Desolate magnificence -The Space Review

LRO images on display at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum [Dwayne Day/The Space Review].

Dwayne Day

The Space Review

Right now Washington, DC’s museums are filled with the noise of hormonal teenagers on their spring break trips to the nation’s capital. They run around aimlessly, oblivious to their surroundings, or sprawl on the dirty carpet absorbed in their own little worlds. Later, in May, the senior class trips will show up, and those older students are a little less noisy, a little more focused, but they too will probably not be all that interested in the actual museums, even if they take their noses out of their cellphones for more than a second or two. But just maybe, perhaps, one or two of them may accidentally wander into one of the National Air and Space Museum’s new exhibits and they might quiet down for a moment and see something both familiar and alien.

The exhibit is titled “A New Moon Rises” and it is a display of large format photographs from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter featuring the Moon in all its panchromatic glory. You could look at most of these photos on your computer screen, but seeing them enlarged and displayed on a museum wall like works of art is an entirely different experience.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, was launched in 2009 and has been chugging away ever since. If nothing breaks, in four or five years the spacecraft will probably run out of fuel and, because the Moon’s gravity field is uneven, it will ultimately fall and silently crash into the surface after more than a decade in orbit.

- Read the full article online, in the latest issue of The Space Review, HERE.

Understanding the legal status of the Moon

Astrobotic (CM) Moon Digger concept [Mark Maxwell/Astrobotic/JAXA].

Urbano Fuentes

The Space Review

In 1969, the United States successfully performed the first human landing on the surface of the Moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin placed an American flag in the lunar surface, winning the space race against the Soviet Union. The US government stated later that no sovereignty claims of any kind were made on the Moon. After that historical breakthrough and for decades to come, space exploration suffered a considerable slowdown. The United States had won the space race, and no serious efforts have since been made by any nation to return to the Moon.

In 1985, researchers at the University of Wisconsin discovered that the lunar soil had a considerable amount of the rare isotope of helium known as helium-3 (He-3). This scarce element could be used in energy production, in fusion power plants that—hypothetically—could produce an amount equivalent to 130,000,000 barrels of oil per ton of He-3.1 . It is also environmentally friendly, producing no greenhouse gases or radiation.

Whether because of helium-3 or not, several nations have recently shown interest in returning to the Moon. In 2013, China became the third country to land a spacecraft on the Moon, and other nations have places for lunar missions in the next several years. Besides nations, several private corporations had expressed interest in lunar missions of one kind or another.

Law in this area is not particularly broad. Nevertheless, during the Cold War and because of the progress in the field of space exploration in those early years, some international treaties related to the legal status of the Moon and the outer space region arose, creating a legal regime that is still valid today. Those treaties are the Outer Space Treaty (1967) and the Moon Treaty (1979), currently the existing legal framework valid to some extent.

These treaties, while overlapping to some degree, settled a series of principles regarding human activities outside Earth. The Outer Space Treaty forbids the placement of weapons of mass destruction in space; it also addressed the situation of lunar sovereignty, claiming that the celestial bodies could not be subject of national appropriation. The later Moon Treaty established that the Moon shall be regarded as common heritage of mankind, in a similar regime as the one applicable to the Deep Sea Bed Area.

This essay will address primarily the legal status of the Moon, using the existing framework on the subject. Taking into account the current state of space exploration and other legal systems similar to the one of the Moon, such as the Deep Sea Bed Area, it will analyse the question of whether the Moon could be considered the Common Heritage of Mankind, or if some other legal concept should be used in relation to its resources.

Read the full essay in The Space Review, HERE.

Ranger: America's first successful lunar program

Replica of Ranger Block III (Rangers 6-9) spacecraft on display at the National Air and Space Museum. The replica spacecraft made of parts from Ranger test vehicles and is about 3 meters tall and 4.5 meters across [Smithsonian Institute].

Andrew J. LaPage
The Space Review

With the successful landing of the Chinese Chang’e-3 lunar spacecraft on December 14, 2013, and the subsequent deployment of its Yutu rover, the Western press has been filled with claims of how the Chinese are catching up with the American space program. Usually overlooked by these writers is the fact that these Chinese successes would have been almost impossible without the pioneering efforts (and many painful failures) of the American and Soviet lunar programs a half a century earlier.

NASA’s earliest Pioneer lunar probes, a program started by the military and inherited by the agency after it was founded in October 1958, were plagued by a series of launch vehicle failures (see “The Pioneer lunar orbiters: a forgotten failure”, The Space Review, December 13, 2010). Out of all of NASA’s initial attempts to launch probes towards the Moon, only the tiny six-kilogram (13-pound) Pioneer 4 built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and launched on March 3, 1959, by a team at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) headed by Wernher von Braun (which would become the basis of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center) managed to escape Earth’s gravitational grasp to make a very distant flyby of the Moon.

