The Dragon capsule has nearly the same volume as the Orion capsule. Dragon has a heat shield which can survive a Mars return re-entry, which Orion cannot. It is probably a more capable spacecraft than Orion. It costs far less and has sucked up a fraction of the cost of the Orion thus far. And now, to top it off, Dragon has flown and landed. Orion is still on the ground. Enough said?
Viva la capitalism!

With that, I bid you all a good night... and that's the way it was... Wednesday the Eighth of December, two thousand and ten.

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The MD-11, a derivative of the DC-10, first flew in revenue service a mere 20 years ago, making it just middle-aged by aircraft standards. However, KLM's birds are included on this list because they're the only three-engined jets currently operating in scheduled transoceanic passenger service — with the exception of an occasional Qantas A380.

This delightfully catty witticism nicely rounded off an interesting Wired presentation: Fly Away on These 10 Classic Airliners

I always thought the A380 a hideous gargoyle of a plane. And Qantas is a pretty rubbish airline these days. So have at 'em both, I say.

(H/t: Instapundit)

(3)

Rand Simberg has a nice article at Pajamas Media today on a topic which he and I and others have been harping on for many months: Republican socialists. The Utah delegation is one of the worst in this regard. To them, NASA is simply a State Jobs Program. It keeps the re-election funds coming in and whether they actually make anything useful or not does not really matter.

A NASA official once privately corrected me when I insisted I they would be forced to build a heavy lift vehicle (HLV), "We'll spend money on it..."

There lies the problem. There is arguably no real point in an HLV at this time. There is most certainly no need for one with ATK multi-segment rocket boosters (SRB's) of the sort which accomplished the self-disassembly of the space shuttle Challenger in January 1986. I admit, that is a cheap shot, but I think it is an accurate one. Yes, SRB's give a lot of thrust at start up. Yes they are stable for long term storage. Yes they are a great way to deliver munitions to faraway places. And NO, they are not a good way to build affordable access to space.

The only player in the commercial space game that is using anything like a solid rocket is Virgin Galactic, and their engine is a hybrid, not the same thing at all. Hybrids have solid fuel but use a liquid oxidizer. This allows throttling in real time. More importantly, if necessary, they can be turned OFF. The big ATK SRB engines can only be shut down by blowing off the end caps, and that has rather extreme aerodynamic braking effects.

The Utah delegation wants a new generation of white elephant built at the tax payers expense. They are not at all pleased with the idea that a new generation of commercially minded people are building spaceships which will bring their party to an end.

PS: If you have questions, I will meet you in the comment room as time allows and may well invite a few of my rocket designer friends if needed.

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An American friend of mine, Andrew Ian Dodge - known to several folks around here - has recently undergone a deeply unpleasant encounter with airport security types in the US, thanks to those lovely folk from the TSA. A few years back, Andrew had surgery for cancer treatment, and bears the scars of that. It seems that he suffered a lot of discomfort when a TSA character tried to pat him down, as they say. What the TSA goons may not have realised, since Andrew is not your regular stiff in a suit as he dresses more like a rocker clad in plenty of leather, is that he has some pretty weighty political connections, and will use them. There will be consequences.

I am not an expert on the pros and cons of scanner technologies, or whether they flood the body with dangerous radiation, and so on. What I do know is that this sort of outrage will always happen when certain persons, such as TSA officials, have that moment of supreme power over anyone else, as in a queue for security at a busy airport. What I suspect is different, however, between the USA and the UK is that the former country, as demonstrated by the recent successes of the Tea Party movement, has not yet entirely decided to kowtow to the conventional wisdom. So there is a decent chance, I think, that Congressmen and women might try and smack the TSA down, and hard. We can only hope. Back in the UK, there seems to be scant chance of this occurring. Our sheeplike habits are now too ingrained.

There is a good article in the Wall Street Journal on the same issue. And NickM, of Counting Cats, has an absolute blinder of a post on the subject. As he says, whatever excitements may once have attended air travel - at least the nice kind of excitements - are dead. The only people who can enjoy such travel these days are the mega-rich and politicians. As for the rest of us, we get the dubious pleasure of being felt up by the state's functionaries.

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I ran across this item in a Jane's Newsletter this morning:

US, Japan agree to diversify rare earth minerals. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara agreed on 28 October that diversifying sources of rare earth minerals was a priority in the wake of China's freeze on exports to Japan. These minerals are indispensible to modern defence systems and see commercial use in mobile phones, wind turbines, televisions and hybrid electric drives

Rare earth elements, with names like Yttrium, Scandium, Lanthanum and Praeseodymium, are critical to a modern industrial society. They appear in lasers, high tech alloys, superconductors, and much else. China is applying Mercantilist practices to corner a larger share of the global market in high end electronics. They are the largest producer of the strategic REE's and see this as an advantage in a geopolitical sense as well.

It will not work however. They may well be the current largest producer, but these elements exist all over the world. In the short term they will gain an advantage. Over the medium to longer term they will accomplish the same thing ITAR regulations accomplished for the United States. They will create a thriving industry elsewhere and it will eventually 'eat their lunch'.

To paraphrase an old saw: "You can't fool Mother Market."

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As I noted yesterday, Scaled Composities carried out the SpaceShipTwo drop test. Rand Simberg linked to their video.

She really looks lovely in flight and the pilot really did grease it in. I can tell from the closeup of the touchdown that the pilot had a bit of crosswind component and it did not cause any problems at all.

(1)

I have received notice that SpaceX will be running an engine test firing on the pad pretty soon. The second test flight of the Falcon 9 includes a full up Dragon capsule and they will be attempting their first test of the re-entry and recovery of the cargo (and later on passenger) capsule.

I suspect the political situation may have caused them to wait awhile on this, although the time since the first test flight is not overly long ago, only a matter of a few months. I am assuming that Elon would not want to risk a test flight failure during the time when the porkers in Congress were in a frenzy looking for any ammunition they could find to keep all funds flowing to the Ministries of Aviation rather than purchasing services from commercial space providers.

Since the House voted by a very wide margin to accept the Senate bill (which did not cut private space usage nearly as deeply), SpaceX can now risk a second flight.

I give the second flight about 90% chance of attaining orbit like the first flight and 50% chance of a successful re-entry and recovery of the Dragon capsule.

I will keep you informed as I hear more.... oh, and by the way. there was a successful drop test of SpaceShipTwo today.

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I have been seeing a great deal of these folks lately.

6 km/sec aluminum slugs fired by a railgun built by a small company. Is that cool or what?

(2)

I just read the details on the SpaceX Dragon capsule drop test which occurred earlier this month.

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Rand Simberg pointed out this article. The level of incompetence shown by 'professional journalist' Peter Fenn is simply breathtaking to those who know the subject matter.

When I read something like this, it lowers my already sub-basement level of trust in professional media. If they are this bad on things where I know what is going on, what might they be feeding me in areas where I lack such inside knowledge?

It is really quite scary.

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Business partner Rand Simberg has this to say about the attempts of Congress to design pork propelled rockets. The only practical idea in the lot is the BFR from SpaceX, and that (in my opinion) only if a market of 500 Metric Tons or so a year materializes.

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I have expected this to come along as it seemed an obvious market step for SpaceX. They have announced their plans to enter the Heavy Lift arena.

If you are familiar with the politics in DC right now, this really puts the cat amongst the pigeons.

(2)

Rand Simberg attended the Boeing press conference and has supplied some notes on their CST-100 plans.

I am glad to see there will be competition in the LEO cargo and business passenger field. As much as I like Elon and what he has accomplished, there is nothing like real competition to grow the market.

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The Porkers are out to kill the US space program..

There really is not a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats (with a few nasty exceptions) when you scratch the surface. Almost to a man and woman they are just Socialists with different priorities over what part of the economy and your life should come under State control first. Perhaps the bi-partisanship in the attack on New Space has more to do with the threat that an area once part of the Statist 'Ummah' might escape.

If you are an American and not a Socialist, call your congressman and senator and tell them off. Then join your local tea party and work to excise the Republican-Socialists from what once was a slightly (but only slightly) more freedom oriented party.

As the Commies used to say, you have nothing to lose but your chains...

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I was driving past Duxford, the airbase near Cambridge, at the weekend and unfortunately, I was so busy with other things that yours truly did not have time to go to the airshow there. They were marking the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Then, as now, the skies were a deadly clear blue - ideal for any bombers looking to find their targets at the time. We curse heavy clouds in Britain, but we should be grateful for them occasionally.

It is perhaps not surprising why this epic battle over the south and southeast of England continues to capture imaginations, even among those usually and rightly wary about military power: there is the fact that the battle was a largely defensive one, pitting a relatively under-strength air force up against a larger, and more battle-hardened, German airforce, although the UK had the great benefit of an integrated radar/fighter dispersal system put in place in the late 1930s and run with magnificent calm by Dowding. If there ever was a case of a relatively clear Good versus Evil sort of conflict, this surely was it. (That should get the peaceniks going, Ed). For us aviation nuts, there is, obviously, the aesthetic as well as emotional appeal of one of the most beautiful aircraft ever built. And whatever some revisionists might claim, there is little doubt in my mind that Britain's decision to resist invasion in that year rather than agree some sort of grubby and easily-broken deal with Hitler was the right one.

Many of those who fought in the skies are no longer with us; soon, this conflict will be captured not in first-hand memories, but in books, films and TV documentaries. Here is a review of three books of that conflict.

The headline on this blog entry was taken from one of my favourite war films, The Battle of Britain. It was uttered by the great Ralph Richardson. The film does have some great one-liners. I must run that DVD again some time.

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Boeing has no intentions of being left behind in the commercial race for space. I have been hearing for some time about their CST100 capsule. They are doing this on their own dime. I always knew the Boeing guys would eventually get on the commercial bandwagon and the contract to launch and support the Bigelow Aerospace space station seems a key turning point.

Once Elon Musk gets his divorce all worked out so that ownership is clear, I am pretty sure we will be hearing about an IPO at SpaceX.

Take the success of SpaceX, Boeing entering the commercial manned space market and the pending IPO and the expectation I have of a flood of investment money following a big run up in the value of the placement and you have the recipe for a commercial explosion into LEO.

First LEO, then the Moon, Mars... and beyond. Privately.

(2)

Now that the Falcon 9 has flown, the Falcon 9 Heavy is looking a lot closer.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the success of SpaceX is that they have designed and orbited multiple clean-sheet design engines; the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launch vehicles; and a test article for a cargo/manned space capsule for about $500M. That's comparable to the fully burdened (Not the incremental) cost of one shuttle flight. I believe it is less than the escape system development cost on the dead-on-arrival Ares I project.

(19)

Bob Bigelow, the operator of two inflatable test habitats in orbit, fired one back at the idiots who claim to be all for free-markets, capitalism and liberty... until their own socialist-space ox gets gored:

"... I don’t understand the critics who say ‘commercial’ entities can’t safely build a capsule. Why is it that Boeing, the company that constructed the ISS itself, can’t safely build a capsule that would go to their own space station? These are the sorts of questions and issues that we will be posing in Washington as a member of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation."

(7)

SpaceX has signed a $500M deal to launch the next generation Iridium satellite system.

The mammals are now getting big enough to go for the dinosaurian jugular vein.

(13)

Webcast starts in a few minutes. Launch windows runs from 11:00 US East coast until about 15:00 today and the same tomorrow.

You can watch here

1150 EDT: Hold is due to low signal on a Flight Termination System (FTS) antenna because of the hardback being in the way. If that is the problem, it will go away at launch. I expect they are studying the issue and will see if the USAF RSO (Range Safety Officer)will waiver them.

1200 EDT: I have heard a rumor that the issue might be with a transmitter belonging to the ETR (Eastern Test Range).

1226 EDT: A fishing boat with engine trouble is crossing the exclusion zone; They have tested the FTS problem by raising and lowering the hardback. No solid word on when they will continue from the hold or scrub.

1243 EDT: They tested the signal propagation by raising and lowering the hardback; the Reel Insanity fishing boat has been convinced to stay out of the exclusion zone. Waiting to hear if the clock is going to start running again.

1312 EDT: Coast guard is apparently chasing a sail boat away. Word is that it is a lovely Friday and lots of rank amateur boaters are out and not even listening or turning on their marine radios. This is about the 3rd one in a couple hours. I think a few Exocet's would do, 'pour encourager les autres'...

1318 EDT: They will be launching soon, going back into terminal count.

1325 EDT: 6 minutes to liftoff. Godspeed SPACEX!

1331 EDT: Terminal count abort. Waitting for word on whether there will be a recycle today. They have done this often on Falcon 1's, even to the point of detanking and refueling on the pad.

1354 EDT: Still no word on a recycle. There is still time in the current launch window and they have the clock reset and frozen at t-15 minutes.

1357 EDT: They are going to recycle. Waiting for notification of when the count will restart. It was an out of limits event at the terminal count down checks that can be worked with. No word yet on precisely what it was, but I will guess it had to do with engine ignition timing being too tight. All engines are supposed to fire at the same time. Just my guess. There did not appear to be an ignition so it would be something to do with pre-ignition events obviously. Pressures, valve timings, etc.

1427 EDT: count is to resume at 1430 and launch at 1445 if all goes well.

1432 EDT: terminal count has resumed.

1456 EDT: Falcon 9 has had a flawless launch to orbit on the very first test flight. It has carried with it the aerodynamic test article for the first commercial crew capsule. I did not in my wildest dreams expect the first try to go this smoothly. I was here with the Executive Director of NSS and we were both screaming like mad men as each major risk area got ticked off. I'm just limp.

We are in a new age folks.

1540 EDT: An initial congrats is out from NSS

1546 EDT: And SFF

(34)

Incoming from Michael Jennings, alerting me to this:

UK survey calls iPhone 'more important than space travel'

The headline could equally well have said: UK survey calls Sky+ 'more important than Post-it Notes', but the iPhone and space travel were what they zeroed in on. Fair enough.

I agree about the relative triviality of space travel, except insofar as it makes things like iPhones work better. I mean, you couldn't have those maps on your iPhone telling you where you are and where you're going were it not for GPS, as in S for Satellite, now could you? So, space rockets of some sort are needed for iPhones. But space travel? How significant is that? The bigger point, made by all those surveyees but then contested by the headline writer, is that space travel is now rather oversold, compared to how things are - insofar as they are - hurtling forwards here on Earth. Which, I think, it is.

The people who are for space travel keep going on about how Man Needs to Explore the Universe, and no doubt Man does. But is Man anywhere near ready to make a serious go of that yet? The trouble is that there is so little out there, in the immediate vicinity, accessible to actual men, easily and cheaply, now.

I suspect that the problem is that people, especially political people when composing political speeches, automatically assume an equivalance between the expansion of Europe circa 1500, and the expansion of Earth circa now. But the rest of the world in 1500 was full of stuff, much of it really very near to Europe, and much of it right next to Europe. There was continuous positive reinforcement available to any explorer brave enough to give it a go and lucky enough to hit some kind of paydirt. Now? Communications satellites? Weapons? Tourism? Astronomy? All we can yet really do in space is make various very Earthly enterprises work that little bit better. Which is not a trivial thing, and I'm certainly not saying we should give up even on that. All hail Virgin Galactic! Go SpaceX. But for many decades, most of the important space action will be in geo-stationary orbit rather than anywhere beyond.

And as for that constant libertarian refrain you hear about how Earth is becoming a tyranny and we must all migrate to space, to rediscover freedom, etc. ... Please. People found freedom in America because there was this great big place to feed themselves with. America. Settlements in America were, pretty soon, potentially if not actually, self-supporting. Our technology has a long way to go before a colony on some god-forsaken wasteland like the Moon or Mars, without even breathable air, could ever be self supporting, in the event of Mission Control back on Earth getting shut down by something like an Earth war of some kind. Profitable, maybe, eventually. But able to stay alive without continuous contact with Earthly back-up of various kinds? That will take far longer. The reality is that for the foreseeable future, any humans who set up camp on the Moon or Mars or wherever will be far more dependent upon the continuing and sustained goodwill of powerful people back on Earth than the average Earthling is. There is no America out there, or China, or Australia or Africa. Those early European pioneers found a world full of land and resources, to say nothing of semi-friendly aliens whom we Europeans could trade with. But now? Just a few little rocks and gas blobs bobbing about in a vast sea of utter emptiness, emptiness that is an order of magnitude emptier than our actual sea, which is a cornucopia by comparison. And apart from that, for decades, nothing seriously big that isn't literally light years away. It's an entirely different state of affairs to Europe in 1500.

I wrote all of the above with my own personal blog in mind, but now realise that Samizdata is the place for it, if only because of all the enlightening and perhaps contradictory comments that may become attached. And since this is liable to be picked to pieces by people most of whom are far more technologically savvy than I am, it behoves me to rephrase it all as a question. Which can basically be summarised as: Is that right? Am I missing something here?

Am I, for instance, getting too hung up on mere distance? Yes the Solar System is almost entirely empty. Yes, the Asteroid Belt is a hell of a way away. But, if you are willing to be patient, is it actually quite cheap to send rockets there? Does all that emptiness cancel itself out as a barrier to travel, because of it being so easy (and so much easier than our Earthly sea) to get across?

I actually would quite like to be told that I am wrong about this. In particular, I really really wish that there was somewhere else nearby where the Fight For Liberty blah blah could be restaged, but on better terms to how the same fight seems now to be going here on Earth. But I just , as of now, don't see that happening any time soon.

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Hardly a day seems to go by nowadays without somebody with approximately the same kind of political attitude as me scratching his head, publicly, in writing, about President Obama's bafflingly sensible space policy, which sticks out like a healthy thumb in an otherwise horribly mutilated hand of policies.

Critics are disturbed by the large and unprecedented role Mr. Obama sees for the private sector in space exploration. For a president who is often accused of being a socialist, he has more faith in the ingenuity of the private sector than his detractors do.

