Telescopes on Lunar FarSide 'Revived'

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer

"Not only would that avoid all the distortions and disturbances caused by Earth's turbulent atmosphere, but equally important, the moon's mass would block the noisy torrent of radio signals emanating from Earth. Only in the moon's radio "shadow" could the farseeing radio telescopes envisioned for the future pick up the extremely faint signals left over from the early universe, signals that would otherwise be drowned out by the broadcast barrage from Earth."

LNBLOG EDITORS NOTE: Some of us never stopped thinking about the Farside's "radio-quiet" as the place to begin direct and 400,000 kilometer long baseline interferometry. How, then, is this concept "revived?" And weren't Farside landings well within the capabilities of the Apollo Program, perhaps at Coriolis and other likely Farside equatorial spots? The problem of how to relay the data from such a site and the limitations placed on the instrument package by weight, 1969 sophistication and size would have presented quite a quandary. And high-end frequency communication we take for granted in the GHz range was barely the stuff of Extra-Class ham radio experiments at the time. Imagine, however, where the state of both radio astronomy and perhaps Lunar exploration might have been if this unoriginal idea had been followed through, at the expense of trusting experimental landings to astronauts with buggy, unimaginably slow computers without the aid of Houston's watchful eye. Though admittedly difficult, and a likely cause very high groundside anxiety, it still seems a Farside landing might well have been within the realm of possibility for Apollo -if it had been a priority.

As future problems arise (such as sticky questions like how to retrieve and restore the Apollo 11 ascent stage blow-over of the original American Flag placed at Tranquillity by Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin in July 1969, without disturbing those historic first foot prints) Lunar Networks will be asked to review present day news to discover such dilimia. In the case of the long-acknowledged distinctly anthropomorphic radio-quiet for radio astronomy on the Lunar Farside, how much of a problem will the inherently unstable orbits and spurious emissions from LPS/Cellular satellites needed for exploration of the Moon become for the planned (and important) Deep Space Radio Telescopes, and their controllers?

Answers to such questions are welcome.

Meanwhile, read the remainder of this late article from today's Washington Post.

Lunar Networks: Hyde County Moon Port?

North Carolina has surfaced in commercial space industry rumor mills again as a site for future private spacefaring. Several locations are under scrutiny in secret negotiations with North Carolina's Department of Commerce, and sources indicate the private consortium "Lunar Networks" has narrowed it's search for a site to develop an east coast space port to three locations near the Pamlico Sound.

"North Carolina has several things in its favor," a representative of the developers said. "It's the last place on the eastern seaboard that hasn't been completely taken over by development. The sites were examining all have a wide arc of eastern window, making them prime locations for launching into the orbital plain of the International Space Station to both ascending and descending nodes."

After the abandonment by NASA of the Single-Stage-to-Orbit (SSTO) concept several years ago North Carolina's aggressive promotion of two relatively low populated "inner banks" launch sites to Lockheed Martin for the now-defunct X-33 and VentureStar came to an abrupt end. The region inside the more famous Outer Banks and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore has suffered from high unemployment and isolation indemic to geology and geography since before Blackbeard and the days of Colonial North Carolina, and a century earlier the famous Lost Colony of Roanoke Island.

North Carolina has been more friendly to business moving in from outside the state, offering special incentive programs to Dell Computers and Google, including decades of sales and property tax exemptions. Reliable sources indicate "the consortium" is in intensive and very closed-door negotiations with North Carolina's Department of Commerce, the state's Port Authority and legislative leaders and staff.

This site is dedicated to reporting on these developments, without spoiling the deal.

Much of the success of the venture, code named "ascending note" depends on political developments after the 2008 election. In 2007, Google and the N.C. Department of Commerce reached a complex deal behind closed doors to build a server farm in the similarly economically distressed Caldwell County, in western North Carolina, the details of which began to leak out before the Internet online application giant was ready, and "heavy handed threats" to legislative staff, some say, came out in Emails leaked to the press.

The clam tight secretive "Lunar Network" consortium is working hard but with tactical patience. Local county commissioners have been approached cautiously, with "zero promises" made on either side.