The initial flights of NASA’s first in-house lunar program, Ranger, which was built and managed by JPL, fared little better than the Pioneers. The two flights of the Block I Ranger, which were designed to test the innovative Ranger design in extended Earth orbit, were stranded in short-lived low Earth orbits due to failures of the upper stage of the Atlas-Agena B launch vehicle (see “Ranger: Voyage to the Moon and beyond”, The Space Review, August 22, 2011). The three Block II Ranger flights, which were designed to hard-land a small probe on the lunar surface, fared little better. While most of the launch vehicle issues were resolved, fatal malfunctions of key spacecraft components resulted in complete failure of all of these missions (see “The Difficult Road to the Moon”, The Space Review, January 23, 2012).

Impact site of Ranger 7, a 14 meter-wide crater near the center of Mare Cognitum (10.634°S, 20.677°W). 487 meter-wide field of view from LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) observation M153014430L, LRO orbit 7693, February 22, 2011; 33.97° angle of incidence, resolution 49 centimeters per pixel from 42.69 km [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

As 1962 was drawing to a close, the situation with the American Moon program looked bleak. The failure of the last Block II Ranger, Ranger 5 launched on October 16, 1962, was NASA’s sixth consecutive lunar mission failure in three years. Only 17 months after President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to landing a man on the Moon with Project Apollo, it was beginning to look as though the Americans would never make it. If NASA could not get a simple unmanned probe to the Moon in working order, how could they hope to pull off the much more complicated mission of a manned lunar landing?

Read the full article at The Space Review, HERE.

Related Posts:

Ranger 7: Making an Impact on History (November 7, 2013)

LROC Coordinates of Robotic Spacecraft 2013 Update (September 25, 2013)
Surveyor Crater, Before and After (July 9, 2013)
Graves of the GRAIL twins (March 19, 2013)
48 years of memories of Alphonsus and Ranger 9 (January 24, 2013)
Ranger 8 impact on digitized LOIRP image (July 31, 2012)
The discarded extension of the Ranger program (April 30, 2012)
"Boy, that sure looks like Luna 9!" (December 3, 2011)
Apollo 13 S-IVB Impact in Apollo seismic recordings (March 22, 2010)
The LCROSS 'Smoking Gun' (November 13, 2009)
LCROSS confirms water on the Moon (November 13, 2009)
When bombing the Moon was a good idea (October 21, 2009)
Apollo 14 S-IVB Impact Crater (October 8, 2009)

Why not return to the Moon? (Part 1)

All trussed up, with nowhere to go? NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift launcher compared with the Saturn V used to send Apollo to the Moon, forty years ago.

Anthony Young
The Space Review

For the first time in nearly half a century, the United States will, in a matter of a few years, have the launch capability to send crewed spacecraft to the Moon. The launch vehicle that could make that possible is the Space Launch System (SLS). However, while the Moon was once a goal of exploration under the Vision for Space Exploration and Project Constellation, much further destinations are currently under consideration by NASA.

 There have been several incisive articles in The Space Review against the SLS, primarily against the cost of its development and projected operation. Even the former deputy administrator of NASA, Lori Garver, has now publicly come out against the SLS, stating the launch vehicle design embraces decades-old propulsion technology (which it does) and that America can do better.

For better or worse, the heavy lift launch vehicle in America’s future will be the SLS. There is, as yet, no funded mandate—that is, program—to send crews to a near Earth asteroid, and the cost of mounting a crewed mission to Mars would give the Congressional Budget Office fits. Funding for such programs are for future congressional hearings to debate.

Under NASA’s website heading “Human Spaceflight Missions” is the subheading “Future Exploration Plans” with the following items: Asteroid Redirect Initiative, Commercial Space, Orion Crew Vehicle, and Space Launch System. Only the first item is a mission: the remaining three are not. You will not find a definitive mission goal for the SLS, only nebulous statements about taking astronauts deeper into space than ever before.

The Constellation Altair lunar lander (as conceived in 2010) After the scrubbing of the Constellation program, the only vehicle still missing from it renamed replacements was a manned landing vehicle, along with plans for "extended human activity on the Moon."

NASA also has an impressive science website. The tabs to go to specific pages regarding the space agency’s primary scientific thrust. They are (bypassing the Big Questions tab) Earth, Heliophysics, Planets, Astrophysics, Missions, Technology, and Science News. Conspicuously absent is a tab for the Moon. It is only under the Heliophysics tab one finds information related to lunar scientific exploration, in the form of a 2007 report titled “Heliophysics Science and the Moon: Potential Solar and Space Physics Science for Lunar Exploration.”

However, prior to this heliophysics-centric publication, the National Research Council (NRC) published “The Scientific Context for Exploration of the Moon”. The interim report was published in 2006 and the final report was released in 2007. It laid out the scientific rationale for the resumption of exploration of the Moon. There have, in fact, been many such strategy documents published over the decades since the end of Apollo by NASA, the NRC, and other organizations supportive of America’s return to the Moon.

It is clear, judging from the above-mentioned websites and documents, the current emphasis for scientific exploration is focused on the Sun, the Earth, and the planets, with seemingly cursory attention to the Moon. However, with the development of the SLS, the Moon may yet come back into favor.

Read the full article at The Space Review, HERE.

The International Lunar Decade

Effective utilization of lunar resources may require an international regime to avoid potential conflicts and maximize the return on investment [NASA].

