Despite crash, Genesis appears to be to have at least a partial payoff.
“We’ve managed to actually pull something out of this. We’ve done it,” said the mission’s chief scientist Don Burnett, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
A failed parachute deployment put doubt in the recovery of samples from the $264 million project when it crashed into the high deserts of Utah back in September of 2004.
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Not really space related but these two articles (HERE and HERE) lead to stories discussing research efforts to recombine DNA strands. Hopefully this will lead to something useful other than tapping new grant moneys from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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On the subject of DNA a Space.Com article has an interesting piece of a recently discovered nebula with a unique twist … the familiar double-helix of a DNA molecule.
So we go from DNA woven maps measuring just a few hundred nanometers (billionths of a meter) across, smaller even than some bacteria - a scale of 1:200 trillion to the DNA nebula is about 80 light-years long. (See, I knew I could find a space tie-in.)
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The subject of this next item has become a big news story discussed just about everywhere but I’ll point you to another Space.com article. Lawmakers are taking a hard look at ways to put the science back into NASA’s budget. (On a side note I did get a chuckle from a pop-up advertisement promoting the next installment of the road-tripping brain-dead blondes, Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton in “The ‘SIMPLE’ Life 3.”)
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SpaceX posted this update in preparation for another static fire test.
Falcon 1 Maiden Flight Update: Posted March 15
Falcon 1 has been removed from its hangar and erected on the launch pad. All systems are currently go for a static fire on March 17 or 18, followed by a launch between March 20 and 25.
—Elon
If available we will try to provide live coverage of at least the launch attempt.
NASA has delayed the next space shuttle launch from May until at least the first of July, in order to replace suspect engine cut-off (ECO) sensors in the external fuel tank. Discovery is slated to fly mission STS-121, the second of two engineering test flights in the return to flight sequence following the Columbia Disaster in 2003. Assuming the shuttle does fly in the July 1 to 19 window, almost a full year will have elapsed since the last flight.
NASA now finds itself at a critical juncture. For the agency’s plans to complete the ISS and develop the shuttle’s successor to have any credibility, this next flight will need to go off almost flawlessly. NASA needs to demonstrate over the next few flights that the foam problem is both understood and fully resolved, and it also needs to demonstrate that it can ramp back up to the flight rate required to fly the remaining missions before the 2010 retirement date.
Therein lies a major problem: The shuttle is a highly complex, high performance, and frail experimental vehicle. On top of that, the fleet is aging. It seems hard to conceive that the remaining sixteen or seventeen shuttle flights will all fly on schedule, and without new problems appearing. Yet NASA does not appear to have a plan B. There seems to be an expectation that, because they have to make it work, they will.
This is not the first time. In the early days of station construction New Scientist ran an article, ISS Titanic, pointing out that a simple statistical analysis comparing shuttle reliability with the number of assembly flights manifested showed that the chances of losing a flight over the period of station assembly were unacceptably high. NASA didn’t appear to have a plan for that, either. Ultimately, they gambled and lost.
Hopefully NASA’s renewed safety focus can prevent the loss of another shuttle, but the very vigilance that guards against that eventuality also works against efforts to fly regularly. Shuttle managers have promised to “listen to the hardware” – but given the shuttle’s age and complexity, it’s almost certain that the more they listen, the more they will hear, and the less they will fly. Throw in the pressure to get the station assembly completed before the shuttle is retired in 2010, and the whole proposition looks even dicier.
So why fly shuttle at all? Why not retire it now and move on? In a perfect world, that’s exactly what should happen, but don’t hold your breath. It sounds good on paper, but it’s hard to imagine it happening in the real world where the shuttle program means jobs in congressional districts. Then there’s the International Space Station, with which NASA has painted itself into a very shuttle-shaped corner: The only vehicle that can loft ISS elements is the shuttle. There’s no compelling technical reason that this should be so, the components were just designed that way to meet one of the station’s fundamental (political) requirements: providing a mission for shuttle. Scrapping shuttle and launching the ISS components some other way would see any money saved get spent modifying the station modules for a different launch vehicle, and would also introduce a delay of several years at a time when the ISS international partners are clamouring to have their modules launched earlier. It seems unlikely that NASA would be allowed to go this route, even if they wanted to.
So shuttle will fly, and likely run into further technical difficulties and delays, and cost overruns. Shuttle has become the project that wont die: NASA is stuck having to cannibalise other programs to feed it ever increasing sums of money, all so that it can be shut down to free up money for the Vision for Space Exploration.
The first step in NASA’s plan to return to the moon, the orderly retirement of the Space Shuttle, may yet also prove to be the most challenging.
Nance, John J.
“Orbit”
Simon & Schuster
03/13/2006
ISBN: 0-743-25052-4
Published in 2006 by Lulu Press, it weighs in at 175 pages. A few interesting idiomatic errors, and a couple of grammar errors.
***Full Disclosure: Virg & I were both delegates at the Space Generation Forum that was part of the UNISPACE III conference in 1999. We’ve kept in touch off and on since then, but I’m not really a law guy.***
Our story opens with an advert dating to 1901 and noting that the Big Brick Store boasts ‘There is nothing that you can want for Christmas that we cannot get for you, unless you should want a piece of the Moon or something equally unreasonable’ before leaping back to 1756 and the lands of Prussia. This is Exhibit A in Mr. Pop’s voyage of discovery in what is essentially a Title Search on celestial bodies.
We begin with the story of King Frederick the Great, and his bestowal upon one Aul Jürgens title to the Moon. This was by virtue of a document noting the gratitude of the King for Mr. Jürgens curative powers in cases of gout, and that the Moon should pertain to the Jürgens family, to be passed down the generations to the youngest born son until the end of time. Less than a footnote to history, this fact remained dormant until 1999, when a descendant of the original Jürgens, one Martin Jürgins, sent what could be described as a Cease & Desist letter to one Dennis Hope, who created the Lunar Embassy to sell Deed rights to the general public (as well as bestow them upon key public figures). The following media publicity echoed around the world, though it wasn’t for the first time.
