Earth Space Continuum

No longer working at C&Space

2009-10-18T20:43:00.000-07:00

Yes that's right, I've quit C&Space, but typically for this blog, I've waited a couple of months before announcing it.

The last few years, including both work and study, have been very fulfilling and I certainly don't regret the time spent in Korea. The opportunity to work in New Space and meeting some of the active players has been a highlight.

I don't know if I have the patience to continue this blog in the same way now that I'm not working in the field. Commercial space development seems to be progressing over a period of decades rather than months. I might just prefer to occasionally check to see how things are going and take note of the major highlights (such as the anticipated Falcon 9 and SpaceShipTwo launches) rather than closely following every minor development.

If you would like to get in touch with me about anything, please just leave a message in the comments section and I'll get back to you shortly.

Good Luck and a happy Thanksgiving and Christmas in advance to all the new-spacers out there toiling to make the last frontier accessible!

Space Settlement post

2009-07-20T16:56:00.000-07:00

I didn't sign up to do a post on the 20th originally because I thought I might be traveling to the USA, that day, plus I'm in the middle of finishing my paper. This is actually the 21st for me, but I guess in the US timezones it is still the 20th.

Rather than a long post on an overall vision and rationale for space settlement, which I believe other bloggers can do better, I will just throw together a number of statements that summarize my own ideas and opinions.

I strongly believe in the concept of space settlement driven by non-government organizations. By this I mean private enterprise, and settler organizations. I'm not sure that it is inevitable, but it surely ought to be. My concept of space settlement is technology driven. I believe that people will venture into space when the tools and infrastructure are available for us to stay. Tools will include, for example, advanced tele-operated robots, and infrastructure will include long term maintainable life support systems, energy harvesting systems such as large solar concentrators, and magnetic field generators for protection against charged particles. While I think there will be a significant element of risk, the environment should be such that we can, for the most part, stay safely within a maintainable technology framework, with plenty of redundant options should anything go wrong.

I'm an asteroid settler, myself, rather than a Mars or Moon settler. By this I mean that I think that asteroids are likely to be the first places to be settled and will be much easier to access than gigantic clumps of round matter at the bottom of steep gravity wells. I'm predicting that most prospective settlers will prefer to live in approximately 1 earth g. and have some prospect of returning to earth, and will adapt quickly to the coriolis forces present in a rotating habitat.

I think the first settlers will not be in it for the money or even the thrills. Being one of the first off earth settlers is going to be like basically volunteering for the 21st or 22nd century's version of a lifetime of backbreaking labor. The only way the first habitat will be built is by a group of settlers who know that this will be their only option for survival in the long term. They won't be receiving much, if any, monetary benefit, but they will at least obtain their wish of being able to set up a mini-society in whatever way they wish, and having some likelihood that the people around them will share the same values.

Unless the space elevator is built, access to space is going to remain somewhat expensive, at least compared with air travel. I know many space enthusiasts are hoping for a vast low earth orbit infrastructure which can provide settlers with the materials they need. I'm not sure this will be the case. Settlers may have to be almost self sufficient, with the exception of certain high value, low mass products, such as medicines, ICs and precision mechanical devices. I think it is an important field of study to understand the technology necessary to maintain a colony with a limited mass flow rate, and mass transfer latency into the colony, and the period of time the colony can be entirely self sufficient based on their level of technological capability and resources.

Nothing is free, and the settlers will be paying for whatever supplies they receive somehow. I somehow feel that minerals from commercial mining ventures will not be one of the first exports. The initial exports are likely to be information. First, there will be a lot of interest on earth in the daily lives of these settlers. This could be one of the most valuable exports for quite a long period of time, until space travel becomes commonplace. Secondly, there will be much scientific knowledge to be gleaned from the environment around the settlement, for example observations of the sun and other planets, and detailed research on the composition of the asteroid itself. Later, high quality zero gravity research may also be conducted relatively cheaply by settlers.

Lastly, I'd just like to comment that although most of our focus is on finding better ways of getting out of earth's gravity well, there are other, just as important, fields of research that need our attention in order to spread civilization to beyond the planet. I suggest that space agencies in various countries that can't afford a large space program can participate in this kind of research in a really meaningful way. For example I would love to see Australia start a space program based not on developing launch vehicles, but on applying its considerable mining expertise to ways of harvesting materials from asteroids, and using them to build structures. That's a space program I could really be supportive of!

Congratulations SpaceX and ATSB

2009-07-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to SpaceX for a first successful commercial launch, and congratulations to ATSB for having the guts and foresight to select the Falcon 1 as their launch vehicle and saving a packet of cash by doing so!!

IEEE Spectrum on Mars

2009-06-30T18:18:00.000-07:00

Over the last month IEEE Spectrum have been doing a special on "Why Mars, Why Now"

They don't seem to have a permanent home for all the articles, so here are a few links in case some disappear:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/why-mars-why-now
http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/special-reports
http://spectrum.ieee.org/mars (actually returns a 404 error, but this link was found on an IEEE page and was redirected to previous link. Maybe they intend to make a new page with this link in the future.)

I'm putting their spaceflight section in the sidebar links.

Amazing artificial muscle made from CNT

2009-06-22T18:09:00.001-07:00

If half the claims in this article at IEEE Spectrum (actually from March, but I only discovered it a couple weeks ago) are true, we may be about to enter a new era of biomimetic robotics. In my robotics class last year, I learned that robots are usually quite weak for their size. To design a robot that can pick up another robot the same size and weight is still a difficult challenge. This invention may change that. The only thing is I can't see how the wine-rack explanation for how it works matches the claim of 220% dimensional change made in this video, unless they are referring to lateral dimensional change which doesn't seem to be very useful.

There must presumably be some more development work before they can be set to use, otherwise if it were me, I couldn't wait to try putting them into robotic arms and fingers and make a much more impressive demo.

Importantly this could be a good initial application for long nanotube fibers. In the video, those fibers look so much like space elevator cable sections!

X37 - some speculation

2009-06-04T22:31:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty pleased about the story about the X37B in space.com. It's funny how USAF and DARPA seem to be playing tortoise to NASAs hare. While the US military may not be the most efficient organization either, at least they seem have a good handle on what 'operational' means and the importance of having a well thought out plan for maintaining and running a system when it gets past the development stage, and how important it is to design a system with operational requirements in mind. The X37B is, of course, an experimental platform but it is interesting to speculate on what it might develop into in conjunction with a suitable heavy lift launcher.

I assume that the planned tests will involve integrating the X37B into an EELV as purely a payload, ie the current 1st and 2nd stages of the launch vehicle will be used. This will put a small winged return vehicle into LEO. It is interesting to compare the possible capabilities of a hypothetical, operational follow up to this system with the needs of USAF in space.

As I understand the USAF would like to have the following:
-ability to protect/replace assets in space,
-rapid and repeated delivery of munitions anywhere, anytime,

A followup system to the X37 could possibly have the following capability:
-rapid launch to orbit via heavy lift including possible recovery of the first stage if SpaceX are eventually successful with that,
-rapid turnaround between flights if the turnaround time between heavy lift launches can be reduced,
-ability to insert an object into orbit and return to a designated landing site,
-(maybe) launch to a suborbital trajectory over a target location, followed by powered return to CONUS.
-ability to loiter in orbit, with scope for limited orbit changes,
-ability to drop a payload during some sections of its non-orbital flight path.

some limitations:
-Whether you think this limitation is a good or bad thing depends on your point of view, but I can't see this hypothetical system becoming a 'space weapon' capable of dropping munitions from orbit simply due to the impracticability of having to decelerate the payload from orbital velocity, and only being over the target every 90 minutes or so. (although I suppose such a system might solve a need to avoid overflights of aircraft or missiles of other non-participating nations)
-The second stage will be disposable for any standard launch system in the forseeable future.
-In the event of a full fledged attack on space borne assets, it would be vulnerable to orbital debris.

The best part is that a successful operational system will be a good demonstrator for a commercial reusable orbital stage so I'm hoping that something practical comes out of this program. Who knows if one day we might be seeing routine launches of winged orbiters atop VTVL launchers.

changed my links again

2009-06-04T00:56:00.000-07:00

After I got in email contact with the author of the ISS blog offering me a 'link exchange' (see 2 posts back in comments) I strongly suspected based on the email I received that the blog was a mashup done by a group of professionals, probably in a poor part of the world where the work involved might actually pay enough to be worth it. This was confirmed by a google search of a text sample from the blog that returned an article in the NASA site. I should have guessed it before due to the odd nature of the blog's own links. (men's suits indeed!) The link is gone and I've replaced it with a couple of links to sites that make their own content.

To anyone who wants to propose a link exchange, the site you want me to link to needs to have 3 qualities:
-be interesting to me,
-be maintained by a human,
-be of sufficient quality.

frankly I would probably fail my own blog based on the last point (and yes I am human :-) )

Relay board completion

2009-06-02T18:27:00.000-07:00

I've finished the relay board and it's been working well for several weeks. We can now independently control up to 32 24V valves, expandable to 35, plus 3 spark plug igniters. I discovered that I had made some mistakes with the PCB design after all, when I received it which was a bit disappointing. Fortunately there were some relatively simple workarounds that didn't require carving up the board. I'm not sure if I subconsciously screened the design for really bad errors and just ignored the others. It just goes to show that absence of anxiety about a design should not be the only indicator of the quality of said design!

A reader asked me if we could swap links, so I have put a link to his ISS blog in the sidebar. Somehow, when I changed the blog design the old links were lost. I'll have to get around to adding some more soon.

I'm heading into a period of reduced busy-ness, especially following my final exam next week, so hopefully I can start posting a bit more often. There is certainly no shortage of topics to post about at the moment!

Finished the relay board PCB design

2009-04-13T00:05:00.000-07:00

I've been spending much of the last two weeks designing a PCB to hold the relays and associated drivers for the 24VDC power signals to the engine valves and the 220Vrms power to the igniters. (This is the first time I have designed a complex PCB. The reason for the new board is that the current board doesn't have enough 24V channels even with additional relays glued onto the top of the board.) I finally sent off the file to Sunstone Circuits on Saturday.

Some time ago I read an entry in Wayne Hales' blog about the origin of "burning rocks" issues and how they still give the Space Shuttle Flight Director sleepless nights.

Well, I can tell you that "burning rocks" anxiety is a real factor, even with such a trivial matter as sending a PCB file off for manufacture. In my case, if I have made a mistake, in the worst case it would cost around $300 to get the boards remade. More likely I would have to do messy board mods. (possible because the boards are only 2 layer) In the event that the board could not be modded the lost time waiting for the faulty board, finding the problem and fixing it, then possibly getting the board remade would be a significant issue. It could conceivably cost up to 3 weeks, so I was understandably cautious.

Based on previous experience, not to mention having burning rocks on my mind, I was not completely unsurprised to get a sudden anxiety kick at the point when I was prompted to enter my credit card details. Of course I closed the window straight away and put the anxiety to good use, trying to think of things I might have forgotten. (such as component clearance off the edge of the board) I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that having got so close to committing myself, I could feel my mind straining to think of something I had neglected to consider seriously.

As it stands I don't recall making any changes to the PCB between the first and final submission attempt, but when I finally did pay up and submit the PCB design I had very little anxiety about my design, and was more concerned about using the 10% discount coupon.

Burning rocks issues are real. I think, if it hasn't already happened, there needs to be some serious studies into the psychological mechanisms behind it and whatever is learned needs to be integrated into engineering courses.

In any case, the next test will be to find out if their absence implies a clean design, as I will find out when I get the PCBs in a week or so! In the mean time, to avoid burning rocks issues I recommend some imaginary brinkmanship. Pretend that the design you are submitting three months before the final article is launched is actually going to be used in action in two weeks, or one week - or tomorrow. Hopefully those little issues your mind blanks out so easily will be forced out into your consciousness :-)

What's keeping me so busy, and link to smart grid article

2009-03-18T21:14:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted for a little while because I have been fully occupied with:
-Modifications to make the CHASE-10 Engine Monitor-Controller (CE-MORE) easier to use,
-working on the next upgrade to the CE-MORE that will allow active control of the engine (which I also intend to be related to my masters degree paper) .
-Starting my last two classes for the masters degree course.
-Planning how to complete the modifications to the CE-MORE gui to put all the system specific configuration data into separate files.
-Working with the other engineers as we prepare to move the test facility to a different location, ie start to put together procedures for making the CE-MORE portable.

