space

The Age:

A JAPANESE spacecraft will land in Australia in June, bringing with it samples from an asteroid found 300 million kilometres from Earth.

Uhh...isn't that how Godzilla movies usually start?

Hmmm....

A spectacular meteorite shower that lighted the sky in several Midwestern states Wednesday night sent meteorite hunters scrambling to get to southwestern Wisconsin during the past two days for the pieces of rock from outer space.

...

“Our first reaction was one of disbelief,” Mr. Boudreaux said Friday. “I expected it to be a piece of asphalt.”

Being in New Mexico, I've clearly missed my chance at 1950s-era gold farming. Although if you've ever seen that TV show, Meteorite Men, you'll know that it takes a different kind of character to succeed in that business.

Charles Stross: "How habitable is the Earth?"

The point is this: we are finely tuned survival machines that have evolved to survive in a niche on one particular planet in one particular epoch. Even our own planet is unimaginably hostile to our kind of life for most of its history. And while survival outside that niche is possible with the assistance of a horrendously complex toolkit we call "civilization", we've yet to try it somewhere where we can't count on the basics (free oxygen and triple point water).

Sophie and I went out last week to see the International Space Station and Space Shuttle as they flew over just after sunset. Very impressive brightness, and we noticed a bright cloud of vapor surrounding the shuttle, like something venting into space.

Well, turns out that was astronaut pee. Popular Science has a story and photo gallery of it, including a photo from an amateur astronomer in Madison, which pretty much caught our point of view.

When I was in high school, in the pre-internet days, my informative speech in forensics one year required me to send away for information from NASA about toilets in space. Never did I dream that they would give us such a display from the heavens!

The Freakonomics blog ran a Q-and-A with astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Your life changes because of the significance of being put on a historical pedestal and the demands of answering questions like “what did it feel like?” “what were your emotions?” and other vague questions. To tell them that I took a leak on the moon jazzes up interest, but it doesn’t answer the question.

That's followed by some vague questions, but some focused ones as well, with Aldrin's buzzworthy responses.

Could the first Mars colony be a retirement community? Lawrence Krauss thinks so:

The most challenging impediment to human travel to Mars does not seem to involve the complicated launching, propulsion, guidance or landing technologies but something far more mundane: the radiation emanating from the Sun’s cosmic rays. The shielding necessary to ensure the astronauts do not get a lethal dose of solar radiation on a round trip to Mars may very well make the spacecraft so heavy that the amount of fuel needed becomes prohibitive.

There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again?

His solution: send older astronauts who can live out the rest of their lives on Mars.

I like the spaceship designs with the big sphere of water shielding, but it would be expensive such a mini-moon around the solar system if we're stuck tossing combustion products out the backside. Meanwhile, we will be landing increasingly capable robots there -- as Krauss notes, the "only humans can do it" angle is not very persuasive.

It's not hard to imagine five or ten 70-year-old astronauts going to Mars permanently. Although, I'd go crazy if the Internet were on a variable delay of several minutes.

(via Althouse)

The LA Times had a very nice article last week with reminiscences of engineers who built the Saturn V rocket:

A key problem was the start-up. "They had a design for the starting sequence," Biggs said in an interview. "I did the analysis and told them it was no good. The rocket would probably blow up."

Biggs' solution was to slow down the launch sequence. That gave the Saturn V its characteristic feline look, as it seemed to crouch and gather itself for five seconds after ignition before lifting off the launch pad.

Imagine that -- a "feline look" for a 40-story rocket.

Rand Simberg (Transterrestrial Musings) gives a history of efforts to redirect NASA, and an alternative blueprint for the future, in a long essay in The New Atlantis ("A space program for the rest of us"). If you're interested in the recent trajectory of the agency, the Constellation and Ares projects, and what's been going on since the Obama transition, it's a good overview.

On the topic of future directions, Simberg accentuates affordability and sustainability. Much about the need to develop a propellant infrastructure based on low-cost launches, to enable lighter manned and other high-value missions.

In this space-refueling infrastructure, propellant would be cheaper, flight hardware wouldn’t have to be as heavy, and alternative launch vehicles would flourish. Every year that we starve the kind of research and technology that would make this possible and instead spend our money on mega-launchers like the Ares V is another year that we delay developing a truly sustainable space transportation infrastructure—and becoming a truly spacefaring people.

I would add space-based solar to the mix (particularly as applied to lunar propellant manufacture, but also for ground transmission). I'm pulling for SpaceX.

UPDATE (2009-07-24): A reader suggests that Simberg hasn't gone far enough. Simberg mentions that LOX is around the price of milk. A railgun might put a kilogram into orbit at very low cost; given the ability to coordinate microsatellites in orbit, small 1 kg tanks can be manouvered into large refueling stations.

Oh, and of course nuclear propulsion systems would provide a vastly more efficient solution than most of these ideas. But that would be wrong....

Worth reading from last week if you haven't seen it: The Right Stuff author Tom Wolfe's lament on NASA's unfulfilled promise, "One Giant Leap to Nowhere". Most tragic part: Wolfe's account of the Canaveral tour bus operator:

Sure enough, it turned out he had not been put on Earth for this job. He was an engineer who until recently had been a NASA heat-shield specialist. A baffling wave of layoffs had begun, and his job was eliminated. It was so bad he was lucky to have gotten this stand-up Spielmeister gig on a tour bus. Neil Armstrong and his two crew mates, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, were still on their triumphal world tour ... while back home, NASA’s irreplaceable team of highly motivated space scientists — irreplaceable! — there were no others! ...anywhere! ... You couldn’t just run an ad saying, “Help Wanted: Experienced heat-shield expert” ... the irreplaceable team was breaking up, scattering in nobody knows how many hopeless directions.

(via Jerry Pournelle)

Simulations have shown that ejecta from ancient impacts on Earth may have landed safely on the Moon, allowing future astronauts to search for ancient traces of Earth's life forms within meteorites found on the lunar surface.

I'm not sure whether I want them to turn up any mummified hominid parts, but I'll be happy to look at a tooth.