Vid Beldavs

The Space Review

While much has been learned about the Moon over the decades since the beginning of spaceflight, understanding of its potential resource wealth is incomplete and the technologies to exploit those resources remain to be developed. Now with China, Russia, and the US demonstrating the ability to land and operate on the Moon, and with ESA, India, Japan, and others developing such abilities, it is becoming increasingly clear that capabilities to exploit the resources of the Moon can be developed. Furthermore, the discovery of water in the lunar polar regions, near elevations in permanent sunshine, has led to the development of specific plans for the exploitation of the water resources for fuel for transportation operations in cislunar space, notably by Paul Spudis.

The obvious high value of the Moon’s water resources creates a basis for international competition—a Moon Race—and potential conflict. The necessity of an international regime for the exploitation of the natural resources of the Moon is likely to become an urgent matter for all spacefaring powers. The development of an effective international regime for the exploitation of the Moon’s resources would benefit from a thorough, internationally coordinated study of those resources and from the development of necessary technologies and governance mechanisms for their exploitation including funding for this purpose. What is proposed is an “International Lunar Decade” to study lunar resources and to develop capabilities for exploiting such resources with the following goals:

Read the full article at The Space Review, HERE.

How to form the Lunar Development Corporation to implement the Moon Treaty

An international corporation, operating under the auspices of the Moon Treaty, could allow for commercial uses of the Moon while providing a regime for property rights that doesn’t exist today [NASA)].

Vid Beldavs
The Space Review

The lack of an internationally agreed-to regime for the commercial development of the Moon and other celestial bodies is arguably the most significant barrier to more rapid commercial development beyond Earth orbit. Near-Earth services are structured to meet direct Earth-based needs and fit relatively easily within both established commercial practices and definitions of ownership and property rights. Very little business would be done in a place without property rights and rules of doing business. Much of modern wealth results from intellectual property rights. Without effective patenting systems innovation would stop.

Space is an environment where even the possibility of a claim to resources does not formally exist. The California gold rush that got underway with little government structure would soon have been a bust without a system of claims. A regime for the establishment of claims appears to be necessary due to the likelihood of disputes that will increase rapidly in response to competitive pressures.

Many have pointed to the need for an international regime to enable commercial space development. The Moon Treaty was a serious attempt by the world community to address the need for an international regime for space resources based on agreements reached earlier with the Law of the Sea and the concept of Common Heritage of All Mankind. The Moon Treaty was negotiated in the context of the North-South divide marked by the poverty of developing countries that had votes in the UN and the increasing power of multinational corporations to control economic resources. Space advocacy constituencies in the US saw the Moon Treaty as a power grab by poor developing countries to claim space resources through the power of UN bureaucracies that they did not have the technical means to reach on their own.

The US did not sign nor ratify the Moon Treaty, and neither have any of the major spacefaring powers. However, the Moon Treaty has been signed and ratified by Australia, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Uruguay. France, Guatemala, India and Romania have signed the Treaty, but have not yet ratified it. As Michael Listner noted last year (see “The Moon Treaty: it isn’t dead yet”, The Space Review March 12, 2012):

    "Turkey’s accession to the Moon Treaty will give the accord strength not so much in terms of individual political strength, but through political strength in numbers. As those numbers grow, the “Big Three” could find that their influence as non-parties of the Moon Treaty will be challenged by a chorus of many smaller nations who are parties."

It is noteworthy that three members of the European Union have signed and ratified the Treaty while an additional two EU countries have signed, opening the possibility for the entire EU to agree to the Treaty to enhance and accelerate opportunities for space development of member states, as well as to enhance the large-scale developmental assistance programs of the EU towards African and other developing nations.

Proposed robotic demonstration of In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) presented to the AIAA  in 2012. Even a modest, perhaps critical, program to prove the reward worth the risk seems almost pointless without the concept of property [Frassinito/Spudis].

Today, China, India, and other countries that were poor and without major space programs in the 1970s have programs to explore the Moon and the rockets to get there. China’s Chang’e-3 lander is slated to land on the Moon on December 14. Russia has plans for an ambitious lunar base program and the EU, Japan, India, and South Korea have programs directed at lunar resources. The US, by contrast, has no serious Moon-directed program in its forward plan. Unless there is a dramatic shift in US space policy, the US will be trailing China, the EU, and others in lunar exploration and commercialization in the coming years. Even the entrepreneurial initiative of US firms represented by the Google Lunar X PRIZE is unlikely to meet GLXP goals by 2015 and lesser objectives are being substituted, even as the programs of China, India, Russia and the EU appear to be expanding.

Exploration of the Moon by China, Russia, and others is being planned in a very different spirit from the NASA missions of the 20th century that were scientific in nature. Water and other valuable resources have been confirmed on the Moon. New programs have a focus on potential commercial and strategic exploitation. The Moon is the greatest mineral find in human history. Astronomically speaking the Moon is nearby, gravity is low, it has vacuum and very abundant materials from which things can be built that people need in space: solar power arrays, habitats, electronics, and soil and water for growing food and producing industrial chemicals.

A number of companies have been formed to exploit lunar resources and more are on the drawing boards. However, they all assume that a miracle of some kind will allow them to set up and start operations undisturbed by the dozens of other groups readying to do the same. This adds urgency to the lack of an international regime for commercial development of the Moon.

