(13)

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

(43)

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.

(10)

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.

(2)

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!

(3)

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...

(4)

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.

(4)

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.

(2)

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

(5)

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.

(36)

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.

(1)

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.

(35)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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

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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 .

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and they is US!

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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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?

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'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!

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

Phoenix is down! Congrats to the Phoenix team!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

(13)

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.

(4)

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.

(22)

Well known aviation adventurer Steve Fossett has been declared dead after months of searching for his Nevada crash site using every tool available in the modern search and rescue arsenal.

Steve has joined that small, select group of aviation icons who flew off into the sunset, never to be seen again.

Not a bad way for an aviator to go, actually.

(56)

A successful interception of the falling NRO satellite by a US Navy SM-3 missile fired from the USS Lake Erie (CG-70) occurred at approximately 10:26 p.m. EST last night. It was hit over the Pacific and much of it will have re-entered and burned up by the time you read this. Remaining shrapnel is in a low orbit and will be down within a few weeks at most.

Great shooting guys!

(18)

The US has decided to shoot down a failed satellite. I am sure you have heard over hyped stories about the expected March re-entry already. Personally I had pretty much written it off as a non-story until now. Satellites re-enter all the time. A few bits reach the ground now and again. T'ain't no big deal.

The DOD Press release is rather professional obfuscation of what is going on. It is indeed true that hydrazine is really nasty stuff. You do not want to play with it unless you are in a bunny suit. However... the chance the fuel tank containing it will survive re-entry is rather low. Fuel tanks on space hardware are sturdy enough to hold the fuel and not much more. You couldn't play basketball with them, let alone ram them into a wall of stellar hot plasma at Mach 25.

The real reason they are shooting it down is to keep top secret hardware from showing up on the market in clear plastic pyramids... which is what the enterprising Aussie's did to the remnants of Skylab.

But whatever the reason, this is going to be interesting and I hope they release the videos they are going to take of the kill.

(9)

It is a fast moving world we live in and much has happened in the week or so since I last posted on this topic.

John Carmack, head of Armadillo Aerospace, believes they have an understanding of and cure for the 'hard starting' problem their Pixel and Texel rocket test articles exhibited in their attempts at the Moon Lander prize at Alamogordo this last October. The hard starts damaged several of their motors and even cracked the bell in one of them. They have a new igniter they are testing which may solve the problems.

There is much news at SpaceX after a long period of silence. They have tested their Falcon 9 first stage on a test stand with two engines. They will soon test three engines and work their way up to the full complement of nine. This is a big rocket and requires a BFTS for testing. Elon Musk claims this stands for Big Falcon Test Stand: that is his story and he is sticking to it.

Development of the Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine has been completed. The third Falcon 1 test flight will use this engine instead of the ablatively cooled engine used on the first two test flights. An exact date for the Kwajalein launch has not been announced but it is now scheduled for somewhere in the April-June time frame.

Ground breaking has occurred at SpaceX's Cape Canaveral site, the former SLC-40 pad , once used for Titan-IV launches.

SpaceX has passed the Critical Design Review (CDR) with NASA on their COTS (Cheap Orbital Transport Systems or Commercial Off The Shelf) contract to perform resupply to Space Station Alpha. By 2010 SpaceX is to demonstrate cargo deliveries using the combination of a Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon capsule. The Dragon capsule will carry passengers after it has flown a few times.

I could go on. but there is just so much happening at SpaceX I can only recommend you read their update and if you have any questions about the technology, come back here and ask.

But wait! There's more!

Bigelow Aerospace, which already has two inflatable space station test articles in orbit, is making its move:

Industry sources said Bigelow Aerospace is ready to place an order that includes six launches starting in 2011 to begin assembly and early operation of the new station.

"Those [first] six launches will be comprised of two missions to deploy hardware such as Sundancer itself and our node/bus combination and four missions to dedicated to transporting crew and cargo," Robert Bigelow, president and founder of Bigelow Aerospace said in a written statement.

"Subsequently our launch rate will double, and we will require a dozen launches, all for crew and cargo transportation missions over the next 12-month period. Our third year of active operations will again require another dozen crew and cargo mission launches and, in our fourth year of operations, we anticipate needing 18 such launches."

Things are moving so quickly it is just astounding to an old spacer like myself.

(53)

The US Navy has tested its rail gun at 10 MegaJoules. Railguns will one day become the main armaments on US Navy vessels:

The technology uses high power electromagnetic energy instead of explosive chemical propellants (energetics) to propel a projectile farther and faster than any preceding gun. At full capability, the rail gun will be able to fire a projectile more than 200 nautical miles at a muzzle velocity of mach seven and impacting its target at mach five. In contrast, the current Navy gun, MK 45 five-inch gun, has a range of nearly 20 miles. The high velocity projectile will destroy its targets due to its kinetic energy rather than with conventional explosives.

A very big advantage of kinetic energy weapons is the reduction in size of a warships Achilles heel: the explosives magazine. With a railgun you would not need propellant charges.

The safety aspect of the rail gun is one of its greatest potential advantages, according to Dr. Elizabeth D'Andrea, ONR's Electromagnetic Railgun Program Manager. Safety on board ship is increased because no explosives are required to fire the projectile and no explosive rounds are stored in the ship's magazine.

I am not sure I believe you would get rid of all explosives as you might still want to lob an HE shell over the horizon and downwards on a target. If you are firing on a target 200 miles away, you cannot use direct fire unless you intend to blast a tunnel through a whole lot of water. That means the impact velocity on another ship using indirect fire would only be the normal terminal velocity of the falling shell. Nonetheless, the chance of a repeat of the HMS Hood disaster is much decreased.

What I would like to know is: has anyone done the calculations about direct fire at high elevation? Aircraft are naturally one of the targets. One wonders if it could reach out and touch something at a rather higher altitude.

For those unfamiliar with naval battles of WWII, the HMS Hood was sunk by one lucky salvo from the Bismarck that came straight down into the aft magazine. The ship was on the way to the bottom almost before the smoke cleared. There were (I believe) only 4 survivors.

Correction: It was 3 survivors.

(10)

Last year I traveled continuously from mid-May to early November, not to mention a couple other months on the road earlier that year. One of the trips was to Wyoming in July and while there Jim Bennett and I visited Frontier Astronautics rather unique home office.

Jim and I drove for a long time.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

We found their sign miles down a back road off a County road.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

After a 'short' drive up their private road we arrived at the main gate where Jim rang the door bell.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Two engineers came out and led us on the trek to the bunker doors. They are large enough to pass an Atlas missile on a truck.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Back in perhaps 1962 the bunker center section held a liquid fueled Atlas ICBM. This is the flame trench that would be underneath the ICBM. The sections of the bunker to the left and right contained the fuel and oxidizer tanks used to fuel it. The center section is now (probably) the world's only indoor engine test stand. Interior walls are 30 inch thick reinforced concrete: this allows the engineers and their monitoring gear to sit mere feet away from a firing engine.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The office also has a sun roof... These many, many ton reinforced concrete doors were built to slide to either side so the Atlas could be raised into firing position.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Speaking of the engineers, here are the two who gave us the grand tour.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

This is the tunnel to what was once a control room. The consoles are long gone and it now contains a modern flat where the owner, a former Titan IV engineer, and his wife live.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

It is without a doubt the only family home with an indoor rocket engine test stand.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

(25)

With all the attention being on new private initiatives in space travel hogging the headlines, it is worth noting that there is the real prospect of a new space race taking place between China and the United States, with China planning an eventual lunar landing as a prelude to a mission to Mars.

There would be plenty of people who would welcome such a development, but I am not one of them. As I see it, there is a legitimate role for government funded space programs, but there must be a sensible trade-off between costs and benefits. The Voyager Space probes were sensible investments that produced wonderful results; the Apollo Program, for all the hype, was not something that was worth the immense cost.

I say this because the way that technology is developing, private ventures are expanding in their capabilities quite quickly, and they are much more suitable enterprises to carry the torch of humanity into space. The original space race between the USA and the USSR carried awfully nationalistic and ideological connotations, and a future race between China and the USA is certainly going to have a stench of nationalism about it. Private enterprise ventures have a much greater capacity to bring in international participation.

It cannot be denied, of course, that government ventures are capable of achieving far more, and far quicker, then private ones; having the power of the state to extract wealth from its citizenry, and a powerful will, can cause amazing things to happen. The Apollo Program is a case in point, and so was the Manhattan Project. That does not mean that they are justifiable.

China's space program is still at a relatively modest stage; they only succeeded in putting an astronaut into orbit in 2003. But if they invested enough money in it, they could progress quite quickly. It is simply a matter of how high that they consider it in their list of priorities. If they give it a high priority they could certainly reach their goals, especially given that Chinese taxpayers are not in a position to object.

How long is it going to take private explorers to get to do serious space travel? That point is no longer moot. From 2004 the progress of private ventures has been impressive, and if this momentum can be continued, it might well be that the first private entrepreneur on the moon might not be that far behind the Chinese and American astronauts. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the first explorer on Mars represented a private consortium?

(25)

A number of persons placed comments about my recent article on SpaceShipTwo which showed they did not have a great deal of knowledge about the revolution in space affairs now taking place. Rather than write a long survey article I have decided to simply give you a reading list. The following is not complete by any means. These are just the names which came easily and immediately to mind on a Sunday afternoon and all are building serious hardware or providing services:

SpaceX
Blue Origin
Virgin Galactic
XCOR Aerospace
Armadillo Aerospace
Bigelow Aerospace
Masten Space
TGV Rockets
Rocketplane and Rocketplane-Kistler
Scaled Composites
Space Adventures
Orbital Outfitters
tSpace
Zero G
Starchaser Industries
Orion Propulsion
Spacedev
HMX
X-Prize
Videos about settling the Moon
National Space Society
Frontier Aerospace
Wyoming Space and Information Systems

Enjoy!

Ed: I may add more over the course of the day if the urge strikes. I know I have left out entire categories like spaceports and should probably fill in that gap if I have the time.

(27)

As I mentioned in an earlier article, Virgin Galactic unveiled the design of SpaceShipTwo in New York on Tuesday. This is the first ever commercial tourist spaceship.

There are two 'stages' to this vehicle. A very large mothership, White Knight Two, and a not exactly tiny underslung SpaceShipTwo. The design is similar to that of SpaceShipOne and the White Knight One mothership but much larger. Notice Burt has gone to a dual hull 'catamaran' like structure so the space going craft is slung between them instead of underneath a center hull.

Another thing which jumps out at me is the use of four Pratt and Whitney PW308A turbofan engines. These are the sort of engines you would find on a large business jet and they need this sort of power to get SS2 up to the 50,000 foot MSL drop altitude.

White Knight Two test flights are expected to start this summer. If they are indeed going to meet that schedule, I would expect a roll out by late May.

Artists rendering of SpaceShipTwo and the Mothership in flight
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.

This is no paper spaceship. Both WK2 and SS2 are under construction. In the photo you can see both hulls and the main plane of WK2 are well advanced.

White Knight Two hulls and main plane on the Scaled Composites shop floor.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.

SpaceShipTwo is also well along, as you can see.

SpaceShipTwo under construction
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.

SpaceShipTwo is not a tiny cramped little thing either as you can see in this photo with Burt Rutan providing scale. It is definitely more business jet than Mercury capsule.

Burt Rutan sitting on the flight control panel in the nose of the SS2.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.

This is not a one off deal. There will be many of these produced and each will be flown as often as possible. That means they will need an ongoing training capability for pilots. So... they have a very nice looking flight simulator for training.

Test pilot Brian Binnie sitting in the SS2 simulator.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.

For the technically inclined, here is a cutaway drawing. The real cognoscenti will note SS2 is indeed using the original hybrid propulsion system. Hybrids have been around awhile now: Starstruck and AMROC (Jim Bennett's old companies) pioneered them in the eighties and others have since developed them further.

Cutaway technical details of SS2.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.

(13)

Some of you may have heard of the Google X-Prize for the first private lunar mission. There seem to be quite a number of teams lining up for the prize, including one based on the Isle of Wight.

Sir Richard Branson's US company had a 'do' in New York yesterday at which they were to unveil the design of SpaceShipTwo. This is slated to be the first commercial suborbital tourist spaceship. I asked a friend who works for them to get some photos to me but nothing has shown up so I presume I will have to look for the official photos like everyone else. As they are making this public, one would presume they have finalized the propulsion system and will be using the hybrid engine as originally planned.

Mojave Spaceport's license may still be up in the air due to the fatal industrial accident at Scaled Composites test rig last summer. I have been hearing flip flops on this for the last several months but despite assurances from Patty Grace Smith at the FAA it appears there is something behind the rumor. Last summer we all thought the accident, in which a pressurized tank blew up and killed three engineers, would be a matter for OSHA and Cal-OSHA only. If FAA enforcement on such accidents is indeed forthcoming, I predict the unintended consequence will be all non-flight related spacecraft development operations move off FAA controlled spaceports.

Elon Musk's company, SpaceX, is due for their third launch attempt some time soon. Not much information is floating around about an exact date. Somewhere between January and April is about the best I can guess. Given the switchover to the much more sophisticated and re-usable regeneratively cooled engine I think they will be moving very deliberately towards the next flight. Pretty much everyone expects them to make orbit this time.

For the last year a venture I am in has been slowly spooling up. I am now under so many Non-Disclosures that I hardly know what I can and cannot talk about in commercial Space so I have been erring on the side of silence as I have been too busy to check.

