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Glenn Reynolds, over at Instapundit, has pointed out this Aviation Week story on the deep black space plane that has been under test at Groom Lake through the last decade.

I have long suspected such a vehicle was flying, partly because of logic. I could not imagine there has been nothing new since the design of the 40 year old SR-71 and the US would retire that fleet of spy planes without someting newer and better. No matter what was said about satellites, they are just not as generally useful and do not have the immediacy of a launch on demand and maneuver on the way aircraft.

I know for a fact that the USAF was studying space planes in the late eighties and early nineties because I knew the guy running the study. It was called Black Horse, an H2O2 fueled aircraft which topped up from a tanker after take off. That officer moved on in to private space but the idea of being able to, as he put it, "put precision holes in the ground anywhere in the world within 90 minutes" was one I assumed had just gone totally black.

Another small piece of information came from a friend with a classified job title back in the early 90's. A spacer like myself, he told me that his real job would not be public for decades but people would be quite surprised and it was important... and he added that it took him three airplanes, the last of which was a light plane to get to where he worked. I immediately thought of Groom Lake but kept it to myself then and ever since. I have always assumed the Groom Lake sightings were of an at least suborbital SR-71 replacement.

The other item which clued me that something was going on happened last summer. A number of persons I spoke to were pushing a technology called 'hot structures' which was about to come out of the black and they were afraid that the technology and all of the money expended on it was about to be lost simply because no one knew it existed. While interesting, it turned out to be far too pricey for anyone I know to employ at this time.

Hot structures have to do with hypersonic airframes of the blended bodies sort. This is stuff you build if you are working on spaceplanes as there is little other use for it. I did not however put the final piece together as AWST did with its far greater resources and contacts. My guess is this technology is about to be lost because the SR-3/XOV is being cancelled.

Does anyone else have any interesting scuttlebutt?

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Those of you who follow space will be aware the cornerstone of the 'Moon, Mars and Beyond' program which NASA has been tasked to impliment is a new vehicle. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) is in many ways a return to the Apollo era but does have many useful features, not the least of which is putting the travellers on top. This avoids foam strike problems and at the same time allows the use of proven-in-anger escape tower technology.

It is still a rather old design. Nonetheless it had some features which those of us in the space community apploauded. The biggest win of all was the use of Methane-LOX propulsion. When I read a late draft of the new system plan, this was the single item I found exciting. M-LOX meant someone was serious about going off Earth to stay. It meant someone had read and understood what Bob Zubrin has being saying (perhaps yelling from the prayer town would be a better description) for nearly two decades. You see, M-LOX can be manufactured while sitting on the surface of Mars. The gases of the Martian atmosphere are all you need to manufacture it using a more than century old indstrial process. If you are going to Mars and going to stay, this is the fuel you will use.

That must be why NASA is dropping it although the external excuse is:

Any costs associated with accelerating the five-segmented booster and modified J-2 development programs will be offset in part by dropping plans to develop a liquid-methane fueled engine for the CEV, Hecker said. "From a budget standpoint, it came up as a wash," he said. "We're not asking for more dollars."

NASA is dropping the most important thing they are doing in order to speed up a return to the Moon which will probably be done privately by 2025 anyway.

You may disagree with NASA doing anything at all, but whatever you may desire, they are there. They are a fact of life in the space game. It is much preferable for us to see them waste taxpayer money on something that is at least marginally useful to private sector space ventures.

You can read more discussion on this issue at On-Line Ad Astra, a publication of the National Space Society.

Please excuse any errors as my glasses disapeared whilst transiting Toronto Airport last Thursday and I am writing this by squinting at the screen...

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The last of the Lockheed-Martin Titan rockets, after months of slow preparation, is finally up and away from Vandenberg. The blacksat on board was considered quite important and Lockheed used their clout as the launch contractor to kick fledgling rocket company SpaceX out of Vandenberg and away from the pad in which owner Elon Musk had invested millions of his own dollars.

Now that LockMart's big launch is away they will not have the power to continue their underhanded operations against potentially cheaper competition. A number of folk have told me that Elon's burn rate has been such that he is no longer quite a billionaire. As the adage goes, the way to make a small fortune in aerospace is to start out with a large one. Nonetheless, Elon is not letting the bastards (at Lockmart) get him down. I believe he has his next test coming up in November on Kwajalein, and the USAF is reportedly quite positive about working with him.

Except when LockMart throws a hissy fit...

Elon Musk speaking at the National Space Society's 2005
International Space Development Conference in Washington, DC.
Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved

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If there is a heaven, then I died and went to Las Cruces this weekend. Or perhaps I stumbled into a jackrabbit hole after one of the long sessions in the hotel bar and found myself inside a space art painting I saw some years back. Whatever the case... I was there.

It was obvious from a great distance the event was bigger than I had imagined possible.

Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.

When I noticed the Canadian rebuild of a V-2 missile I decided some Canadians have two. Big ones. Really big ones. Made of solid stainless steel.

And yes, those round things really are view ports for the 'pilot'.

Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.

I got up close and personal with Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne.

Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.

John Carmack pats his Armadillo after it tipped over on landing from a tethered 20 foot controlled flight.

Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.

Your fellow Samizdata readers at XCOR Aerospace brought their EZ-Rocket engine testbed out of retirement just for the event. Astronaut Searfoss jumped at the chance to display this lovely hot-arsed bird twice within the afternoon.

Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.

Even the bicycles had rocket motors on them.

Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.

The British engine gave a rather spectacular pyrotechnic sound and light show as it blew up at t=0. To be fair, the Starchaser group apparently had several succesful firings of this quite large engine over the weekend. I simply had the good or bad fortune to be there for the one that did not.

Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.

I also have video of such things as two low level passes by an F117; the full first flight of EZ-Rocket and much else, but I am afraid I would bring our server to its little knees if I were to try to upload so much to it.

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We will just have to get used to bigger storms as we head deeper into the upside of the decades long Atlantic storm cycle. Over the next decade nature will be reclaiming land which became saleable during the downside of the cycle. Unfortunately there are some pretty useful things in threatened areas. One of which is the marvellous Lone Star Flight Museum.

I hope they are getting their airframes out of Dodge and their exhibits to safety. I would hate to see a repeat of what happened to Kermit Week's collection in Florida about ten years ago.

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Tonight I watched the excellent second episode of a BBC series on the US/USSR space race of the 1950's and 1960's. I found it highly entertaining and well worth the watching.

As some of you are aware, I have some slight knowledge in this area. It was for the most part well researched and an accurate portrayal both of historical facts and the atmosphere of the time. I found the use of bits of old black and white TV from the period fascinating. I must also admit to recognizing the Life Magazine covers as those and Werner's Disney appearances had at least something to do with my own passion for space.

This would not be a proper review if I did not also point out what was wrong. The history they presented was what anyone would find by researching the times and accepting the received wisdom about 'what happened'. There was more to the events of the era than most are aware of even though a great deal of it is no longer classified.

There was more at stake than whether ex-German Werner Von Braun launched the first satellite or not. There was an intelligence sting in progress; perhaps one of the most successful in US intelligence history.

The story began some years earlier with a top secret report on the use of space for military purposes, and in particular for spy satellites. The problem was whether flying an object repeatedly and undeniably over an enemy nation would be taken as an aggressive act. Would satellites be treated the same as Francis Gary Powers and his U2 were treated many years later? That was the sticky point, and the way around it was to make sure the Russians were suckered into doing it first. Once they had established the 'open skies' precedent, the US was free to roll out the spy satellites. It was no accident that the technology was ready to go and that many of the early Explorer's were less than scientific in purpose.

The public response, or 'blowback' caught Eisenhower by surprise. He'd accomplished precisely what he had wanted to accomplish but was now publicly on the hook for a missile gap which did not actually exist. Even at the time of the Nixon-Kennedy debates, the Russians did not have a significant number of ICBM's reliable enough to generate a serious strategic threat to America. LBJ, as a member of a key Senate committee was well aware of the real facts and almost certainly used the fact of their secrecy to his and Kennedy's political advantage.

Meanwhile, Nixon had to hold his tongue on the issue. Some pundits have suggested this may have caused him to strike back in inappropriate ways a decade later, leading to the Watergate fiasco. Personally I cannot forget that he was a key player in the McCarthy hearings of the early fifties, hearings which ruined many lives and did not uncover any of the real Stalinist moles in the heart of the US government.

I will not hold this against the BBC however. Few are aware of this bit of history and there are many who consider it controversial.

I give the BBC an 8.5 for history and a solid 10 for presentation and entertainment.

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I fly a lot and have spent more hours in aircraft and the associated departure lounges than I care to think (don't get me wrong, I am a regular propellerhead). One thing that really cheeses me off is that creature: The Flight Attendant/Pilot Who Thinks He Is The Next Great Wit. On a recent flight our pilot insisted on mixing up his usual spiel (read the safety instructions, we arrive at X GMT, please fasten your seatbelts) with a sort of annoying, endless attempt at making the whole process funny. You could tell that the passengers were getting restless. One chap sitting behind me shouted out "Don't give up your dayjob" but it was no good. The jerk went on and on for about 10 minutes before, mercifully, takeoff commenced.

A small plea to any wannabee Bob Newharts out there in the airline business: just fly the goddam plane and shut up.

Okay, I feel better now.

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It is hard for someone like me to tell how serious this plan for a completely silent aircraft is. This in particular made me dubious:

Environmental campaigners and people living on flight paths have already welcomed the campaign to build the jet.

"Campaign"? That makes me think that this design is as much politics as technology, a suspicion that is confirmed when I look at the website of the Silent Aircraft Initiative, which is the organisation that is promoting this scheme.

The initiative aims to improve competitiveness in the UK aerospace sector by changing the way research is undertaken, through extensive collaboration with a much wider franchise of stakeholders than ever before. By embracing this larger community, the Silent Aircraft Initiative seeks to produce a truly optimised concept design that contributes to the prosperity of the UK in an environmentally sustainable way.

Well, I suppose it could work. But it all smells to me a bit like a rerun of Concorde, in its very early stage, the stage when they were hustling up public money and political support. There is the same obsessive pursuit of one popular variable, in this case silence, to replace Concorde's equally narrow focus – with insufficient subsequent regard for either economy or cacophony – on speed. The thing even looks rather like Concorde.

I can find no mention of how extremely inconvenient maintaining this new contraption would surely be, what with the engines being on the top.

Comments anyone? Is this a serious scheme, or just kite flying? Or is it serious, but only at a very early stage? And is that BBC report wrong only in implying that the thing is nearly ready to be built?

Do all generic aircraft designs in their early stages have to be political, one way or another – either paid for wholly by a government or by governments in secret, or else "campaigned" for, out there in the public realm?

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It has not been a good last few days in the airline industry. Today, a passenger jet crashed in Venezuela, killing its entire passenger muster of more than 160 people. A Cypriot airliner crashed in Greece at the weekend, killing its entire passenger list and crew. And a few days previously, an Air France plane had a crash near Toronto, but fortunately all the passengers survived.

There is probably no direct connection to all this but it is a harsh reminder that, even in an age of ever-improving safety standards, air travel carries its hazards (and of course that is even before we get to the terror issue). It is also makes me aware that the skies over southern Britain, for example, are crammed with aircraft and it is still amazing that not more accidents occur than is the case. The volume of aircraft now flying to and from Heathrow's mega-airport is extraordinary and continues to grow. The margins for error when it comes to potential collisions must be razor-thin.

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I am on the road once again and sit in an upper Manhattan Starbucks as I write. I face another string of busy days; Saturday morning I fly to San Francisco where I will be doing my usual Wizard of Oz impression as a backstage magician for a JP Morgan technology business conference. Then, after a week of 6am crew calls and 12+ hour workdays, I will be off on a red-eye flight to Washington DC.

In DC I put on my National Space Society hat. Within that organization I am the overseer of conferences, The One Whom All ISDC Chairs Must Fear... which brings me around to why I am writing this article in the first place.

The National Space Society's 24th International Space Development Conference starts on Thursday May 19th and runs through Sunday afternoon at the Sheraton National Hotel. It looks like it will be quite a show this year.

NASA is running some programming tracks of their own in conjunction with the Society this time around and we also have our usual strong private space showing. Our speakers include such luminaries of the private road to space as Burt Rutan, President of Scaled Composites and SpaceShipOne designer; Dr. Peter Diamandis, Founder and Chairman, X Prize Foundation as well as Chairman and CEO of Zero Gravity Corporation; Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic; Elon Musk, President of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation; Jim Maser President and General Manager, Sea Launch Company LLC; Jim Benson, Chairman and CEO of SpaceDev; David Gump, CEO of Transformational Space LLC; Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures; Brian Feeney, Team Leader of The da Vinci Project (a Canadian based suborbital space venture); and many more.

But, as the late night TV commercials say, "Wait! There's more!" This year we have an absolutely unforgettable and unmissable event: a Gala banquet in an exciting location whose management will not allow me to disclose to you. Go through the conference agenda and see where Hugh Downs is speaking. It is a great event and who knows? Maybe you will run into me there.

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It is time to Loose The Blogs of War and make some bureaucrat lives absolute hell. It seems the State is being even more annoying than I had imagined possible. I should have known better.

US Government idiocy is delaying Virgin Galactic; it is bureaucratically effing Richard Branson around and it is delaying the time at which you and I will be able to fly into space.

"At this point we are not able to even view Scaled Composites' designs for the commercial space vehicle," Mr Whitehorn (Virgin Galactic President) testified before the House committee.

"After US government technology-transfer issues are clarified, and addressed if deemed necessary, we hope to place a firm order for the spacecraft," he said.

Mr Rutan added that the regulations have already affected financing for the project, which originally was to come from Mr Branson's London-based Virgin Group.

"We have had to move away from the basic concept of this being a foreign-funded development," he said.

I myself had believed that a UK company would not be treated so shabbily. As Burt Rutan quipped in a recent US Congressional hearing about commercial space flight:

"I thought Britain was a relatively friendly nation,"

So did I. Brothers-in-arms and all that? Remember who else is in Iraq? Anglosphere and all that rot? Hmmm?

PS: If you can be in the DC area May 19-22, drop by the International Space Development Conference. Burt Rutan and the Virgin Galactic President are both on the program. See you there!

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Whatever you reckon on the politics of it all, it is still a big (and I do mean big) step (jump?) forward for aviation. I refer to the maiden flight of the gigantic Airbus A380, which has just been successfully completed.

The A380 - designed to carry as many as 840 people between major airports - took off from its production site in southern France at just after 0830 GMT.

"The speed on take-off was exactly as we had expected," said test pilot Jacques Rosay.

"The weather is wonderful. Everything is absolutely perfect and we are very happy."

The crew took the plane out over the Bay of Biscay, before returning to base.

This, though, the Antonov An-225, featured last Monday evening on C5 TV's Massive Machines show, is even bigger.

Airbus will not mind about that, but they may be more worried about this:

WASHINGTON – Buoyed by an influx of new orders, Boeing Co. appears to be turning the corner in its battle with archrival Airbus.

So, will all this airplane competition make global warming worse, to the point of eventual global disaster? My sister goes on about the globally warming badness of jet airplanes is every time I meet her.

I must remember to ask my nephew, her son, what he thinks about this issue, next time I meet him. He is an airline pilot.

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According to The Australian, Richard Branson wants an Australian site for his new suborbital space planes. That in itself would not be particularly unusual: others before him have seen and considered the Australian launch advantage.

A final design for Virgin's flagship spacecraft, the VSS Enterprise, is expected to be signed off on this year. A US base is expected to be training 3000 astronauts for the $US190,000 sub-orbital flights in as little as three years.

Sir Richard said in Sydney that the plan was to build sufficient spaceships to allow the establishment of separate bases around the world.

It may not have done so for many of you, but this sets off tinkling bells and flashing lights for me. If you are at all close to the space industry you will know there is an excellent near equator site in Australia where there has long been interest for a Spaceport. I have not been following it much lately, but I do remember there was an intent to launch Russian rockets from there. The current status is neither here nor there: Australia is the only Anglospherian country with existing space infrastructure and near equatorial lands.

When a spaceship takes off it gets an extra boost from the Earth's rotational velocity. The further from the equator you are, the less advantage you get. Imagine you were at the North Pole. The Earth is rotating your spaceship on the pad once every 24 hours and when you launch, your engines have to supply 100% of the velocity required for orbit.

If you are at an intermediate geographical location, like KSC at Cape Canaveral, the rotating planet is moving your spaceship at a significant eastward velocity before it even leaves the ground.

If you are at the equator, you are already traveling at a rate of 1/24 the Earth's circumference per hour. An equatorial or near-equatorial site is ideal for a first generation orbital spaceship . It gives a starting velocity of a little under a half km/sec eastwards on your fully loaded spaceship before it even leaves the ground. This is a big win. You need roughly 7.5 km/sec to make orbit: you may think of the Earth's equator as a free, reuseable first stage.

So. Inference one: Branson is already looking ahead to orbital flights.

Now notice he is considering more than one spaceport location. He is not talking of abandoning the US launch site in the Mojave. He wants to add another site for suborbital fares. He would have two sites at which he could operate suborbital space ship take offs and landings.

Branson is in the airline business and knows better than I what the size of the market is for people who want to take a short suborbital tourist hop... versus the number of high value business people who would pay extraordinary fares to reach the antipodes in 45 minutes. British Air refused to sell him the Concordes, but Richard might just laugh last and best.

Inference two: I expect we will at some point see a proof of concept flight of a Rutan vehicle which leaves the Mojave on a suborbital intercontinental ballistic trajectory and lands in Australia. If he has a vehicle capable of carrying 6 paying passengers for tourism, that same vehicle with a lone pilot can probably boost onto a trans-Pacific trajectory.

Branson, Rutan and Allen are smart cookies. They are not going to advertise their plans ahead of time. But if you are going to go into space and make it pay, this is the way to do it:

Step 1) Fund a suborbital test vehicle and get it partly paid for by winning the X-Prize. [DONE]

Step 2) Build a suborbital joy ride vehicle that mostly pays for itself going up and down. [IN PROGRESS]

Step 3) Fly the first intercontinental suborbital flight with that vehicle in a stripped down single pilot mode.

Step 4) Build a slightly larger vehicle that mostly pays for itself via trans-Pacific flights.

Step 5) Use that American built vehicle in a stripped down, single pilot mode to fly from an equatorial base into orbit. Perhaps it will be necessary to build a special vehicle to deal with higher re-entry heat loading, but there are now two revenue streams on line, not to mention Bob Bigelow's $50M America's Space Prize.

Step 6) Add another revenue stream. Sell astronaut transport services to NASA about the time the Shuttles are sent off to museums. Perhaps also sell delivery services to Bob Bigelow's inflatable orbital facility for yet another stream.

Step 7) Earth orbit is "half way to anywhere". The solar system is now your oyster.

As they say in the tech business, "It's a plan!"

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This NASA PSA works on so many levels I hardly know where to begin.

It does not at any point say "only socialist space programs can get us there". You could infer that if you saw it in certain contexts, but then again, if you saw it at a space entrepreneurs get together you would not. The underlying message is a good one and I thoroughly applaud it. We will reach for the stars. We will colonize the solar system. We will leave the cradle.

The infant is a young Paul Allen or Bob Bigelow or Burt Rutan... not a future employee of the State.

Ed: You may need to down load the mpg and play it locally.

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Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation is an old friend of mine who has been directly involved in much behind the scenes in commercial space, including the private attempt to save MIR. Here, with his permission, is an article like the one I have been intending to write. I am still traveling and just have had no time do so. Rick probably did a better job of it anyway

There are three initiatives from 2004 that if built upon the right way will rapidly accelerate the human breakout into space.

The first was U.S. President George W. Bush???s vision of permanent human presence beyond Earth orbit, which was endorsed by congressional funding and clarified by the Aldridge Commission.

The second was the flight of SpaceShipOne, the first major triumph of the new space movement and its goal of opening space to the people. This was solidified by a multi-million-dollar contract from Virgin Galactic to build a fleet of commercial spaceships.

Finally, the passage of legislation in Congress that begins to create regulatory certainty in the New Space transportation field clears the way for the long-term development of this nascent industry.

Thus we have both a mandate for our government to explore and open space to permanent habitation, and the birth of a private sector space industry which can power, sustain and capitalize that expansion of our civilization beyond the Earth. But of course, this means they will have to work together, which is a bigger challenge than the physical act of opening space itself. But I believe it can be done with benefits to all.

However, there is one point that needs to be made early in this discussion that clearly is not understood by the traditional space establishment. I believe the new space frontier movement can survive and even begin the opening of space completely on its own, even if NASA vanished tomorrow.

I am not expressing a desire, just a reality that should be part of all future discussions of national space policy. Momentum is building, and the funneling of several independent fortunes into the cause is creating networks of mutual support and interest.

For example, we will soon witness the launch of Bigelow Aerospace hotel test articles on a SpaceX rocket. Projecting this trend further, we arrive at another critical milestone on the way to an open frontier, when the first private space facility is serviced and supported entirely by a private transport firm or firms. This is a real take-off point, for when this happens if we should lose the government space program entirely the frontier will still be at hand.

I am not stretching reality. At some point in the next 10 years the private sector will attain the ability to transport relatively large numbers of people and payloads to and from low Earth orbit on its own, to house them while they are in orbit and to develop the infrastructure needed for industrial development. This part of the frontier formula is simple: Transportation + Destination = Habitation + Exploitation + Industrialization.

As SpaceX and Bigelow begin to develop their infrastructure, Richard Branson, who created Virgin Galactic, will have been flying suborbital commercial space flights for years, as will have Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder who just announced a new commercial spaceport in West Texas. Branson and Burt Rutan, the man behind SpaceshipOne, already have said they want to go to orbit and even beyond, as do Bigelow and Bezos, including trips to and around the Moon.

Again, this is serious stuff. I am not wildly chanting L-5 in '95 as the early followers of the late Gerard O'Neill of the Space Studies Institute in their naivete used to do. I am not betting on some pie-in-the-sky magic product like Iridium and the mythical little Leo constellations to fund start up rocket companies. I am certainly not betting on some magic government X vehicle like the X-33 space goose.

These new O'Neillians have their own money, their own business models and the ability to finance what they are doing all by themselves.

The new imperative that must be faced by our government space leaders is not just to carry out a formal national mandate, and do so on a tight budget, but to maintain their relevance in a field that may well be moving faster than they are. How does NASA justify its intention to spend tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to build what will probably be a far less efficient space transportation system than what the commercial space industry is developing for its own purposes.

Look at the contrasts. Bigelow is assuming that his $50 million dollar America's Prize will result in a safe and reusable passenger capsule for roundtrips between Earth and low Earth orbit. NASA is expecting to spend over $10 billion dollars to develop the same sort of capability. Yes, Bigelow expects the winner to spend far more than the actual prize amount based on hopes of follow-on markets; and yes, the winning capsule will have fewer bells and whistles that anything NASA builds, but the magnitude of difference in the development costs is ridiculous.

NASA, the White House and Congress are being driven more by the power of traditional aerospace lobbying and the need to maintain political constituencies than practical and common sense understanding of the changes at hand. NASA must be made to grasp this now and stop all of its current plans for the Moon/Mars initiative, or it will fail.

Although the current Crew Exploration Vehicle plans incorporate a very small wedge of new space players, the new White House space transportation policy and the bulk of U.S. government funding is still targeted at the old space industry.

How do self- and investor-funded innovators compete against government subsidized systems? How does this help America compete in global markets in the long run?

The government is ignoring the need to grow a wide-ranging and robust space transportation and low Earth orbit industrial base to support all of our activities from here to the Moon in favor of drawing up monster space vehicles such as a new heavy-lift launcher.

They want to be able to toss giant elements of government-designed space facilities and craft into orbit all at once, a la Saturn 5. This may have been necessary when we were in a race to the Moon, but a much wiser, long-term solution now would be to use smaller vehicles over time to get the people and infrastructure to where they are needed.

If the goal is to have a thriving Earth-Moon-Mars economy as an end point, it makes sense to begin creating the low Earth orbit anchorage and industrial port element as early as possible.

Pay for delivery contracts and prizes tied to tax incentives for investment in space transportation would greatly accelerate the growth of New Space transportation systems. On orbit assembly would teach us how to really operate in space, while developing expertise and potentially profitable orbital businesses. Fuel depots in space could be developed now using new space and old space transportation systems to fill them and preparing a technology base for the day when we begin to harvest and refine propellants from space resources. Breaking payloads down into small elements expands the pie greatly. It also mimics how we do things on Earth, which seems to have worked very well so far.

If handled the right way, even the dinosaurs of aerospace could be coaxed into evolving or spinning off innovative space transportation divisions to service this new mixed private- and public-sector market. After all, Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman are not doing their stockholders any favors by clinging to a dying market, when an expanding frontier-based market would not only be potentially huge, but by definition infinite.

The president has said we should go back to the Moon and on to Mars, this time to stay. Of course from his mouth to the ears of NASA is a journey far greater than the distance to the Moon. Already, the concept of permanence has been redefined by those who are mono-maniacally focused on the end point of Mars. They have jettisoned lunar development, instead opting for touch-and-go missions to the Moon on the way to a grand-flags-and-footprints mission to Mars. They prefer Apollo redux rather than the careful build up of an Earth-Moon infrastructure that can teach us how to go and live anywhere in space forever.

Yet there is hope that some in NASA and the space community are shaking free of old ways of thinking. I have met many, including the oft maligned and yet ignored planetary scientists who really are beginning to get it when it comes to frontier-style thinking. At recent NASA sanctioned meetings, I was stunned to hear many of them rejecting a return to the Moon based on scattershot landings for so-called scientific purposes as some at headquarters had been planning. Apollo on steroids, as it was called, seemed to be roundly trounced in favor of a careful build-up to one community on the south pole of the Moon.

There are those who fear we will get bogged down on the Moon, that NASA will simply be replacing the Albatross of the international space station with a large grey boulder called the Moon, weighing itself down so much with lunar infrastructure it cannot proceed to Mars. This is a completely valid point. We must learn from the mistakes of the space station and not repeat them on the Moon.

NASA must never again tie itself to facilities or buildings, or to trying to manage transportation and other infrastructure. NASA will need not an exit strategy from the Moon, but rather an entrance strategy to open the Moon, and the basics of this new way of doing business must be locked in this year.

The actual construction and operation of the lunar community must be carried out by the private sector. Meanwhile, NASA can develop its own pure Mars analog base a few kilometers around the other side of the Moon, using what it learned from the first buildup and focusing purely on studying the elements needed for Mars. The Mars analog can be placed outside of the view of Earth, where the astronauts there can be isolated, delays can be simulated, and yet supported and backed up by staff at the main community-whose facilities and habitat rentals can feed into the economy.

This will require revolutionary thinking on the part of the U.S. government, especially in its relationship to the private sector. These changes will have to extend far beyond technologies and operational considerations, to the legal, regulatory and contractual aspects of space.

The United States must develop a package of tax and investment incentives to open the spigots of Wall Street and other capital sources. The normal methods of cost-plus contracting -- awarding contracts to develop capabilities rather than paying for provision of services -- must be done away with. But it will not be sufficient for the government to simply pay for the delivery of goods, people and services if we want to kick start the space economy. The nation must go further. We must create a package of incentives that together make it irresistible for private investors to want to get involved on the frontier.

One example is what I call a Catalytic Contingency Contract. Let's say NASA needs a laboratory for long-term research. The government, rather than building or contracting a module as was done on the international space station program, would instead offer to lease a certain number of square feet for an extended period from the first private developer who demonstrates the capability to provide it.

This lease would be part of an overall package designed to make it so sweet a deal that the firm and its investors would be able to see past any potential risks. Such a contract would include: The right of the developer to rent out any volume beyond the government's to anyone it pleases at whatever rate it chooses; the right to own all intellectual property it may develop while building the facility; the right to sell any advertising based on its contract and involvement in the project; and freedom from any taxes it might be assessed on profits realized from any activities generated by the project.

The privately funded new space firms will push into space if the money continues to flow and it does not turn out to be a billionaire's fad. NASA eventually might be able to spend billions and get something or someone to the Moon in a couple of decades -- if politicians and presidents continue their support.

For now NASA has billions of dollars and a mandate to push outward into space, but it needs a partner that thinks outside the box. The new space firms live outside of the box and if given the right support they could accelerate the push into space and make it permanent.

Last year both the government and the people said they want to open space. Working separately the public and private sectors might be able to stagger and
stumble into the future, or they might trip and fall back into the past. Together, using the strengths of each, we can create an amazing future and take the first strong steps now. I do not know about you, but I do not want to wait any longer.

Rick N. Tumlinson is the founder of the Space Frontier Foundation.

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There are a lot of big shiny 1940s-era aircraft zooming across our cinema screens at the moment. Yeh! We have had Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, we are due to get the remake of The Flight of Phoenix, based on the wonderful old movie starring James Stewart, and I have just returned from watching The Aviator, starring Leonardo Di Caprio as mogul, test pilot and eccentric, Howard Hughes. It is a fine film, and makes a number of important points about the man himself, the nature of doing business in America in the mid-20th Century and the evolution of modern air travel.

The story is quite well known of how a rich young oil family son becomes a major player in the aviation industry, challenges rivals like PanAm, produces smash-hit movies, before descending into madness and solitude. Director Martin Scorcese has long been fascinated with Hughes' tale and gets DiCaprio to convey the mixture of driving ambition, brilliant engineering skills, bravery and craziness. Hughes could be seen, from one vantage point as an almost Randian-style business hero, challenging rivals like PanAm, whose boss was played with appropriate menacing charm by Alec Baldwin.

There are two great scenes which get the pro-enterprise, unpretentious side of Hughes across. He drives with his then girlfriend, Katherine Hepburn, excellently played by Cate Blanchett, to see Hepburn's family. At lunch, Hepburn's mother, instantly declares to Hughes that "we are all socialists here", and "I do hope you are not a Republican", and Hughes, bless him, looking around the vast mansion and its grounds, is too dumbstruck at these comments to make a fast and smart reply. Recovering his composure, later Hughes tells the preening Hepburns that his favourite reading is technical engineering reports on planes, which of course has the welcome effect of shutting the ghastly Hepburns up.

In a later scene, set in 1947 when Hughes is fighting for the future of his airline TWA against the monopolistic ambitions PanAm in cahoots with the U.S. Senate, Hughes makes a number of fine points about competition and business risk-taking that almost got me cheering in the stalls. Hughes wins his battle and PanAm is forced to concede.

Hughes was a troubled man and spent the last two decades of his life in circumstances so lonely and depressed that it of course will colour one's view of his life in the round. But I came away from the film feeling a certain admiration for Hughes in how he was willing to challenge the status quo. Long after people have forgotten corrupt U.S. senators and complacent airline bosses, they will remember the man who built and flew some amazing planes. I also cannot help but wonder whether people will think something similar in future about our contemporary airline boss and daredevil man of action, Britain's own Richard Branson. We shall see.

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The picture below has been making the rounds of the net aviation (and other) communities the last few days. The young Aussie lads chanced upon a motor race event whilst on coastal patrol. They went into a temporary hover all the better to communicate with numerous and luvly birds on the ground.

Someone caught them in the act and the photo went up on a professional pilot's site from whence it spread to other places.

The lads seem to be in a bit of hot water over it, no doubt due to complaints from the PC (Pulchritudinously Challenged) sector.

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Lt. Charlie William of the British Army survived a 3500 foot fall with minimal damage to his person after his parachute rigging tangled upon exit from the airplane during training over Kenya.

He broke through a corrugated iron roof and gave some Kenyans a bit of a start. I have heard of dropping in for tea unexpectedly, but Charlie seems to have taken it a bit farther than most.

It does not appear to have been reported whether the home owners supplied their guest with a hot cuppa as he awaited assistance.

