Reuse, respin, start-from, even salvage: how is this bad?

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

A concept to boost parts of the ISS either into Lunar orbit or to one of the Lagrange points. One negative comment pointed out the ISS requires a lot of support. Well there is no reason you can’t resupply and crew as needed instead of full time. The point here would be reuse of a facility that is already in orbit ( $aving in the tens of millions to billions in the process) and by that point would have fulfilled it’s original purpose (however vague that was.)

Boeing is getting crap for suggesting the X-37 could be used as is, scaled up, or scaled and crewed. How can it be a bad idea to take a successful aerospace-craft as the basis of future growth. The original X-37 was intended for just this sort of scaling. O.K. it being Boeing does worry me, a little, but they have the scale, resources, focus (maybe) and balls (probably) to do this. My main concern is the crowding out of smaller eSpace players. But the eSpace crowd appear to have gotten their climbing claws dug in and seem to be on a flight path of their own. As long as BigB is climbing as well as, not instead of, I think we’re good.

Space – Dreams – Mind – Future Mil

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

International Space Station's Expedition 29 crew on September 17, 2011, while cruising over the Indian Ocean near Australia and south of Madagascar

Is it only after certain brute needs are met that we can look up and see the wonder, the beauty of the world around us? And if you are trapped in the mental, social, and light smeared deserts where too many of us live in, does it takes a special imagination to see beyond the here and now?

SNC Dream Chaser Docked with ISS

Sierra Nevada Corporation dreams big with the Dream Chaser, a crewed spaceplane based on the NASA/AF experimental lifting body designs from the ’70s (It was the crash of one of these that was a lead in to the Six Million Dollar Man TV show by the way, not to put you off.)

They have a composite fuselage built and have experimented / developed (like Virgin Galactic) a hybrid rocket motor. A hybrid rocket motor has a solid fuel but liquid / gaseous oxidizer. You don’t have to deal with the complex plumbing of a pure liquid motor or the uncontrolability of a solid. They are talking to Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic about catching a ride into the stratosphere on a White Knight II. I’d even guess a sub orbital launch from a WKII is likely. I then hope they talk to SpaceX about a ride to orbit on a Falcon. There is no reason these various guys shouldn’t be looking at cooperation as their technologies mature, or not. Its possible the SpaceX dragon will be a wonderful cargo hauler but not a real solution for crew return or maybe won’t really be reusable….

There seem to be a lot of people dreaming about a lot of options, far and away above what NASA has been able to do for most of my life. I can only hope this continues.

And by the way, the guys who are supporting this stuff, they’re all in the 1% the OWS crowd are against. When OWS talk about bankers, they almost have my sympathy, but when I look to eSpace and Steve Jobs, even Gates, then that faint flicker, flickers out.

You have to have big assets to make big dreams real, and as long as they are spending it on this sort of thing, I’m all for them keeping every last cent of what they make in the money world.

What happens when your memory is so faulty you don’t even know your memory is faulty?

I was reading an article in an actual paper magazine Brain Power that was discussing the problems of a patient with a particular type of brain damage. The patient had a form of amnesia that let him remember old information, from before the brain damage, but not since, the person can do all the normal things, dress and take care of themselves, but they are living in an eternal now. And because all they have is a fixed past and an utterly confusing now their mind basically fills in the gaps, without ongoing memories the persons brain/mind cannot do the sort of ‘running average’ comparison of the now with the near, recent, etc past that keeps us (most of us, relatively) grounded in the hear an now. So this person asked a simple question about where they are and why, would come up with various stories, from the nearly right to the utterly fantastical and apparently believe them and operate as if they were true.

So maybe writing Sci Fi requires a certain amount of amnesia?

: Beating the Decline..

There is a very interesting article at Baen the premier outlet for Sci Fi these days particularly Mil Sci Fi. Mr. Dunn has done an excellent job of outlining the current trajectory of the mil world from the threat to the budget and the current reaction of the Tech Services, the Navy and Air Force, I eagerly await the second part which will deal with the ground forces.