What are the options?

Read the full article, HERE.

It's not bragging if you do it

Climbing high over the central Pacific, a forward camera on the Long March 3B third stage captured the deployment of Chang'e-3 on its 112 hour "Journey to the Moon." Launched after midnight in China, the modified Long March 3B completes its part of the mission minutes later over the International Dateline; confronting sunrise of the previous day. Chang'e-3 and Yutu, its "Jade Rabbit" lunar rover, speed on to intercept a New Moon, into the glare of the Sun [CCTV].

Dwayne Day
The Space Review

Later this week, if all goes according to plan, China will land a robotic spacecraft and rover on the Moon, something that nobody has done in nearly four decades. If the Chinese do what they did for the launch, they will broadcast much of the event live on television and over the Internet. Last week’s launch coverage on government-controlled English language CCTV was remarkable for its openness. Indeed, the coverage was indistinguishable from Western news coverage of a major space event. There was no propagandizing or nationalistic chest-thumping, just a straightforward reporting with lots of information about the mission and what was happening. The event, and its coverage, highlighted the fact that China has an attractive, technically sophisticated scientific space program that could serve international relations purposes. It was a demonstration of what American political scientist Joseph Nye has referred to as “soft power,” the ability to compel or attract nations to do what you want. China’s space program gives them this ability to attract partners. The problem is that some of China’s other activities undercut their attractiveness as a potential partner.

Last Sunday’s CCTV coverage of the Chang’e-3 launch was quite sophisticated. The network had correspondents at the launch site and at the control center. They had a commentator in the studio asking rudimentary questions of an expert during the launch sequence. The questions and the expert’s answers were intended for a general, non-space-savvy audience. They also had animations of the lander and rover, and segments focusing on the development of the spacecraft, including interviews with engineers who had built individual parts. For instance, one young engineer had worked on small electric motors for the spacecraft. He acknowledged that there was nothing very sophisticated or exciting about the motors, but that they were vital to mission success.

Read the full article, HERE.

Red Moon, Blue Moon

The International Lunar Network (ILN) would feature a series of landers built by NASA and other nations to perform seismic surveys of the lunar interior [NASA].

Dwayne Day
The Space Review

Yesterday China launched Chang’e-3 on its way to the Moon, with landing scheduled for December 14. If it succeeds, it will be the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon in nearly four decades. Although the lander and rover have a modest scientific instrument suite, they are headed for a previously unexplored region of the Moon and will therefore return new and undoubtedly interesting data.

Chang’e-3 will not be alone. NASA currently has two spacecraft—Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and LADEE—circling the Moon. But although NASA also has several other possible lunar lander missions that it could start building within the next decade, it is unlikely that a NASA spacecraft will join the Chinese on the lunar surface for many years to come.

Read the full article, HERE.

Spinning for the Prize

"The Spirit of California," a design with unique heritage. A spin-stabilized Google Lunar X-Prize contender-that-was [Southern California Selene Group].

Rex Ridenoure
The Space Review

Five years ago, one of the then-active Google Lunar X PRIZE teams quietly signed off, withdrew from the competition, and ceased operations. At the time, it was arguably considered the team to beat in the quest for the prize. This article summarizes that team’s story and highlights a novel advancement in lander architecture derived from this short-lived yet very effective effort.

A long wait

This story starts fifty years ago at Hughes Aircraft Company in Southern California (Culver City), where Dr. Harold A. Rosen, a 37-year-old experienced and clever electrical engineer and radar expert, was leading a small team of engineers putting together what became the first successful series of geosynchronous communications satellites, Syncom. A few years prior, Rosen floated the idea to Hughes management of designing and launching a small, simple spinning satellite to GEO as part of the US response to the USSR’s 1957 Sputnik launch. This project would also serve as a kick-start toward the vision of global GEO satellite connectivity first articulated by Arthur C. Clarke in his seminal 1945 Wireless World article.

Syncom 1 was launched in February of 1963 and achieved the desired orbit, but suffered an immediate electrical failure. Five months later, Syncom 2 was successfully launched and began operating nominally. Syncom 3 repeated the achievement a year later.

 During 1962–1963, while Rosen and his team were immersed in their Syncom work, Hughes was bidding to be the prime contractor for NASA’s planned series of robotic lunar landers, Surveyor. The Caltech/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory had already developed a notional design for the lander and was looking to the emergent US space industry to complete the detailed design and then build the spacecraft.

Rosen was asked to peer review his firm’s proposal, and came away unimpressed. “That design was so big and clunky, and so expensive,” he recounted some 45 years later. “I knew back then that there was a much more elegant and cost-effective way to land.”

Read the article at The Space Review, HERE.

Golden Spike, no longer 'Waiting for Godot'

Rather than continuing to wait on a traditional government space exploration program, Golden Spike believes it’s time to turn to commercial ventures to enable human space exploration. In their scenario, using the lunar orbit rendezvous and return method, a single stage lander would be launched separately from crews and remain in lunar orbit for future expeditions [Golden Spike].

S. Alan Stern and Homer Hickam
The Space Review

We’ve both had long careers in the space field. And almost all of that time, most people in our industry have been waiting for government space agencies to return humans to the Moon and to go on to Mars—boldly exploring new worlds, inspiring a new generation, and creating a robust future for space exploration.