In spite of all this activity, I had time to read this article on the Wall St Journal about a trial smart grid project in Boulder, Colorado, which is similar to what I talked about in a previous post (I'll have to start calling this an energy blog!). There's no indication that the users will be given the opportunity to preselect a cutoff cost for their power usage, as I had proposed, however I did notice that the power utility, Xcel, wants to be able to modify the power cost at 5 to 10 minute intervals, which suggests that customers really, really ought to be able to cut off power to their appliances or modify the thermostat automatically at a price threshold. If this were the case, I don't think many people would need or want to track their electricity usage in such minute detail as the article described.

Ideas on promoting clean energy through your electricity bill

2009-03-05T23:41:00.001-08:00

Here's my policy suggestion on how to set up the fee structure for electricity usage, to promote clean energy (ie non polluting, reduced or nil CO2 emissions).

To start with, let's make some some basic assumptions. If you don't agree with them, so be it. I think they represent mainstream public opinion.

I think most people agree that non CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) coal plants are not great for the environment. However they continue into the 21st century due to their obvious advantages of low cost, reliable output and long term plentiful supply of fuel. Therefore by the same token, most people know that in the short term we can't do without them.

On the other hand, with the possible exception of nuclear, clean energy sources just aren't capable of competing on all fronts with coal. However there's no doubt that we have to have it to ensure our supply of electrical energy if we either want to start shutting down coal plants or grow our energy supply further.

Therefore we need some way of promoting clean energy that ensures the best technology is given the best chance regardless of what it looks like.

So here's my idea:

First, divide all electricity sources into two categories. Let's call them Old Energy and New Energy. Old Energy would include non CCS coal plants and any other energy source we really don't like. New Energy would include everything else. Natural Gas plants could fall into either category, or you could make a third just for it, but I think that would be too complicated.

Every single household and every business, would have two parts to their electricity bill, a separate charge for Old Energy and for New Energy. At any one time, only a certain number of kilowatts can be charged to the Old Energy portion of the account, and anything else must be charged to New Energy. The maximum number of Old Energy kilowatts at any time during the day may be fixed per household, or perhaps legislation would have to be introduced so that larger households have a higher allowance.

The purpose of this would be to limit the amount of Old Energy that may be produced while allowing low income households to access Old Energy at a reasonable price. Meanwhile those households that wish to pay more could do so, and shouldn't be made to feel guilty for being energy hogs since they are not competing with the poor for their supply of New Energy and the energy is clean isn't it? The smart metering I talked about in my previous post would ensure that no-one gets nasty shocks when they get their end of the month/quarter bill, regardless of their income or energy expenses.

Under this scheme, all subsidies for New Energy sources would be eliminated and the market would decide itself the value of New Energy sources that might vary depending on the time of day, or even at random, as might be for some wind energy plants.

I can see at least one major weakness in this idea (I wonder what the others are!), which is how to allocate Old Energy amongst large and energy intensive businesses, that require reliable baseload power at a predicable cost. Perhaps after the initial allowance of Old Energy has been divvied up amongst households and small businesses, businesses could bid for the rest, in a similar manner to carbon credits. It's a bit complicated but it might just work.

Another lesser weakness, in my opinion, is that there may not be much scope for reducing the supply of Old Energy over time, without hurting low income earners. It is hoped that over time, as the economies of scale for generating New Energy start to kick in, the cost difference will decrease, but there is no guarantee that this will happen. Depending on how 'compassionate' your government likes to be, some New Energy sources with baseload capability could be subsidized and put into the Old Energy category just to keep everyone happy.

Busy today

2009-02-26T00:45:00.001-08:00

I was going to write a follow on post about electricity metering, but I was too busy today. I coded the GUI for the test system controller using Python/Tkinter, and was stuck for a while trying to figure out how to put a message to the user temporarily over the main display while the system is converting the acquired data to csv format, a process that can take several seconds.

The problem was that the screen doesn't refresh until the callback that starts the process is complete. Eventually I found out how to generate an 'alarm' after a specified delay which can be attached to another callback. So the first callback puts up the message and starts a separate thread that converts the data, then exits to allow the main window to refresh. Then the alarm occurs after about 1 second and the alarm callback blocks until the convert process is complete, then closes the message. Simple!

Are there any better ways? (apart from not using Tkinter)

Smart Metering

2009-02-23T21:17:00.000-08:00

I was surprised to find that it took Google to develop a method of actually allowing the consumer to see their electicity use and payment in real time. Naively I had assumed that this is what smart metering is about when I first heard the term.

However it is not clear if they intend to fulfil the second part of my very own 'Smart Metering Vision' by providing the means for consumers to set appliances to automatically turn off (and alert the owner) when electricity rates, changing in real time, reach a 'cutoff point'.

Surely, this is the only way to allow a free market for electricity to exist. The user decides in advance how much they are willing to pay, and it is up to the utilities to try and provide sufficient power to maximise their profits in a competitive environment. To me it seems a much better solution than brownout inducing price caps, or having the utility arbitrarily switch off your heater/aircon/dryer.

I have some more thoughts on electricity metering and how to integrate with a pricing structure that promotes clean energy without selective subsidies or high prices across the board. But they will have to wait until another day, maybe tomorrow. ;-)

Problem with testing new turbine

2009-02-23T21:11:00.000-08:00

We encountered a problem related to our new turbopump turbine. The turbine spins up a lot slower than we expected. This apparently has a ripple on effect to other parts of the test system in a way that I don't fully understand. Various flow rates and orifice sizes will have to be adjusted. I hope it doesn't delay us too much. I'll provide more updates as information comes to light.

Spilling Tests

2009-02-19T00:45:00.000-08:00

We spent much of today out in the cold doing spilling tests. We got some odd results from some of the flowmeters, so we'll investigate those, and if it turns out that there are no serious anomalies, we'll be go for a full engine firing.

That NASA Management Video

2009-02-15T20:15:00.000-08:00

I recently became aware of this video on NASA management problems (via zdnet and npr). It was apparently was put together by astronaut Andy Thomas and was acted out by actual NASA employees. According to Hobbyspace it's been known about for a while now.

If the issues acted out in the video are representative of NASA, it raises concerns about NASA's ability to complete large projects on time and on budget that are much more serious than just the usual problems of large organizations.

Specifically, my concern is this: suppose an organization with the management problems outlined in the video takes on a large project. This project is then divided into separate sub-projects with each sub-project corresponding to a subsystem that is specified with a list of requirements strictly based on a set of top level requirements that represent the goals of the system as a whole. The subsystems are then in turn broken down and more requirements are derived for them.

As a simple example, suppose there are 10 subsystems, each with its own project and management team. Each team is working hard to ensure that the subsystem meets its requirements, but no more than that. Because the people in the organization are dedicated and competent, 9 out of 10 projects result in a subsystem that meets the requirements, however one unlucky project team happens to get the subsystem with unknown problems, that couldn't have been predicted at the start of the project. They miss the requirements goals by about 30%. Now, because all the other teams were only trying to meet the requirements, not exceed them, and only managed to exceed them by a few percent at most, there are no easy ways to make up for the loss in performance or capability. It may be possible to ask some of the other teams to do a redesign, but the other teams, not wanting to make it seem that their initial design was flawed, all vouch for their own designs, based on the unarguable fact that their current design meets the requirements.

The only alternative is to push the problem up into the next higher level of integration, where problems with other sub-systems meeting their requirements are starting to accumulate and cause serious performance/cost/performance issues. Eventually, it is found that the entire system design is flawed as measured against the requirements, forcing either costly design changes or reducing the performance requirements to an obtainable level.

Short of deconstructing the entire organization, I can think of two possible mitigation measures that may be taken to protect against the above scenario. The first method is just to ensure that all performance requirements have generous margins. This involves giving the design team a set of performance requirements that are tighter than strictly necessary, with the option of loosening them later on, however it does somewhat corrupt the whole concept of having the requirements fully derived from the top level, and unless communication with the organization is very good, the individual teams may not have a clear idea of how critical the requirement actually is.

The second is to form 'tiger teams' that actively go out and search for bad designs, and correct them. I suppose this could be quite effective, and could also be used as a formidable 'stick' to threaten low level managers with if their team's design is suboptimal, given the ego bruising that would occur if one's own design were overhauled. However, I doubt that tiger teams are often used this way, although I could be wrong. And even if it were the case, a manager might just think it easier to weather the storm, when the tiger team members come knocking on his/her door, judging the risk of being 'caught' with a poor design preferable to a pre-emptive design change making it look like the team got it wrong from the start.

In any case this approach could have the unwanted, serious side effect of fostering a herd mentality amongst the staff, who learn never to stand out from the crowd for fear of being picked out by a bunch of domain experts hunting for a reason to justify their jobs. If done badly, a tiger team approach could be disastrous for employee morale.

Ultimately the best solution is 'organizational redundancy', by which I mean utilizing multiple organizations with differing management cultures and design methodologies, and allocating work strictly on the basis of past performance. Clark Lindsey commented in his blog entry about this video, saying "The only way I see NASA overcoming this problem is to move product development out to commercial companies and letting them compete to build the products". If this were the case, the US taxpayer could have a lot more confidence that their money is being used effectively, and the USA would have a much more vibrant and viable space program.

Unfortunately, given the political realities, an outsourced space program seems unlikely, in which case we can only hope that either the problems shown in the video are exaggerated, or that somehow NASA can reform itself. If the video is being used at management retreats, at least they have gotten to the stage of acknowledging the problem. The next stage is treatment, but I guess we won't know the results until the next big government mandated project. Personally I don't think the US taxpayer will want to wait that long.

Will Ares I and V be NASA's last launch vehicles?

Toaster from scratch

2009-02-13T19:44:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting project: Thomas Thwaites, who is studying at the Royal College of the Arts in London, has embarked on the quest to build a toaster from scratch, using only raw materials such as iron ore and crude oil.

Though his reasons in no part mention space colonization, his work could have some valuable lessons for those of us wondering what are the minimum necessary equipment, resources and manpower necessary for a group of people to survive and thrive in a colony mostly separate from the mass produced resources available here on earth. Even at this early stage he has learned how to smelt iron ore using only a domestic microwave oven - a handy skill for an off earth colonist.

Some people may disagree with me, but I'm guessing that the first off-earth settlers will be pretty much self sufficient initially. Any supplies delivered on an ongoing basis are likely be limited to lightweight, high value goods, such as roll/fold up solar panels, fuel cell membranes, precision mechanical components, semiconductor devices and medical supplies. Therefore, before they can head out, we will need a clear idea of the infrastructure the settlers will need to maintain their colony at a given minimum mass or value transfer rate from earth.

A lot more work needs to be done in physically building and testing the needed infrastructure for an off-earth colony, and the Toaster Project is a step in the right direction! I would like to see a lot more of this kind of thing, and to get our heads around the problem, I suggest it could be done as a kind of competitive event where several teams compete to see who can reproduce various important technologies from scratch the fastest, based on a set of resources that are themselves reproducible. Possible technologies could range from basic ones such as a smelting facility and forge, glass or glue and fabric, to more complex tech such as a pressure chamber, liquid pump, insulated electrical wire, oxygen/hydrogen production or a functioning mining drill. (I think it would make a great TV show!) Ideally, equipment provided for the competition will also be a goal technology for the competitors, to demonstrate that the colony will be perpetually self sustaining with the given equipment set.

Let me know if this idea or a variant is already in existence.