Maybe so. But how could someone so opposed to free market notions here on earth be so keen on them in space? I would like to offer a version of President Obama which maybe makes sense of this puzzle. What follows is sort of a joke. I certainly hope that readers of it will be entertained. But I also think it might be true.

I start by asserting that President Obama wants socialism, collectivism, statism, whatever you want to call the opposite of free markets and the free society, to triumph, everywhere, in the USA and everywhere else. I'll just call it statism from now on. President Obama wants statism, everywhere in the world. Accordingly, he imposes as much statism as he can on the USA, and he defers to and seeks to strengthen it in all other countries.

Suppose further that President Obama thinks that it will be all part of the triumph of statism that the USA should be become a relatively weaker power in the world than it has been for the last century or so. Logical enough. He won't be President for ever. Not even he can suppose that. Inevitably, people whom he views as rabid free marketeers and rabid anti-statists will be back in the saddle in Washington, again not for ever, but periodically, and more often than in most other countries. Accordingly, President Obama believes that the weaker the USA is compared to the rest of the world, the better for the world, and - same thing - for the cause of statism in the world.

Now, a further assumption, which is that President Obama sincerely believes that free market policies are utterly misguided, and that statism is genuinely a much better way to run things. It's not just that he is part of the statist team, and that he wants his team to damn well win and himself to get massively more rich and powerful from being one of the key leaders of his team, although I'm sure that's part of his motivation. What if, in addition to feeling strong team loyalty and seeking personal career advancement, he is also genuinely convinced of the truth of the opinions proclaimed by himself and by his team? What if he sincerely believes that statism is good, and that free market capitalism is disastrous?

Now, what does President Obama want the USA to do in space? Suppose that, in a word, President Obama wants the USA in space to do: badly. What if, to President Obama, current USA space policy is a massive and decidedly successful exercise in USA power projection, of just the kind that he wants reined in, hobbled, even humiliated? What if he wants the USA to fail in space?

What would he do to accomplish such failure? He would impose the very policy that he sincerely believes will contrive such failure, namely free market capitalism, by, as Dale Amon notes in the piece linked to above, appointing enthusiasts for such policies and saying that he favours such policies. On earth, President Obama wants his domestic policies to be successful, and popular and good for everyone, so that US citizens will continue to vote for such arrangements, more often and with greater extremity than they have tended to in the past. And if paying for all this goodness means that the USA has less money to spend on being a great power, so much the better. But in space, there are fewer voters to worry about, and the overall amounts of money being talked about are relatively trivial. So a chaotic and disastrous space policy, that serves to undermine and weaken the USA as a great power, carries little risk of the voters of the USA getting angry and voting foolishly, as President Obama sees it, in the future, in serious numbers. An anti-statist space policy, which he believes will be a failure, will be, for him, pure gain.

The key to all of this is my understanding of what President Obama thinks he is accomplishing with his domestic policies. The claim I hear in my part of the internet/blogosphere is that President Obama wants to steal wealth for himself and his political supporters – for his team, and damn the interests of the USA as a whole, and of all its people aside from a few political apparatchiks such as himself. He wants to weaken the USA by imposing bad – statist – domestic policies. He is, in other words, a plunderer, a cynic and a traitor. But what if President Obama sincerely wants his domestic policies to be successful, and sincerely believes that they will be, in much the same way that sincere free marketeers like me are similarly optimistic about the impact of their (our) policies, if not immediately then in the longer run, and despite all the immediate political opposition that radical change in any direction inevitably stirs up from special interests who will thrive best if the rules are left as they now are?

The usual story I hear, to boil it down to its essentials, is that President Obama, mysteriously, wants domestic policy in the USA to fail, but, even more mysteriously, wants the USA's space policy to be a success. Why else would he be so predictably and stubbornly stupid and destructive about domestic policy, but yet simultaneously so bizarrely sensible about space? My story says he wants to do well and believes that he is doing well with the USA's domestic policies, so that the votes keep rolling in for statism in the USA. But he wants to badly with the USA's space policy, so that more statist states can supplant the USA in space, thereby weakening the USA and strengthening statism the world over.

It's just that President Obama's understanding of how the world outside of politics works - he understands how the world of politics works very well - is the opposite of the truth. What he thinks will work, will fail. And what he thinks will fail, will work.

Will President Obama's much criticised foreign policies, in addition to his seemingly much improved space policy, also serve to make the USA a more powerful nation, I wonder, an even greater great power? By – I don't know – not getting the USA involved in so many foreign wars? By other nations realising that it is up to them to defend themselves against nearby statist bastards of the kind that President Obama now encourages, and which some future President might encourage yet again, and by other nations then doing a better job of that than the USA could ever do, by trusting themselves instead of the USA? That could also be, I think. I'm thinking: defender of last resort, moral hazard. That kind of thinking has unleashed havoc on the banking system. Cannot the same be said of foreign policy?

To put all of the above another way, and to use a phrase I am fond of in this connection, the best that politicians can often to do for this or that particular activity is to impose upon it a policy of malign neglect. The neglect means that those who choose to be directly involved can get on with it. Malign means that the politician really doesn't care if everything goes tits up, which means that those directly involved are on their own and are going to be truly responsible for whatever happens. If they fail, they fail. If they make a mess of what they are doing, they'll have to clean it up themselves, and they all know it, which concentrates their minds wonderfully. Politicians often do their best when trying to do their worst.

I am rather proud of a short story (there is also an html version, but I see that it contains at least one bad mis-copying error of omission and perhaps there are more), which I wrote some while ago. This story told of a man with similar opinions to those I have attributed here to President Obama about how the world does and does not work. But – hilarious twist, ho ho – my guy was also a psychotic would-be mass murderer, on a would-be global scale. Unlike my version of President Obama, he meant really badly. He wanted to kill everyone in the world and have everything for himself. So, he unleashed rampant free market capitalism on the entire world, imagining that this would cause global havoc and global slaughter. But alas for his murderous ambitions. He died a universally acclaimed hero and a miserably disappointed man, having killed absolutely nobody, in fact quite the opposite.

(14)

I have been rather scarce lately and those who know me well enough probably know some of what I have been up to. Much has been either of little interest to our readership or has had me too busy to even talk about it. However, I have been up to a bit of aeronautical fun the last couple Saturdays which some of you might enjoy hearing about.

For some years I have known about the F4F Wildcat which the Ulster Aviation Society pulled out of the lough where it had rusted in pieces for a half a century. I had no way to get out to the hanger where the restoration work has been going on until last weekend when I finally convinced someone to give me a lift. Once there, others decided they really could use my set of reasonably skilled hands... and the rest is history as they say. Actually all of it is history: this is a genuine British WWII veteran that ditched one winter's day while out on a patrol from this very airfield.

It has taken them over ten years to get here, but she is beginning to shape up quite nicely.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

My first job was to install a small fitting between the outside and inside of the cockpit, so I had to contort myself into odd positions to ratchet in bolts to re-install a 65 year old part to the restored fuselage skin. I also learned that a 6mm metric wrench does quite nicely on a 1/4 inch bolt...

It is a good thing I got skinny again... I spent a good chunk of the day squeezed in here.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

After accomplishing that small task, the foreman, a retired ATC from Aldergrove (BFS), gave me a slightly bigger job. I was told to pull an aluminum fitting from the cockpit port side where the combination of new and old parts had been pressed in for a fit check, and then to do all the filing, cleaning and priming to ready the part for use.

This will eventually contain some controls near the pilot's left elbow
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The hanger is itself history. During WWII Shorts built Stirling Bombers here. The Stirling was a big airplane and stood high on its long undercarriage. If you have ever seen a picture of one you will never forget it.

The Wildcat is not the only airframe in this ancient hanger. There is also a Blackburn Buccaneer, a Shorts Tucano, a number of classic helicopters, a Shorts 330, and a few other airframes that are only to be found here. There is even a recently retired RAF Canberra photo recon plane due to arrive any month now.

My second favorite after the Wildcat however is the Suez War veteran Sea Hawk. Even just sitting there it seems to be telling me "I want to fly!!!" The office is quite comfortable but I could not convince them to move all those other aeroplanes out of the way and let me take it for a spin. Well, there is one other problem: someone built a large building in the middle of where the WWII runway used to be. Oh well...

Did you say catapult one or two?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

(14)

So is the closure of Europe and Britain's airspace really needed to ensure safety?

'We simply checked every single aircraft very carefully after the landing in Frankfurt to see whether there was any damage that could have been caused by volcanic ash,'' Weber said. ''Not the slightest scratch was found on any of the 10 planes.''

German air traffic control said Air Berlin and Condor had carried out similar flights.

[...]

Air Berlin Chief Executive Joachim Hunold declared himself ''amazed'' that the results of the German airlines' flights ''did not have any influence whatsoever on the decisions taken by the aviation safety authorities.''

Quelle surprise!

(20)

When I was a wee kid growing up on my folks' farm in East Anglia, it was a common sight, in the 1970s and 80s, to see RAF Jaguar and Tornado jet aircraft practicing very low flying over the flat (ish) fields of that part of the UK. Typically, a Jag could fly no more than 100 ft off the deck, so low in fact that you could see all the markings on the side of the aircraft, what sort of stuff it was carrying, etc. The idea was to get under the opposition's radar. These aircraft were practicing the sort of flying that would be needed against the-then Warsaw Pact ground forces of the time. (The Jaguar was a very effective strike aircraft).

But nothing, absolutely nothing, compares with flying as low as this. Ye gods!

Here's another.

(2)

SpaceX carried out a 3.5 second test firing of the Falcon 9 engines on the pad at the Cape. This successful test opens the way to the first test launch of the vehicle. I will be keeping my eyes open for news on potential first flight dates.

(1)

I have surmised much about the Blue Origin program and on occasion heard things I was perhaps not supposed to, but this is the first time they have had a speaker at a major conference.

It is my belief they will do something major and public this year and this slight parting of the veil of secrecy fits that perception.

(15)

It is only a matter of time before ballistic missiles are rendered impotent and obsolete.

(4)

I am very happy to see key Republicans Newt Gingrich and Robert Walker have publicly backed the new NASA budget.

(10)

An old friend of mine who is now second in command at NASA gave an FAA AST Keynote speech on Friday which should warm the cockles of any free marketers heart. The new budget is a drastic directional change for NASA from the old Socialist Bureaucracy model to one using entrepreneurship and free market capitalism.

I am sure this is not enough for some of you, but it is a massive change towards the right direction which we should applaud and support.

All I can say is, "Go Lori!!!!"

PS: I will endeavour to write up my take on the new direction as soon as I can. As you can see from the previous article, I have been a bit occupied. If you take from the above that I am a tad... positive... about the new policy, you would be British in your level of understatement.

(13)

Sometimes it takes awhile to get around to a story. I was in Huntsville, Alabama in November 2008 and talked my friend and fellow NSS board member Greg Allison into playing hookey from the meetings for part of an afternoon so I could take some of my own photos of the remains of the DCX rocket. When he told me about his classic Kentucky long rifle, I realized this was a photo op extraordinaire for.... REDNECKS in Spaaaace!!

Three things you do not do in the South. You don't mess with a southerners dawg, his pickup truck or his spaceship.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Don't even think it. He'll shoot off your left at further than you can even see a squirrel.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

(6)

By the time the 'evacuation' bus delivered Rand Simberg and I to the parking lot of the Mariah Hotel, the wind was far worse. 'They call the Hotel, Mariah', Rand quipped on the bus. The wind, however, was more like raging beast. The car was just around back and we had to lean into the sandblast.

Rand thought there might be a party over at the XCOR hanger, but it was rather dark when we arrived. I was unconvinced anyone was still there and stayed in the car. Rand got out to knock on the office door and somehow managed to do so without being carried aloft like some Wizard of Oz character.

So. No joy on Plan A. Plan B perhaps? The spaceport bar at the Mariah? So, back we went. It turned out this was where the action was tonight. We did a quick turn of the downstairs and found Alan Boyle at work near the Christmas tree in the Mariah lobby. He worked so much today he must still have been sober.

Alan was transported from tent to hotel without missing a keystroke.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

While Rand went off to see who else was around, I took a few lobby photos and examined the rather interesting hotel trophy case.

Yep, this is the spaceport hotel...
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

When Rand did not turn up again after a few minutes I went looking and naturally found him with another journalist in the bar. Where else do you find journalists? (Except Alan of course.) They type, they drink and therefore they are.

I must admit my photos went rapidly down hill in quality. By the end of the night the results were about as blurred as what I was actually seeing. Remember, we had free Absolut and wine all day... this was just the after the party party!

It was around this time I heard the evacuation was not just precautionary: the tents had been demolished by the winds.

Len David and Rand Simberg at the Spaceport Bar.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Pretty much everyone was there, including Burt Rutan and Richard Branson.

Sir Richard hung out in the Spaceport Bar with a few hundred close friends.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Since Mojave is the first official commercial spaceport, I am guessing that makes the Mariah Hotel bar the very first official spaceport bar!

The first spaceport bar.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Mostly we stayed in our quiet corner: not too crowded there and the bar staff kept full bottles in our hands. Misuzu Onuki, designer of fashion for space travelers, joined us for awhile. It was impossible to get a candid shot of her as she is just too camera aware! This is not to mention that, by this time, it was surprising I could even find the shutter button...

Barb Sprungman, Len David and Misuzu Onuki.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Although the party showed little sign of slowing down, we had a long trip ahead of us. Rand pointed me down the hallway towards the front door, but I stopped in the front room to thank Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn for a marvelous time. I also noticed Sir Richard was still hanging out and seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly. He was in a small knot of folk talking in the back of the room.

Yep, this is just as I remember seeing it....
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

When we arrived back in LA, I posted my Samizdata teaser story and got into an online chat with one of my friends from the Mojave community. She asked if I felt like helping with the hunt for designer jackets tomorrow morning at the spaceport East fence...

This is the last of a series of 7 articles on the SpaceShipTwo roll out at the Mojave Spaceport. The previous article is here

(6)

As I headed back for the very relative warmth of the main tent I was drawn to the life size replica of SpaceShipOne, the vehicle I watched blasting into space above Mojave in the first half of this decade. It now seemed so small, so primitive, a Mercury to SpaceShipTwo's Apollo. I could not but help imagine what private space will be flying six years from now. Creative destruction has broken free of its chains. The game has changed.

SpaceShipOne: so tiny, so quaint, so... turn of the century.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The first familiar face I spotted upon my return to the main tent was the hard to miss Gary Barnhard of the National Space Society. He and others were chatting in the middle of the floor. Despite being half frozen, I gladly accepted chilled white wine from a lovely lass who was wandering about with a tray of them. I must admit I would have preferred some of the hot 'Glue Wine' concoction I used to imbibe when skiing Seven Springs in Pennsylvania, but... it was antifreeze, it was free... so who was I to complain?

It was not surprising to find Gary in close proximity to wine.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

With wine in hand I started my first photographic round of the party. When I crossed from the main tent to the front balloon tent and glanced out the gap I was taken again by the surreal reality: there is a friggin real space ship out there!

I just saw a spaceship... someone pinch me!
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

As an old hand in the performance arts one of the things which impressed me was the use of light. I have seen no one else mention it so let me be the first to give kudos to the lighting designer!

Red and blue lights painted the interiors and gave the facilities a very unearthly feel.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

It had sparkle, glitter and plenty of blue. (That is an inside joke for anyone else who has ties into the CMU Drama Department of a few decades ago.)
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

It did however give one that 'I'm inside an icecube' feel.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

This is the infamous coat room.

I thankfully did not check my coat or laptop as others did. Does that make me a more experienced pioneer?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

There was spacey music all night long.

A disk jockey was a very good idea. I cringed at the idea of putting fingers on guitar strings at this temperature. The very thought causes a male physiological reaction.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

There was plentiful hot food and the cold Absolut and wine flowed freely. Forget virgins: this was Paradise for my friends of the journalistic persuasion.

We had an Arctic feast complete with dancing aurorae over head.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Some even chose to sit.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

While almost everyone else was trying to keep warm, I slipped outside again and watched them hook up the tractor and tow the ship back into the darkness. The wind was picking up and I presume they got it out of there just in time.

It may be large but it does not take much to move it.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

It was somewhat sad to see it go.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

To those who think this was all a big party... for some it may have been, but for many it was a long hard day of work.

I do not think I ever saw Alan Boyle when he was not interviewing or typing.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

While I was circulating I was also trying to find Rand Simberg since I had no idea when he wanted to head back and had not seen him in several hours. As he was here with his journalist hat on (as opposed to his really quite serious aerospace engineer hat), he was running back and forth between interviews and the unmarked door to the Press room.

Rand Simberg chatting with Gary Barnhard and Mark Hopkins of the National Space Society.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Once I had arrangements worked out with Rand, I went off on further photo rounds. The main bar was in the rear of the big tent. It was quite a striking place... it was also wide open to the frigid outside although slightly sheltered by the runway jetwash deflector.

There was a sort of arctic beer garden in the back... or perhaps vodka garden would be more accurate.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The now fully carved and colorfully lit spaceman was in Absolut-ely no danger of melting.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I have played in venues that had less seating and a shorter bar than this.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

There were many nooks (dare I call them nanooks?) to sit in.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The bar was long and well staffed. There was Absolut-ely no worry of passing over the threshold to sobriety.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

"It's Earth Jim, but not as we know it."
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The crowd was dwindling but the press and space crowds were still hard at work when I returned to the front of the main tent.

The NSS leadership were plotting the rise of the Space Ambassadors program.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Cameras and talking heads were still working on the main stage.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Journalists filed stories from wherever they could find a cranny to work.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I threw this one in just because I liked the composition.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

And then the we were told to tune to our local Conelrad station... well not really, but we were told to get out. NOW! Gale force winds were due within minutes and we were to drop everything and go to the buses. NOW! So naturally the journalists ran to their computers to file the story!