I have some nice photos from an old Atlas missile complex turned rocket test stand out in the Wyoming outback which I took last summer during a business visit. Someday I will get around to publishing some of them.

The International Space Development Conference is in Washington DC this year and we (at the National Space Society) have another good one lined up. Pretty much anyone who is anyone in the commercial Space industry will be there.

I imagine everyone knows that Messenger did the first flyby of Mercury in 33 years just a few days ago and the photos are still being downloaded to Earth. While not commercial in itself, the imagery will certainly be useful to future mining interests. It's a great place to get the materials to build the close-in solar power satellites we'll use to beam energy around the solar system and manufacture anti-matter fuel in the 22nd Century.

Oh, and I believe June this year is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska asteroid explosion in Siberia. For a while many of us thought we would see Mars get pasted this February as part of the anniversary 'celebration' but the orbit of that rock is now known well enough to say it is a definite miss.

(14)

It was a bit of a shock to read, in my old local newspaper, that F-15 fighter/bomber aircraft used by the US Airforce are suffering quite so much from wear and tear. They are currently based at RAF Lakenheath, west Suffolk.

At one stage, East Anglia, the flat bit of the UK, was rather like a gigantic airfield with more than 100 airfields for British and American fighters, bombers, recon aircraft and transportation. Even after WW2, when the Liberators, Flying Fortresses, Mustangs and Thunderbolts no longer buzzed around, the area played host to the jets of the Cold War era. It was a common experience on my parent's farm to be walking around and suddenly, at about 100ft above the ground, a pair of Jaguar jets or an American A-10 "tankbuster" would come over (the latter was eerily quiet, and had an enormous 30mm cannon mounted in the nose). Now it is almost all gone. In a silly sort of way I rather miss the din of jet aircraft. But then, we won the Cold War. It is never a mistake to remind ourselves of that fact.

(31)

With a little help from her friends, Japan has sent a loud and clear message to North Korea.

The interceptor fired by the JS Kongo knocked out the target warhead about 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean, said the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, which carried out the test together with the Japanese and U.S. navies.

Tokyo has invested heavily in missile defense since North Korea test-fired a long-range missile over northern Japan in 1998. It has installed missile tracking technology on several navy ships and has plans to equip them with interceptors.

The SM-3 is certainly a good enough interceptor to handle the appropriately named North Korean 'Nodong' ICBM. I say that because they seem to be as likely to fail as to get where they are going.

(57)

Most of us grew up expecting the flying car would eventually come to pass. One of the more successful attempts occurred in the 1950's but although some were produced, it never made it into the mass market. Although I cannot substantiate it, I understand the FAA of the time was rather horrified at the thought of such large numbers of people flying. Whether true or not, there are very real problems associated with aircraft which one does not face with a car: you cannot pull an airplane over to the side of a cloud when something goes BONK in the night.

Another issue is flying requires a pilot. Even with the new US FAA sport flying category, getting your ticket is no mean feat. Being a flyer does not just mean you know how to point the thing. It implies you are conversant with the rules of a three-dimensional sea, one whose buoys are marked with radio waves and whose small craft must stay out of the way of large aircraft not just for their own safety but for the safety of the heavy iron as well.

This is not to mention knowledge of meteorology, the jargon required to talk to towers and other pilots in order to communicate critical information quickly through sometimes noisy radio systems and all the rules and regulations which encode the hard won wisdom of a century of flight and the loss of thousands of lives. I could go on for a very long time but I will just say that being a pilot right now requires a skipload of skills and knowledge.

However, as we move deeper into the 21st century, some of these problems are abating. With smart systems and eventually self-repairing systems we will get flying machines which either won't take off when there is a problem or get you down before it gets serious. With autonomous AI systems development moving along the way it is (think UCAV's!) the knowledge base of the pilot will more and more be embedded in the avionics and the 'driver' will simply point the thing.

For all this to happen there has to be a Transition that opens up the market. And that machine may finally be here:

An aeronautical startup called Terrafugia has developed a small airplane called the Transition that it says can take to the sky as easily as the road. It is about the size of a large SUV and features innovative folding wings that collapse with the press of a button. Terrafugia calls it a "personal air vehicle."

The team behind the Transition still has to design a drivetrain to propel the craft and a mechanism to transfer power from the propeller to the wheels, but it expects to begin flight tests late next year.

Production could begin as early as 2009, and Terrafugia says it's already received more than 30 orders.

You will still need to be a real pilot, but at least you can save on the hangar or tie down fees.

(5)

Diamond Aviation, a UK General Aircraft company, has test flown its single engine private jet.

Oh, if I were a rich man...

(13)

The following is a short story I penned for a theme issue of Ad Astra magazine. It did not make the cut on that particular issue so I have decided to share it with our Samizdata readership instead. It was, by the way, written before the accident at Mojave Spaceport... Dale Amon, Samizdata Editor... and Chair of the National Space Society Conference Coordinating Committee

Another load of tourists arrived last night (we run UTC here) so I am just getting up and having my morning coffee, or what passes for coffee here in Heinleintown, the main residential tube of Luna City. You see, I work at the Bigelow, and new arrivals are so biologically confused and excited to be here after the two day cruise on the big Virgin cycler that we just keep the bar open until they finally fade off to their rooms. Depending on the age group, that sometimes takes awhile, but they tip well so I can not complain.

Actually I have very little to complain about. I am here, and I am alive, and neither of those would have seemed very probable to someone 50 years ago. I sometimes remember a friend of mine, Gary Barnhard, writing an article for Ad Astra about what it might be like now. No idea where he is off to these days. Last I heard he was off in the asteroid belt on a project to convert an asteroid into a commercial simputer, a gadget to model pretty much anything you could ever want to model. An entire asteroid as a computer. The mind boggles... but then the nanotechnology which allows that is the reason I am here at all. One hundred and seven. Imagine that. I sometimes repeat it and shake my head in disbelief that we actually have managed to create most of Dr Leary's "SMI^2LE" [Space Migration, Intelligence Increase and Life Extension]. Perhaps even more amazing was that we actually survived the nanotechnology transition. I guess it helped that the superpower competition between the USA, India and China was 'mostly peaceful', to paraphrase a long forgotten humorist.

It did help being in the center of it back in the 'oughties' and early 'teens' when things really started cracking open. I was there watching it happen. Hell, I was there helping to make it happen. I can still remember the sight of those early contraptions lifting off from our spaceport in the Western US. Rocketplane Kistler, Virgin Galactic, Masten, Armadillo, SpaceX, BlueOrigin, XCOR and the
rest. Household names now. Some of them anyway. Some failed, some merged... and one fell apart after the big accident. I had known the guy for 30 years. We all had because in those days the whole business was a small family. We had all quite literally grown up together. I wish I could say that was the only close friend I lost to satiate Murphy, but it was not. There were and will be more. Perhaps me some day. I am in great health still thanks to the nanocritters that cleaned me up from the inside out. It has been a long life and I am sorta catching my breath and smelling the daisies here in Luna City, just working the hotel bar and playing the old favourite songs of space flight. They figure I am part of the atmosphere because I lived those songs. They are not dusty history to me like to the party-hearty youngsters of last night.

Yep, I just might be getting ready to move out again. The moon is still empty but it is too close to Earth and I always did say "Happiness is the Earth in your Rear View Mirror". A couple days ago I was talking to some of the guys from the Interstellar Consortium. Yeah, a bit early by a few centuries, but I like their style. A bunch of the guys from the early days, John, Elon, Jeff, Jim, Dave... people who know how to make things happen. Hell, they even got George Whitesides to front for them and help raise the capital. Got a big chunk from the National Space Society Exploration Fund, so we would be carrying their flag to the edge of the solar system.

The idea is to prove that Kuiper Belt Objects could provide the fuel and structures for a 'slow boat' to the nearest stars. As I said, I think they are a bit premature, but hell, how could I pass up a trip to the edge of the solar system? Even if we just stick the NSS flag on a few iceballs, it is a pretty cool thing to do.

And why bother living a few centuries if you do not have a dangerous adventure or two? I never was the stay at home type so at a hundred and seven this old space dog is not about to learn to stay in the doghouse. Besides which, I always did tell friends I intended to go downhill skiing on Europa at a hundred and twenty.

I just might manage to do that thing.

(6)

A fund has been set up to help the families of those killed and injured at Mojave. If any of you are interested, you can find out more at the July 29th entry here.

Scaled Family Support Fund c/o Scaled Composites 1624 Flight Line Mojave, CA. 93501

Acct # 04157-66832 / Wire xfer ABA Routing # 0260-0959-3 (Bank of America) /
Please make your check payable to "Scaled Family Support Fund".

This is not a tax deductible donation.

Many will fall on the road to the stars. We must remember them as best we can.

(7)

Yesterday was a terrible day in the Mojave Desert, as many of you may have seen on the news by now there has been an explosion at space technology company Scaled Composites during testing of a propellant system. Three are dead and three more are in the hospital with injuries of varying severity.

This is a dangerous business we are in and we all know it. I feel somewhat relieved that none of them were people whom I knew well, but at the same time share some of the sense of loss which must be nearly overpowering to their co-workers.

If any of you at Scaled drop by here during this time of sadness, know that you are part of something greater. Your friends will be remembered.

As to the facts of the accident, I have little to add beyond what my coworker Rand Simberg has said.

(3)

Things were 'mostly quieter' for me on May 28th, the Sunday of the conference. I had my one and only chance to run about the exhibitor areas to pick up flyers, buy shirts... and acquire a few DVD's of sessions I really wanted to see but could not due to being in demand elsewhere.

I briefly met Dr. Kistler of Rocketplane Kistler earlier but did not get a picture of him until he came by their exhibit for a photo op. I happened to be chatting with a friend who was manning their company table next to it so I joined the others. The hotel lighting in the public areas was rather problematic for my camera and few of the photos I took there were satisfactory. But hey, this is a really serious old school rocket scientist with a German accent.

Dr. Kistler, on the left, founded Kistler Aerospace. This merged with Chuck Laur's company, Rocketplane, to become Rocketplane-Kistler. They have a contract from NASA for space station cargo delivery.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Late Sunday afternoon there was a demonstration which friends had told me about: Faster Than Light signal propagation. I am rather skeptical of such things but the demonstrator was a serious research physicist from Germany, I believe, so I had to go and see for myself.

All I can say is, I think I saw FTL comms. Nothing practical in real life as the difficulty increases with distance. This rather negates the reason you would want it in the first place. But over a distance of about 3 meters the return signal with the 'barriers' in returned faster than it did with the barriers out (normal light speed) as shown on an OScope synced to the outgoing pulse. He could even modulate it.

I will not go into detail here. You can look for yourself at the photos I took of his presentation. Look for photo numbers around dsc00616. I am still skeptical... but not quite as skeptical as before the demo.

Was it or wasn't it? Demonstration of faster than light signal propagation.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Sunday night we had our closing banquet with Harrison Schmidt, the geologist who flew on Apollo 17 and one of the three Apollo guys at the conference. Actually this is not unusual as Harrison, Buzz and Rusty Schweikart are regulars and Buzz served as the Chairman of the Board through part of the nineties. Harrison has long been a promoter of human settlement and was given our O'Neill award in recognition of his efforts. Excuse the defect in the photo: I think the professional photographers flash went off just as I took this shot. She was standing right next to me.

Mark Hopkins bows in unworthiness before one of the last men to set foot on the moon.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

At the end of the banquet George Whitesides, NSS Executive Director, presented Carol Johnson and Ken Murphy with tokens of appreciation from the Society for their hard work. As the Chairman of the NSS Conferences Coordinating Committee I was sort of their 'boss' so I can publicly state they were a pleasure to work with over the last two and a half years, besides the fact that they ran a magnificent conference.

Yes, Ken really did wear a black hat. Carol got the roses since they would not have matched Ken's je ne sais quoi...
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

And then we partied long into the night...
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

We crawled out of bed for the Society Town Hall Meeting...
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

And then, for the 26th time, it was over...
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

After the conference I spent a week in Dallas with an old friend. That will take us up to the beginning of June. So tomorrow: Aviation museums!

Or I hope so. I take a train to NYC tomorrow, repack, fly out to Denver and on to Laramie on space business Monday.

(3)

There was much of interest in the program of the ISDC, but I missed seeing most of it and much of what I did see was covered at the time by Glenn Reynolds and Rand Simberg among others. As I have noted before, I am part of the National Space Society management so I see a very different face of the conference than most attendees. Much of my time there would be terribly unexciting to write about. I very much doubt a detailed discussion of the 2009 conference site selection meetings, presentations, politics and such would be of a great deal of interest.

Today i will look at the May 26th evening of the conference via candid shots of the people and proceedings.

There is more to the space movement than rocket science. Art and music also have a place. We have had Space Art shows at every ISDC I have attended, which is all but four.

We had a fine Space Art show, thanks to Teresa Patterson and Kaz.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

We have had everything from John Denver (speaking only) to a Space Improv Theater group. At the one I ran years ago, we even had a ballet dance interpretation of Zero G done to a live electronic music performance. As one would expect, there are often filkers lurking about ready to spice up a party with "Home, Home on Lagrange" or "Ron, Ron, Ron, Deuteron, Ron, Ron Ron".

I caught Rand Simberg, Glenn Reynolds and Alan Boyle chatting before the awards banquet on Saturday evening. Oh, and there was a former head of NASA Ames with us as well, just outside of the picture. I discovered he is a professional musician on the side so we hit it off quite well.

