The Size of New Horizons

New Horizons is often described as the size of a grand piano. Somehow it pleases me to come from a culture that calibrates the size of spacecraft in musical instruments.

On Pluto's Doorstep

New Horizons has entered Pluto's Hill Sphere, the space where Pluto's gravity dominates that of the Sun. Pluto and Charon are starting to look like actual places rather than discs covered with low resolution blotches. And it gets better. The closest approach will be July 14th.

New Horizons will streak through Pluto space at 13.8 km/sec. It left Earth faster than any other spacecraft, and it took almost 9 1/2 years to get there. Next stop, deeper into the Kuiper Belt.

These are the days of miracle and wonder.

What to expect when you're expecting a flyby.

A Good Week in Space

During the first week in December:

On December 1, NASA's Dawn spacecraft captured an image of Ceres. It does not yet rival images from Hubble, but wait for it. Dawn did a spectacular job mapping Vesta, and will do the same for Ceres, if all goes according to plan.

On December 2, (EST) Japan launched their Hayabusa 2 spacecraft to visit an asteroid, drop off landers, and return with a sample.

On December 5, NASA launched their unmanned test flight of an Orion spacecraft on an almost flawless mission to a apogee of 3,600 miles. A spacecraft capable of carrying humans hasn't been this far from Earth since Apollo 17 in 1972.

As a taxpayer, I appreciated the live transmission of images of the receding earth and parachute deployment from inside the spacecraft, and capsule reentry and parachute deployment from a circling drone. I didn't get this during Apollo. This is good policy. I like to see what I am paying for. If I can, I will pay more cheerfully.

On December 6, New Horizons awoke from hibernation on Pluto's doorstep.  Given the vast scale of our Solar System, awaking on Pluto's doorstep means the closest approach will be in July.

We will see amazing things, if we are patient.

"Not all those who wander are lost"

Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist.

A CGI video, with narration written and spoken by the late Carl Sagan.

Here is  a gallery of stills from the video.

I do not think we will get our meat bodies to these places anytime soon.  But if and when we do, it will be splendid.

Better Technology for Space Exploration

There are two kinds of technology that would make space exploration easier.

The first will come without government support. Anyone that figures out how to make a lighter solar cell, or how to deliver payload to earth orbit cheaper than their competition will do well without help in existing markets. If you can build a solar array that is lower mass for the same power, plenty of commercial ComSat companies will pay extra for that.

The second is more difficult.  There are technologies that NASA would really like to have: more powerful electric propulsion, or an Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator, but there is no current commercial market for these. Aerocapture beyond Earth orbit would also be good to have. It would be very valuable to have a rotating orbital habitat to simulate the term long effect of Lunar and Mars gravity on living terrestrial organisms like us.

We should spend more on advancing the second kind of technology.

And Now, For Our Next Trick...

So, we landed on a comet. What do we do for an encore?

Well, eventually we land on another comet, and do it even better.  But it will take time to figure out why what went wrong went wrong, and design and fund another mission, and get there. This will take years, but comets will still be there when we are ready to launch. We can, and must, and will be patient. We will play the long game. When we do it again it will be easier to do better because we will have learned in the interim.

In the meantime, I will quote the admirable Emily Lakdawalla, who did good service covering the Philae landing on twitter.

Coming up soon: Japan launches Hayabusa 2, an asteroid sample return mission, on November 30. New Horizons wakes up to begin encounter science for its Pluto flyby on December 6 (the flyby itself is next July). Dawn will get its first images of Ceres in February, and they'll already be better than Hubble's. Curiosity is doing the kind of science it was intended to do for only the third time on its mission, at a spot called Pahrump Hills in Gale crater. Opportunity is very close to the peak of the mountainous crater rim it's been climbing for a couple of years. Cassini has been on a high-inclination orbit at Saturn for a long time, but will soon be switching into an equatorial orbit that means lots more views and close flybys of Saturn's mid-sized icy moons. There's a lot going on!! But some sad things are coming -- both MESSENGER at Mercury and Venus Express at Venus are expected to crash into their respective planets within the next few months, ending those long missions (they've both nearly run out of maneuvering fuel).