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Since Brian brought the subject up... I too have been following the political posturing that has been going on about regulating the nascent human space flight industry. The regime that currently exists is quite satisfactory to all. Customers have to read a list of all the horrible ways in which they will probably die, but once they have done so the FAA will get out of the way so long as the launch company guarantees the body parts will not cause more damage than the insurance covers when they hit the ground. (It is a little more complex than that, but I am not about to give a tutorial on spaceflight FARS just now.)

I think this open letter from an old friend of mine will explain what is currently going on in DC, or at least give you an intro to it.

Friday, November 19, 2004

Dear Space Advocates & Correspondents:

This afternoon the House of Representatives had a 40 minute debate on legislation designed to advance the U.S. commercial human spaceflight industry. It was a good and spirited debate, with bipartisan supporters speaking in favor, and two partisan Democrats speaking against HR5382.

Unfortunately, the opponents' arguments reflected the same misunderstanding of this issue that so many people have. Their presumption is that the federal government needs to set standards to protect the safety of the early adventurers who wish to buy a risky ride into space. Even before the vehicles that would fly them are designed, let alone built and flying. Frankly, Mr. Oberstar and Mr. DeFazio, the Ranking Minority Members of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee and its Aviation Subcommittee, seem to believe that we need to regulate spaceflight as if it were just another approach to Aviation.

But rockets are not airplanes, and the Commercial Space Launch Act and the U.S. commercial space transportation industry are not under the jurisdiction of the Aviation Subcommittee. Space is a new sphere of economic activity, and the House's experts on these issues are members of the House's Committee that is focused on America's future, the Science Committee.

More importantly, the House worked for several months with the Senate to develop a compromise version of the original HR3752, which was passed by a vote of 402 to 1 in March of this year. It is important to note that HR3752 told the Secretary of Transportation to promote and license the carrying of "space flight participants" for compensation, i.e. to make money, under an "informed consent" regime. In other words, the rocket company had to tell the passenger how likely it was they might crash, and then the passenger could choose to take the risk or not. All regulation was focused on making sure the rockets didn't hurt anyone on the ground. The Secretary was not given any authority - and has none under current law - to regulate in order to protect people riding on the vehicle.

And I might just point out, Mr. Oberstar and Mr. DeFazio both voted for HR3752 in March, along with every other Democratic member of the Transportation Committee who showed up to vote. (The only vote against HR3752 in March was by a libertarian Republican who didn't think the government had any right to regulate rockets at all !)

So today's choice on HR5382 is a choice not between one level of safety and another. It's between Congress telling the American people they have a right to go into space and an expectation that, over time, it will become more affordable and more reliable to do so... and saying "we can't be bothered to write legislation to help enable this new industry". Fortunately, the American people *already* have the right to go into space. And the American free market will make it ever-more-affordable and ever-safer, even without the help of federal regulators. But it would be a good thing if this bipartisan legislation were enacted into law to help accelerate the process.

Ironically, the two members speaking in favor of higher safety today will actually leave the industry free to do whatever it wants under current law, with no process by which the Secretary could, let alone would, start to set safety standards. So perhaps they are more committed to stopping legislation - and a new industry - than safety, after all.

James Muncy
Consultant to several Commercial Human Spaceflight companies

I am sure some will complain the government should not regulate space industry at all. I agree. Unfortuneately that option does not exist. We can either ameliorate what government is going to do and have a space industry, or close our eyes and let the worst sort of Nanny Statists have their way. That could kill the industry before it grows big enough to defend itself. That is to say, big enough to get your and my bottoms off this dirtball.

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XCOR Aerospace, the Mojave spaceship company which provided floor space and food for many of us who attended the first commercial suborbital launch in June, has announced a contest.

The prizes will be given to the persons, groups or companies who provide working steam engines fulfilling the contest specifications at various levels.

Yes, spaceships really can use steam engines. There is a lot of waste heat floating around a rocket engine so it makes sense to use some of it to operate the engine. If you are a home machinest or have a small engineering company and think this might be fun, go pick up the rules and the pump interfaces specification.

Ad astra my friends!

Photo: copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved

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I just ran across this quote of Burt Rutan from this afternoon on Space Flight Now:

"Quite frankly, I think the big guys, the Boeings, the Lockheeds, the nay-say people at Houston, they probably ... think we're a bunch of home builders who put a rocket in a Long Easy," he said, referring to one of his recreational aircraft designs. "But if they ... got a look at how this flight was run and how we developed the capabilities of this ship and showed its safety, I think they're looking at each other now and saying, 'We're screwed.'"

Yes, I do believe the pigs had their noses so deep in the trough they never saw the hatchet coming. If any of them did look up they just grunted at the idea anyone could possibly ever displace them, not realizing they were not being so much displaced as bypassed and made redundant to requirements.

I love the smell of bacon in the morning. It smells of... liberty.

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I am sure the Scaled Composites team is busy with their last minute checkouts now. I will be following this event as closely as one can from a third of a planetary circumference away. Obviously I will not be as immediate as those on the edge of the runway, but perhaps I can supply knowledgeable commentary on the next few hours.

So, time to get the Anseri X-Prize out of the way and move on to the Bigelow et al Prize!

Time to up-ship! Hot jets, good luck and Godspeed Mike!

UPDATE: The pilot for this flight has been announced and will be Brian Binnie.

UPDATE 1257 UTC: Weather at Mojave is reported looking good. Which is not unusual for Mojave! White Knight/SpaceShipOne takeoff is scheduled for 1400 UTC, so I would imagine they are outside the hanger and doing the the Pre-Flight about now. Burt Rutan has reportedly stated they are shooting for the alitutude record today, 354,200 feet reached by Joe Walker in the X-15 on August 23, 1963.

UPDATE 1317 UTC: As Rand Simberg points out, today is the 47th Anniversary of the first satellite launch.

UPDATE 1339 UTC: WK/SS1 is reported to be on the taxiway. I imagine the crowds are waving flags and going wild about now. Not much longer before the takeoff... then we wait an hour for the drop and burn.

UPDATE 1356 UTC: WK/SSI is in the air. For the next hour everyone gets a sore neck watching them circle ever higher towards the 47.000 foot drop altitude. It gets a bit easier to follow them when they pass about 20,000 feet and contrails begin to show... of course that depends on the conditions at altitude and is not a given. Then they will fly to the East of the airport so they will be nearer Edward AFB for radar tracking. This means everyone gets absolutely blinded looking into the sun to watch the initial climbout after the drop an hour from now.

UPDATE 1425 UTC: If you were watching Black Sky on Discovery last night (obviously I did not, sitting here outside Belfast) and liked the simulations of the SS1 flight, you can buy the software at X-Plane. Tell Austin I sent you.

UPDATE 1431 UTC: I expect WK/SS1 is passing through 40,000 feet about now. I notice that an old friend of mine, Greg Maryniak, is the commentator for the X-Prize Foundation. Not that surprising since Greg and Peter Diamandes, who I've known since he and the late Tod Hawley were MIT college kids, run the place. Greg was the Exec at the Space Studies Institute in Princeton all through the 1980's and into the early 1990's.

UPDATE 1445 UTC: By the time you read this I expect SS1 will have dropped and fired the hybrid rocket motor. Yeehah!!!

UPDATE 1452 UTC: Drop and burn happened on time... burnout and SS1 is coasting upwards, hopefully to break the X15 record as well as cop the $10,000,000 Anseri X-Prize!

UPDATE 1455 UTC: Unofficial apogee at around 368,000 feet. They may have the record. X-15 max was 354,200 feet. Sounds like a safe margin to me!

UPDATE 1515 UTC: Verily as I was on the phone trading notes with Rand, it touched down. The X-Prize has been won! The X-15 altitude record has been bettered! Now, on to commercial Virgin Galactic flights, on to the Bigelow prize for an orbital flight by 2008... and not to mention we can expect the da Vinci project to carry out their balloon drop flight within a few months and Armadillo Aerospace should fly sometime next year too. Oh what a wonderful year this is!

UPDATE 1619 UTC: It seems the altitude is official and Burt is claiming the altitude record. In an article I wrote last year, I suggested Rutan has a shot at 'the Triple Crown' of aviation records. Voyager flew around the world non-stop for the distance record; SS1 has now copped the altitude record. The only gem missing from the Scaled Composites front office is speed. As many have pointed out, SS1 is probably not capable of surviving a low angle speed run. But that does not mean some near future Rutan vehicle will not do it. I think he will go for it at some point.

UPDATE 1654 UTC: I note that Leonard David has been the journalist blogging for space.com from Mojave. Len is another one of our little crowd of space illuminati. He started off with the Project Harvest Moon attempt to buy the last Saturn V's back in 1976 or so; he founded a space organization of his own at university and later became the magazine editor for for Von Braun's NSI, and later for Ad Astra of NSS, the merged L5 and NSI organization. He also plays a mean autoharp. Yep. We all know each other.

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I just received this Burt Rutan statement in my 'in-basket'. It addresses the much media hyped rolls, which were in reality not a very big deal:

While observing the significant incorrect information being published about the rolls seen on the 29 Sept 04 SpaceShipOne flight, we are responding by offering a bit of discussion to help provide some clarity. This information is approved for publication -- Burt Rutan

Comments On The Rolling Rumors

Burt provides some preliminary information about the rolling motions seen on the First X-Prize Flight:

The complex reason on why the rolling departure occurred will be described in a report we will post at a later date. What I am intending to do here is merely address some of the incorrect rumors about the rolls that have been seen in various news stories and web discussion groups.

While the first roll occurred at a high true speed, about 2.7 Mach, the aerodynamic loads were quite low (120 KEAS) and were decreasing rapidly, so the ship never saw any significant structural stresses. The reason that there were so many rolls was because shortly after they started, Mike was approaching the extremities of the atmosphere. Nearly all of the 29 rolls that followed the initial departure were basically at near-zero-q, thus they were a continuous rolling motion without aerodynamic damping, rather than the airplane-like aerodynamic rolls seen by an aerobatic airplane. In other words, they were more like space flight than they were like airplane flight. Thus, Mike could not damp the motions with his aerodynamic flight controls.

Mike elected to wait until he feathered the boom-tail in space, before using the reaction control system thrusters (RCS) to damp the roll rate. When he finally started to damp the rates he did so successfully and promptly. The RCS damping, to a stable attitude without significant angular rates was complete well before the ship reached apogee (337,600 feet, or 103 Km). That gave mike time to relax, note his peak altitude, and then pick up a digital high-resolution camera and take some great photos out the windows. Those photos are now being considered for publication by a major magazine.

While we did not plan the rolls, we did get valuable engineering data on how well our RCS system works in space to damp high angular rates. We also got a further evaluation of our "Care-free Reentry" capability, under a challenging test condition. As seen on the videos of the flight, the ship righted itself quickly and accurately without pilot input as it fell straight into the atmosphere. No other winged, horizontal-landing spaceship (X-15, Buran, SpaceShuttle) has this capability.

Incidentally... there will be quite an all night party at Mojave Civilian Test Flight Facility (and Spaceport) the night before the second flight. Apogee Books is sponsoring an all night music fest near their tent in the public viewing area.

Sadly I will again not be there.

Addendum: For the non-pilot readers, KEAS is Knots Equivalent Airspeed. Knots are Nautical Miles per Hour in pilotese. To place this in perspective, my old Cessna 172, (N3892S circa 1981), was quite happy cruising along at 120 KIAS, or 120 Knots Indicated Airspeed. Airspeed is how fast the wind is going past your wings. If you were in a 120 Knot headwind, you could be flying 120 KIAS and sitting over someone's head like you were the ball on top of a flagpole. Indicated means it is what you read off the dial in the cockpit; Equivalent means that the air over your wings has the equivalent effect after accounting for speed and density of the air. (You can also play with a thing called a Reynolds number which affects basic design of aircraft in various regimes, here if you are interested.)

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The reports I am reading elsewhere indicate they have made it, although things got a bit dicey. From the sounds of it, they had RCS problems when they left the atmosphere. I do not know if Melvill regained orientation during the exoatmospheric flight or had to wait until the shuttlecock re-entry.

Early reports are that they made the altitude necessary for the X-Prize flight; now they have to do it again within the next two weeks. Hopefully the controls problem can be worked out.

It is a tribute to the design that the craft could tumble going out of the atmosphere and yet return intact. It is also a tribute to the pilot and an answer to those who think robots are the answer. Robots make craters. Pilots usually bring the ship back in one piece.

Now we wait for more detailed reports on the flight.

More It looks like the problem was not RCS. Melvill shut down the main engines 11 seconds early to stop the roll rate buildup. That sounds like some sort of main engine burn asymmetry. Again, we will just have to wait. But they do appear to have made the necessary altitude.

Update Melvill put the blame for the roll on himself. It was not a fault with the ship. Perhaps Melvill has just invented the space age equivalent of PIO (pilots will know what I'm talking about).

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I just had a very short chat with 'a trusted source' ;-) out at the Mojave test facility. The weather is beautiful and the flight is expected to go. I welcome any of our honoured readers who work out there on the runway's edge to report to us as events unfold.

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Unless there has been a change in plans while I slept Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne will fly again in a few hours. This is the first of the required flights in their attempt at the Anseri X-Prize of $10 million. This time they will be flying with the required equivalent weight of passengers in the cabin. The prize clinching flight is scheduled for October 10th.

Some weeks ago the Da Vinci project in Canada announced a first flight date of October 2nd but I have not been following them closely. Armadillo Aerospace is still moving ahead at a steady pace: build a little, test a little, break a little, in the old fashioned hands-on engineering way. Peter Diamandes' Zero G tourist flights - in an airplane! - are now flying and generating revenue.

The next prize, for the first orbital flight, has been announced by Robert Bigelow:

Company founder and millionaire Robert T. Bigelow told Aviation Week & Space Technology that he will announce as early as this week a new $50-million space launch contest called America's Space Prize.

The objective is to spur development of a low-cost commercial manned orbital vehicle capable of launching 5-7 astronauts at a time to Bigelow inflatable modules by the end of the decade.

Bigelow has committed $25 million of his own to the purse.

All in all, 2004 is an exciting year for those of us who have dedicated our lives to opening the space frontier.

Note: I will unfortuneately not be present to photo blog this launch. At the moment I am damned fortuneate I can afford a pie for supper and I have been scrambling to keep my broadband connection bill paid. That is the ups and the downs of freelancing... with much assistance from customers who pay whenever or never. Freedom ain't easy.

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I have for some time been suspicious other big things were going on behind some scenes into which my vast network of spies and informers does not reach. I have had nods of confirmation when I voiced my opinions... but nothing specific as to precisely what was going on. The possibility of a Richard Branson and Burt Rutan alliance and something else secret going on in a Mojave hanger has been very much in the back of my mind.

Today, the Branson part of that became public fact. Whether there is more to it - and I believe there is - at least this much is now admitted openly. According to an article from the Dow Jones Newswire of 5:25 a.m this morning, emailed to me just a short while ago:

U.K. entrepreneur Richard Branson said Monday that Virgin Group (VGN.YY) plans to launch commercial space flights over the next few years.

Virgin has signed an agreement with pioneering aviation designer Burt Rutan to build an aircraft based on Rutan's SpaceShipOne vessel, Branson said.

This I expected. I also have been wondering if they are secretly working on a next generation vehicle already. What I did not expect was major commercialization to happen quite this soon:

"Virgin has been in talks with Paul Allen and Bert throughout this year and in the early hours of Saturday morning signed a historical deal to license SpaceShipOne's technology to build the world's first private spaceship to go into commercial operating service," Branson told a news conference.

The new service will be called Virgin Galactic and expects to fly 3,000 new astronauts within five years.

"Virgin Galactic will be run as a business, but a business with the sole purpose of making space travel more and more affordable," Branson said. "Those privileged space pioneers who can afford to take our first flights will not only have the most awesome experience of their lives, but by stepping up to the plate first they will bring the dream of space travel for many millions closer to reality."

Start saving me lads and lasses! We are bound for the stars and the government may go sit and rotate upon an aging ICBM.

UPDATE: Richard Branson was in the studio for the evening news on Channel 5 here; Channel 1 (which is really Channel 4!) gave far less coverage and used some subtle tricks to give it a negative spin.

First: Channel 5, my current favorite for UK news and not just beause the presenter is good looking. Which she is. Branson will be charging UKP 115K per person initially. He is buying into the venture with Allen and Rutan to the tune of UKP 15M. The first vehicles are to be ready for customers in three years. They will carry six. Five fare paying passengers and a pilot. It will retain the 'shuttlecock' re-entry mode. The fee will cover 3 days of pre-flight training with people like Buzz Aldrin; the flight will not be very long itself, with only a few minutes of freefall time. They will all fly past the 100km altitude which makes them civilian astronauts by current practice. Branson will fly on the first flight and says he might even take his very elderly father along if he is still healthy at age 90 because he does want to go. The first ship will be named... (drum roll)... the SS Enterprise.

The Ch5 presenter then went off into questions about UK rail schedules on Branson lines; the possibilities of polluting space - which Branson put into perspective by noting there are as many stars out there as there are grains of sand on the Earth; and the risk. Branson was up front that this is pioneering technology... but safe enough that he will fly, his elderly father might fly and even his kids would be allowed to go.

Ch1 on the other hand... the background music was rock with lyrics "Military Mission to Mars..." They played on the fear factor a great deal more and overall gave only a minute or two to the story. They were much more interested in what Gordon Brown had to say today.

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It seems the Tuhoe tribe of New Zealand's Maoris have decided to think big:

"In answer to my questions, they also confirmed their claims of absolute sovereignty over all air space to the heavens above. It was specifically stated that, once the Foreshore and Seabed legislation is resolved, they would be approaching Air New Zealand and other airlines to negotiate compensation for all incursions into their air space.

"They drew the parallel of other sovereign states where missiles are deployed to shoot down unauthorised aircraft. The group also confirmed that it would be approaching NASA and other authorities in respect of their satellites that orbit the Earth.

You simply could not make it up.

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Anyone who follows defense issues closely is aware of the global air tanker problem. A) There ain't enough of 'em, and B) What one's there is are a gettin' a mite long in the tooth.

Modern air warfare is highly dependant on tankers. Whether for long distance ferry operations, maximum range missions or extending battlefield loiter time, the tanker aircraft is a crucial element of modern warfare.

Many countries face the same problem. The UK finds itself with insufficient capacity to handle any sort of operational surge. For America it is an aging fleet of Boeing 707's. Yes, you heard me. That classic 1957 jetliner that started it all. There were plans to upgrade via a leaseback arrangement for new Boeing aircraft, but congressional support collapsed amidst a scandal.

So, what does one call a situation like this? Why, a market opportunity of course!

Dublin-based Omega Air has teamed up with US company Evergreen International in a joint venture to launch the Global Airtanker Service (GAS) KDC-10.

GAS is pitching the KDC-10 airliner conversion as an interim solution for the faltering UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft (FSTA) programme as well as targeting other potential customers such as the USAF and US Navy.

They will not be supplying green Jet fuel for Saint Paddy's day.

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If you have enjoyed the discussion about commercial space and the future here on Samizdata, you might find The Space Meetup of interest.

The Meetup website is a good example of ways in which internet entrepreneurs are building businesses on the community aspect of the internet, and in this case assisting the creation of a global community in the non-cyberworld.

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Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon.

After creating this wonderful capability, the Government did what Governments do. They squandered it. They threw it away.

The State is not your friend.

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Greg Nemitz has been a 'love him or hate him figure' within the space community for quite some time. Many have wondered what he could possibly accomplish by claiming the Asteroid Eros and charging NASA parking fees to leave their probe on its surface. Some were outraged when he took NASA to court for the failure to pay... not outraged because they felt it was silly; outraged because they thought he might generate bad case law.

Now Greg is on to the next step up the legal ladder. I am beginning to see the outlines of what may be a fascinating and outrageous (in a good sense) plan to settle the issue of extraterrestrial property rights in the US Supreme Court.

I will let Greg speak for himself:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CARSON CITY, NEVADA

The first legal case in Space Property Law was advanced today, 20 July, 2004, into U.S. Federal Appeals Court. Gregory Nemitz of Carson City, Nevada filed an appeal brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, California. The brief requests that the lower Court's Order to Dismiss be overturned.

On November 3, 2003 Nemitz filed a Complaint for Declaratory Judgment in U.S. District Court in Reno, Nevada. The complaint charged the court to resolve the question, "Does the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 preclude private ownership of an asteroid and/or property on celestial bodies, or does it not?"

In March of 2000, Nemitz published a claim of ownership to Asteroid 433, Eros, commencing the "Eros Project for Space Property Law;" see: www.erosproject.com. On February 12, 2001, NASA permanently landed its NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft on Nemitz's asteroid. Nemitz then sent NASA an invoice for parking and storage fees of $20 for the next century's rents. NASA refused to pay the invoice, citing that the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 precludes private ownership of an asteroid.

Nemitz then sent a formal Notice to the United States Department of State that NASA had exceeded its authority and had denied Nemitz of his legal Rights. The U.S. State Department's Official Determination in the matter stated that, "In the view of the Department, private ownership of an asteroid is precluded by Article II of the [Outer Space Treaty of 1967]." Nemitz then filed the Complaint for Declaratory Judgement in the District Court to determine the matter of Rights v. Treaty.

Nemitz states the importance of this issue, "There will be no commercial activities to harvest the vast and valuable resources in Space without official respect for private property rights." Nemitz's long-held viewpoint was recently confirmed by the President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond, when in June, 2004 it released its recommendations which included:

"Because of this treaty regime, the legal status of a hypothetical private company engaged in making products from space resources is uncertain. Potentially, this uncertainty could strangle a nascent spacebased industry in its cradle; no company will invest millions of dollars in developing a product to which their legal claim is uncertain. The issue of private property rights in space is a complex one involving national and international legal issues. However, it is imperative that these issues be recognized and addressed at an early stage in the implementation of the vision, otherwise there will be little significant private sector activity associated with the development of space resources, one of our key goals."

In Nemitz's Appeal Brief, he succinctly states:

"The United States, in its defense of the U.S. Department of State's and NASA's Official Determinations in this matter of Rights v. Treaty, espouses a position that endorses and is in complete accord with the first plank of the Communist Manifesto.

"1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes." Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848, Marx

It is unimaginable that when the Outer Space Treaty was being negotiated with the Soviet Union in the United Nations, during 1966-67 at the height of the Cold War, that the American delegation intended for our American society's fundamental order of private property rights should be completely withheld from the People who will conduct their business and their lives in outer space. The Department of State's and NASA's interpretations are a completely abhorrent antithesis to the American way of life. At the time of those Official Determinations and even now, Russia and the CIS (former Soviet Union) have reformed their fundamental societal order to accommodate private property rights, yet the U.S. Dept. of Justice today defends or obfuscates these ludicrous and stifling Official Determinations of the U.S. Dept of State and NASA, as if the United States of America was dominated by a Communist regime."

Nemitz's complete Appeal Brief is available for public review at: www.erosproject.com/appeal/apindex.html.

The Eros Project for Space Property Law is primarily sponsored by Beefjerky.com, www.beefjerky.com. Additional support is provided by the Space Age Publishing Company, www.spaceagepub.com. The Eros Project's legal fund accepts the public's donations in any amount on its website.

I will be certain to report on future developments as this case wends its slow way up though the American judicial system.

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Rand Simberg is at the Return To The Moon Conference this weekend and is providing live blogging of the talks by key speakers. Frank Seitzen's talk is of particular interest to those with a commercial space bent:

Taking questions now. Jeff Krukin: "Is there any sense that all of this could be made irrelevant by things happening in the private sector"?

Answer: "Yes, O'Keefe has met with Musk, and O'Keefe is very skeptical about the ability of the conventional space industry to do things affordably. Was particularly disturbed by cost estimates for OSP. Has been reaching out to the smaller players."

"Estimate cost of getting to the Moon by 2020 is 64 billion dollars. They found nine billion for a down payment by 2009, but they won't be able to afford it all without much lower costs from the private sector (and that doesn't mean traditional contractors)."

I have known the disarticulated skeleton of this story for some time but this is the first I have seen it put together and with flesh on the bones.

(0) (6)

You may remember this sad incident in the opening days of the Iraq Campaign: a US Patriot battery engaged and shot down a returning British Tornado. The official report on the incident is finally out:

IFF failure led to destruction of RAF Tornado

A Royal Air Force (RAF) Board of Inquiry investigating the destruction of an RAF Tornado GR.4A by a US Army Patriot missile during the March 2003 invasion of Iraq has concluded that the aircraft's identification friend-or-foe (IFF) system had failed. However, it also criticised the missile-classification criteria used by the Patriot system, and the US Army's Patriot rules of engagement, firing doctrine and crew training. [Jane's Missiles and Rockets - 28 June 2004]

If any of our readers has a link to a pdf of the original report - if such exists - I would be happy to include it here.

Editor: Kudos to Julian Taylor for the link to the MoD pdf file.

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I came across this recent lyrical effort by reader (and recovering ex-NASA employee) Chuck Divine in another forum. With his permission I am sharing the fun with you.

Rutan Spaceship

A Song of great social and political significance
(To be sung to the tune of Janis Joplin's Mercedes Benz)
(With both apologies and thanks to Janis)
by Chuck Divine

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Rutan Spaceship?
My friends all fly shuttles
We've got to get hip
Worked hard all my lifetime
No hope for space trip
So Lord, won't you buy me a Rutan Spaceship?

Oh Lord, won't you get me a space apogee?
The X Prize people are trying to fund me
I'll launch every day
Until I put up three
So Lord, won't you get me a space apogee?

Oh Lord, won't you give me a night on the Moon?
I'm counting on you Lord
That's why I wrote this tune
Prove that you love me
And get me there soon
So Lord, won't you give me a night on the Moon?

Everybody!

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Rutan Spaceship?
My friends all fly shuttles
We've got to get hip
Worked hard all my lifetime
No hope for space trip
So Lord, won't you buy me a Rutan Spaceship?

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All those readers of this who particularly liked Dale Amon's reporting of and ruminating upon this, and whose reaction to this was: I want more! ... should look at these.

These being, in English rather than pure linkese, a stunning set of photos taken by Richard Seaman of the first flight of SpaceShipOne into space, on June 21st 2004. (My thanks to Joseph Brennan for an email with the link.)

Great as the photos of the various air and space craft are, I especially like the very first photo, of all the people watching it, and of course photographing it. Although I doubt if many of them got photos as good as Richard Seaman's.

Seaman used a Canon 1Ds digital SLR camera, a snip at $8,000.

Seaman is a fine photographer, but much of the genius of these photos lies in the automatic focus system that this camera has in it. More fuss should be made of the people who devise things like this, I think. Boy would I love one of these - but smaller and for nearer $80, in a couple of years time.

The 1Ds sports the same 45 point auto-focus system as its predecessor, the 1D. Users on the Canon chat group I follow insisted that the auto-focus system is not only effective in achieving sharp focus, it also does so blindingly fast. One story I remember hearing is that if you point a 1Ds and a D60 at the same object at the same time, and someone walks between the cameras and the object and keeps walking, then the 1Ds would refocus on the person and then back on the object, while the D60 wouldn't react to the person at all!

Ideal for space ships, in other words. Although I recommend a general rootle around Seaman's photographs. If that appeals, I suggest that this list of recent additions would be a fine place to start.

(2) (20)

I finally have all my photographs in hand, or on disk rather. As promised, here is the behind the scenes photo story (via a small fixed lens film camera) of the people and the historic event they came to celebrate.

The first leg of my journey from Belfast ended at Dublin Connolly Rail Station.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

After a night of revelry with some Dubln based musicians I flew to Los Angeles by way of Charles deGaulle Airport. Might Dissident Frogman have noticed disturbance in the Force as a Samizdata Editor flew over France?
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The contents of the house in Redondo Beach have gone elsewhere but Rand Simberg still managed the network connections and 24 Hour News Feed necessary to the health and well being of bloggers.
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Aleta Jackson got stuck with the job of keeping us all fed and watered... as well as helping co-ordinate event staff all over the airport.
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How many rocket scientists does it take to put out a burning barbie?
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Dr Pournelle is outstanding in the field... and you knew he was there long before you could see him.
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A long shot of the XCOR barbecue. I understand it went on much of Sunday, although Rand and I did not arrive until evening.
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Mouser, the XCOR hangar-cat, decided a padded equipment box was just purrfect for sleeping through the territorial invasion.
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Rick Tumlinson of Space Frontier Foundation (and MirCorp fame) was caught in the act of bartending at the XCOR hangar.
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XCOR did their party piece: a teacart engine firing just after dark.
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The XCOR Shelter for Homeless Rocket Scientists. Besides myself behind the camera, Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings is to the left; Michael Mealing of RocketForge is in the centre; and I have not a clue who the laptop wielding person to the right is.
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Meanwhile over at the National Space Society (NSS) RV's... Bethany lights up the camper.
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Randall Severy, sitting at right, is the current NSS Hero of the Revolution for helping recover the NSS membership database (don't ask!) and is also one of the key people in the Artemis Society and Moon Society.
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Meanwhile outside, the DJ plays music in the wind-driven sand. It was 2004. It was loud. "If it's too loud, you're too old", as we say in the music biz.
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A shot of the midnight crowd. The haziness and blobs are due to the sand. There was plenty of food and kegs of beer outside so I am quite sure I brought a wee bit of the Mojave back to Belfast with me.
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Aleta was at her post in the hangar when I returned from the NSS and SFF party and as far as I know did not get any sleep until Monday afternoon.
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Rand's first thought's in the morning were blog related of course...
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Aleta and other XCOR staff served bacon and an "egg-like substance" (as the person frying the eggs labeled it) starting around 0400 or earlier.
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Yes, someone really did sleep under the wing of a rocket plane!
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There were lots more than the fried stuff on the hangar breakfast serving line. Lovely strawberries, other fruit... and most importantly: good coffee.
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Aleta wills the bacon to fry faster.
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Dawn's first light. Cue 'Top Gun Anthem'.
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Sunrise.
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XCOR spectators watching for activity at Scaled Composites, a couple hangars down that-a-way.
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Low level chase plane (Coleman/Bird) taxi's past on the way to the active.
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White Knight (Binnie and Stinemetze) with the underslung SpaceShipOne (Melvill) taxi's past XCOR.
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Rutan's own Beech Starship (Karkow/Scherer), one of the last of its kind, on the way to the active. It is one of the high altitude chase planes.
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The Starship takes off. (Cockpit below it is a NASA T-38).
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White Knight and SpaceShipOne in the air!
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Crowd along the tarmac as I walked down towards the Control Tower.
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Alpha Jet (Van der Schueren/Johnson) on the taxiway. It is the second high chase plane.
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Now we watch and wait as the planes slowly circle up to the 50,000 foot drop altitude. Notice that even this early in the morning most everyone in the XCOR area has moved into the shade...
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One of the XCOR people jury-rigged a walkie talkie on the flight frequency to a PA system so we could hear what was going on far above as we stood outside the hanger and watched.
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This was a good time for me to take a daylight shot of the XCOR EZ-Rocket.
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George Whitesides, center, is the new NSS Executive Director. The outdoor, all-night RV/Disco/Keg party seems to have been his idea... I think I am going to enjoy his tenure!
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At 20,000 feet or so we could see contrails. This made it a lot easier to find the little itsy bitsy dots way up there.
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Drop... and IGNITION!!! Unfortuneately they were coming out of the sun when they did so... thus my need for a handshaped occulting disk.
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They climbed...
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and climbed...
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and climbed...
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and climbed...
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and climbed...
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and burned out a mere 75 seconds later.
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Then all we could do was listen to the cockpit chatter as Mike Melvill coasted over the top and into re-entry. It was a nervous time. Re-entry was the time I personally was most worried about.
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SpaceShipOne was well off the Mojave airport so it was awhile before we saw it. Here it is making a turn over the field as it dumps energy in preperation for the landing. I believe SpaceShipOne is upper right and the Beech Starship is lower left.
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Starship and Alpha Jet (I am not absolutely certain of the identifications from looking at my blowups) come in low as SpaceShipOne glides into a landing.
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White Knight beats up the active on a victory pass.
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Somewhere against the background clutter of stored airliners there is a spaceship sitting on the runway where its rollout completed.
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This is a bit of a blow up. It is there somewhere...
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A formation pass of the three chase planes. The smoke is from the aerobatic low chase plane; the other two are fast jets: the Alpha Jet and the Beech Starship.
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With all the media and potential investors floating around the airport, Jeff Greason (centre) felt it necessary to put on a disguise.
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An atmospheric shot of the XCOR EZ-Rocket.
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The crowd in the XCOR hangar after the flight. Two of the XCOR rocket scientists made icecream for us... mix milk and fresh strawberries in a blender, then stir continuously in a stainless steel bowl while an assistant pours in the Liquid Nitrogen... Took about 10 minutes altogether and tasted great.
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NASA T-38 flown in by an Astronaut.
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Doug Jones (at table in pink shirt) controlling an indoor demonstration firing of the teacart engine. Believe me, it is loud!!!! This engine will be part of the RCS on Xereus, their next step.
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(0) (53)

A commenter to this blog has dismissed the recent achievements of Bert Rutan's Spaceship One flight as being a waste of money, money which the commenter believes should not have been 'wasted' on such a venture and devoted to causes the said commenter no doubt deems a worthier object. We have been here before with this sort of criticism, of course with the Moon landings, with the rather obvious difference that the Apollo missions relied on taxpayers' money, and not funds provided voluntarily by businessmen.