The situation in grunt land has always been more complex than that in the technical services, not to say that the sea or the air are simple, just simpler, on land you have the interaction of so many things that it is hard to readily predict what will work and what won’t.

I can hear a lot of cat calls regarding the fact that Navies and Air Forces have made huge missteps. And I agree but in general those mistakes while suboptimal where still better than what came before. In the mud its not clear that this is always the case. Now I’m not talking about weapons like nukes or even heavy artillery, these are technical services, but as we have found out in Iraq and Af’stan its boots on the ground that matter and a thousand little actions that eventually spell success or failure.

In the J.S.Zaloga book Panther vs. Sherman focusing on the battle of the bulge the author re-examines the face off between these two tanks. And while in most pure technical terms of armor, gun, ground pressure, engine power, the Sherman comes off the worse, in fact tactically it often won. For many reasons, reliability, more vehicles, fighting from ambush, generally more agile, better visibility.

While better equipment is often an amplifier, training, logistics and morale are generally more important once you have reached reasonable parity. You are not going to beat even a PzKfWgn II with straight up lancer charge. But there is no reason that an armored force couldn’t be fought to a standstill by folks on horses given horse portable anti tank weapons, equivalent logistics and lack of air superiority (Russia in Af’stan anyone?)

Precision weapons and ubiquitous day/night recon and observation are having profound effects on open field warfare. And the emergence of extended urban/sub-urban campaigns are making things even more difficult. Then there is the emergence of powerfully armed subnational or non-national forces whose operations are distributed temporally and geographically, to such an extent that they look like policing problems, but are really outside of the scope of traditional police force, since they are often heavily armed and operate largely within the law except for occasional egregious exceptions…..

So I’ll be interested to see what Mr. Dunn has to say in his second article.

Ideas for a NaNoWriMo Novel

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Anybody got any ideas regarding NaNoWriMo, still not firm on my basic approach or genre or anything….probably should keep it simple and the ideas I have even a flicker are all SciFi or Fantasy:

Elgin Hampstead Chalmers, the down and out cowboy in spectacular north Wyoming who finds out that there is more to life than he had ever imagined.
Fifty, the living trigger of an interstellar IED left to wait long after the war she was created to die in has ended in extermination for her creators and their enemies.
Jason DoubleHammer, the son of heroes who just wants to be an ordinary boy and sail his boat in the big race. When he finds an odd friend hiding in a tree and quickly finds himself running for both of their lives across a world in turmoil.
Finna the swordmaid bodyguard of an elderly mage lord, she just wants to keep out of trouble for a year or so. But mage lord has found a gate into a strange new universe and he needs his bodyguard to come along on his last adventure.

Any takers?

Aliens in the Belfry

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

In Sci Fi aliens serve a myriad purposes, but most often as humans in bad makeup. One reason for this is so that the author can tell an allegory without having to worry about being considered racist, or misogynistic, anti immigrant, anti american, etc. Also, if they act/react like humans but are described as ‘Other’ the reader has a much easier time relating, we can understand their motivations and like, or dislike, them. This makes telling a complex story much easier and makes it more enjoyable to read.

They also make better class of zombie, vampire, elf (don’t tell me Spock’s not an elf), gods (small g), etc. In other words they let us retell stories again and again just changing the protagonists and antagonists, the setting and the point of view, creating an endless array of potential stories to tell ourselves.

As a dilettante in the sciences my current expectation is that life at least at the level of microbes is fairly to extremely common, but life at the level of complexity/sophisticated seen on Earth is rare, possibly to the point of singularity. My expectation is that if life will probably come in many forms but from a terrestrial world you will get terrestrial looking creatures that, to the citified might just be one other weird ass racoon, or chicken, etc, they are unlikely to look like Predators etc. Would an intelligent dinosaur or wolf be horrific? Leaving aside the potential they’d consider us good eating or a lower class of pest that is.

And while a Non – Terrestrial world’s environment could easily produce creatures we have a hard time relating to (maybe they’d even be horrific in appearance.) They’re unlikely to want to interact with us except on a purely business matters since its unlikely we’d be of much interest to them. Though again empire builders might not care about having to live in domed cities while the locals mine the tar pits.

