Von Braun's Lost Ideas

At this time of a renewed Space Race with China, to get to the Moon's South Pole, we might want to look backward a bit. In the late 50s and early 60s, NASA's Wernher von Braun presented several ideas for long-term visits to the Moon. There's a good article that outlines the concepts from the US and USSR here. 

The German engineer's enormous lunar landers look dated, but far more stable and feasible than SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System. There were also plans for Project Horizon, with habitats buried under the lunar regolith. NASA moved away from these plans given the then-enormous expenses that lifting so much weight from Earth to orbit and beyond would incur.

Now launch costs are lower and we have several ideas for constructing building materials out of what we find on the Moon. I should be optimistic, Child of Apollo that I am. Yet I fear we are heading for disaster.

What von Braun proposed, but that got dropped then in order to beat the Russians and is not on the table now: build a reusable Moon or Mars exploration ship in orbit. The Russian space agency had such a plan, once, when their government was on friendly terms with the US. You can read about the Marsport plan here at Wikipedia. I've critiqued the idea of Starship and giantism before, but building a big ship that would go back and forth from Earth to the Moon or Mars makes great sense. The trick? Use small reusable rockets to build it from components in orbit, as we did with the ISS.

NASA currently plans a risky landing near the lunar South Pole, something Astronaut Victor Glover has critiqued, when he called instead for an equatorial landing where spots are safer and a quick return to Earth, in case of a medical emergency, more certain. The hastiness of the US/China race, as well as the political imperative to get American bootprints on the lunar before our current President leaves office, seems to be pushing the agenda. I'd have preferred an international mission led by the big space powers and a United Nations flag on the Moon this time.

Dr. von Braun's 1952 lander concept, and the real ones that followed two decades later, had broad legs for uncertain terrain. Allen B. Ury built a fabulous model of the idea.

I fear that the SpaceX's tall, narrow lander will simply topple over and kill its crew, ending the Artemis program and ceding space leadership to Beijing.

Images: Fantastic Plastic Models. They should build the real thing! 

 

Images 

A Good Counterpoint for Orbital Data Centers

I got an F in Thermodynamics, shortly before I flunked out of UVA's Aerospace Engineering program.

So I leave matters such as cooling satellites to experts, and recently I came across a concern about data centers in space: can they scale to the size we need for AI? Forget issues of space debris and power. The Reverse Salient, in Hughes terms, appears to be cooling.  

The article here discusses, in somewhat technical terms that should still be understood by the non-engineer, the reasons that what engineers call "radiational cooling" in space may not work for the amount of heat generated by orbital data centers. Perverse thought, no? Space is either hideously hot in the sun or deadly cold in the shade. But the problem involves moving heat away from the object in question. There's no breeze in vacuum; any water would boil off or freeze solid. Read the article for more technical details.

This year we will find out if orbital data centers can scale. I hope so. We simply do not have the energy resources or land for the types of AI economy the billionaires envision. The Carbon pollution alone might seal our fate.

NVIDIA, many other US firms, and the Chinese space program, are testing the concept now or will be this year. I wish them luck. We need to get this right.

I'm increasingly of the belief that we'd be better off had AI not been invented, a thought I also have about smart phones and social media, but like those technologies AI is not going to be wished away. 

Image source: Daily Galaxy, Creative Commons image 

Giantism and The Moon Race

The race is on, with the Artemis 2 mission coming as soon at early next month. I'm hoping to see it and future endeavors work well, so humanity begins a long voyage to the stars as a multi-planet species. I know that sounds odd in a blog about minimalist living and self-reliance for rural life, but to me the space program has always been about learning new techniques for doing things here on Earth, about new materials, for instance, that went into cordless tools I use as a DIYer or insulation I use to cut our energy costs. Splitting-maul and Moon rocket? Why not?

I've spoken at length about this with futurist Bryan Alexander, who shares my love for space travel. We are both puzzled by a rejection of human exploration by many on the Left and from the environmental movement. It amounts to a form of neo-Luddism at a time when many nations and companies are pursuing reusable launch vehicles. NASA's big SLS Moon rocket is not, save for the Orion capsule.

What critics ignore is how money is already being made in the heavens and how seemingly silly tourist flights resemble early aviation's first paying passengers. I don't think there's any way to stop this next Space Age, save for a Kessler Event (the film Gravity depicts that) making launches untenable and sends telecom back to the 1960s. 