More generally, any innovative endeavour, or venture which may yield benefits not immediately graspable, can be dismissed and attacked as wasteful. The trial and errors of capitalism were dismissed by early socialist thinkers as wasteful, in contrast to their dreams of an efficient, centrally planned order. We know better now, of course. It hardly needs to be pointed out that on that logic, the first man who discovered how to make fire and spent hours chipping flints to make arrowheads was 'wasting time' in the eyes of his fellow cavedwellers, who no doubt wondered if he should be doing something more important.

And I am sure I speak for my fellow Samizdata contributors in hailing the excellent and sustained coverage by Dale Amon of the latest space flight ventures. It is a positive and exhilarating development and frankly, a tonic at a time of so much depressing news out there. So my message to the Luddites who carp, is simply this - you ain't seen nothing yet.

(1) (16)

I am now back in Redondo Bearch and waiting until it is time to pick up the CD's from the developer. In the meantime, I thought I'd pass on a few other items about today's flight.

• Patti Grace Smith of the FAA was on hand to give Pilot Melville an award which recognizes him as the first civilian astronaut.

• There may have been some re-entry damage affecting roll controls. I have heard incomplete and contradictory information. SpaceShipOne did come into the landing a bit hotter than expected. I have heard numbers like +5 mph.

• The candies banging about inside of the cockpit were definitely M&M's. The brand name has been withheld (other than a slip of the tongue by Melville that was edited out later) since there has so far not been any brand placement payments made. I will leave it to your imagination the bad jokes floating around the XCOR hanger...

• SpaceShipOne was about 26 miles outside of the box it was supposed to be in during the re-entry. Because of this the sonic booms on re-entry were barely audible from the airport. There is scuttlebutt about some control problems. This is to be expected in a test vehicle which is being used for a fast-track learning process in a particular flight regime which has never been explored before.

• The engine burn was a bit shorter than was expected. It was 1:15 min rather than 1:30 which was expected.

• I have heard the Governor was not there. The high DOT official was not the Secretary of the Department, it was Patti Grace Smith, the woman in charge of FAA launch and spaceport licensing and regulation.
  

(8) (22)

With the ship back on the ground and the speechifying in progress, I now have a bit of time to pontificate on the importance of this event.

Some of you understand intuitively. Few outside a small circle of friends fully comprehend the magnitude of the breakthrough. Getting into space is not about technology. It is about money. It is about risk, markets, business plans, insurance, and raising capital. It is about the metacontext. The metacontext which died in the desert sun this morning carried built in assumptions that space is for governments; space is expensive; space is too risky for business.

Now we know differently. Paul Allen funded Rutan's two craft from concept to suborbital space flight for around $20 million. In the aerospace world this is pocket change. Design studies cost that much, let alone TWO working vehicles.

The media came. The coverage has been beyond my wildest expectations. This is the second element required. Not only has the metacontext been smashed; everyone knows it.

Two more flights are required to collect the X-Prize. Today's did not carry the extra weight to simulate two passengers, at least not to my knowledge, so this flight does not count for the prize. Scaled Composites has said they will give the media 60 days notice. If true, that is August at the earliest. This makes the Apollo Landing anniversary of July 20th an unlikely date.

SpaceShipOne is not a Commercial tourist spaceship. It is the pre-cursor. The success we have seen today makes it clear to the investment community that the regulatory problems are manageable; the risk is manageable... Most importantly they now know we are not all stark raving bonkers. We really can do this.

The investors will come now. The decades of the Pyramid builders is nearly at an end. Linear growth via government funding will now be replaced by the exponential power of the market.

This is indeed what free men and women can do.

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I am unfortuneately not quite enough of a VIP to make it into the Scaled Composites area, or at least I have not yet seen anyone I know who could get me in. I have heard it is quite an affair... I cannot confirm, but rumour has it Arnold Schwarzenegar is there and perhaps the US Secretary of Transportation. Paul Allen will certainly be there. Oh, and an astronaut flew in, in his NASA T38.

I will just play it by ear this afternoon.

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As of a minute ago, everyone is back on the ground and over at Scaled Composites. SpaceShipOne rolled out a fair distance but not quite past where I was standing at the XCOR hanger. The White Knight did a low pass before doing a sharp turn to come back and land; then the three chase planes did a formation flight. Among the three was Paul Allen's Alpha Jet and Rutan's Beech Starship.

It has been a long wait. We have finally done it. The road to the stars opened today.

Private industry develops on an exponential and we have just gotten to the fun part of the curve.

Now to celebrate!

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Unofficial... they hit 100km. They are on approach now.

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White Knight with SpaceShipOne slung under it took off on schedule and is circling ever higher with the chase plane. Going back out to wait for the drop, should be another 15 minutes or so...

(4) (4)

A lovely quick breakfast of eggs, bacon and fruit in the hanger, cooked by the XCOR management... and now we wait a little bit before the roll out. Rand Simberg and Michael Mealing have been posting from here as well; I've seen a couple others who might be blogging stories as well.

And Dr. Pournelle is running about preparing to connect here in the XCOR office, so perhaps there will also be stories on his site.

I am almost surprised to not see Glenn out here since he knows almost all the same people I do and should be kicking himself for not running out on students for two days to join us here.

Meanwhile, I have to get busy on my second coffee!

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It is now 0430 and most of the bodies are stirring from their sleeping bags and airbeds. Bacon is crackling in the hanger as Aleta prepares to feed the multitudes while simultaneously giving radio orders to volunteers around the airport,

The air seems calm, but I have not been outside the hanger yet. This is as I expected or at least hoped. I have done some flying myself and remember the glorious morning calm.

We will be headed for the VIP stands after breakfast and I will not be posting from then until our return.

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I have just returned from the National Space Society and Space Frontier Society's' outdoor disco's. They have a light show projected on a hanger wall and a corral of RV's enclosing and sort of protecting the party area from the wind-blown sand. There is a thumping beat of good loud 21st Century music, food, talk and dancing. I'll supply photos when I get them developed... assuming my camera managed to take something from which image enhancement can recover something useful.

The party looks like it will go on most of the night, but I am sleeping in the XCOR office, so I thought it best to get back here and get a couple hours of sleep. The wakeup call to travel to the viewing area will come all too soon.

Aleta Jackson is one of the people organizing 'the show' and deserves kudos for her awesome job on short notice... although I expect sleep would be more appreciated. It does not look like she will be getting any tonight. She is out in the hanger taking care of people as they wander in from the NSS party or wherever, and has to have breakfast organized for the XCOR guest locusts after the flight.

Earlier there was a barbecue outside the XCOR hanger. It was like a high school reunion party; I saw people I had not seen in years. I also met a few people I have known for years over the internet but never met face to face. I also got to watch and be deafened by the XCOR teacart engine. They ran several shows just outside the hanger door.

Everyone who counts in private space is here or else will be in tomorror... er I mean later this morning. Takeoff if 06:30 PST if the bleeding wind drops off. The current conditions are not what I would call conducive to safe landings in a glider. There are hours to go though, and dawn is usually a period of calm so I am hoping for the best. If worst comes to worst, I have planned my return flights with several day's of leeway. I have been around the rocket scene for far too long to have done otherwise.

I will post again in the morning, probably after the flight.

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Rand and I arrived at the Mojave Civilian Test Flight Facility about an hour ago and I have had time to run about and snap some candid photos of the crowd at the XCOR hanger. Dr. Pournelle is here, Elon Musk is around somewhere as are others in the commercial space flight field.

I got Jeff Greason's attention just after an interview and have my network connection sorted from inside the office. Now I must go and be sociable... and Rand is pushing for me to unload the airbed and other stuff from his car. I will try to post more later.

Yes, there will be photos, but not until after I get my film developed on return to Redondo Beach.

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'The Space Show' will be supplying a live audio show during the SpaceShipOne flight:

The Space Show is pleased to announce that it will carry live (audio only) the Space Ship One historical launch scheduled for 6:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time (weather permitting) on Monday, June 21, 2004 in Mojave, California. Events unfolding at the Mojave Airport up to and including the launch, plus special interviews and much more, will be reported live to listeners of The Space Show by our special reporter on the scene, well-known space advocate and leader, John Carter McKnight Mr. McKnight is a regularly appearing guest on The Space Show and is also a space analyst and commentator whose work has appeared in Space News, SpaceDaily.com, SpaceRef, Space Times and numerous other industry publications.

Further:

The live broadcast can be heard on the internet at [link]. In addition, an additional streaming site has been provided Space Show listeners by Jeff Birk at Pioneer Radio in the UK. The tentative URL for this additional site is http://usa.rolo.net:8008/listen.pls.

It will be the next best thing to being there.

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I've spent a great deal of 2004 either on the road or preparing to be on the road. That is why my postings have been a bit scarce these last six months. I hope to be a bit more visible the next few days. This trip is not as business intensive as most have been. Yes, I am transacting and meeting with people, but for one day I will be an on the scene reporter for one of the most important historical events since Kittyhawk.

I arrived in Redondo Beach yesterday afternoon after two days of travel. My luggage finally caught up with me this morning: socks will be buried shortly. It was a very, very long journey.

Due to severe financial constraints I cut corners on this trip every which way. I left my flat in Belfast on Thursday afternoon, dragging a luggage trolley behind me. It was great fun getting the luggage onto a bus heading into the City Centre. After a brief stop at the bank where I turned my meager balance into dollars, I pulled the luggage through town and along the Laganside... where I promptly took the wrong side street shortcut to the train station. So... train to Dublin Connolly, and then a Dublin bus with an even narrower aisle.

My overnight stop in Dublin was at the house of a close friend and a meal cooked by her guitarist Graham Dunne. He cooks as well as he plays and that is saying something! Another trad musician was visiting and so we drank wine and talked until at least 1am... and I had to be up at 5am. Niamh Parsons, kind and wonderful soul that she is, got up and drove me to the airport at that ungodly hour.

The next leg was from Dublin to Paris. No, I am not kidding. The cheapest flight I could get on short notice was an Air France flight. I had a very tight window in Charles De Gaulle (CDG) Airport to find my gate for the international flight, but this went smoothly. A literal walk on.

CDG is big. We took so long from landing to parking I thought the pilot was taxiing us directly into the Paris City Centre. The airport is also very unfinished. Airplanes stop at places where there are probably going to be terminals some day. For now, you get a lift on a bus. (Advice: hang on for dear life.)

The food on the Paris to LA flight was good. I expected no less from Air France and they lived up to my expectations in spades. I managed to keep myself busy on this long flight over Greenland, Hudson Bay and down the West Coast. I brought a lot of reading material of the sort you would expect of someone who blogs. A case document on the Kennewick Man case; a Physics Today article on Hafnium explosives; a report to Congress on the state of China's defense... things like that. It kept me busy except when it helped me to nap...

I was not feeling all that bad when I deplaned in LAX. Good thing too. First came the INS. Not really a problem... but the form for Customs has lines which must be filled in telling them where you are staying. However I did not have Rand Simberg's street address (I did not think they would accept his URL). Every time I have been to Rand's house he has picked me up. I never needed to know the address and had not thought of bringing it. The guy at Immigration insisted that something must be written on the still blank line... not because he wanted it but because Customs would send me back to him. Finally, in exasperation (and he didn't want to wait while I tracked Rand down on mobile) he suggested I was actually staying at a nearby hotel. I filled that in on the offending line and voila, problem solved. He told me he is getting out after many years with INS because he is fed up with the way things are going.

Then the wait for luggage... except mine never arrived. My name was listed along with perhaps a dozen other people on a clipboard held by a very helpful lady agent on duty.

Even the lady in front of the customs desk was nice when I told her why I had no luggage.

An hour later I had as good a picture of the situation as I was likely to get. The connection was so tight they could not get the luggage across in time, so it would come over on the next flight... in late evening. I was given a free courtesy kit with a t-shirt, shampoo, razor and such so I could at least freshen up.

So I only had my carry-on shoulder bag with the laptop, camera and papers. Heavy enough but not like hauling luggage. I lucked out then: Rand was home rather than off at his aerospace customer's facility. We agreed to meet just outside the airport, so I had one final bus ride to endure. I got packed into the parking lot bus so tightly with a bunch of end of shift TSA employees I had to stand on the steps and hold on for dear life to whatever I could find. I got off at the parking lot, rang Rand to let him know and walked to the street.

It was good to see Rand pull up instants later.

(0) (13)

Tomorrow afternoon I am off to Los Angeles... and thence to the Mojave desert to watch SpaceShipOne head for space. I will try to post some more when I get to Rand Simberg's place in LA.

In the meantime, you can get a copy of the Aldridge Commission Report here. You do not know what it is? Well, then, follow the link! As for me, I am off to bed... there are some rather long days ahead.

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Vanguard Response Systems, a Canadian company, is now testing equipment for containment and mitigation of the effects of radiological weapons.

This type of weapon, now commonly mis-labeled a 'dirty bomb', is a conventional explosive device packed with bits and bobs of medical or other radiological sources in place of bolts and nails. Such bombs would kill few if any persons not killed in the initial blast. They are weapons of mass annoyance rather than destruction and have entered the WMD lexicon due to the modern phobia of all things 'nuclear'.

Vanguard supplies various sizes of containment 'tents' which are placed around the weapon. The tents are then filled with a foam. Should the device explode, the kinetic energy is soaked up by the foam and tent. They claim all of the bomb fragments are thus contained.

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There is now an NSS Chapters blog online. It is just in its infancy but could become a very useful source of information for the whole space community.

I had several chats with George Whitesides, the new NSS Executive Director, about the need for such a beast and am pleased to see it happen.

I will be reporting on my six weeks on the airways as soon as I have my film developed.

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As old time readers surely know, I am a long time denizen of the L5 Society of yore and the National Space Society formed from its union with the National Space Institute of Werner von Braun. I chair one of the major committees of the society and so state up front I have a rather serious interest in the upcoming ISDC (International Space Development Conference).

With that out of the way... I'd like to invite anyone in the Oklahoma area (or anywhere in the world for that matter) to come along. Programming runs from Thursday this week until Monday (May 27-31). There are one day registrations for those who are too busy to attend the full event.

Speakers include:

• Oklahoma Lt. Gov. Mary Fallin, Chair of the Aerospace States Assn
• Melchor J. Antunano, M.D., MS, Director FAA Civil Aerospace Medical Institute
• Charles Chafer, CEO, Team Encounter, Humanity's First Starship™ Solar Sails
• Fred Haise, Apollo 13 Astronaut, Space Shuttle Commander
• Gen. Ken McGill, Board Chairman, Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority
• Dr Kenneth Money, Canadian Astronaut
• Courtney Stadd, Former NASA Chief of Staff
• Dr. Donald A. Thomas, Astronaut, ISS Program Scientist
• Rick Tumlinson, Founder, Space Frontier Foundation
• Prof. Robert Winglee, University of Washington, Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion
• Dr. Robert Zubrin, President, Mars Society

as well as many others. You will have to skim the program to find them... or else just show up and register at the door. All are welcome.

If you do drop in, look for a harried guy in corporate battle armour (ie. a dark suit) running about the place. It will either be me or someone who will point you to me. You are welcome to say hello... but be prepared to do so on the run!

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One of the craziest, loudest, most adrenalin-charged race events in the planet is held every year in Reno, in the United States, in the middle of September.

Cars? Nope. Horses? Nope. What you get are hundreds of aircraft, ranging from pre-WW2 biplanes through to modern jets, but for me, the absolute stars of the show are the souped-up Second World War fighters, especially my favourite, the mighty P-51 Mustang. These planes are now owned by mega-rich race enthusiasts who fly around a great circuit in the sky. Well, about 50 feet above terra firma, actually.

I once watched Samizdata television favourite Jeremy Clarkson present an entertaining show about the Reno Air Race, and have wanted to trek up to Lake Tahoe and enjoy the sights of this air race ever since. Well, this year, yours truly and his fair girlfriend will be there. I can hardly wait.

And if anyone reading this is going to be in the vicinity of Reno between September 16 and 19, and would like to meet up, please let me know via the e-mail address in the sidebar.

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The good news in space travel just keeps piling higher. An american group has launched a rocket to suborbital altitude.

An amateur unmanned rocket has been launched into space from the Nevada desert - the first time this has been achieved by a privately-built vehicle.

The Civilian Space eXploration Team's 6.5m (21ft) GoFast rocket is understood to have exceeded an altitude of 100km.

The BBC's statement may not be entirely accurate. I would have to look into the altitude reached by Space Services Inc. of America's (SSIA) test rocket in the mid-eighties. It was launched from Matagordo Island on the Texas coast and impacted in the Caribbean.

The GoFast rocket of the Civilian Space eXploration Team rates higher marks in any case. SSIA used the upper stage from a surplus Minuteman Missile, if I remember correctly. In contrast, these folk did it from scratch.

The only other private 'launch' into space I am aware of was a BB sized bit of molten metal fired into solar orbit by a shaped charge final stage of a Tripoli Rocket Society rockoon in the sixties.

This is only an appetizer for the year 2004. The main course will be a manned suborbital flight by Scaled Composites. This is almost certain to happen within the next few months. I would not find it at all surprising to see SpaceShipOne 'passenger' flights before this year is out.

This is a very good year.

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On May 13th, Mike Melville piloted Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne to an altitude of 40 miles. At 50 miles a USAF pilot would be granted their Astronaut Wings. The Federation Aeronautique International (FAI) defines the boundary of space as 100 kilometers, just over 62 miles.

Here is the Scaled Composites flight report:

Objectives: The third powered flight of SpaceShipOne. 55 seconds motor burn time. Handling qualities during boost and performance verification. Reaction control system use for reorientation to entry attitude. Supersonic feather stability and control.

Results: Launch conditions were 46,000 feet and 120 knots. Motor light off occurred 10 seconds after release and the vehicle boosted smoothly to 150,000 feet and Mach 2.5. Subsequent coast to apogee of 211,400 feet. During a portion of the boost, the flight director display was inoperative, however the pilot continued the planned trajectory referencing the external horizon. Reaction control authority was as predicted and the vehicle recovered in feather experiencing 1.9M and 3.5G’s. Feather oscillations were actively damped by the pilot and the wing was de-feathered starting at 55,000 feet. The onboard avionics was re-booted and a smooth and uneventful landing made to Mojave.

The previous test flight on April 8 reached just under 20 miles. It seems certain they will cross the 50 miles 'astronaut' threshold sometime in June unless detailed examination of test data or post-flight inspection of the vehicle turn up a serious problem.

Given the progress of the current test campaign, I expect the the FAI altitude will be reached no later than July: sooner if test results and vehicle condition allow it. In the best case they will cross both altitude thresholds in June and will make the Ansari Prize (X-Prize) winning flights in July or August:

The ANSARI X PRIZE is a $10,000,000 prize to jumpstart the space tourism industry through competition between the most talented entrepreneurs and rocket experts in the world. The $10 Million cash prize will be awarded to the first team that:

1. Privately finances, builds & launches a spaceship, able to carry three people to 100 kilometers (62.5 miles)
2. Returns safely to Earth
3. Repeats the launch with the same ship within 2 weeks

I believe they will make at least one flight over 62 miles on July 20th, the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

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Glenn Reynolds has reported some recent photos purportedly showing flag drapped coffins at Dover Air Force Base are a hoax. According to a NASA headquarters statement, the pictures are actually of the coffins of the Challenger astronauts:

An initial review of the images featured on the Internet site www.thememoryhole.org shows that more than 18 rows of images from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware are actually photographs of honors rendered to Columbia's seven astronauts.

Apparently a number of news outlets fell for it hook, line and sinker.

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Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne executed its second powered flight on April 8, 2004 and reached a peak altitude of nearly 20 miles. Its first powered flight was on the December 17, 2003 anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight at Kittyhawk.

Objectives: The second powered flight of SpaceShipOne. 40 seconds motor burn time. Handling qualities during boost, through transonic and supersonic. Reaction control system functionality in-flight and feather configuration stability during transonic re-entry. Evaluation of radar tracking capability.

Results: Launch conditions were 45,600 feet and 125knots. A planned immediate motor ignition was delayed about 2 minutes to evaluate a shock induced stall buffet resulting in an ignition altitude of only 38,300 feet. The 40 second rocket boost was smooth with good control. Pilot commented that the motor was surprisingly quiet; however the boost was heard by ground observers. Burnout occurred at 1.6M and apogee was over 105,000 feet. There was no noted flight control flutter or buzz during the climb. Feather recovery was nominal. Maximum feathered speed on entry was 0.9 Mach. The wing was de-feathered and locked by 40,000 feet. Handling quality assessments during descent were satisfactory and a smooth landing made to runway 30 at Mojave. All video and tracking systems performed well with spectacular footage obtained onboard, from chase and from ground stations.

Space is deemed to begin at 50 miles (the hieght at which a pilot gains his Astronaut wings) and the current (unofficial) record holder is the X15 flight of August 22, 1963 which reached 67 miles.

It appears suborbital flight will be approached over a period of months with a very cautious test campaign. At the current flight rate I would guess early fall. If they pick up the pace to that of last autumn, it is possible we could see an earlier suborbital attempt. The Fourth of July or the 35th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing on July 20th are good choices if there is a desire to maximize publicity.

Unless something goes drastically wrong, this is the year of the first manned private suborbital rocket flight.

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In the latest (April 2004 – paper only so far as I can tell) issue of Prospect, there is an excellent letter about private investment in space exploration, from Stephen Ashworth of Oxford, in response to this article by Oliver Morton in the March issue:

Oliver Morton (March) is misleading Prospect readers with his implication that Nasa spaceflight is the only kind that matters. His statement that Nasa's new direction "marks the end of the era in which the goal of spaceflight is to become routine" will be seen in retrospect as the exact opposite of the truth.

The government space agencies' monopoly on manned spaceflight is about to be broken. Twenty-seven industrial teams, mostly in North America and Britain, are competing to be the first to fly private passengers to the edge of space in a commercially-operated reusable spacecraft. Their immediate goal is to win the $10m X prize (see www.xprize.org). In America, aircraft designer Burt Rutan is almost ready to claim the prize. In Britain, Steve Bennett's Starchaser Industries has been building and test-firing large rocket engines and test-flying a reusable piloted capsule, as well as touring schools with Starchaser 4, which in 2001 became the largest rocket ever flown from mainland Britain.

If our civilisation is to make the leap from a one-planet to a multi-planet one, then, just as when it made the leap from a European to a global civilisation, the ultimate drivers will not be government programmes (of Prince Henry the Navigator, Ferdinand and Isabella, Kennedy and Khrushchev). Progress will rather depend upon commercial enterprises which serve public demand (the East India company, the Cunard line, the embryonic space tourist companies).

It would not surprise me if the first astronaut on Mars were not a government employee, but a visionary entrepreneur like Burt Rutan or Steve Bennett, a CEO of a space tourism company with a string of orbital and lunar hotels. That outcome would take much longer than a focused Apollo-style push. But, unlike any past or future Nasa programme, it would not run ahead of the market or the technology in the way that Apollo did.

This letter was worth reproducing in its entirely here not just because it is a good letter, but also because it appeared in Prospect. I like Prospect. It is often leftism, but it is not nearly so often knee-jerk leftism, and often, as here, it is not leftism at all.

I particularly like the comparison between NASA and its political paymasters, and Henry the Navigator and Ferdinand and Isabella. We are told with wearisome frequency nowadays that "technology is moving so much faster these days", but even the time scales of space exploration have an early navigation feel about them.

It will be interesting to read what Dale Amon has to say about this.

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Things have been awfully quiet (officially at least) over at XCOR. They are busy working on their suborbital spaceship design, Xerus is still in early days and remains a paper spaceship. However, unlike many other designs which exist only in POVRAY renderings, the engine technology is real and the team has already proven itself by building and flying and reflying and display flying a rocket plane.

Watch that space.

PS: They are also your fellow Samizdata readers, our 'home team' in the X-Prize contest as it were.

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Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne has been repaired. As you may remember, the portside gear lock failed and the strut collapsed on landing after the historic first private rocket-powered supersonic flight on December 17th 2003. The recent March 11th test was an unpowered drop test. Beside the reported objectives it is likely they wanted at least one unpowered test to be certain of the gear and airframe repairs. As my flying instructor used to say, the most dangerous time to fly an aeroplane is the day you get it out of the shop at the local FBO.

Objectives: The twelfth flight of SpaceShipOne. Objectives included: pilot proficiency, reaction control system functionality check and stability and control and performance of the vehicle with the airframe thermal protection system installed. This was an unpowered glide test.

Results: Launch conditions were 48,500 feet and 125 knots. All systems performed as expected and the vehicle landed successfully while demonstrating the maximum cross wind landing capability.

According to a 'knowedgeable aerospace source', there is still a lot of envelope to test before they get to a 'hot' re-entry.

Rutan holds the distance record (non-stop around the world) and will soon hold the alititude record. A speed run would net him the third leg of the triple crown. This makes one wonder if the ablative they are using could handle the severe heat loads of ultra high-speed flight for long enough to allow such a record attempt.

It is perhaps something for Rutan to think about after he wins the X-Prize... and before he sends SpaceShipOne to join Voyager in the National Air and Space Museum.

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One of my favourite films, which I watched again last night on my DVD machine, is The Right Stuff. It superbly captures the era spanning the end of the Second World War and the mid-1960s, when test pilots like Chuck Yeager and astronauts like wisecrackin' Alan Shepherd put their "hides on the line" to test new limits of speed and height in the early parts of the space race. Among the many things that jumps out of this marvellous film, made about 20 years ago and based on the book of the same title by Tom Wolfe, is the almost blase treatment of risk.

Right at the start, when Yeager is testing the Bell X-1, he manages to hurt his ribs through a late-night horseriding incident (he was racing his missus from the pub, like one does in Nevada). Next morning, on the day in which he eventually becomes the first man to officially break the sound barrier, Yeager is in agony. He realises he cannot shut the door on the plane with his right arm because of his injury. So he gets a colleague to cut him a length of stick so he can slam down the door with his only useful arm.

That's right. The world's most celebrated test pilot hit Mach One using one functioning arm. Not the sort of thing a modern health and safety bureaucrat would approve of, I am sure.

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There is now a web site for the commission which is to create the implementation plan for the new space policy. We would like to see them relying on private sector developments for transport and for lunar exploration and settlement.

Times are changing. We have a major policy opportunity. We can quite possibly move things in our preferred direction: private operation. Although it is lovely to talk about how we would do space exploration in a perfect libertarian society, we do not live in that world. We have to deal realistically with the hand we have been dealt.

I think we have at least a couple pairs going into this one.

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There was a documentary about the Royal Navy in WWII on tonight, and one image etched itself into my mind. With a sidescan sonar they found the wreck of the Ark Royal, and along the debris path there was an unmistakeable outline.

A Fairey Swordfish!

This is not just any Fairey Swordfish. This is one of the survivors of Bismark torpedo raids of May 1941. It is sitting at the bottom of the Mediterranean, certainly with all the fabric gone, but still sufficiently intact to give image enough for type recognition.

My mind is boggled at the find and I still find it hard to believe.

I simply cannot wait until someone figures out how to recover it. And if there is one, there might be more. Who knows? Perhaps the very plane that doomed the Bismark will one day grace the Imperial War Museum.

click for larger image

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Dana Rohrabacher (R-Ca) has just introduced a bill to clarify language in Federal law relating to commercial human spaceflight.

I must admit there is much about this which truly grates on me as a libertarian. But the realist/entrepreneur side of me recognizes Dana is doing us a good turn. He is easing existing law to make life easier for X-Prize entrants.

Under current law, every launch requires a license. Under the Rohrabacher bill, a single permit appears to cover all flights until the vehicle is ready for commercial operations. Ideally, I would like a single permit to cover all normal commercial operations as well. It seems silly to have vehicles which can take off and fly a suborbital job on a half-day notice and yet require months of effort for the approval to do so. I do not think commercial aviation would have accomplished very much under such a regime. Perhaps we can talk Dana into doing something about this problem when it arises in a year or two.

The other interesting point is his treatment of liability limitation. He has continued the existing law in this area but has laid out a path for removing the government from this loop entirely. My libertarian side would say "get rid of it now", but my spacer side recognizes the complexity of the insurance issues for the infant field. In a litigous society like the USA, human spaceflight would be uninsurable without this fiat ceiling... despite the fact that a SpaceShipOne or similar craft could do very little damage in the worst of cases. The details of the liability situation would require discussion of FAA regulations which are far too complex for me to reduce to a few bloglines. Let it suffice for me to say US X-Prize entrants are quite happy to have such limitation right now... and I am quite happy to see it phased out as insurance companies become more familiar with the Insurable Risks involved.

I do not have time for a really detailed study of this law. I do know from personal contacts (an ex-staffer for one) Dana Rohrabacher is very familiar with the issues and is pro-commercial space. I have also heard he started off on the libertarian side of the fence but went Republican and drifted a bit out of our quadrant. Still, he is about as good as they come outside of Ron Paul.

The issue is now open to discussion amongst the exceedingly knowledgeable space entrepreneur wing of the Samizdata commentariat.

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There are some fascinating (if incomplete) bits of news from the Warbird world this month. The first one really made me sit up at my curry chicken, and it wasn't because of the spices: a Ju-87 Stuka has been added to the UK civil register! It is another Russian front recovery.

There is very little other information about this as yet. It could be corroded parts at the start of a ten year restoration or it could be in the paint shop and weeks from rollout. Your call.

The other item was quite as stunning, not because of uniqueness, but due to the amazing state of the newly recovered airframe. An Me-109e-7 (upgraded from a -1) has been pulled out of a Russian lake where it landed on the ice 60 years ago. The airframe is in such incredibly good condition that the yellow nose is not only visibly yellow... it is Yellow. I've never seen the like of it.

This Emil has been returned in carefuly packed bits to the UK and is now on sale. The project is a real steal for any warbird fan with a million or so burning a hole in their pocket.

A Bf-109g-6 Gustav at NASM
Photo: Copyright D.Amon all rights reserved

The sheer number of WWII airframes sourced from Russian crash sites over the last decade is nothing short of astounding. It also humbles one. The air battles on the Western Front pale to insignificance when set against the hordes thrown into the aerial meatgrinder of the East.

