Monthly Archives: March 2014

Space Policy

Space policy roundup – March.19.14 [Update]

NASA awards ULA the 2017 launch of the Solar Orbiter:

NASA says:

The total cost for NASA to launch the Solar Orbiter is approximately $172.7 million, which includes the launch service, spacecraft processing, payload integration, tracking, data and telemetry and other launch support requirements.

This number, however, does not take into account the $1B per year subsidy that DoD pays to ULA for the EELV program. With about 10 EELV flights per year, htat works out to be about $100M per flight. Sso the actual cost to the US government is around $270M for this launch.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 v1.1 has apparently not yet been qualified by NASA’s Launch Services Program for their unmanned spacecraft missions. For comparison, though, a typical Falcon 9 flight for the government costs about $90M after all the bureaucratic requirements are met according to Elon Musk’s recent testimony to Congress. So about $80M to NASA’s budget  would be saved if a F9 were used.  Doesn’t take many launches for those savings to add up to real money.

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More space policy/politics links:

Webcasts:

Update:

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Activism, Space Policy, Space Settlement

The space settlement enabling test

The Space Frontier Foundation announces a tool to judge whether a space policy will encourage or delay space settlement:

The Space Frontier Foundation Releases a
New Metric for Crafting Space Policy

Silicon Valley, CA – The Space Frontier Foundation is pleased to announce the creation of a new tool, the Settlement Enabling Test. This tool acknowledges that our fundamental goal in space exploration is large scale space settlement, and provides a way to determine if our national space policy is delivering on the promise of space settlement. This expands on our previous Frontier Enabling Test that has been with us since our founding.

For many years, the Space Frontier Foundation and other organizations have been advocating for space settlement. Over the past few years, those efforts have paid off, with national policy moving towards space settlement. Some examples of this include:

  • The Vision for Space Exploration stated “The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program“
  • John Marburger, presidential science adviser for President George W. Bush, said “questions about the vision boil down to whether we want to incorporate the solar system in our economic sphere …. the question has been decided in the affirmative“
  • President Obama stated “Our goal is the capacity for people to work and learn and operate and live safely beyond the Earth for extended periods of time, ultimately in ways that are more sustainable and even indefinite.”

“The fact that space settlement has shown up multiple times, at the highest level of power, without regard to political party, shows that people do see the value in space settlement,” stated James Pura, President of the Space Frontier Foundation. “But it’s not enough to have a goal – we need to formally proclaim it as our goal, and we need to develop a strategy that will achieve that goal. That is what the Settlement Enabling Test allows us to do.”

The Space Frontier Foundation carefully deconstructed what the conditions are that would show large-scale space settlement is happening. It developed metrics across multiple areas, such as societal values, ensuring sustainability of space, pro-settlement legal and regulatory policy, and creating value from space. Each category has a series of questions that allow the user to measure how settlement enabling a space policy is. The intention is to apply it to various space policies (from policies no longer in existence, to policies that are still in development), and determine whether a national policy is settlement enabling. The test, along with instructions used to apply the test, can be found on the Space Frontier Foundation’s website, under the heading Settlement Enabling Test. In addition, an abbreviated version can be found in this week’s SpaceNews.

“It is our hope that as the US and other countries work to expand humanity’s use of space, elected officials and policy makers apply the Settlement Enabling Test to all of their country’s endeavors,” said the Space Frontier Foundation’s Policy Director, Aaron Oesterle. “This will help to improve polices, and ensure space settlement happens sooner, perhaps even in our lifetime.”

Science and Technology

Sci-Tech: DARPA selects 4 designs for Vertical Takeoff & Landing X-Planes

DARPA has announced the winners of the first round of its Vertical Takeoff and Landing Experimental Plane (VTOL X-Plane) project:

VTOL X-Plane Program Takes Off
DARPA tasks four companies with designing new aircraft to
revolutionize vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) flight capabilities  

For generations, new designs for vertical takeoff and landing aircraft have remained unable to increase top speed without sacrificing range, efficiency or the ability to do useful work. DARPA’s VTOL Experimental Plane (VTOL X-Plane) program seeks to overcome these challenges through innovative cross-pollination between the fixed-wing and rotary-wing worlds, to enable radical improvements in vertical and cruise flight capabilities. In an important step toward that goal, DARPA has awarded prime contracts for Phase 1 of VTOL X-Plane to four companies:

  • Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation
  • The Boeing Company
  • Karem Aircraft, Inc.
  • Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation

“We were looking for different approaches to solve this extremely challenging problem, and we got them,” said Ashish Bagai, DARPA program manager. “The proposals we’ve chosen aim to create new technologies and incorporate existing ones that VTOL designs so far have not succeeded in developing. We’re eager to see if the performers can integrate their ideas into designs that could potentially achieve the performance goals we’ve set.”