We then jump to 1937, when the registration of claims on the Moon and other celestial bodies really started to begin in earnest. We find that in the ending days WWII people were starting to look beyond, and realizing the technology was starting to become available that could make such claims a reality. The research ranges far and wide, and Mr. Pop has certainly done his homework on this one. Some of the examples take things perhaps right to the edge, like the chapter on laying claim to Uranus. From Registrars records to letters to public figures and institutions, from fundraisers for schools and planetariums to hucksters hustling a profit, though certainly perhaps with some sense of intangible satisfaction. We travel around the globe, from Prussia to Mexico to Japan. The footnote section weighs in at 26 pages and contains over 650 citations, many of which are internet addresses (and yeah, there are ibids in there as well).
Virgiliu has woven an amazingly rich story of individual hubris laying claim to the heavens. He notes of course that animus must be matched with corpus to really lay claim to any piece of dirt. It is not clear how he really views the solution to the question of how claims will be recognized on non-terrestrial bodies, but he certainly makes it evident that something will have to happen to address the question, because there certainly will be disputes in the future, and some mechanism must be found to resolve them.
But that is a post for another time. ‘Unreal Estate’ is a fascinating read, though it raises more questions than it answers. Legal training not needed, though a dictionary for some of the latin terms would be helpful. I’ll give this one just shy of a Full Moon.
Would you like to know more?
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has successfully slipped into orbit around Mars. Over the next 6 months or so the craft will use a series of aero-braking maneuvers to refine that orbit to a nearly circular loop ranging from 320 kilometers (199 miles) to 255 kilometers (158 miles) in altitude, lower than any previous Mars orbiter.
Then in November, the fun will begin. The MRO is equipped with a lot of science packages that will provide unprecedented abilities for gathering data.
A spectrometer will map water-related minerals in patches as small as a baseball infield. A radar instrument will probe for underground layers of rock and water. One telescopic camera will resolve features as small as a card table. Another will put the highest-resolution images into broader context. A color camera will monitor the entire planet daily for changes in weather. A radiometer will check each layer of the atmosphere for variations in temperature, water vapor and dust.
I am really looking forward to the months to come as the images and data start to flow in.
Published in 2006 by Xlibris, it weighs in at 131 pages. A few grammatical and spelling errors.
Mike Wren is an unhappy thirteen year-old young man. He’s going to go to Moon whether he likes it or not (he doesn’t) now that his mother has a job as a teacher. His dad has already been commuting to the Moon for his work as a Lunar geologist. Prepared to be miserable, especially since he’s leaving all of his friends behind, he actually finds the families on the Moon to be quite friendly. The education is structured more towards homeschooling projects that are useful, and young Mike quickly finds he has an interest in finishing putting together a rover, and thus do our adventures begin.
This is a fine juvenile in the tradition of “Growing up Weightless” or “Higher Education”, but much more wholesome. It is very well written, and I have no doubt that educational curricula could be drawn up around this book, as with Heinlein’s “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel” for World Space Week last year. It is jam-packed with solid Lunar knowledge conveyed in a subtly pedagogic way. The story is engaging for both young men and women, with Mike and Toni as the male and female newly-minted teen protagonists, and their friends Laura and Jason as Lunar visitors. It’s strictly PG, so there’s no concern of questionable content.
While obviously geared towards juveniles, there are probably more than a few grown-ups who could profit from reading it as well, if only to bone up a bit on current Lunar thinking. The authors cover a lot of territory, and must have done one of those Zero-G flights to so accurately describe weightlessness. It’s a quick read, as we barrel from one life-threatening calamity to another. Life on the frontier can be brutal and one has to be careful. Nevertheless, it can also be a place of never-before-seen wonder.
This is a wonderful book, and I wholeheartedly give it a full Moon at perigee.
Would you like to know about other Lunar Sci Fi stories?
Back in January I mentioned that the Dawn Mission which is part of NASA’s Discovery Program had been placed on hold. In a brief note on SpaceRef.com, Keith Cowing informs us that the project has now been officially canceled.
Sorry outside distractions kept me from posting recently so I’m going to do a bit of catch up. First up, is an article that appears to have taken a wonky turn posted a couple days ago on Wired News. Okay kids, adjust your tinfoil hats and take a look…
“The U.S. military still doesn’t have the capability to launch a spy satellite on demand,” said Marc Schlather, director of ProSpace, the lobbyist group coordinating March Storm. “We are seeking a cross-pollination.”
The quote above, taken out of context and stuck in with unrelated comments from the writer about “Star Wars” in attempt to connect spy satellite launches to weapons of mass destruction raining down from orbit. At the same time he is trying to paint the Strategic “Defense” Initiative as the Strategic “Offense” Initiative. (I guess the word “Defense” really was just something cooked up by the PR/Spin people in the Reagan White House.)
A response to the article came a few days later from none other than the aforementioned director of ProSpace, Marc Schlather, in a letter to the editors of Wired News which is reprinted at SpacePolitics.com which you can read HERE.
My only additional comment on this view of the March Storm activities is, if I could spare the time and the money, (since I’m niether employed nor sponsored by any major, minor or start-up aerospace companies…) I’d be “Storming” D.C. with the rest of them.
Niles, Steve & Dan Wickline. Illus. by Milk
“30 Days of Night - Dead Space #3″
IDW Publishing
03/2006
Rocketplane now have a press release on their site with more detail about the new “Rocketplane Kistler team”.
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