It hasn’t happened.

 Why? The reasons are many, but after observing a long series of false starts and dashed attempts, we’ve concluded that relying on the 1950s and 1960s model of space exploration led primarily by central governments, is a little like Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. In that story line, two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, endlessly wait in vain for the arrival of a character named Godot. Well, it’s not just in Beckett’s novel, because in space exploration the 1950s–1960s model, Godot isn’t coming either.

Fortunately, 21st century industry and entrepreneurs are stepping up to the plate, creating exciting new models for how human space explorations can be launched commercially.

Just read the papers, it sounds like science fiction—companies planning suborbital space lines, private space stations, and a private expedition to fly past Mars. In the case of our company, Golden Spike, privately mounted lunar surface expeditions to be sold primarily to foreign space and science agencies, but also to US and international corporations, and wealthy individuals.

And why not? Back in the heady days of Apollo’s Moon race, the hard part was the technologies that had to be invented to make it all possible. Today, those technologies are well in hand. The hard part of today’s Moon shots and other commercial space exploration is raising the capital for large ventures.

Read the full article, new this week at The Space Review, HERE

A Russian Moon?

Another design for renewing Russia's groundbreaking program of robotic lunar exploration is set aside. Above is a 2008 notional concept of the Roscosmos Luna-Glob orbiter, equipped with penetrators and supporting both a lander and an ISRO-built rover, part of a highly anticipated international mission recently abandoned. Under the Soviet regime Russia pioneered and brought to an end exploration of the Moon's surface [IKI/Lavochkin].

Dwayne Day

The Space Review

Earlier this month the Russian government announced that it plans to launch a lunar orbiter in 2015, followed by a lander a year later, both of them designated Luna-Glob. This is the latest version of what has been a rather convoluted series of Russian announcements about their planetary exploration plans, particularly with regards to the Moon. Previous plans had involved launching the orbiter and lander together, then changed to launch the lander a year before the orbiter. Now the Russians have switched the order. This is a more logical plan than previous ones, and at least to outsiders it appears as if the Russians are starting to develop a more sensible sequence of planetary science missions, as well as mission goals, than they have in the past. It’s something we should hope for, as the Russians could possibly by the most active nation conducting lunar exploration in the next decade.

Although they have experience with landing robotic craft on the Moon, launching a Moon orbiter before a lander is a better approach for the Russians because they need to re-learn how to walk before they can start to run. In late 2011 they suffered an embarrassing failure of their overly-ambitious Fobos-Grunt mission. The spacecraft fell silent almost immediately after launch, circled the Earth for a few weeks, and finally reentered. Many independent observers had predicted that Fobos-Grunt would fail because it was too complicated for a space program that had not built a planetary spacecraft in over a decade and a half (see “Red moon around a red planet,” The Space Review, November 7, 2011). The only real surprise was that the spacecraft failed so early, probably a sign that Russian quality control and systems engineering are both in bad shape, something that has been reinforced by a series of launch vehicle problems. Russian planetary science plans in recent years appeared to experience the “Christmas Tree” problem that American robotic spacecraft suffered from in the 1980s. This is where a mission gets more and more complex as scientists add more instruments, increasing the cost and the risk that something will go wrong. Fobos-Grunt had this problem in spades and some Russian lunar missions appeared to be succumbing to it as well. A single mission including an orbiter, lander, and rover, some of them from different countries, is very hard to integrate, but until recently such a mission was in Russian lunar plans.

Read the full article at The Space Review, HERE.

Cislunar transportation: the space trucking system

The concept of the way-station could be extended from cislunar space to Mars or elsewhere in the solar system, as needed For AIAA gathering in 2012, a lunar lander departs from L2 [John Frassanito & Associates].

John K. Strickland
The Space Review

Many people wonder what all the fuss is all about when they keep hearing the phrase “cislunar architecture.” Many of us are using the phrase to refer to what is essentially a space trucking system, with the equivalent of truck stops and cargo loading yards (freight terminals). Lets use the trucking analogy to explain what we are talking about.

You do not use an expensive truck to carry a load just a single time, and then immediately send the truck to the junkyard to be scrapped. Trucking businesses could not operate this way. Some truck cab and trailer combinations today are probably worth close to a quarter million dollars new. Some cabs alone are close to $100,000 used. Most of the current rockets used today cost over $100 million, so large rockets can be up to 1,000 times more valuable than a tractor-trailer, yet all of them smash into the ocean or desert and become scrap metal after just one flight.

For rockets that take off from the ground, one obvious way to allow re-use is for them to land on the ground intact. SpaceX and some other companies are trying to do just that. Quite a few rockets have now accomplished short flights and landed again safely. Without wings, the landings must be vertical. Re-use with a vertical landing was first done by the DC-X at White Sands on September 11, 1993.

For rocket vehicles in space, the problem is different. We do not want to bring the vehicle back to the ground to refuel, since it is extremely costly to get it up into space in the first place. Once it is in orbit, we want to be able to re-use that vehicle in space over and over again.

Read the full article HERE.

