NASA's decisions were completely correct from their point of view -- maintaining employment levels of NASA and its established contractors at all of its existing centers, and keeping American manned spaceflight alive, albeit without any meaningful objective. This has also been the only result of the utterly senseless Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs over the last 35 years.

NASA's manned space program has become the equivalent of the nuclear weapons national stewardship program. The Constellation program mainly involves relearning technologies forgotten. Development of the Ares launch vehicle and Orion space capsule, supposedly derivatives of proven and well-understood technologies, have run into innumerable difficulties. For example NASA and its contractors were unable to replicate the proven heat shield material used for Apollo - the recipe is known, but the art has been lost. What can be more sobering than NASA returning to water landings and expendable capsules descending under parachutes -- technology selected as a 'stopgap' measure 45 years in order to beat the Russians to the moon.

There is only one valid reason for pursuing human spaceflight - that by removing a portion of the human species and its knowledge off the earth, they can be preserved in the event of a planet-wide catastrophe. But this is no longer on the agenda. Human spaceflight will only continue because of the political imperative to perpetuate existing bureaucracies, no matter how pointless.

It is apparent that in my lifetime no progress will be made against this only meaningful goal. Some of us attempted to pass the torch to the next generation. But they not only dropped it, they are not even in the race…

What’s up here? Has something that is simple been made complex by the desire for autonomy? Are these steps backward for mankind? Why are the Russian systems always more robust? Discuss…

Delays and problems have also emerged with NASA’s ‘off the shelf’ J-2S for the Ares booster second stage. It only took a short period of NASA buro-engineering to produce what is essentially a completely new engine, the J2-X. Government hasn’t developed an engine of this class in the United States for thirty-five years, and everyone who knew how to do such a thing is long gone (the RS-68 was developed privately, without NASA ‘assistance’). The situation is so bad that there is buzz that NASA is looking at the Ariane 5’s Vulcain engine as an alternate solution.

The 21st Century NASA will take nine years in a ‘crash’ program to fly what might as well be a build-to-print Apollo capsule using substitute technology where the old ones don’t exist any more. By comparison the much greater technical challenge of Gemini took four years from go-ahead to first flight.

All this means, that NASA, unable to get out of its own way, will produce a manned spaceflight gap greater than that between the last Apollo and the first Shuttle flight. US manned spaceflight will undoubtedly survive that gap, since the NASA centers will continue to get Congressional funding regardless of the program. But it looks like the 50-year-old Soyuz design will get heavy use in the 2010-2020 period. One can only hope that the United States maintains good relations with Russia - which will have complete control over the fate of the International Space Station…

The only white knight in all this is if one of the COTS vendors can produce a manned orbital spacecraft - and the only real contender there is the SpaceX Dragon…

In any case, it seems it will still be some time until Iran reaches orbit using its own launch vehicle - an event that was originally expected to occur before the year 2000….

One wonders if this isn’t just kind of a subterfuge to keep the workers at the big-tank line at Michoud employed in the face of likely indefinite deferral of Ares V development. Evidently NASA can already contemplate the Return to the Moon being reduced to a one-off Zond kind of loop-around-the-moon circus ride (but they can already buy one of those commercially from the Russians for $100 million).

Hopefully the subtext doesn’t mean that the orbital version of Orion will have to drag the deep-space version of the heat shield to the ISS on every mission (at the cost of a tonne of payload). Of course, NASA is the Agency which has uselessly orbited over 10,000 tonnes of payload - (the “reusable” shuttle) - on every manned mission since 1981. So such blithe rejection of common sense and the rocket equation on that scale means a tonne here and there is nothing…. All of that net payload would have established colonies on the moon and Mars long ago….

NASA (and the Pentagon, for that matter) continue to project unsustainable budgets in the face of insurmountable political likelihoods. With the Democrats in power, with ever-increasing pressure on all aspects of the federal budget by the needs of teeming masses of ever-more-decrepit baby-boomers, it just ain’t going to happen. The Return to the Moon will not come to pass in the manner NASA and Congress want (e.g. continued full employment of government employees at all NASA centres). There is going to be a gap in US manned spaceflight of probably a decade. The whole thing looks like a repeat of the 1970’s on a smaller scale. Who would of thought that the ever-diminishing scale of manned space exploration meant that the Shuttle/ISS would be to Orion as the Apollo program was to the shuttle?