The "Consortium" representative, who works for a well-connected Raleigh legislative lobbying firm, denied the "rump organization" was connected to Google or involved in contending for Google's recent "X-Prize" competition, offering $30 million to the first private company to land and return a robotic spacecraft from the Moon.

"They are looking at the Moon," he said. "In fact, their calling them the Consortium in Raleigh, but amongst themselves, they call themselves Lunar Networks." But their representatives in Raleigh and along the Inner Banks are, he said, "are definitely taking the long view."

Among three North Carolina locations for what may be the second Moon Port constructed on the U.S. eastern seaboarn, 800 miles "as the Shuttle flies" from Merritt Island and Pad 39 is what many contend is the largely failed "Global TransPark," a "field of dreams" contructed to move eastern North Carolina mainstay agricultural products to world a decade and a half ago. The TransPark is considered to be the most striking example of wasted taxpayer-funded economic incentive money in the state.

Adjacent to the borderline commercial Kinston Regional Jetport, the TransPark might well be one of the cheaper alternatives for development of a Space City, but the local population is relatively concentrated and encroaching from all directions; a bad place for a catastrophic spacecraft accident. Instead, the Inner Banks also host North Carolina's largest, lowest populated and poorest of the state's 100 counties, the only truly dry land anywhere more than 150 miles from the busy, prospering Interstate 95 with its many attendant Road Cities.

Hyde County, site of one of the two locations studied by Lockheed-Martin to build a launch site for the VentureStar, is losing population in 2007's fastest growing state.

"The Global TransPark," the LN spokesman said, "is not really their favorite spot. The insiders who introduced North Carolina to the Lunar Network people had the TransPark in mind, looking for a way for the state to unload what they believe is a notorious White Elephant. But the Department of Commerce people are still holding out hope that the TransPark will live up to the huge investment the state has paid out, and is still paying. So a lot of this is science fiction that depends on what the voters decide in November."

This reticent representative of something called "Lunar Networks" wouldn't deny they were looking "around Hyde County," but said "we don't want to sell anyone false hope. There's a rumor that's hung on for a generation or more out that way that Disney had plans on building another park there. Lord knows how that got started. Maybe they were planning on it once. Maybe they are still. It may be one big bean field surrounded by poor commercial fishermen now, but who knows what the southern Great Dismal will look like 100 years from now.

"And they may end up moving offshore. There's a strong contengent that insists they should move below the 30th parallel, farther south than Kennedy, where they can directly intersect the plain of lunar orbit, without using fuel to line up at the nodes.

"The ISS certainly passes almost directly overhead in North Carolina once or twice a day, with it's fifty one degree inclination to the equator, but the Moon's orbit never comes this far north.
"Then again, these guys and gals are all-America folks, who don't want to be at the mercy of some tin-pot dictator or regime with a whole army with its hand out. What they have in mind is very long-term, something that will be in operation, in harmony with the host community and a good neighbor for the next century or more.

"When you think about it," he said, revealing nothing and, perhaps, everything, "a whole lot of what may happen in a whole lot of lives depends on how people vote who haven't got, and will not have, a clue as to what's at stake for them and their grandchildren."

I pressed him, after this, to tell this North Carolina voter, who lives directly on the hundreds of miles of the quiet Inner Banks which Party works best with the secret vision of the Lunar Networks consortium, he said, "a little of both, I guess."

But after tapping his fingers in silence, as we meditated over our lunch at Raleigh's Player's Retreat, he spoke. "I'll tell you this much. Let's just say there are people in the present leadership of the legislature, and the Administration, who are being, shall we say, a little shortsighted and stubborn."

North Carolina's Governor cannot run for re-election, and both Republicans and Democrats are jostling to take his seat in 2009. The Governor's Mansion, the entire Counsel of State and both houses of North Carolina's General Assembly are up for election this year.