Turning science fiction to science fact: Golden Spike makes plans for human lunar missions

Golden Spike proposes to land humans on the surface of the Moon commercially as soon as 2020, for a price tag that has raised eyebrows—and some skepticism [Golden Spike Company].

Jeff Foust
The Space Review

The last 12 months has seen the unveiling of a number of commercial space ventures whose audacious plans can’t be immediately dismissed given the technical and financial pedigree of their founders and backers. Almost exactly a year ago, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen announced the formation of Stratolaunch Systems, an air-launch system that requires the development of the world’s largest airplane. Allen assembled a team that included Scaled Composites and, originally, SpaceX (since replaced by Orbital Sciences), with a board that included Burt Rutan and former NASA administrator Mike Griffin (see “Stratolaunch: SpaceShipThree or Space Goose?”, The Space Review, December 19, 2011). In April, Planetary Resources announced plans for a series of robotic missions to prospect and, eventually, mine asteroids. That company has an impressive list of investors, including Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt as well as Ross Perot Jr. and former Microsoft executive and two-time space tourist Charles Simonyi (see “Planetary Resources believes asteroid mining has come of age”, The Space Review, April 30, 2012).

Yet, the goals of these startups—a giant air-launch system and missions to prospect and mine asteroids—pale in comparison to the goal of another new space startup: sending people to the surface of the Moon. That feat has been accomplished only six times, and by one nation, the United States, with the last such mission, Apollo 17, flying 40 years ago this month. At the time, it was a potent symbol of America’s capabilities, and one of the signature achievements of the 20th century. The scale of that accomplishment, in many respects, grows as the decades stretch on without anyone else repeating it.

Given those factors, the idea that a human landing on the Moon could be done commercially, and for a fraction of the cost of Apollo or any more recent proposal, hardly seems credible. However, like those other firms, the plans of Golden Spike, the company that formally announced last week its desire to carry out such missions starting as soon as 2020, can’t be easily dismissed. The company has assembled an impressive team, including an Apollo veteran and others with experience in technology, science, policy, and finance. But can this lunar A-team overcome what are likely to be giant technical and financial obstacles?

Read the full article at The Space Review, this week, HERE.

Flight training for Apollo: An interview with astronaut Harrison Schmitt

Apollo 17 lunar module pilot (and future U.S. Senator) geologist-astronaut Dr. Harrison "Jack" Schmidt, December 14, 1972, soon after close-out of the the mission's third and final walk on the Moon. This week marks the 40th anniversary of Apollo 17, the last mission to the Moon and the last time manned spaceflight left Earth orbit. AS17-134-20530 [Gene Cernan/NASA].

Jason Catanzariti

The Space Review

Harrison “Jack” Schmitt was selected by NASA as a scientist-astronaut in 1965. Unlike the Space Shuttle era, all astronauts at that time had to qualify as pilots. Trained as a geologist and having never flown an airplane before, he joined a class of cadets for the year-long Undergraduate Pilot Training program at Williams Air Force Base.

The syllabus began with small propeller planes, later moving on to jets, including the supersonic T-38 Talon. Schmitt would have a long relationship with the T-38, as NASA astronauts used them for pilot proficiency and travel. He also received helicopter training that was overseen by the Navy.

Schmitt eventually flew as lunar module pilot on the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. During the liftoff from the Moon there was a communications problem, and it was his job to solve it. I spoke with Dr. Schmitt about his experiences learning to fly, and how they impacted his actions during his flight to the Moon.

Read the interview, featured this week at The Space Review, HERE.

Human space exploration: asteroids vs. the Moon?

Sunflower solar panel-powered architecture, featuring the LER, Athlete and Chariot vehicles, that were well along in development before Congress and the Obama administration shelved the Constellation program [NASA/John Frassanito & Associates].

Jeff Foust

The Space Review

Two years ago, the Obama Administration changed the direction of the nation’s human spaceflight programs in a number of ways, including the destinations of those efforts. Gone was the goal of the previous administration of a human return to the Moon by 2020, a date that was looking increasingly unrealistic in the eyes of many, including the Augustine Committee that reviewed NASA’s plans in 2009. In its place was something resembling the “flexible path” approach in that committee’s final report, with the Moon replaced as an initial beyond-Earth destination by a near Earth asteroid. President Obama established a 2025 goal for a human mission to an asteroid in a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in April 2010, also setting a goal of a human mission to Mars in the mid-2030s.

From a technical standpoint, a human mission to a near Earth asteroid could be done solely by the United States given both existing capabilities and those under development, like the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket. Yet, from a financial standpoint, particular in an era of constrained and even declining budgets, it’s likely the US will seek international partners for an asteroid mission, and almost certainly for later missions to Mars. But do the potential partners of the US also want to participate in human asteroid missions?

The recent Global Space Exploration Conference, or GLEX, held in Washington, DC last month by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), offered some mixed messages about international interest in human asteroid missions. Some space agency executives instead spoke openly about going back to the Moon, comments that have some support among former NASA officials who believe that human lunar exploration will have greater support internationally.

Perhaps the boldest endorsement of the Moon, and not near Earth asteroids, as the next destination for human exploration came from Vladimir Popovkin, general director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. Speaking at a plenary session at GLEX on May 22 that featured the leaders or other top officials of six space agencies, Popovkin suggested the Moon, and not the asteroids, was the preferred destination of the Russian space program.

