The New (Improved?) NASA

NOTE: Cross-posted to Getting There From Here.

If you follow space-related news, then by now you are surely aware that the White House released President Obama's budget plan for 2011-2015 today, and there is no funding for the Constellation Program (the Vision for Space Exploration created under Bush in 2003). So what does that mean? Everybody has their own opinion, but here's mine:

First, it means that the more than $8 billion spent over the past 5-6 years is basically wasted money (along with an additional $2.5 billion that will be spent to close down the program). A lot of people thought that Constellation was a flawed program—including me—but that's a lot of money to flush down the toilet. Sure, not all of it was wasted money. For example, we produced a few new scientific and technical innovations out of that money, but spending $8-9 billion to get what little we got (a single demo flight with non-representational hardware) was a bit crazy. And if Constellation had continued the way it was going, it would have been massively over-budget and late on delivering on its goals. Still, that means that the government will have spent more than $3,500 for each man, woman, and child in this country on a program that effectively accomplished very little.

At the same time, a new generation of rocket scientists got some first-hand experience at designing and building new (or at least updated versions of old) rocketry systems. Again, a pretty expensive price to pay to get some people some good experience, but given that the average age of our rocket scientists has been climbing since the 1960s, that's not really a bad thing.

But that's what it means for the past. What does it mean for the future? Well, that's pretty tough to say, since predicting the future is always a challenge. But here is what is being proposed: NASA will abandon low-earth orbit (LEO) to companies like SpaceX, encouraging and financially supporting a commercial space industry. Instead, NASA will focus on the heavy lift programs necessary to get us to the Moon, Mars, and asteroids.

NASA will spend $7.8 billion between 2011 and 2015 on advanced technology demonstration programs to explore more advanced exploration options. This includes in-orbit propellant transfer, closed-loop life support, automated maneuvering and docking systems, and inflatable space modules (similar to the ones that Bigelow Aerospace is experimenting with... perhaps the new focus on partnerships will allow NASA and Bigelow to work together on these). All of these technologies will be essential to exploring our solar system and beyond.

In addition, NASA will spend $3.1 billion on research into new propulsion systems (hopefully solar sails and VASIMR will be included in this spending) and another $3 billion on robotic missions to pave the way for human exploration.

All of this means that—with the Space Shuttle fleet retiring later this year—NASA does not have any way to get crew into orbit other than to pay $51 million per flight to the Russian Space Agency for launches aboard Soyuz capsules. To alleviate this, NASA is encouraging commercial spaceflight companies to pick up the slack by allocating $5.8 billion for crew launches provided by commercial operators. With the money already allocated to SpaceX and Orbital as part of the COTS program, they have an advantage over other small operators. But with that much money on the line, you can bet that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and others (including, perhaps, the joint venture United Space Alliance, which operates the Space Shuttle program) will jump into the fray with commercial offerings.

And with the cancellation of Constellation and the end of the massively-expensive Space Shuttle program, more money will be available for basic scientific reasearch in the areas of Earth Observation and Astrophysics. Most interesting to me are added funding to get Mars Science Laboratory launched in 2011 and a probably 2014 launch for the James Webb Space Telescope.

I personally like NASA's renewed focus on research and development, while letting business enterprises commercialize the results on behalf of the government. Too much of NASA's budget over the past two decades has been spent on the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs. While those programs have provided benefits (notably in the areas of living and working in orbit, including orbital construction methods), the costs once again far outweighed the benefits. The new plan will hopefully shake a lot of complacency out of the system and encourage creative thinking and innovation, while also spurring commercial development of space travel and exploration.

Moon Landing Anniversary

Forty years ago today, three American men—Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, and Michael Collins—were floating in a tiny spacecraft above the surface of the Moon getting ready for two of them to make history: tomorrow will be the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

If Neil, Buzz, and Mike could have looked ahead 40 years from that point, where would they have thought we'd be right now? The reality is that we haven't been back to the moon in decades, and our space program has languished by trying to do too much (space shuttles, space stations, earth science, planetary science, astronomy, robotic exploration, etc.) with too little funding. And here we are, finally talking about going back to the moon. But we're going to be doing so with basically the same level of technology that those three brave explorers had at their disposal.

That's not to say that we haven't learned anything in that time. We know far, far more about the effects of weightlessness on the body, about how the radiation of space will affect the next wave of explorers we send beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), and the avionics that control the spacecraft will be vastly more advanced than the mostly analog and mechanical components that powered Apollo 11 and the Eagle landing craft to the Moon.

But we have numerous challenges to overcome before routine flights to space stations and beyond are within the grasp of mere mortals like you and me: the cost of just getting to LEO are unimaginably high (they say that once you've gotten to LEO, you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System); we still don't have a good way to protect the intrepid explorers aboard the space craft in the event of a solar radiation storm; we still don't have the ability to survive once we get where we're going without sending replacement supplied from Earth at great expense.

Decades before the U.S. space program was even conceived, science fiction writers painted a picture of a future with flying cars, asteroid mining, people travelling the stars in highly advanced spacecraft, extrasolar colonies, and more. And for the most part, they thought we'd be there by now. What went wrong?

The Possibility of Interstellar Travel

There have been a number of blog posts over the last two days about interstellar travel and the difficulties involved therein. As reported in Wired, Robert Frisbee, group leader in the Advanced Propulsion Technology Group at JPL, conducted a study that designed an interstellar vessel with an antimatter-based propulsion system that could reach α Centauri in a mere 40 years. Brice Cassenti, associate professor in the Department of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute says that it would take between one and 100 times the current energy output of the entire world to send a probe to α Centauri. Many scientists at the recent Joint Propulsion Conference analyzed the proposed designs and largely agreed that traveling to even the nearest stars within the human lifespan is nearly impossible.

