The Art Neuro Weblog

Sorry for the lack of posts
It's been a busy week in the space frontier.

John Kerry Has A Blast At Bush's Space Policy; Shoots Himself In The Foot
First cab off the rank for a mention should be this article where John Kerry has a a go at Dubbya over the space program.

Kerry said that the most immediate impact of the Bush plan is that NASA's resources are being stretched even further than they were before the Columbia tragedy, forcing NASA to make unpopular choices like canceling a space shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope (news - web sites). NASA is currently seeking industry proposals for servicing Hubble robotically, but space agency officials have made clear that the highest priority of such a mission is attaching a module to Hubble that can be used to guide the space telescope safely into the ocean at the end of its life.

Kerry also criticized the Bush Administration for abandoning the hunt for low cost space transportation, a central goal of NASA during the 1990s.

The most critical element of our space program should be reducing the costs and increasing the reliability of space transportation to and from low Earth orbit, Kerry wrote. This is just one of the many critical areas lost in the Bush initiative.

This is very disappointing coming from the alternative administration, not so much for what they are saying, but what they haven't sorted through in their heads. Just because the shuttle program is popular doesn't make it a priority. The point of NASA is not, and we can't be more categorical about this, to fly space shuttles. Well, I guess it goes with the terrain that a Democrat candidate only seems to see the Aerospace industry as the classic job-provider. As for what he considers the most critical element of the space program, I'm a little aghast at how pedestrian that assessment stands. What kind of space program would it be if the critical elements were not to reduce costs and increase reliability? Well, D'uh, Mr. Kerry. We might all argue and bicker about the policy on Iraq, but it has to be said based on this account that the Democrats do not have a vision worth voting for when it comes to space; and more's the pity.

Robots are Go
There is a new plan to get a robotic probe out to Uranus (hold the anus jokes, thanks). The craft would get out to Uranus around 2014, and continue out to the Kuiper Belt. The project is dubbed New Horizons II after the New Horizons project with a similar profile headed out for Pluto.

The (probe) would use a gravity assist from Jupiter, then slip by Uranus en route to multiple Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), said Alan Stern, Principal Investigator for New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute here.

"We have an opportunity to study building a New Horizons II. The science looks very good and a second mission would yield a much larger sample of KBOs," Stern told SPACE.com.

The New Horizons 2 idea will be showcased June 21, Stern said, at a Uranus System Encounter with New Horizons II Workshop, prior to a Forum on Outer Planetary Exploration being held in Pasadena, Calif. that begins June 22.

Stern said conducting a second New Horizons mission is the same concept used for numerous other dual missions over the last three decades, such as Voyager, Pioneer, and the twin Mars rovers now busy at work on the red planet.

The Kuiper Belt with its 100,000 objects is ripe for a survey and a robot probe in the mold of New Horizons.

Competition is a Good Thing
So far, the front-runner in the Ansari X Prize seems to be SpaceShipOne, but now there's a serious competitor, contending. The Armadillo Aerospace group has announced its craft successfully launched a testflight of its craft.

Leading Armadillo's bid to snag the X Prize is John Carmack, co-founder and chief technical engineer of id Software. He admits to being a long-time rocketry enthusiast, anxious to send civilians into space.

"The flight was perfect. It went 131 feet high, and landed less than one foot from the launch point," Carmack reported on his publicly accessible web site. "It can easily do flights three times as long, which may show up some problems before we hit them with the big vehicle."

Armadillo's rocket concept makes use of a hydrogen peroxide monopropellant.

Carmack said the vehicle's auto-land system worked perfectly, softly settling down on its tail section. "I had tried several algorithms on the simulator before settling on this one, and it behaved exactly the same in reality, which is always a pleasant surprise," he noted.

So the private sector is moving ahead greatly in the race to space. And so it should. Meanwhile, speculation is mounting on who the first private astronaut into orbit is going to be aboard the SpaceShipOne project. There was also a survey about people's attitudes about the project. It seems people are interested after all.

- Art Neuro