Shuttle tanks spared, NASA still boondoggled

New Scientist says Lockheed Martin's space shuttle external fuel tank factory got through Hurricane Katrina with only minor damage. That leaves the space shuttle program free to continue boondoggling along toward its next in-flight disaster. If it can ever get off the ground again.

SpaceRef has just leaked the text of a speech NASA head Mike Griffin is to deliver to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) tomorrow. Griffin will confirm that the shuttle won't be cancelled any time soon and that the agency's next-gen spaceships will be based on shuttle technology. Seems to me there's more politics at work there than sound management; lots of people making lots of money off shuttle don't want their cash cow to die, no matter what the cost to taxpayers or astronauts.

Meanwhile, the release of NASA's blueprint for its Vision for Space Exploration has been held up as government officials squabble of how much it's going to cost, according to NASA Watch. NASA can't pull off President Bush's scheme to send people back to the moon and then on to Mars while continuing to pour billions of dollars into the shuttle; the money's just not there.

So where does that leave NASA? Firmly on the ground as far as I can see, unless a side bet Griffin briefly mentions in his speech gains some traction:

"As I stated earlier this year, one strategy NASA will employ to meet our future needs is to utilize, to the fullest extent possible, commercially-developed cargo resupply and, ultimately, crew rotation capabilities for the International Space Station. Indeed, we will issue this fall a request for proposal for such capabilities, with the development to be done on a commercial basis, much like that in the commercial communications satellite market. This is a priority for NASA. Utilizing the market offered by the International Space station's requirements for cargo and crew will spur true competition in the private sector, will result in savings that can be applied elsewhere in the program, and will promote further commercial opportunities in the aerospace sector."

In other words, Griffin wants to hire entrepreneurial companies as a hedge against the price gouging of the big aerospace firms that now have a lock on NASA's spaceflight operations. It's a good plan, but Griffin's got a lot of political inertia working against him. The moment of truth will come with this request for proposal to be issued this fall. Hopefully it will represent a substantial opportunity for the emerging commercial spaceflight industry to work side by side with NASA. If not, I'm going to return my full focus back to commercial spaceflight--that's where the real action's going to be.

Shuttle about to be hit while it's down

The major hurricane that's about to hit New Orleans also has a major space shuttle facility in its sights. If this facility is destroyed it will very likely spell the end of the shuttle, and perhaps NASA's big-budget shuttle replacement as well.

The facility is Lockheed Martin's external tank production facility, where all of the space shuttle big orange fuel tanks are built and serviced. It was foam flying off these tanks that destroyed space shuttle Columbia two and a half years ago, and that grounded Discovery after its last flight in July.

Political support for the shuttle program is already weakening. If the tank production plant is severely damaged or destroyed, shuttle supporters may not be able to muster the support for rebuilding, especially since NASA has already spent over a billion dollars trying without success to fix these tanks. The big-budget shuttle replacement, as currently conceived, also depends on the tanks, so that might go out the window too. All of which would give small, entrepreneurial companies like t/Space a clear shot at building America's next spaceship.

See reports from SpaceDaily and SpaceflightNow.

The Space Journalism Association

That's Eli Kintisch on the left, receiving the first annual Space Journalism Prize from founder Sam Dinkin at the International Space Development Conference in Washington last May.

Sam had this radical idea that all the space journalists should band together to keep each other up to date on developments in the field, exchange ideas on how to cover the big stories, and generally harness the power of the press to help boost the new commercial space industry. Read all about it in Sam's essay for The Space Review.

Sam put his money where his mouth was by fronting the first $1,000 Space Journalism Prize out of his own pocket. Poor Eli thought maybe he was the victim of an elaborate practical joke; he could hardly believe someone he didn't know would give him a fist full of cash just because his X Prize coverage for the St. Louis Post Dispatch was among the best reporting on commercial spaceflight last year. I enjoyed his reaction, and then I took this photo.

Sam also collected contact info for many of the top space journalists, and then sent the list to me and a couple of others to organize. It's the beginning of what could become a powerful force in the new industry; the press has a lot of influence on public opinion, and hence the cash flow and legislation that will drive the industry.

For instance, when (not if) the first fatality happens in commercial space, overly sensational coverage could doom the industry even as it gets off the ground. On the other hand, thoughtful reporting will put it in proper perspective as the normal, if tragic, growing pains of a new industry. The Space Journalism Association could help shape the direction of such coverage starting now, before a crisis hits.

When I was trying to get a science fiction writing career off the ground a few years ago, I used to dream about the old days, back in the '30s and '40s, when Asaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and the other giants of the field first started meeting regularly. If only I could have been around then, I thought. My dream has come true; I get to be one of the few shaping an organization that young bloods coming up in 10 or 20 years will clamor to join. It's a heady feeling.