Gas Generator Tests

2009-02-12T21:16:00.000-08:00

Here are some pictures from our recent gas generator tests. We were pretty happy with the result. The picture is a hotlink to our website which doesn't seem to have the news release in the English version.

btw, we have the entire test stand set up inside a temporary tent structure right now to protect ourselves and the engine against rain and snow over winter.

Thoughts on a universal Launch Escape System

2009-02-12T21:14:00.001-08:00

I'm completely unqualified to provide any serious analysis of this subject but it is my hope that someone else more qualified may pick it up and run with it...

I get the impression that a Launch Escape System (LES) on a crewed launch vehicle is not considered the most fundamental consideration of safety. By that I mean that risk analyses tend to calculate the risk of loss of the entire vehicle, and then tack on the failure rate of the LES as an extra factor. I'm sure I've seen the probability of loss of crew calculated like this a number of times.

My question is " Can the reliability of the LES, given loss of vehicle be drastically improved?"

I suspect the answer is 'yes' for a number of reasons:

-Identified Vehicle failure modes as related to LES mostly seem to assume the worst possible scenario, eg an explosion at maximum velocity. But many failure modes may be quite benign from the point of view of the LES, eg drifting out of the correct flight path or loss of adequate thrust.

-Not many LESs have been designed. A quick online search that inevitably led to Wikipedia revealed only two that have been or will be used in operational systems, the Ares-I Launch Abort System, and the Apollo LES. There must surely be great scope for iterative improvements.

-As far as I know, an LES has never been designed as an individual project with the explicit goal of saving the crew regardless of how the rocket underneath behaves.

-If great advances in crash safety can be made in motor car racing, it is reasonable to hope that some of the same principles are transferrable to launch systems.

-The next generation of fighter aircraft, such as the Eurofighter Typhoon have extremely capable ejection systems that are intelligent enough to adjust their behaviour for the situation, to maximise the likelihood of survival for the pilot, eg by dropping them down more quickly from high altitude using a drogue shute.

Suppose NASA were to make development of a new 'safe' LES that could be fitted to either Falcon 9 or EELV's, or possibly other rockets a priority, the whole method of crewed launch vehicle development could change. With such a prototype LES in hand, NASA could deliberately search for unproven launch vehicles for use in an iterative test regime. This would make a great partnership between NASA and private companies, although admittedly each organization would have almost diametrically opposed goals during the test process. NASA would be happy for catastrophic failures to occur in order to test their system under realistic conditions, while the private entity offering the launch vehicle would be trying to ensure NASA doesn't get to test their LES too thoroughly! A nice problem to have would be where the unproven launch vehicles are found to be too reliable to meet the test objectives, forcing NASA to deliberately rig the launches to induce failures - something that hasn't been done previously to my knowledge.

Australia Bushfires

2009-02-11T19:46:00.000-08:00

By now most people will have learned of the tragic events of last Saturday in Australia. Over the course of a few hours, over 300,000 hectares of land was destroyed, ~~1000~~1831 houses were burned down, an estimated 200 to 300 people were killed and 5000 were left homeless. The state affected was my home state of Victoria, and many of the places destroyed we have visited in the past, including the tourist town of Marysville, which is was just a couple of hours scenic drive from our previous home in Nunawading. It used to be one of my favorite day trip destinations. Fortunately I don't have any friends or family that were directly affected, as far as I know, although I did make a call to a couple in Bendigo we know, who were ok.
It is a strange feeling being overseas while all this happened. I didn't find out until Sunday night when my mum called to give me the news. Being so disconnected from the events despite the amazingly comprehensive online coverage yields a sense of unreality to it all.
The reason for such utter destruction was an unusual confluence of circumstances. The previous week, the state of Victoria had been subject to a heatwave with temperatures soaring to 43 to 44 deg. C in Melbourne. (109.4 to 111.2F). Then on the day the fires happened, the temperature reached a never before recorded 46.4C (115.5F) along with gale force winds. In Kinglake, one of the worst hit areas, a house surrounded by 16 hectares of almost completely bare paddock burned down, killing the two occupants even though they were actively trying to save the house, with working pumps connected to a full dam. Survivors describe the locations near the bushfire fronts as raining embers.

My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.

Gearing up for another engine firing test

2009-02-09T19:18:00.000-08:00

Almost exactly the same time of year after last year's test we are gearing up for another one. This time things should work a lot more smoothly. We are much better at data acquisition, procedures, etc.

My own contribution is the 'CEMORE' (CHASE-10 Engine MOnitor-REgulator) engine controller. Last year I was using a serial interface to shift a small amount of data to the PC from the FPGA. Now I'm using the PXA272 microprocessor on the development board, to provide an Ethernet link to the PC. This is providing a data transfer rate of 256K/sec with our current hardware, compared with 1K/sec of unreliable transmission, previously. The better setup allows the CEMORE to be our basic DAQ system, with the NI DAQ system used as backup on some data channels. For our first test last year, the setup was the other way round, with the NI system as the primary.

Other enhancements include the capability to rapidly modify the 'cyclogram', the sequence of actuator controls during the firing, to allow fast turnaround during test attempts, and other improvements for increased reconfigurability.

I'm Baaaaack

2009-02-09T18:26:00.000-08:00

After a hiatus of nearly a year, I've decided to restart this blog. I'm still here in Korea at the same place, pretty much doing the same thing, so what's new, and why did I stop posting for so long and then suddenly start over?

Well, there were a number of reasons I stopped posting. Certainly I was just too busy, what with studying part time and working and trying to have enough time for family. But as well as that, I have to admit I was discouraged after my company's first attempt at firing the new engine. There was too much time pressure and I felt that marketing commitments had taken priority over the actual engineering, which ultimately severely limited our marketing potential since we were unable to collect the data during the test that would have shown conclusively whether the test had been a success. Nevertheless the company was able to attract significant investment, just by being able to produce a good display of smoke and fire on the demonstration day, which just goes to show! (By the way, although we didn't get good data, we recorded the firing on video, and there is evidence to indicate that the firing was successful, but the mixture ratio was out, resulting in an almost clear, invisible flame - at least that is what I have been told)

Another reason was that I was unable to decide what the blog should be about. There are plenty of really good blogs that post regular news stories, or do detailed in depth analysis of space issues. I certainly have a different perspective based on my location and background but that didn't translate to new topics, so I started to feel that either I had to find new topics and a new focus for the blog, or to fully immerse myself in the nitty gritty of ongoing space related news and discussion in order to provide the quality I expected of myself.

Lastly, I found some of my own ideas in flux, and I wanted to be clear about my own opinions before commenting about someone else's.

So why start posting again and what am I going to write about anyway? Blogs such as Hobbyspace and Transterrestrial Musings offer respectively space related comprehensive online news coverage and detailed in depth analysis and opinion, and there is no point replicating that. Instead I will endeavour to offer a variety of items, such as news about my company, ideas and commentary on space related policy, bits of personal news trivia as it comes up, some news and analysis on Korea, my country of residence, some minor technical stuff, and some daft ideas that come to me from time to time. I have thought of having a different topic for each day of the week, but considering I was posting less than once a month before quitting for almost a year, this could be considered a little ambitious, maybe? Generally, I want to post stuff that might matter to someone else, expands the reader's horizons and perhaps makes their day better.

There is one other topic I want to cover, which is a large part of my reason for restarting. Lately there has been some discussion about motivations and reasons for going into space and the role of government and private industry/ventures. I want to weigh in on this discussion with my own perspective and some associated ideas on space policy, which, while being at least partially in sync with the opinions of the better known commentators, have a different focus that might just have an impact with some readers. You will find out what I mean if you keep reading and I keep posting :)

Finally, I want to maintain this blog in the spirit of a (web) log, not an authoritative text. I doubt that I will have time to furnish every claim and argument with references, although ideally I would like to. I'm likely to make mistakes and change my opinions over a period of time, or even stop posting altogether for a while if things gets too busy. That's just the way life is.

Successful Firing - and a good show for the spectators

2008-02-29T14:28:00.000-08:00

On Friday we actually succeeded in firing the new engine! But we did have a few difficulties that made the end of the test interesting. During the chill-down sequence we inadvertently left a purging valve open too long and ran out of liquified nitrogen!

So that meant we were stuck with two full tanks of propellant, a nice cold engine but no way to stop the combustion once the test was over. This was all in front of a crowd of maybe 100 invited onlookers and a substantial media crew. They certainly do things in style over here!

So what did we do? The show had to go on, of course. I received the command to continue with pressurization and then the firing sequence. The actual firing went without a hitch. The engine made a loud bang during ignition, as I was told would happen. During the actual firing, there was actually less noise than I expected, and the plume was almost invisible. Then after the main sequence was complete, the engine continued to flame for quite a long period of time, spilling quantities of LNG on the ground and causing a spectacular fire. After most of the propellant had burned up, someone had to approach the test stand with a fire extinguisher to put out the blaze.

Apparently the engine was unharmed since the temperature of the blaze at the end was too low to cause any damage.

So all in all, a successful event. Afterwards I got a glimpse of the thrust level reached during the test and it looked adequate, but I won't quote any numbers because they might be wrong.

Afterwards I got to see liquid oxygen (LOX) up close for the first time. The CEO of the contracted company who looks after the engine plumbing had some steaming in an open plastic container and was showing it around. It was a beautiful clear icy blue color. He suggested that we should drink some and it would be a cool and refreshing beverage. :)

Quick update

2008-02-28T03:43:00.001-08:00

It looks like we will be going ahead with the firing test tomorrow! Lots of small delays have eaten into our intended dress rehearsal period such that we only finished the spilling test today. We will only have time for one complete dry run tomorrow morning. The spill test result, while not ideal, was considered acceptable enough to continue with the next stage.
We will be situated in a converted shipping container about 40 meters from the engine, so when ignition occurs it will be extremely loud. Our audience, which as I said before includes filmcrews from major Korean media companies, will be not much further away, out in the open. I've been told that it is quite safe, even if something goes wrong, because the propellants will be stored at a lower pressure than for a pressure fed engine.
I'm very thankful that the engine control system is now running extremely reliably and I seem to have shaken out all the bugs in the system, including non-critical comms problems that have persisted for some time. I will be very surprised if the control system causes any problems tomorrow.
Initially I will be controlling valves individually as commanded by an individual with the title "Test Commander" (The title is probably a translation from Russian to Korean to English, but at least it is unambiguous.) He will also command the other operators to manually open or close the manually operated valves as required. Then, I will click a button to start the automated test sequence that will last for about 30 seconds, with a 10 second burn time.

I'll put up a post to describe the result, when I remember!

Opinion - Why Space?

2008-02-21T22:51:00.000-08:00

Since, as I said in my last post, I'm not pressed for time, I thought I'd do a quick opinion piece. Lately, with the presidential primaries in the US, there has been some talk about the reasons for having manned space exploration funded by the government. Personally I can think of only one really important reason - to set up the conditions for economic growth to continue into the long term future. The expression 'environmental sustainability' has reached popular recognition and acceptance, and for good reason. However sustainability has its own risks if carried into the long term. Stagnation, both economic and social, are the inevitable result. A much better model is gradual economic expansion, which can really only be supported by harvesting space based resources.
Until recently, I thought this would be a good argument to use to convince government that it is worthwhile supporting research into technology leading to space settlement, but apparently, some don't believe in such long term planning. Funding of the ITER project by the US government has been slashed to only $10.7 million this year, from $160 million promised. The reason given from the article: “R&D resources just aren’t there to support projects that are so expensive and have shown so little potential for promise in the near term.”
If that attitude is carried over into space exploration, then the inevitable conclusion will be reached that there is no compelling reason to fund crewed space exploration at all.

Delay

2008-02-21T22:07:00.000-08:00

We were all set to perform our first engine test on Thursday next week, then yesterday, suddenly someone noticed some really nasty welding problems with the main propellant feed lines. The pipes and fittings were all provided by a subcontractor that was thought to be reliable. They are taking the problem seriously though. No less than 5 of them arrived at the test site at 7:00am and promised to have the problem fixed by 5pm today!