So having wandered all over the topic, what is my point you ask?

I don’t really have one I guess, I was thinking about the Post a Day challenge and then decided to post about what I would write if I take up the NaNoWriMo challenge and wandered off from there. Am I going to write Sci Fi again, I think so. Will it have aliens, again I think so, though perhaps not obviously. Am I going to try to do NaNoWriMo…who knows…if a big job hits at work then certainly not, 1,700 words a day and 80 hour work weeks do not mix. But the aether appears clear at this time. So Maybe.

Dawn @ Vesta

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Vesta South Polar Region Dawn Framing Camera

The Dawn Mission is ultra cool, what’s not to love about orbiting an unexplored world. Motoring there on ion drive and planning to motor over to a new planet (minor) on your ion jet after you’ve finished with this one. This is what space exploration was supposed to be like….and it is, we just got too jaded in the mean time to understand what we are seeing. This image is from the Image of the Day.

Another eSpace Post

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

SpaceX Falcon Heavy

Another Instapundit hit, National Space Society Blog on Why the SpaceX Falcon Heavy is important. Read back over some of what I’ve said and linked articles and read this article. We have the potential core of a commercial space program but will congress or others (?) manage to screw it up.

The Senatorial Launch System Revealed

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Image from NASA of SLS on launch pad

For only $18Billion….and I’m not kidding about the ‘only.’ This is a big budget program on a pitiful credit line. All the technology development is to happen in the first couple of years of development, before inflation robs the fixed and thus effectively decreasing NASA budget, of its buying power. The choice of technologies was based on reusing the shuttle solid booster technology, shuttle main engine derivatives and the canceled Constellation’s upper stage engine because they are hydrogen fueled and thus use shuttle Infrastructure. It will launch either cargo or cargo and the Orion exploration capsule/system into low orbit.

It’s an impressive beast, it will start with the ability to loft 70 tons into orbit and end with something like 130 tons, significantly more than the Saturn V of Apollo fame. But the plan is to launch maybe 1 a year, and that will make it terrifically uneconomical. The intent is to have a booster capable of lifting exploratory craft for Luna and Lagrange Point exploration, with multiple launches it could do a Mars mission.

In the meantime we are supposedly going to fund the Entrepreneurial Space companies to compete for ISS supply including crew launch and recovery…..

But if we have the ESpace why do we need SLS. If SLS is going to need to do multi craft build to go further than Luna or the Lpoints why not focus on building up our space infrastructure and refueling capability to support a common set of commercially viable launchers lofting the parts for assembly of the earlier and simpler systems in orbit. It may seem more expensive at first but in the long run it will become cheaper because the launchers are cheap on a per use basis.

OK I’m sure they’re promising that SLS will be real cheap per lb to launch because it uses proven technology and it has the advantage of being bigger (bigger is generally more efficient in this game.) But its a Gov’t program w/infrequent launches, using technology that has been chosen to save money up front. Not a promising Start.

And it’s quite possible that one of the driving factors in choosing solid booster over pure liquids was to keep the manufacturer in business (I believe there is only one US supplier at this point) Solid fuel rockets are brute simple, on the surface, but brutally complex in detail, and the only other significant market for the stuff is weapons. With the wind down of the cold war and the use of solids for various boosters the solid rocket industry has hovered on the brink of bankruptcy. That means the supplier will have the ability to hold NASA over the barrel for providing the boosters.

So the SLS remains the Senatorial Launch System and a yoke around the neck of our future in space…..Its a pity we didn’t build this system twenty years ago, when it would have had a positive impact….

At B & N !!!!!!!!

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Moon Dreams is now available as a Nook Book through Barnes and Noble ! Also at the Apple Store and at Smashwords. At Smashwords you can get it in most common eBook formats including mobi for the Kindle.

Cover Art

I Admire NASA but, Should it be Disbanded?

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

I do not hate NASA, it is and was a shining example of many things I dreamed about as a kid. And I hate to say this, but if we are serious about space it should should be shuttered, and its staff released to find other jobs.

Then we need to create a vision of where we want to be in the long term, and not in small terms…we need sweeping strokes that paint a backdrop for us to see our childrens children against and be excited.

