Private Spaceflight--Blasting Off

Hey, if you're interested in privately-funded spaceflight, here's a tidbit from Spaceflight Now you might want to peruse. It's a partial transcript of a post-launch press briefing by Elon Musk. Musk is the founder of SpaceX, a private company contracted by NASA to develop the Falcon 9 rocket for delivering cargo to the International Space Station. According to SpaceX's website, if all goes well with the rocket's development, "At the option of NASA, the Agreement can be extended to include demonstrating transport of crew to and from the International Space Station (ISS). If successful, NASA will have the ability to use the demonstrated capability to resupply the ISS after the 2010 retirement of the Space Shuttle." The goal for SpaceX is to create a line of launch vehicles that will reach anywhere from low Earth orbit to other planets. The company just tested its Falcon 1 rocket as part of developing the Falcon 9, but that is only the beginning of their plans for private spaceflight. Also from their website:

As part of this Agreement, SpaceX will execute three flights of its Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon spaceship. These will be the first flights of the Dragon spaceship and the fourth, fifth and sixth flights of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle.

The missions are scheduled to occur in the late 2008 to 2009 time period and will culminate in demonstrating delivery of cargo to the ISS and safe return of cargo to Earth. The Dragon spaceship is designed from the beginning to have an identical structure for both cargo and crew transport, allowing for a rapid transition from unmanned to manned flight as soon as reliability is proven.

"By stimulating the development of commercial orbital spaceflight, the NASA COTS program will have the same positive effect on space travel as the Air Mail Act of 1925 had on the development of safe and affordable air transportation," said Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO. "Moreover, the requirement for significant private investment and the fact that NASA only pays for objective, demonstrated milestones ensures that the American taxpayer will receive exceptional value for money."

The freshly tested Falcon 1 rocket met with mixed success, making it to space, but failing to establish orbit. However, Musk was quite pleased with the progress nonetheless, and has high hopes for the future. Apparently the most dangerous part is making it off the planet, and the rest will be a fairly straightforward fix, as Musk discussed in his press briefing:

"I feel very confident 10 years from now that we can be putting both satellites and people into orbit, and maybe beyond (Earth) orbit. I feel very confident in the future of commercial spaceflight, private spaceflight and I think this bodes very, very well actually for achieving some of the goals that I mentioned. It is really an excellent indicator that a small company can achieve great things....We had what I would call a relatively minor issue with the roll-control very late in the flight. But all the really big risk items, the ones we were most concerned, have been addressed. If you look at the early history of rocketry, I think they had something like 12 Atlas failures before the 13th one was successful. To get this far on our second launch being an all-new rocket -- new main engine, new first stage, new second stage engine, new second stage, new fairing, new launch pad system, with so many new things -- to have gotten this far is great."

Sounds encouraging. I'm totally on board with the notion that privately funded and developed spaceships can and should be part of humanity's space future. I really like seeing NASA contract with private companies to meet its goals, especially since America's space shuttle is soon to be grounded. Private industry can take financial risks that government agencies shouldn't necessarily be taking, and a commercial spaceflight industry can reap great rewards in the process, both from government contracts and private tourism/commercial transportation. With companies like SpaceX putting private expertise to work, in hopes of making a profit, everyone involved, NASA included, can ultimately benefit, and as Musk pointed out, NASA, and thus the taxpayer, "only pays for objective, demonstrated milestones." Free market meets space. Two of my favorite things taking flight together. Go for launch.

Hat tip: Instapundit, for the press briefing link.

The Basics--And Beyond

What are the things you can't live without? There are a lot of things we think we can't live without--love, productive employment, a place to live, purpose and health, among others--until we find ourselves lacking any of the above and discover that we can, indeed, survive for quite a while, notwithstanding the fact we may not enjoy it very much. Long term, we do need food and shelter, but under most conditions we can get by without them for considerably longer than most of us would ever imagine. Short term, though, what are the things that are absolutely imperative for a human to survive? Assuming the ambient temperature is within acceptable parameters, if short term is described in terms of minutes, you've got one possible answer--oxygen. If you extend short term to a few days, you can add water to the brief "absolute imperatives" list.

When you come right down to it, there's very little that's more valuable to human beings than clean, potable water, and clean, breathable air. I'm speaking in physical terms here; spiritual needs are just as real, in my opinion, and in the long run even more important, but that's not where I'm headed with this post, so for now, I'll stick to the tangible basics--water and oxygen. Let's start with oxygen. Here on Earth, we are part of a built-in exchange system--oxygen for carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide for oxygen. The animal kingdom breathes, and the plant kingdom breathes, in a mutually beneficial exchange, and the whole cycle goes on in perpetuity. It may be contaminated in places, but air is essentially ubiquitous. To a lesser extent, so is water. Water is very scarce in some regions, and too dirty to drink in others, but with two thirds of the planet covered in ocean, and a natural water distribution system in place, which we affectionately call weather, for most people there's enough water to meet their needs. (Sometimes too much.)