Rand, and therefor myself, were among the last ones out. Someone has to file the story, right?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Barb Sprungman and her significant other, Len David were also among the last ones out of Saigon... er I mean the main tent.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

We then searched for a bus to the hotel. It was hard to see and hear as the winds were now vicious. It was like walking into a sandblaster. Someone spotted us, came out and yelled which direction to head. Another person pointed us to the correct bus.

Line of buses getting a paint strip job.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

In the next episode our heroes retire to the local bar after barely escaping disaster in the desert.

This is the sixth part of a photo series. The previous one may be found here

(7)

Rand Simberg posted the news that XCOR has closed a deal with Yecheon Astro Space Center to provide Lynx II flights. The Lynx I they have been working on will now only be used as a test article to work out design issues before moving on to the fully suborbital Lynx II. Previously their plans were to fly passengers in the Lynx I at a price and altitude somewhat comparable to adventure flights in advanced Russian fighter planes. The income was to have been ploughed into the development of the Lynx II, the true suborbital spaceship. Thus there will be at least two companies flying passengers into space in the near term, Virgin Galactic and XCOR.

If you are reading my posts in expectation that I am a neutral observer of this industry rather than a deep insider passing on tidbits of info then you must be a new reader. Lessee... Rand Simberg and I are in business together in Wyoming Aerospace. I know a bunch of the Virgin Galactic High Command and work with them through the National Space Societies 'Space Ambassadors' program. As to XCOR... well, not counting that I have known some of them for up to 30 years... I wrote software under contract to them which was used by their aerodynamics guy for the initial rough planform design of the Lynx.

So yeah, I have dogs in this race. All of them. And I am damned proud of whatever tiny contribution I have made to the industry over my lifetime and ecstatic that I am actually around to see it all come to fruition.

Ad Astra and Merry Christmas to all of my aerospace family. May you reverse the adage about aerospace and fortunes and break the surly bonds of gravity and self-induced poverty. And while we are at it... may a now minuscule Wyoming aerospace company also make a bloody fortune for its owners!

(9)

After the speeches finished I headed up to the stage to take a photo or two. We were supposed to wait for the speakers and the press to go outside first so I intended to put my wait to good use. To my surprise, I was nearly run down by the group of very very important persons and had to squish back against the edge of the stage as Arnold hurried past inches away. Once they were all outside I joined the rest of the merely VIP filing out onto the tarmac at the side door .

It was cold outside, at least down into the twenties. That would not have been so bad except for the rather brisk wind coming down the runway into our faces.

There were a lot of media folk freezing their tuckus off in the Press Stand.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

There was music and a deep percussive bang as each of the huge images on the left of the runway flashed to on, starting from the direction in which we could hear the sound of distant engines. Then a white line became visible in the distance, the wing of WhiteKnightTwo. It lengthened as the singing jets grew louder... and then I could see it: the underslung SpaceShipTwo.

It came from out of the dark of a Western night... the first commercial Space Ship. Am I really here? Is it really here?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Is it just love in the eyes of the beholder or is she just plain gorgeous?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Ship and mothership came to a stop in front of us.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

A group of four persons went up to the ship for the Christening and the Governors simultaneously smashed bottles of champagne. I had expected the woman with Richard, his daughter, to do this as it seems more in line with centuries of British and American naval tradition.

Left to Right: Holly Branson; Sir Richard Branson on the mike; Governor Richardson; Governor Schwartznegger.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

To my great surprise, we were allowed to move forward right up to the dual vessel. I might say I was almost shocked that in this day of lawyer-induced destruction of our quality of life something as cool and wonderful as this would be allowed. Of course, now that it has been done I am sure they will realize people got to directly experience something amazing and you can not have things like that, now can you?

You would almost imagine this was still a free country: we were allowed to walk right up to her.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

A crowd formed around the nose of SpaceShipTwo.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

It even had sexy nose art like American warbirds of WWII.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

There were too many people at the starboard side of the nose so I started working my way counterclockwise around WhiteKnightTwo. My fingers were numb well before this and when I was taking these photos I could quite literally not feel my finger depressing the shutter button. I could only tell it had happened by watching for the still image to show on the preview screen.

It seems that not very many folk did what I did, so there are not a lot of other photos floating around showing the business end of SpaceShipTwo.

Portside of SS2 nose.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Like any old spacehand, I went around the other side to look at the most important part of any spaceship.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Two ships and four vertical stabilizers.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

As I had hoped, the crowd had mostly headed for the relative warmth of the tents and Absolut vodka by the time I got back to the nose.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I framed one last shot of the huge ship as I left the tarmac.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

In part six our crowd of future space travelers party on until dire storm warnings force an emergency evacuation.

The previous section of this tale may be found here

(15)

If you intentionally invented a mechanism to damage the future of the american Aerospace industry you could not do better than this.

The State is NOT your friend.

(0)

The period of speeches and such is an unavoidable but necessary part of the game and the team present for this event was quite high powered. First in the batters box was Will Whitehorn, the President of Virgin Galactic. I first met Will when he joined in a small circle of New Space entrepreneurs late at night after a Gala at the Udvar-Hazy Center. The group of us were trading hanger tales of the space age and doing our best to empty the hospitality suite bathtub. All I can say is, how could you not like a beer drinking kilted-Scot who flies commercial jets and can hold his own in such circles?

Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic, did the introductions. Besides being a quite nice bloke to share a drink with, he has been known to show up in formal kilt.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

There were many speakers but I think Burt Rutan was the one most of us were ready to really cheer for. Burt is the one who created SpaceShipOne and now SpaceShipOne. Few would disagree that he is the most creative aircraft designer alive today. On top of that his views on many topics would fit right in here at Samizdata. He misses no opportunity to point out how he has created a manned space program totally in the private sector and done it for a small fraction of what the government programs cost.

Burt Rutan, Hero of the Revolution..
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The most important people on the stage this day was the team that actually designed and built the world's first commercial spaceship. They are the ones who took up tools and laid out the design.

The ones who made it so.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Sir Richard was another member of the cast of on stage characters who helped make it all real. He is the one with money, guts and vision and I suspect shares 'the dream' with as much intensity as any of us. He is also a fairly approachable person in the right circumstances, but that is another story.

Richard Branson: the man who sold the suborbit .
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Oh, I almost forgot... there were a couple politicians there also, and I discovered that the California politicians are somewhat jealous that New Mexico is building Spaceport America near Las Cruces. It will be the initial home port for Virgin Galactic's fleet of WhiteKnightTwo's and SpaceShipTwo's.

Arnold Schwartznegger, Governor of California.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

In the next episode our adventurers stand in freezing high winds to watch the new spaceship taxi out of the gloom and stop close by.

The previous episode is here.

(1)

I had planned on visiting the Masten Aerospace hanger as well, but as we ran into Dave at XCOR I got business out of the way and did not really have an excuse to sandwich that much desired visit into our schedule. Time had slipped by far too rapidly and Rand was due at the Mariah Hotel to get his Press credentials.

Since I was also doing articles and had not yet had any guarantee of getting into the event as I was still just wait listed, I chanced showing up at the press desk, egged on by some Press friends. It did not work and in fact a woman named Jackie looked like she was about to turf me out of the building on my ear and thereafter seemed to glare at me every time she saw me.

My main chance at getting in was more official and as it turned out, it was successful. After Rand left on the press bus I tried the VIP desk. They were much more helpful and after showing a key email and talking with a few people in Virgin Galactic I was presented with one of the last of the stainless steel VIP badges and told to hurry on board the last bus.

The VIP registration desk.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The busses were the only way onto the field and even they were held up waiting for obeisance to red tape. All the buses, whether from LA or the hotel, were held in a queue and all were released to the taxiway at once.

The party site was at the end of the runway, hard up against the exhaust deflector and far from the hanger area. There were large signs which I correctly took to be part of the night time light show and a grouping of tents, one very large clear plastic covered structure and

The main tent.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

two smaller inflated balloon structures. It was all very 21st Century.

Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Inside of the tents was the sort of environment you would expect from a party held by Richard Branson for a few hundred friends. The first tent held the coat and bag check and was the point at which we were given our very nice Puma 'VirginGalactic' jackets and ski caps.

OCST Director George Nield deep in a conversation inside the first balloon tent.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The interiors of the two balloon tents were quite nice looking

Interior of second balloon tent.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The second balloon tent exits at the jet exhaust deflector.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Outside the second tent I found a sculptress still at work carving a space-suited figure out of a block of ice. As it turned out one of the sponsors was Absolut and carved ice played a big part in the night's festivities. I do suspect at the planning stage they did not think it would be so cold that there would be no melting to worry about.

It was in no danger of melting.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

There was another bar inside the main tent and then the main auditorium area. People were collecting there as the speeches were due to start soon. There were little knots of conversation as people made contacts of opportunity or met with old friends.

Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The fellow in orange is Dick Rutan, the man who along with Jeanna Yeager flew the first non-stop flight around the world.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The global media were out in force. Note Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize Foundation in the lower right. He is the man responsible for this explosion in commercial manned space flight.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Brett Silcox from NSS was busy chatting with targets of opportunity..
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I walked around the tent to get a feel for the territory.

This is the tarmac area where I expected we would see SpaceShipTwo after dark.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The media were everywhere and interviewing everyone.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

There was a full scale replica of SpaceShipOne, the craft whose first flight I live blogged from here some five years ago.

The X-Prize Foundation arranged for the creation of replicas of SpaceShipOne.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The main stage was ready for occupation and speechifying.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Tomorrow I will cover the speeches.

This is the third in a series of articles. The previous one is here

A few of my photos also appear in Rand Simberg's Popular Mechanics article.

(6)

After hanging out in the SSI office for awhile, Rand and I headed over to the XCOR hanger, the next after the Scaled Composites one shown here. I am sure caffeine was flowing like water inside as Scaled staff got everything ready to roll.

You could almost feel the coming buzz from the Scaled Composites hanger.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

We were let into XCOR through the front reception and found yet another crowd of which we knew practically everyone. It is not a big industry so practically everyone knows everyone else. Rand and I were there for business as well as saying hello. You know, just making sure people remember us when they suddenly have money and need someone to help spend it!

California does not yet require listing Rocket Scientists and Hanger Cats as potentially Hazardous Materials.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

XCOR was the host of the local get together. The crowd there traded thoughts on rocket engine design, control systems, who currently has money and who does not... all of the important things in life. Well, some of them at least. See how many people you can name from this crowd.

XCOR and Masten folk talking about rockets
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

XCOR and Masten folk talking about rockets
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I had a long chat and traded stories with Aleta Jackson who besides being one of the leading lights of XCOR is also someone I have known for.... well perhaps I should not say how long, but the light had definitely been separated from the dark by then.

Aleta has lots of good stories.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

There are bits and bobs of rocket planes, rocket engines and test gear all about the hanger the XCOR folk have called home for much of this decade, but the real eye-catchers are these beauties:

The Rocket Racer looks fast just sitting there.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

And they have two of them sitting there!
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Aleta saw me drooling and smitten at the cockpit door and demanded I sit in it. On the serious side, the controls of this baby are pretty much what you would find in any General Aviation aircraft, although I suspect the glass cockpit part of it has a few other twists. At Alamogordo two years ago I heard they are to have a Heads Up Display to superimpose an image of the racing 'gates' on the external view.

In any case, I got a brief ground stint in the left hand seat and held its throttle in my hand.

I will remember to ask Aleta for the keys next time.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Part 1 of this series is here. The next article will show our intrepid rocket renegades making their tortuous way to the most historic party of the decade.

(4)

Rand Simberg and I left his house in LA at a time he predicted would be optimal from a traffic standpoint, and as he used to commute to work at Rotary Rocket several times a week in the Nineties, he ought to know. We were in rain and overcast until one set of hills before Mojave when the Native American gods blessed the undertaking with a full rainbow bridge. Since photo ops of this sort are not easily scheduled with higher authorities, Rand pulled over.

Rand Simberg peers intently into the distance in hopes of spotting the pot of gold we need for our Wyoming Aerospace venture
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I have not been up to Mojave for a few years and some things have changed. The gate guardian Phantom is now at the airport entry, and it has been joined by a rather rare 1960's vintage Convair airliner. Most striking to me was Roton standing proud not far from the main building. The first time I saw it was inside the Rotary Rocket High Bay back in 1999 and at that time I was only allowed to record it in my memory.

Roton is the first commercial space Gate Guardian that I am aware of
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Those who have been around the space scene for awhile will remember the Space Studies Institute. It was once a major player but seemed to fade out over the last 15 years and some thought it had died completely. Not so! Lee Valentine and Robin Snelson have moved it from Princeton to an office inside the terminal just behind Rand.

Obligatory tourist style photo of Rand. As if he has not been here a few thousand times before...
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

First stop was the Voyager restaurant, an amenity that is fairly recent. Lunch used to require a trip into town. The first thing I noticed coming in the door was that I knew a large fraction of the people there; the second thing I noticed was the private jet parked just outside with a G-number and a Virgin logo. I wonder who that might belong to?

Familiar faces in the lunch crowd at the Voyager.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Care to hazard a guess at the owner?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

After chatting awhile in the lounge we found that someone was over in the SSI office and we could connect to the net or work from there if we wished. As it turned out, we mostly just talked and looked over the large collection of commercial and space industrialization books lining the walls.

Just hangin at the SSI office.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

In the next installment I will cover the visit with our old friends and colleagues at XCOR.

You can find an intro article here.

(8)

The world's first commercial spaceship was unveiled and christened today at Mojave. I will post more when I have slept and caught my flight home, but here is just one photo of the very full day of activities. I did not have as much time as Rand Simberg to get articles out due the large number of hats I was wearing today. I was also not official press although I could have slipped in as most of the annointed press knew me and would have said nothing

In any case, I will have more to say and I have hundreds of photos. Here is just one.

Christening of the VSS Enterprise.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

(13)

I attended Alan Boyle's book release signing tonight amongst a group of familiar faces. As such things go, this one was a great deal of fun as attendees were actually rather familiar with the material and the debate to which Alan has taken the 'Pluto is a Planet' side. If you are interested in the history of the whole debate over what is a planet according to astronomers, this is a worthwhile addition to your shelf.

Alan Boyle reading from his newly released book, "The Case For Pluto" at Barnes and Nobles in The Grove in LA.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Alan's book release also presents me with the excuse I have been waiting for to throw in my tuppence in this 'debate'.

For astronomical purposes, the reclassification of Pluto to officially be a scare quoted 'Dwarf Planet' is useful. I can also admit their classification of every element other than Hydrogen and Helium as a metal might also be useful... to them. On the other hand, neither classification is of much use to anyone else. Oxygen might be an astronomer's metal, but to one like myself whose undergraduate degree was in Electrical Engineering, this method of sorting elements is rather silly. astronomer's definition of planet is likewise rather worthless outside their discipline.

For those of us who look upon space as a place for settlement, commerce, and a source of resources to feed a solar system wide industrial economy, knowing whether a body clears its orbit of other matter is a "So what?" issue. Settlement and industry have different concerns and will most likely require a more complex system of classification. A planet with a thousand kilometer deep atmosphere that gradually turns to a liquid and then a solid phase is not useful for the same things as a body with a rocky surface. There may be temperate bodies out there covered with hundred mile deep oceans of water; there may be ones with molten rock surfaces. Each presents unique characteristics to the future explorer or industrialist.

From my point of view a planet has sufficient gravity to make it round-ish. Ceres and many of the new bodies outside of Pluto's orbit are therefore planets in my book. I propose that just as Electrical Engineers ignore the astronomer's definition of metal, the rest of us should ignore their definition of planet as well.

(3)

I am sitting a few feet away from Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings in his home office in LA as I write. I flew in last night partly for some work and meetings having to do with our company (Wyoming Aerospace), and partly for an historic event. Well, more than partly for the historic event... and no, it is not Alan Boyle's book signing, although I will be seeing him tonight! I cannot actually say anything yet as the press release is still under embargo as far as I know.

I will report on some interesting matters in a few days, hopefully with a lot of photos.

Ah, the embargo must be over!

I will be up at the XCOR and Masten hangers and hope to have access to Scaled as well. I am waiting to hear on that still.

(42)

It is not everyday you find an email in your email box telling you someone you know is a real, honest to goodness spy, but that is what happened to me this morning. According to The Huffington Post:

Nozette allegedly informed the agent that he had, in the past, held top security clearances and had access to U.S. satellite information, the affidavit said.

The scientist also allegedly said that he would be willing to answer questions about this information in exchange for money. The agent explained that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, would arrange for a communication system so Nozette could pass on information in a post office box.

Nozette agreed to provide regular, continuing information and asked for an Israeli passport, the affidavit alleged.

Personally I find it difficult to become exercised over someone passing information to an ally who may well use that information to do horrible things to people who really, really deserve it. It would be rather different had he sold information to China, North Korea, Iran or one of the other current or potential future enemies.

Oh, and the personal connection? I have crossed paths with Stu off and on over the last thirty years as he was once active with the L5 Society and was a leading figure in the Clementine lunar mapping project for which we (the National Space Society) awarded him one of our highest honours.

Stewartt Nozette receives the National Space Society's Space Pioneer Award at the 1994 International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Toronto for his work on Clementine.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I still hold Stewart in the highest esteem and if I have anything to do with it, we will still reserve that space for his name on the Luna City wall of "Heroes of the Frontier" .

(14)

Here is another article which puts some more meat on the rumourous bones.

Bangalore: Water on the moon could be just the proverbial "tip of the iceberg" that India's very own Chandrayaan-1 has discovered. According to scientists involved closely with the project, instruments on the spacecraft have for the first time found strong indications of "indigenous" ice formations on the moon surface and sub-surface.

I can hardly wait to sit back at the Lunar Bigelow and sip my Lunar Margarita.

(7)

The following was sent to us by our occasional Samizdata correspondent and secret agent within the heart of the MSM, Taylor Dinerman.