NASA to hire private spaceships

It's a scoop! I nabbed it for Wired News, and it's today's lead story.

Read all about it at Wired.com, or, after today, at http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,68528,00.html.

In essence, NASA's going to start hiring private spaceship companies like transformational Space Corporation (t/Space) to send its crews to orbit. It's a huge shift for NASA, and possibly the only thing that can save its manned space program.

The shuttles are down until at least next March according to the latest reports. Coincidently, that's when Lockheed Martin and a team made up of Boeing and Northrop Grumman are due with their concepts for NASA's big-budget next-gen spaceship. Concepts. No actual hardware, or even finished designs.

Meanwhile, t/Space has spent the last year building and testing hardware for an orbital spaceship it wants to hire out to NASA on a contract basis. If fully funded, they'll get to orbit way before the big guys.

To anyone who stops and thinks about the situation for more than five minutes, and that includes NASA administrator Mike Griffin, hiring lean, hungry space startups to get NASA off the ground again quickly and affordably makes a hell of a lot more sense than relying soley on fat, monolithic aerospace primes whose executives' salaries burn up more NASA money than t/Space's entire annual budget.

Lots of heavy-duty politics going to fight this one, though. Griffin can only do so much with the money directly under his control before he has to turn to congress to get this new program fully funded. And a lot of powerful dudes in Congress have a vested interest in keeping the (very lucrative) status quo, no matter how many astronauts have to die along the way.

Meanwhile, the Russian Space Agency has pulled way ahead of NASA, also as I report on today's Wired News. After today, hit http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,68529,00.html.

Private moon mission update

Just got off the phone with Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures. Yesterday his company announced the first privately funded mission to the moon (see my last post). It's a real mission that really will happen. Space Adventures has cut a deal with the Russian Space Agency to use existing hardware. I got some more details from Anderson, who is absolutely glowing; this is the biggest coup yet for the company that brokered the first tourist flights to the International Space Station.

I'm writing up a report for Wired News now. I'll post the link when I have it, probably early next week. The important thing to note now is that the mission will not orbit the moon as I and the New York Times reported, but will use a free-return trajectory, where the craft will loop around the moon and sling back to Earth without going into orbit. This is a less technically ambitious mission than going into lunar orbit, but still amazing: the Russians are going to upstage NASA's own return-to-the-moon program by getting there first (by 2010 instead of 2018).

I told you things were going to get wild! Stay tuned....

The new moon race is on!

John Schwartz got the drop on me at the New York Times, but even he's missing the big picture. For now.

Check this out.

Space Adventures announced yesterday that they've cut a deal with the Russian Space Agency to return people to the moon by 2010. It'll be the first manned Russian ship to reach the moon, and it'll be funded by two space tourists each paying $100 million. A Soyuz spaceship carrying a professional Russian cosmonaut and the two tourists will enter lunar orbit and then return to Earth without landing, just like NASA's Apollo 8 mission in 1968.

Most of the hardware to accomplish this already exists, and once the two tourists can be found (which I have no doubt they will be), the funding will be there. This is going to happen. Absolutely. And if it goes well, landings will be next.

Meanwhile, NASA's own plans to return to the moon depend on fabulously expensive new hardware that has yet to be designed, let alone built, and which won't be ready for lunar flights until at least 2018.

This second moon race will have an entirely different outcome from the first. But we'll all be the winners here, as private citizens push outward into the final frontier and blaze a trail for the rest of us.

They made it!

Thank God, and no thanks to a series of stupid decisions based more on politics than science, shuttle Discovery touched down at Edwards Air Force Base just now. Now if only NASA doesn't risk another crew in this broken-down space jalopy.

It's public knowledge that NASA knew before this flight that it had not corrected the very problem it had spent two and a half years and over a billion dollars trying to fix--namely the flying foam problem that downed Columbia. Yet NASA brass chose to fly anyway.

NASA also chose to put seven lives in jeopardy--a full crew--on this so-called test flight, even though the best plan for their rescue from orbit called for holing up on the International Space Station, whose Soyuz lifeboat can seat only three. Why didn't NASA put a skeleton crew of two on this flight, as it did on Columbia's maiden voyage back in 1981?

NASA's own estimates put chances of catastrophic failure on any given shuttle flight at 1 in 100. That's under the best of conditions, with no flying foam involved. That's a one in a hundred chance of being killed every time you climb in that thing.

Yes, spaceflight is risky, but it doesn't have to be that risky. If NASA would just do the right thing and retire the remaining shuttles now, it could spend its money on technologies designed from the ground up for increased safety and stop needlessly risking lives.

