Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

Doubts on Display from Congress during hearing on Private Space

8:59 pm

Several Congressmen expressed doubts about and resistance to the new private space manned effort by companies like SpaceX during hearings today in the House.

Let’s be honest: it’s all about pork and only pork. Unfortunately, the new companies don’t deliver the same kind of pork to the right congressional districts, even if they might deliver a real product faster and for less money. To quote the article:

Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., rallied to the industry’s defense, citing a “hostility” to the private space industry. “Much to my dismay, I see some of the worst elements of decision making,” he said. “I see an anti-commercial-space attitude that could have very negative consequences.” Rohrabacher (who represents a district near SpaceX’s headquarters) seemed to chide Hall and Johnson, the two Texans who chair the panel, for parochial views. “Focusing on one’s own district and directing federal funds seems to be having a major impact on this decision,” he said.

As we anticipated yesterday, there were other regional pleas connected to the word of choice heard in the halls of Congress: jobs. Rep. Hansen Clarke, D-Mich., for instance, asked how the space contract could be used to create jobs in his district of metropolitan Detroit. The witnesses made the most diplomatic kowtows they could. “I’ve been pushing SpaceX to use more automotive suppliers,” Musk responded. Other space industry execs went on to claim Michigan subcontractors, to praise the auto industry, and to speak of spin-offs from space science programs.

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Virgin Galactic has hired its first astronaut pilot

3:17 pm

Virgin Galactic has hired its first astronaut pilot.

[USAF test pilot Keith] Colmer, whose aviator call sign is “Coma,” joins an elite team in Mojave, CA, where Scaled Composite’s test pilots and [Virgin Galactic’s Chief Pilot David] Mackay have been putting WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo through an exhaustive series of test flights to fully explore and quantify the performance profiles of the two revolutionary vehicles.

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The battle in Congress of the EPA’s effort to regulate dust

10:02 am

The battle in Congress over the EPA’s effort to regulate dust.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats all support the EPA’s effort, while there are Republicans who oppose. What I consider significant is that more than a hundred agricultural organizations oppose the regulations.

One of the agricultural groups that is supporting the bill [to block the EPA regulations], the National Association of Wheat Growers (NAWG), wrote a letter to the committee last month, saying that a slight raise in overall particulate matter standards would require the EPA to regulate farm dirt under the current standards. “And, for what purpose? Scientific studies have never shown rural dust to be a health concern at ambient levels,” said the NAWG letter. [emphasis mine]

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Eradicating polio: not this year

8:35 am

The effort to eradicated polio entirely by the end of 2012 will not be met.

Afghanistan and Nigeria, two of the three remaining endemic countries, have had more cases in the first nine months of this year than in 2010 altogether. Several other countries targeted by the plan have also seen more cases to date this year compared to this time in 2010. Additionally, polio had popped up in countries where it had previously been eradicated — notably China, which went polio-free for 11 years until this summer.

Sadly, politics and culture are almost certainly the main reasons polio still survives in these countries.

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VAB to be opened to tourists for the first time in years

6:56 pm

The Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral is going to be opened to tourists for the first time in years.

Back in around 1977 I was down in Florida for that year’s science fiction Worldcon convention. At one point we went out to the space center to take the tour. Since this was after Apollo but before the shuttle, the VAB was then part of the tour, and they took us inside at the ground level so we could look up into its vast height. Hopefully, the new tours will let the tourists see more.

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NASA steals moon rock given to widow of NASA engineer

7:53 am

In a sting operation, NASA steals a moon rock from the widow of an retired NASA engineer.

Five months after NASA investigators and local agents swooped into the restaurant and hailed their operation as a cautionary tale for anyone trying to sell national treasure, no charges have been filed, NASA isn’t talking and the case appears stalled. The target, Joann Davis, a grandmother who says she was trying to raise money for her sick son, asserts the lunar material was rightfully hers, having been given to her space-engineer husband by Neil Armstrong in the 1970s.

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Tea Party in Space argues for more money for commercial space

7:43 am

Andrew Gasser at the Tea Party in Space website today argues strongly for Congress to fully fund the new commercial space program at the $850 million amount requested by the Obama administration.

As much as I am for these new commercial companies, I do not think it a good idea to fund them at these high levels.

For one thing, the government is still broke. It can’t afford to spend that much money. It is therefore unseemly for a website that uses the “tea party” label to advocate more spending at this time.

For another, the more money the government commits to these companies, the more control the government is going to demand from them. Far better to keep the government participation as small as possible. Make it just enough to allow the companies to succeed but not enough so as to make the whole effort a government program.

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NASA Is Considering Fuel Depots in the Skies

8:34 pm

NASA is considering putting fuel depots in orbit.

Under the plan outlined in the document, the propellant depot would be launched first, and then other rockets would carry fuel to the depot before a spacecraft arrived to fill up. That would increase the complexity for an asteroid mission — 11 to 17 launchings instead of four — but could get NASA astronauts to an asteroid by 2024, the study said. The total budget needed for the project from 2012 through 2030 would be $60 billion to $86 billion, the study said.

By contrast, a study last year that designed an asteroid mission around a heavy-lift rocket estimated that it would cost $143 billion and that the trip could not happen until 2029. The earlier study briefly considered propellant depots but quickly dismissed them.

This idea of putting fuel depots in space merely mirrors the 1960s proposal of using the Gemini capsule and the Titan rocket to assemble a spaceship in orbit for getting to the moon. According to the earlier proposal it would have been faster and cheaper to use existing smaller rockets and many additional launches than to build a giant Saturn 5 rocket that could put everything into orbit in only one launch. I have always thought this idea had merit.

The fuel depot concept is further confirmation that a heavy-lift rocket is not necessarily the only way one can get humans beyond Earth orbit.

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