This can be done on the moon and at L3 using telepresence - no need for autonomous logic, just remote operation - more effective than being there in a bulky spacesuit, but without the need for ECS supplies and capable of 7/24 operations. Once these are established, the experience and technology would be available for extending the operations to Mars using autonomous robotic logic. This entire off-earth infrastructure has to use solar power generation, ice and soil processing, and habitation modules of the greatest possible simplicity that can be repaired indefinitely using local resources and a minimal tool and spares set.

Meanwhile the Orion CEV can prove itself in continuing operations to the ISS to certify the design through long experience, and observe human response not to zero-G, but to sustained 1/6 G, 40% G, and determining the appropriate level of artificial-G for long-duration interplanetary voyages necessary to sustain human health…

First off, let me proclaim my sympathy for her. The details are vague, but apparently after a lifetime of focussed achievement, capped by a successful spaceflight, she had risked it all in an affair with another astronaut. Having put her marriage, her career, her life’s goals on the line for the sake of this man, she then discovered he was cheating on her. There is no more powerful human emotion than betrayal, and the betrayal in this case, compared to the risk taken, was inordinate. So an extreme reaction can be easily understood (although not sustaining it over a day-long motor trip across the country).

Now some news accounts have claimed she never had the affair at all, it was all in her mind. No source for this, although it sounds like the standard first line defence for cheating men. But the old lesson seems to apply double here - if you have an affair with someone who is cheating on their mate, don’t be surprised when they cheat on you as well.

NASA went into its standard Challenger-Columbia-disaster management mode. Shut down any airing of dirty underwear publicly. Declare its undying competency and begin an internal investigation to identify corrective action. Astoundingly, and as usual, the press gave the august NASA “scientists” their standard free pass.

But what utterly saved NASA was the (un)timely death of Anna Nicole Smith the very next day. NASA management must have said a little prayer to Anna Nicole’s memory that evening. Whatever Nowak-raking guests Larry King and Nancy Grace had lined up for that night were knocked right off the air by the Smith-death-orgy. Poor Lisa Marie was spared further examination of the whole mess by the press, although she continued to be the butt of cruel jokes on late-night talk shows (evidently Anna Nicole, in the act of dying, had put her affairs off limits to them; while Lisa Marie, in not succeeding in murder, was available).

NASA’s statements during the 36 hours of Lisa Marie showed how refreshingly inept they are at publicity after 50 years of trying. First, astronaut Steve Lindsey made the impassioned speech that NASA was anxious to take her back to their bosom, to her NASA “family” and her own “family”. This sounded pretty lame once the murder charges were filed and the fact she had recently separated from her husband (and children) was revealed. Next was the legal-bureaucratic decision to return her to Texas on a commercial aircraft at her own expense. The press sniffed around this at the news conference. NASA knew they would be condemned either way on this issue.

But the most amazing thing was that, just like Challenger and Columbia, NASA just did not “get” it. The Houston press asked some insightful questions probing on the lack of psychological support of astronauts while in-service and especially post-flight and post-astronaut-career. Numerous astronaut biographies, and a couple of cosmonaut and astronaut suicides, have shown that there are real problems here.

The in-service problems are attributable to NASA’s perpetually screwed-up, opaque astronaut-selection process and certain inhumane managers. NASA’s constant habit of recruiting more astronauts then can fly based on constantly over-optimistic projections of future flight rates and programs also plays a role.

The after-flight after-service problems were similar to those faced by others in hard-driving careers - movie stars, sports figures, girl- or boy- wonder CEO’s - who reach the pinnacle and then face many decades of further life that will just be anti-climactic. Unlike these other figures, NASA astronauts do not have the money for serious psychiatric support to deal with these issues.