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This post is not going to be about "NASA screwed up, how come after 40 years we still have a space 'program' and not a space industry, NASA is drifting off focus and no longer has a clearly defined mission, etc." I will leave it to someone else to write that column, because Rand Simberg (or our own Dale Amon) could do it a lot better than I could anyway.

What I do want to talk about is: how the way information is organized and presented can make a difference in how it is received - and how bureaucracy can sometimes stand in the way of effective data organization and promote cluttered thinking. When we lost the Challenger in '86, it should have been clear that it was unsafe to launch the shuttle on that cold January morning. NASA had plenty of data to suggest that it was not prudent to launch that day - the problem is that the data was not refined into a conclusive answer, but rather was shrouded by poor communication and bureaucratic ass-covering.

Edward Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale and author of several brilliant texts on graphic design and the visual display of quantitative data, has made the Challenger accident a centerpiece of his traveling seminar. His exegesis of the Challenger disaster is available in his book Visual Explanations (Graphics Press, 2001).

In hindsight, it was quickly determined what caused the Challenger to fail: the poor cold-weather performance of the rubber O-rings in the field joints that held sections of the solid rocket boosters together. In a memorable session of the Rogers Commission (the group that investigated the Challenger disaster) the late Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, conducted a dramatic experiment. He affixed a C-clamp to a sample of O-ring material, dropped it into his glass of ice water, and then removed the clamp, revealing that the O-ring rubber lacked resiliency when cooled to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. (See photo below.)

Engineers at Morton Thiokol, the Utah-based firm that made the solid rocket modules, had been concerned about the cold-weather performance of the seals, so much so that they took the unprecedented step of issuing a "no-launch warning" to NASA the day before the doomed flight. As Tufte puts it:

... the exact cause of the accident was intensely debated during the evening before the launch: will the rubber O-rings fail catastrophically tomorrow because of the cold weather? These discussions concluded at midnight with the decision to go ahead. That morning, the Challenger blew up 73 seconds after its rockets were ignited.

At this point, some would be tempted to say: "See? As usual, the engineers were right, the bureaucrats were wrong!" But the story is more complicated. Tufte argues that the Thiokol engineers failed to present a compelling "no-launch" case to NASA because (1) their analysis failed to make crystal-clear the relationship between O-ring performance and temperature, and (2) their presentation to NASA had other shortcomings, including contradictory advice in some places.

What kind of analysis/presentation might have saved the Challenger? In Visual Explanations, Tufte argues that a single graphic (had such a thing existed) could have given NASA all the data they needed to make a decision. (You can see the graphic here - it is shown on the cover of one of his booklets.)

The x- (horizontal) axis shows temperature at launch time; the y-axis shows the level of damage to the O-rings. Each dot represents a previous space shuttle launch in the years 1981-85. The forecast temperature for Cape Canaveral that infamous morning was below freezing, in the 26-29 degree range; the previous coldest shuttle launch was at 53 degrees. As Tufte points out, 29 degrees is an extreme outlier, 5.7 standard deviations outside the previous range. And, of course, the relationship of resiliency to temperature is quadratic, not linear. In other words, the Challenger mission was at substantial risk.

So the problem with the Challenger was not that the NASA bureaucrats lacked the needed data. Nor was the problem that they simply disregarded the advice of the engineers for political reasons. They had the data; what they lacked was the capacity to quickly and accurately refine the data into a clear no-launch decision.

This is the same problem that presents itself over and over in bureaucratic decision-making, especially in intelligence / antiterrorism efforts. Muhammad and Malvo's "snipermobile," the modified Chevy Caprice, was spotted and even apprehended at the scene of several shootings before authorities put two and two together. They received tips from thousands of disparate sources. Our intelligence agencies receive a ton of information, chatter, noise, whatever you want to call it, from sources all over the globe. The challenge for police and intelligence agencies is to refine that desultory information into a meaningful conclusion.

We know that markets do this task - refining enormous amounts of information into concise signals - exceptionally well. John Poindexter took a lot of heat for proposing a "terror futures market" in which participants could bet on events such as the Saudi government falling. Politicians, journalists and cartoonists derided the idea, but many bloggers and other commentators (such as Reason's Ron Bailey) rose to its defense. There are limits to the applicability of markets like this, but potential benefits as well. (For example, studies have shown that weather futures markets actually outperform the US National Weather Service in predicting certain weather patterns, and you had better believe that campaign managers these days pay as much attention to political futures markets as they do to polls.)

Would something like this work for space shuttle launches? If there was a market in which we could trade, say, the probability of a failed space shuttle mission, would that have helped? Best case scenario would be: analysts independently peg relationship of temperature to risk; temperature forecasts for launch day are issued; demand for (and price of) 'mission failure' bets in futures market accelerates; NASA views this as a signal to postpone launch.

Building a market like that does not just happen overnight; investment bankers know the difficulties inherent in 'making a market'. You would need a lot of knowledgeable players before the market could achieve stability and begin to provide robust answers. There's no way to know whether a 'shuttle futures market' could have helped NASA in 1986, but it is hard to see how it could have hurt, either. Could the power of the free market help protect NASA's future shuttle missions?

"I believe that has some significance for our problem."
- Feynman's testimony at Rogers Commission panel, Feb. 1986

Recommended Reading:
Feynman, Richard. What do YOU Care What Other People Think? Norton, 1988.
Tufte, Edward. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Graphics Press, 2001.
Siems, Thomas F. 10 Myths about Financial Derivatives. Cato Institute Policy Analysis, 9/11/1997.

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On this day one year ago, the crew of the shuttle Columbia died when their spaceship broke up during re-entry.

Rick Husband
Kalpana Chawla
Laurel Clark
Ilan Ramon
William McCool
Michael Anderson
David Brown

Barry McCool, father of Columbia Astronaut Willy McCool,
accepting a Space Pioneer Award from NSS Board Chairman Kirby Ikin
at the 2003 conference in Palo Alto, California. (PS: Kirby is not a midget!)
Photo: Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved.

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The US bureaucracy's space branch (NASA) wants to scrap a Shuttle flight to carry out a servicing on the Hubble telescope. A petition has been started by Fernando Ribiero, a Brazilian, to "Save the Hubble".

As one commenter on the site points out, it is easy for someone living outside the USA to demand that US taxpayers' money and US lives be risked in a leaky Space Shuttle. For all sorts of American reasons there is a petition but only Americans can sign.

Surely the answer is obvious: privatise Hubble!

I am sure someone could set up a website taking credit card donations to pay for the upkeep of Hubble. Without the NASA inter-departmental bickering, it should be feasible for a few dollars per subscriber a year. I for one would consider this a far preferable use of my money than most government schemes I can think of.

If no trips to service the Hubble telescope are made, it will cease operating by 2007. At some point after that we can assume that the telescope would come crashing down to Earth (statistically not going to do any damage). So the privatisation method I would suggest is that used by the British government to dispose of the Trustee Savings' Bank in the late 1980s. A price was set, to encourage some sorting out wasters from serious operators and the net proceeds were used to boost the bank's capital. A variation of this method should keep Hubble up for the next 10 years.

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On this day eighteen years ago, seven astronauts on the Space Shuttle Challenger died when their ship broke up during boost.

Dick Scobee
Ellison Onizuka
Mike Smith
Greg Jarvis
Christa McAuliffe
Ron McNair
Judy Resnick

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Thirty-seven years ago today Astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chafee and Ed White died in an on the pad test of an Apollo capsule.

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Ladies and gentlemen, this is what it looks like on Mars.

That is the vista that will greet the first humans to set foot on that planet. I do not expect to be around to share in that experience but I still tingle with excitement at the prospect.

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It has been a busy couple of weeks: two proposals and the holiday season on top of it. It's had me so tied up I am just now getting around to other matters.

I'm 'throwing my hat in the ring' for the next National Space Society Board of Directors election. The time left for me to be included amongst the Board nominees is rather short. I need my signed petitions into the NSS office by midnight January 15th. I've already emailed petition forms to a bunch of folk, a few of which I know are also Samizdata readers. If you are not one of them (ie you didn't just get an email from me) and know you will be a paid up member of the Society as of January 15th, 2004, please contact me via the comments section and I'll send you a copy of the petition and related information.

Note that attempting to send email directly to me will result in delays of a day or two as I have a white list which dumps all unexpected mail into a holding pen.

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While answering a comment I had a sudden realization: Scaled Composites is going to take the Triple Crown of aerospace.

There are three top records in aviation. Distance. Speed. Altitude. The Scaled Composite built Voyager already holds the distance record with their around the world flight.

SpaceShipOne is a 21st Century version of the X15, which holds the other two records. I think SpaceShipOne is going to take the altitude record off of it very soon. If it can do that, it may also be capable of taking the speed record in a different flight profile if it can avoid overheating.

This is getting very interesting.

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I've finally got my hands on the Scaled Composites flight test report from Dec 17th, 2003:

Objectives: The eighth flight of SpaceShipOne and first powered flight. 15 second burn of the rocket motor and supersonic flight. Motor light off at altitude and inflight engine performance. Vehicle handling qualities through transonics and feather performance from altitude.

Results: Launch conditions were 47,900 feet and 112 knots. Motor light off was achieved at 44,400 feet and 0.55M. Burnout occurred at 1.2M and apogee was 67,800 feet. There was no noted flight control flutter or buzz during the climb. Feather recovery exhibited a +/-30 roll initially and then settled down into the familiar falling bathtub mode. The wing was de-feathered and locked by 35,000 feet. A nominal landing pattern was flown but touchdown caused the left main gear to collapse and the vehicle rolled to a stop off the runway in the soft sand. Although the damage was not major, repairs are expected to take approximately three weeks to complete.

Now hands up for everyone who believes NASA could return an unmanned children's kite to flight in three weeks after a gear collapse...

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All going well, on December 25 at 2:45 am GMT, The Beagle 2 lander will touch down on the Isidis Planitia impact crater on the surface of Mars. This lander, which has a planned six month mission on the Martian surface, was developed and built in Britain and forms part of the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission, from which Beagle separated on December 19. Mars Express will be inserted into Mars orbit at 3:00 am GMT on December 25 for a planned mission of between one and two years.

A mockup of the Beagle 2 lander at Sandy Quarry, Bedfordshire. (All rights reserved Beagle 2).

All going well, Beagle will be followed by two identical American landers that are scheduled to land in January. These two Mars Exploration Landers will have wheels and will be fully mobile when they arrive, being able to travel distances of up to 40 metres per day. (Everything important is self-contained in the Rover, and the rest of the lander is just a delivery vehicle). Spirit will land in the Gusev Crater on January 4 at 4:35 am GMT on January 4, and Opportunity will land on Meridiani Planum on January 25 at 5:05 am GMT. If all three missions land successfully, we should be getting back lots of interesting data on the red planet.

Projection of the Mars Exploration Rover leaving the lander shell. (Copyright NASA/JPL).

If all are successful (about which there is a caveat that I will get to in a moment) these will be the fourth, fifth and sixth successful lander missions to arrive on Mars, after Viking 1 and Viking 2 in 1976 and Mars Pathfinder in 1997. (I am excluding the Soviet Mars 3 mission from 1971 which transmitted data for only 20 seconds after an apparently successful landing).

All three missions will use the landing method pioneered by Mars Pathfinder in 1997.

This consists of parachutes, followed by the firing of small rockets for further deceleration, and finally inflated airbags that will cushion the landers as they bounce around a bit after impacting with the surface of Mars. (This method only really works for landing on relatively low lying areas of the Martian surface, as the first (parachute) stage requires the lander to pass through a fair amount of Martian atmosphere before reaching the surface, and there is not enough atmosphere for a landing on the elevated sourthern polar region for instance. In addition, there is not enough sunlight to power a polar mission from solar cells, and more expensive nuclear power sources are needed, making a polar lander a much more difficult undertaking).

Projected landing sites of the three Mars landers. Note they are all fairly equatorial.

Beagle is concerned principally with looking for evidence of life on Mars. It will be searching for the presence of water, carbonate minerals, organic compounds, will be studying atmospheric composition, the geological nature of rocks, and other environmental factors. The two Mars Exploration Rovers have broadly similar missions to this, being concerned with looking for evidence of water, surveying the geological properties or Martian minerals, and (interestingly) comparing results of ground based instruments with data recovered from orbiting Mars missions, in order to calibrate instruments property for orbiting missions. And of course, all three missions will be taking and radioing back lots of really cool photographs.

This is all terrific, and I am looking forward to seeing what these landers find more than anything. However, in the case of Mars exploration, one shouldn't take anything for granted. Although there have been some tremendous successes, the history of Mars exploration is fraught with failure. The United States and Soviet Union took seven attempts to get the first successful flyby mission (ultimately the American Mariner 4 mission in 1964) there at all. After this there were about another ten failed Soviet missions and US missions (although US missions were generally successful, and one or two Soviet orbiting missions succeeded too) prior to the successful (but very expensive) Viking Landers in 1976.

Overall, there were far more failures in Mars missions than anywhere else, and this "Curse of Mars" continued when the Soviets lost two further missions in 1988, the US lost an orbiter in 1992, and the Russians lost an orbiter in 1996.

The US commenced a new phase of Mars exploration in 1996, and this started well with Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor in that year. Unfortunately, though, Mars Climate Orbiter and 1998 and Mars Polar Lander in 1999 also failed. (The loss of this last mission was a particular tragedy, as this was the most complex Mars lander probably ever, and was intended to look at the extremely interesting carbon dioxide icecap on the southern polar region. The current missions are probably less interesting than this one would have been).

Since then though, the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter (which has mapped Mars' geology and radiological properties from orbit) has been highly successful. However, just to remind us that Mars is hard, the Japanese Nozomi orbiter was abandoned by Japanese controllers after repeated electrical failures just last week.

So, we can hope. I think I may be up on Wednesday night with a bottle of champagne to open when I hear that Beagle is down and transmitting data. Landing on another planet is tricky. So I will wish everybody involved in these missions the best of luck.

Now that is Mars. Later in the year may be even better. We all got a little sad three months ago when the Galileo orbiter was crashed into Jupiter's atmosphere after eight years orbiting Jupiter. Somehow it was reassuring to know that the orbiter was there to look at anything interesting that might be happening in the Jovian system. While JPL does have another Jupiter orbiter being planned, it will not launch until at least 2011, so we will have to do without such observations for a while. The good news, however, is that we will be able to look at Saturn instead, as the Cassini orbiter will be arriving in Saturnian orbit in July 2004. The mission will do much interesting science, looking at Saturn itself, Saturn's rings, and the various satellites. In particular Cassini will be dropping a probe into the opaque atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. This mission is initially planned for four years, but judging by past successes it may well go for significantly longer than that.

Artist's impression of Cassini during its Jupiter flyby (Artist: David Seal. Copyright NASA/JPL)

Composite image of Saturn taken from Cassini on October 21, 2002. The dot in the upper left is Saturn's largest moon Titan. (Copyright NASA/JPL)

While looking at data from planetary missions has always been a marvelous and fascinating thing to do, it has become so much easier in recent years with the advent of the internet. These days, ordinary people like me can look at images almost as soon as the scientists running the mission can. (I remember as a teenager waiting for magazines containing detailed photographs of Uranus from Voyager 2 in 1986 to arrive in Australia by sea mail). This is of course splendid. However, with the Beagle Mars mission, there is a new development.

As far as I can tell, it is the first plantetary mission with a blog.

(Thanks to Jay Manifold for some of the information and links in this post).

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Here are the official Press Releases. Microsoft billionaire Paul G. Allen has used the event as an opportunity to admit what everyone knew: he is the secret backer of the Rutan's project. The second release is the official announcement of the flight, warts and all.

They reached 68,000 feet after a 15 second burn and hit Mach 1.2 during the flight.

I'm not all that surprised they went supersonic. I was thinking about the issue and suspected the thrust to weight on that craft is such they'd have little other choice for a serious test. I've been watching them gradually build up the test profile over the last couple months. Even so, I was a bit surprised to see the first powered flight of SpaceShipOne push the envelope as aggressively as it did.

They have tested it several times in a sort of hammerhead stall if the picture I get from the test documents is right. They let it fall off the top in a stall and then recover control. The vertical stall at altitude is part of the testing for recovery of control on re-entry. As I understand it, they do not have an RCS (Reaction Control System, what you use when there ain't no air for ailerons). If true, they will be more cautious as they begin probing non-aerodynamic altitudes as they are depending on the inherent balance of the ship to keep it facing forwards and rightside up.

From here on out, they are reaching for Space. They'll take SpaceShipOne higher and faster flight by flight until they finally put some vacuum under her tail.

Those supporting the government position have said high costs are inherent in space flight. The short time scale, low costs and aggressive testing program of Scaled Composites should be an eye-opener to those nay-sayers. What I and others have been writing for nearly a quarter of a century is correct. The rocketmen are not underestimating the cost of space. It is the government and government contractors who have been "ripping the arse" out of the public purse.

After twenty-five years of the blood, sweat and tears of pioneering rocketmen from Zaire to Matagordo Island to San Francisco Bay to Vandenberg we have proven our case. Scaled Composites is not alone. There are others close behind them. Many first flights will happen this decade in a reprise of the totally private aviation of 1903-1910.

It is the end of the beginning and a marvelous time to be alive.

Note: Doug Jones reports SpaceShipOne has a cold gas RCS. I find this very comforting.

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It is rather late here and I've had a flu bug all week... but I had to confirm and report this before I call it a night.

One of our readers (Juliam Morrison) mentioned in comments that SpaceShipOne went supersonic. I've just chatted with Jeff Greason of XCOR, another Mojave denizen and confirmed it.

On December 17th, 2003, SpaceShipOne dropped from the mother ship, lit the rocket engine and broke the sound barrier. The Space Age is about to begin.

I probably won't have the flight data for a couple days, but I'll pull the press release tomorrow and post the info.

Now, was I right or was I right?

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Scaled Composites carried out its seventh drop of SpaceShipOne on December 4th. According to the test report, pre-ignition propulsion system checks seem to be moving forward nicely:

Objectives: The seventh glide flight of SpaceShipOne and new pilot check out. Full functional check of the propulsion system by cold flowing nitrous oxide. Completed airspeed and positive and negative G-envelope expansion.

Results: Launch conditions were 48,400 feet and 115 knots. All propulsion components, displays and functionality performed as designed. The feather was extended after a 4G pull-up to the vertical at 24,500 feet and rudder used to induce sideslip and yaw rates while "going-over-the-top". The vehicle recovered to a stable attitude and descent after only a single oscillation. The landing pattern was flown following established procedures resulting in a satisfactory touchdown.

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Brian just posted one of my favorite shots of the Scaled Composites spaceship and wondered how large the windmills in the background windfarm are.

The answer is: big. Here are two of my non-telephoto photos of roughly the same area as seen from within the confines of the Mojave Civilian Test Flight Facility (a couple hours travel north and east of Los Angeles, California):

Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved


Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved

Yes, those are the same mountains you see in the photo on Brian's blog. The windfarm was actually just barely visible in the top image before I cut it down to blog-size. I am far less certain of the direction of the bottom photo, but I think it shows the mountains in the opposite direction as I can see the control tower in it. (There is also an F4 Phantom. Can you find it?)

Things tend to be very big and very far away in that part of the world!

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Meanwhile, Armadillo Aerospace has solved their H202 supply problems, has run a test engine at better than 1000lbf and good ISP and is working on vehicle modifications to deal with the new engine design.

You can watch them testing the modified landing shock absorbers of their VTVL spaceship.

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Scaled Composites flew their sixth drop test on November 19th, less than a week after the previous flight on the fourteenth. Tests prior to this have been at roughly one month intervals so I assume they are entering a new phase of testing.

Objectives: The sixth glide flight of SpaceShipOne. Test pilot Mike Melvill's first flight with the enlarged tails. Emergency aft CG handling qualities eval and simulated landing exercise with the new tail configuration. Airspeed and G envelop expansion and dynamic feather evaluation.

Results: Launch conditions were 48,300 feet and 115 knots. Satisfactory vehicle handling characteristics at the emergency CG limit. Melvill reported improved stability, improved control powers and improved stick forces throughout the flight profile. The feather was extended after a 3G pull-up to the vertical at 30,000 feet. The vehicle recovered to a stable attitude and descent after a few mild oscillations. The landing pattern was flown at a higher airspeed than previous flights which allowed for a more controlled flare and landing at the nominal touchdown point.

The odds for an in-flight engine ignition on December 17th are getting better again. It may now be a matter of how satisfactory the ground tests of the SpaceDev hybrid engine have been.

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I did not see the spectacular solar storm last month. It turns out I was wrong inferring from my failure that there was no auroral display visible in Belfast. A week or so ago I was chatting with a fellow who worked for me in two different companies over the course of perhaps eight years... and found that not only did he see an auroral display - he photographed it!

I hope for the sake of his server the Samizdata effect is not quite so dire as the Reynolds Effect...

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Scaled Composites completed the fifth test flight of SpaceShipOne on November 14th at the Mojave Civilian Test Flight Facility.

Objectives: The fifth glide flight of SpaceShipOne. New pilot checkout flight. Stability and control testing with the new extended horizontal tails. Tests included stall performance at aft limit CG and evaluation of the increased pitch and roll control authority. Other objectives included additional testing of the motor controller (MCS) and handling qualities in feathered flight.

Results: Launch conditions were 47,300 feet and 115 knots. Satisfactory stability and control at aft limit CG. A notable improvement in control power, particularly in roll. Handling qualities into and out of feather remained excellent with good nose pointing ability. Adjusted landing pattern altitudes resulted in a touchdown at the targeted runway aim-point.

There is as yet no indication when they will be ready for the first in-flight engine ignition test. It is conceivable this might be carried out next month on the date of the First Flight anniversary. As for the first suborbital flight, I certainly expect to see it before next summer. I do not know the status of their launch license filing beyond the gossip of last summer when they most likely decided to start the process, and that is likely a limiting factor on the launch date.

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Over on RocketForge, Michael Mealing has an interesting discussion on how best to seed entrepreneurial space companies.

He lays out a good list of what an effective early stage incubator should provide:

1. Funding
   
2. Mentoring
   
3. Market Development
   
4. Ongoing Support
   

Any takers?

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Here is an interview of SpaceDev CEO Jim Benson. O'Brien spoke with him about the eBay satellite auction I mentioned yesterday.

SpaceDev also supplies the hybrid rocket motor for Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne.

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Are you having trouble deciding what to get that friend who has simply everything?

Why not buy them a satellite!

Jim Benson's SpaceDev is a commercial space company which has managed to earn money with creative marketing of space goods and services.

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Elon Musk of PayPal fame will be unveiling his spacecraft in Washington DC next month:

Smithsonian Date Confirmed
The date for unveiling Falcon in Washington DC is now confirmed and will be Dec 4th at the Smithsonian. The actual vehicle itself, along with the mobile launcher, will be available for public viewing that evening after 7pm. It was not logistically possible to fit Falcon in the Smithsonian, so it will be located nearby.

His new company, SpaceX, is planning a first launch of their re-usable launch vehicle some time early in the new year.

Elon is just one of the new breed of technology billionaires who have realized NASA is a waste of space. They have come to the not so new conclusion that: "If you want anything done right, you had better do it yourself".

Swift Enterprises are alive and well and living in America.

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Congrats to Jeff and the gang at XCOR for being first over the regulatory bar.

I would write more but I am up to my ears in work, so just read the article.

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Greg Nemitz has opened his case in a Reno Court. He publicly declared a claim to Eros and sent NASA a bill for parking its probe on his property. Since he has not received payment, he has taken the next logical step.

I know... it sounds crazy: but 'crazy like a fox' is a more accurate way of viewing it. Greg has carefully followed legal steps on claims of ownership. He can now force the issue into the court systems. It is his feeling law already on the books is a perfectly reasonable starting point for extraterrestrial land claims and property rights.

It is not that Greg wishes to be the first extraterrestrial parking magnate. He is out to force 'the system' to make determinations on questions it doesn't particularly want to face. If the courts make statements about what conditions are required for such claims, he will have met his victory conditions.

I wish him luck.

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In case anyone was watching, a couple of our inimitable readers were to be seen on "Future Flight" earlier tonight. The show, on ITV Channel 5, spent fifteen minutes out of an hour program showing the EZRocket in flight and on the ground. Jeff Greason showed up as a talking head, as did Aleta Jackson. I think I saw Dave Jones also but I'm uncertain. Maybe he'll confirm to us if he was in camera range.

Erratum: Doug Jones. Sorry Doug! Insufficient caffeine. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

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I just had a long series of crackles on my speakers in time to the flickering of the overhead lights. One of the others in the flat noticed problems with his radio this morning. These all could be signs of the incoming solar storm. It is one of the three largest since records have been kept on such things. The last really big one, in 1989, took down a big chunk of the Canadian power grid.

If it hits us just right, there could be spectacular aurorae tonight. It is worth going outside tonight and looking up, just in case. There may be nothing or there may be one of the more spectacular heavenly sights you have ever seen. There is just no telling.

At the moment my upward view is rather grey and the outdoors is cold, damp and rather miserable. I doubt I will have the pleasure of seeing this natural lightshow unless the weather changes drastically.

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Everyone knows the Fisher Space Pen was a valuable spin-off from the early space program. NASA funded them to invent a pressurized ink source so Astronauts could write while hanging about 'upside-down' in microgravity. It has become well known folklore. The trouble is, like much other folklore, it isn't true. ESA's Pedro Duque took a normal pen with him on his space station visit and tried it:

Duque has discovered that "ordinary" pens work just fine in space and that the famous American versions that use a pressurized ink source may be a little overkill. In commenting on the ball point pen, he (unintentionally?) makes an interesting observation about the U.S. space program:

"Sometimes being too cautious keeps you from trying, and therefore things are built more complex than necessary," Duque writes.

You will not find many naysayers to this observation in the space community. NASA is synonymous with gold-plated and overbuilt. They have long had a philosophy to never use a 10 cent screw from the local hardware store when they can let a research project for a million dollars into a key congressional district.

The State is not your friend. NASA will never get you and I off this planet.

You can read some of his daily diary entries here.

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Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne was dropped from the mothership at 46000 feet for its fourth glide flight on October 17th, after undergoing minor aerodynamic alterations to correct problems discovered during the third flight on September 23rd. The turn around was faster than I'd expected. As they are now testing the preliminaries to engine ignition, I expect the first in-air engine startup will happen within the next few flights.

According to Scaled Composites, the flight objectives were:

Fourth glide flight of SpaceShipOne. Primary purpose was to examine the effects of horizontal tail modifications at both forward and mid-range CG locations (obtained by dumping water from an aft ballast tank between test points). The tail modifications included a fixed strake bonded to the tail boom in front of the stabilator and a span-wise flow fence mounted on the leading edge of each stab at mid-span. (See the write up under the SPACESHIPONE GROUND TEST section that describes our Ford-250 wind tunnel which was used to help derive the current flight configuration). Other test objectives included a functional check of the rocket motor controller, ARM, FIRE and safing switches as well as the oxidizer dump valve. Additional planned maneuvers included full rudder pedal sideslips and more aggressive nose pointing while in the feathered configuration.

Launch conditions were 46,200 feet and 115 knots and produced a clean separation. The tail performance was examined by flying "longitudinal stability" points between stall and 130 knots and showed considerable improvement of the airfoil's lift coefficient as well as its post stall characteristics. No vehicle pitch up tendency was noted as the main wing now stalls first. Real time video of the tufted tails fed back down to mission control helped considerably in assessing the performance of these aerodynamic improvements. More aggressive maneuvering in the feather made it evident that the pilot could readily point the vehicle's nose where desired and all rocket motor functionality tests were satisfactory.

I expect a drop test and powered flight to occur by the Wright Brothers first flight anniversary date in mid-December. A full suborbital attempt is possible but would be pushing the envelope rather hard. How hard is impossible for anyone on the outside to estimate.

It would be a lovely Christmas present for all of us spacers though...

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One of the many hats and t-shirts I wear is that of the National Space Society (NSS). We need a cultural component to our spaceward movement. It is not just to bind the 'oldtimers' together. We must spread the 'frontier meme' where it is extinct and nurture it where it still lives. It takes more than talk to do this. It takes art.

Prometheus Music in conjunction with NSS will soon release To Touch The Stars. It is now available for pre-release order.

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Matthew O'Keeffe also feels the same pangs as Johnathan Pearce at the passing of that magnificent artifact of the 1960's

I had mixed feelings watching the footage of Concorde's last flight today.

Concorde belongs with Eurotunnel in the category of things which should never really have been built - at least not by profit-seeking realists. This may even be unfair to Eurotunnel which will now be with us in perpetuity and was built with private money. Concorde, by contrast, was financed by the British and French taxpayers at the behest of the very ridiculous Tony Benn (as Minister for White Hot Technology or some such nonsense). And now it is heading for the scrapyards.

And yet, and yet, through the 1980's and 1990's Concorde was the very symbol of the bull market. The shock troops of capitalism could lunch in London before having dinner and closing their deals in New York (it never really made sense the other way round, incidentally, on account of the time differences). As Jeremy Clarkson put it on the radio today, fast is good.

I travelled on the rocket only once myself - and that was the day after the Paris crash. I had a business trip to Wall Street planned that week, purely by chance. Meanwhile, all the supermodels, actors and other weak-kneed types had cancelled their Concorde tickets leaving British Airways happy to upgrade me from Club World to Concorde - with a seat in row one to boot! I was almost ecstatic as we went through the sound barrier and promptly ordered a bottle of their finest champagne - much to the disapproval of the partners from Goldman Sachs who were siiting next to me. Happy days ...

One of the more striking statistics of 9-11 is that Concorde lost 40 of its frequent flyers. I'm not sure how many Concorde frequent flyers there could have been but my guess would be not more than a few hundred. Concorde has suffered from the slump in the stock markets on either side of the Atlantic in general but from the particular horror of 9-11.

To end on an optimistic note, historians may look back on this day as the real start of the next big upturn in the world's economies. One thing that denotes economic cycles is that companies nearly always invest too heavily at the top - and cut back too savagely at the bottom. (British Airways is particularly bad in its timing - they sold Go for £100m to venture capitalists who sold it on to EasyJet a year later for £400m). That our national carrier should retire its flagship, on a route between the two centres of world capitalism, suggests to me that we may be at such a trough point right now. So farewell Concorde - but here's to the next twenty year bull market.

Matthew O'Keeffe

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Yep, I know it was supported by taxpayers' money (boo, hiss) but I think one would have a piece of brain missing not to feel a pang of sadness that Concorde, the world's only supersonic jet airliner, has landed for the last time at Britain's Heathrow airport. An incredible plane, beautiful and able to take folk across the Atlantic at a speed unthinkable to our ancestors.

As a free marketeer, I do of course recognise that state-backed endeavours such as this are largely indefensible, particularly as only the rich could take advantage of something paid for by the poorest taxpayer. But on a more upbeat note, let's hope that in the years to come, the possibility of superfast transport such as this remains a reality, and not just the stuff of science fiction novels.

And that is why, like Dale Amon and other contributors to this blog, I am eagerly awaiting the start of the race for the X-:Prize. You can read about all the privately-funded space ventures involved here

The age of Concorde is over. But another age may hopefully be about to begin. Chocks away!

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Here is an interesting bit of development work being let by the DOD which I found while reading through a list of contracts:

United Technology Corp., West Palm Beach, Fla., is being awarded a $49,405,000 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for research and development for the Robust Scramjet. The Air Force will issue delivery orders totaling up to the maximum amount indicated above, though actual requirements may necessitate less than this amount. At this time, $220,000 of the funds has been obligated. Further funds will be obligated as individual delivery orders are issued. This work will be complete by September 2010. Solicitation began April 2003, and negotiations were completed September 2003. The Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, is the contracting activity (F33615-03-D-2418).