Writing in the Washington Post Adam Nagorski the former Moscow corespondent (Reagan's Missile Defense Triumph) wants us to believe that Obama's September 17th decision to cancel the deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic of a missile defense system based on the one now deployed in Alaska and California, is somehow a triumph for Reagan's SDI (Star Wars) concept.  Like they said to the tomcat when they brought out the snippers, "Its for your own good". 

He writes, "The debate is no longer focused on whether to build such a system, but on what kind of system will do the job better against what sorts of threats. " That debate was over long ago. The Democrats, in the 1990s under Clinton, came to the decision that publicly at least, they could no long promote the idea that the US population should  be totally defenseless against nuclear attack. 

Either Nagoski is ignorant or he is being disingenuous. In 1993 after canceling the first Bush administration's space based Brilliant Pebbles with the words "I'm taking the stars out of Star Wars"., the Clinton administration could not simply abandon missile defense completely, instead, like the Obama administration they sought to proceed with the smallest and least offensive possible program. They ordered the Defense Department to concentrate its efforts on defending against tactical and medium ranged missiles.  

After the GOP gained control of Congress in 1994 Clinton's team faced unrelenting political pressure from Congress to build up America's anti ballistic  missile defenses. They chose to support a few programs including the Navy one that Obama is now touting as if it were something new, and the Airborne Laser (ABL)  program that the administration has eviscerated.   

Most significantly Clinton and his team promoted something called National Missile Defense, a mid course interceptor system designed to handle ICBMs. It was this program that Bush, on taking office decided to proceed with especially after he withdrew from the much violated ABM treaty. This has long been the most controversial part of the US Missile Defense program since provides a direct, though weak protection to the US civilian population. For the Democrats and their allies who still believe in Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) this is intolerable. 

Bush and the GOP pushed ahead and now there are about 30 Ground Based Interceptors (GBIs) deployed in Alaska and California, along with a network of sensors. The Obama administration is choosing to cut the number of deployed GBIs to from the 44 ones planned by their predecessors to the ones now in the ground. The Bush plan was in itself inadequate, so this cut means that the US population is almost as completely vulnerable as it was under Clinton. 

Like Clinton, Obama knows little about missile defense or about nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. At least Bush had flown air defense missions in a nuclear capable aircraft, the F-102. To imagine the plan to deploy sea based SM-3 missiles as a substitute for the GBIs that were to be based in Poland is laughable, as is the idea that sometime around 2020 there will be a version of the SM-3 that can do the job the GBIs are now doing. 

The SM-3 is an excellent missile and Vice Admiral J.D.Williams (ret.), the father of sea based missile defense, is to be congratulated. It is however,  not a system that can defend the US population against an ICBM attack. That is the main question that Nagorski tries to avoid. The Democrats are still doing everything they can to prevent a real space based missile defense. The other question as to why Bush failed to revive his father's Brilliant Pebbles program is a tough one for him and for the GOP. The little they did is now being cut to ribbons by President Pantywaist (as he was referred to in the London Telegraph.) Trying to put a Reaganesque happy face on this fact is typical of the way the MSM is willing to make a fool of itself for its man.

Taylor Dinerman

(10)

I have just got back from an air show, and one of the stars of the show was this beauty, the F-16. My ears are still ringing with the sound of its engine. Awesome. This video conveys some sense of what these aircraft can do. I suppose these kind of things bring out my inner schoolkid.

The F-16 I saw was in the Dutch airforce and painted a bright orange. I'd love one of these fellas to fly the thing fast and low, repeatedly, over Polly Toynbee's Tuscan villa while the witch is in residence with her broomstick.

(26)

There is a rumour floating about that a lot of water has been found on the moon:

Reliable sources report that there will be a press conference at NASA HQ at 2:00 pm this Thursday featuring lunar scientist Carle Pieters from Brown University.

The topic of the press briefing will be a paper that will appear in this week's issue of Science magazine wherein results from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) aboard Chandrayaan-1 will be revealed.

There is both good and bad to this discovery from our viewpoint. Much will depend on whether the deposits are limited to polar cold traps as has long been suspected or are to be find over a broader polar area. The presence of ice cuts down the required consumables budget for any lunar settlement. The fewer bulk imports required, the nearer the time at which settlement is feasible. The downside is an International Regime led by the United Nations no doubt will be created to ration this valuable resource.

My presumption is they have finally found large deposits of real ice inside some of the polar region craters. The theory for the last thirty years has been that when comets strike the moon, most of the volatiles escape into space, but some linger long enough to find their way into the shadowed polar craters where the temperature is so low that water cannot remain a gas even in vacuum. About 25 years ago I helped a friend of mine, Dr. Francis Graham, to gain funding from the Space Studies Institute to do some telescope work on this problem. His results were negative but I believe Francis may have been one of the first to attempt the search.

(29)

Because of my interests and network of friends in the business, things of interest often cross my virtual (and real) desk. Sometimes they are surprising. This time my jaw is still laying under the desk and I am applying a healthy dose of skepticism until I really, really am sure these are real and not exceedingly good fakes. I do not think they are and I have examined them closely. The first is the F/A-37, reportedly capable of Mach 3.5 supercruise and top speed in excess of Mach 4. It is shown on board the USN George Washington for catapult fit tests according to the source.

The only thing I can say about this one is it has some familiar resemblance to some test articles I am aware of, and it looks a bit like some things which have been described coming out of Groom Lake. Other than that, it has me absolutely flat-footed... if it is real.

F/A-37 prototype on USN George Washington.
Photo: original source unknown (Now pinned down to the making of the movie "Stealth")

The second aircraft caught me only a little less flat footed. I am well aware of the base design of the aircraft but to my knowledge it was just a concept design, something that might or might not be built 20 years from now. Given the efficiency and strength and capacity (larger than the Airbus 280) this has got to have Airbus executives reaching for the Maalox... if it is real.

Boeing 797 Blended Wing/Body aircraft.
Photo: original source unknown. (Now pinned down as photoshopped.)

Given that these images are now slithering their way around the mailboxes of the cognoscenti, I am certain we will be hearing more about them one way or the other. I think this is on the up and up, but I am just not yet sure of it.

So, any comments on what has this Samizdata Editor in a state of flabbergasted shock?

(4)

They have finally fired the 'big gun' in the air. A Janes newsletter reports:

Boeing reports ABL COIL's first in-flight firing. The Boeing Airborne Laser (ABL) team has fired the system's primary chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL) in flight for the first time, the company announced on 20 August. The firing, which took place at Edwards Air Force Base (AFB) on 18 August, was carried out with industry team mates Northrop Grumman (which makes the COIL), Lockheed Martin (which is responsible for the beam-control/fire-control system) and the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA)

I will have to go searching for a picture. This is seriously Buck Rogers!

I found more news here in the Boeing Press Release. The beam was fired into a calorimeter to measure it and was not sent outside the aircraft. They may attempt a missile intercept before the end of the year.

(6)

I picked up the following two items from a Janes newsletter and thought they might be of interest:

US military airborne laser passes first in-flight engagement The US military's airborne laser (ABL) successfully completed its first in-flight test against an instrumented target missile on 10 August, the prime contractor Boeing said in a statement on 13 August. The US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is testing the viability of using the high-powered laser to destroy enemy missiles in the boost phase.

Standard Missile 3 Block IB cleared to begin flight tests The Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) Block IB programme to develop an improved missile for the US Missile Defense Agency's sea-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System has completed its critical design review, Raytheon announced on 13 July. The new missile is expected to begin flight tests in 2010. SM-3 Block IB offers significant improvements over the SM-3 Block IA version currently deployed on US Navy Aegis cruisers and destroyers and Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyers to defend against short- to intermediate-range ballistic missile threats in the ascent and midcourse phases of flight.

So things are still plodding along on all fronts and all becomes simpler as technology improves. I still believe the key number for missile interception is the figure of merit I wrote of a long time ago: instructions per meter. That is the number of machine code instructions that a CPU can process in the time it takes for the relative positions of the target and the interceptor (or laser station) changes by one meter. When this number gets large, the targeting system has more time to ponder what is going on and more time to analyze fused sensor data. Another way of looking at it is that time effectively runs more slowly for the targeting software as the number gets larger.

This is yet another side effect of Moore's Law. Our processing capabilities are growing to the point where either very sophisticated predictive programs may be used... or very unsophisticated and unoptimized programs will become 'good enough'.

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A few months ago I noted the importance of having good people selected for the top jobs at NASA under the Obama administration. I believed then, as now, that NASA and the current way of doing business is a fact of life for those in space business and the best we can hope for is folks in the power seats who are positive towards wholly private space ventures.

There has been much too-ing and fro-ing in Washington during the ensuing months over the role of private sector and the old socialist space model. Surprisingly (to some), the most anti-free market action came from a Republican, Senator Shelby from Alabama. He succeeded in reprogramming funds for the COTS-D program, aimed at enabling the purchase of Astronaut tickets to space in a commercial way, back to funding of the old NASA and Aerospace Design Bureaus model borrowed from the Soviets during the Moon Race. Republicans are no different from Democrats when it comes to the basics. They like the Space Kommisars when they represent jobs and campaign contributions in their district or State.

But change is overdue. There is simply no choice for NASA and everyone knows it. Most importantly, the people now in charge understand it and with the supporting Augustine Commission findings (one of whose members, by the way, is a long standing occasional Samizdata reader) that change is about to be implemented.

As I indicated in the title, the end results of all this appear to be even better than I had dared hope.

Next year in L5 anyone?

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Excalibur-Almaz has announced its orbital tourism plans. They have built up a great team of astronauts, cosmonauts and contractors and are in the process of resurrecting a flight tested Russian military capsule and space station. They have a long way to go to get the thing flying again, but that is the point, it is 'flying again', not 'flying the first time'.

I unfortunately must step lightly here as I was one of the persons in my company involved in some early consulting for them. NDA's you know!

I can say that it is a very interesting project!

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I have been sitting on this story for several years, ever since Gary Gaudet contacted me through the Samizdata comments section after a story I published about a Swordfish from the HMS Ark Royal being spotted on the ocean bottom near the sunken carrier. Since that time I have spoken with him several times as well as trading emails.

His Swordfish is in a somewhat drier and slightly more reachable location in the wilds of Nova Scotia. It will soon be brought in from the cold after resting where it ended its flying career after a walk-away crash in 1944. I spoke with him again this afternoon and with his permission I am bringing this story to a wider audience. It has been known locally for some time, but there has been an understandable desire not to attract undue attention until the aircraft recovery was at least imminent.

It may not look like much to the untrained eye, but to those of us who are Warbird afficionados, it is incredibly complete. There have been rebuilds to fly from wrecks recently dragged out of the Russian wilderness which were found in worse condition that this.

Fairy Swordfish Mk IV in Digby County, Nova Scotia.
Photo: Gary Gaudet

Although the Swordfish is a biplane, it used very modern construction methods and was an incredibly rugged aircraft. The 'stringbag' was still in use at the end of WWII and is much loved by those who flew her and all the youngsters like myself who built the Airfix model of this beautiful bit of British Naval Aviation history.

PS: There is ever so much more to this story than I have time to write this afternoon. I have hopes Gary Gaudet will drop by the comment section and regale you with more of the story: he has been in contact with the family of the fellow who happened to have flown this very particular airframe!

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Bill Whittle has a video report of his visit to XCOR on Pajamas TV. If you enjoyed my future history of yesterday, you will enjoy this vision of the current and the near future of New Space.

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The New Space conference has been in progress all weekend and runs through tonight. Some idea of how the world has changed is that a bunch of free-market entrepreneurs are welcome at NASA Ames. This is partly because so many of the high positions in NASA are now taken by people who (mostly) agree with us, or at the very least see no other way NASA can continue to function. They need cheap access to space too and the 'big boys' are not delivering it.

My associate in space ventures, Rand Simberg, is there live blogging the event so please go take a look at what he has to say.

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I am going to go very far out on a slender limb and tell you my thoughts on how things might play out over the next few decades.

First, NASA is in deep trouble. The Ares 1 is well behind schedule and the gap in their ability to take cargo and passengers to the space station has widened into a chasm. Ares 1 was pushed ahead by former NASA director Mike Griffin for two reasons. It was an effort to train younger engineers on a smaller manned vehicle design before all of the old folk retired and as a means to get to the space station when shuttle retired. Building Ares 5 as a first effort was correctly thought to be a bad idea. The problem is, Ares 1 seems to have become less an interim vehicle and more of a goal in itself. This is something one less enamoured of government would have predicted. I do not think Ares 1 will fly before 2015 and 2017 would not much surprise me.

So where does that leave us?

SpaceX has flown two very small expendable rockets of a new design with new engines. By itself that would be fun but not of much use for the long term. What is important is the commercial sense of this vehicle. It is cheap to build and cheap to fly as such things go, and more importantly for our topic today, it was the first step towards a bigger and more interesting expendable, the Falcon 9. This rocket uses a first stage cluster of 9 of the same engines as the Falcon 1 main engine and is big enough to deliver cargo to the space station. Given the clean performance of the most recent Falcon 1 flight, a second success in a row, I am going to predict they have this vehicle working by no later than the 2nd flight. That means a true commercial orbital cargo capacity by 2011, and possibly as soon as 2010.

But wait, there's more. The cargo carrier is not just an expendable container. It has windows... for a reason. The Dragon capsule was designed and built as a manned craft from the start. After a few cargo flights SpaceX will have the operational data needed to risk placing people in it. That should happen within only a few years of the first successful flight of the Falcon 9. There is also a next generation rocket on the drawing board, the Falcon 9 Heavy, but let us leave SpaceX for now.

Although I know less about their efforts, Orbital Sciences Corporation should not be counted out in this market niche and time frame. It is entirely possible there will be two commercial package and personnel delivery companies operating in the space station environment by 2012.

Let's look at Bigelow Aerospace. They currently have two inflatable habs in orbit. They have a 100% success rate on their orbital operations and have years of real flight data backing them now. Somewhere in the period of 2010-2012 they will be putting up the full scale unit. That one will contain a goodly amount of rentable pressurized and fully habitable volume in space. Their habitats have shown themselves to be rugged enough to survive years in space... but there is nothing special about them being in orbit. They can provide habitable volume in any low or no pressure environment.

Next. Orbital Outfitters. They are making space suits for the passengers and crew of pretty much everyone working in the suborbital tourist market. Spacesuits are very expensive items and even with all of that cost are not very good. American astronauts painfully lose fingernails inside their suits. All the time. No one quite knows the cause but I understand the Russian Orlon suits do not have the problem. Perhaps an energetic small company that is building more suits and trying different things at a faster pace can solve the problem. It is always easier to try new things when the test article is relatively cheap.

Next we have a whole crop of suborbital rocketeers. The first of these, SpaceShipTwo, should have its official roll out sometime this year. Its first stage carrier, WhiteKnightTwo has already flown. Unless something drastic happens during the test campaign, real suborbital tourist flights will begin by 2011. There will be multiple airframes and the flight rates will be accelerating towards a goal of airline operational rates per tail number. This means more civilians will have flown into space by 2013/2014 than the total number of government employees who have flown to date, and that is assuming no one else succeeds.

Next in line is XCOR and its Lynx 1 project. I have a soft spot in my heart for this ship because I played ever so small a part (paid!) in its early design stages. The Lynx 1 carries only one passenger who gets to sit in the co-pilot position. The rocket plane will rotate at the end of the runway and basically go straight up to an altitude higher than that reachable by tourist flights on Russian fighter planes. Lynx 2 will follow a couple years later, paid for by the Lynx 1 flights, and will be a true suborbital vehicle.

Another interesting project is Space Diver. Armadillo Aerospace won the first phase of the lunar lander competition and now has a fairly reliable vertical take off and landing vehicle (VTVL). They are also intending to use it for tourist flights to suborbital altitudes. However, if you have a small rocket like that at high altitude, it is also possible to simply... unstrap and step out at apogee. Colonol Joseph Kittinger set the skydiving altitude record of 102,800 feet on August 16, 1960. To my knowledge, no one has even attempted to better it since then, largely because it is difficult to get a balloon gondola to a significantly higher altitude. That is why our current day record seekers are looking at Armadillo's VTVL as a path to ever increasing record altitudes. Eventually someone will skydive from space. At some later time, some will do so and live to tell about it.

There are numerous other players, but this is enough to give you the flavor. Each one of these companies has orbital plans as well, mostly in the 2017 and after range.

There is more to spaceflight than this, and there a certainly a number of small companies like Orion Propulsion and Spacedev who are doing well and building components for other commercial space entrepreneurs.

I should also note there are now seven FAA licensed spaceports in the US, and those locations will become centers at which the commercial and entrepreneurial energy will reach fever pitch.

Now that I have laid out where we are, I can go out on that limb and project the future.

It is 2020. Several billionaires with interest in space have banded together in a Lunar Project. SpaceX has heavy cargo lift for hire; Bigelow has a large orbital business park of inflatable habs. SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, XCOR and several others have the capacity to deliver people to orbit. SpaceX has a much upgraded Dragon capsule that can be used to get to the moon; Orbital Sciences has worked with Orion Propulsion and others on the Lunar Transfer stage; Armadillo Aerospace has the lunar lander and return vehicle technology well in hand; Bigelow has built a lunar version of his successful orbital habs; and orbital outfitters has provided a new generation of lunar EVA suits.

All the staging work happens in orbit and those directly involved work and sleep at the Bigelow facility. A set of large Bigelow habs are sent from there to the lunar surface first. The pilots and workers who are going to follow remain at the Orbital Bigelow until the cargo is confirmed to be down and safe.

There are one or more super-Dragon capsules on open frame Orbital Science transfer vehicles, along with Armadillo built landers. The engineers check out all the parts in orbit; once satisfied the crew transfer over to the capsules and fire their Orion built thrusters to gently move away from the hotel before firing the main engine.