Meanwhile since the engine controller system is mostly complete, I am finding myself suddenly with no urgent tasks to work on, until the engine test system is complete. It's somewhat like being in the eye of a hurricane.

If you are wondering what all the hurry is about, the reason is that for marketing reasons we are trying to move the test date forward to next week if at all possible. Additionally the test will also be used for publicity purposes with representatives from all the (Korean) national media stations present. Frankly, this is a bit of a gamble, since we are testing a new engine using our own brand new facilities. We are depending on the heritage of the engine, with the mixing head and turbopump design both being in common with the previous engine that was successfully tested.

The official test date is now Friday next week. I'll keep posting any significant news.

Test preparations update

2008-02-15T18:50:00.001-08:00

Yesterday morning was all meetings. I demonstrated the engine control system to be used for the test, and Mr Park demo'd the test sequence. Then, Unyong (Violet) Cha showed us the new company website design that will soon be rolled out.

We are now within a few weeks of performing our first engine test with the new lightweight engine components. I'll keep you posted if we have news to share.

International Perspective

2008-02-04T20:30:00.000-08:00

Jeff Faust recently commented on a speech by Michael Griffin. I think he is wrong in one respect, in what he said. I seem to recall he has said the same kind of thing before. It is completely untrue that the USA would gain standing in the world by giving up its manned spaceflight program in favour of concentrating on internal affairs such as climate change, healthcare etc.

I don't know about western Europe, but in my experience the average person outside of the USA is surprisingly uninterested in the US participation in Kyoto and degree of participation in alternative energy research, or other fashionable activities. The US manned space program has a highly visible iconic (it is associated with a number of iconic images, such as the space shuttle launch, and the planting of the US flag on the moon) presence that is recognized and celebrated the world over. It probably doesn't hurt that it is also run by a civilian organization. Amongst average people around the world, and certainly here in Korea, it is seen as one of those things that is distinctly American, in the best possible sense.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that if the US were to willingly give up its lead in crewed spaceflight, it would probably be seen as somewhat strange, and a symptom of some unrevealed weakness. I certainly can't see any respect being gained from it.

Engine test related work

2008-01-15T21:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's work consisted of two engine test related tasks. First we sent off our engine to Vitzro for spill and leakage tests. Second we fired a torch ignition system for the first time, using our own control and monitoring system. It was a useful initial test of our systems and procedures. I started to learn first hand the difficulty of rocket engine tests when I observed some mysterious interference on one of the control system's communication channels. It only happened when the spark plug ignition system was turned on. In combination with the torch igniting and becoming very noisy, it gave me a heck of a fright. Changing the location of the RS232 cable and uncoiling the power cable to the spark plug seemed to help, so we were able to complete the initial tests by this morning but I need to make sure the interference problem doesn't crop up again because it prevents communications from the control system to the operator's PC. Next up is firing all three igniters simultaneously. It's kind of exciting to be playing with some real fire at last :)

Major News Update for C&Space!

2007-11-16T16:39:00.000-08:00

I have a couple of news items for C&Space:

First, our office has moved! C&Space now owns its own site located in Cheo-In Gu within the city of Yongin, slightly further south of Seoul than our previous office. Our new office is just beyond the edge of the highly developed area of Gyounggi province around Seoul, so we are surrounded by forest on one side and the air quality seems to be a bit better.

Second, our new flightweight engine, integrated with the test stand, has been delivered to the site. (as shown in the photos) I'm only about 5ft6 so you can see the engine is not so big. The tanks will supply enough propellant to support a 10 second firing.

The entire test facility, including the test stand and control room is mobile, and can easily be loaded onto the backs of two flatbed trucks for transport to a remote testing location. We plan to be doing just that within two months when we start our firing tests.

By the way, I also feel obliged to comment that Time magazine's implicit crediting of another company with the "invention" of the methane rocket engine in 2007 suggests a myopically US centered attitude when it comes to technology reporting. We actually did our first integrated firing test in 2005!

What I've been up to

2007-08-05T23:44:00.000-07:00

I'm still trying to figure out a way of fitting blogging into my weekly schedule in a way that doesn't get compromised. I've tried after work at the office, but that doesn't work well because my wife complains that I'm always late for dinner. I've tried at home, but there are usually one-hundred and one other things I should be doing there that take priority. I tried typing my blog items in tiny pieces with the intention of posting them at the end of the week. The end result was that I ended up with two perfectly fine blog entries that were completely out of date by the time I was ready to post. (I may yet be able to salvage the one about space solar power) The other post about Orbital Express will probably have to be dropped.

The kind of thing that has kept me busy has been development of the electronic control system for our next methane engine plus helping out with the data acquisition system design, learning Korean, and now preparing to start my first semester of a masters degree in Computer System engineering at Sung Kyun Kwan University (SKKU). While I do any of these tasks at home, I am usually being distracted by my 10 month old son who has now achieved the development milestones of being able to pull books and other items off shelves, eat tiny objects off the floor, eat books he has previously pulled off the shelves, eat the contents of plant pots, and when he's done, find daddy and demand to be picked up.

My plan now is to somewhat modify the contents of my blogs. I've been trying to post exclusively about space stuff, but the problem with this is that I'm not really an expert in space systems, especially the launch vehicle side of things. I really doubt that my opinion in those areas counts for very much. Instead I want to focus a little more on my personal experience of living and working in Korea. I suspect this will be more interesting to a lot of people, and will be a subject I can be a little more authoritative with, and quite frankly, will be less difficult to write accurately about. I will also try to talk a little more about the company I work for, although I am somewhat limited in what I can say since we want to avoid building false expectations, or providing our competitors with free information about us. I also hope to be a bit braver about hitting the 'Publish Post' button when I've finished my entries. It's just a blog after all, not a trade publication. ;-)

Chinese ASAT vs US Orbital Rendezvous

2007-05-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

A comparison of the Chinese ASAT test and the US orbital rendezvous and docking test makes an interesting contrast, to some extent even reversing some racial stereotypes often applied to Asians and the USA.

The Chinese military's January 11 pretentious demonstration of ASAT capability consisted of blasting the disused Chinese Feng Yun 1C satellite into hazardous fragments.

A few months later subcontractors of DARPA in the USA completed a beautifully executed demonstration of the mastery of space that I suspect has been tailored as a response to the Chinese test, shown to the rest of the world complete with video evidence stitched together from photos taken during the mission (unfortunately I am unable to see it because it is on a .mil site that presumably blocks page reads from outside the US, although I previously saw a clip on, I think, the space.com site).

So now, even if the Chinese can blast entire flotillas of satellites into smithereens and make LEO virtually unusable, for now only the US is capable of making an 'ASTRO' satellite that can gently float up to another satellite, photograph it, refuel it and otherwise service it, or alternatively spin it up, push it into a useless orbit or deorbit it altogether, all without affecting the surrounding space environment in the slightest.

Of course the specific purpose of the ongoing tests is to develop an in orbit servicing capability that will greatly increase the lifespan of satellites and reduce costs. However, the goals of this mission and the was clearly not formulated in a vacuum, if you'll excuse the pun. There is no doubt in my mind that DARPA has identified satellite manouverability, and rendezvous capability as a high priority need, partly as a result of ASAT research in foreign countries.

Nevertheless, in order to have full control of LEO, the DOD really needs rapid access to space (or Operationally Responsive Space capability) in order to ensure the necessary hardware can be put in place when needed. It is to be hoped that a future Presidental administration realize the importance of this, and the wrong headedness of pursuing an unenforceable treaty prohibiting ASAT technology when they are so close to the goal of complete mastery of near Earth space.

Finished first prototype engine control system

2007-05-08T20:53:00.000-07:00

I've been quite busy at work lately, finishing the first prototype for the CHASE-10 engine electronic control system, which is the main reason for the lack of blog posts lately. I've now finished the first prototype. It performs a real time data acquisition and signal processing on up to 42 analog input signals. One of the main requirements was engine health monitoring, so it performs Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) on up to 20 input channels, at a maximum sampling frequency of either 20KHz or 60KHz. The FFTs will be mainly used to monitor the pressure sensor and accelerometer signals. The system also incorporates an end-to-end simulation mode.
We're now thinking about making it a commercial product. In the near future I'll be taking some photos and putting them on the website to announce the product officially. I'll put another post on this blog as well, to let everyone know.
My next development task will be improving the real time data transfer rate to a remote PC so that it can have a secondary role as a data acquisition system in our test facility, and building the next prototype which will use custom PCB's instead of development boards; - plenty to keep me busy over the next few months.

SpaceX's Successful Test, Almost Successful Launch

2007-03-21T00:21:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to SpaceX for their very close to successful Falcon 1 launch.

I am fortunate enough to be in a time zone where the launch time was quite convenient - around 10am. I watched the webcast yesterday and today, including the last moment abort. I would like to comment at this stage that the coverage at spaceflightnow.com was excellent. In fact for much of the time during the lead up to the launch and during the flight I had the browser window open to the spaceflightnow Falcon 1 status page, and the streaming webcast showing in a window next to it - not quite a mashup but good enough.

Spaceflightnow also has now posted quite a good summary of the launch. Originally I had thought that the second Kestrel burn was to finish orbit insertion by circularizing the orbit, but it seems from the spaceflightnow article that it was for demonstration purposes only. This means that if the Kestrel upper stage had continued to function properly for its first 6 and a half minute burn, Elon would have been celebrating a successful launch right now. As it stands, it appears that something caused it to spin up like a top which in turn, through an unknown event sequence, (such as propellant being pushed to the sides of the tank) caused the engine to shut down and, judging from the video, possibly pushed the TVC system beyond its limits.

Elon Musk said at the press conference that no additional test flights will be required before they launch a commercial payload. From a strictly engineering point of view I'm not sure this is the best decision, especially since SpaceX missed out on some important technology demonstrations, such as the Kestrel second burn, and simulated payload ejection. However, to be somewhat cynical, it makes sense from a business perspective. Assuming Elon has funds for one more test launch up his sleeve, he probably wants to keep it in reserve just in case he runs out of willing customers. Then, having achieved a final successful test flight he could gather a second round of customers. However, if he uses it too early and has another failure, some of his customers could pull out.

Something else that occurred to me is that Kestrel must seem a bit of a technology dead end to SpaceX. ~~I'm not sure where I saw it but I remember Elon saying that he regrets not developing a regeneratively cooled second stage. Also~~ Elon Musk has set his sights on heavy lift. The Falcon 1 first stage will be used as a clustered system for Falcon 9, but I assume Kestrel won't have a place in SpaceX's future designs. Perhaps this has resulted in some lack of attention to Kestrel, but that's pure speculation.

In any case, SpaceX's future looks bright after their latest attempt. Certainly they have demonstrated some technology innovations that are likely making customers such as USAF hungry for more. Their rapid turnaround from last moment launch abort to the next launch attempt was particularly impressive - around 1 hour I think. The winds of change are starting to blow a little harder in the US launch industry.

Pushing The Limits

2007-02-20T20:00:00.000-08:00

We frequently hear about aerospace projects struggling with weight gain, cost overruns, insufficient payload capacity or insufficient performance. When we hear of these kind of problems (or experience them ourselves) we often don't think too much of it - It just seems to be an inevitable part of the business. However it's worth asking ourselves every now and again, why does this happen so frequently and why don't the project managers simply start out with easier goals and less strenuous performance requirements? To answer the question, I've come up with the following list of legitimate reasons why aerospace projects so frequently push the limits of performance and capability:

-A military system must be designed to be operationally superior to other systems which it may face off against in the event of a conflict. For example, the F-22 Raptor should be superior to the Sukhoi Su-35. As an alternative example, the F-117A Nighthawk should have very good survivability against most established radar based defence systems.

-A commercial system should at least be equivalent in price and performance to competing systems, for example the Boeing 777 as compared with the Airbus A340.

-The system will be entered into contests, eg races. Any formula One or Indy 500 car is a good example of this outside of the aerospace industry.

-The company or organization with the task of developing the system was given a requirement including a 'maximum' or 'minimum' word, eg lowest cost, maximum possible payload, etc.