Less immediately, in 2016 Juno arrives at Jupiter. And OSIRIS-REx launches, also intended to visit an asteroid and bring back samples.

We launch, and launch again. It's a great life, if you don't weaken.

These are the days of miracle and wonder...

Comets Are Weird

So this week, humans landed a robot on a comet. And when I say landed, I mean we bounced it off the comet twice, until it came to rest.

Philae was one of two robot spacecraft launched over ten years ago. Rosetta was the larger of the two, and still orbits Comet 67P.

Philae bounced twice, and landed in a place that was mostly in shadow and so starved for solar  power  It continued to transmit data until only enough power was left from her batteries to put the craft in hibernation, and it uploaded quite a lot. Plucky robot.

It gave us images of the surface. The one above is the strangest landscape beyond Earth's surface I have seen to date.

But wait, there's more.

We have known for some time that the nucleus of the typical comet is mostly fluffy; typically about half the density of water. They have been described dirty snowballs or snowy dirt balls.

But wait! Some of the uploaded data already show a more complicated picture than we thought. One of Philae's experiments, MUPUS, was designed to hammer one of its sensors into the surface of the comet. The surface turned out to be much harder than expected, and apparently broke the probe.

Perhaps we should think of comets not simply as dirty snowballs, but dirty snowballs that a cosmic prankster dipped in water and then left at subzero temperature until the exterior was as hard as rock. Alternatively, this might be a condition peculiar to impact craters on comets, and Philae happened to fall into one. But Philae also bounced pretty hard at the first landing site.

Or one might think of the comet as a a deep space Mallomar, or in this case a chocolate dipped Peep: a hard crust around a fluffy interior. But the reality is probably still more complex than that, with all but the most recent crater floors dusted with ejecta from later impacts.

And  even the fluffy parts of the comet might include large chunks of less fluffy matter: dirt, rocks  or ice.

Update:  As of November 18, ESA scientists say the data received so far suggests 4-8 inches of dust over hard ice, and a fluffy porous interior below that.

Humans Continue to Play the Long Game in Space

Today, the European Space Agency successfully landed a robot spacecraft on a comet for the first time in human history. Well done! It was launched ten years ago.

It was intended to launch even longer ago, to a different comet in January of 2003. A 2002 launch failure of the intended launch vehicle required a change in plans.

This is how you do it: with patience!

Humans Prepare to Land a Robot on a Comet Shaped Like a Rubber Duck

Well, they are and it is. The pictures remind me of an Alp in space, because that's more or less what comets are. There's a lot of snow.

But, I read that the comet itself is quite dark, like a lump of coal.

These are the days of miracle and wonder.

Ansari and Orteig: The Hard Going to the Stars

On Friday, October 31, Spaceship Two, Virgin Galactic's suborbital manned rocket, broke up in flight, killing one pilot and seriously injuring the other, and providing another harsh reminder of the risks of space flight.  Following the loss of an Antares rocket on October 28, it was a bad week for the launch industry.

I'll repeat what several other people has have said this week: space is hard.  Getting to space requires harnessing enormous energies with very light hardware. The Space Shuttle high pressure fuel pumps
each produced about 71,000 hp, equal to 15 large diesel locomotives, yet they were not much bigger than an automobile engine. They had a power to weight ratio of over 100 hp/pound: .5 hp/pound is typical for an automobile engine.

Ed Kyle puts it well:

Modern rocketry is a frightening balancing act. To accelerate from a dead stop to more than seven times faster than a rifle bullet in a few minutes, an orbital launch vehicle must create, contain, and endure extreme pressures, temperatures, and forces. All it takes to trip up the process is one loose connection, one small piece of sand or rust, a bad bit of metal or insulation, a misplaced bit in a control program, or an unexpected vibration.