NASA’s response to these real issues was just to mumble about the in-service and post-service physical examinations “to assess the long-term effects of spaceflight”. These had nothing to do with the psychological support issues raised, but NASA management seemed totally oblivious to that.

In fact, NASA earnestly tried to characterize the whole affair, and issues of astronaut mental and physical health, as being handled no differently than for any other NASA employee. This ultimate civil-service position - whereby the astronauts were supposedly handled, supported, compensated, and held to no hjgher standard than any NASA GS-11 water cooler troll - shows the ultimate revenge of the nerds over the hyper-achieving astronauts. Ayn Rand would be turning in her grave.

The press got it wrong by demanding more psychological screening. Just what the astronauts need - more bureaucratic BS! History hath shewn that psychological screening does not work all the time. It breaks down to a game of the interviewee trying to figure out what the interviewer wants to hear. There has never been an astronaut or cosmonaut (or prisoner seeking parole) who thought that the psychologists had a clue in what they were doing. Hopefully they were only right in this some of the time. Often the more psycho- or socio-pathic the interviewee, the more they were able to psych out the psychs. And the incompetent or nutty astronauts, cosmonauts (not to mention psychopathic parolees) who have slipped through psychiatric ’screening’ processes over the years have verified that fact.

Russia pretty much abandoned use of the now non-Russian booster, but Western money and the backing of the former Ukrainian president, who was also the former Zenit factory manager, kept the project going. In fact it seems that the boosters being flown were still being assembled primarily from components built in the 1980’s when the booster was ramping up to full-scale production and was to have been the mainstay of third-generation Soviet space systems. In any case the Zenit never had the benefit of high continued production rate, a consistent launch rate, or cumulative launch of enough vehicles to drive it down the reliability curve.

The third stage, derived from the notoriously unreliable Block D system developed on a crash basis for the Soviet manned lunar landing program in the 1960’s, has been the biggest problem. The Block D, despite several derivatives designed for the Proton booster in the 1970’s, has proved impossible to make into a reliable upper stage satellite deployment bus. The latest version of the Proton has abandoned the Block D after 30 years of problems. The first two stages have also proven their continued immaturity - with failures first in the second stage, and now a catastrophic first stage failure.

The launch platform survived the explosion, as it was designed to do, but will still require repairs. Whatever the problem is with the first stage engines, it may have a ripple effect on not just the Zenit-3SL, but the just relaunched Zenit-2 land-based version, and the related engines for the American Atlas V.

Hopefully SeaLaunch can get back into service soon. Although its actual costs have never been revealed, it is probably the lowest-cost launch service available, and a model for future lower-cost launch vehicles. The launch price is not that much lower than the more complex Ariane 5, Proton-M, Atlas V, or Delta IV vehicles; but the unrevealed operating costs must be.

The nature and efficacy of tests of satellite vulnerability are naturally closely-kept secrets, but reportedly a Pentagon team annually demonstrates easy disabling of geosynchronous communications satellites using “components from Radio Shack”.

The US was in a tizzy in the early stages of the last Iraq war over a few ex-Russian GPS jammer/spoofer emitters which threatened to make hundreds of billions of dollars of American precision weapons useless.

In any showdown between China or Russia and the United States, the severance of communications, reconnaissance, and navigation satellite services to American military and commercial users would have devastating consequences - but much less so for the other side.

Logically the US military should be developing techniques and weapons that can operate in a radio-free environment, rather than becoming ever more reliant on

I’ve also spent the last few weeks incorporating a backlog of hundreds of corrections and additions sent in by my faithful readers, in many cases persons actually involved with the person, project, or vehicle described in an article. I couldn’t respond to all of them directly (it took me so long to get around to this that some e-mail addresses were now invalid), but my very heartfelt thanks to all those who took the time to improve the quality and content of this site. And thanks in advance to all those who take the time to let me know when they see an error - you are my editors!