A SCRAMjet is a Supersonic Combustion Ram jet, an engine which is of use only for hypersonic speeds. It would needed for missiles or near-suborbital warcraft.

PS: For those not familiar with the space community, the Air Force Research Lab at Wright Patterson (AFRL-WPAFB) is where very interesting future-looking propulsion systems work is done. If you want to talk about things like antimatter engine design, these are the lads.

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H. R. 3245, a bill to streamline the regulatory framework under which the new suborbital tourist business will operate, has been submitted to Congress by Dana Rohrabacher (R-Ca).

Dana has a somewhat libertarian background (or so I was told by a staffer of his from early days) but has become more a conservative Republican over the years. He still shares many ideals with us. He is also one of the few who actively support commercial space development. This is not to say it is opposed by many; most in Congress don't particularly give a damn.

You can read the bill here, but this summarizes it nicely:

The Secretary of Transportation shall take appropriate efforts, including realignment of personnel and resources, to create a streamlined, cost-effective, and enabling regulatory framework for the United States commercial human spaceflight industry. The Secretary of Transportation shall clearly distinguish the Department's regulation of air commerce from its regulation of commercial human spaceflight, and focus the Department's regulation of commercial human spaceflight activities on protecting the safety of the general public, while allowing spaceflight participants who have been trained and meet license-specific standards to assume an informed level of risk. Not later than 6 months after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Transportation shall transmit to the Congress a report on the progress made in implementing this section.

If you are in the US, you may want to encourage your congresscritter to support it. The bill has inputs from many in the commercial space advocacy community, Among them are a number who actually run the small companies who will be most liberated by a simpler and clearer regulatory framework.

We might wish for a zero regulation policy, but that is not the world we are living in. Still, we can push legislation in the direction of clarity and minimalism.

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China has successfully launched Taikonaut Yang Liwei into low Earth orbit (LEO).

Buzz Aldrin thinks the Chinese could launch a circumlunar flight in a few years using a modified Shenzhou.

I've been watching the slow moving Chinese program for a very long time. They are the tortoise to the American hare. They are not intent on spending the next four decades in LEO with the other two go-nowhere space-faring governments.

We must remember the hardware that put Buzz Aldrin on the moon is forty year old technology. The 'computer' in Apollo capsules couldn't even match the calculation abilities of a cheap 21st century wristwatch. The lunar orbit rendezvous which created the need for Von Braun's giant Saturn V was not the best way to go to the moon even then. It was merely the quickest, most brute force method. Future lunar visits, whether by governments or tourist flights, will use Earth orbit rendezvous - something which can be done with existing launch vehicles.

All else being equal, the next footprint on the moon will be Chinese. With a bit of good luck they may arrive before 2020. That would be just in time to see the last traces of the American footprints fading into the lunar soil after half a century of wild lunar day and night temperature swings.

Of course all else is not equal. The dawn of commercial space tourism in entrepreneur built spaceships is not far off.

I'd love to be among the lunar tourists waiting to congratulate the Chinese on their arrival.

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Scaled Composites has carried out the third drop test of SpaceShipOne and moves ever closer to the first private manned suborbital flight. The test objectives were:

Aft CG flying qualities and performance evaluation of the space ship in both the glide and re-entry or "feather" mode. Glide envelope expansion to 95% airspeed, 100% alpha and beta and 70% loadfactor. More aggressive post stall maneuvering and spin control as a glider and while feathered. Nitrous temperature control during climb to altitude and performance of upgraded landing gear extension mechanism and space-worthy gear doors.

These were mostly met, but the flight uncovered some minor control problems:

Launch conditions were 46,800 feet and 115 knots and produced a clean separation. First stall entry maneuver resulted in an un-commanded nose rise before reaching the wing stall angle of attack. Lateral/directional controls were used in conjunction with forward stick to effect recovery. This aft-cg stall characteristic was worse than predicted and will likely require aero modifications to fix. The feather entry was not explored and the rest of the glide flight used to assess the handling qualities of the vehicle leading to an uneventful landing. The White Knight's heating system was able to keep the Spaceship's nitrous oxidizer conditioned during climb, such that the maximum N2O pressure variation was less than 6 psi.

This is not unusual for a test flight. After all, that is why they are called test flights! One of the beauties of composite airframes is that even major changes can be made relatively easily. When I visited the Rutan facility it was pointed out to me how Rutan and his merry band had modified the tail of one aircraft with a chainsaw. After cutting out the bits they didn't like, they laid up a replacement structure.

Since the main engine has been undergoing tests and SpaceShipOne seems well along on glide trials, it really may come down to whether the government approvals come through in time for the Wright Anniversary date.

Credit for my tour goes to Jeff Greason. This was long before the blog, back when he and Rand Simberg worked for Gary Hudsen's Rotary Rocket and I showed up at the Mojave Civilian Test Flight Facility and bothered them for a day. Perhaps someday I'll find an excuse to do a pictorial on the place as I've several rolls of film from the visit.

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It is perhaps only a matter of weeks now before the Chinese become the third government with proven manned orbital capabilities. This article by Len David (with quotes from sci.space alumnus Jon McDowell) summarizes their current status. It also contains a discussion of the Chinese government's plans for going beyond LEO (Low Earth Orbit).

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I'm sure we've got a few closet Martians out there. You know who you are. Last month during the opposition were you standing out in the back garden every night staring up at that bright red dot with something akin to homesickness? Then have I got the t-shirt for you! This new fashion delight from Kim Poor is just the ticket!

Also, Kim's a great guy and has a lot of other fine space art on sale. It's worth a click or two just to see the artwork.

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There seems to be a lot more information floating about now than there was last week. The first Chinese orbital flight might come as soon as October 1st, but probably not until mid month.

You may remember I suggested the Chinese will aim for the moon within a few decades. I'm not a lone voice: here is what Space.com has to say:

Although tight-lipped on a range of technical details, Chinese space officials have hinted at a multi-pronged human spaceflight program, including space station construction, as well as eventual travel to the Moon, all by 2020.

I've some friends that hope to be able to offer them a hotel room with a nice Mare view by that time.

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In a recent Boeing and USAF test, a B2 bomber dropped 80 bombs in 22 seconds... and hit 80 different targets. They call it revolutionary. I call it awesome to the point of being scary.

Perhaps in a future war we'll only need two very large bombers. One as a backup for maintenance downtime... and the other to make a single war-ending zig-zag pass over enemy territory.

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The Galileo space probe yesterday concluded its mission by entering the Jovian atmosphere and disintegrating at 1957 hours GMT. During its 14 year mission, Galileo sent back more than 14000 images, and highlights of the mission involved watching a comet crash into Jupiter and finding evidence of large oceans under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa.

Galileo really tested the ingenuity of the people controlling the mission at JPL, who firstly had to figure out a way for the probe to reach Jupiter despite having to use a much less powerful rocket to launch it from the space shuttle than originally intended, and then later to find a way for it to complete its mission despite the failure of its high gain antenna, meaning that data could only be transmitted at a much lower rate than originally intended.

However, ways were found, and Galileo ended up being an utterly magnificent success. We criticise the present form of NASA a lot, usually with good reason, but this mission is one that was ultimately got right. To everyone connected with it, might I offer a hearty "well done". I'll miss watching the photos and data come in.

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There are reports China may launch its' first manned spacecraft by as early as October 15th.

I fully expect the general media will not consider it a major story. They will be wrong. China is not going to park in Earth orbit for three decades like we have. Western complacency is up for a serious butt-kick. China is going to aim for the moon as soon as they can concievably do so.

Before you complain about how far behind their technology is, please note it is not technology that has kept us from colonizing the solar system the last thirty years. It is the iron triangle which has kept us here: NASA, Big Aerospace and Congress. Congress primarily looks on space as pork for the re-election. Big Aerospace sees it as a feeding trough. NASA chiefs see it as a means of turf expansion.

The whole system is bloated and risk averse. Getting people into space is a side issue from what really matters. Congress runs taxpayer funds through as many districts as possible. The government contractors want the most profit for the least possible amount of deliverables. NASA top management wants to minimize the risk of adverse media attention to their careers.

The end result is... three decades of next to nothing for our money but paper spaceships and imaginary engines.

Don't tell me that NASA isn't risk averse just because the bureaucracy missed a problem and lost a shuttle. We've lost fourteen men and women in spaceflight and three more on the pad in four decades of manned spaceflight. More aviators than that died in almost every single year at the dawn of flight whose centenary is but three months away. Individuals can accept risk and push boundaries forward rapidly; democratic governments cannot.

This is why the answer to the Chinese is not NASA and the Ministries of Aircraft Production (ie Lockmart and Boeing); it's XCOR, Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites, Bigelow Aerospace, TransOrbital and the rest of the small and the innovative. The ones who are ready to put their own lives and fortunes on the line.

As Ben Bova said many years ago: "The Meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us will have left for the stars."

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I've not been writing about XCOR lately as there has not been much I feel at liberty to write about. There has not been a press release from them since July. So... I rang the CEO, an old friend from sci.space days. I caught him in DC where he is no doubt carrying out obeisance and sacrificing a fatted calf or his first born to the God of Paperwork.

Mojave has submitted its application to be a launch site.

XCOR has submitted its launch license paperwork.

I would say both are fairly good news. It certainly makes for convenience if the Mojave Civilian Flight Test Center adds spaceship testing to its' approvals. Both Scaled Composites and XCOR are based there.

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On September 4th, Scaled Composites executed a full scale ground test of the SpaceShipOne hybrid rocket engine. If all goes well, this engine will power the small ship on the first non-State manned suborbital flight.

The engine was run for the same amount of time and at the same thrust levels as a real flight. Due to proprietary concerns there are no technical details available on the test. Most of the publicly available details are summarized in this article by Leonard David.

Hybrid engines have a solid fuel that is quite similar to the material in truck tires. They are throttleable over a wide range (although Rutan appears to not be utilizing this ability) because they use a liquid oxidizer, typically liquid Oxygen (N2O2 or laughing gas in the case of SpaceShipOne). The engines are inherently safe.

Hybrid rocket engines were pioneered by the long departed California based companies Starstruck and AMROC, run by the late George Koopman and our good friend Jim Bennett. SpaceDev, one of the SpaceShipOne engine developers, bought the patent rights when AMROC went out of business.

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Edward Teller, one of the great intellects of the twentieth century, died on Tuesday at age 95. Fox News has an obituary. It's not bad although the reporter obviously has a rather negative attitude about Dr. Teller. These lines are some of the best of the article:

In an interview in 2001, Teller showed his old fighting spirit, delivering the two-word endorsement -- "High time!" -- to President George W. Bush's decision to pull out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia to work on a missile defense shield.

"So many times I have been asked whether I regret having worked on the atomic and hydrogen bombs," he wrote in his autobiography, "Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics." "My answer is no. I deeply regret the deaths and injuries that resulted from the atomic bombings, but my best explanation of why I do not regret working on weapons is a question: What if we hadn't?"

I was my good fortune to attend a lecture by the good doctor some years ago. Teller was an idea factory through his entire life and was a rivetting speaker. I never knew the man personally, but I know people who worked with him in the national labs. He was a forceful leader and did not like obstacles or excuses. The future was there to reach for and he was fully prepared to reach as far as possible.

We owe him a debt of gratitude.

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As expected, the refined orbital parameters of 2003QQ47 show no chance of impact with Earth.

Y'all can come out of your Asteroid Cellars now.

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Back in May of this year, the Mars Global Surveyer was commanded to turn its' camera outwards at the solar system. These marvelous images show us the home system as not-so-far-future Martian colonists will see it.

I was particularly captivated by this view of North and South America as it would appear to an amateur astronomer.

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Scaled Composities carried out a second drop test of its' X-ship, the SpaceShipOne, last week. On this flight pilot Melville extended the flight envelope with aileron and rudder control tests at stall. The objectives of the flight were, according to the test report:

Same objectives as the aborted flight 31LC/04GC earlier today. Second glide flight of SpaceShipOne. Flying qualities and performance in the space ship re-entry or "feather" mode. Pilot workload and situational awareness while transitioning and handling qualities assessment when reconfigured. As a glider, stall investigation both at high and low altitude and envelope expansion out to 200 kts and 4 G's. More aggressive, lateral directional characteristics including adverse yaw, roll rate effectiveness and control, including 360 degree aileron roll, and full rudder side slips.

Each test brings us one step closer to commercial space. If Scaled Composites' red tape clearance efforts are going equally well we may yet see the first private suborbital space flight during the December centenary of the Wright brothers first flight at Kittyhawk.

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You may have heard the news reports. This newly discovered asteroid could potentially ruin everyone's day on March 21st, 2014. It is way too soon to take this seriously and the odds of an impact event are a little under a million to one. It will take astronomers some time to refine the orbit. It is likely, but not certain, such refinements will prove it harmless.

You can view the current data on this rock at JPL.

If by outrageous bad fortune this one has our name on it we'll spend a good part of the Global Economic Product over the next 11 years to get out there and sort the matter. This is not exactly the way I want us to bootstrap ourselves off the planet, but it is certainly better than the alternative...

I'll post on it again if it gets interesting.

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I posted information about the first drop test of Scaled Composite's X-ship a few weeks ago. Here's a photo of the spaceship on approach to the Mojave airport during that test.

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The Armadillo Aerospace X-Ship is coming together nicely according to their latest report:

All engine plumbing and wiring is complete on the big vehicle. We loaded water into the big tank and tested all the valves, with pretty good results. Our distribution manifold has a leak in the weld which will need to be fixed, and the fill port 2" threads were loosened during the filling process when the giant hose pressurized itself and whipped around a bit. We can’t just weld the inlet fittings, because the check valve is stainless steel, while the rest of the hardware is aluminum, so we may need to weld flanges onto each side and bolt them together.

They seem confident they are close to completion:

If there was catalyst in the engines, the big vehicle is now capable of flight, but we still need to get the drogue cannon worked out before it can land properly. We also need to make some honeycomb panels to protect the base of the tank from exhaust at launch, but we are running out of things to do on it. The base will need a fair amount of rework when we put the full size engines on it, but the basic layout will probably remain the same.

I look forward to news of their first static test of the big vehicle.

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If you are interested in space history, have I got the link for you.

This is the now declassified National Intelligence Briefing given to President Lyndon Baines Johnson in January 1967 on the topic of the soviet lunar program.

Enjoy!

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Is this beautiful or what?

(Labelled version here. Descriptions of how the Hubble Space Telescope took the photo here).

(Link via slashdot).

Update:

This infrared image taken by the UK Infrared Telescope in Hawaii is claimed to be one of the sharpest ground-based photos of Mars ever taken. (Descriptions here and labelled version here).

Sadly, I think that the position of Samizdata's representative in the first hundred may already be filled.

Further Update:

Having just adopted the advanced astronomical technique of opening my window and looking in a vaguely easterly direction, I have to agree with Dale that Mars is extraordinarily bright, particularly given that it is only about 30 degrees above the horizon right now, and I am in the middle of the light pollution of a metropolitan area of eleven million people. I will go out and have another look in a few hours when it is directly overhead, and I have to go somewhere on the weekend where there are fewer lights. I also have to take careful note of what other planets are viewable and where they are in the sky, as the comparison is no doubt interesting.

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As is rather common in Belfast, it was cloudy earlier this evening. Even so, I laid the latest two issues of Sky and Telescope out on the bed, open to the sky map pages. I tried to interpolate where Mars would be tonight. The charts are basically for the East Coast USA, so they aren't quite right for my considerably different longitude and latitude.

I needn't have bothered.

Somewhat after midnight the clouds parted. I pulled on a jumper against the chill of the night. I went out into the too well lit parking lot hoping to navigate my way around the sky based on what ever made it through the glare. It's not as bad as being in the city centre, but the sky glow here is still considerable.

I found Cygnus. Then I started looking for where I thought the plane of the ecliptic should be. Over in the general direction of the Belfast City Airport there appeared to be a plane in the pattern, and the brightness of its' lights were an annoyance while looking for.... HOLY SHIT!!!

That was when I realized just how bright Mars is. I've seen oppositions before, but nothing remotely like this. The various astronomical news items have been just words. One suggested Mars might be bright enough to throw a dim shadow if you are in a sufficiently dark place. Another said Mars is nearer and brighter than it has been since Neanderthals were hunting Wooly Mammoths in Europe.

You really can't miss it.

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The September Astronomy issue reports what may be a cosmological bombshell. Time is continuous. It is not quantized. There is no such thing as an 'instant' of time, only a continuim. This makes the paper I discussed a few weeks ago look even more interesting than it did then.

The test is quite an elegant one. Light waves from a distant source exhibit fringes called an Airy disk. This is a set of rings around a central bright point with an appearance much like a Fresnel lens.

If we assume time is discrete, there are definable instants a quantum or Planck time interval apart. The speed of light in a vacuum becomes slightly fuzzy rather than exact. Photons that leave a source at the 'same' time would go out of phase by a small amount as they travel because some would travel slightly faster than others.

The theoretically proposed smallest time interval (the Planck time) is incredibly short. Phase slippage could not possibly be detected unless the light had travelled for an almost unimagineably long time: such as from a very distant galaxy. If time is quantized, the slippage in the phases should fuzz out the Airy disks of such distant objects.

Astronomers found sharp Airy disks. QED: time is not quantized. The work has already been replicated and seems fairly solid.

I await the theoretical fallout with great interest.

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22 engineers and technicians died instantly in an explosion on the pad. This is the worst pad accident since the Nedelin disaster in Russia in 1960.

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The X-Prize entry from Armadillo Aerospace is coming along nicely. They've carried out a helicopter drop test. They've acquired a Russian space suit - sans gloves so far - from eBay. They've got the landing legs sorted. Most importantly, they have finally sourced more high purity 50% Hydrogen Peroxide. They are still having difficulties convincing the manufacturer (FMC) to sell them the hi-test rocket fuel grade. Nonetheless, this lets them continue the engine test series so they can solve problems identified in an earlier firing.

Armadillo Aerospace was created by John Carmack, one of the founders of Id Software. If you want to support private enterprise in space, buy their games! Of course, since they are the creators of such titles as "Wolfenstein", "Doom" and "Quake", you probably have already done so.

X-Prize entry under construction
Photo: Courtesy Armadillo Aerospace

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Many of you probably know Burt Rutan drop tested the second stage of his suborbital passenger spaceplane on August 7th. You might be interested in some of the details of this historic event. White Knight, the first stage, was piloted by Brian Binnie with Cory Bird as co-pilot. SpaceShipOne flew with Mike Melvill at the controls.

The flight report states:

The space ship was launched at 47,000 feet and 105 knots, 10 nm east of Mojave. Separation was clean and positive with no tendency to roll off or pitch bobble. An initial handling qualities evaluation was very positive, supported close correlation to the vehicle simulator and with that confidence, the first flight test cards were executed as planned. The flight provided handling quality and performance data over 60% of the expected subsonic flight envelope from stall to 150 knots. Trim sensitivity, stick forces, control harmony and L/D performance were all as expected. The on-board avionics and energy management cueing displays performed flawlessly, the gear extension rapid, and the vehicle made a smooth touchdown at 7:56 local on Runway 30 at Mojave. The entire flight, from launch to landing, was viewable from the ground and SpaceShipOne with its unique planform was intriguing to watch as it cut gracefully through the air and was put through its paces.

The test flight time was 1.1 hours for White Knight and 19 minutes for SpaceShipOne.

The biggest thing between them and a first suborbital private launch on the Wright Brothers First Flight Anniversary in December is a pile of US Government forms. These will hopefully be processed in time as the bureaucrats involved are, from what I have heard, doing their best within what the system allows.

The process was begun very late... I will not go into details as I believe Rand Simberg may have discussed this earlier in the summer.

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The DOD announced a site for a new US missile defense system today: Adak Island.

This is exactly where I expected the first 21st century land-based ABM system would go. It is the most likely of two well placed islands in the Aleutians Chain extending south and west from Alaska. Adak Island is an old NSA Cold War listening post and has a military airfield.

It also just happens to sit almost exactly on the great circle route on which a North Korean based ICBM must travel to reach American soil. The DOD release doesn't mention that little tidbit. You've heard it first on Samizdata.

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While I'm on subjects Astronomical... don't forget to keep an eye on Mars. On August 27/28 it will be at its' closest approach to the Earth in recorded history. Calculations show humans have not had a Mars show this good in perhaps 50000 years. It is hard to be certain because chaos takes its' toll when you run the solar system backwards that far.

This close approach is called an "Opposition". It means the Earth and Mars are both in a line with the Sun and on the same side. It happens once every year when the Earth on its' inner, faster track around the Sun catches up with the dawdling outer track Mars. The orbits of Mars and Earth are both slightly elliptical so the distance between the two varies with where the two bodies are on their elliptical paths. When Mars is at its' closest to the Sun at the same time Earth is at its' farthest, we have especially good views. The one coming up later this month is spectacular.

This does not mean you will see a Martian disk with your unaided eye. It does not even mean you will see views like a Hubble telescope from that cheap refractor you got for Christmas when you were aged twelve. However, if you have any amateur astronomer friends, they may be acting like giddy twelve year olds for the next two months. They will certainly be showing up at the office with bleary eyes and silly grins.

They will see detail they have never dreamed of seeing before. Of course there might be a global dust storm just after Opposition... in which case they will stare at the largest blurred reddish disk they've ever seen.

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For the astronomically inclined there have been interesting goings on in the constellation of Scorpio these last three years. The star Delta Scorpii, a constant magnitude 2.3 for as long as anyone can remember, changed habits in July 2000. It has been a variable star ever since and not only that, seems to get a bit brighter on each cycle. It is now just a hair under becoming a first magnitude star. That means it is nearly bright enough to be seen in Manhattan and London.

As to exactly what is going on, no one seems quite sure, but it shows the sky is a changeable thing even on a human timescale.

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Veteran space tourist Dennis Tito is ready to invest in a suborbital spaceship... but he is worried the FAA is going to regulate them like aeroplanes. He and others are worried this would kill the infant industry:

Jeff Greason, president of the Mojave, Calif.-based XCOR Aerospace, testified before the panel that holding suborbital vehicles like the one his company has in development to the same standards as airplanes would ensure that commercial space flight never gets off the ground.

In aviation, Greason said, the FAA's focus is on keeping planes in the sky. When it comes to rocketry, the FAA assumes that the launch vehicle will fail and places most of the regulatory burden on ensuring that adequate measures have been taken to safeguarding people on the ground.

Greason called on lawmakers to help ensure that reusable launchers are treated as rockets, not as aircraft, as some in the FAA would prefer.

"If we insist on perfect safety at the beginning of the industry, we will get it, because no one will ever fly." Greason said.

Perhaps one of our readers will drop in and expound on this at length. (wink, wink, nudge, nudge Jeff)

This link from Xcor points to the written testimony.

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On July 21st, 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned from the Moon after joining up with Michael Collins who had orbited overhead.

The last man set foot on the moon a few years later. All the hard work and miraculous efforts of thousands of dedicated scientists and engineers was thrown into the dustbin of history. World experts on esoteric science and engineering fields were fired and drove taxis to feed their families.

This is what happens when you place your faith in the State.

Down load and play this song (vocals Julia Ecklar, words and music Bill Roper)

If you still don't understand then you have no soul and I can't help you.

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When was the last time you heard anything about neutral particle beam technology? It seems like it almost vanished from the vocabulary after the 1980's "Star Wars" program. From the information released by defense sources over the last few years one would conclude there isn't much happening in that field. One might have concluded it was found to be a dead end.

But... why is everything to do with neutral particle beam technology included in the State Department's ITAR Munitions List? In the most recent revision I've looked at (Sept 19, 2002) energy weapons technology has been promoted to an even higher profile. Neutral particle beams are included.

I wonder what's going on out in the desert that I don't know about?

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I've been reading the discussion about Brian's post on a possible USAF suborbital spaceplane project. It seems to me much of the discussion is overblown and ungrounded in reality. This is the expected next generation of military aircraft. An acquaintance of mine, Mitchell Burnside Clapp, championed a military space plane project named "Black Horse" a decade ago when he was a USAF officer. I have some of his papers on my islandone web site. Mitchell has been involved with commercial space ventures since he left the military.

This is not an ICBM or an ICBM derivative we are talking about. That is a non-starter for practical vehicles, whether for the warfighter or the commuter. It will be an aeroplane with a rocket engine. If it is a descendant of Mitchell's design studies it will use in-flight refueling to top off the tanks. This reduces the weight of landing gear. They will only need to support a partially fueled craft. Once such a craft drops away from the tanker, it lights up and goes suborbital. It is not that much different operationally from the SR-71, it just goes a bit faster and higher.

Perhaps the USAF will buy from some of my other friends. There are some in the Mojave desert who would be more than happy to scale up to their suborbital design (XCOR). Brian has indicated this is a DARPA initiative, so contracts to companies like XCOR are a very real possibility. DARPA likes small groups with new ideas and has very little red tape or strings attached to their funding. I know. I've worked on DARPA projects myself.

This could be the real start of the commercial space launch industry. Greg Maryniak of the X-Prize organization has at various time spoken on this point. The early days of aviation were done privately and their products were then purchased by government. So airplanes are, in the minds of the person on the street, a commercial product. Rockets were built by and for government projects. Apollo made space travel a "government product" in the common mind. It was a false start and it has delayed space travel by decades. It sent us down a dead end road of manned artillery rockets and giant white winged elephants.

We are about to see a total conceptual change. People like those at X-Prize are changing the mind set. There are a dozen or more small companies building suborbital aerospace planes and ships. At least one (Rutan) will fly by the end of the year (target is mid-December on Wright Brothers first flight anniversary); several more will probably fly in the following 2 years. We are about to go back in time and start the space program over. This time we'll do it the way the Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss and others did it. Privately but with the odd military or mail contract to keep body and soul together.

Suborbital aircraft are no revolution in aerial warfare. They bring no completely new capability to the USAF. It is advantageous to the aircrews. I am sure they will very much appreciate flight times of 1.5 hours instead of fourteen and up. As to those on the recieving end... I don't much think they care what time the bomber took off and how long it flew before sending them off to Valhalla.

Where it may well be revolutionary is in US basing policy. It won't change things over night. In a couple decades closure of US overseas air bases may be a viable policy option. That's a salutory effect from where I sit.

We already are seeing the start of a retrenchment of US global forces. I suggested this outcome some months ago. We are moving large numbers of our forces out of Europe; we have moved out of Saudi Arabia; US troops are being pulled back from the truce line in North Korea. I can't see us maintaining a high profile in Turkey any more. Even worse than being unreliable, they have had been working to assasinate leaders and destabilize the Kurdish areas of Iraq. Turkish black ops guys on such missions have been captured by US forces at least twice. We will be stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq for a long time, but it will not be comparable to the fifty year deployments in Germany and South Korea.

You may argue whether the US government intends this trajectory. Nonetheless, we are on it. The time will come when we can force a return to a "Fortress America" defense posture. There is no other possible path that will make it politically feasible for us to militarily disengage from the world. If we can defend ourselves against any attacker from anywhere on the globe and do so quickly from our own shores, we can satisfy worries of the most paranoid Hawk.

At the same time we will decrease our target profile amongst the nutcases of the world.

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For those who feel like a little (slightly horrifying, but not especially surprising) insight into the French way of doing business, might I recommend reading this article from the Economist giving a detailed history of the various occasions in which Airbus Industrie have been revealed or alleged to have paid kickbacks in order to procure orders for their airliners. It is worth observing that to some extent the cause of the problem is the traditional structure of the airline industry, in which there have been a great many state owned carriers for which aircraft purchases have had to be approved by (very corruptible) government (or in some instances even military) officials. Airbus are by no means the first company to indulge in this sort of activity, but the enthusiasm with which they apparently have gone about it, and the apparent collusion and encouragement of the French government, are quite impressive.

A highlight

The Delhi court has a withering opinion of the help Airbus has given the CBI. It allowed Mr Wadehra to add Airbus's Indian subsidiary to his action on the grounds that Airbus in France was not co-operating. Airbus told Mr Wadehra that French law forbade it from answering his questions. “[Airbus] sells its aircraft on their merits,” the firm insisted.

The court has castigated the CBI for its dilatory approach. It took the Indian authorities until 1995 to contact Airbus for information, only to be told that such requests should be routed through the French government. The CBI told Mr Wadehra, despite trying Interpol and diplomatic channels, it was not getting any help from the French government. The French embassy in Delhi in effect told Mr Wadehra to get lost when he wrote to ask why France was not co-operating.

(Link via Arts & Letters Daily).

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Sometimes things cross my desk which are so interesting I have to just pass them on verbatim. I've been expecting this one for years. In 1999 I walked under the wings of the Proteus high altitude aircraft in the Rutan hanger at Mojave. I knew immediately that Rutan had to be thinking of this as a first stage prototype. I also knew that I would not hear about such a thing until roll out.

Rollout day has finally arrived.

Here is a press release from Huntsville L5.

Huntsville Rocket Man Key Player in First Private Manned Space Program
Legacy Ties to Local HAL5 HALO Program

In the early morning hours of April 18, before the in burning heat blasted the Mojave Desert, the hangar doors swing open to reveal yet another strange craft with the obvious signature of the designer. Burt Rutan, President of Scaled Composites LLC, thus unveiled "The First Private Manned Space Program" with the roll-out of the suborbital SpaceShipOne. SpaceShipOne will be air-launched from the "White Knight" high-altitude research aircraft at 50,000 feet. Once released, SpaceShipOne will fire its rocket engine and climb to over 100 km (62 miles), carrying a crew of three into space on a suborbital flight. The rocket engine that will enable this historic feat was co-developed by Huntsville-native Timothy L. Pickens, who served as the Propulsion Systems Developer for Scaled Composites.

Tim first met Burt Rutan (designer of the famous Voyager aircraft) at an AIAA event in Huntsville in 1998. Because of their common interests, a professional rapport developed that would lead to Burt asking Tim to move to Mojave and lead a very important part of this "history in the making." From what started out as napkin sketches with Burt in a Huntsville restaurant became what was rolled out in the Mojave. The propulsion concept was very much rooted in the Rocket City. Tim's contributions to the SpaceShipOne project drew extensively from his involvement in HAL5's High Altitude Lift-Off (HALO) Program. HALO pioneered the high-altitude launch of hybrid rockets.

Tim's SpaceShipOne responsibilities included main and RCS propulsion development, nitrous-oxide portable fill station, rocket motor test stand, ECS support, propulsion fluids, and pressurization. Two hybrid motor vendors were selected to handle the fuel pouring, injector/valve design, and engine controller. This allowed Tim to reduce Scaled's workload, decrease costs, and focus on the complex issues of designing the hybrid rocket motor, fuel case, and nozzle.

SpaceShipOne's hybrid rocket engine employs a solid fuel grain (HTPB rubber) and a liquid oxidizer (nitrous-oxide), providing greater safety and lower cost than fully solid or liquid rocket engines. Scaled's hybrid motor also employs a common bulkhead between the oxidizer tank and the motor. Tim's co-designed the case/throat/nozzle (CTN) which reduced weight and complexity. This approach saves weight and reduces complexity. SpaceShipOne will be the first venture to launch people into space without government money or government technology. Rutan claims this will be accomplished before the 100th anniversary of the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk (17 December 2003).

SpaceShipOne's Huntsville roots can be seen in HAL5's Project HALO. HALO's hybrid rockets utilize either an asphalt or HTPB solid fuel grain with liquid nitrous-oxide that is kept in an oxidizer tank separated by a common bulkhead with the motor case. In 1997, HALO air-launched a hybrid rocket from a high-altitude balloon over the Atlantic Ocean into the edge of space. That HALO mission, designated Sky-Launch 1 (SL-1), is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records 2000 (Millennium Edition) as the highest flight of an amateur rocket (36 nautical miles).