VTOL X-Plane seeks to develop a technology demonstrator that could:

  • Achieve a top sustained flight speed of 300 kt-400 kt
  • Raise aircraft hover efficiency from 60 percent to at least 75 percent
  • Present a more favorable cruise lift-to-drag ratio of at least 10, up from 5-6
  • Carry a useful load of at least 40 percent of the vehicle’s projected gross weight of 10,000-12,000 pounds

All four winning companies proposed designs for unmanned vehicles, but the technologies that VTOL X-Plane intends to develop could apply equally well to manned aircraft. Another common element among the designs is that they all incorporate multipurpose technologies to varying degrees. Multipurpose technologies decrease the number of systems in a vehicle and its overall mechanical complexity. Multipurpose technologies also use space and weight more efficiently to improve performance and enable new and improved capabilities.

The next major milestone for VTOL X-Plane is scheduled for late 2015, when the four performers are required to submit preliminary designs. At that point, DARPA plans to review the designs to decide which to build as a technology demonstrator, with the goal of performing flight tests in the 2017-18 timeframe.

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Here are images of the winning designs (none available for the Aurora Flight Sciences design):

Boeing VTOL X-Plane Concept_b_500x250Boeing VTOL  X Plane Concetp (Hi-res image)

Karem VTOL X-Plane Concept_b_500x284Karem VTOL X-Plane Concept (Hi-res image)

Sikorsky VTOL X-Plane Concept_b_500x355Sikorsky VTOL X-Plane Concept (Hi-res image)

 

Multiple media, Space Science, The Moon

Interactive mosaic of lunar north pole created from NASA LRO images

Check out the interactive map of the lunar north pole created from images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) :

NASA Releases First Interactive Mosaic of Lunar North Pole

Scientists, using cameras aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), have created the largest high resolution mosaic of our moon’s north polar region. The six-and-a-half feet (two-meters)-per-pixel images cover an area equal to more than one-quarter of the United States.

Interactive mosaic from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
A new interactive mosaic from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
covers the north pole of the moon from 60 to 90 degrees north
latitude at a resolution of 6-1/2 feet (2 meters) per pixel.
Close-ups of Thales crater (right side) zoom in to reveal increasing
levels of detail. Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Web viewers can zoom in and out, and pan around an area. Constructed from 10,581 pictures, the mosaic provides enough detail to see textures and subtle shading of the lunar terrain. Consistent lighting throughout the images makes it easy to compare different regions.

“This unique image is a tremendous resource for scientists and the public alike,” said John Keller, LRO project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “It’s the latest example of the exciting insights and data products LRO has been providing for nearly five years.”

The images making up the mosaic were taken by the two LRO Narrow Angle Cameras, which are part of the instrument suite known as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). The cameras can record a tremendous dynamic range of lit and shadowed areas.

“Creation of this giant mosaic took four years and a huge team effort across the LRO project,” said Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the LROC at Arizona State University in Tempe. “We now have a nearly uniform map to unravel key science questions and find the best landing spots for future exploration.”

The entire image measures 931,070 pixels square – nearly 867 billion pixels total. A complete printout at 300 dots per inch – considered crisp resolution for printed publications – would require a square sheet of paper wider than a professional U.S. football field and almost as long. If the complete mosaic were processed as a single file, it would require approximately 3.3 terabytes of storage space. Instead, the processed mosaic was divided into millions of small, compressed files, making it manageable for users to view and navigate around the image using a web browser.

LRO entered lunar orbit in June 2009 equipped with seven instrument suites to map the surface, probe the radiation environment, investigate water and key mineral resources, and gather geological clues about the moon’s evolution.

Researchers used additional information about the moon’s topography from LRO’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, as well as gravity information from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, to assemble the mosaic. Launched in September 2011, the GRAIL mission, employing twin spacecraft named Ebb and Flow, generated a gravity field map of the moon — the highest resolution gravity field map of any celestial body.

LRO is managed by Goddard for the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. LROC was designed and built by Malin Space Science Systems and is operated by the University of Arizona. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed the GRAIL mission for SMD.

For more information about LRO, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/lro

To access the complete collection of LROC images, visit: http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/

To view the image with zoom and pan capability, visit: http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/gigapan

History, Space Systems

Reawakening and returning a 36 year old spacecraft to its original mission

Dr. Robert W. Farquhar led the effort in the early 1980s to re-direct the International Sun-Earth Explorers (ISSE) spacecraft from its solar science mission to a rendezvous with Comet Giacobini-Zinner. Here is an interesting story about his new effort to reawaken the spacecraft and direct it back to its original orbital location so that it can resume its space weather studies: Space Thief Or Hero? One Man’s Quest To Reawaken An Old Friend – NPR.