-The design team found that for some reason, the most marginal solution in one respect is clearly the optimum solution in almost every other way. In practice this will virtually never happen.

-The requirements 'happen' to specify a system which the technology will only marginally allow for, given the available budget.

Clearly there are some cases where pushing the envelope is desirable or necessary, but no sensible engineering manager would take on that kind of risk without good reason. It involves extensive test and validation of design concepts throughout the design process. It may also involve engineers squirrelling away weight and performance reserves in various subsystem designs, so that when the design budget is inevitably maxed out, they can dust off design B which might have significant penalties in other areas such as material and manufacturing cost. Significant rework, unexpected development cost increases and compromises in manufacturing and operating costs in order to meet the required performance parameter may also be unavoidable. Does this sound familiar?

Fortunately there are cases where pushing the envelope is unnecessary and therefore practically speaking a Bad Thing. Usually this is the case when the project is the only one of its kind. There are currently two good examples of this within the New Space industry. First is the Bigelow space habitat project. There are two ways in which this project is comfortably overengineered. The first is the choice of launch vehicle. The Dnepr vehicle has a payload capacity of 4500kg, which is more than double the mass of the Genesis I. The second is the design for the outer skin, which is 15cm on the Genesis I and will be about 40cm thick for the Nautilus. I suspect the bugs inside the next prototype will be safer from collisions than I am in my (800cc) GM-Daewoo Matiz on a Korean expressway!

The second example is Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne. It was only required to reach 100km above sea level but had a demonstrated capability of reaching about 112km. This extra margin may have helped play a part in the success of the initial X-Prize flight in which it barely reached the required 100km altitude due to control issues.

Now let's consider a design that is marginal - NASA's Ares 1 launch vehicle and Orion capsule combo. At the current stage of development, with the system still in the design stage, the weight for the Orion vehicle is estimated at an effective 50,231 lb (with the launch escape system not included entirely because it is jettisoned well before the payload is placed into orbit), however the absolute weight limit for the Ares 1 to deliver a payload to the ISS at an orbital inclination of 51.6 degrees is 52,405 lb, with a margin of 2175 lb. That's only 4% and at this stage of the design process. Additional weight gain is quite possible. Scott Horowitz , NASA's Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Missions Directorate (ESMD), in a recent media briefing talked about various ways they could reduce weight and improve performance, in a way that seems very similar to what I just described.

From my perspective, it seems strange that the Ares/Orion design is pushing the limits to the extent it does. Certainly there are no known competitors. The origin of the requirements for the Constellation program is a complex story and is outside the scope of this post. However it seems certain that NASA at least partly responsible for the requirements interpreting President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration, so they cannot with 100% legitimacy claim that an inconvenient set of requirements was hoisted on them.

Nevertheless, Scott Horowitz and Jeffrey Hanley, the Program Manager for the Constellation Program seem to be treating the entire situation as entirely normal and business as usual.

In my opinion there are two reasons for NASA's approach - one kind of legitimate and the other not. First, from my perspective, frankly NASA's development paradigm appears to be a poor one. There is no reason why any development program, even in aerospace, needs to push any boundaries unless there is a particular need for a superlative system, for the reasons listed above. Surely NASA projects are no exception.
Second, with a bit of mind bending, one can see that NASA in fact has a competitor- not a present day project under the control of another government in a race to land a crew on the Moon first. As far as I know, there is no other credible crewed lunar exploration project in existence. Their only competitor is in fact the Apollo era, 1960's NASA-past. If NASA of today can't deliver a much cheaper, better exploration program than Apollo they risk seeming, to the rest of the world, to have been unable to make any observable progress in opening up the space frontier since the end of Apollo. Of course they can lose as much credibility from a blown out budget as from poor public perception of technological progress since the 1960's. It's a risk they seem willing to take.

If I had more time I would have liked to join all the other bloggers in looking at Ares alternatives, but since I don't, I will merely comment that from my point of view it seems that NASA would have been better off finding a solution for Ares that is at least 20% bigger or made Orion 20% smaller from the very start.

On the other hand, at the end of the day the ultimate engineering test for an engineer is how well he or she delivers. If Ares/Orion works out, NASA will have quite a capable system with just enough performance to fulfill its main purpose, which is all they need to outdo the ghosts of the past.

A Lifelong Goal

2007-02-14T21:25:00.000-08:00

Back again!

It's been kind of hard to figure out my priorities lately, what with young Joseph appearing on the scene, and trying to accelerate my Korean language studies. I had decided that learning Korean would be a higher priority than writing this blog because I am now at a stage where I'm able to start applying what I've learned in the real world. The unfortunate consequence was that blog entries ended up being put on hold permanently. I'm now seeking a more balanced approach, with blog entries hopefully taking around 5 to 10% of the time I had allocated to language study. That way I can still contribute something even if not as often as I'd like.

The post below is what this entry's title is about. I've been planning to post it for a while but held off because I wanted to get it right since it concerns real people and real companies.

Supposing you found out that someone who had passed away had left a trust in their will especially for you. The terms of the trust are that you will receive $10,000 per month for the rest of your life, for the express purpose of designing and building a crewed spacecraft. Under the terms of the trust you are legally obliged to use the money only for developing the spacecraft - nothing else until you build the first orbital vehicle, then the next billion is yours to keep. Lets assume that the amount per month is indexed to inflation so that it gradually increases over the years, although the actual income in today's dollars remained the same. Could you make an orbital vehicle with that much cash within your lifetime? What about suborbital? What if the amount of cash per month were more or less than $10,000? How much do you think you would need? How long would you need to live?

For some new space and other engineering related ventures based on a paradigm changing but expensive idea, whose funding is a constant trickle, either from various projects and spinoffs they maintain on the side, or out of their own pocket or from an angel investor who sees the project more like a hobby than a serious capital investment, this must surely be a relevant question.

In the normal course of events no-one is going to get to orbit on $10,000 a month. So the first goal of many companies is to try and find ways to turn that funding into $1 million a month. Remember all those small companies with X-Prize winning vehicles on the drawing board, with the 'invest' button at the top of their webpage? (Does your webpage have an 'invest' button?) That's the easiest way, but probably also the least effective. The more successful ones like Spacedev are set up as real businesses with useful products and skills that are in demand in the real world.

That's the obvious professional approach but it's intriguing that there are also other methods to make the cash go further. One of the great things about space is that it generates an incredible amount of enthusiasm among certain groups of people. I have absolutely no doubt that this enthusiasm translates to genuine cost savings for many NewSpace companies, whether is is the capacity of the employees to work in inhospitable environments, (think Mojave desert, or for that matter Korea!) or work longer harder hours than they would otherwise, or put up with or otherwise ignore and don't care about crumbling facilities, and in some cases perhaps genuine financial hardship.

Taking this idea a step further, the people at Armadillo Aerospace and JP Aerospace work for free - that is, they are volunteers. However I have no doubt if those companies later on start to turn a profit, the initial group that had the vision to put in their spare time toward a revolution in spaceflight will enjoy a correspondingly generous share of the rewards.

There is another method of making money go further and it's interesting that companies which choose this method are also likely to be staffed by volunteers - changing the technology paradigm.
At Armadillo, they are now thinking about developing systems based on the OTRAG concept, which consists of clustered, multiple self contained propulsion systems, each complete with its own propellant supply and rocket engine. The idea is to start off with a very simple system with relatively limited range and thrust, and bolt multiple copies together to make something equivalent to a much larger system but at much lower cost. It appears that OTRAG failed for political reasons rather than economic ones. Having said that it seems strange that until now, as far as I know, no-one else has picked up the idea as they did with the DC-X.
On the other hand JP Aerospace plans to go to orbit ... by balloon! - that is more specifically by airship. John Powell seems confident that the Airship To Orbit (ATO) concept is sound but most observers have their doubts.
Both these companies base their hopes on throwing out the current big launch vehicle paradigm of getting into space in favour of something completely different, with a much lower investment level required.

Finally, one individual stands out in my mind for sheer unbending determination, although not in the area of spaceflight. Paul Moller, founder of Moller International has been pursuing the goal of developing the world's first commercially successful vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL)flying car for most of his life, and has reportedly burned through over $100 million and three marriages in his effort to make it work. Much of the money has come from spinoffs and other investments. (investors beware - it seems likely that unwary investors have contributed to his efforts over the years with not much to see in return.) He is now 70 years old and claims, perhaps humorously that he hopes to extend his life with almond butter (of all things) in the hope of seeing his dream come to fruition.

Lets hope that the dawn of the new space age brings more concrete achievements, and that I don't need to start consuming almond butter in the hope of living long enough to learn Korean.

Korea's astronaut selection intended to inspire public

2007-01-03T17:01:00.000-08:00

There has been some talk lately about recent survey results show that NASA is considered largely irrelevant (space review) by about half of under 25's in the USA. It's interesting to compare NASA's PR culture with the way Korea selected their astronauts. The whole process was broadcast on commercial TV over a period of several weeks like a kind of reality TV show. They started off with over 20 contestants who were then gradually whittled down to 8 then 6 and then the final 2. The final 8 had each contestant from a different walk of life, for example there was a policeman, an airforce pilot and at least one scientist (I think the scientist was eventually selected). They also had approximately equal numbers of men and women. In each TV episode the contestants had to face various challenges such as underwater EVA training. After the challenge the contestants were interviewed and described their experience and estimated their chances of advancing to the next round.

The process seemed pretty funny to me at the time, but that's probably because I've been preconditioned by the US/Russian space programs to think of astronauts as being larger than life superhumans rather than ordinary talented people.
At least they made it to the front page of the newspapers.

The Super Wealthy - Part 3

2007-01-01T21:07:00.000-08:00

So how do we resolve the problems I described in my previous post that prevent the wealthy from being interested in space travel? With great difficulty of course, but the stakes are high enough that it's probably worth trying at just to see how far we can get. The challenge is to design a luxury space system that meets the extraordinarily high standards of someone who is willing to forgo a $150 million custom built luxury yacht for your space vehicle or station so that they can impress their equally rich friends who have no interest whatsoever in space travel. Mission Impossible? You be the judge.

Starting with the objection, first of all someone has to offer a system at an obtainable price. The Super Wealthy appear to be interested in owning stuff themselves rather than renting it. It seems likely that such an individual would be interested in purchasing either an entire space station or RLV. (lets assume their budget is under $200 million) Are there any companies in existence capable of offering an RLV (an actual vehicle, not the entire design project) for sale for under $200 million while still preserving some kind of profit margin? Perhaps not today, but I personally think it will be achievable in the not so distant future, perhaps a decade or two from now. Alternatively if the customer just wants their own space station I would expect that Bigelow Aerospace will be quite capable of offering an excellent system to them as long as the means of getting there is acceptable.

The second objection is that space travel is unsafe. Of course this is as much about perceptions as reality. It would be interesting to know how the market for luxury submarines evolved, since submarines presumably didn't start out with a reputation of being particularly safe or comfortable either. Perhaps luxury space travel will have to evolve down a similar tortuous path, presumably starting as military transport, then as science labs, followed by miniature civilian versions that gradually increase in size and opulence until eventually they are capable of carrying 50+ passengers in luxury. Alternatively the best way to overcome the customer's fear of being blown to smithereens in the icy vacuum of space is probably by repeated demonstrations of a safely operated of crewed spaceflight program by a private company. (On the other hand, any accidents that happen on privately funded space programs will make the perception of space travel more unsafe than ever.) I suspect also that dressing up the system being offered to make it look more user friendly while hiding as much as possible of the nitty-gritty technical details will tend to allay customers fears by presenting them with a more familiar environment in which to travel.