Suborbital is technically a lot easier. 2,500 mph is probably enough to reach space briefly on a suborbital flight, compared to about 18,000 for orbital. And six times the velocity requires 36 times the energy, and much better shielding on reentry.

SpaceShipOne had the enough volume and payload to carry three humans to at least 100 km in altitude.  SS1 was less than four metric tonnes, fully loaded. It was launched from the White Knight One carrier aircraft, probably similar in mass fueled but not including the SS1 payload.

The closest orbital comparison is the Soyuz launcher and manned spacecraft, over 300 metric tonnes fully fueled and capable of carrying three humans to orbit and back.  And that's for an expendable launcher, while SSI and WK1 were reusable except for the SS1 motor.

But. While suborbital space flight is technically a lot easier than orbital, its economics are far more challenging. Commercial satellites are so profitable that their owners are willing to pay tens of millions of dollars to get one launched. The most capable launchers can charge over $100 million for an orbital payload.

If Virgin Galactic fills six passenger seats on SS2 per flight at their announced price of $250,000, that's only $1.5 million. A brief suborbital flight measured in minutes is simply a lot less valuable than an orbital flight that can last as long as you have supplies for.

And building a reusable rocket plane capable of speeds in excess of Mach 2 is not a trivial task at all.

One that carries six passengers is even harder. SS1 had a theoretical capacity of only two passengers. The supersonic X-planes carried only a pilot.

Compare the Orteig prize to the Ansari X Prize.

The first offered a prize of $25,000 in 1919, worth about $340,000 in 2014, for "the first aviator of any Allied Country" to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, or vice versa. To win required an aircraft that could fly the required distance at about 100 mph. Lindbergh won, but there were several other entrants that could have won if history had been somewhat different. They included a Wright-Bellanca WB-2 and a Fokker C-2 Trimotor, both of which became successful commercial aircraft, although operating in an environment of subsidized mail transport.

Linbergh's plane was a unique variant designed for the stole purpose of winning the Orteig Prize, but still part of a successful family of Ryan monoplanes.

In contrast, when SpaceShipOne attempted the Ansari X Prize in 2004, there were no rivals remotely ready to fly,  Building a rocket-powered airframe that can fly to the edge of space at over twice the speed of sound and return safely is much, much harder than flying nonstop from New York to Paris.

When only one company has shown that they can fly a reusable rocket capable of carrying passengers into space, if that company blunders in building their operational vehicle, there's no one to provide an alternative.

Yes, there's XCOR and their Lynx spaceplane. I wish them well, but they haven't flown it yet.

I believe the people responsible for SpaceShip Two have made at least major mistakes. The first was in making a jump to a spaceplane twice the size of the one that one went to the Smithsonian, instead of following it with a SpaceShip 1.1 for further flight tests followed by operational flights.  The second is choosing and sticking to the immature technology of hybrid rocket motors.

I think it's fair to say that entrepreneurs like Branson are rather more prone to hubris than the  average mortal. But it's a mistake to think that NASA administrators are quite free of hubris: pre-Challenger estimates of Space Shuttle reliability and the decision to launch Challenger in 1986 would both seem to qualify.

And government space agencies have their own unique failure modes: particularly, making important technical decisions influenced by jobs at stake in key Congressional districts, or the non-US equivalent.

I believe that some version of SpaceShip Two can be made operational, perhaps with significant modifications, and be relatively safe by the standards of dangerous pursuits like climbing Everest. Unless the investors lose faith in the project.

But remember: space is hard.

We Lost a Rocket Last Night

We lost an Antares rocket and a Cygnus spacecraft, bound for ISS, last night. About twelve seconds off the pad something went wrong. There seems to have been rapid unscheduled disassembly at the aft end of the launcher, and then the rocket fell back to the ground and exploded.