I'd claim that moving human energy and heavy industry into space would be a godsend for our home planet's ecosystem, especially when cleaner rocket fuels come into play. You'll find a few ideas about that here. As much as I dislike the billionaire associated with SpaceX, he has one thing right: we need to begin moving some of our people and energy off-planet. That does not mean abandoning our world to the slow ecocide currently under way.

At the same time, I've written of his megalomaniacal plans for Starship at my other blog; I suspect the derivative called the Human Landing System (HLS) will prove a disaster the first time it tries to land on an unprepared lunar surface. To me it's as bad an idea as von Braun's Nova rocket of the late 1950s, also marketed to NASA as a Moon rocket when its maker was really trying to build a Mars rocket in disguise and with public monies. Both Nova and HLS would try to land a skyscraper-sized rocket on the Moon.

The current US President, who pays no attention to details save those concerning his enormous ego, is pushing us to land by 2028, the final year (I hope) of his Administration. Doing that would beat China's measured program, which plans to land astronauts by 2030. I suspect the Chinese will make that deadline, and we'll lose an HLS lander or, worse, lives trying to beat that arbitrary date. 

Perhaps Jeff Bezos' Blue Moon, an alternative lander from Blue Origin of less monstrous proportions, can get American (and I hope international partners') boots on the Moon safely and even begin the work of building a permanent settlement there. If we think small about getting there (to stay this time) we might do better than SpaceX's giantism.

By the time we make that next giant leap, we may also have national leadership that is not anti-environmental yet still pro-Space. We may then have both well-funded science and human exploration / settlement happening beyond orbit.

It's one of the things that still gives me hope in a difficult time. 

Reason 11 For Not Building Data Centers Now

A few stories recently caught my eye about moving data centers away from where we live, far away, in fact.

 China's government plans to test space-based data centers starting in 2026, with a rollout of ones with costs as low or lower than earth-based centers slated for the 2030s. Meanwhile in the States, Amazon's Jeff Bezo has hatched similar plans. Not to be left behind by his billionaire rival, Elon Musk wants to use his Starship mega-rockets to orbit data centers. Then there's Google Starcloud, with a test planned for 2027. That system would also depend upon something like Starship to make the venture cheap enough to construct.

At first blush, it seems like a crazy idea, but as I considered the benefits versus costs, it makes sense to move this industry skyward:

• With reusable rocket boosters, costs to orbit per kilogram have dropped radically in recent years. If Starship prospers and others copy its model, we'll see the door opened for very cheap rocket launches.
• We have abundant solar energy in orbit. There's no need for generators, nuclear reactors, or natural gas.
• We also have easy cooling, without using water. Rotate a satellite and you have a solar heating on one side, the utter cold of space on the other.
•  Space-based data centers need not be huge to do their job. They could be a constellation of large satellites that talk to each other, as Starlink does already. Right now, however, big centers seem to be the model for space-based construction.
• If we do go big, we know how to do this already thanks to the International Space Station. 
• Parts of orbital centers can be replaced with one launch, and the old centers can be upgraded by robots or small enough to burn up on a deorbit. 
• Beaming data to ground stations 200 miles away on Earth is not a problem. We already do this.

My hope is that this technology will mature fast, to avoid more environmental and social disruption on Earth. And closest to home, I hope my County's Board of Supervisors pays attention, before we end up with a huge and obsolete building placed on agricultural land next to residences.

One issue that does bother me, beyond the possible climate-change effects of launching so many rockets?

It's called The Kessler Effect (or Syndrome). Readers may have seen the film Gravity, which one explosion in space results in a cascading set of collisions and, consequently, a massive cloud of space debris hurtling around 10 miles per second, chasing an underwear-clad Sandra Bullock.  

How serious is a collision in space? I once saw a piece of Space Shuttle Challenger's front windows, removed from a mission before the craft's 1986 catastrophe. The section of thick glass was damaged badly by hitting a tiny fleck of paint tossed off some forgotten rocket-booster, perhaps decades earlier. Now imagine millions of these objects, large and small, forming a cloud around the Earth, making any rocket launches an exercise in futility, destroying telecom networks, and grounding human space travel for many decades. Or centuries.