BACK TO THE MOON

BACK TO THE MOON:

Paul Grayson of Control Engineering, a cutting edge pub touching on the often overlooked and essential field of Robotics has tipped his hat to Team FredNet. The latter are heavily involved with the Google Lunar X Prize and may be among the first teams announced next month. Reading his column turned out to be one of those "Manifest Deja'vu" experiences, as when you discuss Elvis with someone, hang up your cellphone, and "Are You Lonely Tonight?" is the next very next song you hear when you turn up the radio.

East Carolina University with it's exceptional pioneering use of robotics in surgery is eliminating a lot of grossly traumatic open thorastic proceedures and replacing them with sometimes hands-free bilateral rib operations, an obviously far less invasive snip snip than "the old Black and Decker," as Jerry Lewis once described it.

This is happening at East Carolina University's Biomechanics and Robotics Exploration for Information Technology Literacy and Skills Project, an outreach to the engineers who will likely one day be replacing your liver over the Internet. Right in the operating room, my daughter Valerie tells me, is the Uncle of a friend who contracted Hepititis C while ever-learning to become one of the most skilled chest men on Earth. Rather than allow that set-back, which banned him from the operating room, stop him, he instead became devoted to remote procedures, which is akin to watching real surgery online, except he is actually performing this surgery online. He might yet be in the next room, but some procedures he's partnered with already over the web, and at great distances. As much as we are talking about the future of health care in politics these days, whether to socialize or about "single-payer" insurance, etc., few are talking about the advancements, which are astounding.

The grand debate over Internal Improvements in the early United States, whether Charleston Teriffs collected as federal revenue should pay for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, for example, is long over. Whether governments should facilitate commerce, by building roads rather than concentrating on agenda-driven regulation, is not discussed any longer. That's why we need Libertarians and Liberals, particularly to remind us of what matter and what doesn't.

In lunching as I do weekly with Lobbyist X, always rotating the location to some great and some common locations, I discussed these things with him in the context of my own experience with getting completely off pain medications to treat symptoms related to facet arthrothopy, which I have written about elsewhere. He reminded me about ECU, with that wink that is not a wink that indicates he is giving me yet another clue about what his secretive clients are up to. That it involves Space Exploration, Earth's relatively large natural satellite the Moon, and North Carolina obviously means it involves robotics.

Their interest in eastern North Carolina makes more sense yet agan. As my former employer and good friend Patrick Ballantine once said, the "economic engine that drives" the feeble "economy" of my home region "is the" boom city "of Greenville, home of ECU" and as excellent a hospital in Pitt County Memorial Hospital as can be found on the planet.

I'm assured by Lobbyist X that none of those he is working for are "officially" (he repeated that twice) involved with the Google X Prize, always insisting "they're going for a different magilla."

The weekly meetings are becoming more interesting, and the latest venue was also telling. We ate lunch yesterday surrounded by virtual dinosaurs and other state government administrative types at the rooftop cafeteria in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. You can't miss it. It's firectly in front of North Carolina's General Assembly, where, in the interests of full disclosure, I work for House Republican Leader Paul Stam.

Once again, I should point out because of the Post-Speaker Black ethics legislation that Lobbyist X and I always split the tab. He never pays for my lunch or gasoline nor anything else when we meet. We also have yet to discuss passed, pending, or possible legislation, directly or indirectly, outside the formal settings of the General Assembly's proper facilities. Although I've known LX since 1999, we talk only about the future, and he feeds me information which I share here about his employers activities. While he's said his clients are talking with NC's Department of Commerce, I have no idea what that might be about or why. I can guess, sure. But I don't.

We share an interest, LX and I, in amateur astronomy and the history of space exploration. And being too stupid to know how, I haven't profited and probably never will from our conversations except in life experiences.

And yet, it's very much like when you're driving down the road and a street light blinks off as you drive under it when talk turns to robotics at ECU and within a few minutes you are Emailed an article from a friend hundreds of miles away and in another state and who wouldn't know LX from "Adam's housecat" where Paul Grayson, an expert in the subject, is talking about Team FredNet and Destination Moon.

"Quite a world," said David Ossman, wrapping it all up and tying the package with a red ribbon.