One thing which isn’t getting enough public recognition is the extraordinary beauty and exotic imagery being sent back from space these days. The stuff being produced by the robot probes to the planets is achingly gorgeous. National Geographic made it the cover story recently, but of course they could show only a few of the images. Back in the days of the Space Race, Life magazine would put out large-format color spreads of these kinds of pictures - but there is no magazine of that format in circulation any more. Nobody is paying any attention to the ISS these days either, but go to the NASA mission imagery web site and look at some of the awe-inspiring images. Unfortunately you have to go through a lot of bad stuff (innumerable pictures of astronauts at pre-flight press conferences), but then you’ll suddenly hit one that chokes you - the gargantuan station against the earth at sunset, two astronauts, in weightlessness akimbo, dwarfed by the enormous truss assembly towering “over” them into the distance. It is 2001 come to life, at last, in 2007. Unfortunately, NASA, in its wisdom, seems to make it impossible for anyone to put together a permalink exhibit of the absolute best images from each mission….

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Angle of Attack, the biography of Harrison Storms, the manager for Apollo at North American. I noticed a few errors of fact, but it does capture some of the intense experience of working on a vital aerospace program - the exhausting and exhilarating effort of proposal, the exultation of winning, the despair and then reinvention after losing, the long days, business trips, and - dare it be said - male camaraderie of pulling a daring and difficult project off. The American engineers, unlike their Soviet counterparts, or the undocumented and unsung heroes - the people that actually made the American space program happen. Hopefully in the next year we will be able to add more of their stories to this site.

The costs of shuttle are not unavoidable for a design of that type. As studies and mock up tests in the DC-X program showed, very minor configuration changes in the orbiter systems could dramatically reduce costs by reducing labor costs (roughly $300 million per launch) by improve accessibility and maintainability. Re fitting the skin with proposed metal skinned tiles, replacing the hypergolic OMS pods with less toxic Lox/Kero or other systems, etc would drop costs further. Eliminating the expendable tank and SRBs would cut about $130 million per flight. And yes the lousy SSME’s add at least $10 million a flight, but even that gets lost in the servicing costs.

I was in the shuttle flight planning department for the first 7 years of flights, so I’m sensitive to this – but not in the way you might expect. What drives me nuts is knowing all the retrofits, as well as simple shuttle II concepts that could have cut launch costs dramatically- perhaps by 90% in some scenarios – and dramatically improved safety and flight rate capacity; but were all rejected because the savings would have laid off thousands of shuttle workers, and were therefore politically unacceptable. Worse, many now seem to be learning not that a bad reusable isn’t more economical – but that all reusables are a bad idea, and that we should go back to the equally unaffordable fully expendable designs, rather then fielding working economical systems (which we fully know how to build with current technology).

Nuff’ said.

Windows Explorer windows will continue to have no reasonable default and constantly forget for no apparent reason the preferences previously set (like detail view, most recent file first)

Windows Explorer will continue to use the same basic design assumptions for proper performance: that you have a two-processor PC with 2 GB of RAM, a 20 MB hard drive, no network or internet drives connected, have only six files per directory, and want to see those files in giant cartoony icons or miniature views with no information.

Windows will continue to take at least 20 seconds of drive rattling and waiting whenever you open a folder, while it searches for the correct icons, internet file links, and zip file contents for thousands of files.

Windows applications will cheerfully present nearly every known file type as the ‘default’ types that application when all you really want to see is all *.doc or *.xls files. You will be unable to turn off this ‘feature’.

All applications will continue to be pre-programmed to valiantly trying to open most .html or .xml files until the application inevitably crashes after locking up for several minutes, thereby forcing you to loose all of your work-in-process in other Word or Excel windows.

You will be unable to paste-as-text tables copied from Internet pages. You’ll have to paste them with full formatting and links first, then copy that in Excel, then paste-data-only into another Worksheet, in order to work with the table in any meaningful way. However, see the previous item; pasting the table from an html file as often as not will simply tie up Excel for several minutes until it crashes, taking all of your work-in-process in other open Worksheets with it.

Essential menu items in applications will continue to be dimmed or hidden in sub-sub-menus, the access of which requires precision mouse use beyond the powers and abilities of mortal men, while dozens of unintelligible and useless menu items are displayed.