Several days later they arrive on lunar orbit and the construction crew shift to the descent module. They land near the habs and other cargo and proceed to move them to the robot prepared foundation area. Once inflated they enter and bring the habs up to full operational standards. And then they stay until the next crew arrives to relieve them. Meanwhile, more cargo ships land and they continue to expand the facility.

After a few months they declare Luna City (more like a tiny village) open for business. Among the first customers to arrive are researchers from various space agencies around the world. One or more of the habs has a big NASA logo on it and is handed over to them in a televised ceremony. Next come the tourists. By 2021 there are more than enough super rich on Earth to afford the multi-million dollar trip. Technology has moved on since the $20M tourist flights to the space station on Russian rockets.

Since Luna City is a commercial venture as well as being the dream fulfilment of those with the money to do so, it is intended to grow. Large numbers of very smart people in an unusual environment sparks creativity and very lucrative patents. The filming of documentaries and movies, moonrock jewellery, patents, tourists and paid for researchers and labs pay the bills.

And thus begins the vast outward explosion of free people.

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Niklas Järvstråt has invested in a simulation of a lunar settlement using an old Swedish mine which he bought some years ago.

Just a short note to mention that the moon-mine inauguration and moon landing 40-year anniversary will take place tomorrow at Storgruvan, Nora, in the middle of Sweden. We will start the pumps and make footprints in lunar regolith simulant FJS-1, donated by Shimizu cormoration. Maria Aldrin, Buzz Aldrins great great great grandfathers great great great great great great granddaughter, will make the first footprint for the mine. We are looking forward to an interesting program of local and national interest, and a recorded well wishing message from the Romanian Space agency. Happy anniversary, all "lunatics" and space buffs!

Niklas is part of a world wide conspiracy to settle the moon and planets. Shhhh. Forget I told you that...

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The Moon Society is looking Beyond NASA. While I would prefer a pure free market opening of the moon, the practicalities are that libertarian ideas are not globally influential enough to let us have our way. Peter Kokh discusses ideas that might at least let us get an opportunity to plant and grow the tree of liberty off world.

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Today has been declared a space settlement blogging day and Samizdata is one of the participants. We hope you will also check out some of these sites for other stories on this topic.

Ad Astra... and may the high frontier be settled by free men and women, from whence ever they come.

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Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and it seems only fitting to show what 'Tranquility Base' and the other sites look like today. NASA recently photographed the landing sites at high resolution.

Apollo landing sites 40 years later.
Photo: NASA

If you look closely at the Apollo 14 landing area, you can see the very off-road tracks made by the Lunar Rover.

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A good article over at Reason by Ronald Bailey, the magazine's science correspondent. He talks about the factors that explain why humans haven't been back to the Moon since the early 1970s. It is, he says, because of a lack of profit.

Every time I write something about the incredible feat of putting someone on the Moon, as happened almost exactly 40 years ago, there is an inevitable chorus of criticism - much of it justified - about how the huge sums of taxpayers' money involved rendered the project beyond the pale, even if the critics grudgingly accept what a great adventure the whole thing was. It has to be accepted that by "crowding out" private space initiatives in the way they did, government agencies both in the US, former USSR and elsewhere have arguably retarded more promising, long-term space ventures that might have got off the ground. The existence of large, politically directed agencies like Nasa do not help innovation, either. Consider how quickly the aircraft design process occured from the Wright Brothers and through to the jet age, and then compare the rate of progress of space flight over the past 40 years. It is not a flattering comparison. So this is precisely why Dale Amon is so right to comment on stuff like this.

The best way to honour the likes the astronauts, both the living, such as Buzz Aldrin, and the dead, such as Gus Grissom, is not to continue down the statist path of space flight. This is too important an issue to leave with bureaucrats.

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SpaceX is scheduled for a launch today or tomorrow from their pad at Omelek Island in Kwajalein. The payload is RazakSat for the Malaysian government.

Most everyone in the commercial space business is wishing them good luck and hope the Falcon 1 flies well on its first 'operational' flight. I use quotes because it is still a new system and it takes time to really understand the foibles of that which you have wrought. Personally I would say their chances of a successful flight are excellent but not one hundred percent yet.

The big one for SpaceX will come with their first flight attempt for the Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral. The rocket is on the pad and has been there for some months as they slowly work through all the issues preceding a launch of a big new rocket, probably later this year. This is the one which will eventually carry people in the SpaceX Dragon Capsule.

For now though, stay tuned. I will pass on information on tonight or tomorrow's launch window as I hear it.

18:40 EDT: Launch appears to be currently schedule for 02:00 UTC/Zulu/GMT. Live feed for the Kwaj launch is available but is still showing dead air.

2230 EDT: Live coverage has begun. Watch here

2250 EDT: We are into a 15 minute weather hold at T-30 min.

2300 EDT: The woman doing some of the interviews is someone I know pretty well, Cassie Kloberdanz. She is a young member of the commercial space family and a lot of fun.

2316 EDT: As you can see if you are watching, the weather is starting to clear. I understand there was also some issue on the Helium pressurization which the hold gave them time to deal with.

2323 EDT: The clock is rolling again. We're getting down to t-13.

2346 EDT: SpaceX has delivered its first international paying customer's satellite to orbit! The flight was almost flowless as far as I could see from the video's. Most notable to me was how 'cool' the expansion nozzle of the Kestrel second stage engine ran relative to previous flights. With two successes of Falcon 1 under their belts, SpaceX is now a competitor to be reckoned with.

So, what does this all mean? First, this was a key time for them. A launch failure would not have put their company at risk, but it would have had some serious repercussions on their future. The Augustine Commission is meeting right now and there is a political fight brewing in DC. There are some powerful congressman and constituencies that much prefer the status quo. The government backed Ares 1 project is, as one would expect, years behind schedule. The innovation of that particular camel is in the way they have taken bits and pieces of existing expensive hardware, manufactured for several decades in a number of key constituencies and managed to make a crewed vehicle out of it.

There is a small budget, relative to that of the big aero companies, that was set aside for new players. Those companies will be paid for a result: cargo on orbit at the Space Station. There are two currently: Orbital Sciences Corporation (run by David Thompson and friends) and by Elon Musk's SpaceX.

This new way of doing business is something of a threat to the old one. The vehicles do not require huge numbers of people to process them. They are not as complex. They are designed with the idea that they will be commercially viable, and that means they cannot afford the baggage that every NASA designed ship has carried with it. Just as an example, the SpaceX rockets use the same fuel and oxidizer in both stages: Liquid Oxygen (LOX) and rocket grade Kerosene. Both are easily dealt with and familiar to industry. Notably they do not use Liquid Hydrogen (LH) for a higher energy, more 'efficient engine' because that efficiency comes at a high commercial cost. LH is squirrelly stuff. It will find ways to leak out if just about anything is not perfect. It is a 'supercryogen' and thus requires special materials and special handling. It is of very low density so it requires huge tankage to hold enough. By the time you are through, the margin gained in ISP (a measure of the efficiency of a rocket engine) is mostly eaten up by the extra structural mass. On top of that, the special requirements of dealing with LH are much more costly in terms of manpower, materials, care and testing.

But wait, there is more: The Ares I rocket uses the absolute worst feature of the Space Shuttle it replaces: a stack of solid rocket engine segments. You know, the ones with the famous O-rings? Once you light them you cannot shut them down or change the flight profile. However at least Ares I is a vertical stack so they could put an escape tower on the top to pull the astronauts away to safety if they find the thing is going to blow up or come apart or the RSO (Range Safety Officer) decides it really should be blown up before it hits Miami.

As bad as it is, Ares 1 had some major political clout behind it. Senator Richard Shelby from Alabama recently pulled funding that was to be used to do cargo delivery for hire and moved it to his district to feed the dinosaurs. A failure of this launch would have allowed these political types to say "See? We told you so! These commercial upstarts are not able to do the job. Rockets really are that expensive for a reason. That is why we need the money for our government designed rocket done by proper government contractors and with proper government design oversight... and built with parts made in our districts."

Elon could probably get by without the space station delivery contracts, but they would certainly help. The problem for the American Rocket Design Bureau's is that if he succeeds, he will change the game to one which is open ended and done with a wider commercial model in mind.

With this flawless launch under their belt, the case for commercial cargo delivery to orbit followed by commercial delivery of people becomes very hard to ignore.

0228 EDT: I heard a little while ago that the second burn of the upper stage was nominal as was the payload sep and the Malaysian customer satellite is in the correct orbit and is communicating with the ground.

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I ran across this item in a Jane's publication:

Boeing prepares X-51A for hypersonic test flight. The US Air Force ( USAF) plans to fly the Boeing Phantom Works X-51A Waverider hypersonic engine research vehicle at up to Mach 6 later this year. Joseph Vogel, Boeing X-51A programme manager, Advanced Network and Space Systems, and Charles Brink, X-51A programme manager, USAF Research Laboratory, spoke to reporters at Boeing's Huntington Beach facility in southern California on 14 May.

For those who do not know of the Waverider idea, it is a technique for 'surfing' on the re-entry plasma. It could be an easier way forwards for getting back from orbit if it can be proven out.. The first I heard about it was roughly in 1985 when I met a Scotsman named Duncan Lunan at a the International Space Development Conference in Washington, DC. He showed up in his clan kilt at the celebration party of the Pittsburgh L5 team which I had led to victory in the competition to run the 1987 conference. Duncan paid his way over and back through the sale of a commemorative brew called "Halley's Whiskey", done by a Scottish whiskey maker for the 1986 return of Halley's Comet. Duncan is without a doubt one of the more memorable characters I have met.

Duncan and his merry band of Glaswegians (ASTRA) ran a long campaign of low budget testing on the Waverider concept and managed to pool resources and get access to a wind tunnel as well as more eclectic test methods. I heard many of the results in the early 1990's when he gave a talk at Queens University in Belfast for the local astronomy society lecture series. His talk was punctuated by the 6th floor windows rattling from a 1000 pound or so bomb going off at the police forensics lab a few kilometers distant. It was quite an introduction for someone who had never been to Belfast before... we in the audience were then of course discussing probable distances, type of explosive, size, and so forth. As you did when you lived in Belfast in those years.

I again ran into the ASTRA crowd at the WorldCon in Glasgow in 1996 I believe it was. I was there as a sponsor as I had provided the event with a free internet connection via my company in Belfast, Genesis Project Ltd. I believe we talked about Waverider then, but as I went bar hopping in Glasgow with one of the other team members and walked out of his high rise to greet the morning sun, I cannot say I remember much other than that Scotsmen drink like Irishmen.

In any case, I am glad to see this concept is finally getting some serious attention. It has, after all, only been around for three decades that I am aware of, and I would not be surprised if someone told me the idea was old even then. Although it could carry out the same sort of mission, it is not the same as the German Skip-Bomber concept which simply did the skipping stone thing off the upper atmosphere.

If anyone knows more about the X-51, feel free to drop by and comment.

You can learn more about waverider here

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Well, it is finally official. Astronaut Charles Bolden is the new NASA Administrator. If that were the only news then I would not be writing about it. What does interest me is that a woman who has worked towards this nearly her entire life has snatched the Deputy Director slot and I wish to publicly congratulate Lori Garver, a very old and dear friend on her success.

Ad Astra Lori!

PS: Now I have to find out what jobs George Whitesides and Alan Ladwig are getting. I have worked with George for the last 5 years and know Alan from back to the early eighties. I should be seeing them at the ISDC in Orlando in a couple days.

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A US stealth aircraft, photographed while breaking the sound barrier. I don't know why, given that Man has achieved the feat of breaking Mach 1 for more than half a century since the great Chuck Yeager officially did it first, but stuff like this still gives me a buzz.

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Long time readers know I am part of the senior leadership team of the National Space Society and specifically the person charged with oversight of the conference which happens around this time each year.

We are going south to Orlando, Florida this year; the hotel is marvelous and the program likewise. Our Orlando conference management team and our HQ have brought together an excellent group of speakers. Most of the powers that be within the new commercial space industry and from NASA will be there. (Notice one dour visage within the photo gallery belongs to our own occasional writer, Taylor Dinerman. )

If you happen to be in that part of the country, or can arrange to do so, I highly recommend dropping in. You can register here.

I do not have time to be a speaker myself and will be racing from task to task, but if you spend some time in the hallways and corridors you are likely to see me transacting society and commercial space business in between board and committee meetings.

Be there, or be a groundlubber!

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I would never have considered that the energy output of a TypeI Civilization could fit into my flat:

It is difficult, even for someone who has been working with these ideas and numbers for the past couple of decades, to get one’s head around the utter raw power potential of real nanotechnology. What Drexler is saying in this dry passage is that the amount of nanomotors needed to power a Kardasheff type I civilization, using all the sunlight that hits the Earth, would fit in a 500 square foot apartment (with 8-foot ceiling).

I might need a bit of air conditioning though...

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I just picked this up form a Jane's newsletter:

US announces successful tests of Airborne Laser The US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) successfully fired multiple long-duration blasts of the Northrop Grumman high-energy Airborne Laser (ABL) during ground tests, the company announced on 19 February. The tests for the Boeing 747-400F-based ballistic missile defence system lasted up to three seconds each and were concluded on 12 February

This is good progress, but I am still waiting for the real test: shooting down an ICBM in flight.

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Way back in 1994 or thereabouts I wrote in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society about future applications of nanotechnology on spacecraft to get sensing in depth across all wavelengths in all directions at once. Well, it looks like we are getting there:

THE NEXT GENERATION. Beyond the realm of CMOS and CCD image sensors, SiOnyx Inc. is developing a new material called “black silicon.” The company believes the material will lead to a new class of image sensors that are 100 times more sensitive than conventional silicon, detect energy from the ultraviolet to the short-wave infrared bands, operate at very low voltage levels, and can be made in extremely thin 0.5-µm forms (Fig. 5). Most importantly, the material is compatible with existing CMOS processing methods.

“This is a brand new material that is compatible with the largest manufacturing infrastructure of the world,” says Stephen Saylor, SiOnyx’s president and CEO.

I am guessing that 'black silicon' might be carbon nanotube technology or it might simply be an array that is so good at sucking up light that it appears black due to lack of wasted reflected photons. Whatever the case, I believe this is just the start of the sort of sensors I would like to see on spacecraft.

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Taylor Dinerman attended a funeral of a respected soldier and space advocate and sent us this small remembrance of the man. I expect a couple of you in the commercial space business knew Mil Roberts from his days in High Frontier.

Taylor is a freelance professional journalist who from time to time graces our pages both on 'page one' and as a respected member of the commentariat.

"The flag that he honored with his life, now honors him." These words spoken by the Army  chaplain at the graveside ceremony for General Mil Roberts at Arlington on March 12th, explained why it is so symbolically  important that the flag cover the coffins of our fallen heroes. The idea of reciprocal shared honor is one that binds any good  military organization together, the past, the present and the future are all embodied in that symbol and with the deep meaning that we Americans give it. 

The ceremony, with the honor guard, the riderless horse,  a fifteen gun salute, the US Army Band playing Ruffles and Flourishes and America The Beautiful, the firing of the traditional three volleys, all done with precision and strict discipline but without the boot stomping and barked orders that one associates with some military ceremonies. The whole event was simple, elegant and dignified.  

Mil was sent off to what he, as a Christian, believed was a better place by his friends, comrades and family in a style and manner that he had earned in combat and in years of service to America. He landed on Omaha Beach on June 6th 1944 and fought his way across Europe ending up in Czechoslovakia. Later he served in the Army reserves while pursuing a normal civilian life. In 1970 he was called up for active duty as head of the Army Reserve in the Pentagon. 

As President of the High Frontier Missile Defense advocacy group,  he helped get the DC-X program off the ground. That Rocket proved many things, including the fact that worthwhile space launch development programs could be done for far less than the billions of dollars that the government normally requires. This helped jump start the suborbital space tourism industry and may someday lead to a revolutionary low cost way to get into orbit. 

Mil always had a great sense of humor and both he and his wife Priscilla had a wonderful gift for friendship.     

He lived his life according to the old Jewish rule "Be a Mensch!"

- Taylor Dinerman

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While doing some research for other purposes I ran across this excellent video of a B-2 stalling and crashing on takeoff. If you have the vaguest interest in aviation I am sure you will find this as fascinating as I did.

All escaped unscathed except the USAF budget.

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I am beginning to wonder whether the enemy outside or the enemy within is the more dangerous to our liberty. The al Qaeda can kill me... but DHS can enslave me. Here is the latest loathsome attack on private property and our rights as free citizens, courtesy of Downsize DC:

The same one-size-fits-all regulations will apply to both passenger airliners and non-commercial, business-owned jets that are used to move cargo and personnel. For instance, the "no-fly" list and Air Marshall provisions will apply to business planes even though the pilots usually know everyone on board personally. The definition of "large aircraft" is arbitrary, applying both to planes as small as 12,500 pounds and to 747's ten times that weight. Items that are prohibited in passenger jets will also be banned to employees in these smaller business planes, even if they are needed for their work. (Just think of what that will do to business efficiency in this time of recession.) Airplane owners will be forced to pay, at their own expense, for audits of their safety compliance. The audits won't even be done by government inspectors, but by private consultants. These rules can potentially expand to all aircraft and all airports.

There is more here.

Crazed Islamic fundamentalists cannot destroy our country. No one in the world, nor any alliance of enemies or 'friends' can destroy the United States.

Only we can do that... and 'we' are racing to see how quickly we can snuff the light of Liberty.

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Virginia Postrel has a nice item about WW2 aviator style and the Tuskegee airmen who broke racial barriers of their time in WW2. I must say that there is something deliciously satisfying at the thought that these guys helped shoot down the airforce of a racist German empire. And that they flew such glorious birds like the P-51 Mustang as they did so.

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I am sure many of you have by now heard the coverage about the airplane crash into waters off of La Guardia airport in New York.