A center as large as Starcloud makes for a huge target, were the Kessler Effect to begin. 

Belatedly, firms and governments are considering ways to mitigate space debris and harden orbital infrastructure. Let's hope they get is right, as they'll only have one opportunity. I'd like to get my data from the heavens, not from Earth with more carbon pollution and wasted groundwater.

image: Starcloud center from Google video 

Abandoned Tech: The Saturn Rockets

Location: Day-Dreaming about a 1985 Mars base

image source: Encyclopedia Astronautica's entry about the Saturn V rocket

What might have been, had Richard Nixon been a different man, possessing an optimistic vision that matched his calculated-but-brilliant realpolitik demonstrated by the opening to China and the bombing of Hanoi's government to the negotiating table.

I've been thinking of this occasional series since I began shaving with my grandfather's safety razor. It still works great and costs me very little, months into my experiment. Now I own two of these antique Gems (the trade name that fits well). They demonstrate that corporations seeking new markets often over-engineer products and make dubious claims about their improvement. I wish government could do better, but history shows otherwise when it comes to manned space travel.  Odd for me to propose such flights of fancy. I call myself a Neo-Luddite, though as one friend pointed out, I'm better described as a "Reform Luddite" more interested in appropriate technology than in getting rid of technology or curbing its use drastically.

I hope to explain why this Neo-Luddite thinks the US needs its manned program badly, and why it needs NASA for the sort of deep-space ventures that both Presidents Bush and Obama championed.  Both Presidents had NASA contractors scramble to re-invent something we gave up nearly 40 years ago: a heavy-lift rocket suitable for deep-space exploration.

When Nixon canceled the last three missions of the Apollo program, it put the world's most effective--then or now--space transportation system on its way to the scrap heap.  It's a myth that the Saturn V rocket's plans were scavenged from NASA dumpsters, though as Dwayne A. Day noted, records were lost or destroyed along the way. In any case, once the assembly lines for the Saturn IB and V shut, engineers moved on, and the tooling got dispersed or scrapped, there was no practical way to rebuild the mighty F-1 engine or other components without reverse-engineering from a museum piece at huge cost.  Rocketdyne did, as Day notes, save their records and record information from Engineers involved in the F-1 program. Much of the rest of the Saturn, however, would not meet modern standards for alloys and other technologies. A similar rocket today would weigh less and have the benefits of computer-assisted design. That's my hope for Dragon's proposed heavy-lift rocket.

But what if Saturn and its mighty engines had stayed in production, to be incrementally improved or parted out to new NASA and private vehicles?  Most of the pieces for a Mars mission were in place by 1970.

Boeing, in 1968, studied the technology needed to go to Mars by the mid-80s: a Nerva nuclear third stage lofted into orbit by a Saturn V, followed by assembling a Mars spacecraft there. Instead, we got Skylab, then an expensive and tragically flawed pickup truck to low orbit called the Space Shuttle.

Our nation badly needs unity now, and my optimistic side favors a multi-year mission scientific mission to Mars, using the International Space Station if possible to assemble our Mars ship, all this with the aim of resolving the questions about past or present life on the Red Planet. Such a program, paid for by deep cuts in defense spending and, yes, more debt, would have pay-offs in the hiring of technicians and engineers whose work would develop the sorts of spin-off technologies that came from Apollo, including the small computer on which I am writing this post.

We need deep space missions, not merely planting the flag but searching thoroughly and with tools greater than those carried by the Martian rovers. Finding out if we are alone or not in our solar system would, I'd hope, make the texting masses look above the horizon again. NASA's lead can help private industry follow, not to do science but to pioneer, as the pioneers came in the wake of Jefferson's expedition to the Pacific.

And if profit is to be had in space, profit that requires humans to live there, the masses will do more than look up.

They'll go there and we'll become an interplanetary species.

Dream On: Space Travel Musings, 2012

Location: Chair-bound, looking up

There was a time when pundits predicted hundreds of thousands would live in Earth orbit or further up the gravity well by the year 2000. The Dream did not last much beyond Richard Nixon's cancellation of the last three Apollo missions, but from time to time it crops up again.