The order, hot keys, and names of essential menu items in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint will have all been changed around again.

Dozens of useless new ‘features’ will have been added to the applications, when all that anyone except fifty people in the world are actually using are the feature set of Word 2.0, Excel 1.0, Powerpoint 3.0, and Windows 3.1 File Manager.

All applications and the operating system will assume that you are at all times connected to the Internet by a high-speed flat-rate connection. Those who have dial-up connections and pay by the minute will be harassed by constant warning messages. When they go on line, their already limited on-line experience will be degraded to uselessness by the operating system and various applications working in the “background” to download megabytes of unwanted upgrades and fixes.

Microsoft will continue to offer a series of low-end “applications” (e.g. Wordpad) that actually would do everything you would ever need but have cunningly been deprived of one essential feature (e.g. a spell checker or the ability to print out) rendering them useless and requiring you to purchase their full-scale applications which have instead hundreds of useless features which you never use and have to learn to ignore in order to find the menu item of the thing you want to do all the time.

The marvellous feature of Word, lately extended to Outlook and other applications, whereby you delete a space or letter and the formatting of the entire text becomes bizarre and unfixable, will be extended to other applications.

The inability to paste-as-text or alter the formatting when replying to certain kinds of e-mails will continue, ensuring that important business correspondence is received in triple-spaced 6-point Comic Sans which the message originator could not turn off.

Windows Explorer will continue to revert to bizarre time-wasting graphic displays of files for no reason whatsoever.

Word will continue to cheerfully open documents that are in foreign languages or are binary files, then rattle away for minutes, no way to stop it, until it reports that there are too many spelling errors for it to handle, then crash.

If you try to use Notepad instead of Word, it will continue to crash when attempting to load files of any significant size. It will continue to give twenty-impossible-to-understand encoding choices when you try to save a file.

Each application will be carefully designed so that the common functions in each application will be different - e.g. to find a string-within-a-string will still require SEARCH (n,y,x) in Excel, Instr(n,x,y) in Access, and Instr(x,y,n) in Word; changing to all upper case will be UPPER(x) in some applications and UCASE(x) in others.

Despite the fact that Bill Gates started his career with Basic, no simple natural-language programming language will be available.

Visual Basic and other programming languages offered will require learning yet again another set of bizarre non-intuitive code words and command lines for the most-often-used programming tasks (e.g. accessing a data table and reading through its records and fields one-at-a-time).

Excel will still, after twenty years, be unable to graph multiple-series linear scatter plots with labelled series or data points.

Excel will still have any kind of geographical graphing disabled, forcing the occasional user to either purchase an incredibly expensive special software to produce a chart of states colored according to corn production, or laboriously make one by hand using Paint.

In Explorer, the system will freeze while it spends endless time determining the contents of any network folders to which your company has connected your PC that you have never accessed in your life.

Explorer will continue to give the option only to ‘Replace All’ when moving files between directories. The more logical ‘Replace None’ will still not be available (e.g. move any new files to the directory, don’t replace any identical files, ask for any files with the same file name but some changes).

Explorer will continue to show mysterious 2 second differences in date-of-modification for identical files moved between computers or USB drives.

Visual Basic will still have the instr() function (find the first instance of a string within a string starting from the beginning), but after 20 years, no reverse instr() (find the first instance starting from the end and going backwards).

Applications will continue to be unable to correctly interpret date strings to dates except unless they are exactly a certain format.

The Toolbar will continue to use similar blue icons for major applications (Desktop, Word, Internet Explorer) that cannot be changed and force you to have to look very hard to tell which are for Word and which are for IE. Useful other colors (orange, red, green, yellow) will only be used for applications people hardly ever use).

Windows behavior will continue to be different between applications, evidently because Bill Gates, after 25 years, still cannot get the Word and Excel guys to talk to each other.

Whether you select the show-multiple-windows-within-the-same-icon option or not, multiple icons for the same application will proliferate on your toolbar for no apparent reason (evidently because some Microsoft applications open a new instance of the application every time you open a new document in an e-mail or directory, while others do not).