What I have not heard yet are comments on the fine piloting it took to grease a rather good size metal bird into the water. The pilot could not have had many minutes to think about his options, and yet as far as I can see, he did everything flawlessly.

I just want you all to ponder what it takes to bring a commercial transport of that size down on the water, in one piece, floating and with all your passengers alive.

The pilot and co-pilot of this flight deserve all of the applause we can give them and a heart felt thank you from all the passengers and their families.

(1)

The carrier aircraft for SpaceShipTwo took off for its first test flight. This is the first step of what will probably be a year long test program culminating in drop tests and flights of the world's first tourist spaceship.

It is late over here. I am sure there will be a lot of information up about it. If not, talk to me tomorrow!

(10)

I have been informed that Majel Barrett Roddenberry has died. She is best known to many as Nurse Chapel aboard the original Starship Enterprise. Despite being a major celebrity, she was perfectly at ease joining the rest of us in the hospitality suites until all hours of the night.

Somewhere I have a photo of her behind the suite's 'bar' counter chatting with Buzz Aldrin, Lori Garver and another close friend of mine, Beverly Freed at once of our International Space Development Conferences.

She and her husband Gene Roddenberry, who died in the early 1990's, were strong supporters of the National Space Society's goal of a solar system wide human civilization.

Here are a few links to photos of Majel I took at the 1993 ISDC in Huntsville, Alabama.

Majel accepting posthumous award on behalf of Gene Roddenberry.

Majel accepting posthumous award on behalf of Gene Roddenberry

Majel with Lori Garver (currently member of the Obama transition team for space policy)

Majel with Buzz Aldrin

Meanwhile, the band played on... Home on Lagrange anyone?

Note: the dates on the files are the dates on which the rolls were developed, not the dates they were taken. Photos were scanned from prints and thus the quality is not wonderful.

(10)

Not much information yet but a Marine fighter is down in a residential area on the approach to Miramar. No fatalities reported so far: the pilot ejected and there are no reports of deaths on the ground.

That might well change but I hope the worst result is only a destroyed home.

Unless things have changed since 1978 when I was doing a building automation system for them, the County of San Diego has its main building complex just off the end of one of the runways at Miramar, so one would presume services were quite rapidly on the scene.

It's definite. No casualties.

Later reports indicate the early good news was wrong, sadly. There may have been three casualties on the ground.

(5)

Jane's reports the following:

Thales aims directed-energy weapon at ground, naval applications. Thales Air Systems Division is working on a joint development project with the Ecole Polytechnique engineering school in Orsay, France, to develop a directed-energy weapon (DEW) for ground and naval applications. Project Director Philippe Antier of Weapon Systems, Thales Air Systems Division, told Jane's that the aim of the project is to provide a capability against missiles, aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to a range of up to 10 km as a complement to very-short-range air-defence (VSHORAD) systems, with the goal of having the system operational by 2015

When it is steam boat time, you steam...

(14)

It is a strange old world. About 2 weeks ago I was on a flight from Huntsville, Alabama, where I took part in the National Space Society board meeting, back to Washington, DC where I had some consulting work lined up. As I and two other board members walked to the luggage retrieval area, I commented that if someone had told me twenty years ago I would find three people from my address book on a Presidential Transition Team I would have thought them crazy.

One compatriot said, "You know what that means don't you?"

"No", was my puzzled answer.

"You're now a genuine Washington Insider", he replied.

I did know one of the Bush 2000 space transition team really well and a second shared many contacts with me. This time around is different. I find it very strange to find people I have known for decades and in two cases worked with for years, in actual position to define space policy for the next four to eight years.

The good news is, they are all good people who are both aware of New Space and who wish it to succeed. At least two of them have tried to work angles to get their own private sector trips into space. What I do not know is how much real influence they will have on globally important issues. I know for a fact all of them are aware of the disaster that is 'ITAR', a regime whose purported purpose was to prevent transfer of weapons related knowledge and hardware and whose actual, unintended consequence, has been the creation of competitive non-US space industries. Niches, whether biological or market, will be filled and all the State's horses and all the State's men working together can do nought but delay that inevitability.

With Hillary Clinton in State, there is a personal channel of communication available for this issue from within the transition team membership. I very much hope they use it.

(6)

SpaceX tested the Falcon 9 a few days ago, November 22nd, on their giant test stand in McGregor Texas. I have reported previously as SpaceX increased the numbers of engines by a few at a time each test and am happy to report they have now succeeded in firing the nine Merlin engines in a sequence and for a period of time identical to that of a real mission.

Nine engines fired for 160 seconds; two were then shutdown and the remaining seven burned until the 178 second mark. The two engine shutdowns are done in the later stages of flight when much of the fuel mass has been burned off and the 'G forces' climb. This spare 'oomph' means a Falcon 9 can lose two engines and still reach the required orbit.

The stage developed 855,000 pounds of thrust at sea level. This will increase to about 1 million in vacuum. The Falcon 9 is not a little rocket.

A first flight attempt is expected from their Cape Canaveral pad during the first half of the coming year. I am not betting on a successful first flight, although it is a possibility. While the Merlin is now a fairly well understood engine, there are complex dynamic interactions between engines when you fly with more than one. I am sure Elon's team has modeled and tested to the best of their ability, but simulations and ground tests are still 'theory' relative to real live flight.

I have no doubts whatever that the SpaceX team will have Falcon 9 flying for hire within the next two years.

You can watch the test here

(11)

I am sure most of our readers are not amongst those who can write checks for $200,000 to fly Virgin Galactic a few years from now. The first will be 'high flyers' of the sort who always subsidize new market frontiers. They will pay the high price to be early adopters and by doing so they will generate the capital required to lower costs as companies begin to fight for market share. That is capitalism at work and it is just the way we like it.

Markets have a certain ponderous inevitability. They take time. If you have neither the money nor the desire to wait twenty years, there is another option.

At this point I must stop a moment and note that I am on the Board of Directors of the National Space Society (NSS) and have been part of the space activist cadre since Adam first looked up and dreamed of giant space colonies at Lagrange 5. So I really want lots of folk to look at this competition and join in.

This is not a lottery of any kind. The NSS and Virgin Galactic have worked together to make it possible for one person to earn their way onto a SpaceShipTwo flight near the end of the decade. All you have to do is join NSS and work your butt off in the community promoting the future of humans in space. The person who is judged to have done this most successfully will be selected as our Space Ambassador. They will be expected to work even harder at this task upon their return to terra firma.

I will not be signing up myself as I am hoping I will find other ways to earn my way off planet. The point of this initiative is to let folk like you believe you can turn your dreams into reality.

Ad Astra... and next year in L5!

(5)

The people at ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization, have scheduled their first lunar probe for October 22nd.

You can read the Times of India and The Hindu for more information.

I sometimes wonder if we will see a second 'Race To The Moon', this time betwixt India and China for pretty much the same reasons as the first. If so, I hope to be sitting in the lounge watching the news with a Guinness in hand after flying Virgin Galactic to the Bigelow Luna.

Speaking of tourism... Richard Garriot flies to the space station today. There is no bar there, but hopefully the Russians keep a little stash of vodka for 'medicinal purposes'.

Richard's aunch occurred successfully at 3am EDT. Docking will happen Tuesday and there will be live coverage on NASA Select starting at 0530 EDT.

(1)

Richard Garriot, son of Skylab astronaut Owen Garriot, will leave Kazakhstan for the International Space Station on Sunday, October 12. He is also going to be a bit creative with his sojourn:

Inspired by his artist mother, Richard will be hosting an art show in space. The show will incorporate art created by his mother, by sculptors, art submitted by artists through a competition and also art that Richard will create during his time in space. After Richard's mission, the art will be put up for auction to benefit the Challenger Center.

You can find out more here.

(45)

Over the last week I kept running across articles and video about a heavy weight couple who lost weight after the embarrassment of being asked to move to a different seat so the airplane could take off safely. On one Fox News show the talking heads went on about the times they were asked to move. None of them were particularly large so they talked overly long about how a jumbo jet could be unsafe to fly because a mere wisp of a talking headess was in the wrong seat.

This riled me a bit and has been roiling about in the back of my mind for some days. The people who write or talk about these things are supposedly educated, but the level of ignorance shown makes me very worried about what schools are actually requiring students to learn, even at the university level.

In hopes some of these ignorant but otherwise intelligent folk happen to drop by Samizdata, I will provide a bit of a remedial lesson in basic physics and a bit on aeroplanes as well.

I am hoping everyone is at least familiar with what a lever is, or at the very least a childhood teeter-totter. If two children sit on a board on opposite ends, they can find a balance point regardless of how fat or skinny the two are. One can move closer to the fulcrum, the thing upon which the board rests, or farther away. A child of a given weight at a given distance from the fulcrum creates what is known as a torque. The two children can balance these torques: Mass of child 1 times distance from fulcrum = Mass of child 2 times distance from fulcrum. In more typical notation: m1 * d1 = m2 * d2.

If you understand a teeter-totter, you can understand everything else I have to say.

An aeroplane has a number of points that are of interest. The most important to this discussion are the 'center of lift' and the 'center of gravity'. If you had a very hefty jack and the underside of your 747 could handle it without a requirement for body work afterwards, a single point at which the aircraft could balance like a toy on a pencil is the center of gravity. This is just like the balance point of the children, but with the entire class and their teddy bears instead.

The fulcrum is the center of lift. This is a balance point created by the airflow over the surfaces of the plane in flight. Ideally, and in the simple case, the center of lift should be near the center of mass and both should be on the center line of the aeroplane. If one wing were longer than the other, the center of lift would shift away from the center line. This would not be a good thing unless you are Burt Rutan and know how to do tricky things which no normal mortal would think of doing.

In practice it is impossible to get the two exactly together. If the center of lift is forward of the cg the airplane will want to pitch up. If it is aft of the cg it will try to pitch down. Similarly if it is to the right or left of the cg. the airplane will want to roll right or left.

You can control the attitude of the aeroplane by neutralizing these forces. If you have a pitch up tendency, you dial in a bit of pitch down on the elevator trim tabs. Likewise for the other directions. In worst case you can use the control column and use deflection of the elevator or ailerons themselves to counteract the problem. It is not wise to fly like this under normal circumstances. If you run out of trim you have either not done your weight and balance papers properly or you are flying a Lancaster to Europe in WWII with a max bomb and fuel load and expect you are going to die anyway.

Airplanes have a bunch of numbers which pilots have to know. Among them are the 'aft cg limit' and the 'forward cg limit'. Basically these mean you are too tail heavy or nose heavy to fly with enough of a safety margin to deal with the unexpected. They are not absolute limits. You are not going to reach the 'my god we are all going to die!' limit unless everyone piles into the tail and the pilot can not keep the nose down even with full downward elevator deflection.

Inside the cabin the pilot has readings off the landing gear that tell him what the weight and balance looks like after all the luggage, consumables and passengers are on board. If those indicators show the aeroplane is approaching the aft limit he or she will have a flight attendant pick someone from far aft and move them as far forward as possible.

That is all this whole storm in a teacup story was about. It is standard aviation practice that goes back to the first time Wilbur took Orville along with him.

(2)

I just received this note in private email from a fellow board member of the National Space Society:

For those who haven't been on a news site or station in the last few hours, a small asteroid that was discovered *this morning* is going to enter the atmosphere over the Sudan at 10:46 PM EDT. Estimated size is in the 10 ft range. It is not expected to reach the surface, but it *is* expected to create a 1 kiloton fireball. Should be visible from northern Africa and possibly southern Europe, so there might be a chance of live video on one of the major outlets. Interestingly, I am having trouble getting into spaceweather.com and space.com, so it looks like people are paying some attention. - JP

So if you are one of our readers who happens to be well to the south in Europe, please do report back if you see anything a couple hours from now. I will be watching for videos to show up in blogs and the big outlets.

We can all be very, very happy it is only a couple meters in diameter.... this time.

Note: The email seemed to indicate today; the only article I have found elsewhere so far seems to indicate last night. I am still looking...

(5)

Rand Simberg is live blogging the conference in Lake Buena Vista and from his initial description it sounds like all the players are there.

It is really not too difficult to understand why the military would find the idea of beaming power from space to a front line post a more appealing solution to energy requirements than driving trucks loaded with petrol hundreds of miles through ambush country.

Power from space starts to sound cheap when compared to a cost of as high as $200 per gallon for gasoline pumped into your Hummvee on the battlefield.

(10)

The launch live webcast link is here..

2322. This could be an interesting evening. As you know, the third launch failed at staging. It was quickly determined that the cause of this was a 'burp' from the Merlin engine after shutdown. There is some fuel and oxidizer left in the system when the engine shuts down, and in a regen engine there will be a bit more because the oxidizer is warmed and the nozzle cooled by running it through tubes around the outside of the bell. When they checked test data they found this had actually occurred in a ground test but the transient was 'down in the weeds' at sea level pressure and had not been noticed as it was perhaps only a tenth of an atmosphere of pressure and thus hidden in the 1.0 sea level pressure. At high altitude the ambient was near zero so the burp was significant. What happened then, was that after a perfect first stage burn and a flawless staging... the engine burped perhaps 2 seconds after sep and was enough to cause the first stage to ram the second stage just as it was ready to fire.
For flight four they have raised the delay from first stage cutoff to stage separation from 3 second to 5 seconds to account for this. There were no other flight anomalies of any significance on flight 3; flight 2 with the earlier Merlin regen engine has successfully staged and fired the Kestrel engine almost to second stage cut off so I am hopeful we will see a successful orbital insertion today.

2349. Fueling is in progress and near completion, or at least as near as they will go this early. The final top off will not occur until later in the launch. I am wondering if this might be partly to prevent the RP1 (kerosene) from chilling down as much as it did on a previous flight. Ah, the webcast has just now gone live.

0011. They are into the terminal count but they have been giving us loads of talking head chatter instead of the interesting stuff. I'd much rather listen to the real internal loop than people assigned to interpret to us. There is in any case only about 5 minutes to go.

0013. As you can see if you are watching the video, the tower is retracted, and we are now hearing the real control loop. 2:30 to go! Launch director gave a green, range is green, about 1 minute to go!

0018. She's going up and looking great so far! Max Q... first stage going great. Getting close to time for pitch over and MECO.

0021. Second stage is burning beautifully!!!!!! There is no roll problem this time. Now we wait 4 minutes as she goes down range.

0022. No sign of roll anomalies like on flight 2. The slosh baffles are doing their job. 315 km high now...

0024. Almost there... the bell glows red hot but it is built for that. We now have lost signal, probably due to range.
We are waiting now for whether we got the orbital insertion.... and.... THEY HAVE DONE IT!!!!!!

0043. They are in orbit with their dummy satellite. The only things we need to hear now is whether they get a successful recovery of the 1st stage from the Pacific. It should have come down on parachutes but I don't expect I will hear about that until 'tomorrow'. I feel a bit like Elon... I hardly know what to say. I must admit that I was here screaming like the SpaceX employees and I now feel just limp, tired and very, very happy. So... another Falcon 1 launch latter this year and then on to the much larger Falcon 9 next year!

(1)

The SpaceX test flight 4 of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle is scheduled for Sunday. That means around midnight in my part of the world and earlier in the USA.

I will be here as usual, giving a blow by blow live-blogging of the event. My gut feel says they make it this time. But that and a shiny new pound coin will get you a small cup of coffee at the local coffee shop.

Here is a very nice Q&A with Elon Musk done by the Washington Post.

2300. The launch webcast link is now up.. Coverage should start in about a half hour.

(8)

It is now officially official as the awaited press release has been officially released:

As mentioned in my update last month, we do expect to conduct a launch countdown in late September as scheduled.

Having said that, it is still possible that we encounter an issue that needs to be investigated, which would delay launch until the next available window in late October. If preparations go smoothly, we will conduct a static fire on Saturday and launch sometime between Tuesday and Thursday (California time).

The SpaceX team worked hard to make this launch window, but we also took the time to review data from Flight 3 in detail. In addition to us reviewing the data, we had several outside experts check the data and conclusions. No flight critical problems were found apart from the thrust transient issue.

Flight 5 production is well underway with an expected January completion date, Flight 6 parts are on order and Flight 7 production will begin early next year. We are now in steady state production of Falcon 1 at a rate of one vehicle every four months, which we will probably step up to one vehicle every two to three months in 2010.

- Elon Musk

I will keep you informed as news comes in and if at all possible will live blog the launch from here on the other side of the planet from Kwaj as I have on each of the previous Falcon test flights.

Monday, Sep 22: The engine test was accomplished successfully over the weekend so we are on track to see a flight 4 launch attempt later this week

Tuesday, Sep 23: The flight is scheduled for today if you are in the US, or 'tomorrow' if you are where I sit. Window opens around 2300 UTC and runs until 0400 UTC. That will be afternoon or evening for US readers.

Tuesday, Sep 23: They are swapping out a component in the second stage and the launch is now note expected until Sunday, Sep 28 at the earliest. Current range usage window lasts until next Wed, October 1.

(4)

Officially unofficial (as yet) information has it that SpaceX will try another test launch from Kwaj before the end of this month.

I will keep you informed.

(2)

If you are a lover of aviation history, you may want to help them out.

(10)

Bruce Dickinson, front man for the heavy metal rock group, Iron Maiden, is a qualified civil aviation pilot and was involved in flying home tourists left stranded by the collapse of a UK tourist agency. A nice story.

Of course, if I am on a flight that Bruce is piloting, I'll insist he plays something really, really loud during takeoff. Go Bruce!

(11)

The National Space Society held a press event at the National Press Club today in conjunction with the Discovery Channel to announce the results of power beaming tests carried out in the Hawaiian Islands earlier this year, between January and April. The testing was funded and filmed by the Discovery Channel as an episode of an eight part 'Discovery Project Earth' series and should be airing tonight in the US.