Like SpaceShipOne, HALO SL-1 used no government money, nor hardware. HAL5 had tested a rocket utilizing the same motor design a year before when it launched HALO Ground Launch-1 (GL-1) from a field in Tennessee to about 30,000 feet. In 1998, the group conducted the HALO SL-2 mission from a barge in the Gulf of Mexico. Other projects that spun off from HALO included the Balloon Launched Return Vehicle (1998) and the Cheap Access to Space (CATS) prize launch (2000). The HALO Program began in 1994 with a high-altitude balloon flight, launched from Huntsville's Space & Rocket Center Alabama. Rocket motor testing at a site just east of Maysville in rural Madison County began early in 1995, followed by dozens of high-altitude balloon flights and hundreds of rocket motor firings. Tim Pickens was the Rocket Lead/System Designer for all of those local HALO and HALO spin-off projects. He was responsible for all mechanical and system designs.

Tim has returned to Huntsville where he continues to support Rutan's propulsion efforts on a consultant basis. He is currently a propulsion engineer working for Plasma Processes and runs his own propulsion test company called Orion Propulsion located in Gurley, Alabama. Tim has designed and built a rocket-powered bike featured in Custom Bike magazine, and he is currently working on a "James Bond" type rocket belt. Mr. Pickens, who began his serious hybrid rocket work with the HALO Program, has since worked on such noted rocket engines as the RL-10, Fast-Track, the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME), and Space America's 4000-50,000 pound thrust LOX/Kerosene engines. HALO member Glen May currently works for Scaled Composites in Mojave, California as a propulsion technician responsible for many aspects of the program.

Tim and other members of Project HALO will be testing future rocket engines and are available for press interviews on Thursday, 24 April from 7-10 PM, at his rocket workshop located at 104 Lindell Drive in Madison. For more information on Project HALO, please see web site.

HAL5 will host a public presentation by Mr. Pickens on the Huntsville connection to SpaceShipOne at the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library main auditorium on Thursday, 1 May 2003 from 7:00 to 8:30 PM. The public is invited and attendance is free. For more information, please call (256) 971-2020.

HAL5 is the Huntsville Alabama chapter of the National Space Society. It formed in 1983 as a non-profit, 501(c)(3), space educational/advocacy organization. Members share the enthusiasm that space development can stimulate our world with immeasurable benefits in the areas of education, energy, environment, industry, resources, and (ultimately) room to grow for our society. Members believe that by educating and working with the public, the government, and private industry, we can speed up the date when routine, safe, and affordable space travel is available to anyone who wants to go. Tim is helping this to become a reality.

The National Space Society, formed in 1974 by Wernher von Braun, is an independent, non-profit space advocacy organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. Its 23,000 members and over 50 chapters around the world actively promote a spacefaring civilization.

Please note that the NSS was created from the merger of two organizations formed around the same time; Werner Von Braun's NSI mentioned above, and The L5 Society from which myself and chapters such as Huntsville L5 came from. The two merged in 1987.

Greg Allison, the leader of the HAL5 group is usually seen wandering about the yearly ISDC

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The National Space Society invites you to join fellow space enthusiasts at the International Space Development Conference, May 23-26, 2003, in San Jose, California. Buzz Aldrin will be hosting a tour of the U.S.S. Hornet on Wednesday, May 21. For more information, visit the conference website.

I'll be there: I hope I'll see you too!

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Last night the British television channel, Channel 4, gave us another superb documentary history programme with a great twist - the story of the Dambuster raid on the German dams in WW2. It relayed the story of how Wing Cmdr Guy Gibson (a mere 24 years old) led a squadron of Avro Lancasters to smash two dams using the famous "bouncing bomb".

The programme makers got a group of present-day serving RAF aircrew, including two women, who work in the very different airforce of today, to try to repeat the feat of Guy Gibson's men, using a flight simulator and a real-live Lancaster. These modern flyers are used to state-of-the-art navigation technology rather than the old pencil, map and compass techniques that had to be used back in the 1940s, when radar-based techniques were in their relative infancy.

It made for compulsive viewing. And one thought stuck in my head. Most of the flyers are about on average 10 years younger than me (I am 36). Gibson, as noted above, was just 24. I don't think - as the Iraq campaign demonstrates - that the best of our young folk today are any less capable of performing heroic and dangerous feats than our forbears. And while I would prefer to see such talents used for peaceful purposes like entrepreneurship rather than flying a bomber, I think recent events bode rather well for our future.

That's something to remember when London gets infested with the usual rag-bag of anti-globalistas and Saddam mourners on May 1.

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So, just three things here so far today, one very short and two rather serious. So here are a couple of curiosities.

First, there is this map, which was originally claimed to have been taken posthumously by Columbia before it burned and crashed. You want this to be true, don't you? As did Michael Jennings. But as I commented at Michael's, those killjoys at snopes.com have now killed this particular joy. But it is still a thing of beauty, and certainly has my little country looking its best. Snopes says it is "false", but their map is even bigger than the one Michael put up, so they liked it even as they trashed it.

And the other is a beating heart, courtesy of b3ta.com. Who are those guys?

When you consider all the metaphorical baggage that has been loaded onto the human heart over the centuries, it turns out to be very small and yucky, and you can swap yours for another with "you" carrying on pretty much as usual. It's just a pump.

And a picture is just a picture.

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It appears that we may have underestimated the soaring ambitions of the European Union. Not content with absorbing the 'Vilnius 10', they have set their sights on outer space:

"Europe's first mission to the Moon looks set for a July blast-off.

Scientists and engineers working on the Smart 1 spacecraft are hoping to fly around the 15th of that month - but it all depends on the status of the launcher."

Doubtless this will be the first of many such missions designed to extend the scope of the European orbit. According to French EU Commissioner Bertrand Maginot:

"At this time, the cosmos is totally unregulated. This is an intolerable situation."

A Swedish EU representative, Helena Hankårt was prepared to outline the precise aproach:

"It is not so much that we intend to conquer space. It is more a question of bringing space within democratic control."

The British deputy chair of the Celestial Expansion Committee, Sir Crispin D'oilly-Gitte was rather more forthright in his views:

"Oh but we simply must extend Euwopean influence into space. Otherwise it will be full of those fwightful Amewicans"

The Celestial Expansion Committee has drawn up detailed plans for future ventures and even a broad agreement on contingency operations, as indicated by Dutch Committee member Willy Van Der Pimp:

"There is a draft plan setting out an appropriate response in case of encounters with alien life-forms. However, it is agreed that the aliens must commit themselves to meeting certain minimum regulatory standards before any communication can be approved."

Members of the committee refused to be drawn on the question of whether space should, indeed, be referred to as the 'final frontier'.

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I have not been posting on this subject for awhile as there has not been any single bit of news significant enough to require it. The weight of the bits and pieces has finally built to the point at which I must return to it.

Little has changed in the basic scenario of the breakup. Most everything I have read has added detail or backed up early scenarios. One of the more interesting bits was the set of internal emails released by NASA. As an engineer myself, I know this sort of "what-if" goes on all the time. In any given team at any given time there will be persons who are overly optimistic or pessimistic. Everyone takes a turn in these roles; everyone has a day of certitude on some new hypothesis. The problem a manager faces is how to figure out whether that person is actually correct on some particular day and some particular issue. Usually the answer is in the middle ground. When it isn't, you've just bet your career,

In this case the pessimist wasn't pessimistic enough. He was worried about a portside gear door burn through causing a failure of that gear to descend on landing. An aircraft with one gear down is in deep shit. A friend of mine managed to get he and his wife safely on the ground in a Cessna 180 with that problem... but none of the techniques he used would work on a brick that doesn't so much land as carry out a controlled 220 mph near-crash. Believe me, you really, really do not want to ground loop at those kinds of speeds. I'm sure anyone else out there who has ever landed an airplane by their sweet lonesome would get the same retractive reflex I get at the thought.

The point is, things were far worse than the most polyannish engineers thought.

Some of the other interesting news is confirmation bits were coming off even before the shuttle crossed the Pacific coast. This validates the report we noted from a San Francisco paper, and the first hand report of one of our friends at XCOR in the Mojave Desert. A shuttle tile has been recovered from Nevada. They are searching for more in the area as it is those earliest bits of debris which will tell the greatest tale.

The USAF has a lot more detail on the radar reflection from near the shuttle on Day 1. Something 1x1.3 feet in size was floating near the shuttle shortly after a "major maneuver". I'll guess that means a brief blip on the OMS system. If something were loose, that is exactly when you'd expect a seperation.

No one knows what it was. The size and orbital characteristics coupled with the time it appeared suggest to me it is not from a waste water dump and not due to an orbital debris impact. We're left with either something floating out of the payload bay or something broken during the ascent. Its' rapid de-orbiting tells us it had a low mass to area ratio. That certainly isn't true of water at 60 pounds per cubic foot. I cannot tell you much else though. Virtually anything structural on the shuttles is quite light.

I read this as evidence of quite severe damage caused by the foam/ice impact we've all seen in slo-mo by this time.

The news I found rather amazing is the recovery of video tape that was in the cabin. Some was burned: I am utterly amazed that it wasn't all fried, or at the very least heated above it's Curie point and completely demagnetized. This is a sad experiment to have the results of, but I must admit the details are fascinating and not at all what I had expected. Other than the larger debris footprint, the results are little different from an airliner crash. Some bits are amazingly intact through sheer providence... and nearby parts ravaged beyond belief.

It seems clear another of my early predictions is correct as well. They are never going to find more than a fraction of the vehicle. Tangled bits will be showing up for centuries. Farmers will be plowing them up and selling them to museums and collectors 500 years from now. It may even be centuries, or at least many decades before the last of the major parts turns up.

Columbia is now an eternal part of the Texas landscape and history.

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Taking my life into my hands the other day, I squeezed around the London Underground and found myself pressed up against an advertisement on the Piccadilly Line for that manufacturer of jobs, I meant 'first-rate military equipment' British Aerospace or BAe as it would now prefer to be known.

I discovered that Royal Air Force pilots enjoy the delights of an 'assertive' and 'calm' woman's voice, produced by electronic circuitry, telling them 'Missile locked onto you', 'Pull up! Pull up' and 'You fool! You're going to die'... I made that last one up, I hope.

The advertisement informed me that the pilots affectionately know this disembodied squawking harpy as 'Nagging Nora'. Far be it from me to even hint that this nickname could be anything other than a cute moniker of endearment. However, the only person I have met in the last five years who worked in the R.A.F. was a woman, although she wasn't a pilot. And I also know that gays are now allowed into the armed services. So this caused me to wonder... Has a pilot been sued for divorce yet, by a jealous wife, angry at her beloved calling out of 'Nora, Nora' in his sleep?

Can a female pilot sue the R.A.F. for refusing to provide her with a 'Nagging Norman' voice, perhaps modelled on the authoritarian tones of that former pilot Lord Tebbitt? Can a homosexual pilot demand the same (which would be funny given Lord Tebbitt's known 'enthusiasm' for gay rights)? And if different voices are provided for women and gays, will it be considered 'pressure' on lesbians to reveal their sexuality to admit that actually, they rather preferred Nagging Nora's soft and assertive tones, all along?

As we prepare for war, I hope that these vital issues for the nation's defence are given the proper attention that they deserve. And never mind that the Tornado is hopelessly outclassed as a fighter by the Iraqi Mig 29s.

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Kudos to Steve "SteKwack" and his friend for passing these enhanced images along to me. In Steve's words:

"I saw your weblog entry relating to the shuttle damage, and saw a long range photo which I suspect was taken by one of these targetting systems. A buddy cleaned up the picture and vectorised it. The pictures clearly show some form of plasma streaming off the left wing, along with what may be turbulence caused by damage on the front of the same wing."

Now let's see what he is talking about. First we have a "solarized image".

We are seeing the shuttle from below, so the wing at the bottom is the port (left) side where the problems occurred. The double delta wing plan shows up clearly on both sides of the fat and blunt-ish fuselage; the squared off thing at the stern is the body attached elevator which sits directly underneath the SSME's (Space Shuttle Main Engines). The OMS pods may be the cause of the apparent rounding of the elevator; the tail is either hidden in this view or too thin to show at this resolution.

What leaps out at you is the double bump at the boundary between the two parts of the double delta. Given the level of detail I see elsewhere this is a huge break not only in the leading edge, but in the front wing structure itself.

The more amorphous deformation of the trailing edge is a plasma trail that should not be there and which shows only on the damaged port side.

Next we see a vectorized version of the same image:

The green line faithfully shows the fuselage center line. For control to be possible, the centers of Lift, Thrust, Drag and Mass should lie along this line. The blue vectors show a flow line through the damaged leading edge to the plasma tail coming off the trailing edge.

Finally, they put them all together:

Whether the break at the division between the two delta planforms is entirely structural or a combination of damage and turbulence, it should be apparent to anyone this spaceship is already deep into its' final death throes. I do, in fact, expect the deep notch is plasma on either side of a structural break in the wing at that point. 2000 degree Fahrenheit plasma is most likely ripping through the wing interior from the tip of the notch. Wires are burning, aluminum frame members are weakening and total structural failure is imminent.

Note: If Steve would like credits added for himself and his friend, I'd appreciate it if he would comment and give me full names to use.

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A couple of days ago I noted it is not unusual for the USAF to use the landing shuttle as a test target for their space defense optical systems. They did so this time as well and are reported to have seen major wing damage.

I'd love to see those photos, but I would say there is a fair chance it would take a security clearance to do so unless they were taken by something non-black and not even "grey".

ANOTHER ONE: While I was not the one to first note this, I did report it early on. Insulation hits began causing tile damage after NASA switched to an "environmentally friendly" (read that as Astronaut killing) non-CFC based material.

EXTRA! Reader GK Elliot pointed me to this Craig Covault article on the story.

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A few of you may have noticed a comment I made a few days ago about the flaking problem being due to NASA trying to be green. I didn't follow up on it at the time because I had very little more than hearsay on it then. Brian Carnell has the confirmation.

We may just have to lay this disaster at the feet of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Further, I believe safety recommendations for return to flight should require a return to the old and proven CFC based ET (External Tank) insulation foam.

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While I was at tea (or more accurately, pizza) after my earlier flurry of keystrokes, I received a call from Jim Bennett. Some of you know him from "Anglosphere". I known him from his AMROC and Starstruck launch company ventures. The pizza got cold but the ideas flowing back and forth over the phone line should have been enough to reheat it.

First of all, Jim came up with one more question which needs to be dealt with.

If the engineers saw the insulation hitting the wing, couldn't they have called for an RTLS (Return To Landing Site) or TAL (Trans Atlantic) abort? No. The material was not easily seen. It was later that it was noticed and at least two days before it was analyzed. An abort would have had to occur almost instantly. Even if we assume someone could have monitored, realized implications and reported it as it happened, we are left with a stark choice. We don't know if it is a Category 1 problem and the shuttle has never flown an RTLS or TAL outside of a computer simulator. I won't go into great detail on the maneuvers required. Lets just say they are "interesting".

As we talked, it struck me there was a possible scenario if a shuttle could be gotten up quickly. Those old rescue balls must surely be in storage somewhere. A second shuttle with a skeleton rescue crew could send one man across to stuff the plastic balls in the outer airlock. Then they could cycle the crew through one at a time and have them carted across. I still had strong doubts a shuttle could be programmed for the weight and balance and particulars of the rendezvous in less than 6 weeks unless NASA took serious risks. (If there is anyone at KSC or HMSFC out there willing to put a hand up, please correct me). Then Jim came up with the idea. Some of the new commercial ELV's are more easily programmable. All you really need to get up there is probably O2 for breathing and CO2 scrubber cartridges. You could perhaps get some food and water as well, but I don't believe they are as limiting.

I can only see one problem here. The Canadarm was not installed and there is not (to my knowledge) any sort of portable maneuvering unit on board a flight that only has an EVA suit for the contingency of payload bay doors not closing properly. So the one astronaut in the one EVA suit is going to have to bet his life on a jumping for it. If he hasn't enough tether, he'll have to free jump. That's an all or nothing, life or death bet.

Then they have to survive.

The shuttle is in a low orbit, it would probably re-enter in much less than 6 weeks unless measures were taken to reboost. They could do a small OMS burn since their goal is not re-entry. They might even have enough margin to do it without cutting into the fuel for re-entry.

Then they power every thing down; sit as quietly as they can; talk to friends and relatives on the ground and try to stay alive for 6 weeks or more. It would be simply awful, and I imagine the - how to put this delicately - "scent" would be somewhat like a sewage treatment plant in the summer sun. But they might be able to last.

Then bring the crew across in a combination of rescue balls and EVA suits. If a repair kit can be put together, the damage could be assessed and perhaps repaired. If it cannot, the shuttle can be set on autopilot to do a controlled self destruct re-entry; if repair is possible, a two person crew of pilot and commander could take the risk of bringing it back.

If all of this seems to be moving in the direction of large numbers of dice rolls falling your way... you are absolutely right. There are so many potential problems with the re-supply and rescue I've not even bothered listing them. But if there were no other way and we were sure of the consequences of the re-entry, I'm sure drastic measures would have seemed more reasonable than watching seven people die.

NOTE: Many thanks to Jim Bennett for the brainstorm upon which this post is based.

By the way: Here is Jim's column about the shuttle and its' replacements in National Review.

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The last 36 hours have seen a lot of traffic on the "Draft L. Neil Smith for President 2004" mailing list, most of it centered around you-know-what, the same obsession we've all shared this weekend. One refrain I've been hearing is, "I need to dig out my copy of that Victor Koman book", Kings of the High Frontier.

I made the mistake of lending my copy to a former colleague a few months ago, who just now got around to mailing it back to me. See my own longer article on the book: there aren't many copies of this superb work in publication. If John Ross' Unintended Consequences is "the Atlas Shrugged of the gun freedom movement", then Koman's book is "the Atlas Shrugged of the free space movement".

Russell Whitaker

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I have seen numerous questions which come down to "If NASA had taken the wing impacts on launch seriously, the astronauts could have been saved".

Unfortunately this is not true. I'll work through the scenarios. Some have been covered reasonably well in the media; some not so well due to a lack of real understanding of orbital mechanics.

• Why didn't they have a docking collar?

The Columbia is the heaviest of the shuttles because it is the oldest. For that reason it performs many of the non-space-station missions. This one in particular had a Spacehab in the bay. The spacehab couples to the main airlock of the crew cabin. It also supplies an EVA lock if I remember correctly. What it does not do is allow for an International Docking Collar. There simply will not be room (or more accurately enough payload weight capacity or "payload mass budget") for one on any flight doing really major non-station hauling.

• Couldn't they have gone to the space station if they'd known?

No. The space station is in an "orbital plane" tilted around 50 degrees to the Equator. Since KSC is at around 25 degrees latitude, a spaceship going into orbit there will be best off going into an orbit that is tilted 25 degrees to the equator. If you have a globe handy, look at the location of KSC in Florida. An orbit is a circle around the earth with the centre of the earth as its' centre.

The Earth is about 24,000 miles in circumference. If you are standing on the equator, you must do a full rotation in 24 hours; thus you are travelling at about 1000 miles per hours. If you were to launch from there, in the direction the Earth is turning, you get your first 1000 mph for free. As you move further north or south, the "length" of your line of latitude gets smaller and smaller. You travel a shorter distance in 24 hours, so the velocity is lower. When you reach the pole, you just turn in a circle once a day but don't actually go anywhere. Your velocity is 0 mph.

When a rocket takes off, it must go into an orbit; it cannot follow a line of latitude except if it is at the equator. So it not only gets a lower free boost the further it is from the equator; it can't even use all of it. I'd really like to get into the velocity vectors but that would require diagrams and an assumption you have all had geometry. Instead, just think of the extreme case: if you wanted to launch due North, a "free velocity" in the due East direction is something which not only doesn't help; it must be cancelled out.

So we now have an idea about why a particular orbital plane (actually a pair of them) is the "cheapest" for a given point on the Earth's surface. If you are at KSC, it is about 25 degrees; if you are at a Russian launch site, it is more like 55 degrees or higher.

When a shuttle is going to the ISS, it must do a "plane change". This is most efficiently done during the boost phase. The shuttle rolls onto an azimuth for that orbit and boosts up along the East coast of America. But this is costly; it is not getting the full use of the "free velocity" it would have gotten if it instead rolled onto a 25 degree azimuth. It has to replace that lost factor by burning more fuel. A longer burn means more fuel; more fuel means more fuel to lift that fuel and so forth... this is what is known as the rocket equation.

Carrying more fuel means less of the total mass budget is available for payload.

Once you get into orbit, a "plane change" maneuver is just about the costliest (in terms of fuel) thing you can do. You are travelling at 18000 mph in a very heavy vehicle in a "straight line". Remember "things in motion tend to stay in motion". There is a lot of momentum. If you want to go from 25 degrees to 50 degrees inclination, you have to fire your engines at right angles to your direction of motion. You have "turn" your entire orbit. It is almost "cheaper" to land and re-launch than to make that change. It is certainly beyond the abilities of any of the shuttles.

But that is only the first maneuver! The ISS is in a higher orbit. So you also have to do a burn that raises the apogee or high point of your orbit. This is a "Transfer Orbit". When you next reach perigee, you have to do another burn to raise the perigee. This is a "Circularization burn".

Oh, yeah... you will have to then be in an orbit slightly above that of ISS so you'll rendezvous with it within a few days. Then you do minor orbital changes and carry out the rendezvous and docking.

If this all sounds like a nonstarter... you are correct.

• Well, couldn't they just sit tight and be rescued?

No. They have limited food and water, but most critically, they have limited Oxygen. Whether the margin left after that 16 day mission was in days or a couple weeks I don't known. I guarantee you it was very finite.

Shuttles are not "launch on demand" reusable vehicles. They are more "re-buildable" vehicles that are extensively refurbished after each flight. There might have been one already stacked (I haven't checked the status) but even so, it would take days to get it out to the pad; days more to do a rush checkout job... and they still wouldn't have the computers set up for the mission. I do not know how hard they can push that. Maybe weeks if they took lots of risks. Shuttle flight software used to be scheduled and tested over a period of many months in advance. They have in recent years done some "rapid" re-profiling of missions, but at the best I think we are talking 4-6 weeks.

Not soon enough I'm afraid.

• Couldn't we have asked the Russians to rescue them?

The Russians had an unmanned, full cargo ship on the pad. But the Progress vehicle is discarded. It has no re-entry system. The Russians currently build 2 Soyez per year. None were on the pad to my knowledge. Even if they were, a Soyuz holds 3 persons. You are going to need at least one inside to deal with on the spot issues. So best case, you can draw lots and save two... but ooops... There is only one EVA suit. So I guess you save one guy and wave to the rest.

• Couldn't one of the Astronauts have gone EVA and fixed it?

No. It's conceivable the EVA could have been carried out; however one astronaut spokesman has pointed out the risk of the inspector causing damage. And if he finds "a situation"... there is no means of in-orbit repair.

• Couldn't they have just been really gentle on re-entry?

Doubtful. The re-entry glide path is tightly constrained. Too shallow and you skip a number of times and then when you dig in you dig deep; too deep and you burn up. Like the three bears, you have to get the one that is just right. Perhaps they could have avoided the S turns, started re-entry further out and stayed wings level... but my level of hope for that is rather low. It's probably the option they would have tried.

It comes down to this. If they had known from immediately after launch, those seven people would have spent their last 20 days of life facing certain death. Instead they enjoyed themselves immensely and died instantly doing exactly what they wanted to do.

Who could ask for a better way to go?

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NASA has set up this FTP site here for the public to use to upload photos, videos and documentary commentary of found debris. It may be the first use of the Net to assist in disaster evidence collection on such a massive scale.

REMEMBER not to touch anything. And FORGET about trying to profit from this tragedy.

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I really don't want to add anything to this statement by the families. If it doesn't bring a tear to your eye, you have no soul.

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Since Doug Jones uttered the name Henry Spencer in a recent comment, I decided to ring Henry and compare notes. A very interesting 15 minutes pooling our various bits of hearsay and rumour...

Henry thinks a heat induced tireburst in the wing is one possible scenario. As we know (think Concorde) such events can be extremely violent and cause air frame damage.

For my part, I note the best place to run the hydraulic loops from the APU's is right through a section of rear fuselage and wing root where the news have been pointing to as places where the temperature rises were seen shortly before loss of communication. Neither of us knows exactly how the hydraulic lines run and how far apart their independant paths are. However the lines all have to come together at the actuators for the ailerons (or elevons since they can provide both functions I believe).

Loss of the hydraulic loops would cause instant and violent loss of control, but I would expect at least a small amount of data showing the lines popping before the control loss occurs. I am not privy to any such data.

Henry's suggestion on the tire gives us a very sudden air frame damaging event, but unless it causes immediate catastrophic structural failure, I can't see it happening without the crew knowing a few seconds in advance something was terribly wrong.

I would expect clear signatures of either in telemetry. I guess we all have to say "we don't know", and we are at a disadvantage without access to the actual telemetry and time sequence.

Which is of course what teams of engineers at NASA are most likely doing right now.

Also, Henry reports from his sources that there is uncertainty that remains of all 7 have been found yet. They announced one way and then back tracked apparently.

No one has found the significant heavy structures of the shuttle: the SSME's or major portions of the crew pressure vessel. Something the size of a compact car is said to have gone down into a reservoir but it has not been found and no one knows what it was. The fact that remains have been found tells us the pressure vessel must have been split open.

It is likely these items travelled the farthest. They could be deep into Louisiana or perhaps into the Gulf of Mexico. If the latter, there is the risk they will not be found for a very long time.

Hopefully Henry will drop by and add his tuppence (Canadian) to these random jotting about our brief brainstorm.

MORE: A 6-7ft long piece of the cabin has been found. Added to the evidence that astronaut remains have been found, I think it is safe to say the pressure vessel and contents were shredded pretty thoroughly. The good news is, more of it is likely to be found around Nacogdoches rather than further down range. There is still no word of the three SSME's.

STILL MORE The Indendant claims bits will still be turning up in ten years. Ten years hell: centuries more like. Not to mention the few odd bits that will make it into fossil layers to be dug up a hundred million years hence. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of shuttle bits spread over half of East Texas and potentially spread from California to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. They'll be lucky to even find all the big parts this side of 2100!

AND MORE They have now found the nosecone

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Fox News today reported information given out by Shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore I find quite useful:

"He [Dittemore] added that engineering data shows a rise of 20 to 30 degrees in the left wheel well about seven minutes before the spacecraft's last radio transmission. There followed a rise of about 60 degrees over five minutes in the left hand side of the fuselage above the wing, he said.

The shuttle temperature rose the normal 15 degrees on the right side over the same period, he said. All the readings came from sensors underneath the thermal tiles, on the aluminum hull of the craft.

The temperature spikes were accompanied by an increased drag, or wind resistance, that forced Columbia's automated flight control system to make rapid adjustments maintain stability. Dittemore said the corrections were the largest ever for a shuttle re-entry, but still within the craft's capability."

But his description of "an L shape" makes me think of a tile or tiles unbonding and disintegrating into powder as they smash against the pitched up wing, and then being ionized into a burst of glowing plasma... followed by a steady erosion of surrounding tiles in the 3000F+ slipstream. A spectrogram would have been wonderful for the investigation team.

His photos may well show the beginning of the end, the initiation of an unzipping of tiles.

NOTE: The DOD sometimes uses the re-entering shuttle as a sensor test target for space defense systems. It is possible NASA is already getting such information. I have seen unclassified photos of a shuttle re-entry taken by experimental DOD optical systems. Such might exist this time as well.

I have absolutely no way of knowing. This is pure (but "educated") speculation on my part.

STILL MORE: Doug Jones from XCOR may also have seen tiles disintegrating if I am right. He posted a comment here on Saturday:

"I watched the reentry from Mojave, CA at about 0553 this morning. Although there was some light haze (clearly visible when viewing Venus and Jupiter with 10x50 binoculars while waiting for the event), I was able to see an orange dot leaving a glowing trail behind it. At about the time of closest approach (about 220 miles, I believe) the brightness flared for an instant and a small speck came away from the main body, drifting backwards relative to it. Over about ten seconds, it dimmed and went out, then perhaps thirty seconds later the shuttle flared again but no debris was visible."

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Peggy Noonan hit the right tone. I think she understands the dream.

And Buzz... I did to:

"Buzz Aldrin captured it this morning. He tried to read a poem about astronauts on television. He read these words: "As they passed from us to glory, riding fire in the sky." And tough old Buzz, steely-eyed rocket man and veteran of the moon, began to weep.

He was not alone."

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The Washington Post reports that remains of all seven crew members have been found.

This will make it easier on the families. I hope they all get a missing man flyover.

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I've now seen more (but still sketchy) details on the telemetry timeline in the port wing. There is enough there for me to suggest another possible scenario.

The first problem detected was a temperature rise in the port hydraulics. All the flight surfaces on the shuttle are controlled by hydraulics. Pressure is supplied by the APU's; control is supplied by actuators controlled by the shuttle computers (GPC's). There are 5 GPC's. If I remember the architecture correctly, each controls a seperate hydraulic loop. If a GPC fails and tries to ram an aileron full down, the other 4 override it. This is not handled in electronics, it is handled in the hydraulics themselves. The pressure from 4 actuators pushed by hydraulics one way over rides the one going the other way. So long as no more than two GPC's fail unsafe, control is still possible.

Let's posit a heat induced hydraulic failure in the port wing. The temperature rise is a common mode failure which overrides the redundancy. I do not know if they have any additional failsafe to return and lock the position of the aileron at a neutral position. However even if they did we can see a potential problem. The shuttle was in the second of two banks in an S curve the shuttle follows for bleeding off energy. Just at the time communication was lost. If the shuttle has just been commanded to roll and lost all hydraulics when put under the pressure by the actuators, we have the shuttle going into a roll that will go faster and faster. It seems likely (to me) we'd lose the aileron very quickly, followed by breakup within seconds.

Even on level flight, I could imagine serious problems from complete loss of use of control surfaces on the port side. I doubt the fly by wire system could deal with something that extreme. I doubt you can fly a brick that way. Period.

CORRECTION: After chatting with another knowledgeable friend and doing a bit of checking I found I was in error about the number of loops. There were 4 loops in the Enterprise drop test article; they apparently cut this down to three independant loops for the first flying article.

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I've noted a few interesting items as I've read through coverage this AM.

1. My first sighting of the media's second stage reporting: when they start finger pointing and looking for a "whistleblower" or a "smoking gun". Jackals need a carcass, and they will find one.
2. I was right about some debris making it into the Gulf of Mexico. Coast Guard cutters have been dispatched to search for locations where debris is supposed to have come down off shore.
3. There is an unconfirmed report of something coming off over California and someone suggested it might have been tiles. I'm a bit skeptical a tile would cause a trail visible at a distance of 70 miles or so. Meteor trails come from dust particles, but they are traveling many times faster.
4. The breakup occurred near the point of maximum temperature. It's hard to imagine a worse time for it. Or perhaps a more likely one for the top scenario.
5. O'Keefe is immediately putting the investigation into an external investigation team's hands, which is a wise move. During the days after the Challenger, some of the sleazier denizens of Capitol Hill tried to use it for political advantage. In particular I seem to remember Senator Fritz Hollings (D, Disney and sometimes NC) as one who particularly tried to use the 7 deaths to gain media attention for his own political ends.

I think I will be calling it a night very soon as it has now passed 3am here in Belfast and I am starting to hear my mattress' siren call; "come to me".

ONE MORE THING: If you can't sleep and need reading material, you might find it interesting to relive the past. I believe all the discussions about the Challenger accident will be found in this 2.5 megabyte tar.gz file. Right click and download, Look for January 28th, 1986 and start reading from there.