Why is it bloggers always seem to congregate in the bar?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The NSS annual award banquet is a big event for our community. We have several major awards: the Heinlein Award, a working model brass cannon on a hardwood base; the O'Neill award, a space colony replica; The Space Pioneer Awards, pewter lunar globes; and finally the Von Braun Award. The Heinlein and Von Braun alternate years. Both men were intimately involved with the founding branches of our society so this is a fitting way for NSS to honour extraordinary members of the space community.

Our Chairman of the Board of Directors (an Aussie), Kirby Ikin, bestows one of our highest honours upon Dr. Steve Squires of JPL.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Weeks before the event Mark Hopkins, one of our senior officers, asked if I could snap photos at the awards banquet. Even though there was a professional photographer, with equipment to die for also talking pictures in front of the podium, I did not realize I was being set up until my name was called...

Mark Hopkins bestows the NSS Exceptional Service Award upon a very surprised me.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

After the banquet came the receptions and a mobile party which finally settled in, with the tolerance of the hotel, in a 15th floor meeting area. This one lasted until dawn I believe, but I had to be up for the morning sessions so I only stayed until 3am. Or so.

Some of our people are very dedicated to getting off the planet.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Excuse the darkness but I preferred that to the loss of mood my flash causes. I loath flash shots and do them as little as I can. Perhaps someday I will own a camera that is fast enough to match my photgraphic tastes. Stabilization during long exposures would be nice...

The party was brought to us by the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) with a bit of assistance from our expert speaker to hotel staff.

Serious partiers... check.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Food... check..
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Alcohol... check.
6ft 4in Dallas conference chair in a white cowboy hat???... check.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

(2)

After arriving in Manhattan on the Boston train, I had just enough time to repack and get perhaps three hours of sleep before heading for the airport. My May 24th NY-Houston-Dallas flight was early enough that I was able to attend the latter half of the Space Venture Forum morning track.

I had loads of time to schmooze with potential customers, as well as listen to 'the suits' discuss venture funding, deal making, IPO's and pitfalls. I am sure many here would have appreciated the slide which noted:

"Addiction" to Government Business Alone: Problems have emerged for companies that aimed solely at government markets and had substantial timing delays. Companies should avoid developing an "addiction" to government business since these companies will need cash for commercial development"

Glenn Reynolds also had a few things to say about how much real business has taken hold at the ISDC's. It is definitely true. I went partially (and successfully) for business contacts for many years but this is the first year in which I represented a space venture. I may have been one of the persons quoted by Glenn and others and I spent one entire morning 'under the lights' as a talking head for someone's documentary.

I particularly enjoyed the lunch, partially because I finally met Esther Dyson whom I have known 'virtually' for over a decade. She introduced the speaker, Tom Pickens, son of the capitalist hero T. Boone Pickens. Tom is a man who learned business from childhood. He has a protein crystal product which can only be produced in quantities on orbit and which is highly valuable for medicine. His demand projections are such that told everyone in the room he can fill whatever they can launch or return.

Tom Pickens says "You've got 24 months to get a seat at the table".
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Now I could go on about all of the marvelous speakers and news events of the conference, or talk about all of the meetings I ran or attended... but instead I will show some of the fun side of the first few days of the conference.

While I was chatting with some old friends, someone commented that our Executive Committee Chairman, Gary Barnhard, bears a striking resemblance to Dr. Gerard O'Neill, the inventor of the L5 Space Colony concept, who died around 15 years ago.

Gary Barnhard attempts to channel Dr. O'Neill.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Armadillo Aerospace brought 'Pixel', one of the Moon Lander Prize contenders, to the exhibit room. It was quite a center piece of a reception for rocket scientists and activists. It reminds you why you are here, even after quite a few bottles.

It is amazing how difficult it is to talk, hold your bottle and enjoy the nacho dip at the same time.

No we did not tap the fuel tanks when the cash bar closed.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Glenn Reynolds. Rand Simberg and I have known each other for over 20 years so of course we had to get together to discuss blogging and how to fix everything. We were also joined for awhile by Alan Boyle of MSNBC.

What do you mean, "we drank it all?"
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I was surprised to see a native Texas gal I'd not seen in a few years. Turned out Kaz had been in London while with the USAF.

The world of rocket scientists has been improving steadily,
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I caught Glenn Reynolds in mid post just before the Space Blogger summit at the conference.

The blogfather at work plotting world domination,
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

This brings me up to May 26th. I will try to post on the rest of ISDC 2007 tomorrow. If you can not wait, you will find hundreds of photos of the event in the archives.

(1)

Just a brief note... You can probably find stories from Rand and Glenn who are also here in Dallas at the 26th International Space Development Conference. Alan Boyle from MSNBC is with us and Jeff Foust is acting as the cat-herder.

(1)

It is that time of year again, when a young (or perhaps not so young) spacers thoughts turn to thoughts of the International Space Development Conference (ISDC). This year it is in Dallas - Fort Worth at the Intercontinental Hotel, over the Memorial Day weekend. In total it will run from Thursday May 24th to Monday May 28th although the core events are Friday through Sunday.

You can find out much more at the web site. This is going to be a great event. Many of the principals of the new commercial space revolution will be there so it is a great place to network if for you "Happiness is the Earth in my rear view mirror".

I will be heading there immediately after I finish my webcast edit job on a big JP Morgan Technology business conference in Boston.

(16)

Sometimes I write because something needs to be said or brought to the attention of our readers. Other times I write because something is just simply so interesting I must tell someone about it. On rare occasions I write because I have to.

This is one of them.

This evening Channel 4 showed a documentary "Challenger: Countdown to Disaster". I tend to avoid such programs but this time I decided to watch. I was actually quite surprised by the instant and gut-wrenching emotional impact it had on me. Christa and the rest of The Seven marching out with smiles on their faces. The family and teachers and friends in the viewing stands. The black puff of smoke. The demon mask in the sky. The long fall.

To this day it just rips me apart inside.

I doubt many of you watched and doubt even more that those who did felt anything other than interest in the story. For me it is very different and that difference is why I am writing.

Anyone who reads Samizdata knows I have a fair knowledge and perhaps a few contacts in the field of aerospace. Well, it is a lot more than that. Space flight, whether NASA or private or defense contractor is populated by people for whom space is not a job. It is a dream that is in their bones. That is why 'Space' is a family. Like any family it can be fractious but when a family member dies or is in trouble everyone pulls together. Pains and emotions are shared only within the family and not with 'outsiders'. I am a part of that family and have been for a very long time.

I heard about the Challenger explosion when I arrived at my office in the 3rd floor of Wein Hall at CMU. There was a cryptic note sitting on my desk chair, a message taken by my office mate. I immediately returned the call. The message did not give the full gravity of what happened. I did not get that until the friend blurted it out on the phone. I am certain I went pale. Another friend of mine had been talking to Dick Scobee a couple days before; one of the members of Pittsburgh L5, the chapter I had founded in 1980 and built up to where it was about to run an International Space Development Conference, was one of the 104 Teacher In Space candidates and was in the viewing stands with all the others. Judy Resnick was a CMU electrical engineering grad who was one year ahead of me when I was an undergraduate and shared an advisor with me. I remembered her well because in 1971 there were not very many women in EE. There were, in fact, two. Judy and a friend of hers.

By this time nearly everyone in our chapter knew about it. There was no way I was going to get any research work done the rest of that day so I started making phone calls. First I rang Johnson Spaceflight Center to see if they needed a manual I had in my office. You see, I had the controls manual for the Challenger, one of a limited number of sets. It was part of the research I was doing on 'virtual control panels' on a NASA research contract. The fellow at Johnson told me they did not need that copy returned right away... and then the two of us commiserated. It was a death in 'our family' although neither of us voiced it that way. It was just automatic. Astronauts live in Houston. He knew them and had seen them not long before they left JSC for KSC.

Then I got a call from the woman and close friend who handled PR and media relations for the chapter. Channel 4 WTAE-TV wanted us to supply a local Pittsburgh angle on the tragedy. The good side of this was it gave us something to do. The bad side was that we spent hour after hour going over the satellite backhaul footage she had videotaped of the launch. We fastforwarded; slow motioned; stopped on frames. Over and over and over and over. By the time I left in the wee hours of the morning the devil cloud in the sky was burned into my brain. But I had as good an idea then as just about anyone of what had happened.

With minimal sleep I showed up at the agreed location, a conference room at a Mellon Bank management office where she worked. I brought along a model of the Shuttle Challenger I had built some years before for use in our displays at the Space Days we organized with Buhl Planeterium. I still have it and it is in near perfect shape to this day, despite being shipped across the ocean and traveling with me through my rather severe personal trials in Belfast. There was over a hundred hours of labour in it. It was gap puttied, sanded, primered and air brushed in multiple coats to the point at which it was more than good enough to be a star of the WTAE TV News. I used it to show how a burn through at the aft field joint had taken out a strut and the tank had then come apart, the Hydrogen slamming into the LOX tank up front. I missed a lot of fine detail but I was pretty spot on. I must also admit I was talking with many others about it. In fact, if you are really interested, you can still read the discussions and relive the disbelief, the attempts to deal with it by talking about the engineering, the attempts to understand. I have it all because I was the last of the Keepers of the Archives of the ARPA Internet side of the sci.space news groups. If you open up that tar.gz file and start reading from January 29, 1986 you will feel like a time traveler.

A few days later our resident Teacher in Space returned. We dedicated a meeting to Challenger and she described what it was like being in the stands. She was next to Christa's family and I believe I spotted her in the film on tonight's documentary. She told us how the teachers were chanting and stamping their feet to keep warm; how when the launch went off everyone was cheering. Then there came the uncertainty. The strange cloud in the sky... but due to the distance and the speed of sound they were still hearing the roar of the distant engines for almost a minute. They all grew silent. Then the engines stopped. People began to sob.

She had a tape recording and she played it all for us. We heard the whole thing. I heard Christa's family crying. That tape will probably never be played again within any of our lifetimes, nor will I assist anyone with more information. It is only for 'the family' and outsiders need not apply.

My own feelings came out in a song:

ONE OF OUR OWN
song and lyrics by
Dale Amon
Pittsburgh, 3/24/86
(all rights reserved)

The seven stepped out,
On that cold, frosty morning.
Crista was smiling,
And marching in time.
The teachers were chanting,
From the viewing stand.
And they cheered,
And they cheered,
And they cheered,
For one of their own.

Challenger awoke,
And she rose with a roar.
Just like she'd done,
So many times before.
But something was different,
A dark puff of smoke.
And they cheered,
And we cheered,
And I cheered,
For one of our own.

A smokey white arrow,
Through the burning blue.
Scobee read his flickering screens,
"Go at throttle up".
Fire spurt and fire ball,
Demon mask in the sky.
And they cried,
And we cried,
And I cried,
For one of our own.

BRIDGE
Ride the wild rockets,
Up to the sky.
For death or for glory,
For dreams or for hopes.
The bold own the future,
Put your lives on the line.
The meek get the Earth,
And the rest...
Inherit the stars.

Out there on the shores of space,
A thousand years from now.
Our petty wars and our politics,
Will be forgot.
But Challenger will still live on,
In the pioneers.
And they'll dream
As we dream,
And I dream,
For more of our own.

I do not remember if it was that night or another, but Pittsburgh is a very Irish town so a group of us went out to the local, The Squirrel Hill Cafe, and held a sort of wake. Seven classic Pittsburgh drinks: 7 Boiler Makers. We went around the table and toasted each of The Seven in turn. By the time we were done a friend from CMU Robotics had joined us and we ended up over in his house where we killed another bottle of whiskey.

Our chapter was in the run up to our own conference the next year so a bunch of us were at the ISDC in Seattle that year. The word about my song had gotten around so I was invited to play it at a ceremony down by the harbour. I sat there looking out over the water and as I played the song they set off seven sky rockets, one after another. The seventh one blew up a few feet off the ground, right at my eye level. How I managed to keep singing and not go to pieces I do not know.

I think it was during that summer that CMU unveiled a small memorial to Judy Resnick in front of Hammerschlag Hall. In any case I was invited and surprised to run into Judy's friend and classmate. She and I talked and were together through much of the ceremony.

Another incident I remember was dropping in on a friend from my undergraduate days at her house. She and her three sisters were all close friends of many years and the youngest was working with the Navy and was home for a visit. She had been in a blockhouse at the Cape and gone outside to take her own photographs of the shuttle spearing into the blue and of the cloud of water from the burn off of all those many thousands of gallons of Hydrogen and Oxygen. They were taken from a different angle than any others I had seen.

My conference was long enough in the future that we were able to do quite a bit more than Seattle. We gave an award to the guys at Morton Thiokol who tried to stop the flight. MT paid for Arnie Thompson to come and receive it at our awards banquet. Despite being exceedingly busy with the behind the scenes running of this complex event, I did manage to talk to him for a little while. He thanked me for the award and I thanked him for what he tried to do. By the way, I would almost swear they used that very same plaque in the scene where Beaujolais was packing! It was there and gone too quickly for me to be sure.

We had about 400 Pittsburgh area students in for a session with an Astronaut friend of ours and three of the Teacher In Space candidates, including Dick Methias whom you saw on the documentary.

We had the Civil Air Patrol dealing with our security and such and they also helped out in other ways. On early Sunday morning we had a ceremony near the fountain in Point State Park with the CAP kids as the Color Guard. They flew in Judy Resnick's Rabbi from her home town in Ohio in a light plane especially for the ceremony. We also had a Priest and a Minister.