The meaning of the close window box in the upper-right corner will continue to vary from application to application, causing you to lose data in Excel, where it closes all open Windows, and Word, as opposed to Word, where it closes only the current Window.

In its continuing effort to force you to get you to upgrade to the latest versions of its applications on all the PC’s you own or have access to, Microsoft will continue to present the user with convoluted and incomprehensible warning windows every-single-time you attempt to save a document in an earlier or standard format, with the evident intent of making you lose critical data, find out you can’t access it on your other PC, and finally break down and spend the money to upgrade. Obviously written by a team of crack lawyers, this statement runs: “This document may contain features that are not compatible with this earlier version of Microsoft Excel. Do you want to keep the document in this format? To keep this format, which leaves out any incompatible features, click Yes. To preserve the features, click No. Then save a copy in the latest Excel format. To see what might be lost, click Help. In the event you do not understand this message, no Cancel button is available.”

If the guidance system fails, the L1 had to make a ballistic re-entry with splashdown in the Indian Ocean as opposed to Soviet territory. The G-forces were horrendous (20 G’s) but survivable. In the CEV example, with landing in the Western United States, this would presumably mean an emergency splashdown in the southeast Pacific.

A problem the Soviets had with the technique was that a guaranteed recovery of the capsule would mean a massive deployment of air and sea forces along the re-entry corridor of the capsule - forces the Soviets never had. At the very end of the program, the Russians changed the technique. They now came in over the North Pole, dipping into the atmosphere, then skipping back out into space for a final splashdown in the Indian Ocean. This approach allowed an emergency ballistic landing to be on Soviet territory if the guidance system failed. If the guidance system had not failed, it allowed tracking radar on Russian territory to make a final precise measurement of the capsule’s trajectory after the first dip, allowing an update to the L1’s guidance system to be radioed up, allowing it to make a precision landing near the recovery force in the Indian Ocean.

Undoubtedly NASA, with modern redundant electronics, does not expect Orion’s guidance system to ever fail (it never has on the shuttle, and the shuttle has no final option in case of a complete breakdown of avionics). And the CEV won’t be reliant on ground-based radars for position and velocity updates in a world of inertial and GPS navigation. Finally, since the United States still has a substantial global navy, which the Soviet Union never did, it would still be likely a few destroyers with helicopters could be strung out along the corridor of possible emergency landing points on the one or two occasions a year NASA plans to fly crews to the moon.

But it still points out that return from deep space is a tricky and dangerous business. Failure is not an option. An orbiting spacecraft with problems can stay in orbit and work them out before committing to re-entry. When the re-entry comes, it is at only half the energy of a return from the moon, and the margins for error and failure are broader. But lunar return is another matter.

The safest method for return from the moon would still be a combined propulsive/aerobraking technique like that envisioned for NASA’s aborted reusable Orbital Transfer Vehicle or currently used by JPL for its Mars orbiters after some bitter lessons. The entire spacecraft - service and command modules - would be enveloped in an aeroshell of some kind. A small propulsive manoeuvre would capture the spacecraft into an elliptical earth orbit. This would guarantee time to work out any problems. The aeroshell would then brake the spacecraft into a lower orbit. The final phase would be rendezvous with the International Space Station, a direct descent to a landing on earth from a parking orbit, or in the worst case, a rescue mission would be mounted to save the crew.

Of course one disadvantage for a manned spacecraft could be repeated passages through the Van Allen radiation belts caused by the elliptic orbit capture technique. It would also mean more days in space. But these can be worked out. Polar approaches would take the crew outside of the worse of the radiation belts in an elliptical orbit. Aerobraking, with precision navigation and knowledge of the atmosphere at earth, could be more aggressive than that used for planetary missions. This would mean only one elliptical passage before final re-entry or braking into low earth orbit, not the many-month gradual orbital decay used for unmanned planetary missions.