Randall Parker at FuturePundit points out that the development of therapies for rejuvenating people will make it possible to live long enough to travel to another solar system, but wonders if anybody would be willing to spend 50 years traveling to reach another star system if all we find there are planets like the ones (other than Earth) in our own solar system.

Paul Gilster, meanwhile, points out that thrust-based systems (ejecting mass backward in order to go forward) are not the only means of propelling a spacecraft, and remains positive in spite of his bet that an interstellar mission will not be launched before December 6, 2025.

Brian Wang agrees that newer technologies may change the basic assumptions Frisbee used and eventually make interstellar travel possible, but points out that advances are needed not just in propulsion but in materials. And people.

There are some very smart people hard at work on solutions to the interstellar travel problem, but I suspect that Paul is right... they won't find a good solution in the next few decades. I do think, though, that we'll solve the problem eventually. I very much hope that I'm around to see it (possibly with the help of the rejuvenation therapies Randall mentioned).

If you want to participate in the ongoing discussions, Paul's Centauri Dreams site serves as the discussion area for the Tau Zero Foundation. Also, The Ultimate Project has forums to discuss their 500-year plan for a massive interstellar colonization ship. I'm sure there are other sources as well, but those are the two that immediately come to mind.

Third Falcon 1 Fails To Reach Orbit

Yesterday, SpaceX attempted to launch a Falcon 1 rocket into orbit for the third time (I blogged about one of the payloads here). Unfortunately, they also failed for the third time, this time due to the failure of the two stages to properly separate.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, issued the following statement:

It was obviously a big disappointment not to reach orbit on this flight [Falcon 1, Flight 3]. On the plus side, the flight of our first stage, with the new Merlin 1C engine that will be used in Falcon 9, was picture perfect. Unfortunately, a problem occurred with stage separation, causing the stages to be held together. This is under investigation and I will send out a note as soon as we understand exactly what happened.

The most important message I’d like to send right now is that SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward. We have flight four of Falcon 1 almost ready for flight and flight five right behind that. I have also given the go ahead to begin fabrication of flight six. Falcon 9 development will also continue unabated, taking into account the lessons learned with Falcon 1. We have made great progress this past week with the successful nine engine firing.

As a precautionary measure to guard against the possibility of flight 3 not reaching orbit, SpaceX recently accepted a significant investment. Combined with our existing cash reserves, that ensures we will have more than sufficient funding on hand to continue launching Falcon 1 and develop Falcon 9 and Dragon. There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport. For my part, I will never give up and I mean never.

Thanks for your hard work and now on to flight four.

Falcon 1 to Launch Solar Sail

The next few days should be pretty exciting for advocates of space exploration. SpaceX's launch window for their 3rd Falcon 1 launch starts tomorrow (Aug. 1) and ends on the 5th. If this launch is successful, it will be the first time SpaceX has successfully put a payload into orbit aboard its low-cost Falcon 1 rocket, potentially ushering in a new era of less-costly space launches.

Not only that, the rocket will be delivering several payloads to orbit, but one of the most exciting (for space exploration advocates) is NASA's NanoSail-D, a 100-square foot solar sail created by NASA in just six months. Solar sails are an exciting technology, because they could allow spacecraft to accelerate without the need for on-board fuel, which greatly increases the costs. Also, fuel is the number one limiting factor in space travel, because the more fuel a spacecraft carries, the more mass it has, and the more mass it has, the more fuel it takes to move it. Every kilogram of fuel added provides less total thrust than the kilogram before it, so a system that can reduce or eliminate the amount of fuel needed could allow spacecraft to function further and longer.

Wikipedia has a pretty good page about solar sails.

I'm curious as to how well the NanoSail-D experiment will work, as Falcon 1 is not designed to lift payloads into high orbits. Lower orbits have increased drag, which is especially bad for solar sails given their surface area and the limited amount of pressure they receive from the solar wind.

You can watch the launch by going to the SpaceX website.

Putting the "Warp" in Warp Drive

Paul Gilster over at Centauri Dreams calls attention to a scientific paper reported in Spaceflight (the journal of the British Interplanetary Society) back in April and now available on arXiv that highlights an updated take on Miguel Alcubierre's 1994 proposal for a warp drive.

It is impossible for any object in the universe to travel faster than the speed of light (according to Einstein's theory of relativity). But, it turns out, space-time itself is expanding, and has been doing so ever since the Big Bang. What Alcubierre realized was that a spacecraft does not have to be moving itself through space-time (and thus will not violate Einstein's theory) if it can cause space-time to contract in front of itself and expand behind itself. Basically, the hypothetical craft creates a bubble of space-time around itself and uses the expansion and contraction of that space time to move, while remaining stationary with respect to the space-time inside the bubble.

What the authors of the paper—Richard Obousy and Gerald Cleaver—did was to combine Alcubierre's warp bubble with supersymmetry. Their work shows a theoretical maximum speed of 10³² times the speed of light, although moving that fast would required more energy than exists in the universe.

Of course, Cleaver and Obousy's approach will be meaningless if supersymmetry is ever proven to be invalid. And even if supersymmetry is validated, there are a large number of challenges ahead for the Alcubierre drive. But, as Paul points out in his write-up, this theoretical foundation is a first step on a long road. Much more research is needed, but perhaps the Tau Zero Foundation will be able to fund some additional steps along this road in the future.