The loss of those seven members of the Space community was a blow, but it was one we all knew we would one day face. Space is a frontier. People die on frontiers. Contrary to what the documentary said, no one seriously believed we would not lose a Shuttle or two before they were retired. The only question was when and the shock was of the, "Why this time? Why these seven?", sort.

Christa and all of the Teachers knew what they were doing. Our own local friend knew those dangers and knew that Christa knew. All astronauts are aware of their mortality and the fragility of our primitive systems. Even if the danger were far greater, they would still step forward and say "I want to go." A new age is dawning now and space is becoming a place for anyone who wishes to test their mettle and their courage. Ronald Reagan said it best:

The future does not belong to the faint hearted. It belongs to the brave.

I only hope that I and my close knit family can live up to those words. It is up to us to make those Seven proud to have led us.

(3)

After the flight termination a week or two ago, I promised our commentariat I would post information on the problems which caused the second test flight to not reach orbit. A few days ago Elon Musk released this statement:

Post flight review of telemetry has verified that oscillation of the second stage late in the mission is the only thing that stopped Falcon 1 from reaching full orbital velocity. The second stage was otherwise functioning well and even deployed the satellite mass simulator ring at the end of flight! Actual final velocity was 5.1 km/s or 11,000 mph, whereas 7.5 km/s or 17,000 mph is needed for orbit. Altitude was confirmed to be 289 km or 180 miles, which is certainly enough for orbit and is about where the Space Shuttle enters its initial parking orbit.

It turns out that as many of us suspected, there was a feedback between fuel slosh and the control equations:

In a nutshell, the data shows that the increasing oscillation of the second stage was likely due to the slosh frequency in the liquid oxygen (LOX) tank coupling with the thrust vector control (engine steering) system. This started out as a pitch-yaw movement and then transitioned into a corkscrewing motion. For those that aren't engineers, imagine holding a bowl of soup and moving it from side to side with small movements, until the entire soup mass is shifting dramatically. Our simulations prior to flight had led us to believe that the control system would be able to damp out slosh, however we had not accounted for the perturbations of a contact on the stage during separation, followed by a hard slew to get back on track.

There was indeed a contact of the first stage with the bell of the stage two motor at stage separation and it was indeed not a big thing:

The nozzle impact during stage separation occurred due to a much higher than expected vehicle rotation rate of about 2.5 deg/sec vs. max expected of 0.5 deg/sec. As the 2nd stage nozzle exited the interstage, the first stage was rotating so fast that it contacted the niobium nozzle. There was no apparent damage to the nozzle, which is not a big surprise given that niobium is tough stuff.

The unexpectedly high rotation rate was due to not knowing the shutdown transient of the 1st stage engine (Merlin) under flight conditions. The actual shutdown transient had a very high pitch over force, causing five times the max expected rotation rate.

The vehicle will be launching a satellite on its next flight:

The reason that flight two can legitimately be called a near complete success as a test flight is that we have excellent data throughout the whole orbit insertion profile, including well past second stage shutdown, and met all of the primary objectives established beforehand by our customer (DARPA/AF). This allows us to wrap up the test phase of the Falcon 1 program and transition to the operational phase, beginning with the TacSat mission at the end of summer. Let me be clear here and now that anything less than orbit for that flight or any Falcon 1 mission with an operational satellite will unequivocally be considered a failure.

This is all very good news to the new space industry. There is also supposed to be some more good news this month: Bob Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace, maker of fine inflatable space stations, is supposed to make an important announcement. I suspect it has to do with a next launch date and he may announce he is skipping more intermediate tests or perhaps even an early anchor tenant for an operational station... if we were to speculate even more wildly.

All of us in 'the biz' will be watching closing.

(19)

"Warren Buffett said that the one thing that really changes your life is the private jet."

- Bob Hersov, entrepreneur and the man behind NetJets. Actually, using a private jet need not be just for the mega rich.

(0)

The next International Space Development Conference (ISDC) will be held in Dallas over the Memorial Day weekend this year. Of particular interest to all of our Space Venturers is the symposium to be held on the front of it.

Here is the press release:

__________

National Space Society to Host Second Annual Space Venture Finance Symposium at 2007 International Space Development Conference

Commercial space investment symposium scheduled for May 24, 2007 at the Hotel InterContinental in Dallas, Texas

WASHINGTON, March 23, 2007 - The National Space Society today announced the second annual Symposium on Space Venture Finance, to be held on Thursday, May 24, in conjunction with the 2007 International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Dallas, Texas. Bringing together leaders in the investment and space communities, the symposium will focus on recent innovations and deals in early- and mid-stage finance within the commercial space, spaceport, satellite and space-related information technology industries.

The day-long symposium program will focus on the following current topics of interest:

• Pre-operational finance methods in aerospace, including debt-equity financing deals
• Private venture capital financing of entrepreneurial commercial space firms
• State venture equity fund investment in space companies and space-related infrastructure such as spaceports
• Angel financing of commercial space ventures
• Private equity in satellite, telecommunications and space-related information technology industries
• Current investment opportunities in entrepreneurial space companies in the US, Canada and elsewhere

Members of the investment banking, venture capital, private equity, angel financing and state venture equity investment communities will give presentations concerning new entrants, best practices and emerging trends in the space finance sector.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Lon Levin, Chief Strategic Officer, Transformational Space Corporation; Co-Founder, XM Satellite Radio
• Mark Ellison, Director, Texas Emerging Technology Fund, Office of the Governor
• Greg Kulka, Director-Alternative Investments Portfolio, New Mexico State Investment Council
• Stephen Fleming, Angel Investor and Board of Directors; XCOR Aerospace; Chief Commercialization Officer, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Peter Banks, General Partner, Red Planet Capital
• John Higginbotham, Chairman (retired), SpaceVest
• Burton H. Lee, Managing Partner, Innovarium Ventures
• Mohanjit Jolly, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures
• J. Armand Musey, President and Partner, Near Earth LLC

"A key element of the National Space Society's mission is to enable the development of a sound and sustainable global commercial space industry that solves problems here on Earth while making significant contributions to the peaceful exploration of the solar system," said Dr. Burton Lee, symposium Co-Chairman. "In that spirit, the Space Venture Finance Symposium will showcase an emerging high-tech sector that is now reaching maturity, and represents a reliable and diverse pipeline of funding opportunities and exit strategies for both startup firms and investors."

Participants include leading finance and space professionals from the United States, Europe and Asia, representing a broad cross-section of industries and disciplines, including:

• Investment banks;
• Venture capital and private equity firms;
• State economic development departments, venture equity funds and spaceport authorities;
• Commercial space company CEOs and entrepreneurs;
• Satellite telecommunications and other space-related information technology firms;
• Major aerospace and defense corporations;
• NASA and other space agencies;
• Advisors and analysts with institutional investors; and
• Space and finance media.

Program details are subject to revision. Current program information and registration details are available here.

Registered attendees for the International Space Development Conference (ISDC), which officially begins on Friday, May 25, will need to complete a secondary registration to attend the Space Venture Finance Symposium. Conversely, registrants for the Space Venture Finance Symposium are NOT automatically registered for the Friday-Monday sessions of ISDC. ISDC registration must be purchased separately.

Members of the media who wish to cover the Space Venture Finance Symposium may request media credentials on the ISDC Web site by completing the secure online credential request form at here.

_____

About the National Space Society
The National Space Society (NSS) is an independent, grassroots organization dedicated to the creation of a spacefaring civilization. Founded in 1974, NSS is widely acknowledged as the preeminent citizen's voice on space. NSS counts thousands of members and more than 50 chapters in the United States and around the world. The society also publishes Ad Astra magazine, an award-winning periodical chronicling the most important developments in space. For more information about NSS, how to join or donate, or the annual International Space Development Conference (ISDC), visit: www.nss.org

For media inquiries:
Jeremy Pyle
Vice President of Public Affairs
National Space Society
(415) 713-6272
jeremy@nss.org

For Symposium-related inquiries:
Dr. Burton H. Lee,
Symposium Chairman
(703) 282-4513
Burton.Lee@gmail.com

(45)

The webcast has not yet started but will be here when it does.

2218 GMT: T minus 0 seems to have been pushed back to 2330 GMT. I will report as I get news.

2225 GMT: T minus 0 is now set for 0005 GMT; webcast is to begin at approximately 2305 GMT.

2300 GMT: There will be two burns of the second stage, separated by about an hour. The second burn is strictly a test. In operation it would be a correction or plane change or circularization burn. Most importantly, this will prove they have an engine that is restartable in microgravity. This is not as easy to do as you might think...

2307 GMT: Web cast is now live.

2317 GMT: Fuel and oxidizer loads of the first and second stage are in progress. The video signal is having some problems however, as I am sure any watchers will have noticed!

2328 GMT: First stage LOX fill completed.

2331 GMT: First stage fuel load completed.

2336 GMT: This just in: "Media call note that the webcam problems are unknown and this is what you all may be stuck with."

2339 GMT: Both stages fully loaded with Kerosene (RP1), LOX and Helium tank pressurization .

2348 GMT: T-218 now, Helium top off. The are having some telemetry probs with the stage 1 recovery ship... which has just now been solved.

2350 GMT: All operator stations report ready status for terminal countdown. Cleared for launch!

2356 GMT: Entering terminal count! T-10.

0006 GMT: Terminal count abort after engine ignition. Impressive that they could stop it here, sad that they had to. Will report as I here more.

0016 GMT: This is amazing. They are recyling to T-10!!! I have *never* in my life seen such a thing! Ignition has always been the point of no return or at least a full scrub. I stand in awe.

0021 GMT: Shutdown was due to chamber pressure being 1% low. There was apparently a fair amount of swearing going on... they may still try for a launch. Range is okay with a recycle.

0044 GMT: They are well into the recycle for a second try. Count is still in a hold at T-16 while they recycle.

0056 GMT: The clock is running again. T-14:30!

0057 GMT: Cleared for launch again.

0101 GMT: Into terminal count again at T-10.

0112 GMT: Launch successful! Passing through Max Q. Now the big one coming up is Stage sep...

0114 GMT: THEY DID IT!!!! SECOND STAGE SEP AND FIRE: FARING SEP CONFIRMED!!!!! 117km altitude!!!!

0126 GMT: There is some discussion as to whether the first stage sep bumped the second stage engine bell. There were some signs of oscillation of the engine before it got out of range and the webcast terminated. So they made it into space but we will have to wait to find out if this test flight made orbit.

(0)

The Kwajalein launch abort of the SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket yesterday was caused by a minor timing problem that would not have affected the launch. According to Elon Musk:

The abort that occurred a few minutes before T-0 was triggered by our ground control software. It commanded a switchover of range telemetry from landline to radio, which took place correctly, however, because of the hardware involved, this transition takes a few hundred milliseconds. Before it had time to complete, our system verification software examined state and aborted.

I remember the first Space Shuttle launch attempt (STS-1) being scrubbed on first try due to... a software timing glitch between the redundant onboard computers. Certain classes of problems (like LOX valve freeze ups) are just in the nature of the beast, part of the learning curve of a new vehicle and launch control system.

The software fix has been uploaded and a launch attempt is scheduled for 1600 Pacific time today. As I type it is 17:37:32 UTC (GMT) and 10:37:32 AM PDT putting the launch about 5 hours from now. I will return about an hour before launch and give commentary as I did last night.

See you all later!

(10)

The SpaceX flight readiness review has cleared Falcon 1 for launch from Kwajalein at 1600 Pacific Time (US West Coast). As I post it is 19:40:40 UTC here and 12:40:40 PM PDT there. Those who are interested can watch the launch here in about three hours.

They have stated they will scrub today's launch if there is the tiniest doubt or problem.

2220GMT: Launch is about 40 minutes away and the bird is sitting on the pad with some boil off showing around the interstage. Wish I were there instead of the freezing cold here in Belfast tonight!

2225GMT: I have just read a report that there are some telemetry problems between Kwaj and El Segundo.

2227GMT. They are in a planned hold. Wind is 13 knots at 050.

2239GMT. Still telemetry problems. Most of the engineering eyeballs are at the office in El Segundo rather than onsite, so it could cause a scrub if not solved soon.

2256GMT. Telemetry problem sorted. At the moment we are go for launch today.

2300GMT. T-0 is now set for 2345 GMT.

2305GMT: They have recommenced fueling and you can see the boil off at the interstage and up on the second stage.

2317GMT: Audio on webcast has begun, fueling is reported complete. I see quite heavy venting at the interstage.

2320GMT. Venting at engines visible now. This bird is raring to go!

2330GMT: 15 minutes to go, Everything is green!

2332GMT: Cleared for launch, no more holds in count.

2342GMT: T-4. There are 5600 people watching the live stream.

2345GMT: Terminal count abort. I will let you know when I get some info on why.

2358GMT: Abort due to a range issue. There will be a decision on recycling and continuing within the next 10 minutes or so.

0011GMT: It's a scrub for today. I will let you know when. It will be at least 24-48 hrs.

0033GMT: Recycle is for 24 hours. See you all tomorrow, same time GMT. Goodnight all!

(2)

Elon Musk's SpaceX has announced its pre-flight engine test was successful. A Kwajalein launch attempt is now planned for this week and may happen as early as tomorrow.

The first flight, last year, was terminated by flight control systems on board when a problem was detected. The majority of the rocket's systems had performed flawlessly but as it turns out a corroded nut caused a small leak and an engine fire. SpaceX engineers have spent the last year making their systems more robust.

Good luck and hot jets, Elon!