It's away!

Yesterday Popular Science shipped the October issue, the cover story for which will be my piece on t/Space (see post below for latest news on that company). I spent the day going back and forth with the my editor, fact checker and sources to fine-tune details and correct errors. Along the way I got to see the layout with photography and artwork. Wish I could show you some of it--it's a beaut. But I'm sworn to secrecy until it hits the PopSci website, probably in just over a month.

I can say my story will be the first in-depth coverage of a brand new commercial spaceship company, one with real potential. Hell, there's hardly been any coverage on these guys at all. But if they're successful, you'll hear a lot more about them in the coming year. In a nutshell, they have a plan that could just rescue NASA's manned space program from its morass and help open the final frontier to private citizens in the process. Both NASA and at least one investor with deep pockets are taking t/Space very seriously. Exciting stuff.

Even more exciting to be right here in the middle of the action with the place all to myself. When I'm on these assignments, I keep wondering: where's everyone else? Where's the New York Times? Where's Dan Rather? Where's CNN? How did I get to be the lucky dog with the scoop? I tell you, I'm still trying to figure that one out. I'll let you know when I succeed.

The space curmudgeon

I'm following with amusement the rising career of Alex Roland, official spaceflight curmudgeon. I first heard about him from Dwayne A. Day's commentary last December in The Space Review. Day calls Roland the "“doom and gloom guy,"” the one reporters go to when they want a negative counterpoint to a positive opinion on spaceflight. He's all negative all the time, says Day, because it's simply his nature. Says Day, "“He'’s the kind of guy who, when people say "“Nice day,"” will respond that it is going to rain tomorrow."” I've never met Roland, so I don'’t know about that, but now that Day has pointed him out, I see him everywhere; he'’s been getting a lot of work lately.

Here he is in Tuesday'’s New York Times saying NASA's post-shuttle plans have "“the aroma of a quick and dirty solution to a big problem."

Here he is last week on PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer on the shuttle and the International Space Station: "“Both have been disastrous failures. It's time to move on."

And here he is in Popular Mechanics'’ June cover story saying we shouldn'’t even bother sending people into space at all: "“In the 1960s, the concept that humans were needed for this exploration may have been true, but it's now both unrealistic and impractical."”

What'’s even more amusing to me is watching reporters all over the world in every medium doing exactly what Day describes in his commentary: reaching for Roland's phone number whenever they need a negative opinion on NASA or spaceflight in general. Roland's no more qualified than any number of other so-called experts on the subject; it's just that he's one of the most consistently consistent. I know how it happens: you'’re on a hard deadline and your editor wants an expert opinion on the pros and cons of some aspect of your story. It'’s easy to find the pros: just talk to someone at NASA. Con, now, that'’s harder. Most people involved in spaceflight are there because they love the whole idea. Not so Roland, and therein he'’s found himself a nice little niche. In fact, he may just have the space curmudgeon market cornered.

t/Space does it again

Transformational Space Corporation, or t/Space for short, yesterday drop-tested a full-sized mockup of their proposed space capsule from a helicopter at 10,000 feet. This photo was taken from another helicopter rented by Popular Science (t/Space chipped in too) in hopes of getting a good shot for their October cover. I haven’t seen those photos yet, but if this one from one of t/Space’s people is any indication, it’ll be spectacular. I was angling to get on the chopper too, since it’s my story the PopSci photography will accompany, but the thing was too small to accommodate me as well as everyone else. Still a great feeling to know that it’s because of my story that any of this photography even exists. And one of t/Space’s NASA liaisons got to ride in the copilot’s seat for a ringside seat. Also good. Gotta keep the customer satisfied.

While most of the press is focused on the latest shuttle woes, these guys are quietly building what could very well become America’s next spaceship. So far I have the scoop on them (though that won’t last long). I’ve been on this story since May when I met t/Space CEO David Gump at the International Space Development Conference in D.C. PopSci signed me on for a small feature in the November issue, and my story was perking along at a nice steady pace until July 26, when space shuttle Discovery almost got nailed by the same flying foam problem that doomed Columbia two and a half years ago. Suddenly a low-cost program to build NASA a backup spaceship got a whole lot more relevant, especially since now all the shuttles are grounded indefinitely. My story got fast tracked to the October issue, which was then in progress. I don’t know what poor soul got bumped to make room for me, but there I’ll be, with my second cover story this year. Should be on stands mid-to-late September.

Check out Gump’s press release on the drop.

Also check out my coverage of t/Space's last series of drop-tests for Wired News.

Stay tuned to this space for new developments on the opening of the final frontier to us regular folks; they’ll come hard and fast now. This is it, right here and now, the beginning of a brand new space age. Welcome to history.