The briefing was given by John C. Mankins, COO of Managed Energy Technologies LLC who actually built and carried out the tests and shared the podium with Mark Hopkins, Senior Vice President of the National Space Society. The house was packed, standing room only with more people in the hallway,.according to an attendee whom I interviewed.

John Mankins and his crew built a portable and modular energy transmission system for under a million dollars. This was not just a technological feasiblity study. We have known for decades that it is possible to transmit power via microwaves over long distances. What the Mankins test showed was how it can be done in a real world situation. They had to work around bureaucratic approvals which limited the total power; they had to deal with tribal religious requirements that nothing be left on the sacred volcano over night and they had to build equipment that could be carried to a site, plugged together, aimed and turned on.

They succeeded. 1 watt of power was beamed from a portable antenna on Maui to a small receiving antenna on Hawaii, 147 kilometers away.

The equipment was not engineered for efficiency nor high power, both of which are possible. Mankins and the Discovery Channel team have succeeded in what they set out to do: they have an iconic real world demonstration that shows the key technology behind Geosynchronous Solar Power Satellites works.

(15)

I thought I would let all of you be the first to know I have won my election bid to the National Space Society Board of Directors.

The last time I served on the board it was still called the L5 Society :-)

(8)

As a fairly regular user of Heathrow Airport and other UK airports such as Gatwick - the former has suffered all manner of problems due to loss of baggage, massive queues - this, on the face of it, looks a good development, but I have my reservations, as I will explain later:

Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) -- BAA Ltd., the owner of London's Heathrow airport, should be broken up and its Gatwick and Stansted terminals sold off to foster competition in the U.K. capital, antitrust regulators said.

The unit of Spanish builder Grupo Ferrovial SA provides a poor service to airlines and passengers and has shown a lack of initiative in planning for additional capacity, the Competition Commission said today, recommending that the company should also be stripped of either Glasgow or Edinburgh airport in Scotland. BAA said the analysis was ``flawed.''

Hmm. The problem partly stems from the fact that when BAA was originally privatised by the former Tory government, it was sold as a monopoly. That is not, in and of itself, a terrible thing so long as there are other competing transportation businesses. But there were not other big airports owned by non-BAA businesses to compete, especially against the crucial hub of Heathrow. In a previous Samizdata posting on the Snafu of the opening of Heathrow's Terminal Five, one commenter pointed out that one issue that is sometimes overlooked in issues like this is restrictions on new airport builds by the planning authorities. Well indeed. I think there is a good case for building an airport to the eastern side of London, on the flat lands that sit to the north of the Thames (it is not as if this is an area of outstanding natural beauty). It would relieve some of the air traffic now coming over the capital, which would be good for abating noise as well as removing a potential safety and security issue of thousands of aircraft flying into land over the middle of London.

Getting planning permission for a new airport is, under the current system, very difficult. Yes, there are, in the UK, a lot of old, disused military bases left by the RAF and the USAF, such as in Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia and bits of Kent. However, the trouble is that such bases were deliberately built miles away from major urban centres, to prevent the danger that an attack on such a base would hit a large city. So you have th situation of huge runways turning into rubble in the middle of Suffolk but of no real use to commuters in London. So we would need something a bit closer. Another matter to bear in mind is that southern England is not very large: airspace is at a premium and already crowded, if not quite so bad as during the Cold War, when the UK was covered in airbases.

I am not, as a free market purist, at all happy to see a private business broken up at the behest of a state regulator, but then we should recall that BAA was originally put together as a state business and sold as a monopoly as a matter of state policy. When its current owners, the Spanish firm Ferrovial, bought BAA, they must have known that failure to sort out the problems might have incurred the wrath of the regulator. It would be nice in a total free market not to have to bother about such things, but it would have been failure of basic due diligence for Ferrovial's lawyers not to have warned their managers that competition issue might arise. Well, it jolly well has arisen at last. We would not, as the old joke about the Irishman giving street directions to a tourist, want to start from here. But here is where we are. If there is a chance of putting a large, competitive fire up the backsides of BAA's management, there is a chance, however slender, that the experience of coming to and from the UK by air might be a tad more pleasant in future.

(48)

The C-130 based laser you have read about here seems to be doing quite well in testing, and although I have not yet read a document on the topic, there are at least some who would like it deployed to Iraq. The weapon is even better than I had thought it would be. No, let us be truthful. I am stunned at the capabilities they are demonstrating. According to a Wired article (hat tip to Glenn Reynolds):

According to the developers, the accuracy of this weapon is little short of supernatural. They claim that the pinpoint precision can make it lethal or non-lethal at will. For example, they say it can either destroy a vehicle completely, or just damage the tires to immobilize it. The illustration shows a theoretical 26-second engagement in which the beam deftly destroys "32 tires, 11 Antennae, 3 Missile Launchers, 11 EO devices, 4 Mortars, 5 Machine Guns" -- while avoiding harming a truckload of refugees and the soldiers guarding them.

The author goes on at length about claims the weapon could be used for plausibly deniable standoff attacks. It is my belief he is being insufficiently creative when he imagines what such attacks would entail. One might take out a communications facility by targeting a turnbuckle on an antenna guy wire; or a power plant by blowing away a standoff and dropping a high voltage line onto others; or perhaps blowing a hole in an oil filled transformer. I can easily think of ways of disabling infrastructure with this device in ways that would leave enemy repair crews terribly puzzled.

You just have to think outside the box: new weapons imply new definitions of the possible.

(1)

Spacex has released the full high definition video of the flight from liftoff through the first stage impact on the second stage, complete with audio signal. It is really worth watching!

(72)

Earlier this afternoon Perry and I had a lengthy editorial telephone discussion on the subject of Georgia. While we agreed broadly there was one area in which we had intense debate until I finally figured out how we were talking past each other.

The question is, how the hell did US intelligence assets miss the Russian Black Sea fleet movements? How did they miss the massive transport job of the troops and their logistical tail? They did not just materialize in position. It takes time and planning to make such moves. I will leave the detail of that to Perry as he seems to have been thinking about it in great detail.

My take is there is a limited amount of time available on the black satellites. The manpower and resources have been re-targeted on the Middle East. Orbits have been shifted to give maximal coverage in those areas of interest and experienced personnel have moved to 'where the action is'.

This is not to say Russia is being ignored. It is however a very big place and I am going to guess that the time between scanning particular areas has greatly lengthened. Russian troop movements are mainly rail based and with enough eyeballs and Cold War era periodic coverage one might hope to pick up changes in traffic patterns and notice "something is going on". But... this requires a certain periodicity in coverage. Changes in static positions like silos and strategic air bases are much easier to pick up even with occasional coverage. Dynamic changes, such as train and road movements are a different story. You have to have a satellite taking pictures at just the right time or often enough to pick up a signal just by chance.

This is what took Perry and I awhile to meet minds on: I have been thinking of this issue as a communications/information theory problem. How often do you have to sample an area to notice a change in the density of train traffic? I would posit it would have to be several times a week at the very least if the spike in traffic was huge and extended; if the spike were smaller and flatter you would need to sample daily or multiple times daily. You would have to do it at night and through clouds as well if you were to get a statistical value high enough to ring alarm bells. It is an issue of sampling rate versus the highest detectable signal frequency, pure and simple.

I doubt they have even been scanning large areas of Russia more than a few times a week (I suspect much less often) except in areas of nuclear strategic interest. They could easily miss large troop movements in a part of Russia which is not of great national interest to the United States.

Let the discussion begin. There is a lot of meat on this bone!

(3)

Here is the official word from SpaceX on the cause of the failure last weekend:

On August 2 nd, Falcon 1 executed a picture perfect first stage flight, ultimately reaching an altitude of 217 km, but encountered a problem just after stage separation that prevented the second stage from reaching orbit. At this point, we are certain as to the origin of the problem. Four methods of analysis – vehicle inertial measurement, chamber pressure, onboard video and a simple physics free body calculation – all give the same answer.

The problem arose due to the longer thrust decay transient of our new Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine, as compared to the prior flight that used our old Merlin 1A ablatively cooled engine. Unlike the ablative engine, the regen engine had unburned fuel in the cooling channels and manifold that combined with a small amount of residual oxygen to produce a small thrust that was just enough to overcome the stage separation pusher impulse.

We were aware of and had allowed for a thrust transient, but did not expect it to last that long. As it turned out, a very small increase in the time between commanding main engine shutdown and stage separation would have been enough to save the mission.

The question then is why didn't we catch this issue? Unfortunately, the engine chamber pressure is so low for this transient thrust -- only about 10 psi -- that it barely registered on our ground test stand in Texas where ambient pressure is 14.5 psi. However, in vacuum that 10 psi chamber pressure produced enough thrust to cause the first stage to recontact the second stage.

It looks like we may have flight four on the launch pad as soon as next month. The long gap between flight two and three was mainly due to the Merlin 1C regen engine development, but there are no technology upgrades between flight three and four.

Good Things About This Flight

* Merlin 1C and overall first stage performance was excellent
* The stage separation system worked properly, in that all bolts fired and the pneumatic pushers delivered the correct impulse
* Second stage ignited and achieved nominal chamber pressure
* Fairing separated correctly
* We discovered this transient problem on Falcon 1 rather than Falcon 9
* Rocket stages were integrated, rolled out and launched in seven days
* Neither the near miss potential failures of flight two nor any new ones were present
* The only untested portion of flight is whether or not we have solved the main problem of flight two, where the control system coupled with the slosh modes of the liquid oxygen tank. Given the addition of slosh baffles and significant improvements to the control logic, I feel confident that this will not be an issue for the upcoming flight four."

So it looks like I may have to stay up all night for you again in September!

(4)

Elon Musk, CEO and owner of SpaceX, has released a statement (or whatever you call it when done in a Q&A!) in which he says:

We're not quite ready to release details on the initial investigation yet, but we should do it very soon. We think we have a very good idea but I don't want to get ahead of ourselves and then be wrong. We definitely know where the problem occurred, but 'why?' is the question. We think we know, but have to be sure. We think it's very small and will require a tiny change, so tiny that if we had another rocket on the pad we could launch tomorrow.

I will let you know when I see a more final report.

(16)

0023. LOX tanking is in progress; there has been some audio coming across now on the live feed.

0025: Note that they are in an 'unplanned hold' at the moment. Second tank LOX fill is happening and I believe I heard them discussing Helium pressurization.

0027: On the video you can see the LOX venting on the second stage.

0031: If you think the video quality s... is less than optimal, you are not alone!

0045: http://www.spacex.com/webcast.php in case you don't know where to go. There is an Aussie presenter at SpaceX you will notice.

0058: I am having diffs due to the bandwidth the video is sucking up, so my posting may be more erratic than I would have liked. When you see the public affairs team again, the thing behind them marked Dragon is the mockup of the manned capsule they will be flying to ISS in the 2012 time frame.

0129: You may have noticed they lost video for awhile until someone rebooted their Mac streaming application. We are down into the t-30 range and all is looking good so far. Other than my Virgin Media cable connection which keeps seems to go off line entirely every now and again...

0133: This rock is so highly automated that there are a lot fewer people acting as controllers than in old fashioned 20th century artillery rockets. Things will not get really interesting until we get into the last few minutes. Also, remember that they have on board cameras so we will get live feeds from the rocket during ascent. Last time we had a really good view of the 2nd stage engine bell glowing red hot as it fired.

0246: My link was down for about 45 minutes... I am hoping it will stay up long enough for me to watch the launch! Looks like they are still in a hold so I have not missed anything big.

0251: The detanking is something they did last time as well. If things take too long, the fuel starts getting cold and this caused a shutdown on flight 2 because the thrust is below nominal if the temps are wrong.

0310: Since I have to sit and wait like everyone else, perhaps I can give a bit more explanation. They have a Helium tank there for pressurization I presume, at least from the size of it. Helium is a super cryogen. It makes LOX look like burning petrol by comparison. If they sit too long, the Helium starts chilling the fuel, which is Kerosene. You want your fuel and oxidizer to be warm and volatile when you
inject them; otherwise some of the energy is taken from thrust to heat them up. That lowers the efficiency of the engine, something usually measured as ISP. The computer controls know the expected profile from initial injection to when the igniter fires and as the burn starts and stabilizes. If it is outside of the expected band, the engine is shutdown.

0319: The have restarted the count and launch is now scheduled for about 0300 UTC, which would be about 0400 here since we are on BDT. Weather at Kwajalein is crystal clear by the way, at least from the weather map!

0325:They are back on the air doing the recycle. Incidentally, you may have noticed that the webcast appears to be done by a video camera focused on a computer screen at the Hawthorne facility. My guess is they have a single circuit from Kwaj and for security reasons wanted to totally isolate the public net from the operations net. I would do the same, but perhaps a little differently. It may simply come down to them having too little time to do anything more than this work around. This is all pure speculation on my part, but it is based on doing a paper system level design for an LCC for someone else.

0338: It looks like along with the rewind of the count we are also getting a replay of the video clips we saw earlier... I'd rather listen to the control loop myself!

0344: Their Mac video application just fell over again... and a few minutes later the talking heads are repeating the same description of the Falcon 1 that they did a couple hours ago. Meanwhile, while they jabber on, from other sources on Kwaj I read that everything is in the green. We should be about 15 minutes or less from launch now.

0352: While they are showing silly repeats, terminal count is about to start, or probably has. Everything is go for launch at the moment.

0403: A terminal abort, But there could still be a launch tonight. Er this morning. I think this is a good time for me to put the kettle on...

0415: If you have been reading the announcements, they think they may recycle the count to t-10, which means they have had a minor issue. The automatic check out that happens at ignition is extraordinary fascist and they want it that way: you can't bring it back to the pad once you've launched!

0426: Wow. They have recycled to t-10 terminal count start in almost no time!

0440: They called it an anomaly. I wish they had not killed the video so quickly... the plume from the first stage was looking rather strange just before that, with streaks and instabilities that didn't look right to me, also I was seeing a greyish color that did not seem quite right. But I could be totally wrong. We will just have to wait for more information. Not what I was hoping for tonight, but this is rocket science... The most likely response to an 'anomaly' is flight termination.

0530: Well, I am calling it quits as there is unlikely to be any real news for quite some time. The vehicle either blew itself up or was commanded to do so; I have the impression it performed its own self disassembly but have nothing to back that up. My own eyeballs are on the new regen engine bell but I will with hold judgement until I have had a chance to watch the video again and more importantly have some expert feedback. But tonight, with my bed calling, I will place my bets on the new engine, perhaps the regen cooling channels. It is a wild stab in the dark and I will probably disagree with myself by the time I have some sleep. But there you go.

Good night all.

0552: Elon issued a statement, and here is an excerpt on the problem:

It was obviously a big disappointment not to reach orbit on this flight. On the plus side, the flight of our first stage, with the new Merlin 1C engine that will be used in Falcon 9, was picture perfect. Unfortunately, a problem occurred with stage separation, causing the stages to be held together. This is under investigation and I will send out a note as soon as we understand exactly what happened.

(5)

Spacex will attempt the third launch of the Falcon 1 tonight at 1600 PDT / 1900 EDT / 2300 UTC. You can go here and test your video set up with the available webtest.php link.

Video will go live around 30 minutes before the scheduled launch time. I will attempt to add comments here as it happens if I have any thoughts that might be useful to our readers.

(11)

SpaceX has just test fired nine engines at full thrust in the full Falcon 9 configuration, a test I was not expecting to see until this fall at the earliest. According to their press release:

Major milestone achieved towards demonstrating U.S. transport to the International Space Station following retirement of the Space Shuttle McGregor TX - August 1, 2008 - Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) conducted the first nine engine firing of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle at its Texas Test Facility outside McGregor on July 31st. A second firing on August 1st completed a major NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) milestone almost two months early. At full power, the nine engines consumed 3,200 lbs of fuel and liquid oxygen per second, and generated almost 850,000 pounds of force - four times the maximum thrust of a 747 aircraft. This marks the first firing of a Falcon 9 first stage with its full complement of nine Merlin 1C engines.Once a near term Merlin 1C fuel pump upgrade is complete, the sea level thrust will increase to 950,000 lbf, making Falcon 9 the most powerful single core vehicle in the United States. "This was the most difficult milestone in development of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and it also constitutes a significant achievement in US space vehicle development. Not since the final flight of the Saturn 1B rocket in 1975, has a rocket had the ability to lose any engine or motor and still successfully complete its mission," said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. "Much like a commercial airliner, our multi-engine design has the potential to provide significantly higher reliability than single engine "We made a major advancement from the previous five engine test by adding four new Merlin engines at once," said Tom Mueller, Vice President of Propulsion for SpaceX. "All phases of integration went smoothly and we were elated to see all nine engines working perfectly in concert."

I will admit to being caught totally flat footed by this announcement. Given that the Falcon 1 launch at Kwajalein is due any time now I felt certain the company's full attention would be focused there.

I guess Elon and his crew are better multi-taskers than I gave them credit for.

Falcon 9 first stage on test stand: nine Merlin 1C engines at full thrust.
Photo: courtesy SpaceX

(1)

I have just received some photos from one of our XCOR readers who has had the good fortune to actually fly in one these beauties.

Getting ready for takeoff.
Photo: With thanks to Mike Massee/XCOR/Rocket Racing League

Rolling down the runway with a tail of fire.
Photo: With thanks to Mike Massee/XCOR/Rocket Racing League

It must have been really loud where the photographer was standing!
Photo: With thanks to Mike Massee/XCOR/Rocket Racing League

You can also see some flight video and an interview with the test pilot here .

(17)

and they is US!

US Marine MV-22 Osprey's landing in Jordan.
Photo: courtesy of US DOD

(1)

This is not the first time I have seen images of this bird in flight, but it is the first public venue at which a Rocket Racer has flown and the second rocket powered aircraft ever to fly at the Oshkosh AirVenture. The first was a few years back (four? five?) and was also an XCOR powered craft, the EZ-Rocket, trailered from Mojave to Oshkosh by that company.