You might even recognize a few names.

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Fox News has a number of anecdotes from people who have reported on debris. The report includes some knowledge on the effects of spaceflight disasters I would rather have lived out my life without knowing.

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I'd have waited awhile, but the TV mediots are already trying to place the events of today into A Grand Context. They are speaking in sweeping generalization and grand predictions of Its Effect On America, The End Of The Space Station... and so forth.

Yes there will be some effects, but primarily this is a human tragedy. We've lost some brave people and many of us empathize with the great vision and are saddened by the loss.

But it is not going to cause any Earth shattering changes. It is not going to scar the national psyche. It is just a family funeral of loved ones in which we are all part of the extended family; those of us in the space community feel it perhaps more deeply than most but not nearly so much as their co-workers in Houston and Cape Canaveral or their families.

With all of that said, I can now plunge into the punditry.

The shuttles are going to be grounded for anything from months to a year. This will cause an enormous impact on the ISS scheduling. Completion will be thrown back by years. It is not only the loss of time while the fleet is grounded; it is the loss of capacity. Columbia was not much use for ISS missions and so it was useful for other non-ISS missions. Now those missions will have to be cut or serviced by the remaining fleet. That means a lengthening of the ISS completion time line. This can be somewhat ameliorated by giving the Russians a bundle of money to handle most of the supply trips.

We can't abandon the ISS for a long period of time. It must be reboosted at regular intervals because the vast solar arrays give it a lot of drag. There is a small amount of gas even at that altitude. Enough to slowly bring it down. So there is no real option of abandoning it for a couple years. You can't.

You also can't risk bringing something that big into re-entry in one piece; and you can't disassemble it without shuttle support.

So NASA must get the fleet flying again. President Bush has already said we will not abandon space. In the community, we all knew that. It's simply too important now.

There will almost certainly be a push for a replacement vehicle. The shuttle is, after all, a 1975 base level of technology. It's been upgraded and retro fitted, but even the newest shuttle, the Endeavour, is nearing 15 years old. The problems are budgetary and the inability of the "old aerospace" to perform on anything like a reasonable time and budget. I had actually much hoped NASA would work with the existing shuttles until the end of the decade, long enough to let the start up companies move in and revolutionize the field.

NASA will go to Boeing or Lockmart for a replacement. They are not going to talk to XCor or Armadillo or any of the other companies who will develop the true space ships.

What is my guess? I will suggest we'll see a half hearted program for a shuttle replacement initiated. It will run over budget or be stillborn like every other such program in the last 15 years. The ISS schedule will stretch out to a completion date of 2010, almost 30 years after Ronald Reagan called for a space station to be completed in 10 years. An X-Prize space ship will fly suborbital this year or next year and there will be private tourists on private suborbital flights by 2006 and orbital by 2010. NASA will then buy one for crew turnaround. The Russians will get a big capital infusion to turn out more Soyez and Protons.

The world will keep turning and the sky will stay firmly in place.

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Time for a belated tea (I've been running on nuts and candybars all day) and the late news is on in a half hour. I'll be back then with whatever new info I have. The main thing on my mind now is: "where did the crew compartment come down? Did it burn up and break up during re-entry or hit mostly intact?

It's a pretty sturdy bit of structure and about the only chance they'll have for... well, humans don't do so well in a re-entry plasma.

Later.

LATER: Networks seem to be far behind the blogosphere curve. Only thing new is that some partial remains have been found. They also suggested loss of a one of the control surfaces. While that would indeed cause loss of control and breakup, I see no reason for it to occur; and besides which, that port-side tire telemetry tells me a different story. So I'm still standing by my first scenario.

ONE MORE THING: One of the TV shots clearly showed one of the re-entry engines from the back of one of the OHMS pods (those bumps in the back by the tail). So much of the debris came down more quickly than I thought, and that probably means it came down in much smaller pieces than I expected. I also am wondering what portion came down in the smoking field they showed. Nothing there was identifiable from the helicopter overview.

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I've thought of one other scenario to add to my initial list. Since the Shuttle was a spacehab mission, the payload is likely to have been well forward. If the payload tie downs to the longerons were to have broken during the reentry, the payload would have slammed into the back and the payload doors. The vehicle would then break up as in the other scenarios.

I rate this idea as extremely unlikely but worth tossing out for the sake of completeness.

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Okay, I've got the timeline and I will strongly bet the booms were off the varous bits. Here is the evidence:

"We were outside and my Dad said "there it is!" in one piece. Then a tiny, tiny piece came off and I was somewhat perplexed. That wasn't supposed to happen. Then bigger pieces rained away from the main piece. It looked very similar to the video we saw of the Russian space station Mir reentering. Later, there was one loud boom and accompanied by smaller booms. Normally we hear two distinct sonic booms when shuttles pass over during entries."

I think it is safe to assume there were numerous sonic booms due to the numerous bits of wreckage each having its' own shock cone around it.

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On this day, the space shuttle Columbia has been lost during re-entry. Rick Husband, Bill McCool, Mike Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, Dave Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon died in the breakup of the spaceship.

May their souls rest in peace and guide those who work to carry on their dreams of the high frontier.

For so long as humans fare the spaceways this time of the year will be labeled accursed and unlucky.

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The network news here are utterly clueless. But then I've said that before. The reports were not totally without value, although I'd have gotten as much real information with the volume turned off. The various shots of the breakup were informative.

Many report a window rattling bang. This could be due to a number of reasons, but the one I find most likely is sonic booms. There usually are booms from the shuttle re-entry anyway and with the vehicle still travelling at the velocity it was at the time of breakup, I would be highly surprised if there were not severe booms from major structural elements tumbling in a supersonic flow.

I will not guarantee I am correct, but I have my doubts the RCS would have produced a loud enough explosion to be heard on the ground. The APU fuel supply might have, but I think that might even be marginal.

It is apparent from the films that one major structural element left the shuttle first, followed by the breakup of the rest of the vehicle a few seconds later. This is what would be expected from any of the three possible scnarios I discussed below.

Debris has rained down on Texas and apparently one major debris field is around Nagodoches. From what I have seen so far, the bits on the ground are light bits of composite. When you see black bits, those are likely from the underbody. None of the photos showed major structural elements. They have far more mass and will not decelerate as quickly, thus they will have travelled much farther. 12,500 mph is 2/3 of orbital velocity, so they were still deep in the re-entry. In particular, the Main engines and the crew compartment are likely to have travelled a very long distance before impact. Depending on the track at the time of breakup, they might have made it into the Gulf of Mexico. I really can't guess how far a multon bungalow sized pressure vessel would take to decelerate from that velocity, or even if it could have held together.

This appears to have been an aerodynamically violent event beyond what most of us could imagine. I will guess they died instantly due to the very sudden very high G deceleration.

Best I can do with the very limited information I have so far...

MORE: Just back from stocking up on junk food for a long night. I forgot to mention one useful bit of information pointed out by an "expert" science journalist but not expanded upon. The contrail goes spiral after the first bit comes off. That almost clinches it in my mind. The first bit to break off had to be large from what the image shows: I would think it more likely a wing than the vertical stabilizer; the subsequent spiral looks like a violent roll to me, which is what a would expect after losing a wing.

Since, like Rand, I do not feel fatigue failure of the spar as highly likely, I'd say it is a burnthrough on the wing, possibly abetted by the insulation loss from the ET damaging the thermal protection system (TPS) on takeoff as reported earlier.

It would have been a simply hellish few seconds.

STILL MORE: As I think about it, the puffs of smoke and flashes one sees in the broken bits are most likely the volatiles cooking off. Also the boom would have occured well before the breakup even started if people got outside to watch it happening. I do not have an accurate time line on this yet. But if the booms were explosions, you would have seen bits coming off silently followed perhaps a minute of more later by a muffled boom. The shuttle is perhaps 50 miles away in those pictures you are seeing if it was 200K feet up and not directly overhead. Speed of sound is much, much less than that of light as I'm sure you are all aware but our media seems not to be.

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I have little information at present. The news over here has not cut in over the sports and soaps, but I have received a call and found a short story at Fox.

Contact with the shuttle Columbia was lost during re-entry. Whatever you worship, pray. I would have little hope for good news and will soon be calling friends as there is no one around me here how would fully understand.

Frontiers are not safe places and are not for the cowardly or the weak of heart.

MORE: Channel 4 cut in for 60 seconds and showed the breakup film clip. That's all. The media here isn't worth the bandwidth it takes up. Here is my bet based on very little information, including this report:

"On launch day, a piece of insulating foam on the external fuel tank came off during liftoff and was believed to have struck the left wing of the shuttle."

I suggest there was damage to the TPS on one wing, causing a burn through and structural damage leading to failure of the wing structure when aerodynamic forces built. The shuttle has very high wing loading, so any loss of margin would be disastrous. If one wing fails, the shuttle will immediately roll violently into the direction of the failed wing followed by god only knows what sort of tumble. It would break up into major components almost immediately. That is what we saw on the clip.

There would be very little fuel on board. Only some remnants of RCS fuel, a lot of hypergolics for the APU and perhaps a small left over from the reentry burn. Almost all off this is at the extreme rear in the two lumpy bits either side of the vertical stabilizer.

A second scenario is catastrophic failure of the APU's taking out all the hydraulics just when they are needed the most. With or without structural damage directly caused by such a failure, the shuttle will go into uncontrolled tumble and breakup.

A third scenario is fatigue failure. I don't feel this is likely, but if so we can kiss our manned space access goodbye.

I give almost zero credence to ideas of terrorism being involved. Ten years ago predictions were for the loss of one more shuttle during the space station construction, just by pure probability ("If it's not one damn thing, it's another"). We all prayed we'd continue winning on the dice toss but ultimately knew we'd roll snake eyes.

The only hope is for the crew compartment to remain intact and presurized. If it did, if it was through the re-entry interface and if it was not in a high speed (high G) tumble, a bail out by one or two of the crew at lower altitude is concievable... but unlikely.

I have very, very little hope of survivors. But miracles do happen so keep praying. They need all the help they can get.

MORE: I've found that Rand Simberg is on the road and racing home to blog on this. He'll be worth listening to as he worked on the Shuttles at Palmdale when they were built.

MORE: Chatted with Rand. He's in SF, not going home until tonight (his time). We agree on the most likely scenario and ordering of failure modes. He blogged it before we talked. Great minds think alike.

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On this day in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger was lost during boost. Dick Scobee, Mike Smith, Judy Resnick, Greg Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Ron McNair and Ellison Onizuka died in the breakup and crash of the spaceship.

May their souls rest in peace and guide those who work to carry on their dreams of the high frontier.

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On this day in 1986 Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnick, Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Greg Jarvis, & Christa McAuliffe lost their lives in the Challenger space shuttle (STS 51-L).

Look here for an independant view on the reliability of the shuttle done by Richard Feynmen after the loss of the Challenger shuttle. I believe that he was asked to do this as part of the official investigation, but when it turned out to be so damning, they refused to use it in the report.

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On this day in 1967, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire during an all up test of Apollo Capsule 101, later renamed "Apollo 1" in their honour.

May their souls rest in peace and guide those who work to carry on their dreams of the high frontier.

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I've been meaning to write a little about Bigelow Aerospace since before Christmas but just never could get around to it. There always seemed to be some Earth shattering events of war or liberty lost to soak up my limited writing time.

I'll state right up front that I am not a disinterested party. The space community is incestuous beyond belief and everyone knows everyone else or a friend of theirs... or something. You would be hard pressed to find two people with more than one degree of separation. And so it is with myself. I've known the VP of Bigelow for over a decade, since back when in his own words "he drowned astronauts for a living". Greg Bennett was one of the EVA planners at NASA Houston Manned Space Flight Center back then, and involved with dunking suited astronauts in the big tank they used for mission training. He was the founder of the Artemis Project of which I also became a part. And when I started my own company, the commercial side of the project got a sliver of ownership and Greg a board seat in it.

So I've bared all. Now for the interesting parts. Bigelow intends to kick start space tourism. He's put $500M of his own money on the line, and there is little risk he won't carry through because his low profile fortune was earned from Budget Suites of America, a company wholly owned by he and his wife. Decision making is rapid and final. He can plan in terms of decades.

Space was his dream from when he began his business career some thirty years ago. He is now in a position to actually do something. Unfortunately for those on the outside, this total control means he doesn't have to publish information. He is playing this venture quite close to the chest because he can. I know most of the people named in one of the links below and I know of their travails. I do not blame him for doing his work behind guarded doors.

I do not know "Mr Big" and I am not one to pump old friends in high places (ie Greg) for proprietary information. All I can say is, Bigelow Aerospace are up to some interesting things in their desert version of the "Fearing Island" compound. You will want to read this and this to learn just about everything there is about the venture in the public domain.

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Glenn Reynolds put me on the trail of this one: EMP weapons.

I personally don't know what all the fuss is about. New Scientist published an article a year or three ago which shows how to build one of these in your garage. Perhaps getting things right for targeting from a moving cruise missile and accurately controlling the output energy are the special part... but the main concept is dead easy.

If you are interested, go dig it up yourself. I'm not going to tell you how.

Once WWIII is over with... perhaps.

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Sometimes the lads at NASA are slow learners. Back in 1989, George Koopman of AMROC offered to replace the dangerous Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB's) of the Space Shuttle with a safe, throttleable hybrid version. NASA wasn't interested and not long after George's tragic death in a car accident, AMROC folded.

But never fear! Fourteen years later, NASA has discovered hybrids! Better late than never I suppose.

Why, you may ask, am I making such a big deal about a hybrid replacement for the SRB's? They fixed all the problems on the Shuttle after the Challenger didn't they?

No. They did not. Not because they didn't want to, but because there is one problem inherent in the STS design which can't be fixed without a big change: SRB's cannot be shut down. Once those candles light, there is no survivable abort until they have burned out and SRBSEP has occured. (That's "Solid Rocket Booster Seperation" in laymanese). You can't do an early SEP either. I'll try to explain why.

The current SRB's are basically very large skyrockets. So large they have to be built in segments (with O-ring sealing gaskets in between the bolted together sections) because quality control on pouring the fuel/oxidizer mixture inside would be a nightmare on something that big. The stuff must be perfectly regular inside and have no voids (bubbles). There is a shaped void down the centerline which must be of the right shape. The SRB's are ignited from the top and since the mixture contains both the fuel and the oxidizer, once they start burning, there is no stopping them until the gunk is all gone.

There is a way to stop the thrust however; there are explosive charges that blow the endcaps at an appropriate time so that dropped SRB's don't go flying off on their last legs somewhere they shouldn't; opening the tube can also act as a brake. The recovery chutes are up there as well.

Now for the scenarios. Let's assume some pending Cat1 (category 1, failure leading to loss of vehicle, loss of payload, loss of crew) shows up on the consoles of the commander or ground control.

1. Before launch. The crew open the hatch, run out along the gantry, jump into escape baskets that whisk them to ground level and an armoured vehicle some distance from the pad.
   
2. At launch. The shuttle is too low to reach a landing attitude, let alone an ET (External Tank) and SRB SEP, and get on a glide path to the runway. Either the whole stack collapses back onto the pad in a big fireball or it blows at low altitude or falls into the sea and then blows. Survivors? Are you joking?
   
3. During ascent. The SRB's are at thrust and cannot be shut down. If you do a premature SEP, the odds are rather high the shuttle will be ripped apart by aerodynamic stresses far above design limits. It wasn't built to ride the wake of two hot SRB's passing beneath its' wings. If they blow the endcaps to "put out the fire", the stress of the sudden deceleration rips the ET apart and we get a Challenger type cloud in the sky with bits falling out of it. No survivors.
   
4. After SRB burnout. They can throttle back the SSME's (Space Shuttle Main Engines), do an ET SEP, drop out from underneath (they fly upside down to orbit), do a half roll and proceed with an RTLS abort. (Return To Launch Site).
   
5. Too far for RTLS, too low for Spain... If they can't make the runway and have to ditch in the Atlantic, they get into parachutes and extend a long pole out the hatch which guides the jumpers away from the wings. The commander has to keep the shuttle flying level and make sure everyone gets out. He also may not have time to escape himself, but that's Pilot's Burden and acceptable to most who understand the responsibility of being a Pilot.
   
6. Just a close call. If an SSME or two is shut down, they may still be able to Abort To Orbit (ATO) or Abort Once Around (AOA), depending on what low orbit they can reach. This is much preferable because it gives valuable time to work through the situation. There has been one ATO so far. The engine shut down was due to a faulty sensor and most of the mission was completed in the lower, less than optimal orbit.
   

Another idea was a B-70 or B-1 like crew compartment seperation. Blow the entire pressure vessel off and put a big frigging parachute or parasail on it. This was dropped as being not very feasible. Removing payload capacity from an already overpriced and unecomical vehicle was a non-starter. Payload mass is a terrible thing to waste.

Now we get to the point. Why are hybrid's so great? And what the hell is a hybrid anyway?

A hybrid is superficially like a solid rocket. It has fuel coating the inside of the tube in a way that looks just like the solid. The difference is this coating is only fuel, not a fuel/oxidizer combination. The oxidizer is usually LOX (Liquid OXygen) that is fed from the top in gaseous form. Things burn in pure Oxygen like you would not believe. AMROC's hybrids used butyl rubber for a fuel. That's basically a truck tire. In pure oxygen the stuff burns very cleanly. No black smelly smoke, just water and CO2. The nice part is you now have control. Slow the LOX flow and the thrust goes down; increase the LOX flow and the thrust goes up; cut it off and the fire goes out.

This is all assuming, of course, you have heaters on your valves. If you don't they'll freeze in position and nothing will happen. Don't laugh: it happened to AMROC on the pad at Vandenberg AFB. The valve stuck partially open during the start up and would neither go to the full open or the full closed position. Their rocket sat there pouring black smoke out the bottom. When enough fuel burned to upset the balance - there was a payload on top - the thing fell over ala Firesign Theatre ("She's no fun, she fell right over"). Afterward the AMROC guys walked up to the used and now empty rocket laying on the ground and retrieved the payload.

The fuel was so safe AMROC were legally allowed to drive a fully fueled rocket through a city centre at rush hour. It was no more explosive than the tires of the trucks beside it. Technicians could smoke cigarettes while working on it on the pad any time until the LOX was pumped in during the countdown. Their cigarettes were more dangerous to them than the rocket.

The only thing better for a manned rocket is an all liquid booster. The problem is the cost to develop a complex reuseable engine whose plumbing gets dunked in salt water after every use. I don't know about you, but the idea scares the hell out of me.

I must admit I like the image the new NASA hybrid gives me though. We really will be lighting candles. The fuel, you see, is paraffin.

Note: I have vastly oversimplified and glossed over detail. One could write books on this topic. I haven't the time to write enough to really cover it accurately; most of you neither would care nor have the time to read it; and those of you who know what I've left out or simplified don't need to read it anyway.

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The stories are circulating. President Bush will announce backing for the NASA Prometheus Project during his January 28th State of the Union Address. This is an effort to design and build an advanced, nuclear based rocket engine for manned solar system missions.

It is a major step forward for those of us who have spent our lives fighting to open the high frontier. My preference is for everything to be commercial and private, but I recognize there is simply no way on Earth this kind of propulsion system can be privately built in the political reality we live in.

If built, it suddenly makes the Moon an economically feasible place to do business and Mars a place that is reachable for settlement within our life times.

Given what I know of some of the people whom the Bush administration brought in for space policy, I expected good things. Even though I have been aware of such ideas being floated for over a year now, I was not prepared for goodness on this scale.

I intend to buy one of them a pint the next time I'm in DC.

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I recently had an email chat with Paul Blase, the CTO of TransOrbital, and he kindly provided me permission to publish his description of a winter night's launch in Baikonur. I've known him for many years because we've both been involved with the Artemis [Lunar Settlement] Project, and my company (Village Networking Ltd) is also a proud member of the Artemis Group of companies. However I will be the first to admit that a small Linux, internet and software consulting and development company in Belfast, which barely (and I do mean barely!) makes ends meet is not nearly so interesting as TransOrbital. I'll leave the rest to Paul. I had just asked him about O-rings in Russian winter...

The Dnepr is silo-launched, so environmental problems are minimal. Being an ICBM, though, they can launch the thing into a blizzard if necessary. Fortunately the night was very clear. At the launch last week it was -30 C with a nice breeze from the North. I had very warm boots and an insulated coverall. Even so, we all spent a lot of time in the tea-and-coffee trailer. Perhaps 60 people there, including the Italian launch team and the Kosmotras and Baikonur reps. (The Saudi professor got sick and went home, the German and American teams went home after the payload capsule was sealed and didn't stay for the launch). Rather neat: it was dark so that we couldn't see the silo proper, even with the full moon. They announced "liftoff" (they don't use a countdown, just tell us the time left at about 15 second intervals) and suddenly this light appeared about 50 ft in the air. The sound didn't hit for 20 seconds (the viewing stand is 7 km from the silo); not loud enough for a Shuttle launch, but definitely a rocket going off. The light soared away to the East and the night was clear enough that we could see it for a good 2 minutes, and even see the first stage cutoff and separation. They need to work a bit on their anouncer's patter - their updates were mostly along the lines of "all systems functioning well". It hit orbit and deployed the payloads at 915 seconds after launch, at about 5 second intervals.

Paul Blase

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If you're going to bet, then always bet on a sure thing. Modest gains made on short odds are generally preferable to the large losses threatened by longer odds. It is with that philopsophy in mind that I comment upon the boondoggles of Brussels. I never expect anything good to emerge from the EU and I am seldom disappointed.

Back in April of this fast-fading year, I passed a few less-than-enthusiastic comments upon the EU plans for the launch of a European GPS system called 'Galileo' and during the course of which I made it clear that it might cause some transatlantic friction:

"There is some small chink of light at the end of this particular worm-hole, though. The US government has expressed concern that should Galileo become operational it could be used by terrorist cells to plan attacks on the US. Now, personally, I think that the Americans, the Russians, the Indians, the Israelis, the Australians, the Japanese and just about everybody else will have functioning colonies on Mars before that happens, but, in the event that it does, the US just might find itself in a position where they have to shoot the bloody thing out of the sky (chortle, snigger, stuff handkerchief in mouth). What a tragedy!!"

Now, there are some people who would charge that my cynicism is merely a reflection of my personal prejudice and they would be quite right. However, an article published in a US web-zine called 'Space Equity' has given me cause to believe that I might have been quite prescient. The article in question was published in October which renders it archaeological in blog terms but that didn't prevent it from slapping me around the head like a wet sock:

"It is now evident that by reserving a frequency in close proximity to the frequency used by code M, the Europeans have put themselves in a position to veto the effective use of GPS by America's armed forces. They believe that once they have begun transmitting on this frequency, the US will have no choice but to ask their permission before conducting any GPS supported military operations. This, in effect, means all US operations anywhere in the world. For example, in case of a North Korean attack, the US would have to ask the EU for permission before it could begin flying close air support missions against invading North Korean troops . This would give the EU enormous leverage whenever the EU wanted the US to concede something in the Middle East or elsewhere."

Voila! Of course, I also postulated that 'Galileo' would prove to be nothing except a Eurocratic wet-dream, so perhaps the brass hats in the Pentagon should cool their heels. For now.

[My thanks to James C. Bennett for the link]

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The Dnepr launch including the TransOrbital engineering test article for their coming Lunar Trailblazer vehicles has been orbited successfully. According to the Russian company's news section:

"The third launch of SS-18 missile under Dnepr Program with a group of 6 spacecraft belonging to several customers was performed at Baikonur Cosmodrome on 20 December 2002 at 20-00."

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TransOrbital, a member of the Artemis Project, will soon carry out its' first launch, an engineering mockup of their lunar probe. The vehicle is scheduled for launch into low earth orbit (LEO) tomorrow, Dec 20th, on a Russian Dnepr former-ICBM.

TransOrbital hopes to launch the first commercial lunar probe in late 2003.

From all of us at Samizdata: "Good luck and clear jets TO!"

More information is available here

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The 2004 International Space Development Conference (ISDC) will be held in Oklahoma City. The ISDC is the annual National Space Society (NSS) conference. This is a direct inheritance from the L5 Society which began the conferences in Los Angelos in 1982.

The NSS Executive committee voted the final approved of the 2004 site candidate on Dec 12th. The 2003 conference is in Palo Alto, California this coming May. Please check out the web page for more information.

Just for the sake of full disclosure... I chair the committee that makes the location recommendations to the NSS Board of Directors, so I sort of knew this for a few weeks now.

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The Ministry of Defense released a paper for public discussion (pdf) on missile defense today. Mr. Hoon would like the public debate on the issues to begin now because deployment will take many years here from the start of such discussion.

The media reports claim there is currently no threat. I was surprised not even Mr Hoon pointed out how even an existing short range ballistic missile can be fired from a tramp steamer outside of the UK territorial waters.

I hope to find some mention of this in the aforementioned document which I have not yet had a chance to read.

You may email your comments to the UK MoD on this subject at:

Missile-Defence@mod.gsi.gov.uk

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Elon Musk, a South African internet entrepreneur made $300M on Zip2 and followed it up with $1.5B on PayPal.

His third company, set up in June this year, is SpaceX. He has done a clean sheet design start on a new vehicle aimed at cutting costs by two thirds. Falcon is targeted for launch by the end of 2003. Once operational, the two stage lox/kerosene Falcon will become the upper stages of a three stage heavy lifter.

He's out to eat Boeing, Arianespace and Lockheed's lunch.

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Today's Ballistic Missile interception test has been successful:

"The target was launched at 2:30 p.m. Hawaiian Standard Time (7:30 p.m. EST). The USS Lake Erie, equipped with Aegis BMD computer programs and equipment, developed a fire control solution without any external sensor inputs. Within two minutes after target launch the Aegis Weapon System fired the SM-3 guided missile. Approximately two minutes later, the missile's kinetic warhead acquired, tracked and diverted into the target, demonstrating the Aegis BMD system's capability to engage the ballistic missile target in the ascent phase. This was the third consecutive target intercept."

NOTE: The available information does not specify the missile type intercepted, but I would guess it is more an IRBM than an ICBM in this test. I know very little about the Kaui Launch site so I can't comment on what sort of pads/launchers they have. I'll add more information when I receive it.

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1. Take a sheet of grey construction paper.
2. Hold it over your head.
3. Look up at it in a dark room.

I would just about see the glow from a dinosaur killer asteroid,.. if it passed directly overhead.

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I was just reading an article about the "space parasol" idea. That's the concept of placing a sunshade at the Earth-Sun L1 point¹ to intercept perhaps 2% of the solar flux before it reaches Earth. This would counter the projected temperature changes on Earth due to a green-house effect.

It struck me there is more to it than that. It is known the Solar Constant² has risen slowly over the aeons of our star's life and will continue to do so. At some point in our distant future we will have no choice but to either move our planet further outwards, abandon it for a new home or build sunshades. The evolution of the solar system gives us absolutely no choice in the matter. We will be forced to take complete control of the energy balance of Earth or else we and all other life will be on our way to extinction.

I'm confident our "greens" will by then have mutated into "browns" who will believe we should allow events to run their natural course from parched bare rock to parched bare rock.

Whether we take up the reigns of control now or our descendant species do so millions of years from now is not relevant to the purpose of this article however. Somewhere in the Universe there are civilizations which have faced the choice already. Some of them will have chosen to control the stellar flux on their home world.

We have two methods of detecting extrasolar planets currently. One is by the doppler effect caused by a stars' dance about the changing center of gravity of its' planetary system; the other is by watching the light curve for dips due to planets passing across their star's disk from our perspective.

It is quite possible for us to see doppler effects without seeing eclipses. It happens if the plane of the alien solar system is tilted with respect to us such that planets never pass directly between us and their star. This is the most likely scenario.

But what if we were to see the opposite effect? What if we see a significant dip in the light curve at predictable intervals and yet do not see any doppler effect?

I'll expand on this for those who have not said "Aha!" yet.

It should take a fairly significant sized body to make a dip we detect: almost certainly one with a disk size from which we would infer a substantial, Jupiter class, mass. Such an object would almost certainly cause alternating redward and blueward doppler shifts of the stars spectral lines as it orbits the star. If that is not the case, we have an anomaly. An object in orbit about its' star which is large enough to block substantial light and yet is very low mass relative to its' size should strike one as very odd.

It could be a parasol built by intelligent life.

¹ = Lagrange points are where the gravity between two bodies creates a "balance" point such the pull from each tends to keep the object where it is. The Earth-Sun L1 point is on a line directly between and a couple million miles inwards. You can either read about it or calculate it yourself.

² = The Solar Constant is the average total energy flux at Earth orbit, currently about 1.37 kw/m^2 flat on to the Sun. It is reasonably constant over a human lifetime but is not constant in the long term. The Sun was hotter in its' earliest years until it stabilized somewhat cooler than it is now. It has slowly grown hotter and will continue to do so for billions of years to come. Life will be impacted long before our star leaves the Main Sequence in the far future. At that time it will expand to red gianthood and will become large enough to absorb or at best turn Earth into an orbiting cinder.

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The US DoD is studying whether to continue with its' current broadband satellite systems or to move on to a global space laser com relay network. According to Undersecretary of the Air Force Peter Teets at a DoD News Briefing on Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2002, they hope to be ready for a decision by December 2004:

"Just exactly that way. We will progress in the development of the laser comm. technology between now and 2004. In 2004, we will decide whether or not we have confidence enough to deploy -- whether we have confidence enough to not procure AEHFs 4 and 5 and, rather, rely upon a high bandwidth relay network of some kind using some form of laser comm."

They seem primarily interested in space-space links, but I predict usefulness for space-ground links as well. Laser links have many admirable characteristics for this if you can get the pointing right. They do not have the extensive sidelobes or wide footprint of radio signals¹; they are difficult to jam²; they can carry enormously more data³; and left entirely unsaid at this briefing... they are amenable to quantum cryptography⁴.

Oh I just love the future!

¹ = This makes it very difficult to intercept. Even tightly beamed microwaves have enough off axis signal to be read miles away as the Russians did in New England in the 80's. They purchased an old country house as a diplomatic site, stuck up a bunch of antennas and started picking off White House and other phone calls. At that time the exchange number was part of a clear text header, easily filtered for out of the massive volume of long distance voice traffic. It goes without saying US ELINT sats can pick up the faint leakage of microwave links from orbit.

² = Someone will certainly comment about the effect of fog, clouds etc. It is not as much of a problem as you think, and most especially for point to point orbital communications. Even on ground links, much depends on the frequency in use. Water vapour does not absorb at all frequencies.

³ = Think of live two way hiresolution video links between pilots in theatre and control centres elsewhere in the world; perhaps even holographic 3D heads up data displays. The possibilities are staggering.

⁴ = Even without encryption, quantum tricks lets them make sure undetected "man in the middle" attacks are literally impossible.

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The laser testbed at White Sands has racked up yet another first. It has shot down an artillery shell in flight:

“This shootdown shifts the paradigm for defensive capabilities. We’ve shown that even an artillery projectile hurtling through the air at supersonic speed is no match for a laser,” said Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Cosumano, head of the missile defense command.

You can find out more about it here.

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It is with heavy heart I pass on the news of yet another death in the space activist community. Dr. Charles Sheffield, one of many Brit expats who chased the dream of space flight across the big pond died yesterday.

I have no photos of Charles,¹ although I interacted with him on an almost daily basis in the mid eighties. I was "the Prez" of the Pittsburgh L5 Society chapter and ran a local and an international L5 Conference and other space events for which he came up from the Washington, DC area to attend, assist with and speak at. We both served on the board of directors of the L5 Society during that period, so I worked with him in that capacity as well. At times we felt like he was part of our crazy bunch of hard drinking, hard partying, Steeler and Penguin cheering Spacers at Pittsburgh L5.