(17)

Every lover of fine aeroplanes will want to be present for the first public flight of an Avro Vulcan in fifteen years. XH558 is due to lead the Falklands Anniversary flypast over London on June 17. Test flights are to begin in April.

The Vulcan is the largest and heaviest (204,000 lbs MTOW) delta winged aircraft ever flown. Designed in the late forties and operational in the fifties it could carry a 10,000 pound nuclear weapon or 20,000 pounds of conventional bombs from the UK to targets over 1500 miles away and bomb from 60,000 feet. The aircraft only saw battle once in their long career. Between April 30th and June 2nd, 1982, four successful bombing missions were performed at a range which at the time was the longest in history: 3900 miles to the target! Needless to say, this required in-flight refuelling. Even the in-flight refuelling aircraft required refuelling!

This magnificent beast has been brought back to life by the Vulcan to the Sky Trust. The group has laboured to do what most thought impossible. They have brought what is arguably the most complex British military aircraft ever built back to flight status. They fought many battles to get to this point and I hope that worthy crew take some time off after first flight to bathe in the glory of their accomplishment.

It is notable that XH558 was retired from display flight status by the RAF due to a required strengthening of the rear lower wing spar. The MoD estimated the cost of this at 1.2M pounds sterling. The Trust did it for 80,000 pounds!

Private enterprise wins even with complex bombers it seems.

(12)

Most people have no idea how much damn maintenance and tender loving care a ballistic missile needs to remain operational. The frigging things are like a temperamental girlfriend (more likely to go off in your face than take you to the heavens). If I was forced to chose between standing 500 yards from the launch site of a Russian ICBM or within 500 yards of the intended target, I'd chose the target.

- A pseudonymous commenter

(19)

Yet again, the Leviathan crushes dreams.

Next question: is there anyone out there for whom this does not make the point of why libertarians hold the state and its defenders in deep contempt?

(15)

How cool is this? A MIG-21 available on eBay!

Although it is not all that expensive, sadly I really do not have anywhere to put it.

(8)

At long last the secretive space venture of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has gone public. The video of the test hop is very informative to the rocket afficionado. Note what you do not see: rocket 'bells' and flames. The lack of expander nozzles and the large number of small engine ports in the bottom are strongly indicative of an aerospike engine; the lack of flame means they are probably running a high efficiency cryogenic engine using LOX/LH.

These features, plus the shape of the vessel have a long commercial space history. The prototype of this design was Gary Hudsen's 'Phoenix' of the 1980's. In the early 1990's, Bill Gaubatz of McDonell Douglas actually built something much like it, but without the aerospike. Bill used the easily available RL-10 LOX/LH engine for his 'boilerplate' test ship. (Some months ago I posted a picture of the remains of this test vehicle).

I have been waiting a long time for someone to actually try this configuration. Some say it cannot be made to fly single stage to orbit; others swear vehemently that it can. Noone, however, disagrees that it can do a fine suborbital job or that it is a much more effective general purpose space vehicle than anything with wings.

(8)

I have just run across a story which I will not have time to research: the only information I have (other than the industry grapevine) is this fragment from WSJ (it requires a sign up so I will not bother linking):

British tycoon Richard Branson may have a large ego. But is he a threat to American national security? The Department of Transportation seems to think so, and this week it tentatively rejected a bid to put his famous brand name on a U.S. based airline that would be known as Virgin America.

What do these bureaucrats hope to accomplish? Are they trying to stop the biggest investor in the only currently real commercial space line? Do they want to block SpaceShipTwo from being built? Would they prefer space tourism happen in another country with spaceships designed and built and funded elsewhere?

Where do you find people of such beleaguered mental capacity?

I could go on. The US government has caused so much trouble for Branson in his dealings at both the Federal and the State level I can hardly understand why he bothers... but I am glad that he does.

I must unfortunately run now, with much unsaid, or face an empty pantry for New Years!

(0)

Audio downloads of the Libertarian Alliance Conference from November 25th are available and if anyone is interested, you can download and listen to my talk on the current state of the 'New Space' industry.

Dale Amon expounds on a 21st century industry at a Victorian venue in Whitehall, London.
Photo: DMA (with a little help from Tom), all rights reserved.

(1)

For those who might enjoy a non-virtual session on the growing New Space market sector, I will be talking at the Libertarian Alliance conference The National Liberal Club in London this coming Saturday afternoon.

Be there or be Earthbound.

(4)

After an hour or so scanning the 'Region A' which Jeff Bezo's BlueOrigin's environmental impact statement says is the launch area, I have found one reasonable possibility.

If anyone else feels like doing some detective work and having a bit of craic, feel free to carry on and report back to Samizdata HQ on your findings.

(3)

All I can say is they launched something.

Blue Origin is working on a derivative of Dr Gaubatz's DCX so my guess is they did a low peak altitude take off and landing test, the first 'push on the envelope' of a long series.

(4)

As I write I am sitting in a motel room in Colorado after two days of meetings in Wyoming associated with the launch of a new company. I am sad to say I will miss the coming festivities of the Samizdata Fifth Anniversary party so I hope those present have a wonderful time.

Meanwhile back in Colorado... exactly why is it I am blogging about the start up of another commercial space company?

Perhaps it is the officers of the new company, Wyoming Space Information Systems (WYSIS) : James C Bennett, CEO; Dale M Amon, CTO; and Rand Simberg, Space Operations.

I expect Rand will also make some announcement on Transterrestrial Musings if he has not done so already, and I will post more information as we finalize and develop plans.

(4)

Greg Allison claims this title because instead of finding junked cars hidden in the back yard grass when he mows, he finds rockets. If you ever wondered what happened to the wreckage of the DCX rocket, now you know. Its remnants have been serving as a parts source for Alabama space entrepreneurs.

Here is what the stripped spaceframe looked like as of a few days ago.

The DCX rests in pieces.
Photo: Courtesy Greg Allison

It kinda reminds me of 'The Rolling Stones'. No, not the band... the Heinlein novel!

(16)

I am sure at least most of you have heard of free and open source software. If not, I am not quite sure which part of the headwaters of the Rio Negro you are living on and how you managed to get your satellite internet link past the croc's and piranha's.

You can be excused however, if you are unaware of the open source hardware movement. There are people out there designing everything from CPU's to rocket engines in a global network but only the very plugged in are aware of these efforts. One stands above them all in my mind, and not just because I know a 'kiwi' who is one of the key participants: the Darwin open source replicator project.

A replicator is a machine which cannot only make things, but can make copies of itself. In the 'classical' literature the macro versions of this are known as Von Neuman machines; in more recent decades most who keep up with such things have come to associate them with Drexlerian nanoscale replicators. The nanoreplicator may be decades away, but the first generation of macroscale open source replicators is already available and spreading.

Darwin is not quite a full Von Neuman machine but it is a good start:

RepRap 1.0 "Darwin" is a Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) rapid prototyping machine that is capable of making the majority of its own component parts. It is available free under the GNU General Public Licence from this website to everyone.

As Darwin can copy itself, once you have one you can make others for your friends; or if they have one you can ask them to make one for you. Of course, you can also make as many as you want for yourself; the more you have, the faster you will be able to make other items.

If you have some room to spare and want to play too, I suggest you join. Once there are enough of these gadgets around the world, I am sure there will be plenty of folks passing around the designs of all sorts of nifty things for you to build with it.

Within a handful or two of decades we will build spaceships this way.

(32)

The F-117 Nighthawk, the stealthy USAF 'first responder', is retiring after 25 years of active duty.

HOLLOMAN AIR FORCE BASE, N.M., Oct. 31, 2006 - After 25 years of storied service, the F-117 Nighthawk, the Air Force's first stealth fighter, is about to retire.

The technology that once made it unique has now caught up to it, and newer fighter aircraft are joining the fleet. Still, the Nighthawk was the first of its kind, a fact anyone who has spent time around the aircraft is quick to point out.

Many of these people gathered here Oct. 29 to commemorate 25 years of Nighthawk history at the Silver Stealth ceremony. Members of the F-117 community, past and present, were on hand to pay homage to the aircraft's illustrious history, a history that contains as many secrets as it does legends.

F-117 over Las Cruces, New Mexico airport on Oct 21st during X-Prize Cup,
Photo: Dale Amon, All rights reserved

(27)

I read this item with interest as it shows a major difficulty with the flying laser battlewagon has been solved.

The big laser gunships use powerful chemical lasers in which fairly toxic chemicals are used in massive quantities to fire missile-killing rays thousands of miles through the atmosphere and space. Even a very large aircraft can carry only enough 'ammunition' for a handful of shots. For this and other lesser reasons I have not been enthusiastic on the viabiliity of the current developmental generation of laser weapon systems for defense against anything beyond a single missile. I do admit I have always appreciated the major cool of a 747 with a battle laser on board!

Not surprisingly the USAF has seen the same problems I have. The referenced article shows they have worked on and perhaps solved it. If the chemicals are recycled onboard the aircraft, the number of shots becomes very large, limited only by the recycling efficiency and the onboard power available to carry it out.

The chemicals become a sort of 'capacitor' or rapid discharge 'battery' rather than a consumable 'bullet'. In operation an airborne laser would fire one or more shots and then over a period of time use lower density power systems to recharge for the next salvo.

(5)

I am in Las Cruces New Mexico right now, taking a short break from a heavy schedule to at least let readers know I have been at the X Prize Cup field all day yesterday and also this morning and have the sunburn to prove it. I have also been tied up in National Space Society meetings and doing meet and greets with other members of the society leadership at events of the AIAA and others. Not to mention I am now in the space business myself... something I will leave you in suspense about for the moment.

I have only a few minutes right now, after the board dinner and multiple bottles of champagne toasting our Executive Director's recent wedding, and must prepare for a meeting of my own committee. I will try over the next few days to post some stories and photos from here. In the mean time, Rand Simberg did some live blogging so you can get some immediate gratification if you must.

Now I must leave you as the Mexican band turns up the volume in the lobby and my meeting time approaches...

Rand spots a familiar name on the wall.
Photo: D.Amon, All rights reserved

(1)

This next week I am off again on a month of continuous travel and will be awaiting my sainthood for putting up with all the ineffective security checks on multiple long flights.

But now, on to the good stuff.

Next week is the second annual X-Prize event out in Las Cruces and I will be at the airport on Sunday a week. As I will be attending a National Space Society board/management meeting for several days before, I understand we will also be co-hosting a party with the X-Prize people

I fully expect to run into many old friends in the commercial space business in the place one would most expect to run into rocket scientists: the bar! Last year I got my clock cleaned at air hockey (while a Japanese film crew wandered about filming and interviewing people) and it is time for a rematch.

(48)

I love the Science Museum in London, and there is another good reason to go there: it has an exhibition about the Spitfire fighter aircraft. Here is a nice review of it at the Social Affairs Unit blog.

Do not believe the nonsense about how the RAF was not essential to preventing an invasion of Britain in 1940. It was vital, and it seems morally right somehow that the aircraft that helped to nail the Luftwaffe was not just a brilliant piece of engineering, but also drop-dead gorgeous.

(26)

The Manchester based Starchaser has rolled out its prototype and they hope to give the Rutan/Branson team a run for the pole position in suborbital tourism.

They intend to launch in 2007 and follow up with a manned launch in 2008. Their spaceship can carry 3 passengers to 100 miles at 98,000 Pounds Sterling (US$183,000) for the half hour flight.

"The race is on," he said. "This is a new space race. We're building the vehicles, we're building the hardware, we're building capsules, we've done manned drop tests of capsules, we're building engines," he said. "We're really going for it. You know we're not just buying a ready made system from someone else so we have more control over what it is we do and I think we're going to probably beat him to the punch."

I am guessing I will see them at Las Cruces a few weeks from now, perhaps running their engine in a less spectacular fashion than last year.

Richard Branson has 'rolled out' the interior concept for the Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composites SpaceShipTwo:

“It won’t be much different than this,” Branson told reporters here at Wired Magazine’s NextFest forum. “It’s strange to think that in 12 months we’ll be unveiling the actual plane, and then test flights will commence right after that.”

Meanwhile, Anousheh Anseri has returned from her week aboard space station Alpha and UP Aerospace is retrieving their sounding rocket payloads after a launch which failed to reach suborbital altitude.

There may soon be some other news much closer to home ;-)

(4)

A bit of as yet unidentified debris was seen floating away from the Shuttle Atlantis after some RCS engine firing tests. The landing will be delayed while they try to figure out what it was.

My take on the enhanced image is a tile with some of the gap fillers and thermal blanket from the backside of it. In most cases a single tile loss is not a huge deal unless it is in a critical location or likely to cause an unzippering of other tiles.

This is all pure conjecture, probably wrong, on my part. But hey, what is a blog for if one can not make wild guesses on insufficient data?

(13)

Today is probably the day. Anousheh Anseri, as I reported some weeks ago, will within hours become the first woman to have paid her own way into orbit. She and her entire family are an example to us all of what value immigrants bring to America. As a family, they have already secured a place in the American history books right up there with Lindbergh and the other great names of American aviation. They are the ones responsible for Peter Diamandis' dream, the X-Prize, coming to fruition. If, as I believe is now a certainty, America forges ahead in commercial human space flight, it is the Anseri's and Peter whom we should all thank.

I am incredibly happy for this woman and I pray I might one day follow on the trail she is personally forging for us all.

Godspeed Anousheh!

If you are interested in learning more about what sort of person Anousheh is, read this interview. I think you will like her.

Additional: You can follow her flight here.