Of course, all of this points to the disadvantages of NASA’s one-shot moon plan as opposed to taking advantage of a space infrastructure (the ISS in LEO, an L1 way-station en route to the moon) that would ensure safe access to and use of space. The infrastructure approach would mean the crew would not be committed to a do-or-die return to earth. They would simply take the next ISS-L1 aerobrake shuttle back to the ISS, and then return on the next ISS-earth return capsule.

Safety in space will only ever be assured by a robust infrastructure, one, where, no matter where you are on the interplanetary superhighway between earth and Mars, if you ever get stranded, somebody will either be by shortly or you can call AAA for a tow..

This brings the hope that eventually some of the older mysteries of the robotic exploration of Mars will be solved. What happened to the Mars 2, 3, and 6 landers? Mars Polar Lander? The Beagle 2? Hopefully time will be taken to try to find the wreckages of these missions on the surface, perhaps of sufficient resolution to allow their fates to be understood. It would also be interesting to see how much dust has accumulated on the Mars and Viking landers in the three decades since their arrivals.

In fact, this is what the US government did with the KH-11 spy satellite which was supposed to be closely related to the Hubble design. Compare the seven shuttle-launch Hubble project, spread over 17 years, to the nine-Titan-launch KH-11 program, also spread over 15 years. One KH-11 was lost in a launch failure. The other eight KH-11’s were believed to have had lifetimes of from three to twelve years, so at any one time at least three were in service.

Due to Moore’s law, and the reliability of modern electronics, the idea of serviceable spacecraft has proven invalid. By the time the satellites come to the end of their (decade-long) service life, electronics and sensors have gone through seven order-of-magnitude technology generations…. and it would be better to simply launch a new-technology replacement rather than use even greater payload on a repair mission.

This also applies to aircraft. The bizarre spectacle of taking twenty years to develop the F-22 Advanced Tactical Fighter illustrates the point. The aircraft represented an integrated airframe-electronics approach. But the software and hardware development cycles to military standards were so long that by the time one set of prototype avionics was completed, it would not only be obsolete, but spares would be unavailable and many of the subcontractors out of business. Aircraft or spacecraft platforms - propulsion, structure, power systems, basic control electronics - should be developed separately from the electronics or sensor payloads. Then ever-newer generations of electronics and sensors can be launched using the same bus. This is the very common-sense and successful approach used by commercial satellite manufacturers. It decouples that part of the platform that is subject to slow technological change from that part which changes rapidly.

After years of endless trying to decide, or forwarding plans that had no hope of receiving funding, Griffin has made decisions that have saved the continuity of manned spaceflight, in a budget and political environment that realistically will be sustained by Congress. America is unlikely to go to the moon and certainly not Mars on anything like the schedule NASA proposes. But it is likely to continue to make manned spaceflights, if only to the International Space Station, for a couple of decades at least. Hopefully in the meantime commercial spaceflight will develop to the point that cheaper human and payload access to space becomes a reality, allowing some kind of extraterrestrial colonization - if only hotels - to begin.

And the gift of life will continue.

So away we go. The GAO and Congress have already started their cruel sniping. The only thing that will keep the CEV alive is the pork it will deliver to Congressman and the fact that any President will not want to be remembered as the ‘one that ended American manned spaceflight’. In this connection one can only be grateful for the Shenzhou program and the tourists that are keeping the old Russian hardware in production. The existence of other nations’ citizens in space, no matter in how limited a fashion, will goad the Americans to continue.

But in the absence of funds to visit and colonize other planets and the asteroids, what purpose does manned spaceflight serve? Would it be better to abandon expensive government-funded manned spaceflight and wait for privately-funded, more economical, space tourism to emerge?

This choice doesn’t really exist. Parkinson’s Law of Perpetual Bureaucracy will ensure that government manned spaceflight continues at a low level in American, Russia, and China. Those bureaucracies will continue to hinder rather than help the development of cheap commercial access to space. None of these countries will want to be the one to abandon manned spaceflight entirely. But despite election-year rhetoric, there will never be any political support for the money needed to carry out lunar or Mars colonization, either. So one can only expect manned spaceflight continue at a feeble level, until, hopefully, privately-funded tourist/adventurer exploration will finally take man out into the solar system in the late 21st Century.