He was one of those whose life was utterly dedicated to our goal of moving off planet. He worked on commercial satellites by day; he wrote great hard science fiction by night; in all his spare moments he was an L5 Society activist... and how he found time to also raise a family I have no idea.

Vaya con Dios, Ad Astra and "next year in L5" Charles.

¹ = There might be 1987 photo's of him here but I have not had time to look through them all.

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Many Samizdata thanks to reader FeloniusPunk who pointed out an article in the LA Times on the state of the art in laser weaponry. I must admit to being technologically blindsided and slack jawed after reading it.

I have been following the USAF conversion of a 747 into a chemical laser gunship (below) and I knew great advances had occured in solid state lasers... but nothing like this

Photo: USAF

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What with islamic snipers, bombers and hostage takers, I never did get around to this story while it was current.

It seems the recent ground based anti-ballistic missile test was quite successful. Keep in mind this test series is an engineering effort and not testing of a product to be deployed. I point this out because most journalists I read don't know the difference nor understand that bugs, glitches, failures, mistakes and blowing things up spectacularly are all part of everyday engineering R&D.

I must admit my own most spectacular glitch was not in the same league as these lads can accomplish. My "best effort" caused a dump of a fifty thousand gallon water deluge into a helicopter hanger outside Denver late one night in 1976. Well... it probably does rate well up the engineering test bug Richter scale. Fortunately for my career and possibility of future procreation, no helo's were in at the time.

But that's life in the world of engineering. "The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat", along with a good healthy dose of the totally unexpected.

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For the last couple years many pundits have expected a black aircraft to have a coming out party "Real Soon Now". It has finally happened but the new debutante is not at all what anyone expected.

It's neat looking but only a technology demonstrator. Slow, low ceiling... and very hard to detect.

Personally I think there are a few other rather more interesting craft still in the deep, deep black of Groom Lake.

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The Space Elevator concept is one I've always found to be of interest, but which I personally placed at least a century or more in the future. I remember many fun discussions in the early days of the sci.space netnews group; in which calculations of exponential tapers, masses and tensile strength tables were batted about gleefully. Carbon nanotubes were still in the future back then; and even in later discussions we all considered mass production of real fibres to be very far off.

Well, sometimes even those of us who have one foot in the next decade are too pessimistic. A company, High Lift Systems, has been formed to work on a near term design. Advances in production of carbon nanotubes have (mostly) solved the last basic problem. We will soon be able to build sufficient quantities of sufficiently strong material to actually build one.

Of course there is that one little detail of raising $10 billion dollars in the capital markets...

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Making dire predictions about the organisational abilities of the European Union is a fairly safe bet I reckon, but even I have been taken aback by the speed with which this prediction (from early April):

"So, cue another round of horse-trading, bickering and monumental waste as each part of the Galileo project is apportioned out according to who makes the most noise. The French will build the electrics, the Italians will build the housing, the Belgians will make the navigation system, the Germans will make the rocket boosters, the Spanish will make the launch platform, the Austrians will make the sandwiches and Sweden will provide the environmental protestors."

has become this reality:

"Germany and Italy are fighting it out within the European Space Agency for the right to provide the main production base for the satellite system, to which EU governments gave the green light in March.

Their dispute has prevented the ESA from beginning work on the project and risks setting back its projected completion date of 2008."

I submit that I am entitled to enjoy a brief frisson of self-congratulation.

[My thanks to Philip Chaston for the second link]

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Armadillo Aerospace has finally let one of it's team fly on their testbed. Although the flight was a tethered one of short duration and trivial height, it encompassed all the dangerous bits of engine startup, liftoff, hover, setdown and engine shutdown. Major kudos are due to John Carmack and his team! You can read more and find the video here.

In John's own words:

We finally let someone ride on one of our landers. Only a few seconds in the air, but still pretty damn cool!

If the name John Carmack sounds familiar... it's probably because it is. He is a founder of Id Software and the author of all those classic state-of-the-art pushing games from Castle Wolfenstein through Quake Arena and beyond.

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I've just received email notice of the death of Dr. Robert L. Forward. He's known to some for the wonderful "hardest of the hard" Science Fiction he wrote; to others for his cutting edge work in physics and propulsion systems; and to still others for his loud vests, boyish exuberance, smile and tossled white hair. At any conference his gesticulating presence around the bar of the hospitality suite was certain. He carried all around him on a race through one stunningly creative idea after another.

I last talked to Bob in May when he was of enormous help as I put together a conference track on Novel Propulsion Systems. "Enormous help" from Bob was the rule, not the exception. He's been of assistance to me so many times over the twenty years in which I have had the good fortune to know him I would be filling pages if I were to itemize.

All I can say is, we'll miss you Bob. Intellects and personalities wrapped up with warmth and caring like yours are more than few and far between: they are nearly non-existant.

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I've just been reading a very long transcirpt of a DOD press briefing entitled "Gen. Kernan And Maj. Gen. Cash Discuss Millennium Challenge's Lessons Learned". It's about the recent experiments in future warfighting methods, techniques, procedures, C-cubed and so forth. It's a very long transcript. I woke abruptly from a deep alpha state when I read this comment by Cash:

And the big idea is, I want to be able to, as a concept developer, strike any target on the globe within 45 minutes from the time the president says, "Strike". Forty-five minutes. That's the big idea. Then I want to follow up that strike in 20 hours with a ground force. That's the big idea.

Hands up for everyone who recognizes the significance of "45 mimutes".

Objects in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) do one full orbit every 90 minutes. The exact time varies with the orbital parameters, but this has been a rough number for human operations from the time of John Glenn to the time of the International Space Station. 45 minutes is one half an orbit, the time required to reach the antipodes from where you sit.

Maj General Chases' requirement can only be fulfilled by a suborbital spacecraft or a space based weapon. Since these experiments were aimed at studying future warfighting capabilities and requirements, I would suggest he is thinking about a manned suborbital bomber. It is technically feasible in the near term and I personally know of at least one USAF guy who was pushing for the idea a decade ago. He left the service but that does not mean his ideas died.

It's not that far out and there are those of us who think it might already exist in the very deep black world. More because it could and because it would be rather useful than because we "know" anything.

It just seems like such a bloody good idea.

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More from my webwanderings. This is from sashinka, who is one of the other bloggers that the Guardian bloggers like.

One of the other students revealed [that] adopting the Brace Position during airplane emergencies does not improve your chances of surviving an impact. What it does do is preserve the location of your teeth in proximity to your mortal remains in order to aid forensic odontologists in corpse identification.

That sounds horribly true to me. Sashinka got it from somewhere (don't know where) in a blog/website/virtual place called Methysalicylate. Most blogs go up and down, but Methy-etc. scrolls sideways. Well why not?

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What happens when a "we-didn't-go-to-the-moon" moron calls an astronaut a liar? Yep. You got it in one. He gets decked... and that is exactly what happened when Bart Sibrel, an ignoramus, shoved a camera in Buzz Aldrin's face.

One should remember Buzz is in his 70's at the very least. So we have here a demonstration of what a lifetime of physical fitness can do. Mr Sibrel should consider himself lucky... had he done this twenty years or more ago, he would now be doing a richly deserved pretzel impression in an emergency room.

Congratulations to Buzz for giving Mr Sibrel his just deserts... and he's definitely got my vote the next time he runs for the NSS board!

Buzz Aldrin chatting with members of National Space Society
at their 1992 conference in Washington, DC (photo: D.Amon)

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When I was deciding on a category to select for this glorious bit of news my cursor flickered momentarily over the 'Science Fiction' section because this item has 'Heinlein' written all over it.

Except that it's true. An American company has been given the go-ahead by the Federal Government to launch the first private moon landing:

"TransOrbital of California has become the first private company in the history of spaceflight to gain approval from the US authorities to explore, photograph and land on the moon."

I can hear the sound of rusty, iron floodgates opening.

"Several other private companies are pursuing Moon missions. LunaCorp of Virginia also wants to put a satellite into lunar orbit in 2003."

And the seductive fizz of genies escaping from bottles.

"The Moon is ripe for commercial development," said Dennis Laurie, of TransOrbital."

That's what we want to see; the commercial development of the moon and the whole solar system beyond. 'Would you like fries with your McVenus, sir?'. Next stop: the stars!

Who knows, maybe, one day, it will even spread to Europe?

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It has been noted before by bloggers such as Rand Simberg that liberty-loving folk are often fascinated by space exploration and science fiction. There are various reasons for this. Folk who are interested in entrepreneurship and enterprise can relate to those interested in discovering new worlds and ways of doing things. And moving into space offers the opportunity of leaving statist, stagnant societies behind.

So, if you are depressed by the current wrangles over what to do about Iraq or outbreaks of mass idiocy in the South African Earth Summit, then may I recommend a book written just over two years ago by top-notch space scientist and pro-Mars exploration advocate Robert Zubrin. Although some of the science is quite tough for the layman, he convincingly lays out how space exploration is both doable and necessary. If we want to continue advancing as a civilisation, we cannot afford to assume that Earth will be our only habitat. He is a bit too dismissive, in my opinion, of how commerce could be a driver of exploration, but overall this is one of the best books on the subject I have come across in years.

Well worth the money.

Dr. Robert Zubrin
1999 NSS Conference, Houston TX
(photo D.Amon)

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Next month just might be the month it finally happens: a non-government rocket may finally cross the boundary into space. Ky Michaelson's Civilian Space eXploration Team (CSXT) has got the i's dotted and the t's crossed with the bureaucrats and are now ready for the easy part: sending their rocket up to 62 miles from a Nevada test range. The officially defined altitude at which space begins is 50 miles.

I wish them luck and godspeed.

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Nice piece by fellow blogger Patrick Crozier on Tuesday about the tale of a group of passengers using low-cost British airline Easyjet who refused to leave a plane and make way for a different set of customers.

It centres around the wrong-headed idea that a consumer has a "right" to something beyond the specific contents of a contracted service, such as a flight taking one from A to B at a set time. Enforcing such "rights" via government intervention will inevitably mean higher costs on the rest of us. If folk want to be able to fly at flexible times, then that entails a higher cost, since airlines can't be sure exactly when their planes will be full.

The price mechanism is a great way to let consumers and providers balance the pros and cons of flexibility versus cost. I should know. I just booked a return flight to San Francisco from London on the Web for just 450 pounds. It is non-refundable and requires me to fly at a set time. If I turn up late and bawl about my "rights", I'd rightly be regarded as a fool.

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de Havilland Mosquito

I am a near-religious reader of the Daily Telegraph obituary page, full of larger-than-life aristocrats, obscure explorers and dozens of extroardinary men and women who served during the Second World War. A classic of the genre is in today's paper about the late Group Capt John "Cat's Eyes" Cunningham, a famous night-fighter pilot and post-war civilian test pilot who was associated for many years with the de Havilland aircraft company, and no doubt Perry has heard all about his exploits*. I met him several years ago in Hatfield to see the restoration of a 1950s British fighter plane called the Venom, which my father worked on as a navigator around the time of the Suez Crisis of 1956. Anyway, give it a read. A must for aircraft nuts like yours truly.

* [Note from Perry: I also met John Cunningham many years ago]

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NASA Glenn has selected General Electric Aircraft Engines (Evendale, Ohio) for a Revolutionary Turbine accelerator (RTA) demonstrator as part of the Revolutionary Aerospace Engine Research contract given to GE in 2001.

Propulsion is perhaps the major driver in the world of aerospace. If the demonstrator project succeeds in pushing turbine propulsion based systems up to Mach 4, it will be a major step toward airline style access to space.

While I'd rather see NASA get out of the way, I must in all honesty commend this type of work. If they are going to spend our money at all, they should at least be applying it to the commercially high value high-risk research which was their original remit as NACA.

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I was reading Aeroplane over what might charitably be called "lunch". Some crisps and a cup at the approximate time of a normal lunch... but this is just making a short story long.

Castle Bromwich is well known in aviation circles. It's where a large number of Spitfires and Lancasters were built (for the non-aviation minded, that places it in World War II). Each airplane had to be taken up and run through some rough testing before being handed over to the ATA (the men and women who delivered aircraft to the RAF bases). The test pilots were there to ensure manufactruing mistakes were found at the plant and not in battle.

Now Castle Bromwich had miserable weather, lots of fog, a rather short runway that was half paved and half grass. I remembered reading much of that before. What I didn't know was the interesting bit about the approach. You see, there was a sewage treatment plant just before the threshold.

It really has to be asked. Did the test pilots at Castle Bromwich originate the phrase.... "landing us in the shit"???

I couldn't resist it.

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I've just been in a discussion on the Artemis Societies digest in which one person bemoaned even after the commecial flight of Dennis Tito people still think of space as a "government thing", an expensive thing. That attitudes haven't changed...

Well I didn't expect them to: at least not yet. Dennis was the very first commercial tourist and in the public's mind his flight was a one off stunt. For most it's already forgotten. "Tito who?" is the likely answer you'd elicit from the man or woman on High Street. But I'm more interested in the long term effect, the 'meta-context' as Perry puts it.

Imagine a little needle in everyone's head, one scaled zero to ten on two opposite viewpoints. Day to day events move each person's needle a tiny bit one way or another while not necessarily being remembered in their own right. Over the next few years that needle is slated for a steady push to the view of space as a place for Joe Bloggs as well as Buzz Lightyear.

At this moment I'm aware of three tourists who are going to fly within the next one to two years:

* Mark Shuttleworth - assigned to a mission
* Lori Garver           - if she raises the money
* Lance Bass           - NSync lead singer

I understand there are quite a few more serious customers in the queue.

To top it off, NASA's new administrator has approved Barb Morgan, Teacher-in-Space Christa McAullife's backup, to finally go up. She's only been waiting 16 years for the go ahead.

We're on the edge of a time when a continuos stream of the rich and famous, the energetic fund raisers and the lucky lotto gamblers will be travelling to the Space Station. It will be the "in thing", the oughties thing to do. The place to see and be seen. It is going to be the punchbowl talk at the exlusive Hollywood parties. I can imagine gossip columnists will be overhearing snippets like, "oh yes, when I was up at the Station...", "You just won't believe what you can do in zero G".

Is there anyone who thinks when Lance comes back down there won't be space themes sneaking into his music? Artists mine their experience for their creativity. Kids are going to get songs about floating in zero G from singers who've been there and done that. This is going to go mainstream guys. Not filk: Top 40.

When Society and Celebrity news regularly cover People in space; when teenage girls read popstar mag articles about their heart throb idols while laying on their bed amidst walls plastered with posters of Lance Bass and others floating in space...

Where's that little needle gonna go?

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It had to happen eventually. Someone has finally gotten a space lottery "off the ground" as it were:

There will be 10 lottery or raffle winners selected to participate with the training. The individual who trains the best (one out of ten) then receives the trip on the Russian Soyuz rocket. The nine winners who pass the miniature cosmonaut training program - yet do not liftoff on the Russian Soyuz will journey into space via Interorbital Systems Neptune Orbital Space Liner, TGV Rocket or another RLV.

I hope the Internet Is With Them and that millions of people take them up on this.

It gets even better. They are out to water the sprouts of the new space tourism industry:

Twenty percent (20%) of the ticket price (less card processing fees) goes directly to the private aerospace companies or space tourism related organizations of choice.

Among the beneficiaries will be Mir Corp, the company which tried to save Mir, the Worlds first permanent manned space station, the true "Alpha Station".

The space lottery idea has been around for perhaps twenty to twenty-five years. In all that time I know of only one truely serious attempt to do it, and that was by Jim Davidson when he still lived in Houston... before he went off to enjoy life in the anarchy of Somalia where he now resides. Jim unfortunately was taken on by a Texas Prosecutor who had political designs. In the end the entire incident was nothing except extortion and a shake down by the State. Jim was "allowed" to not go to jail so long as he didn't complain about the money they stole from him. Thus ended the first Space Lottery attempt.

But good ideas never die, so here we are another 14 years on with the idea finally up and running. I'm not the betting sort. I can walk through a Las Vegas Casino, put one coin in one slot machine... and walk on. Just so if someone asks me if I gambled in the casinos, I can truthfully say "yes". I know far too much Probability and Statistics to enjoy gambling unless I wanted to put in the time to learn card counting strategies in Blackjack. This is different. Even though I'll "lose" my money, I'll be directly helping companies build the infrastructure that will one day take ME up.

I wish them Godspeed and lotsa money.

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There's an old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee. Well, what do you call a Navigational Positioning Satellite designed by a committee? Galileo.

"At a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, EU ministers reached a deal to provide funding for the launch of Galileo, the multi-billion Euro navigation satellite system intended to rival the US Global Positioning System (GPS), thereby removing the last obstacle in the way of the project."

Ah yes, the 'last obstacle' being a blank cheque for the mind-boggling amount of taxpayers money that they are going to throw at this thing. The report estimates the cost at a laughable 3.6 billion €uros but who are they trying to kid? It'll cost more than that to supply the EU ministers with a set of custom-made luxury 'space slippers' for when they attend the ceremonial launch.

Or, rather, when they don't because if this thing ever actually makes it into space then my name is Buzz Lightyear. Just like that other grand EU project the Eurofighter the damned thing will be lucky if it ever emerges from the assembly line. The Eurofighter has had public money hosed it at for lord knows how long, it was obsolete 2 years ago and it hasn't even been built yet!

The exhausted European taxpayer would have had to have forked out far less money if the EU had simply ordered a squadron of F-16s (as HM Government was advised to do by the Ministry of Defence). But, oh no, we don't want that. We have to have a 'European' combat aircraft to express our distinct 'European' identity. Looks like they got it.

So, cue another round of horse-trading, bickering and monumental waste as each part of the Galileo project is apportioned out according to who makes the most noise. The French will build the electrics, the Italians will build the housing, the Belgians will make the navigation system, the Germans will make the rocket boosters, the Spanish will make the launch platform, the Austrians will make the sandwiches and Sweden will provide the environmental protestors.

And you can guess, I mean you just know that none of the bits will fit together, the rest of the bits won't work and all the bits will be behind schedule, ludicrously over-budget and held up by strike action. And, naturally, nobody will wish to complain because to do will cause a diplomatic incident and the launch site will be located in the country that agrees not to vote against French agricultural subsidies (and guaranteed to be the one furthest away from the Equator - Finland probably).

The Galileo project will, again, graphically illustrate everything that is wrong with the EU. The Soviets managed to get into space because they had a command economy where a Kommisar for Space simply ordered that a satellite be built and it was duly built. Mind you, they had to work with a wooden crate, a leaky old battery and a tube of glue but, by golly, they did it. But there will no such bullish positivity for Galileo, proving that the EU is riven with all the drawbacks of a totalitarian state and none of the advantages.

This whole debacle could have been avoided if they'd simply taken up the American offer of buying bandwidth on America's own GPS system. It would certainly have saved a mint. But, no, the EU has to have its own satellite system so it can cock a snoot at those imperialist 'Yanquees' and get on with doing lots of, er, 'European' things in space. Besides, the European taxpayers have got far more money than they need.

There is some small chink of light at the end of this particular worm-hole, though. The US government has expressed concern that should Galileo become operational it could be used by terrorist cells to plan attacks on the US. Now, personally, I think that the Americans, the Russians, the Indians, the Israelis, the Australians, the Japanese and just about everybody else will have functioning colonies on Mars before that happens, but, in the event that it does, the US just might find itself in a position where they have to shoot the bloody thing out of the sky (chortle, snigger, stuff handkerchief in mouth). What a tragedy!!

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On Friday the DOD reported a successful midcourse impact of an Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) from Kwajalein with an ICBM launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB). On this flight only actual system tracking components were used to control the EKV trajectory. The dummy warhead was picked out from the two decoy balloons.

This is another in a long series of engineering tests. Each test checks out certain capabilities and finds problems to be solved in the next. Earlier flights, for example, used simulated targetting data rather than the actual ground based targetting radar.

They seem to be making quite steady progress towards a working system, although such is some years away at present.

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The April issue of Aeroplane reports an XF-90 was found on Frenchman Flat. It was used during the nuclear testing series there in the early 1950's and apparently was just forgotten. Not that surprising I guess. One wouldn't expect a lot of hikers wandering about one the most heavily A-bombed spots on Earth.

It has been recovered and is being decontaminated (after 50 years in the desert I suspect that means hosing the dust off it) and will be displayed at the USAF Museum in Dayton, Ohio. I would imagine it needs "a little work" done on it as well.

Here's a USAF picture of one of the two of them back when they were new. That makes it 50/50 this is the same plane:

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The name Hollings rang some bells, but I just couldn't place it. I Googled him and nearly drew a blank... except I found his name is Ernest "Fritz" Hollings. That clicked. I dug back into my old email queues and notes from the days when I ran Pittsburgh L5 and found a cryptic lead. I had angrily called Hollings office on February 21st, 1986. All I could tell from the phone log was Hollings had done something I'd considered utterly despicable at the time and that it had to do with the Challenger disaster.

What else to do but call on friends like Glenn Reynolds to do a quick Lexus search? And now I've got it.

Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D, Times-Warner) tried to grandstand on the corpses of 7 dead astronauts. While submarines were still looking for key bits of debris on the ocean floor and the Rogers Commission was starting the long difficult job of sifting the evidence, Hollings was trying to grab headlines by calling for Senate Investigation. As reported in the MacNeil Lehrer Report transcript of that day:

LEHRER: Key members of the U.S. Senate went to war today over the shuttle Challenger investigation. Democrat Ernest Hollings fired the first round, holding a news conference to call for the resignation of NASA chief William Graham and for a Senate investigation of the Challenger accident. Hollings also had critical words for the presidential commission which is already investigating.

Within that context the log entry for my phone conversation with Gary Oleson (head of the Washington DC-L5 chapter) makes it clear why I was ticked off enough to call a Senator in another state:

Gary Oleson: looks like a setup. Jesse Moore is from S. Carolina, knows Hollings, and just moved to JSC [Johnson Space Center] post, puts him in line for running NASA if Graham gets the boot. Graham is evidently being fed incorrect info and the commission is being told that he's going to give them incorrect info. Hollings, with GHR [Gramm-Hollings-Rudman] amendment under his belt is headline grabbing and has nothing to do with investigation. We have already notified chapters in SC. We'll try to nail Hollings.

So this isn't my first run in with this.... person.

And by the way... there's a new Hollingsgate article over at Instapundit.

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40 years ago today John Glenn rode his Mercury-Atlas rocket into the pages of history. His short mission in the Friendship 7 capsule was the first American manned orbital flight.

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I was just checking in at Xcor to see what they've been up to the last week or two. No new flights listed, but they are selling this really neat poster. Go for the signed copies. If they manage the next step - suborbital - it will be like having the autographs of the Mercury 7 team from 1960.

Besides - all you old net heads from the days of Space Digest know at least three of the people in the photograph besides Dick Rutan: Jeff Greason, Doug Jones and Aleta Jackson.

By buying one you'll help fund the research program which will let you to go up some day soon.

Yes, I do have an interest in this. I know and like some of these people, I want them to succeed... and I want to go myself.

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The FAA released AD 2001 06 22 a few months ago. This AD grounds all B17 Flying Fortresses until inspections of the wing spar have been carried out:

SUMMARY: This amendment adopts a new airworthiness directive (AD), applicable to all Boeing Model B-17E, F, and G airplanes, that requires inspections to detect cracking and corrosion of the wing spar chords, bolts and bolt holes of the spar chords, and wing terminals; and correction of any discrepancy found during these inspections. This amendment is prompted by reports of cracking and corrosion of the wing spar. The actions specified by this AD are intended to prevent reduced structural integrity of the wing of the airplane due to the problems associated with corrosion and cracking of the wing spar.

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Sgt Stryker reports on an idea batted around ten years ago in the Spring '91 Air Power Journal: fill obsolete aircraft with explosives and use them as remote controlled flying bombs.

It's been done. The earliest I can think of off the top of my head was the secret mission in which Joe Kennedy Jr. died in WWII. He volunteered to pilot a B-24 Liberator packed with 20,000 pounds of plastic explosives from takeoff to altitude. He and the co-pilot were then to bail out. The Liberator was then to be flown by remote control from another aircraft... and crashed into its' target. Unfortuneately the aircraft exploded before Kennedy and his co-pilot bailed out.

This month's Aeroplane carries a story about "A Cat With Nine Lives" which mentions in passing that a number of Grumman Hellcats were flown into North Korean targets with a less than 50% success rate. Between August 28th and September 2, 1952 six drone Hellcats carrying 1000lb bombs were flown into a power station, a bridge, a railway tunnel and other targets. The Hellcats were controlled by AD-4N Skyraiders of VC-35.

Guess there is nothing new under the sun...

erratum: I realized this morning that I'd said Flypast instead of Aeroplane, as both new issues were sitting on my desk and I confused which one I'd just read which article in... I've corrected this above.

Addendum: a reader in Traverse City, Michigan pointed out a secret robot bomber project from WWII that I was completely unaware of. Information can be found here and here.

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Greg Nemitz, one of the founders of TransOrbital has reported in the Artemis Society e-mail digest that Paypal will be going public early next week, possibly Monday. What is particularly interesting about this IPO over others is Elon Musk, the largest shareholder of Paypal, has dedicated his wealth to opening Mars.

Paypal presently has 12-13 million members.

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Steven Den Beste has replied to my remarks about World War Two aircraft. Tally ho!

Perry's British sensibilities do not need to be defensive about that, because the British contributed nearly as much to the success of the Mustang as did the Americans.

It has nothing to do with my 'British sensibilities' but I do know a thing or two about aerocraft of the era.

As a Brit, it was inevitable that Perry should be nostalgic about the Spitfire. In 1940 there was no better air defense fighter in existence, and the UK damned well needed it. Twice as many Hurricanes fought in the Battle of Britain than Spitfires, but it was the Spitfires which made the difference because the Hurricanes were not really able to stand up to the 109's. That said, it has to be recognized that as an all-around fighter, the Spitfire had major weaknesses, especially compared to later designs. Its airframe wasn't as rugged as those the Americans built, and for most of the war it was undergunned (because it relied on .30 caliber machine guns). And its biggest weakness all through the war was short legs; it simply could not carry enough fuel for anything except defense.

I will try not to get too irked that Steven seems to imply that my presumed nationality somehow skews my historical judgement. He also should have read my article more carefully. I said I was talking about mid-to-late war piston engined fighters (the P-51 was not around in the early war period), and what Steven is describing is a 1940 Battle of Britain era Spitfire I. From late 1941, all Spitfires, from the Spit V onwards, were armed with two 20mm cannon as well as (usually) four .303 machine guns. It is the lack of cannon armament in the P-51 to which I was referring. More importantly all the Luftwaffe fighters which the USAAF were facing were cannon armed aerocraft.

When most aficionados of WWII aircraft speak of "the best", it mainly becomes a question of sending 8 of each into the air to duke it out and see how many of each come back. On that basis, the Spitfire would not have rated against the Mustang because of the Spit's final drawback: it wasn't as fast. In combat, speed is life. Which doesn't take anything away from the Spitfire's designers; North American designed the Mustang six years later and had learned much.

Quite incorrect. Stephen seem to be comparing the Spitfire I with the Mustang, rather than the Spits that were flying at the same time as the various marks of Mustang (such as the Spit IX). In fact, there was never really anything to choose between the two fighters in terms of speed because as the newer versions of Mustang came out, so did the newer versions of Spitfire. There were many versions of the P-51 and even more of the Spitfire and the Spits in particular had many sub-variants optimised for certain altitudes making the comparisions even harder. In fact the late war Griffon engined Spitfires were generally both faster, better armed and more heavily armoured than the directly contemporary Mustang versions. But this also goes to show the fallacy of comparing them at all: the Mustang was fighting most of its battles at very high altitude over Germany, for which it was optimised and handled beautifully, whilst the Spitfires were fighting at low to medium altitude over the battlefront or defensively over Britain, neither of which required long range. Certainly Spitfire LF variants would be able to outfly a Mustang of equal era at low altitude by a significant margin, but that is not really what Mustangs were for, even if they were occasionally used that way, so is it even a useful comparison?

Perry brings up night-fighters. They were important (especially to the RAF, which did most of its bombing at night) but most people don't consider them to be the same kind of thing. Night fighters had to be larger because they had to carry radar. There was much less emphasis on maneuver because night fighters didn't tangle with each other, so most of the emphasis was on simple ability to carry weight. The Mosquito made a decent night fighter, but it could never have competed during the day. (It is noteworthy that the ME-110 was meat on the table during the day but ended up being a pretty decent night fighter.)

The fact is RAF nightfighters did indeed operate against Luftwaffe nightfighters. For much of the war, hunting German nightfighters was the primary RAF nightfighter mission, both as escorts to the RAF night bomber streams and as night counter-air intruders over German airfields. If you want to know more about that I strongly recommend History of the German Night Fighter Force by Gebhard Aders. It is written from the German point of view and is a superb book, pretty much the definitive work on the subject of the night air war in WW2.

Also to compare a Mosquito (of any mark) with an Bf.110 is like comparing a Ferrari with a Pinto. Mosquitos did indeed operate against single engined day fighters in a way that would have been suicide for a Bf.110. There are a host of books on the history of the Mosquito, but I would recommend Mosquito by C. Martin Sharp & Michael J. F. Bowyer, if you want to see a very broad range of information and statistics of all versions. By day, what it could not outfight it could outrun (until the jets arrived of course). Mosquito day fighter-bombers (mostly the FBVI version) regularly clashed with high performance single seat fighters like the formidable Fw. 190 and were quite capable of holding their own. For some excellent accounts of Mosquito tactical day and night operations, I recommend 2 Group RAF: a compete history. 1936-1945 by Michael J. F. Bowyer, which I have just finished re-reading.

[...] If one really wants to open up all the stops and say what the best fighter of the war, anyplace, anytime was on the basis of "send 8 up and see how many come back" then there is no question of the choice: it would be the pure fighter version of the ME-262. With a hundred mph edge in speed and a decent weapons load, it was deadly. It is fortunate for us that Hitler had his head wedged and ordered the majority of ME-262's to be equipped as fighter-bombers.

Maybe, maybe not. There are many historians who disagree with that widely held view and contend it was production problems, not the so called 'bomber directive' that was actually the reason so few Me-262's ever became operational.

Update: As a couple people have asked me to recommend some sources regarding my remarks about the Mosquito, I have edited the article to include two in the text above.

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Steven Den Beste treads where 100,000 aeropundits have gone before

Ultimately, they switched to the Mustang, which was the prestige fighter of the European theater; beautiful, fast, deadly and long ranged: it was the best fighter the Allies had in Europe, and for bomber escort they needed every bit of it, especially after the Germans began to fly the Me-262.

Best fighter is truly meaningless unless it is stated what specific role it was best for. The P-51 Mustang was without doubt the most effective long range piston engined daylight escort fighter of World War II. Of the mid-to-late war piston engined fighters, it was not the best defensive fighter (Fw.190D or Spit 19) or nightfighter (He.219 or Mosquito, various) or day/night intruder (perhaps Mosquito FBVI) or multi-role fighter (no clear winner).

Comparing fighters with different roles is pointless and thus there was no single 'best fighter', just 'best fighter in some role'. The P-51 had good all round performance, very good cockpit visibility and most importantly had the range to carry out the strategic escort mission that other even higher performance piston engined fighters did not have. But as all combat aerocraft do, it also had its weak points and like all USAAF fighters of the time was certainly under-armed by 1943-1945 standards. How about "The P-51 Mustang was the most important USAAF daylight fighter of the European Theatre in mid-to-late World War II period". A much safer contention.

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16 Years ago today, 7 honoured members of the space community gave their lives for the dream we all share. I and others in that community pledge to carry their names to the stars.

Dick Scobee Mike Smith Judy Resnick Ron McNair Ellison Onizuka Greg Jarvis Crista McAuliffe

I raise my glass. We will never forget you.