(12)

There is so much happening in the commercial space breakout right now that it is difficult to keep up. I will just give you a few links to recent events.

The waiting list for tourist flights to Space Station Alpha is growing longer as former Microsoft developer Charles Simonyi has passed his Cosmonaut physical. Charles is in line behind a Japanese entrepreneur, Daisuke 'Dice-K' Enomoto who is already in training for a September flight. Meanwhile, the lovely Anousheh Ansari, whose family are the all-american heroes behind the Ansari X-Prize and X-Prize Cup is waiting in line for a slot to open up.

Also in the news, efforts towards a Canadian space port are moving ahead. There is something very poetic about a Cape Breton launch site: I can imagine the tourists spending an evening before their flight listening to some of the very fine Cape Breton traditional musicians. What better way to prepare for a flight than sipping a pint and listening to a few good sets of jigs and reels?

Breaking news: 'Dice-K' has been pulled from his flight for medical reasons. Anousheh will likely get the next flight opportunity.

(8)

I received a press release from my old drinking buddy Rick Tumlinson at the Space Frontier Foundation last night. NASA has announced the winners for the 'Commercial Off The Shelf' (COTS) space launch program:

Los Angeles, CA - August 18, 2006 The Space Frontier Foundation congratulated SpaceX and Rocketplane - Kistler, the two winners of NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation (COTS) program announced today at NASA headquarters. The winners, selected out of a field that began with at least 20 teams, will split a total of approximately $500 million in funding to help them develop transportation systems that can be used to support the International Space Station (ISS).

Many of us in the space field applaud this. Whether we like government involvement or not, it is there. This puts more money into the pot at just the right time and pretty much guarantees success of the SpaceX Falcon. A commercial manned orbital capability might now arrive in time to save NASA's bacon: the sell-by date on the Space Shuttle fleet is rapidly approaching and their 'CEV' (Yesterday's Space Program Today!) does not seem to have progressed past the view graph thus far.

The next SpaceX launch test from Kwajelein is due in the November-December time frame.

(3)

The way I heard the adage long ago, was "you are not a member of the club until you have blown one up", as a NASA KSFC engineer is reported to have said when he called up Gary Hudson after Gary's first big bang on Matagordo Island in Texas. Whatever the quote, Masten Aerospace became a full member a couple of days ago when their engine test resulted in an uncontrolled engine self-disassembly.

I am curious if they will still be entering a vehicle in the NASA Challenge at Las Cruces in two months.

I know at least several of the guys at MA. But then, I know a lot of the guys (and gals) at most of the rocket companies. Commercial space is a small world.

(5)

Bigelow Aerospace made a rather interesting announcement on August 11:

Due to a number of factors related to the outstanding performance of Genesis I, the hoped-for adequate performance of Genesis II and various additional factors—including, but not limited to, domestic and international issues forecast over the next four to five years bearing upon America's transportation and launch deficits—we have made several bold decisions. An important announcement early in 2007 subsequent to the launch of Genesis II shall expose some of our plans.

Due to this change in direction, the Genesis II will be the only opportunity to fly photos and items for the "Fly Your Stuff" program. The general public is being urged to act quickly or they will lose their chance to be a part of this exciting program. Items and photos will be accepted only prior to November 1, 2006, or until all reservations are sold out on Genesis II, whichever comes first. Please be aware that there will be no second chances to fly personal items or photos in space through the "Fly Your Stuff" program.

If I were a betting man, I would guess the reason for no further fly-your-stuff opportunities is that Bigelow is going to jump to the full scale station next year, assuming the next larger size test article, Genesis II, is also successful.

I think the 2012 time line for a manned private space station has just been pulled in by a couple years.

Photo: Bigelow Aerospace

(8)

This just in! Our ever vigilant illuminati underground has just uncovered the little known fact Adnan Hajj photographed early shuttle flights. As a Samizdata exclusive we have this spectacular shuttle landing photograph.

Ms. Ima Fake, a senior Reuters representive, has assured us this photo is absolutely genuine.

(6)

Kevin Connors mentioned this blog story about the fascinating new small jet from Honda to me a few days ago and I remembered it when I ran across this today:

Honda announced today it will begin taking orders for a new, small jet aircraft later this year.

The HondaJet, unveiled last year, will enter the "very light jet" market in the United States, the company said.

It sounds like quite a nice piece of kit:

The sleek jet has an an all-glass flight deck. An over-the-wing engine design maximizes space in the fuselage for passengers and luggage, the company said. The configuration is also said to reduce drag at high speed to improve fuel efficiency.

The prototype jet, which seats up to seven, has completed more than 240 hours of flight testing, flying to 43,000 feet and hitting 412 knots.

I am much afraid I will not be running out to buy one myself, but I will certainly have my camera ready to click on it at first sight!

(4)

Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic expects to start flying in 2008.

Designer Philippe Starck, former soap star Victoria Principal and 'Superman Returns' director Bryan Singer have booked their flights for tourist trips in outer space, an official from the company selling the galactic voyage said Monday.

Virgin Galactic, a Virgin Group company, has sold some 200 tickets to passengers for suborbital flights, starting in 2008, said Will Whitehorn, the company's president.

It has collected 8.5 million pounds (US$15.6 million, euro12.4 million) in deposits for the flights that cost 109,000 pounds (US$200,000, euro158,000).

Despite the seemingly hard scheduled time here, I have heard Virgin Galactic officials state emphatically they will not fly until Burt Rutan says SpaceShipTwo is ready nor will they put pressure on him to rush the job. Branson is in this for the long haul, and that means he has to 'Bring 'em Back Alive'.

(3)

The official report on the SpaceX Falcon-1 launch termination at Kwajalein in the Pacific has been released and as it turns out, the problem was not human error after all. it was subsurface corrosion, possibly due to the tropical ocean climate and galvanic action, of a single nut on a fuel pump.

You can read more about it here.

Elon Musk's next launch is now scheduled for November.

(15)

Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame is moving his spaceship company, Blue Origin, forward through the high hurdles race called government regulations.

The Blue Origin craft is slated to fly regularly by 2010. While this is indeed an aggressive schedule, I find it more reasonable now that I know a bit about the spaceship. It is the next step in development of the McDonnell-Douglas DCX. The test article for this was built and flown at White Sands for under $60M in under two years by Dr. Gaubatz and his team in the early to mid nineties. Takeoffs required a ground crew of less than a dozen people and they were perhaps the first to ever fly a Vertical Takeoff/Vertical Landing craft or "A spacehip like God and Robert Hienlein intended", as one pundit put it, multiple times in a day. They also proved DCX could carry out a safe emergency landing after a major problem on takeoff and proved out the flight software for the complex flipover maneuver to rotate from pointy end first flight to ass end first for landing.

For those interested in such things, the McDonnell-Douglas master control console inside the single control van on site was... an Apple computer.

I am now wondering if Blue Origin will show up at Las Cruces this fall to compete for the NASA moon lander technology challenge prize I wrote of a few months ago. The beauty of a VTVL spacehsip is it works anywhere, whereas spaceplanes are rather limited in their choice of landing worlds. I know Dr. Gaubatz is going to be there and if they do, I am sure he will shed a tear of grandfatherly pride.

Hot Jets and Good Luck to Blue Origin!

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There are a bunch more photos from inside the Genesis 1 space station prototype with all sorts of fun stuff floating about. I would have loved to have been sitting in the meeting where they came up with the idea of flying a container full of Mexican Jumping Beans!

The external shot is also far clearer then the post-launch quick look shot I posted a week or so ago.

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I suppose one of the main reasons that airshows are held is that actually seeing the thing fly can temporarily remove the sense from people who in their rational moments think that an A380 or some other aircraft may not have much of a practical role, or may not be worth the money.

And as it happened, on Sunday, I was impressed by the A380, and I was again impressed by the V22 Osprey, which if nothing else can certainly put on an impressive display.

Alas, I didn't get a good picture of it in "aeroplane mode", but for a helicopter it was certainly quick in getting from A to B. This is the best I can do.

On the other hand, it is quite impressive what a proven, useful, and big helicopter can do when it only has the tiny fuel load needed for a ten minute display.

It was something of a day for the helicopters. As well as the Chinook, the RAF sent a Merlin for an aerobatic display, and this was also really impressive. Of course, there were lots and lots of jet fighters, too (the highlight of which was probably a MiG-29), but in order for photos of them to not look like a black spot in the distance, you really need a lens like this one, which I did not have.

Still, I am sure Brian will give me points for the billion monkeys shot.

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If you have just purchased your trip to Space Station Alpha from Space Adventures for $20M and still have money burning a hole in your pocket, you can now take a walk in space for a mere $15M extra.

According to Astronaut Tom Jones:

During a 90-minute EVA, which is the time it takes the ISS to make one complete orbit around Earth, a spacewalker would experience orbital sunrise and sunset, Jones said.

“That 90 minutes is like gold to a real spacewalkers,” Jones said. “I got a total of five or 10 minutes of doing that in my 19 hours in terms of just unstructured time, so it’s literally that precious an experience.”

Now if my next venture works out and makes me a billionaire...

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You simply have to look at this if you are into unaffordable jet aircraft!

Although I have had some doubts about the financial case for the A380, it is none the less awfully impressive when you see it from up close.

(Farnborough 2006 was splendid. More later).

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You simply have to watch this if you are into affordable jet aircraft!

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One way or the other, we will see the private flying transport before the end of this century. Materials and information technology advances have brought the idea to the edge of viability and this venture between Bell and an Israeli company might just be enough to push it over the edge.

On Monday at the Farnborough International Airshow, Bell Helicopter announced that it will team with an Israeli company to develop a futuristic aircraft that would allow soldiers and police far greater mobility in cities.

The X-Hawk, as envisioned by Bell, could hold a pilot and up to 11 troops. It could navigate congested urban areas by flying above narrow streets and between closely spaced buildings.

Propelled by two jet turbine engines that would drive pusher propellers and downward-thrust lift fans, similar to those on the short-takeoff-vertical-landing version of the F-35 Lightning II, the X-Hawk could operate in spaces far more confined than a helicopter can.

If they do not do it, someone else will. There are multiple 'flying car' projects out there and someday someone will cross the threshold into commercial viability.

Ed:Thank reader Steven Peterson for pointing us to this article

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The MV-22 Osprey programme has survived so many fatal crashes and attempts to kill it in congress that perhaps it should be renamed the MV-22 'Rasputin'. Yet still it continues, though I see that one of the two MV-22s flown from the US to Farnborough a couple days ago had to divert to Iceland because of engine difficulties.

Yet every time I look at the amazing disc loading on those things, I wonder how the hell they intend to use them? Given that when hovering the downwash has been known to knock people off their feet and send fast moving debris flying in all directions, how is this kite going to replace the CH-46E and CH-53D? An aircraft designed for unprepared LZ special operations that has to hover high to avoid downwash related problems and which cannot auto-rotate if damaged fills me with grave foreboding. Although the range and speed are very impressive, I wonder if this aircraft will not just be too hot and too inflexible for practical operations at the current state of technology.

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The Farnborough Air Show is on near London this week. In the commercial jet market, things have changed dramatically since the Paris Air show last year. A year ago Airbus had their first flying displays of their very large new A380 airliner, and for the fifth year in a row Airbus received more orders for airliners than did Boeing. Through a combination of more modern aircraft, more modern production lines and (perhaps) state subsidies, Airbus has come from a distant position in the market to market leadership.

However, this year Airbus fallen to a distant second in the market, having received only 117 orders this year to Boeing's 480. The A380 is behind schedule, the first airlines to receive it will be getting it six months late, and Airbus has scarcely received an order for it in the last couple of years. (Total orders are presently for 159). Boeong has received orders for 400 of its new mid-market 787 aircraft (and orders for Airbus' A330 and smaller A340 variants have dried up completely) and is also significantly ahead of Airbus in the upper mid-market segment containing Airbus' A340-600 aircraft and Boeing's 777-300. Airbus' British shareholder BAe Systems would like to sell its minority stake in Airbus, and therefore recently commissioned N. M. Rothschild to provide a valuation of the stake. The resulting valuation (€2.75bn) was dramatically less than the (€4bn) BAe Systems had anticipated.

The short term reasons for this turnaround are fairly obvious. The dollar has weakened significantly compared to the euro. While Airbus has hedged its currency exposure on existing orders and these will therefore still be profitable, it lacks this advantage going forward on new orders. While Boeing's production methods were outdated five years ago, its logistical systems have been dramatically improved since, and in terms of production it once again can compete. The A380 delay is certainly a short term factor, but most aircraft programs feature a delay like this at some point.

But these are only the short term reasons. There are more long term reasons, but the financial press seems to have failed to put the whole story together.

There have been various observations that Airbus will have essentially have no products in the mid market segment opposite the 787 unless they launch a new product fast. There have also been one or two observations that Boeing and Airbus are going to have to launch new products to replace their aging smaller aircraft shortly, but no real explanation as to why. (Boeing's 737 was first launched in the mid 1960s, whereas the Airbus A320 was mid 1980s. If an updated 1960s aircraft has been able to compete with a 1980s aircraft up until now, why do both companies now have to suddenly start from scratch?) To actually explain what is really going on, I am going to go off on an apparent tangent.