Throwing hardware out of our gravity well is really, really hard, and this is a reminder. The energies required are immense, yet the builder is required to make the rocket as light as possible

But, we know this is hard. So the United States can also reach ISS with completely different hardware: SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft and Falcon launcher. Russia, the European Union and Japan all have their own spacecraft and launchers as well. Our bench strength is deep.

To watch the launch I stepped out on the patio with my phone to point the way to due south and my laptop to watch the launch until it climbed above the horizon. Space travel is still hard, but we do live in an age of marvels.

Bruges Back in Transportation News after 500 Years

Bruges was an important port in the 14th and 15th century. The wealth that trade bought allowed the city to afford some lovely art and architecture. Then the channel silted up, and the city couldn't afford to replace those old buildings with something newer. If you have the opportunity it's well worth a visit.

Bruges is back in transportation news with a planned underground beer pipeline.

"We Need To Get More Comfortable With People Dying In Space"

So some say.

I think not.

When we operated the Space Shuttle, we killed two crews in 135 launches, a fatality rate like a bad year on Mount Everest. Nonetheless, Congress and NASA tolerated this every year for thirty years, even though we had, like the Soviet Union and later Russia, known how to do much better for decades.

We now plan to make the first manned flight of the Orion spacecraft on the second flight of the as yet unflown Space Launch System. This is not risk averse.

I don't think we as a nation are generally unreasonably risk averse about space. Our manned space program is currently heavily dependent on pride and prestige as a motivation, because our manned program hasn't figured out how to do anything particularly compelling in low earth orbit, and going further is extraordinarily expensive and without immediate economic return. That's OK. I'm proud of our share of ISS, just as I'm proud of the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty, and I'm willing to to pay for that pride.

The flip side of this is that killing our astronauts is unusually costly to our pride and prestige, because they die when everyone is watching, or when their deaths are replayed again and again. We hate it when that happens. It makes us sad. Since we're paying for the program, it makes sense  to do it as rarely as reasonably possible.

I think that excessive fear of people dying in space is most often deployed when NASA and members of Congress with NASA centers in their districts want a superficially plausible reason why NASA needs to continue to own and operate its own space launch system. Of course, they would want that, for institutional and political reasons, but the argument doesn't bear close examination.

Arguments that the NASA launcher will be significantly safer have been based on NASA's own reliability estimates, which have consistently been biased in favor of NASA launchers and against non-NASA launchers, and have been shown to be so when tested by experience.

The Misunderstood Jade Rabbit Farewell

"Before departure, I studied the history of mankind's lunar probes. About half of the past 130 explorations ended in success; the rest ended in failure. This is space exploration; the danger comes with its beauty. I am but a tiny dot in the vast picture of mankind's adventure in space."

"The sun has fallen, and the temperature is dropping so quickly... to tell you all a secret, I don't feel that sad. I was just in my own adventure story - and like every hero, I encountered a small problem."

"Goodnight, Earth. Goodnight, humanity."

The brave message, written as though from the stoic, malfunctioning rover, has been widely reported as coming from China's official news agency. In fact it seems to be from the unofficial twitter equivalent and blog of a Chinese space enthusiast, which says something about how China is changing.

They are heading in the right direction, but we are still far ahead. We've had official twitter feeds cheating on Turing Tests since 2008

Jade Rabbit in Trouble

China's Yutu rover has malfunctioned as the long Lunar night begins, a reminder that most of the real estate in the Solar System is cruelly difficult and harshly unforgiving by human standards. I hope they can fix the rover in time, but it will be difficult at that distance: the Moon is a harsh mistress.

The universe is coldly indifferent to your survival, and it isn't going to cooperate in your robot's survival either.

If, as seems likely, Yutu doesn't last the night, I expect the Chinese to react like most humans: "Kill our beloved robot rabbit? Very well. Be that way. We see how it is. We'll be back, with a BETTER RABBIT!"