Making the experience more comfortable and less demanding on the passengers is very much an engineering problem. With a little work, bathroom facilities can probably be improved to the point where the customer doesn't have an anxiety attack whenever they have to use them. Friendly decor will probably go a long way toward helping the user cope with the unfamiliar fittings and equipment.
Zero gravity is a harder problem. It is quite possible that the Super Rich customer's friends that are invited along for the ride are not so crazy about the whole floating around thing, and are quite adamant they never want to have any kind of holiday that involves getting sick. Ideally the design would aim to allow the individual to decide when they want to experience zero-g themselves. On a space station this could be possible using a rotating structure that provides artificial gravity but on a launch vehicle, this would seem to be completely impossible because at some stage the engines have to be powered down or the vehicle will keep accelerating until it runs out of fuel or leaves the solar system altogether. Clearly some compromises will be needed just for the short period when the passengers approach their orbital destination. It may even be possible to cut the period of weightlessness down to a few minutes after engine cut-out while the passengers wait for the tether based artificial gravity system to be deployed. How such a system could then dock with a space station I leave as an exercise to the reader's imagination.
The acceleration forces themselves are going to be an inevitable part of space travel much as limited mobility is an unavoidable aspect of air travel. They can however be reduced somewhat by careful use of engine throttling and a passenger friendly launch trajectory. Coming back to Earth is a bit trickier. Design a better capsule and the luxury space industry will beat a path to your door.
If your RLV gives the passengers less room than their private jets the proud owner will have to apologize to them for the cramped conditions. Better make it as roomy as possible.
Finally, the passengers will, quite frankly, reserve the right to get drunk all the way from blastoff to touchdown. If there are emergency procedures, make sure they can be carried out by the well trained attendants.

So your RLV/Space Station lacks a polished woodgrain and leather interior? Better start adding those little extras into the weight budget, not to mention decent furniture all the way up to and including king size beds, which yes you will need because the entire station will rotate to provide artificial gravity (see above), although not necessarily at 1g. Clearly turning a space station or RLV into a luxury item will incur a significant weight penalty. Exactly to what extent customers will accept compromises in this area will be determined by the market expectations that develop over time. Just don't forget the space station exterior. It should at the very least be unblemished white with the name of the vessel clearly printed on the side and look superb in the photos taken by the guests as they approach in their transfer vehicle.

If a company is already offering space systems to the Super Wealthy, we probably won't know until the launch appears on a country's launch manifest. The people we are thinking of here don't want to be dragged into the public eye unless they are Paris Hilton. We should also assume that they have no interest in being role models to encourage children to pursue careers in science and technology. Nevertheless if we find out that someone has gone to the trouble of purchasing a space system purely for personal use and doesn't want to step into the limelight, lets not castigate them for wanting to keep the experience to themselves. They are the first genuine customer in a sense for the entire industry. Let's wish them safe travels and leave them to enjoy their system/vehicle/station in peace, even if we never find out who they are.

The Super Wealthy - Part 2

2007-01-01T17:45:00.000-08:00

I feel that I'm on a roll today, so I'll keep going and make my original post into a 3 part discussion. In this second posting I'll hazard some guesses as to why the super wealthy are not investing in space travel, and in the final part I'll speculate about some remedies. Please keep in mind though, I have a job, I also have to work, so don't expect too much! :)

Here are the 5 main reasons I thought of for why really rich people don't invest in space travel.

1. Lack of credibility or 'the giggle factor'. There is a very obvious problem in the minds of most people - it can't be done for less than a few billion or the resources of a well financed national government. I'm talking about space stations and RLV's here, so there is some truth in this objection. Of course the space station problem is being taken care of as we speak, but launch vehicles are another story.

2. It's dangerous! You bet it's dangerous. No-one wants to take their guests up for a week of luxury on an orbiting space habitat only to have them go down in a blaze of glory without a chance to savour their guest's awe and envy for several months after the trip.

3. It's uncomfortable (and undignified). Martini's and zero-g don't mix (at least not in an open glass). Come to think of it a lot of things don't mix with zero-g, although some things might mix rather well in zero-g. Space sickness and the necessity for toilet training come to mind as potential turn offs. Also the acceleration forces between Earth and orbit would doubtless be unpleasant to some.

4. It lacks class. All those pipes and wires and tin foil are a bit dreary compared with the custom decor available for luxury yachts and hotels. The shuttle transport is cramped and the service on the shuttle is limited to bottled water and bathroom assistance.

5. Too public. There are 2300 megayachts operational around the world according to U.S. Submarines (see previous post) but we are hardly aware of them because the super rich generally want to keep to themselves and avoid those pesky journalists and photographers. That being the case, why would they then want to suddenly leap into the public eye with their brand new spaceship?

There may well be other objections as well but this is a start. Perhaps if a stray billionaire is reading this, he or she can let me know if I'm on the right track.

The Super Wealthy

2007-01-01T16:42:00.000-08:00

A brief post on the Hobbyspace website gave a link to a PopSci article about an underwater hotel. I great idea, but if you are willing to explore a bit deeper (excuse the pun:) there is some very interesting background to this which gives some idea of the extraordinary amount of wealth that is sloshing about largely out of sight of the ordinary person.

I took the trouble to look up the website for the company which is planning on building the hotel. U.S. Submarines. Now take a look at their FAQ for luxury subs. It's worth reading!

Consider this quote "With 2300 megayachts operational around the world, some costing in excess of $150 million, the stakes in the game of one upmanship are rising. Some yacht owners like the idea of having a larger and more unique toy." By comparison, the Seattle 1000, a 500 ton displacement luxury submarine with all the trimmings is only about $19.7 million, a mere trifle.

The reader may possibly now be saying, well, so what, we already know there are a lot of rich people around. But look at it this way: Just think how much cash is being spent on luxury items by the wealthy compared with the amount they spend on space tourism and building space vehicles. Clearly, collectively and with very few exceptions, the rich are not interested in space. This is in spite of the fact that it is the super wealthy who have the most to gain. Want one-upmanship? Well, a fully furnished Bigelow space station is about as one-up as you could possibly get. Just imagine the look on your stuck up, so pleased with their $150 million yacht, billionaire neighbours when you blast them into orbit for a week of leisure on board a ship with full length window views of the entire Earth! Want to intimidate your acquaintances with the scale of your corporate empire? - well maybe the Earth isn't big enough for you? Time to start setting up business off Earth. Avoid all those taxation and regulatory hassles.

The super wealthy are passing up on these opportunities with scarcely more than a glance, and we need to know why. Perhaps its the credibility or 'giggle' factor, but there could well be other issues as well. I suspect Robert Bigelow knows more than we do.

Systems Engineering vs Rapid Prototyping or "Someone reads this Blog!"

2006-12-04T20:13:00.000-08:00

It appears as if Eric R. Hedman, a frequent contributor to the thespacereview.com website has been reading this blog judging by his most recent article. (Incidentally his articles are always extremely clear and thoughtfully written. I enjoy reading them enormously.)

"From the start the Ares 1 development is different then almost any other project on the planet. Not only is it being designed to carry the Orion capsule into orbit, it is part of a much larger, less clearly defined project. It is also being developed in a metaphoric fishbowl, being observed from all sides by people with radically varying interests and backgrounds."

...definitely an improvement on my clumsy style. Good thing he didn't put in a link to my original post. I just went back and fixed a couple of spelling and punctuation errors. :)
(and quite frankly my original post reads to me now as just plain grumpy, see end of this post below)

Anyhow he says the same thing as I wrote two posts ago about the Ares 1 project being the first to be subject to so much independent scrutiny.

One could also interprete his emphasis in the article about the importance of good management in a project to be a counter to my comment about modern systems engineering techniques as practiced by NASA. But more likely it just ties in with the main thrust of his article that NASA need to be more open with the public and congress about their decision making process so that they can show they haven't picked up and run with a particular solution without doing their homework.

I'm actually not sure myself if I would want to throw out systems engineering altogether as embodied by MIL-STD-498 or equivalent processes. Nevertheless in my experience the overhead in man hours spent maintaining rafts of documentation ought to add much greater value than it usually does. In many cases adding additional paperwork to the design process cuts the actual engineering output by half, or even more. The net result is that two systems could have been designed and built for the same price as one that was built with the benefit of thorough systems engineering, and both of them done in half the time.
If this is the case, why not build an initial prototype of the system first, get the customer to check if it is what they want, then build a second with the customers requests incorporated?
Modern rapid prototyping methods do better than this. The customer can be integrated into the development process and their input constantly sought to ensure the product is what they wanted in the first place. Not all documentation is thrown out. Top level requirements and build configuration tracking will always be of utmost importance, and various design documents such as 3D models are maintained according to their relevance.

There are some problems however with applying such approaches to an organization such as NASA. First rapid prototyping results in a different type of system, partly because of the demands of incremental testing on the configuration. It results in White Knight-SpaceShipOne or a VTVL as opposed to a sounding rocket. The systems also seem to be a little bit lighter in functionality, more idiosyncratic and lower tech, but that may be just my impression. Second it would be hard to integrate a system built using rapid prototyping into a larger system developed using a detailed requirements flowdown approach. Third it can result in occasional embarrassing failures during the development process which just look bad, bad, bad in a multibillion dollar publicly funded project. Fourthly there may be limits to the size of project that can be taken on using rapid prototyping, although to some extent this problem is mitigated because rapid prototyping itself tends to reduce the size of the project. Fifthly the process really does depend on good management and without adequate supervision it could be very hard to tell when the project becomes unstuck, and finally, it probably doesn't do as well at passing on knowledge from one generation of engineers to the next .

In conclusion there are pros and cons with any approach we use to make new stuff and of course we shouldn't automatically blame processes when things go wrong. However with so much at stake, if expensive and time consuming processes are incapable of saving a project that takes a wrong turn we should nevertheless be asking if the processes are worth having in the first place

Oh, and by the way, I actually do want to see NASA succeed spectacularly and not just to prove they went to the moon the first time. I was probably in a lousy mood when I wrote that part because my newborn son kept me awake as he usually does for an hour or so every morning between 2 and 4am:(

(I'm getting used to it now - I think)

SSP Energy Return On Investment.

2006-12-01T17:03:00.000-08:00

Geoffrey Styles at energyoutlook.blogspot.com in his most recent post, briefly discusses Energy Return On Investment (EROI). He mentions that Space Solar Power may only return a positive EROI after the first 5000MW of power are installed. For some time I've been thinking of crunching the numbers on this to see what the EROI for SSP actually would be. Anyone willing to have a go at this task? One of my main questions is what is how much does SSP EROI actually vary against the number of MW produced and to what extent could a larger system improve EROI apart from requiring fewer actual workers per MW.

ARES/ESAS

2006-11-27T18:25:00.000-08:00

I've been following the ongoing debate about the ARES 1 rocket combined with the overall ESAS defined architecture for the Orion project with considerable interest. My interest lies in a slightly different direction than most of the other bloggers. Not being a US resident none of my salary goes toward paying for NASA's various projects and ambitions. Nevertheless, I would like to see them succeed and get to the Moon again, at least so they can shut up the 'Moon landings were faked' idiots.

It has occurred to me that this situation may be a first of its kind. Since when has any large organization committed to a publicly funded, massive engineering project with very specific goals laid out, while all the time being subject to continuous scrutiny and second guessing by large numbers of interested and, occasionally, well qualified onlookers? The original Apollo program may have had some elements of that, but I doubt there was nearly the level of criticism being levelled against that project at a technical level as there is with Orion. For one thing, at that time there probably wasn't any other architecture capable of succeeding. As for the Space Shuttle project, certainly over its lifetime the voices of the critics have become progressively louder. But at its inception, there again I doubt there was much (or nearly enough) critical analysis by members of the public. Maybe I'm wrong but that's my strong impression.

If so, and this situation is a first, it becomes an interesting test of modern systems engineering methods. Consider this: A senior project manager has claimed publically that the project is on track and that none of the problems encountered so far are unexpected for a project of this scale. Meanwhile the critics are claiming that there is a grass roots feeling at NASA that the project is fundamentally flawed and there are doubts that the system will be capable of the required performance for it to carry out its job properly without major design changes accompanied by a budget blowout and severe schedule slippage.