The latest incarnation comes from the Space Island Group's vision for their company. To quote:

By 2020 more than 20,000 men and women will be working aboard these orbiting Islands, and 10 million more high-paid specialists will be supporting them on Earth. That 20,000 number will double each following decade. . . .SIG's larger stations will grow their own food, recycle their air and water, and have their own onboard engines and guidance systems. Water mined from asteroids by "Space Island" will be converted into hydrogen and oxygen rocket fuel by sun-powered converters, letting these Islands travel throughout the inner solar system. Metals mined from asteroids will let the stations grow without bringing materials up from Earth.

What will Space Islanders find on these asteroids and on the planets they visit? Will they find life where its now least expected? Will they find remnants of past visitors? What incredible structures will they build in space, freed from the gravity chains of Earth? 

 I want so hard to believe this possible, as I did in the 70s when I read Gerard K. O'Neill's book The High Frontier.

Why do I feel gun shy? It could be that the last time a visionary group promised me world-changing wonders, it was Linden Lab and the potential of Second Life. Like Spooky Mulder in the X-Files, perhaps I do want to believe. But as with the childish hopes for Apollo's legacy and adult ones for virtual worlds, I do feel the pull of SIG's promise.

And, frankly, reject it. These sorts of wild projections only lead to a new generation of disappointed teenaged geeks. At the same time, one can be a bit more optimistic about goings-on for the High Frontier:

• Space X's plan to launch their Dragon Spacecraft to the International Space Station
• China's upcoming Shenzhou 9 mission
• Sir Richard Branson's plans for the maiden voyage to suborbit for Spaceship Two
• Planetary Resources' deep-pocketed plan to mine an asteroid.

As I watched live at NASA, however, the Space X launch was aborted, just as the ignition sequence began. We will have many such disappointments, and worse, on our way to what NASA liked to call "our destiny in space."

At least the spacecraft did not blow up, and Space X's team worked quickly and professionally. Today, they got the rocket into orbit and I wish them stunning success in reaching the ISS. As a firm that operates more like a Silicon Valley start-up and less like a huge government agency, Space X gives me some guarded hope that they will, with marginal improvements, get their next launch right.

That such events are happening in the midst of a global economic downtown actually gives me a bit of hope that, if matters improve, we may see the first glimmers of a new technological revolution. Because as cool as the Internet is, we remain chair-bound or fixated on our palms.

Neither are the places for heroes, explorers, and world-builders. I'd prefer to dream on.

image credit: Wikipedia's entry on the L5 Society

Technologies Overengineered, Ruined, or Abandoned: An Occasional Series

Location: Staring at the Shaving Mug

I'm getting ready to shave again. Some time ago, I switched from an expensive and over-engineered Sensor razor to my grandfather's 1920s Gem Micromatic razor.  I wrote about my reasons here and I still love it. With only one small nick in two months of fun, shaving has again become a manly and pleasant ritual, not a forgotten act as I prepare to do other things or--shudder--try the rapid task-shifting that some mislabel "multitasking."

Given the lack of news about virtual worlds, other than that reported well by other bloggers, and my lack of teaching there, I'm going to diversify the blog again.

I'm looking at an idea that James Howard Kunstler has popularized for a while, one that preceded my meeting Jim and getting caught up in his ideas. Jim is about to publish a new nonfiction book about the diminishing returns of technology. The idea of technologies done well and then forgotten has long captivated me, though I suspect that my Neo-Luddism has taken a different and more tech-friendly turn than Jim would make.  Both of us agree that "new" does not always mean "improved."

I plan to cover, in the next few weeks, several technologies that have been, in my opinion, perfected but then "improved" further or worse still, abandoned.  Here are some candidates:

• Apple's iMovie software
• The Saturn I and V rockets (you know I can't resist space stuff)
• Light local rail networks of the 20s-60s
• The fast-food restaurants of the 1950s and 60s
• The Leatherman^tm Pocket Tool
• The returnable-bottle soft drink
• DeWalt and Porter Cable power tools, after Black & Decker acquired them
• The Volkswagen Jetta TDI, Honda Civic, and Mazda 3 series.

I have personal experience with all but the Saturn rockets (pity!), Honda, and Mazda (near pity!).

My series will be opinionated (go figure) and open to critique and amendments. 

Got some other candidates for tech done well, then messed up or left to rust?