The universe will remain unimpressed but we will feel better.  And we will be back, with a better rabbit.

Relief Mission

The rover Breathing Is Overrated rolled slowly downhill.  BIO's left center wheel was turning, but without power. The right rear wheel was not turning at all, and dragged a noticeably deeper trail through the red Martian dust.

BIO rolled to a halt beside the little logistics lander. As though on cue, the spring loaded cover of its cargo bay popped open, revealing components neatly packed in foam, looking as pristine as the day they left the builder. The rover, in contrast, looked on close inspection like a dusty and dented machine that had been driving over an unforgiving landscape for six years. Which it had.

The cargo: six new wheel units with their integral motors. Replacements for the primary and secondary arms, with upgraded sensors. A new sensor package for the masthead. And, of course, the usual plug-in memory upgrade.

The relief mission had arrived. In time, if barely so. Arrival was nicely calculated: the mission was funded years before it was needed: anything later would be too late. The planners had estimated when the rover was likely to need resupply, subtracted travel time dictated by the cold equations of planetary mechanics, subtracted the time needed to build spacecraft and launcher, and added a year for cushion. It was barely enough.

With exquisite care the rover deployed an Allen Wrench from the end of its primary arm and began to replace the right rear wheel unit.

It is a good thing to do good work, work of value, work that is valued. The relief mission was a fraction of the cost of sending a new rover. It's a good life, if you don't weaken.

Good News from Space

Opportunity has been operating on the Martian surface for 10 years, and is still going.

The Chinese have released a high resolution full color panorama taken from their  Chang'e lander on the moon.

Atlas V has now completed 42 successful launches. This makes it the most reliable large launcher in service. Delta II and two Soyuz variants are statistically somewhat more reliable but less capable. Soyuz can haul a bit over 8 tones to LEO, Atlas V over 17. Ariane V is slightly less reliable  but perhaps not significantly so, and the picture will change with each new launch.

This is how we move forward. Every successful launch demonstrates our improved skill. Every failure is an opportunity to find what we are doing wrong.

Ten Years on Mars

Opportunity has spent ten years on the red planet, and is still pressing on. Ten years! The team that built our patient unbreathing harbinger built well.

Ten years. Savor that. Of course, it's a good thing we sent two. Spirit was declared beyond recovery in 2010, which is still not too shabby. Six years working on Mars is a pretty good epitaph. But ten is better.

And still Opportunity rolls onward.

What is beyond the next Martian hill? We will see.

Why We Pay for Space Exploration

I think there’s actually a fairly broad consensus that we’re currently doing space exploration for science, pride, prestige and to support our domestic space industry, not necessarily in that order. Also because it delights some of us to see other worlds, and our own, and that gives us joy. And that in the United States we don’t want to spend much more annually than the post-Apollo norm.

The conflict comes from districts with existing NASA centers passionately wanting to preserve jobs at those centers, and everyone else, not so much.

Asimov Mostly Wrong in 1964

The Huffington Post has declared Isaac Asimov's 1964 predictions "Eerily Accurate". Which, I suppose, will generate more page views than "Mostly Wrong."

Suburban underground houses "fairly common"? No.

Preprogrammed toasters and bacon grills? No. Because if you're grilling a product composed mostly of  delicious but flammable grease in the night when the hu-mans are asleep, what could possibly go wrong? A lot, Mr. Asimov.

Common use of ground transport riding on compressed air? No.

Moving sidewalks downtown? No.

Lunar colonies? No.

Algae based "mock turkey" and" pseudo-steak" ? No.

Colonization of the continental shelves? No.

"The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction." No, a thousand times no.  Robobarbers are beyond the reach of current technology. Roombas can vacuum, but nothing more. LOLcats are as yet unmastered by AI. But then, how much of what humans do is actually routine?

Prediction is hard, especially about the future.