In 1931 the Empire State Building was built in New York. It has a roof height of 381 metres (and a spire of 449m). The tallest building in the world today is Taipei 101 in Taiwan, which has a roof height of 449 metres (and a spire of 508m), only about 18% taller. On the other hand, the Empire State Building was 58% taller than the world's tallest building in 1930 (the Woolworth Building, also in New York). However, under construction at the moment are the International Commerce Center in Hong Kong (484m), the Shanghai World Finance Center (roof 492m), the Busan Lotte Tower (494m) in Korea, and much more mindbogglingly Burj Dubai in Dubai, which will have a spire of 808m, Although the builders haven't yet publically announced what the roof height will be, it will be at least 50% higher than the present highest building. The pattern is that in the 1930s a limit was reached as to the maximum height that could be easily built, and that this limit stayed in place until recently. However, the limit is now no longer in place, and records are being shattered in the same way they were shattered in the 1930s.

In 1931, the George Washington Bridge was built, crossing the Hudson River between upper Manhattan and Fort Lee, New Jersey. This bridge had the longest span in the world (1067m), and this was an amazing 89% longer than the previous record holder (the Ambassador Bridge, connecting Detroit MI with Windsor ON). As recently as 1998, the longest bridge in the world was the Humber Bridge in England, with a span of 1410, 32% longer than the Washington, and only 10% longer than the Golden Gate Bridge, completed in 1937.

However, in 1998 two bridges have been opened that are substantially longer than the Humber Bridge, the Great Belt (East) Bridge in Denmark at 1624 metres, and the Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge near Kobe in Japan at 1991 metres. After the length of the longest bridge increased by only 10% in 60 years, it then jumped by 41%. In addition, construction is scheduled to commence in 2006 on the Messina bridge connecting mainland Italy with Sicily, which would have a main span of a rather mindboggling 3300m, a further 60% longer than the Akashi-Kaikyo, and 134% longer than the Humber. (It is still possible that the bridge might not be built, but if it is cancelled it will be due to political difficulties and fears that the project will turn into a massive funds transfer from the Italian state (and the rich cities of the north) to the Sicilian mafia (and the poor south). There are no serious issues with respect to technical feasibility and engineering cost).

The general pattern is exactly the same one for tall buldings. Dramatic increases in the size of what could be built came in the 50 years to the 1930s, there were virtually no increases between the mid 1930s and the mid 1990s, and there have been sudden and dramatic increases since.

What happened to cause this kind of progress to stop in the mid 1930s is no secret. Steelmaking became a large scale industrial process in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the first couple of decades of the twentieth steel was a mature product and was about as strong as it could be. It took a couple of decades for this to filter all the way through engineering design, but by the mid 1930s this process was essentially complete. The tallest buildings and longest bridges that could cost-effectively be built with steel were being built. From about 1980, the so called "materials revolution" got going in a big way. This ultimately led to materials much stronger than steel, but possibly even more importantly led to materials with equivalent strength that were much lighter than concrete. This meant that bridges and towers could simultaneously be lighter (meaning that the structural elements of the buildings did not need to be as strong) and stronger (meaning that the stuctural elements could be just as strong, but made from lighter and cheaper material). This led to a virtuous circle in which large structures could suddenly be made both more cheaply and if necessary much larger. This initially worked its way into smaller structures, which gained a new "spider web" quality about them compared to the rather lumbering look of older structures. The "cable stayed" design suddenly became optimal for medium sized bridges. (For smaller bridges, the cost of the physical structure suddenly became a minor element in the total cost of building a bridge. Suddenly it was no longer necessary to choose the cheapest design from a material and structural point of view, meaning there was suddenly huge scope for creativity in the design of smaller bridges. Suddenly, the construction of smaller bridges became about architecture rather than engineering. Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava became the first significant architect in history to be principally concerned with bridges). The materials revolution slowly worked its way to larger bridges and larger buildings. The physical appearance of the largest structures was not dramatically different to that of the previous generation.

They were just a lot bigger.

Now, back to aircraft. It would be easy to see something similar (although on a different time frame) that something similar has happened here. The largest passenger airline in service - the Boeing 747 - first flew 36 years ago. Now, however, a substantially bigger aircraft (the A380) has come along. Perhaps the same technological revolution has come along for aircraft.

Actually no. The above is dead wrong.

Actually yes. The revolution is here, just not with the A380.

For one thing, the A380 is not really that much bigger than previous designs. The occasionally quoted figures of an aircraft that can seat up to 853 people are actually references to what the A380 would seat in an all economy configuration, and few if any airlines will ever fit an aircraft out like that. (The largest ever seating configuration on a Boeing 747 was 594 seats on some all economy ANA Japanese domestic services, but more typical three class configurations are around 400 seats). The A380 will seat more people largely due to having a top deck running the entire length of the aircraft, but its other dimensions are fairly similar to the 747. The Soviet Union actually managed to build a military jet transport larger than the A380 in 1988, so there is nothing terribly revolutionary about building a jet transport that big. (An interesting diagram comparing these various aircraft is here

In 1970, the Boeing 747 went into service with Pan American Airways. The aircraft could seat more than twice as many passengers as the largest passenger aircraft built prior to it. Boeing and Pan-Am promoted it as heralding a new age of travel. These huge aircraft would be worlds of their own, containing piano bars, comfortable lounges, and all kinds of facilities out of a more civilised age. Travel would be revolutionised. Blah blah blah. The general press lapped this stuff up. High prestige airlines all ordered a few. (Pan Am ordered a lot, as the aircraft had been built in the first place almost as a bet between Boeing CEO Bill Allen and Pan Am CEO Juan Trippe).

Then however, the first oil crisis hit in 1974. Airlines were financially squeezed. Orders dried up. (Boeing sold very few 747s between the early 1970s and the mid 1980s). Those airlines that had 747s set about squeezing the maximum amount of profitability out of every aircraft. Rather than being full of piano bars and lounges, the 747 was about shoving people in like sardines. Boeing had spent so much money on developing the new aircraft that it almost drove the company bankrupt.

In truth, Boeing made a mistake in building the 747 in the late 1960s. The market for an aircraft that size was not genuinely there until about 1985. Another market segment - wide body jets seating between 250 and 350 people - would ultimately be much more important. If Boeing had built an aircraft in this segment in the late sixties it probably wouldn't have had such difficulties in the mid 1970s. As it was, the focus on larger aircraft delayed Boeing's entry into this important segment until the Boeing 767 was introduced in 1979. Boeing's US competitors Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas produced smaller wide-bodies than the 747 (the L-1011 Tristar and the DC-10), but both aircraft were for various reasons rather troubled, and both in retrospect were also too big.

The company that did invent the future was a state subsidised European consortium, Airbus, which in 1972 flew its first aircraft, a twin engined wide bodied jet called the A300, that seated 270 people or so. Airbus had great difficulty selling these at first, due to the mid seventies oil crisis, and due to the fact that it was a new company that nobody had ever heard of. It was able to stay in the market for a few years due to the fact that it had European taxpayer pockets to draw on. It leased some aircraft to a few airlines (most notably Eastern Airlines of the US) on ludicrously generous terms. However, ultimately the airlines operating the A300 figured out that the A300 was a very fine aircraft, and that it filled a market segment that was both vital and which had been ignored by the US manufacturers. Boeing later entered the same market segment with the 767, but the A300 ultimately sold well, and (again with some state help) Airbus followed up by building a smaller narrow body aircraft, the A320 (and later variants the A321, A319, and A318) to compete with Boeing's 737.

By the late 1980s, Airbus and Boeing were the only two significant players in the passenger jet market. The market had segmented into three parts: (1) Narrow bodied aircraft used for domestic and intra-continental travel, in which Boeing's 737 competed with Airbus' A320; (2) Smaller wide bodied aircraft used for long intra-continental (eg NY-LA) and shorter inter-continental travel (eg London-NY or Brisbane-Singapore), in which Airbus' A300 and smaller variants of the A330 competed with Boeing's 767; (3) Long haul intercontinental, in which initially Boeing's 747 was the only option. (Yes, there were and are plenty of exceptions to these divisions, most dramatically in Japan. I am simplifying).

The fact that Boeing's 747 was in the mid to late 1980s the only aircraft in segment (3) gave Boeing a major marketing advantage, which was that it could sign a contract with an airline to provide multiple types of aircraft including the 747, make razor thin margins on the smaller aircraft and fat profits on the 747. It would gain economies of scale on the large numbers sold and keep its total market share.

Airbus at this point became fixated on the fact that Boeing had this advantage of a very large, long range aircraft, and decided that it needed a larger and bigger aircraft. What ultimately became the A380 had a very long gestation, and Airbus took plans for various versions to a lot of airlines over the years. Eventually, around the turn of the century Airbus got enough big airlines to commit to buy it if it was built that the aircraft went into production. Boeing was not willing to respond by building an aircraft the same size, so Airbus is now in a position where it has the largest segment of the market to itself. Airbus was even able to sell a few smaller aircraft to airlines that would not have bought them if they had not being buying A380s as well. (For instance, Qantas bought A330s that it certainly would not have bought otherwise)

However, the market had changed by then. Segment (3) was dominated by the 747 in the 1980s, but that was probably more because of its range than its size: for a few years it was the only aircraft that could manage the really long-stop routes like Sydney - Los Angeles or Hong Kong - London. In the mid to late 1990s, other slightly smaller aircraft were produced that could fly the same distance or further - the larger and longer range variants of Airbus' A340 and Boeing' own 777. By the turn of the century, these were selling in larger numbers than the 747. 747 sales in fact had just about dried up. The fact that Airbus had a strong presence in segment (3) despite not having the largest aircraft was a big factor in it taking market leadership from Boeing.

But Airbus launched the A380 anyway. They got airlines to order about 150 of them. Things looked okay. But they weren't really. Airlines that did want to buy the largest and latest for prestige reasons bought a few, but this market dried up. Deals like Qantas' A330/A380 weren't in fact the sort of good multi-type deal Boeing had managed previously but were more a case of Airbus offering the A330 utterly ludicrously cheaply in order that the airline would buy the A380 at all. In truth there are very few routes in which having an aircraft like the A380 is really an advantage. Airlines that fly into airports that are extremely capacity constrained in terms of landing slots (eg Heathrow, Narita) will likely find it useful, but there are perhaps half a dozen such airports (if that) in the world and maybe a dozen routes between these airports on which such aircraft might be useful. It is difficult to see much of a market for the A380 (over the next decade at least) beyond those aircraft already sold. Further than a decade out, the A380 it going to look horribly outdated, as I shall explain.

On the other hand, there is a huge market for mid-sized aircraft - essentially category (2) and the smaller part of category (3). Rather than having a fight in the large aircraft market, Boeing instead waited, attempted to sell something called the "sonic cruiser" to airlines which didn't provide greater efficiency than existing aircraft but which airlines didn't want - there remains speculation as to whether this was a serious project or a ruse to disguise what Boeing was actually working on, and then eventually announced a new mid sized aircraft - aimed at segment (2) and the smaller end of segment (3) - that was initially had the code name 7E7 and was ultimately renamed the 787. (Boeing would never really explain what the "E" was supposed to stand for, although "efficiency" was a popular guess. Boeing ultimately claimed it stood for "Eight"). This was the revolutionary aircraft, with its major structures being made from composite materials consisting largely of a mixture of titanium carbon, and various complex polymers. Composite materials had been working their way into less significant parts of aircraft for a decade or two, but the 787 is the first aircraft with the fuselage and the wing made entirely from these new materials. It appears that the lighter structures can lead to efficiency gains of about 10%. (Boeing has quoted "25% more efficient" in its publicity, but the rest of the efficiency gains come from more efficient engines (which are easy enough to retrofit onto existing aircraft) and better aerodynamics (harder, but building a new wing is much easier than building a new aircraft from scratch). It is the advantage due to the stronger and lighter materials that give Boeing its edge. It also seems that building from these materials is actually cheaper, so the sticker price on the 787 has been seen as quite reasonable.

Having designed a much more fuel efficient aircraft, Boeing has then encountered perfect market conditions to sell it . The global economy remains quite strong, but oil prices have gone through the roof and the US dollar has fallen. AIrlines care more about fuel efficiency, and the aircraft is cheap in Euro terms. Boeing has thus sold vast numbers of aircraft, and sales seem to be accelerating if anything.

Airbus has had to respond. Initially, they stated that they would produce a new aircraft called the A350. This was to be an enlarged version of Airbus' existing A330, with an all new wing. The new wing was to have been made of composite materials, but this was a classic "Take an old aircraft and update it" strategy of the kind that has worked well from the 1960s but which now just tends to suggest that Airbus hadn't got the paradigm shift, or had got it but couldn't afford to respond. Reaction to the A350 proposal was tepid, and Airbus has been apparently regrouping for the last few months. A few weeks ago French President mentioned something called the "A370" in a speech. As nobody else had heard of an A370, this was initially taken as a sign that the man was possibly going senile in addition to being incompetent and corrupt, but it seems that he had been briefed on what Airbus was doing. Airbus had realised that they did need a new, all composite design, and they were back at the drawing board. This morning, Airbus publicly discussed the project, although they were somewhat vague about the details, and it is apparently now back to being the A350 (the "A350 XWB", more specifically). However, they are yet to formally launch the product (they are talking about doing so "in 100 days") and the earliest the aircraft will be in service is 2012.

In recent times, Boeing has been admitting in private to having something called Project Yellowstone, aimed at replacing all of its product line with new aircraft built from composite materials. This project involves three new models of aircraft, of the which the 787 is the first, and is in the middle in terms of size. (My hunch is that the question of whether tbe 787 came out of Project Yellowstone or that Project Yellowstone came out of the 787 depends on who is telling the story, but I don't know the internals of Boeing politics). Basically, though, it is clear that Boeing is going to follow the 787 with an all composite replacement for the 737. Boeing has been reasonably reluctant to talk about this, partly because the 737 is still selling very well. However, in the last week, (the Farnborough Air Show will do this) Boeing has made some comments about how it expects the 737 to be replaced by an all composite design before long also.