And no I don’t want to kill all space science, it has at times kept me from losing hope in the human race but there has to be more tha wonderous pictures of far stars and Marscapes

So after NASA is good and defunct, maybe 2 years, maybe 5 a number of smaller and more focused organizations need to be set up to support the commercial development of space as well as the advance of technology:

National Aviation Science Bureau (aviation technology) {small and lean probably supporting the airforce and army as well as Boeing, et al with things like wind tunnels and basic research into manned aircraft.}
National Earth Observation and Services Bureau (terrestrial observation/science, terrestrial Navigation, terrestrial emergency/disaster nets, etc
National Space Service (Space Craft Operations (like the ISS,) crewing deep space exploration, oversight of commercial crew training )
Space Science Board to support the above with scientist based at universities and programs funding basic science and instruments (Future, Hubble, Voyager, Sojourner vehicles would be funded by them but not run by them)

Why not just move to this from NASA? Because I have worked in several large-scale (read Gov’t and Mil Industry) organizations through huge upheavals in ownership and management structure and seen how incredibly resilient the ‘cultural habits’ of such organizations are.

[Bureaucratic / hierarchical structures are an offshoot of early industrial age military organizations and the fundamental requirement of an organization in attrition warfare is the ability to keep driving forward after massive losses.]

Don’t break the organizations cultural links with the past and you will not change how it operates in any meaningful way.

{Don’t worry too much about ‘corporate knowledge’ its mostly bad habits and paperwork given a gloss by few knowledgable curmudgeons who get crap done. Those folks will resurface if you give them half a chance, they love the potential and the work.}

I would throw out all this stuff about going to Mars first or the Moon first. The long-term objective is expansion of the human meme space and resource base. Of course the Moon, of course Mars, eventually Venus and I believe that free flying Habs (Habitats) may eventually contain the majority of the human race….in a few hundred or a thousand years. But that is vision not a practical plan.

In the short-term keep the goals limited and real with an eye towards long-term objectives. Grab every chance you get to make a buck, but also incentivize people to stay lean and dream. Every ‘commercial’ space endeavor out there has more fundamental thought in it than has been put into NASA and the ‘Space Program’ since Von Braun. He understood you needed to dream big but work the small near term stuff hard, fast and clean.

Get rid of the idea that there is any advantage to keeping space technology ‘secret’ or that we can try and keep it as a US bastion. This thinking and the resulting ITAR (International Trade in Arms Regulations) categorization has done a lot of damage to our space industry by providing opportunities to our competitors. That’s over and above the damage that having the US Gov’t as the only real customer has done to the commercial viability of our industry.

Space access needs to be the province of the commercial sector. We need variety and flexibility, not just SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, we also want Virgin Galactic/LM Scaled Composite, Blue Origin, Boeing, EADS, probably Long March, Kawasaki and others.

The commercial lifters (and Habs) need to be regulated for safety but reasonably and lightly. A combination of teaming and adversarial oversight is needed, the FAA wobbles between these two methods and neither is healthy. The space access regulator should have a dual model, with two separate organizations, one, the principle one provides oversight via teaming support. The other unit is made up of a few hard-nosed smart auditor teams who check on the partnerships, relatively infrequently.

Bigelow is right, space Habs (space stations) should largely be inflatable structures. They should also be designed for flexibility and for tourists, not professionals. Tourists, who may be astrophysicists, teachers, bio engineers, nano material specialist, or (rich) entertainer. The ISS should become the center of a commercially driven space complex. Its served its original purpose of learning how to build things in space, now we need to treat it as an operational asset, plan to have multiple commercial craft able to access it and use it. Commercialize it, let our commercial innovators as well as those in Europe and Asia use it as a stepping off points for their space plans.

Last: my mid near term goal would be the Lagrange points, the development of a sustainable space based science network and operational habits for humans out of immediate range of Earth.