“We arrived at the conclusion that the Moon is supposed to be the next target” for human exploration, Popovkin said through an interpreter. “We’re not trying to convince you that we shouldn’t be doing anything in the area of Mars exploration, asteroid exploration, just that, in our professional opinion, today we have much better chances to come up with very productive and tangible results when concentrating on the Moon.”

Read the in-depth article, HERE.

Space merchants and planetary mining

Planetary Resources hopes to extract water ice and metals from near
Earth asteroids, while other companies are interested in mining such
resources from the Moon [Planetary Resources].

Ayodele Faiyetole
The Space Review

"The exhaustible mineral resources on Earth and their almost infinite deposits, by comparison, on the different planetary bodies in our solar system is fast leading to the development of a whole new industry spearheaded by exploratory-entrepreneurial visionaries. These space merchants, like the British who prospected America as a tobacco plantation, have conceived that the outer space holds the prospects for some of the world’s most valuable minerals that could be exploited for usage here on Earth and beyond."

"The Moon miners: Moon Express, Inc., which was selected by Forbes as one of the 15 “Names You Need to Know” in 2011, has made known its interest in prospecting outer space for resources since its formation in 2010. On April 23, the Google Lunar X PRIZE contender announced it had successfully delivered its Preliminary Design Checkpoint Technical Package to NASA under its $10-million Innovative Lunar Demonstration Data (ILDD) contract, providing NASA continuing data on the development of the company’s commercial lunar robotic missions and plans to mine the Moon. MoonEx, as Moon Express is also known, was selected in 2010 for this data buy contract, which happens only after technology is demonstrated at the company’s own risk. Technology luminaries Naveen Jain and Barney Pell teamed up with space visionary Robert Richards to form MoonEx based at the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley."

Read the full article HERE.

Related Posts:

First, kill all the lawyers (May 1, 2012)
Staking a claim on the Moon (April 12, 2012)
Bolden: Moon to be a private colony (April 12, 2012)
A Rationale for Cislunar Space (April 12, 2011)

TSR: Fear of a Chinese Moon

Robert Bigelow, speaking at the ISPCS conference in New Mexico this month, claimed that China is on a path towards taking control of the Moon within 15 years [ISPCS].

Jeff Foust

The Space Review

Robert Bigelow is best known in space circles as the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, the company he created over a decade ago to develop commercial space habitats using expandable (or inflatable) technology licensed from NASA. The Las Vegas-based company has successfully launched two prototype modules, Genesis 1 and 2, to demonstrate the technology and has plans for larger modules and commercial space stations for companies and so-called “sovereign clients”, nations without their own indigenous space programs.

Bigelow’s plans originally generated considerable skepticism in the broader space community. However, as the company won success with its Genesis missions and found interest in its plans from potential customers and even NASA—which sees the demand generated by Bigelow’s commercial habitats as a key part of the broader business case for the agency’s commercial crew plans—Bigelow has gained considerable credibility. Now, he’s using the platform he has as one of the nation’s leading space entrepreneurs to broadcast a warning about an unusual, even quixotic, threat to America’s space ambitions: that China will, in effect, seize the Moon.

Speaking at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) in Las Cruces, New Mexico, earlier this month, Bigelow spent very little time talking about his own company and its ambitions.

Instead, he spent most of his nearly 40-minute speech focusing on his belief that, within 15 years, China will notonly land people on the Moon, but will claim it as its own territory, locking out the United States and other nations.

Why would China do such a thing? Bigelow is convinced that China’s quest for prestige—to demonstrate that it is the most powerful country in the world—will inevitably drive the country to lay claim to the Moon. “China already has a grand national vision,” he said. “Their vision is that China wants to be indisputably number one in the world, measured any way you want to measure.”

That means, he said, not just simply repeating the past achievements of the US in space but moving beyond them. “Why not take the all-important syllogistic next step: ownership, ownership, ownership?” he suggested. Doing so, he said, would generate “global psychological impact” and considerable prestige for the Chinese people. “I think nothing else the Chinese could possibly do in the next 15 years would cause as great a benefit for China,” he said.

He argued that China, with its growing wealth and its historical “ability to maintain focus”, would be in a position to land humans on the Moon and start making claims between 2022 and 2026. “China has an ability to focus and galvanize its programs because of the centralization of the government” that can allow them to stay on that schedule, he told reporters after his ISPCS talk.

One obvious obstacle is the Outer Space Treaty, of which China is a party, which prohibits countries from making territorial claims to the Moon or other celestial bodies. Bigelow suggested, though, that China could work to amend the treaty through the support of countries in Africa and Latin America where China is making major investments. Alternatively, he said, China could simply decide to withdraw from the treaty. Public opinion, he said, won’t be factor. “There isn’t going to be World War Three over this,” he said. “There isn’t going to be a single shot fired.”

Read the full article at The Space Review, HERE.

The Pioneer lunar orbiters: a forgotten failure

STL (TRW) - built Able-4 and 5 lunar orbiters were the most advanced American spacecraft of their time, part of the ARPA-sponsored Operation Mona, which was approved by President Eisenhower on March 27, 1958 [NASA].