The XCOR engined Rocket Racer is a larger Lox/Kerosene rocket plane with at about 10 minutes airborne endurance if the burn times are well utilized. The pilot, Astronaut Richard Searfoss, certainly knows his burns and knows the engine inside out as he was test pilot for XCOR during engine development.

A second Rocket Racer is also on display at AirVenture, with an Armadillo Aerospace alcohol/LOX engine. It has not yet received FAA certification but they hope that will occur before the Reno Races when the Rocket Racing League hopes to have both craft in the air together.

For now though, a hearty congratulations to our readers at XCOR who made it possible.

XCOR engined Rocket Racer in flight at Oshkosh. This was the only reasonable photo I could find: the email address of the press contact for RRL given on their site bounces!
Photo: Rocket Racing League

(0)

The first WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft was rolled out of its hanger in the Mojave desert on Monday. The second stage vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, has been held back due to the ongoing investigations into the test stand accident of one year ago. Although that accident was little more than a plumbing and pressure test, there is as yet no full understanding of exactly what happened. Because of this uncertainty, Burt has delayed much development of SpaceShipTwo so as to avoid building things he might later have to rip out. This is the reason why the target date for passenger service has slipped into the 2010 time frame.

Still, the roll out of WK2 is a major milestone. As you can see in the photo, it is not a small aircraft! You gain an even better impression of that size from the raw press release video clip. (if you do not have a quick time plug-in, you may need to download first)

Monday July 28, 2008. Roll out of WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft 'VMS Eve' at Mojave Spaceport.
Photo: courtesy of Virgin Galactic

(7)

You may remember I reported earlier this month that the launch window for the 3rd flight of the Falcon 1 opened around July 30 or thereabouts. We are now into that period and it looks like we might get a launch before the five day window closes: Falcon 1 is on the pad at Kwajalein.

There has been very little information floating around on the launch schedule this time so I will have to keep watching closely to make sure I do not miss a last minute announcement.

I will keep you informed.

(12)

At the beginning of the week I reported that in the EU you can no longer purchase a ticket to fly in a DC-3. However, if the need for the classic warbird experience strikes you, there are some truly amazing opportunities available in the US.

I was just perusing my August issue of The Aeroplane and found a special offer in it. With the reader code from that issue you can fly in not one, but two incredible aircraft, a B-17 and a B-25, for about four hundred quid. Check out the Yankee Air Museum if you want to see these gorgeous babes in flight.

They are scheduling flights from several locations in the US over the next several months so if you are traveling in the US, see if you can align your stars for an experience that I would just about die for.

(15)

If you are interested in a much longer exposition of what you have been reading in my aerospace postings over the years, listen to Burt Rutan as he describes how the socialistic model of State space flight has done exactly what socialism always does. It delivers the equivalent of rough brown toilet paper that is subsidized, overpriced anyway, and rationed because there is not enough of it. He does not say it in those words, but it is a view with which he would clearly agree.

He also shows why the Capitalist Space Race (the race to make money!) is going to take the lead in a surprisingly short time and that it will effectively be putting an equivalent of 5 times the NASA budget into human spaceflight within a very few years.

And by the way... I do not know the names of the other investors and developers he hints at, although I am aware (under NDA) of a few who are low profile and not seen on the Discovery Channel.

(4)

Here is a fascinating teaser for a Janes subscription only article:

US military pinpoints date for HELLADS ground test. The United States military told Jane's it is on schedule for a 2010 ground test of a lightweight high-energy laser that could be installed on a tactical aircraft to destroy missiles, rockets and mortars. The laser, known as the High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS), is being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and General Atomics, along with several other contractors.

It is all coming together about as I expected, although perhaps a little faster than I really believed.

(3)

Flicking through the television sports channels yesterday morning, I came across the Red Bull air race series, with the latest heat run out of Detroit. Fantastic. In terms of sheer skill and eye-popping adrenalin entertainment, this race takes a lot of beating. It makes Formula 1 motor racing, for example, look positively tame, even though I have no doubt that the actual skills involved have a fair amount in common. For a start, the pilots will sometimes pull a G-force of up to 8 or 9 times, which is the sort of thing you associate with astronauts or jet fighter pilots, for which there is a need to wear a pressue suit to stop blacking out.

The race series is continuing in London soon. I am going to find out if I can get my hands on any tickets. It could be difficult.

Apologies if there is no link here - I am having a problem with this function today. A quick Google will bring it up: check out the great photos.

(7)

If you want to be a part of the most secretive of the New Space launch companies, here is your opportunity!

(5)

SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket has been test fired at Kwajalein as the last step in preparation for a July launch. This will be the first flight of the new regen engine which does not require an ablative coating on the nozzle. It is also the same technology as the engines for the larger Falcon-9 slated for launch at Cape Canaveral next year.

Protestations to the contrary, I would consider this to still be a developmental flight, even though it is carrying a customer payload. I wish them the best but it is still early days for their family of boosters. They are going to revolutionize the launch industry but revolutions require hard work and determination in the face of adversity.

That is why they call it rocket science.

(18)

I have been following the slow transition of laser weaponry from infancy to toddler over the last 25 years so I keep my eyes open for interesting developments in that area. This small item from Jane's (subscription only) is quite interesting:

Lasers for area defence. Raytheon is forging ahead with a demonstration programme to show that a laser can equal or better the performance of traditional gun-based systems, with greater development potential and at reduced cost. The company's Laser Area Defense System (LA DS) utilises the Phalanx platform, combined with current solid-state laser capability to tackle the very real threat of mortars and Katyusha rockets.

I saw video of a laser taking down two Katyusha's in flight quite some time ago and am pleased to see things developing apace. I can think of one small Middle Eastern democracy which might find a system of this type highly efficacious.

(9)

This is very cool.. I reckon 007 should get Q to make him one with all those lovely "additional features".

(9)

On May 29th, SpaceX tested the Falcon 9 first stage in its Macgregor Texas test stand with
five engines.

Rather impressive, n'est-ce pas?

(3)

'The Caballeros' of the National Space Security Office were awarded the National Space Society's prestigious 'Space Pioneer Award' this evening for their work in bringing the possibilities of Space Based Solar power to the attention of the powers that be and pretty much every one else.

Although these ideas have been known 'forever' amongst my circles, they have been out of the limelight for decades due to a Carter-era hatchet job.

So, congrats to our friends in DOD, and new found drinking buddy Coyote Smith!

The Caballeros receive their just rewards for saving the planet. Coyote is second from right. I'll add other names later.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Speaking of drinking... there is a party in the suite down the hall, so that is me away!

(11)

If you are interested in watching the Phoenix Mars Lander land, click here.

Phoenix is down! Congrats to the Phoenix team!

(16)

Under the title 'Physicists raise questions on EMR capabilities' Janes, (a subscription only publisher) reports:

Two US physicists have claimed that the European Mid-course Radar (EMR), due to be installed in the Czech Republic in a planned expansion of the US ballistic missile defence system, is substantially underpowered, and will form part of "a defence system that is unable to provide any discrimination services against missiles launched from Iran to the eastern half of the continental United States". George Lewis, associate director of the Peace Studies Program at Cornell University, and Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology, and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are both opponents of US missile defence plans.

Anyone who has followed military space systems should be quite familiar with the consistently negative and consistently incorrect claims of Dr. Postel. If one were to believe his writings in Scientific American and other publications in the 1980's we should never have tried to build anti-missile systems because they are impossible.

One must wonder if Dr Postel is sullying the good name of Physics in defense of his political preference for a global OK Corral gunfight, a world seemingly frozen in a timeless instant before the first gunfighter makes a false move. With only two gunfighters that standoff might well last a very long time and thankfully did. With more players the chance of a miscalculation ending in a free for all grows exponentially.

Thankfully, the good doctor was wrong in his eighties predictions about what would be possible now, so we are rapidly moving away from his MAD dream world.

The first decades of the age of nuclear weapons were an historical anomaly, Our newly operational systems will mature rapidly over the next two decades and in so doing will re-instate the natural balance between offense and defense.

(13)

The Royal Air Force marks its 90th birthday today. There will be a flypast over central London at 1pm, so if readers have a digital camera, keep it nearby.

(15)

Heathrow's Terminal Five, the one which is fingerprinting passengers even if they take domestic flights, has got off to a glorious start.

The British Airports Authority, now owned by Spain's Ferrovial, is a joke. In an ideal universe, it would be broken up - as it should never have been privatised as a monopoly in the first place. If the wannabe Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, wants a campaign issue, this is it.

Update: I should of course stress that BA, which operates out of the terminal, bears a heavy lump of the responsibility for this. Its share price is down today by more than 3%. At least BA feels the economic chill of this sort of mess, BAA does not. One commenter points out that hitches often happen at the start of a new venture, but that does really wash since one assumes - right? - that the baggage and check-in facilities at a new airport were beta-tested to make sure they work properly. One would like to think that this is standard procedure in any new operation.

(19)

XCOR's press conference will start in LA in a couple hours and I have just found that the embargo on the Lynx Spaceplane press release has been lifted. For those few lucky ones who happened to catch my earlier article and then wondered why it vanished, it was due to a communications SNAFU. The person who sent me the info forgot to state it was embargoed so I blogged it. An hour later I received a frantic phone call whilst I was watching a DVD and pulled it as soon as he explained the mistake.

In any case, there is now a lot more information about the Lynx showing up. Rand Simberg, one of my business partners, will be there and no doubt live blogging it.

Disclosures: I might add that I spent several months doing software support for the aerodynamics guy. :-)

The Lynx will fly within two years with Astronaut Searfoss at the controls.

Image: With thanks to XCOR.

(0)

XCOR will be holding a press conference this Wednesday about the spaceship they are building. It will be their third manned rocket powered vehicle so this is no idle threat.

This press event will be held Wednesday, March 26, at 10 a.m. in the Canon Room of the Beverly Hilton at 9876 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, CA 90210. Lunch will be served afterwards. The speaker will be XCOR test pilot Rick Searfoss. Rick has also flown the Space Shuttle three times as pilot and commander. If you are a media person who would like to attend, I presume you should call XCOR as soon as possible, although the information passed to me did not give any details on this.

According to a source associated with XCOR:

The prototype propulsion system for the Lynx now has more than two hundred flight equivalents on it and is in flight test now.

Fourteen engine runs yesterday, probably as many today.

The key to economic space transport is safe, reusable, and operable propulsion.No one else has anything like XCOR engines in that regard. Because engines are the most difficult and expensive part of the vehicle to develop, XCOR has a big advantage over its competitors. That includes giant firms like EADS Astrium.

In fact, no one anywhere has ever built anything even close to the economic efficiency of the XCOR engines.

I must of course note that I have worked as a consultant to XCOR, which basically means I know from the inside how good they are at this!

I would tell you more but I would have to shred you afterwards.

(16)

So there I was, your typical history buff aviation enthusiast, when I overhear a discussion in a cafe that there is a movie out called Horton hears a who.

"Oh fab!" thinks I, fully expecting said movie to feature the coolest Nazi jet fighter ever conceived (and if you know anything about conceptual late war German aviation, that is saying something). Maybe some contra-factual Luftwaffe 1946 scenario? Woo hoo!

Horten 229B

...Sadly it is about an elephant.

(14)

A nice article in the Daily Telegraph on how to make flying a bit more fun, which admittedly is a tough proposition as the enthusiasm for "security theatre", as some call it, makes for longer queues at airports. The term means security measures designed to give the impression of making us safer rather than actually doing so. I rather liked the article's almost heartbreakingly simple suggestion: pack a set of ear mufflers. They don't have to be big, but they can cut out the racket, such as the noise of a fractious baby child. I am going to get some. For years, I always dreaded the prospect of having to share part of the cabin with a set of screaming kids or for that matter, a chatty adult who did not get the hint that I'd rather read one of Lee Child's Jack Reacher thrillers than hear my neighbour's personal problems.

Problem solved!

(20)

I heard the very sad news earlier this evening. Arthur is a member of the Trinity: Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, the greatest of the great Science Fiction writers. The first SF novel I ever read was "Red Sands Of Mars" when I was nine and by age fourteen I had read my way through every SF book in the Coraopolis Public Library and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Arthur may have passed, but he is an immortal, a name which will be honored on far stars long after even after those of the greatest world leaders of our era are lost and forgotten.

(5)

Earlier today business partner Jim Bennett passed this SR-71 story along to me.

Mach 3.5 at 80,000 MSL... It just makes me go all quivery inside.

Not a single SR-71 was scrapped: every last one has been given an honoured and well-cared for retirement.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

(3)

A Boeing 40C which crashed in 1928 has been restored and flown.

Ain't she just gorgeous?

(0)

I do not normally like receiving emails selling me products, but I thought I would have to make an exception for this:

Dear Antoine,

Virgin Galactic is delighted to announce a new destination... space. Climb to 360,000ft. at a cruising speed of almost three times the speed of sound, in unprecedented levels of safety and comfort. See our beautiful planet from 63 miles up and experience the magic of weightlessness.

Redeem 200,000 miles to receive 10% off the cost of a spaceflight, that's an incredible $20,000 saving!* Join our future astronauts and book your place in history.

I look forward to the Nigerian version:

"My name is Mr.Moses Odiaka. I work in the credit and accounts department of Union Bank of NigeriaPlc,Lagos, Nigeria. I write you in respect of a foreign customer with a Virgin Galactica ticket. His name is Engineer Manfred Becker. He was among those who died in a plane crash here in Nigeria during the reign of late General Sani Abacha.

Since the demise of this our customer, Engineer Manfred Becker, who was an oil merchant/contractor, I have kept a close watch of the deposit records and accounts and since then nobody has come to claim the airmiles in this a/c as next of kin to the late Engineer. He had only 18.5mllion air miles in his a/c and the a/c is coded. It is only an insider that could produce the code or password of the deposit particulars. As it stands now,there is nobody in that position to produce the needed information other than my very self considering my position in the bank."

(9)

Somewhat over a week ago I did a posting here about maths. What use, I asked, is it? I always knew there were plenty of good answers, but the quantity and quality of what the Samizdata commentariat came up with amazed and delighted me, as it did a number of those same commenters. Someone even suggested we have other postings here about what use other educationally controversial things are, like poetry, Latin, and so on (I am thinking: media studies, which I definitely do not assume would have to be useless).

At the end of that piece I mentioned that Michael Jennings and I were about to record a conversation on this subject. Its been up and listenable to at my Education Blog for a while now, so apologies for the delay in mentioning it here, but far better a week late than never. This is not the kind of thing that will be going out of date any time soon. Here is the link to it.

I did most of the asking, and Michael did most of the answering, and it must be admitted that Michael is not what you would call a hundred per cent fluent speaker. It sounds like he suffers from the mild remnants of a childhood stutter, which means that he would not be the ideal choice to perform on Just A Minute, a BBC 4 radio show where your mission is to talk uninterrupted nonsense and where you get penalised for the slightest suggestion of hesitation or repetition. For, on the plus side, Michael does not do nonsense either, which is part of the reason why he still often hesitates. He wants to get things right. Basically, the man just knows so much, about so many things, which means that when he answers a question he is as likely as not choosing between four or five equally relevant facts that he might then serve up. You can see why the people in the City of London get so rich, if they have people like Michael keeping them informed about the world and its business. I strongly urge anyone who resents even the hint of a lack of verbal fluency to, as the Americans say and pardon my split infinitive, deal with it. I found my talk with Michael about maths and its uses absolutely fascinating. Word of mouth already tells me that others have liked listening to it also, and I know that many more will if they click on the above link.

The delay in telling Samizdata readers about this recorded conversation enables me also to mention here another such conversation involving Michael Jennings that has been more recently immortalised by another of London's libertarian recording angels (so to speak), Patrick Crozier. This time, the subject is aviation, landing slots at Heathrow, international aviation treaties, and the like. If you have any doubts about Michael's credentials as an expert on this industry (which of course could never have got off the ground without the relentless application of mathematics), then do what Patrick Crozier suggests and have a(nother?) read of this Samizdata posting from way back, on this same subject. Sadly, there was a mix up with the first attempt to record all this (might Patrick perhaps benefit from a media studies course?). The first conversation got stopped in mid flight through a wrong button getting pressed, and a separate concluding recording was done. But here they both are, and they are both well worth listening to. Patrick's brief bloggery about them is to be found at Transport Blog, here and here.

By the way, Patrick Crozier and I seem to have very divergent ideas about what is the correct volume at which to record these things, so be ready to do some nob twiddling if you go from one to the other. Technical comments about which of us got it wrong (both I dare say) and by how much would be very welcome. More media studies.

Getting back to what was said, there are many delightful moments in these discussions, especially in the maths one, which I would say, wouldn't I? Nevertheless, my absolute favourite bit of all happens towards the end of the first of the two aviation conversations, a soundbite which Patrick also featured on the short trailer that he did for that. The dialogue goes like this:

Patrick: "Can you trade your slots?"

Michael: "Er ... kind of. Not legally. Well, sort of."

There are times when hesitation is the most eloquent thing there is. Listen, and all is explained.

(22)

The EU has determined that passenger flights by DC-3's flown by Air Atlantique Classic Flight or any one else must cease when new regulations come into effect on July 16th of this year. These rules are imposed upon and override UK regulations, so even though the UK CAA is on the side of Air Atlantique, it will make little difference. Brussells, not London, is the capital of the United Kingdom.

The new rules require any aircraft with more than 19 passengers must have an armoured door to the crew cabin among numerous other modifications. They even demand an inflatable slide be added to the passenger door. There are no exceptions for classic aircraft and thus after July 16th the soulless gray men will make the European world that much more like themselves.

The EU Federal State is a special case of the general truth whose promulgation is a primary raison d'etre of Samizdata: The State is Not Your Friend.

Note: If you want to fly on a DC-3 before your betters prevent you for your own good, you had better hurry. You can reach AACF at 08703-304747 for reservations.