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On Saturday May 30th, I watched live TV coverage
of the launch of two American astronauts toward the space station, from Cape Canaveral. It’s been almost a decade since I’ve seen
that, and that’s just too long.
This launch had no “window”,
it had to be on-time or not at all.
This effort was scrubbed for weather just last Wednesday, because they could not wait out the bad
weather. The risk was a lightning strike
on an ascending rocket and spacecraft,
something known not to be tolerable.
The launch and ascent looked “nominal” the whole way to
orbit insertion, where TV coverage
ended. They even successfully landed the
booster first stage on the drone ship. Spacex
made this look easy and routine,
but, believe me, it is not.
Not yet.
Now, Spacex has been
launching unmanned, robot-controlled
cargo spacecraft to the space station for some years now. And last year, they successfully sent the manned version of
this spacecraft to the station as an unmanned,
robot-controlled demonstration.
This manned trip was the final demonstration. From here,
Spacex should be cleared to send crews to the space station regularly
for NASA. And everything that flies is
tested at the McGregor test site. Tested
by people who are paid well to do it,
and who spend money to live here.
Remember that when you hear that rocket testing noise: continuous thunder is the sound of
success. It is the single ear-splitting
“kaboom” that spells trouble!
NASA funded two contractors to do this astronaut ferry job
to the space station. Both need to be in
operation, in order to make this as
reliable as possible. The other
contractor is Boeing.
Boeing still needs to do a successful unmanned, robot-controlled demo before it can launch
the final crewed demo. They tried that a
few months ago, but it didn’t work
right.
Uncovering the failures to be fixed is the whole point of a
testing program, so having a problem
with an unsuccessful flight is not a bad thing.
They will fix it and fly again. They
need our support, too.
Now, some of you may
have heard about a Spacex rocket blowing up in south Texas about that same time. That was a highly-experimental prototype for
the new giant vehicle Spacex is trying to build. This has nothing to do with the Falcon rocket
and Dragon capsule that just launched with a crew. It is a new,
future thing.
It blew up,
apparently from a propellant leak,
after a successful engine test. It was supposed to do a gentle low-altitude
“hop” sometime in the next few days, but
that won’t happen now, because it was
destroyed. Such is the nature of early
experimental testing of new designs.
Better to find the troubles early:
you lose fewer lives and less money that way.
This new giant vehicle is to be a huge transport to
orbit, first and foremost. Refilled with propellant from tankers, it can take large loads to the moon and Mars
from there. This is the wave of the future, but it won’t happen, without lots of experimental testing
now.
Which activity by its very nature is going to have some
spectacular failures. Like the one in
south Texas.
Why is this important?
First, the space program has spin-offs
that benefit the public. It always
has.
Your Pyrex glass cookware resulted from warhead re-entry
work in the 1950’s. The desktop and
laptop computers and the related cell phone technology that nearly all of you
depend upon came from the computer rocket guidance systems developed in the
1960’s. The weather predictions you
depend on came from weather models and weather satellites developed to support
spaceflight in the 1970’s. And so on, and so on.
Second, some
day, if this gets inexpensive enough, and reliably safe enough, your kids may travel in space, or from point-to-point on Earth through near
space.
In the 1960’s (but measured in today’s dollars), the cost of sending a pound of payload to
orbit was $10,000-100,000 per pound.
Because of Spacex and the rest of the satellite launch business
entities, that has been reduced to
nearer $1500-2000/pound. Bigger, more reusable vehicles will reduce that
further.
If it ever gets down under $100/pound, that’s getting much closer to the price of a
first-class airline ticket. At which
point the old dream of vacationing in an orbital hotel begins to become
feasible. We’re not there yet, but the progress to date is absolutely astounding.
Third, there is a
need to protect the Earth from asteroid and comet impacts. There is no better justification for both
manned and unmanned space programs than this.
It requires sending both unmanned and manned craft out there to develop
the protection means, and then to use it
when the need arises. And it will
arise, at some time in the foreseeable future.
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