One expects that Boeing will in fact take advantage of Airbus' present weakness by launching their 737 replacement relatively quickly - my hunch is that we will see the official launch at the Paris Air Show next year. Even if Airbus can produce the A350 by 2012 as it says it can, there is every possibility that Boeing may be able to get its 737 replacement into production around that time - stealing a second market from Airbus just at the point where it is becoming competitive again in the first. And in all this, Airbus has a huge drain on its resources in the A380, a large, expensive project that relatively few people want, and that (apart from the engines, which are not made by Airbus anyway) is really not much more than 1970s technology. The A380 is the Humber Bridge or Sears Tower of old technology - it is about the limit of the old technology, but it is not ultimately very useful or economic.

Of course, as well as making aircraft more efficient, the new stronger and lighter technologies also do get rid of the limits on size that may have been imposed by old technologies. If anybody now wants to build a 2000 seat aircraft, it can now probably be done within a decade or two. I find it hard to imagine that anyone would buy it, but it is an intriguing thought.

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Bob Bigelow has released his first baby picture.

The Genesis 1 space station test article is working so flawlessly the Bigelow crew is wandering about with glazed eyes or collapsing to recover from long weeks of sleep deprivation.

The module unwound and inflated to its full 8 foot diameter, the solar panels are delivering power and they are receiving more telemetry data than they can handle.

Photo: Bigelow Aerospace

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Bob Bigelow's one third scale inflatable space station is in orbit after a launch from Russia. This is the first of several unmanned test articles which will lead to a full scale station by 2015. Even so, at 8 feet in diameter and 14 feet in length when inflated, this habitat is not exactly small.

You can read a bit more about it at CNN. I would also recommend checking space.com and the other usual suspects for more detailed accounts, something I am about to do myself.

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Mr Phelps:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explore an ultra-secret North Korean missile launch facility located several kilometers inland from a section of due south facing coastline not far from the Chinese border. There is a small town about 1-2km south of the pad, directly under the most probable launch trajectory. A mad ruler is thought to be building nuclear capable ICBM's at this site. We do not believe their technological level makes them capable of success at the task at present, so we recommend you do not use the town as a base of operations.

Find the various facilities and report back to us. Should you be captured or your computer be eaten by starving North Korean peasants, Samizdata will disavow all knowledge of your existence.

Your targets may be found near N40°51'17" E129°39'58" via http://maps.google.co.uk/ at the 50 meter per 2.5 centimeter scale.

Good luck and good hunting.

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Ok, now this is both cool and a bit wierd.

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I ran across a fascinating historical footnote in the May issue of Sky and Telescope I feel should be much more widely known.

The builder of the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers was a small Manhattan company named Honeybee Robotics. The company offices are just a few blocks from the World Trade Center site, so it hardly bears saying the engineers were deeply affected by the events of 9/11.

They paid their respects in an unusual and touching way. With assistance of the Mayor's office they acquired bits of mangled aluminium debris from the site. The engineers pounded and formed them into cable shielding parts.

Those bits of the World Trade Center have now been roving Mars for two years.

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Pete Worden, who once served various roles in BMD (Ballistic Missile Defense), began his directorship of NASA Ames a few days ago. He joked that after this talk he might be looking for a new job.

The reason for going into space is settlement he said. Since the National Space Society's primary goal is settlement of space, this went down rather well as you might guess, as in 'standing ovation'.

He talked about some of the reasons why the Moon is a very useful place for permanent habitation. There are a number of potentially dangerous technologies which could be developed there first before being applied on Earth. Things like replicators, real AI's that evolve a million times faster than humans, sample returns from Mars, research on Zero Point Energy and others. As Pete said, "There is no EPA and damn few lawyers" on the moon.

Pete believes private ownership of land on the moon is of almost overriding importance. If we can get the international law unambiguously settled, there could be a land rush.

He laid out a way to solve global warming using the market and private ventures. A mass equal to about 30 super tankers placed at the Sun-Earth libration point is enough to build a sun-shade capable of blocking 1% of the solar radiation falling on Earth. It would put a planetary thermostat into human hands. Since he is talking about a large number of 'small' parasols rather than one large one, it allows the project to proceed in commercial sized, independant, competing chunks. How does it get funded? You identify equivalent carbon credit for the amount of solar radiation blocked and price your shade accordingly. At rates of dollars/ton of carbon emissions, 1% of irradiation represents trillions of dollars.

One of my Australian drinking buddies (who works on microsats) asked for Pete's opinion on data purchase. Peter is for it and would be quite happy to buy data or offer anchor tenancies to private ventures that put rovers on the moon. There are several companies who are rather far along in this regard and I would say even his positive public statement will be of enormous assistance to them. He went even further and said he is interested in working with any privately provided space services.

I do not know if Pete Worden can pull this off or not, but I do know he is saying things he really believes. We know him and he knows us.

Before Worden, we had a short talk by California congressman Dana Rohrabacher who is pushing a "Zero G, Zero Tax" bill. He does not think there will be much resistance because it is creating business and investment that would not otherwise be there.

For those who do not know Dana, he was involved with the LP back in the early days but joined the Republicans and became, along with Ron Paul, one of our two 'Libertarians in Republican clothing'.

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Peter Diamandes of X-Prize fame (who I have know since he was an MIT student) gave the first public announcement of an idea he is working on at the Saturday night banquet. Peter, like many others at our conference, has little faith in NASA. Specifically he does not believe they will even get to Mars any time soon, let alone settle it. Peter is creative and has proven his ability to make things happen, so his idea on a funding strategy has more likelihood of crossing the dream bridge than the hot air of many sources.

It will cost billions to settle Mars, even if the known financial incompetency of the State is replaced by private, market based operations. Peter will be looking for persons of 'supercredibility' to do the kick off to raising funds by signing up 100,100 persons for the Mars settlement project. There will be different levels within that group; some will put in $100 thousand or even $1 million; the majority will put up perhaps $10 thousand or so each. I did not write fast enough to get the exact split, but it adds up to $2 billion. At 15% interest from investment it will not take very long to turn this into the $8 billion needed to make it happen. By the time he is ready to go, there will be a lot of private hardware for hire so he does not have to pay for the special multi-billion dollar hardware development projects which NASA always has to paste on the side. Once the project is ready to go, the 100,100 members will each have their name placed into a lottery where each has an equal chance, 1 in 1001, of winning. These will be 'The First Hundred' as in Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Red Mars' novel. Unlike in the novel they will not go in one big international spaceship, but rather in small groups.

This is a risky mission and people will probably die. Peter asked for a show of hands and asked how many people in the room would volunteer at even outrageously high risk levels of 1 in 3 or even 1 in 2. Over half, yours truly included, raised their hands. Pioneering ain't dead in my circle of friends.

Oh. By the way. I forgot to mention... It is a one way trip.

(7)

Rusty Schweikert, a member of the Apollo 9 crew, spoke at the Saturday International Space Development Conference luncheon. Rusty founded the B612 Foundation to make people aware of the risk of asteroid impacts to our planet and to make sure something is done about it.

As it turns out, we are at this moment facing a slight risk on April 13, 2036 from 99942 Apophis if it threads a tiny keyhole in space on an earlier pass. The track of the possible impact points touches down in Siberia, winds parallel to the Pacific coasts of Canada, the United States and Mexico; passes over a few South American cities and crosses the South Atlantic before rising above the Earth's surface near Africa. A Pacific hit would cause a tsunami many times larger than the one which hit Indonesia. It would cause an estimated $400 billion dollars damage and a large death toll on the US West Coast.

He told us an acceleration of a mere micron per second squared, applied over 200 days, could move the asteroid out of the keyhole. This would require international agreement because moving the impact point changes it from an act of God to an act of man as the possible impact point slowly crosses multiple national borders before leaving the Earth's surface.

There is a very small chance Apophis will thread the needle and thus a large chance we will 'get away' with doing nothing. It does represent a wake up call because there WILL be a damaging asteroid strike within a relatively short time frame. If the the Tunguska strike had happened 6 hours later it would have struck in Central Europe. Next time we may not be so lucky.

And yes, Apophis was named for the baddie in Stargate who was in turn named for an Eqyptian snake god, the enemy of Ra, who personified darkness, evil and chaos.

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I have been writing madly while cruising at 40,000 some feet on my way back to New York. The entire midwest is clear and I can see towns and cities laid out from horizon to horizon, orange grids and cloudy distant nebula sprinkled in the pitch black under the stars.

After my last post during the ISDC I was too deep into sleep deprivation and too swamped with work to attempt coherent discourse. Other than meals I hardly saw any of the other sessions. I did at least get in much late night party time with old and new friends from various rocket companies and organizations. Despite or perhaps because of our large numbers in the hotel, our somewhat noisy parties kept getting shut down. The volume level of a large number of engineers, activists and artists packed into a suite discussing their life's passion, when mixed with copious alcohol, is impressive. This led to a series of 'floating parties', moving goodies from one part of the hotel to another to stay one step ahead of the security staff. The only ones who got mildly burned was one of the small rocket companies which had $500 of refreshments impounded over night. That is another story, of the sort best held for late night hanger talk -- "Do you remember the time?" -- amongst the insiders. All in all it was great fun.

Now for the news on this and future ISDC's. The LA conference this year, the 25th ISDC, broke all records. We had over 1300 warm bodies at the event, a number which comfortably exceeds what we believe to have been the previous largest attendence. The profitability of the event was.... pleasing ;-)

I am currently shepherding teams for several future years. Next year the ISDC is in the Dallas - Fort Worth area. If the organization of their party this year is any example, it will be well organized and a great deal of fun, Texas style.

The board approved a bid from a DC team for 2008. We had a couple pre-bid year parties thrown by the Australian led Canadian Toronto in 2009 team. They go through the bid and approval process next year. I also now have potential team leaders considering bids for 2010.

It was an altogether great experience. I will now and over the ensuing weeks pass on more about it.

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I finally managed to herd my Conference Coordinating Committee together to review a 2008 conference proposal and am somewhat less pushed for time the rest of the day. I am of course deep into sleep deprivation but that is a normal part of life at an ISDC, something I have learned to deal with over the 20 or so of the 25 I have attended.

Our collaboration with Planetary Society has been wildly successful and a pleasure to both parties.

Buzz Aldrin had a lively luncheon, including an hysterical fighter jock type joke which I will not quote in order to save his historical reputation. Buzz has been down to the Titanic and up to the North Pole and is now trying to get a hydrogen fueled Hummer drive at the South Pole. When Hugh Downs got up to leave he called to Buzz at the podium to count him in.

There is simply so much going on here I wish I had time to tell you more, process raw images, give more anecdotes. I feel like I am cheating you of the wondrousness of the week and the people and exhibits and talks. A full time live blogger could not cover it enough, let alone someone who is tied up in Society managment, committee and board meetings, organizational shmoozing and such.

Also, please forgive errors in spelling, punctuation and whatever else I manage to screw up while racing to get information on line during stolen moments

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Shana Dale, the NASA Deputy Administrator (and also a rather nice looking southern gal), announced a set of Challenge prizes for lunar lander technology. Not dry as lunar dust stuff, but real flying hardware to compete at the Las Cruces Race for Space this coming October.

There are two levels of prize with different rewards. The competition will be held again next year if any awards are not made this year. The first level has a first prize of $350,000 and a second prize of $150,000 for a vehicle to make a vertical take off, climb to 50 meters; stay in hover for at least 90 seconds; translate 300 meters and land on a designated landing point. They may then optionally refuel before taking off again and doing the same in reverse. If more than one contestant manages the flights, placement is based on how close they landed to the designated point. If there is a tie, there will be a shoot out... the vehicle to do the most trips in an alloted time will be the winner.

Level Two is a bit harder and the prizes are $1,250,000 first; $500,000 second and $250,000 third place. For this money the must take off vertically take off, go up 50 feet; hover for 180 seconds; translate 300 meters and land in a wild bit of terrain in which remote pilotage is allowed.

This is the first NASA competition with a prize over a million dollars. They appear to be doing this right. They are working with people who handled the successful Anseri X-Prize with Burt Rutan won; it will be a great spectacle for the watching crowds at the rocket races; and it will as a side effect also boost earth based private launch technology.

With some luck I will be there to watch and record the competition this fall.

Personally, I would put my bet down on Jon Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace.

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Day 3 of sleep deprivation... I am off to see a session this morning and then to hunt down my commitee to review a proposal for the 2008 ISDC.

Lots of familiar faces around. Rand Simberg is in for a few days but is not lugging his lap top around. Perhaps he will post something later on when he gets bored on his next airplane flight. Also around is Taylor Dinerman, a journalist and regular commentator here.

Now... off to work again.

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To say everyone was there is no exageration. Well, truthfully a few people were not: Richard Branson appeared on a video tape to accept his award. But amongst those honoured were Dennis Tito, the first space tourist. He also handed out awards. Bob Bigelow the space hotel magnate; Rich Searfoss astronaut and rocket racer pilot; Greg Olson, the latest space tourist; Eric Anderson; The Anseri family...

One of the highlights was when Hugh Downs gave Buzz Aldrin a lifetime achievement award.

I bid you good night. I am not doing it justice by a long shot, but I can hear the cans calling from two floors below...

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It has been a busy