Are We Nuts to think about launching the Webb telescope to the Lagrange point with no way to repair it?
The L points are great vantage point s for many things
Set up a Bigelow Bungalow at the L point, big enough to live in for a few months at a time. Send cargo vessels to it when you need to occupy in then a space taxi with the crew.
Need to set up a new telescope? Send a crew : Need to repair an observatory? Send a crew : Have a couple of billionaires who want to show their mistresses an out of this world experience? Send up the wait staff.
There are small rocks around the Lagrange points
(don’t treat them as cultural relics, melt them down and experiment with using them to make stuff in space so we can worry about getting humans out of the gravity well not all their gear)
They offer access to near earth asteroids….stir and repeat

Learn how to operate in deep space, learn how to make things (not just assemble them) get used to putting assets in place so they can support long term plans. The only way we will start making significant progress is by establishing an infrastructure and working knowledge base that give us the keys to our future.

Above all else get over the concept that space is the province of rocket scientists and big brains in general and know that expanding the human envelope has always been dangerous, people will die, we’ll regret their passing but they will have been where they wanted to be, on the leading edge, we should see them as the practical heroines and heroes of our future.

Adrift in Space —- due to sedementary regulation

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

This article pointed to by Instapundit, is really far too positive.

We are adrift and it’s not clear there is any hope for us. Politicians are good at some things but long-term strategy is not one of them, particularly in our instant gratification fantasy addled society. Space is an area where this is demonstrated again and again. While it is simply amazing what engineers and scientists have done with the space program given the horrific level of uncertainty and outright incompetence they have had to deal with from above, it is heart-rending to think of what could have been accomplished if leadership had been competent and the visions stable over time.

Look at what the Space entrepreneurs (scaled composites, virgin galactic, space x, orbital science, etc) have accomplished since they essentially gave up on the gov’t. They are using technology developed by the US, European and even Russian (best cheap rocket engines in the world) space programs. But much of the technology being used is far from bleeding edge. How can it be that Elon Musk (Space X Falcon) can confidently say that he can develop a heavy (medium heavy) lifter that can reach the goal of $1000/lb. A goal that has evaded the US big boys for something like 20 years and do it with functionally tiny amounts of money?

Because……….I was on a call today talking about a program very near to my heart (in real life) and our customer mentioned that he’d recently had a success where he demonstrated insertion of a new technology to the gov’t. When demonstrating to the gov’t customer one of the gov’t program guy’s asked how long and how much it had taken, and was blown away, ‘How did could you do this in such a short time with so little money?’ The contractor looked the gov’t guy in the eye and said, “Because the gov’t wasn’t involved.”

His team had identified the problem, figured out the solution, implemented it and put on this demonstration for a fraction of what it would have cost because he could do it quickly, No CYA and Second Guessing that a normal program entails. If his team had to trade-off something like weight for performance, or ruggedness for cost, they could make the decision in only the time they needed to work it out then move on.

He didn’t have to start out with a study, then develop a spec, have that spec mangled and twenty pages of gov’t specs added to it, then either compete for the job or send it out for competitive bid, set up a gov’t audited program with gov’t audited subcontracts and then carry out the work with every step requiring a sign off and every other step requiring a wait while a bureaucrat made up his/her mind, and/or went home early for a long weekend.

That sort of process is required for the most trivial of programs selling hardware to the gov’t today. If the gov’t were adding value by being the top-level engineer (true until post Apollo) it might be at least acceptable, but the gov’t long ago lost most of its competent people, today they are just a layer of semi technically literate auditors. When you look at the paragraph above and understand that is what one has to go through to change a voltage regulator or a belt pulley on what is essentially a truck and multiply that by a thousand times when talking about a whole vehicle, tens or hundreds of thousands of times for a spacecraft, it’s actually amazing we get anything done.

Why has it come to this, because of CYA and a lack of creative destruction in the gov’t. It’s too strong to say that nothing ever dies in the gov’t it’s also not a bad approximation. The system we have today is the equivalent of sedimentary rock built up by hundreds of thousands CYA rules accreting one on top of the other.

We keep coming up with these grandiose plans, but they mean nothing in the long-term because they are not long-term. And the smaller programs that get some traction are less and less able to break through the near impenetrable impediment that is the space industrial complex and its layers of CYA rules.