Not so in space, of course. Residents of the International Space Station must rely on the generosity of the home world to provide the breathable stuff, and the thirst quenchers. They're shipped up to the ISS in shuttles and rockets, and the water, especially, takes up a lot of precious cargo room in the process. They've been able to get away with this inefficient system for so long because, relatively speaking, the ISS is just a hop off the planet, close enough to make shipping these essentials doable, if not convenient. Any sci fi fan worth their salt, however, knows that if mankind is to reach more distant goals, like the Moon, Mars, or even beyond, there's going to have to be a radical transformation in the way air and water are provided to the space-faring adventurer.

Trudy Bell, writing an article for Science@NASA, tells of a new system so to be installed in the ISS, called Environmental Control and Life Support Systems, or ECLSS ( think eclair, only ecliss), that in many ways will resemble the water reclamation processes described in the Frank Herbert novel Dune. Herbert's book is set on the desert planet Arakkis, where water is so scarce that every possible molecule of it must be captured and recycled. Desert dwellers wear suits specially equipped to catch even the moisture of transpiration and perspiration, so that nothing H2O-related will escape collection and reprocessing. Sounds a bit icky, but that's basically what goes on here on Earth, just on a much larger scale, and you know what they say about desperate times. Anyway, Bell writes that the new system going in on the space station will grab all of the water out of the air, filter in and send it back for reuse. Same goes for the astronaut's urine, except, since the urine has a lot more contaminants, the reclamation rate will be about eighty-five percent, and they will have to jump through some interesting hoops to get the equipment to work.

The way they process the urine is to boil it, turn it into steam, then combined it with the water recovered from the air, and filter it all some more to make it pure enough to drink. According to Bell, using this method, they can produce a half a gallon of water an hour, which more than meets the needs of the three people currently living on the ISS. Sounds simple, right? However, there's a catch. Since there's no gravity in space to make the steam rise, in order to get the steam to separate from the impurities, or "brine," they have to spin the whole kit and caboodle to create artificial gravity. Wild, huh? Something as basic here on Earth as "heat (steam) rises" doesn't apply in space, so they have to go to extraordinary lengths to make it happen. Of course, here on Earth, gravity also comes from spinning, but that's a system God put in place and manages. We really don't have to come up with high tech ways to make it happen.

There are a couple of extra-cool things about this system, "above and beyond" (the pun is lame, I know) just providing drinking water. ECLSS is also designed to provide that oxygen we were talking about earlier:

In addition to providing drinking water for the crew, the water recovery system will supply water to the other half of ECLSS: the oxygen generation system (OGS). The OGS operates by electrolysis. It splits water molecules into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen, which is vented outside the spacecraft.

Nifty, don't you think? Take water, apply electric current, and voila, you get oxygen. That's how they've been doing it on Russian Soyuz rockets, and the (former) Mir space station for years. It's a tried and true method.

One other really cool thing I read about concerns the people who developed the ECLSS system. The are using their expertise to help meet humanitarian needs here on Earth. I followed a related link from NASA, which led me to another NASA article, this one by Katherine Trinidad and Steve Roy, about a project whereby NASA technology is being used to provide clean drinking water for an impoverished Iraqi village, with a broken well pump, and no access to other sources of water. Robyn Carrasquillo, engineering manager of the ECLSS project, and "engineers at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., helped install and test a water purification system in the northern village of Kendala." They've used their own time for the project, which is allowing the few villagers who managed to remain in their small community after the water supply was lost to stay in their homes. NASA-designed equipment is pumping out four gallons a minute for the desperate village!! It must be awfully satisfying to not just further mankind's aims in space, but to also help their fellow men (and women too, of course) here on the "blue marble."

Seems to me that by collaborating to provide this system for the village of Kendala, these NASA engineers are meeting some of the needs on the larger list I made earlier. For the villagers--a place to live, and health. For the engineers--productive employment and purpose. For both of them--the love of their fellow men. Science meets humanity. The best of both worlds. It may not be something we can't live without, but it's certainly something we can all live with.