Andrew J. LaPage
The Space Review

There has been a resurgence in interest in the exploration of the Moon. In addition to current American efforts, Japan, India, and China have placed spacecraft into orbit around the Moon in recent years and they have plans to land on the lunar surface in the future. A genuine competition between the Asian space powers is developing to exploit the Moon and its resources. The success of these programs owes much to the experience gained during the competition between the Soviet Union and the United States a half a century ago in the opening years of the Space Age.

Before NASA was founded on October 1, 1958, the US Air Force had ambitious plans for space exploration. During the national debate that followed the launch of Sputnik, the Air Force was trying to position itself so that it could dominate the nation’s infant space program. Even after the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was founded in February of 1958 and was given the task of coordinating America’s military space programs, Air Force efforts and plans figured prominently.

By the fall of 1959, the Able combination along with its cousin, the Vanguard upper stages, had an abysmal performance record.

The Air Force’s first step beyond Earth orbit, called Project Able, was a series of attempts to place a small spacecraft into orbit around the Moon. These orbiters, along with a pair of small US Army-JPL lunar flyby probes, were part of the ARPA-sponsored Operation Mona, which was approved by President Dwight Eisenhower on March 27, 1958. Three launch attempts made by the Air Force between August and November of 1958, now called Pioneers 0, 1, and 2; all failed to reach the Moon. But even before these missions flew, the Air Force, in conjunction with the builders of their first lunar orbiters, STL (Space Technology Laboratory, a division of TRW), began to study follow-on missions not only to lunar orbit but also to Venus, given priority. Little was known about Earth’s near twin at this time and many believed Venus ranked with Mars as a likely abode for extraterrestrial life, making it a desirable target for exploration.

Read the article, HERE.

The Space Review: Apollo secrets & whispers

Illustration of an Apollo Command & Service Module docked to the NRO Lunar Mapping and Survey System [Space Review/G. de Chiara].

Dwayne A. Day
The Space Review

During the 1960s, the existence of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which managed America’s spy satellite programs, was highly secret. It is difficult to understand why this was so, but the ability to use powerful satellites to peer down into the Soviet Union, count strategic weapons systems, and determine what the Soviets were doing was highly valuable and therefore prized. Although the Soviet government and the American public knew that the United States was launching satellites into orbit to conduct espionage, US government officials felt that even admitting that these activities were being conducted would attract more attention to them, and possibly encourage the Soviets to start shooting at them in peacetime (everybody expected them to shoot at American satellites in wartime). This intense secrecy is the main reason why the revelation that the NRO made then-current, highly-capable reconnaissance satellite technology available to NASA for the Apollo program is so surprising.

The existence of the Lunar Mapping and Survey System was not classified, and actually appeared in an open source publication, a space encyclopedia aimed at kids that was produced in the later 1960s.

As revealed by Vance Mitchell in the current issue of Quest, and discussed here last week (see “Black Apollo”, The Space Review, November 29, 2010), beginning in 1964 the NRO and NASA collaborated to allow NASA to use a modified KH-7 GAMBIT reconnaissance satellite on manned Apollo missions to photograph potential lunar landing sites. These missions were planned to occur in the event that the robotic Lunar Orbiter photographs were insufficient to determine if it was safe enough for an astronaut to land a Lunar Module on the surface. The KH-7 was then one of the two primary American reconnaissance satellites in service. NASA soon employed contractors Lockheed, General Electric, and Kodak to begin work on what was known as the Lunar Mapping and Survey System, or LM&SS. Details of the plan remain sketchy, but parts of hardware for four cameras were constructed before the program was canceled in summer 1967, after NASA determined that the Lunar Orbiter photographs were good enough to pick safe landing sites.

Read the full article, HERE.

Griffin’s critique of NASA’s new direction

Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin was less critical than in months past, speaking to a conference of the International Mars Society in Dayton, Ohio, Friday. The House committee plan for NASA FY2011 , he said, was better than the Senate's, and plans preliminarily approved in both chambers were superior to plans promoted by the White House [File photo: CSM, April 2009].

Jeff Foust
The Space Review

Former NASA administrators are not generally known for being outspoken about space policy after their tenures running the agency...Mike Griffin, however, is not content to remain quiet during this period of upheaval in space policy. The administrator who oversaw the formation and initial development of the Constellation architecture—most notably the Ares 1 rocket and Orion capsule—is clearly not happy to see the White House and even Congress willing to dismantle part or all it in favor of a new approach to human space exploration.

Griffin started his speech by first reviewing the administration’s proposed plan for NASA, and his take on it—which, not unexpectedly, wasn’t particularly positive. One area of concern he expressed was the plan by the White House to defer a decision on a heavy-lift vehicle (HLV) to no later than 2015. “I would ask you to note the timing,” Griffin said: a 2015 decision would come near the end of President Obama’s second and final term (assuming he wins reelection in 2012), and thus the funding decisions would be put in the lap of his successor. “By the time there was any budget year that would actually have to support the development of a real heavy-lift rocket, the president who is promising to do it will be gone,” he said.

Read the full report, HERE.