Get Your Wallet Out, Mr. Steely-Eyed Missile Man

Location: PayPal

Even if the International Spaceflight Museum leaves Second Life for more edu-friendly spaces in OpenSim, they need assistance in the interim.

If you are waiting to see what sort of crowdfunding options emerge, don't. Go to their donate page and help out. I used PayPal for a donation and it went through smoothly.

If you have political objections to PayPal (/me cues Miso and my other OWS pals) contact Kat Lemieux in SL for assistance in how to help the ISM pay Daddy Lindenbux his back tier and reopen the museum.

Then the real fun work begins, I hope: getting whatever content that can be exported, exported. Then off to the real frontier in virtual worlds and away from the closed playpen for breedable Gorean vampire-bunnies that is today's Second Life.

I was unable, through childish wishes, to save the real-life Apollo Program. But we SLers can at least save the dreams of a better, vanished era when humanity still had the will to climb the ladder to the heavens.

Ballardian Fate for Virtual Spaceport?

 
Location: Spaceport Alpha

I'm a space-program junkie...I wanted to see a Kubrick-style future like that of 2001 so badly that it afflicted my childhood.  Those who are not what Eric Strobel calls "Children of Apollo" and remember our young American gods in space suits cannot imagine the sadness of seeing humanity withdraw into the inner spaces of our networks and, yes, "places" like Second Life.

Update for 2/16/12: I located Strobel's article from SpaceDaily about those whose early impressions were profoundly shaped by the Space-Race years. Today we Children of Apollo "are uneasy; feeling vaguely cheated that the nation that went from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base in a single lifetime seems likely to go no further in their lifetimes. This sense of uneasiness is aggravated by the distinct potential of a less-than-mediocre future."

Now a virtual tour of that elusive future, SL's Spaceport Alpha, is threatened with closure. I loved sending students there, but part of me knew that these were not the technological dreams of their generation. Kudos to Hamlet Au for running this story, but he's a techno-optimist. I'll pour some Neo-Luddite tea for readers about this.

The potential closure moves me in some profound ways because it rubs an old wound. Since 1969, being a space-junkie has been a lonely addiction. I do not believe that government programs will give us that long-heralded "Third Industrial Revolution" and the Space Age is, in fact, in its final act. As a Peak Oiler, I fear that we won't be able to travel 100 miles easily on earth in 100  years, so going even 100 miles up will become a whispered legend.  The International Space Station will deorbit, the Russian and Chinese programs wither as energy crises consume all our ingenuity. Meanwhile,  climate change will bankrupt us even as it wrecks our coasts.  I don't think the US will ever, in my lifetime, build a new launch system beyond, perhaps, a few initial missions. Congress, public apathy, and national bankruptcy will see to that.

It might have been different, with solar-power sats and asteroid mining in the 1980s, had Americans not lost their reach. But we did. We might have made money up there and opened that final frontier. We are left with comsats and sub-orbital space tourism, plus a space station that is little more than a floating janitor's closet for the folks who service it while doing little useful science and no exploration at all. The wonderful unmanned missions carry the torch of exploration, but they do little to make us a spacefaring race living on many planets. This is the goal all Children of Apollo share.

And even Space tourism? So far it is a stunt for the wealthy....despite Richard Branson's good intentions, it remains bungee-jumping in a private rocketship. One lost rocket and it will end, too.

I hope that the fate of US space artifacts--physical proof that we are pygmies after an age of giants--is not as squalid as that of our old Russian enemies. Their space shuttle complex, storing the Buran orbiter, collapsed in 2002 after budgets for maintaining the building vanished. Under snow load the huge building came down and obliterated the relics of that project. What remains of the complex for building space shuttles now? "The former orbiter manufacturing plant was reportedly converted to produce buses, syringes, and diapers." (from an Aerospaceweb article).

Syringes and diapers.

Unless we get that long-awaited signal from space that shows us that we are not alone in an indifferent universe, I recommend a new monument in Second Life.

We need a J.G. Ballard "Memories of the Space Age" Museum, with decaying shuttles lashed to rusty gantries that sprout Spanish Moss.

Until I see humans climb to the heavens in any number, I fear that our space fever-dreams will prove as ephemeral as those of Spaceport Alpha. Our current techno-fetishism of thumbing our little phones is, compared to the Big Science of the 60s, pitiable.