The great thing about all this is that, if the project is continued in it's current form, all these claims will be verifiable within a decade. The system is required to be operational by 2014. (Eight years should be plenty of time so it's hard to see how they could stuff so that badly that they miss this deadline.) The entire CEV project was supposed to cost $15 billion (I am assuming that the budget for CEV included funding for the Crew Launch Vehicle and was the equivalent term for the Constellation project before the project was given a name, but I'm not absolutely sure about this.) and I haven't heard of NASA revising that estimate yet. Of that, the stick is supposed to cost about $3 billion according to an unsourced statement in a Wikipedia entry. (I've done quite a bit of online searching but wasn't able to find an authoritative statement on the actual projected cost of the Ares vehicles!) This is a figure that, given NASA's propensity to spend big, could easily blow out in the near future.

So personally I would rather like to see the Ares I project continued to the bitter end. If they manage to get the vehicle operational within the mandated timeframe, without the budget blowing out by more than 20%, and without it killing any crewmembers in the first 100 flights, I would definitely call it a success. It will show that NASA, while expensive, slow and bureaucratic still has the right stuff to conduct a manned space program. On the other hand, if it fails on one of the above criteria, the implications are significant. First it implies that NASA's culture is still basically disfunctional, with senior management totally out of touch with the real engineering issues as recognised by their own people and outside experts. Also by implication, the entire systems engineering process followed by NASA is suspect. Since a similar approach is used on numerous other large projects by other organizations around the world, as I can personally attest to, there will be a flow on effect into other projects and organizations that may or may not cause a major paradigm shift in engineering management methods to completely different models such as rapid prototyping.

That's in the ideal world. In the real world usually politics intervenes to mangle the original project goals and requirements enough to disguise the project crash and burn process, or sometimes to break a well functioning development program.

We'll see.

(Except for the Wiki reference I used Hobbyspace and NASA Watch to find the pages I linked to)

CSI gets write up on Rockets Away website

2006-11-16T15:15:00.000-08:00

A few days ago Greg Trotti from Rockets Away Media, the publisher of Launch magazine, asked us some questions about CSI (or C&Space) and what we're trying to accomplish. He has now put a short descriptive piece about CSI on the Rockets Away website.

Korean Space Launch Vehicle (KSLV) News

2006-11-02T16:48:00.000-08:00

I have been reliably informed that the amount the Korean government are contracted to pay the Krunichev Center in Russia for KSLV development is around US $200 Million. Here in Korea it has been generally expected that this money would pay for extensive technology transfer of large scale rocket engine and launch vehicle know-how to Korea. Now it seems that the technology transfer aspect of the agreement has, to say the least been greatly exaggerated. Recently I obtained a copy of a brief news item from the Digital Times, an online news service in Korean. (I tracked down the link to the original article in Korean.)

Here is my rough translation. (disclaimer - don't use this translation for serious journalism. Get a qualified translator to to a proper job.)

On the 23rd (October), Vladimir Nesterov, manager of the Krunichev Center in Russia, informed (us) that the Krunichev Center intends to perform the design and manufacture work for the KSLV first stage propulsion system. However he also revealed that transfer of detailed technology will likely not happen.

Nesterov said that Korea and Russia had (already) entered a contract for development of the propulsion system manufacturing technology. "We have obtained a contract to develop a first stage propulsion system for a launch vehicle capable of launching a 100kg satellite. We will supply components/materials needed for manufacture without transferring technology." Nesterov said.

In 2004 the Krunichev Space Center with three other Russian aerospace organizations, and the Korean Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) entered into an agreement to develop a two stage launch vehicle with Russia developing the first stage and Korea the second stage.

According to the contract, Russia will provide help to Korea to perform two launches.

This may not seem like a big deal to US readers, but certainly a lot of people here will be annoyed at the decision to give the Russians so much money to basically help them fund their own launch vehicle. The Ministry of Science and Technology has already been asking questions. My wife (ok I admit she helped me with the hard bits) when she read the article, straight away got the impression that Korea is getting a raw deal and I think her reaction would be typical.

Another odd thing: There is nowhere in Korea that a satellite can be safely launched into equatorial orbit! Japan is directly to the east, and only the North Koreans would be rude enough to launch right over the top of them.

Comments from non members enabled (again?)

2006-10-24T22:43:00.000-07:00

It looks like somehow comments from non-blog members wasn't enabled after all. My apologies if you really wanted to respond to something I wrote but couldn't!
Anyway I hope it works this time - just try it :)

Back again. This is what happened.

2006-10-24T22:09:00.000-07:00

Previously I committed to putting up at least one new post every week. Here's why I fell down on that particular commitment (and over X Prize Cup week as well!):

Yep, I'm a (first time) Dad. The Koreans say young Joseph looks just like me but I'm not so sure. He was supposed to arrive on Oct 31, but came on the 11th instead at around 3.5kg (7.7lb). Mom is recovering extremely well but we are both on a steep learning curve when it comes to baby care :)

Fortunately I was able to follow much of what happened at the X-Prize Cup on the internet over the last few days. Personally I think the most important outcome is that the event was successful and people who visited really enjoyed seeing all the competitions, displays and demonstrations. The X Prize Cup should now be well on the way to being a yearly space extravaganza with every year being bigger and better than the last. This is important because every improvement will add greater momentum and encourage yet more innovation and improvement in various space related fields by the participants, and because it could be a key to helping the average person learn to feel comfortable with the idea that space is accessible and doesn't have to be out of bounds to him or her just because they are not a hand picked, highly trained government employee.
The event even made it onto Korean TV (I saw it at lunchtime a few days ago) with key attractions, such as Armadillo's Pixel vehicle and the space elevator climber competions being included in the footage.

Good Luck with next year's X Prize Cup. I hope I can be there next time!

North Korea's nuclear test

2006-10-08T23:24:00.000-07:00

People are probably wondering what the average Korean's attitude is to the news that North Korea now appears to have 'The Bomb'. It's a bit strange for someone who isn't familiar with Korea's history and outlook, but generally there seems to as much concern about how the news could affect the stockmarket as the fear that North Korea may actually in the future be capable of tossing a nuclear explosive device over the border. My understanding of the Korean reaction is this: First, they have lived with the North Korean threat for a very long time now. Since the Korean war Seoul has been within range of North Korean artillery. I suppose you could say they have become complacent. But then on the other hand, in the past they haven't really had much control or choice in the matter. Secondly, Korea is still smarting from the IMF era; the period of time after the Asian financial meltdown in the late 1990's when the IMF forced the country to open up the country to outside investment and sell off ownership of several large companies in exchange for much needed aid. This would have been extremely humiliating for them, given that Koreans are very nationalistic and quite sensitive to their image and status in the international arena. This mindset makes them sometimes see any peturbations in the market as impending economic disaster which many seem to dread more than the threats eminating from the North. I suspect also that some people here may even harbour some pride in any Koreans being able to master nuclear weapons while thumbing the nose at the international community.
Hopefully, as the news sinks in and the implications become clear people will start to become concerned for the right reasons and start thinking objectively about whether the South Korean government is really acting in the country's best interest.

I'm going to offer my two cents worth about what I think is going to happen.
First of all, at this time I'm not seriously afraid that the North Koreans will try to actually use a nuclear weapon on a neighboring country. They still value their own existence.
But I wonder how many people in the west are aware that China has been making noises suggesting that they might have a legitimate claim to Korean territory, including, so I'm told, claims that Korea has historically been part of China, and plans to claim the entire Mount Taebaeksan (a site on the border with China with great historic and spiritual significance to Koreans) as Chinese territory. I personally think the North Korean regime only has a couple of year left in it. Then they will really only have two choices: surrender their keys to the South, or be starved out and overrun by the Chinese military, bomb or no bomb.
Part of the problem is that this is not your parent's or grandparent's totalitarian regime. It has gradually morphed into something more like a religious cult with borrowed Christian references to indoctrinate the people, with Kim Il-Sung as the eternally revered father, Kim Jong-Il the son, and the Spirit of the people all working together. (or something like that) Even the Chinese government probably doesn't like being associated with them too closely. For a rationalist like Hu Jintao the North Korean leadership must enough to make him cringe at times.
Clearly a regime like that is not going to behave rationally as the South Korean president, Roh Moo-Hyun has hopefully learned by now. The best we can hope for is that an internal coup will replace deranged leadership with a more pragmatic mindset.

Forget copyright - GX from the horses mouth.

2006-10-01T23:01:00.000-07:00

Here's the link (pdf) to the presentation on the GX project's own website. Got all the same pics.

Galaxy Express!

2006-10-01T21:54:00.000-07:00

Recently there was an article in SpaceDaily about a new Japanese rocket called the GX, with a kerosene fueled first stage and methane second stage. It is being developed by an industry consortium. I now have a fairly detailed article which a colleague obtained from a Korean website about the GX (or Galaxy Express). I understand the article was translated into Korean from Japanese. The article contains some nice pictures and diagrams but unfortunately I can't publish them until I'm sure there are no copyright issues.
My Korean is not that good, so it would have taken me all day to read it. Fortunately my colleague gave me two key points about the article:
-The rocket first stage will be an RD-180 (not, as the Space Daily website stated, a US engine unless they meant an Atlas V first stage.)
-The current design doesn't include a turbopump for the second stage methane engine(!).

There was also some hint of problems with the methane engine development. We could probably help them there:)

Since we have Korean thanksgiving (Chuseok) this week combined with another holiday to make a weeklong break, I might just have time to RTA. I'll also try to find out if it's possible to view the article online. The website seems to require login access.

Benson Space and other topics

2006-09-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

A colleague and I were discussing why Jim Benson started a new company to market his Dream Chaser vehicle. He couldn't understand why Jim Benson didn't just set up a new division in his company specifically for building the Dream Chhaser.

My response was that US companies, (and by extension most western companies) prefer to have a single focus for their business rather than branching out in a lot of different directions. Here in Korea it is quite common for even a relatively small to medium size business to have a lot of different projects going at once. I learned this from a Polish guy I met in Korean class who worked for a Korean software company with about five different unrelated projects going at once. I suppose it's a kind of insurance. If one part of the business goes belly up, the other parts can continue as normal like a kind of corporate octopus. It is even more evident with the Chaebols (the oversize Korean companies such as Samsung and Hyundai) which are involved in ventures as diverse as department stores and army tank manufacture.

I could have also pointed out that SpaceDev is a publicly listed company and so it probably would have been a bad idea to keep using it as a funding source for a speculative venture.

On another topic...

Virgin Galactic have released some interior views (via Hobbyspace) of their SpaceShipTwo vehicle. Also for some reason Gizmodo (also courtesy Hobbyspace) is the only place I could find sketches of the shape of SpaceShipTwo plus two georgeous looking 3D renderings.
Cosmic Log has an interesting comparison of SS2 with the Rocketplane Kistler's Rocketplane XL.
In terms of readiness my impression is that VG is clearly in first place followed by Rocketplane Kistler (although they also claim to be aiming to start operations in 2009) with XCOR and Jim Benson's venture competing for 3rd place and Blue Origin poised to rapidly move up the rankings. (Sorry if you think I got the order wrong. It's my best estimate without doing proper research ;-) ) The rest of us are either tinkering or in watch and wait mode to see how it pans out.

Talking about how it pans out. I think there may well be a secondary market for people who just can't get enough suborbital flight! I'm hoping these people, once they've tried one flight, will then want to try out various different types of vehicles in search of the one that gives them the best buzz.

Wow: Anousheh Ansari, Bigelow, Lockmart!