To Breathe, Or Not To Breathe

How would you like to live in an enclosed environment, dependant on elaborate mechanical systems to produce oxygen for you to breathe? I'm not talking about air filters, or pumps to bring in air from the outside, but something like the Elektron oxygen generator in use on the Russian side of the International Space Station, which actually splits water molecules to produce oxygen for the nauts to breathe (astronauts, cosmonauts, whatever they are up there, let's just call them nauts.) As much as I would love to be a naut myself some day, learn what it's like to be weightless, and see the Earth from somewhere out in space, or at the very least, orbit, it is a rather sobering concept, being enclosed in a vehicle with a totally artificial atmosphere. It's kind of like being a guppy in a fishbowl, except there's a little machine in there that has to keep making water, or the guppy will run out.

Most of us have been in planes, where there is bottled oxygen available in case of an emergency, but almost none of us have ever known what it's like to live in space, where the chosen few are completely dependant on that Elektron oxygen generator, or its equivalent, doing its job so that they can keep breathing freely. Of course, there are filter systems for the space station; if someone burns toast, or spills bleach, it's not like they can run outside for a breath of fresh air, but what if it were a major problem they were facing? What if the system broke down, and toxic chemicals were released into their very limited air supply? Well, naturally, they'd clean it up. According to Kelly Young, at New Scientist Space, three nauts spent Monday morning cleaning up a small toxic spill of potassium hydroxide, a chemical which can, when breathed, cause various nasty symptoms like "a burning sensation, cough, sore throat and shortness of breath."

It looks like the chemical came from the very system designed to provide the nauts with air to breathe, the Elektron oxygen generator. (It's like the poor guppy's water maker started producing ketchup.) So, the nauts turned off the ventilation system throughout the station, put on masks and gloves, turned up the air filters, and got to work fixing the problem. There is back-up oxygen, stored in tanks and canisters, on the space station, of course, and it looks like the problem has been repaired, although from the sound of it, the system is not completely reliable. According to Young, it has had repeated problems, and required previous repair, and they'll probably have to fix it again the next time their air supply is threatened. It's a good thing that NASA and its foreign counterparts have extensive repair manuals.

It makes me realize how much I take it for granted that God provided us with a system down here on Earth that naturally replenishes its own supply of oxygen, without help from the Maytag repairman. Can you imagine what would happen if the plants we rely on to change carbon dioxide back into oxygen suddenly started putting out potassium hydroxide instead? I don't have a spare oxygen tank lying around in case of system malfunction, do you? It's a good thing they do on the ISS, though. The station has a visitor coming on Wednesday--the first woman tourist to buy herself the experience. I'm glad for her sake that this little incident didn't happen while she was on board. It might put a damper on her vacation.

Droids In Space

Since most of the people reading this blog are my friends, I know there are a few Star Wars fans out there. This one's for you. NASA has some new toys.

June 1, 2006: Six years ago, MIT engineering Professor David Miller showed the movie Star Wars to his students on their first day of class. There's a scene Miller is particularly fond of, the one where Luke Skywalker spars with a floating battle droid. Miller stood up and pointed: "I want you to build me some of those."

So they did. With support from the Department of Defense and NASA, Miller's undergraduates built five working droids. And now, one of them is onboard the International Space Station (ISS).

"It only looks like a battle droid," laughs Miller. It's actually a tiny satellite—the first of three NASA plans to send to the ISS. Together, they'll navigate the corridors of the space station, learning how to fly in formation.

The idea is to work with the little robots, and refine ways to coordinate their movements. There's only one of them up in the space station now, but the plan is to add two more, and then get them to start working in tandem. Tiny satellites are the wave of the future. They can easily hitch a ride with other payloads, which makes them cheap to transport, and a string of them could replace a larger satellite in orbit. So, instead of one big satellite circling the Earth (or whatever other planet we might be wanting them to circle) and sending back readings from one location at a time, you would have a network of them, covering more territory with more flexibility. If one gets damaged, the others will shift to compensate, coordinating among themselves.

The getting them to coordinate part is where the space station experiments will come in. It's easier said than done. There's an awful lot of complicated calculations and mechanics to get worked out before the little droids will be able get it all together. The hope is that, when they do, the things that scientists have learned in the process will also help with other complicated space activities, like joining large sections of a space ship.

Possible applications include NASA's return to the Moon (see the Vision for Space Exploration). One way to build a moonship is to assemble it piece by piece in Earth orbit. "Software designed to control small satellites could just as well be used to maneuver the pieces of a spaceship together," says Miller.

So, the applications of science fiction to the real world continue to expand. The science keeps progressing, and the fiction keeps just a jump or two ahead. It's awfully cool to see the movie images that so captivated us in our youth inspiring actual scientific advancement, and coming to life out in space. May the trend continue--with one caveat. I hope they never build a Death Star.