It involves a downward glance, not the horizon-defying gaze of the rocket men.

To quote a Gordon Lightfoot lyric, "the Space Shuttle ends where the subway begins. There's a tear on the face of the moon."

I heard that in the 70s, reading it as a lament for the end of Apollo. And now we may lose the first virtual monument to that Golden Age of space travel. So, ISM, as the book jacket for the Arkham House edition of Ballard's Cape Canaveral stories proclaims, "Hail and Farewell!"

A Future That Almost Happened: A Review

Location: Looking Skyward

I've really been enjoying Megan Prelinger's book Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957 - 1962. I've lamented the end of America's "reach" in space before in this blog, but Prelinger's book is more than a eulogy for a dead set of dreams. She shows us clearly how the aerospace companies of the Space-Race era recruited employees, wooed politicians, and projected a can-do spirit for technologies that seem alien and exotic to us, like the Nerva Nuclear Rocket. Even companies making ball bearings sexed up their ads with moon bases.

It's all a hazy memory from childhood for me, and those are the sorts that so often retain their power best. Madison Avenue was not interested in prediction, in the ads that Prelinger presents. The clients for the era's "Mad Men" wanted to hire the best engineering talent and beat any competitors in getting the next DoD or NASA contract. Showing what might happen in ten or twenty years was a great way to tap the talents coming suddenly out of engineering schools post-Sputnik.

I'm certain that Republic Aviation or Sperry did not care, or even conceive it possible, that they were going to break the hearts of hundreds of thousands of geeky kids who saw their ads in the public library, skipping copies of Hot Rod and Sports Illustrated to hunt down ragged back-issues of Aviation Week. There was money to be made in beating the Reds to the moon and even in preparing for what would have been humanity's final technological war. Along the way, we got some amazing space art, some of it heavily inspired by the covers of Astounding, others seeming sprung from the walls of exhibitions by Abstract Expressionist painters.

The images in the text, and Prelinger's analysis, reveal a sense of inevitability that the industry sought (and needed) to project, as well as insider information from the post-Apollo days, such as this pronouncement at engineers of NASA's Project Rover with its NERVA engine:

"Long-range research and development work that cannot be expect to have a real need or application until the 1980s must be terminated at this time."

To think that, for a shimmering moment in the last years of the 1960s, alongside the wishes for a Woodstock Nation (who became the ever-more-conservative Boomers of the 80s and went for Reagan) we had promises of a lunar base and Mars landing by 1985. I'll never forget the lonely and dog-eared copy of a NASA book on human-crewed Mars exploration that somehow made it onto a table with Apollo documentation in 1973, when I met the Apollo 17 crew in Richmond. It was an artifact for a future that almost happened.

At this distance this "other science fiction" of the years before Watergate all seems improbable. Yet had public interest and America's economy not waned in the 70s, a great number of these visions would have come to pass. Others, like nuclear-powered projects that exploded a series of small bombs in earth's atmosphere to reach escape velocity, would have run up against the potent dangers they posed to the earth's biosphere. If anything, such schemes prove that the engineering minds employed by the aerospace titans back then were not holistic thinkers and did not reckon with long-term costs.

In 2010 "routine" space travel seems unlikely, America has no concrete plans after the last shuttle retires, China manages a 1960s-style orbital mission every few years, Europe needs to bail out economies and not dream of space. Of course, millionaires can pony up a stack of cash for suborbital joy rides with Richard Branson, touching the Void for a few very expensive moments.

Perhaps I'll always be too much a creature of the 20th Century to find solace in other technological developments and too much a Peak Oiler to believe that our species will reach so far again with anything aside from robotic explorers. Experiences in virtual worlds can be immersive, but I'm still chair-bound as I manipulate pixels, not headed out with the first group of colonists to establish the Lunar International University's first campus.

The type of future on Prelinger's advertisements provided a dream of a transhumanism unlike that of today's merge-with-the-computer futurists. As a spacefaring race, humanity would be one with its spacecraft and colonies. We'd have left the cradle and have transcended our biological origins with hardware. Perhaps today's Transhumanists can upload their intelligences into robotic probes and reach for the stars.

Forty Years on, that possibility repels me, so I'm still waiting for my "ride" to the final frontier. In another forty, I'll get it, but it won't be in a spacecraft and I won't be able to blog about it.