Author: Robert Zimmerman

We’re still not cutting

8:49 am

The day of reckoning looms: We’re still not cutting.

In the spring fight to avert a government shutdown, Republicans promised $100 billion in real cuts but then compromised for $38.5 billion in future savings. In reality, the Congressional Budget Office found the deal still resulted in an increase of more than $170 billion in federal spending from 2010 to 2011. The “largest spending cut in history” ended up being a spending increase.

And this:

But the [super]committee isn’t really trying to cut spending. It seeks only to spend the country into bankruptcy a little slower. Rather than letting the country rack up $23.4 trillion of debt by 2021, the supercommittee hopes to keep it to $21.3 trillion. It’s the difference between speeding off a cliff at 91 miles per hour versus 100 miles per hour.

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DARPA has launched a program to use airplanes as the launchpad for putting satellites in orbit

8:47 pm

DARPA has launched a program to use airplanes as a launchpad for putting satellites in orbit.

The Pentagon’s research agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), also anticipates slashing small satellite payload costs from more than $30,000 per pound to less than $10,000 per pound — making such launches three times cheaper. . . . DARPA wants the program to demonstrate at least 12 launches of 100-pound payloads to low Earth orbit, with each launch costing about $1 million. Launches could start as soon as 2015, according to DARPA’s official announcement of the program on Nov. 4.

At first glance this appears to be good news for Orbital Sciences and its Pegasus rocket, the only commercial launch system that has successfully put satellites into orbit using a commercial L1011 airplane as its first stage. At the same time, however, it appears DARPA is pushing for new technology to lower costs below what Orbital charges, meaning the game is open to anyone.

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A breathtaking view of the Apollo 15 landing site

2:03 pm

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team has released a wide angle side view image of the Apollo 15 landing site, showing the lunar module and the areas around Hadley Rille and the Apennine Mountain range that the astronauts explored using their lunar jeep. Below is a cropped close-up, showing the landing site near the top of the image with Hadley Rille near the bottom. Below the fold is a second image showing a wider view that includes the Apennine mountain slope that the astronauts drove their rover up.

Close up of Hadley Rille and Apollo 15 landing site

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New conservative website: Not Mitt Romney

1:01 pm

On another campaign note, a new website, put together by some noted conservative Republicans, has just appeared called Not Mitt Romney. An explanation can be found here.

Remember how Nancy Pelosi said we need to pass Obamacare “so you can find out what’s in it?” Well, is it any different with Mitt Romney? Does anybody really have the slightest idea what he’d do as President? Nobody can even reasonably predict where the guy will be on any issue six months from now, much less what he’ll do if he becomes the leader of the free world.

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An international team of astronauts recently completed a six day underground cave mission

4:45 pm

An international team of astronauts recently completed a six day underground cave mission in an effort to simulate some of the aspects of space exploration on another world.

I, along with my cave exploration friends, find this article somewhat humorous, as these astronauts weren’t doing anything that unusual from our perspective. Routinely we have teams going underground for three to five days to do exploration and survey work as part of the Germany Valley Karst Survey in West Virginia. The result has been more than fifty miles of virgin passage in the past eight years.

But, if these astronauts want to join us and do some exploration, they’d be welcome!

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Finally some substance in the Presidential campaign

11:20 pm

Up until tonight I had not watched any of the Republican Presidential debates. To me, the game show formats of each debate were such that I had no expectation of seeing any substance. Quick one-liners and gotcha attacks — the only thing that generally comes from these formats — can’t tell me anything about the deeper philosophical underpinnings of each candidate. And without that knowledge I can have no idea whether or not the candidates will follow through with what they say they’ll do.

Tonight however I did watch the Herman Cain-Newt Gingrich debate, which CSPAN has made available to watch in its entirety. The format was basically Cain and Gingrich for an hour and a half, answering a variety of questions about the three big entitlement programs, Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. Each man could essentially take as much time as he desired to say what he wanted.
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An inside look at NASA bureaucratic madness

8:36 pm

An inside look at NASA’s bureaucratic madness.

Much of the time NASA appears to be a loose confederation of 10 quasi independent fiefdoms, each pretty much in charge of their own business. People often ask me what would I do if I were king of NASA for a day. They expect me to say something like: build this rocket, launch that satellite. Rather I think how I would standardize the procurement processes, or the human resources procedures, or the engineering standards used across the agency. But then I always was a dreamer, tilting at impossible windmills. Launching rockets is easy; getting engineers to agree on standards is hard.

And people wonder why I strongly oppose NASA’s heavy-lift rocket (which I think will never get built), or worry that NASA’s interference will choke to death the new independent commercial space companies.

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The first in orbit tests of Robonaut halted because the robot did not carry out its commands as expected.

12:04 pm

HAL lives! The first in-orbit tests of Robonaut were halted today on ISS because the robot did not carry out its commands as expected.

NASA robot operator Phil Strawser said joint movements in the weightless space environment have proven to be different than those performed in normal gravity on Earth. Consequently, software used to operate the robot needs to be “fine-tuned,” he said.

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Russia heads for Mars

11:59 am

Russia heads for Mars: a detailed look at the Phobos/Grunt sample return mission, set to launch on November 8.

I really wish the Russians good luck with this project. Not only would it herald their return to planetary science since the fall of the Soviet Union, success here would break their long string of failures to the red planet. Though their unmanned planetary program had some remarkable achievements during the Soviet era, of the 19 missions they flew to Mars in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, all were failures, producing almost no useful data.

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A NASA senior review of all planetary missions?

12:37 am

Here’s a tidbit I just spotted on the EPOXI (formerly Deep Impact) status website, buried in a November 1, 2011 update::

Meanwhile, NASA has decided that there will be a senior review of all operating planetary exploration missions. That will likely include a review of the status of the Deep Impact Flyby spacecraft to determine whether an additional extended mission should be approved. Decisions will not occur until early 2012.

Though Deep Impact is still a functioning spacecraft in orbit around the sun, up until this notice I had not heard of any plans to use it again after its flyby of Comet Hartley-2 in 2010. However, there is no reason its cameras could not be used for astronomy, though unfortunately its high resolution camera has a focus problem which prevents it from taking the sharpest images.

However, the timing of this review of planetary missions, combined with the story last week that the Obama administration might end all funding for future planetary missions, is intriguing. I wonder if they are tied together in some way. That the notice above says the decision will be made in “early 2012” — the moment when the Obama administration will unveil its 2012 federal budget recommendations — strongly suggests that they are linked.

Could that the administration be thinking it can salvage the bad press it will receive for shutting down all future planetary missions by spending a small amount on extending missions already in space? Or is this planetary review another indication that the rumors are true and the administration plans to end the planetary science program entirely?

Unfortunately, I am speculating here, without any real information. Stay tuned to find out.

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