2006-09-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

What a week for space travel! It started off with the safe arrival of Anousheh Ansari to the space station which was great. Then, on a different topic, Jon Goff pointed out that LM (Lockheed Martin) are planning on man rating their Atlas V. He also commented wisely that the big aerospace companies are not really all that bad and are capable of working in partnership with new-space companies. This turned out to be prescient because lo-and-behold now LM and Bigelow are joining forces, with LM planning to provide the launch vehicle to transport people to the Bigelow space habitat. In his most recent entry Clark Lindsay lists all the space transport related projects LM are involved in: Orion vehicle, Ares 1 (assuming they get the contract), EELV, subcontractor to rocketplane/Kistler and now the Bigelow partnership, and wondered if they know what to make of it themselves.
I think they certainly understand the situation. Someone has looked at all these projects and realized that hey- all they need to provide a complete manned space transportation system is a manrated launch vehicle and a habitat - and Bigelow are showing they can provide the habitat. (orbital propellant transfer, which LM are also looking into, will be the icing on the cake) It seems to be quite rare for aerospace primes to fund their own large projects, but keep in mind that LM's net profit last year was around $1.8B, so they could certainly fund a fairly major design project with a relatively small dint in the bottom line. Why would they do it? Well, most other tech companies depend on re-investing large proportions of their operating profit back into R&D and new projects. They have to do this just to survive. If LM think there is even a chance that commercial space could really take off, they would certainly be well advised to invest in such a project or risk being relegated to the aerospace history books. Even if it doesn't they will still be able to claim to be the only company in the world capable of supplying such an infrastructure. The bragging rights alone might be worth the investment.

Some potential problems:
-If they show they are serious about building a crewed rocket could it destroy COTS? Could NASA then claim that they don't need to invest further in private launchers and close down the program? Possibly. I don't know. But what will mitigate against that happening is that the COTS contestants, especially SpaceX, are probably capable of developing their systems much more rapidly than LM. I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX are already ferrying supplies to the ISS by the time LM has finished its preliminary design.

-Could NASA, in a fit of jealousy (and fear of being upstaged), deny LM the Ares contract thus preventing LM from obtaining one of its key technologies? I don't know but I really don't think NASA are as bad as all that.

Personally I think it will be a Good Thing. Even SpaceX may benefit by being able to supply a low cost cargo delivery service which LM doesn't seem to be interested in trying to do.

Bigelow and sidebar links

2006-09-14T23:16:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the gap in posts. Been kinda busy.

I've added some energy related pages to the sidebar links:

-Energy Outlook is a nice, fairly conservative blog on just about any energy related matters.
-The Energy Blog mainly consists of reports of alternative energy company news releases.
-The End Of Cheap Oil is an entertainingly alarmist blog from someone in the Peak Oil camp, without some of the shrill political rubbish that accompanies many of the other peak oil sites.

Also it looks as if Bigelow have not lost their sense of creativity!

For some reason I was slightly concerned previously that once they start developing the full scale habitat they might lose their creative spark due to focusing too much on achieving a tightly defined set of requirements, possibly to obtain government contracts. Just like a hotel on Earth, I would expect the habitat to cater for a wide variety of users, and being too requirements driven might kill demand, not to mention the fun aspect they are carefully cultivating.

Spacefaring society technologies

2006-09-01T01:11:00.000-07:00

Jon Goff relatively recently (over 2 weeks ago?) posted an interesting article listing the various technologies required to make a civilisation spacefaring. I was going to comment on it last week, but I got distracted, and then after that I was on vacation last week at Jeju Island in Korea.
Basically if the technologies listed were developed, it would allow relatively easy transport between the Earth and many locations in the Solar System. In effect, it is the makings of an interplanetary highway system. I love it!
But after reading his article and the subsequent responses and additions I still felt that there was something missing. But then I realized that his proposal is in fact quite comprehensive for what it is intended for - interplanetary travel. But this is only one side of the coin.
Jon Goff starts with a criteria that inteplanetary travel should be able to support at least the population of Tehachapi in order for the operators to qualify as truly spacefaring. I had to use wiki to find out that the population of Tehachapi is about 30,000 including surrounding areas. That's a pretty sizeable population to keep fed and pressurized.
Clearly the inhabitants of such a settlement would not, for the most part, be trading off the cheap real estate against the longer commute to Earth. Telecommuting is probably not a good idea either. The bandwidth might be ok, but the ping times to the company server would be dreadful. No, most of their work will be providing goods and services to one-another.
However the system won't be entirely closed. In order for such a population to thrive, there needs to be something they can barter for necessary supplies. Unless some kind of government subsidies are available for the goods being supplied (in which case is the country providing the subsidies really spacefaring?), the value of the exports should at least match the cost of the supplies, including transportation costs (Some government subsidies for the transportation infrastructure Jon described may be possible given that it will likely also be used by government space agencies and, possibly, military vehicles). It's unlikely, in my opinion, that mining, even rare earth elements, would be worthwhile at first. The exports with the most value for money would be services rather than goods and hardware. I could easily envisage such a community providing valuable scientific research, as well as other privately funded services such as virtual tourism. However would these kind of exports be of sufficient value to supply all the spacesuits, regolith moving equipment, housing components, etc that the settlers will need? I don't think so - in which case the settlers will have to be largely self sufficient, even while gradually expanding the size of the settlement.
Jon touched on this in mentioning ISRU and closing the water cycle, however what the settlers will also clearly need is a set of tools to allow them to be independent with the exception of small, hard to manufacture items. One key item is something that allows them to build custom structures from the available regolith. Think 19th century settler building a log cabin. They may also need to manufacture their own spacesuits, which may be quite crudely made at first and/or robotic equipment, and will require food production (farming) equipment, not to mention furniture, plumbing and other items to make the settlement reasonably liveable.
For a population to reach 30,000 in a space settlement, they would probably already have to have all the above capability, therefore these technologies would be required not just to maintain the settlement at that population, but to enable it to grow to 30,000 people in the first place.
What this all implies is that we really need to start putting some serious effort into developing the technologies to allow the maximum possible level of self sufficiency in a space settlement. In fact I would like to propose that until this technology is within reach there just isn't sufficient motivation to lower launch and space transportation costs to a reasonable level simply because until then there will be no feasible permanent 'there' to travel to. Robert Bigelow's space habitat is a fantastic start, but even so it won't allow anywhere near the level of independence necessary to start a colony, and without a nearby source of raw materials it won't be possible for residents to expand it significantly.
Note that I haven't been specific about whether the settlement is on the Moon, Mars, or a minor (dwarf?) planet or anywhere else in the Solar System. I really don't want to get into that debate.

One idea to get things moving is to offer (yet) another prize to be awarded to the first team to double the population capacity of a simulated settlement from 5 to 10 people over the period of one year with additional supplies limited to less than, say, 500kg. Initially a team of 5 would start with, say, 2 tons of equipment, which they could design themselves prior to starting the attempt, and would have to include an airtight habitat, pressure suits and oxygen. To make it more realistic, they could be provided with additional electrical power, in exchange for any solar cells they include in their initial equipment set, or manufacture on the spot. They would also be provided with an unlimited supply of simulated regolith.
I've no idea how much should be offered as the prize, but it would have to be substantial. If the above seems impossible now, even with some reasonable adjustment of the allowed equipment weight, it just proves how little effort has been put into making space settlement feasible and how much work remains to be done.

Another thought is that this kind of work could easily be undertaken by a space agency other than NASA. It won't require billion dollar investment, and there is plenty of potential for valuable technology spinoffs. Later on there will be recognition that this work is just as important as developing better boosters. I wish a country such as Australia (I am Australian, of course ;-) ), with significant in house mining and ore processing capability, as well as a can-do innovative spirit would get behind such a project. The benefits would be out of all proportion to the investment.

Koreasat 5 launch

2006-08-22T17:44:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Sea Launch on their successful launch of Mugunghwa 5 (the Korean name for the satellite - Mugunghwa is the name of S. Korea's national flower). I was fortunate enough to see the launch live on TV at lunchtime yesterday.

Also, I have just fixed the settings to allow comments from non-members.

Space Solar Power

2006-08-19T23:51:00.000-07:00

Some time back this month Sam Dinkin made a comment on the Transterrestrial website about how space solar power (SSP) is less cost effective than beaming power to the Moon.

The most depressing figure given is the current $202.5 per watt setup costs (which assumes $10,000 per lb launch costs-reasonable for GTO), however the piece suggests that this estimate could be reduced by up to two orders of magnitude by reduced launch costs and payload weight. In that case I don't think we should need to compare SSP with coal. In a perfect free market energy providers would be free to continue building coal fired power plants until the retail cost of electricity becomes only marginally more than the cost of producing it using coal. In reality NIMBYism and environmental considerations allow less cost effective solutions such as wind powered turbines to exist on the margins as long as the demand exists.

Wind power costs vary but may be estimated at up to about $0.10 per KWh ($0.88 per watt-year) compared with the figure of $0.07 per watt-year for coal, and about $1000 per KW for the turbine compared with $0.75 per watt for a 750MW coal fired plant. (wind power costs based on this source from the UK Oxford Institute for Energy Studies - Disclaimer: quotes^3 ie quotes of quotes of quotes). It still depends on government subsidies and favorable legislation for survival. Perhaps wind power costs would be a better basis for comparison in a real-world scenario.

Having said all that, I'm not at this stage an advocate of SSP and I think it's a real stretch to estimate that the costs could be brought down by a factor of 100, but because of its obvious benefits I believe it deserves a second, third, and perhaps a fourth and fifth look to see if it can be made to work. More on this in a later post.

COTS

2006-08-18T23:03:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Rocketplane Kistler and SpaceX for obtaining the COTS funding. Speculating on what made them stand out made me tentatively conclude that the reason is because they are better financed or have more developed products than their competitors. I had almost expected that Spacedev would be one of the funding recipients given that they are the only company offering basically a spaceplane. Nasa's approach makes sense however. It's a survival of the fittest principle borrowed from nature, where the mother favors the stronger young over the weak at feeding time!
Continuing with this analogy, in the future if either SpaceX or R.K. appear to be not delivering the goods, funding should be diverted to another contender to ensure the best solution is given the best chance of survival.

Korean food in space

2006-08-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

Recently there was a news item in the Cosmic Log which discussed how astronauts tend to find food in zero gravity bland and prefer it 'kicked up' a notch or two.
Koreans are like this even on earth, and if you have ever tried kimchi or meuntang (spicy soup) you would know what I mean. So I could see Korean food being very popular in zero-g. On the other hand, the first Korean in orbit is likely to be disappointed because there is probably nothing on Earth that would be spicy enough for a Korean with suppressed tastebuds!

Bigelow's space habitat program

2006-08-13T17:30:00.000-07:00

I had been thinking about making a brief comment that Robert Bigelow's research program has a fun loving aspect which is somewhat (and perhaps understandably) missing in government sponsored space research - although I think a six foot high version of the 'magnetic sculpture' in Genesis One has a good change of appearing in the foyer of his first space hotel.
Now it seems he is accelerating the program, and the Fly your Stuff offer is going to be cut to just one mission - Genesis II, and we don't yet know what will happen to his other ideas. I hope whatever plans he has doesn't cause the program to lose it's initial spark of creativity.

Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster

2006-08-06T03:48:00.000-07:00

Elon Musk apparently doesn't think much of the prospects of space solar power. Well, it's possible he's right but one has to wonder- where are we going to get all the watts for his Tesla Roadster, if a few years later the rest of us all want one too?

About this blog

2006-08-01T17:52:00.000-07:00

This blog is going to be mainly about space and space travel, of course. I used the term continuum in the title to suggest that Earth and Space are connected and that the process of getting from here on Earth to space is not a sudden quantum leap, but a gradual progression of capability. In fact travel in space itself is arguably separated into more sharply defined borders than the border to space itself.
Nevertheless I'll probably be covering a few other areas as well. I have an interest in the technical and economic aspects of energy production here on Earth, eg oil availability, alternative energy, and of course the possibility of getting electrical energy from orbiting solar panel stations.
I also may share a few tidbits about life here in Korea, and events in my company, CSI. (although probably not much because we generally prefer to lie low)
Since I'm extremely busy these days with helping the team here at CSI develop the first commercially available methane rocket engine while at the same time trying to learn Korean, I'm not quite sure how frequent my posts will be. On the other hand, I started this blog because whenever I read online news and commentary I start to think of all kinds of new ideas and perspectives and I've been itching to write them all down. Hopefully the latter will win out. :-)