For now the CEV is the only game in town. And what an enormous thing it is! One thinks of it as an Apollo capsule until one sees the Northrop ad with the multi-cultural model-engineers standing around the thing set up on its side. Like the shuttle, it is too big for the task. Over 100 shuttle flights have launched and returned to earth 10,000 tonnes of unnecessary shuttle mass that could have been left in orbit instead. Enough to have built a colony on Mars long ago… The CEV will echo the shuttle in a somewhat more economic fashion by delivering to orbit and returning safely to earth 5 tonnes of unnecessary CEV dead weight per mission. An order of magnitude ‘improvement’!

the media has absolutely no interest in more pictures or information about the moon (NASA, please take note!);

the media, and the public in general, remain completely technically illiterate and have no understanding whatsoever of the such basics as the difference between a rocket and a satellite, or landing versus crashing;

space organizations have to quit trying to sell or justify projects to the public on the grounds that ‘it will solve the mystery of the creation of (fill in planet or topic here). It surely can not warm the cockles of the American taxpayer’s heart to hear that he spent $200 billion in current-year dollars to send astronauts to the moon in the 1970’s and returned hundreds of kilos of rocks to earth, only to now hear the space agencies say that ‘Apollo raised more questions than it answered’ and ‘we need a new lunar program to understand finally how the moon was created’.

Part of the gap here is the scientific illiteracy mentioned above. It is the nature of science to never finally answer anything, and for anything that has been ‘answered’ to be perpetually challenged and rechallenged. This is how it works and what makes it great. But it does no good for ’scientists’ to be telling the taxpayer that the purpose of this probe is to ‘answer the fundamental questions of creation’ when actually all it is going to do is tell one experimenter about isotope ratios somewhere using some limited instrument. This overselling wears thin and does more harm than good.

*NASA LEGAL NOTICE: ‘men’ here used for historic purposes, and was meant at that time in the racist, sexist era of 1966 in the collective sense of ‘person’, and its use here is not meant to be non-inclusive of the many courageous women, African-Americans, non-American Africans, Spanish-surnamed and non-Spanish surnamed persons of Hispanic cultural background and/or descent; or the age-challenged, physically challenged, mentally challenged, Challenger challenged; legal and illegal undocumented workers; Native or non-native Americans and/or Amerinds and/or The People; or trans-gendered, trans-sexual, trans-continental, trans-American, and/or otherwise trans-ed individuals; and also not to exclude non-courageous individuals, or any other individuals not included so far, e.g. persons (except the use of the word persons, which includes the male pronoun ’sons’, is also not to be taken in a sexist sense); and also not to be exclusive of courageous non-human species, that have flown into space; and non-courageous non-humans, such as Albert I to IV inclusive, Enos, Laika, Sam, Ham, Pat, Mike, Gordo, Yorick, Able, Baker, Alpha, Abrek,Verniy, Gordiy, Drema, Erosha, Zhankonya, Zabiyaka, Ivasha, Krosha, Lalik, Multik, Bion, Dezik, Zhegan, Lyza, Ryjik Belyanka, Pestraya, Otvazhnaya, Snezhinka, ,Marfusha, Chaika, Lisichka, Strelka, Belka, Pcheka, Mushka, Kometa, Shutka, Chernushka, Zvezdochka, Veterka, Ygolka; and parts of those species, such as the Orbiting Frog Otolith; and not to have even mentioned non-US citizens or persons of foreign birth who may or may not appropriately fall into any of the aforementioned categories; indivisible, under God, or the Gods, or no God, according to your freely-expressed point of view; with liberty and justice for all.

With help from the Congress, the GAO, backed by those whose real agenda is to ’stop wasting money on space’ and help ‘the poor’, NASA will finally be transformed into the perfect federal agency. It will have more or less the same budget and staff, but produce nothing, fly nothing, but be perfectly free of risk, scandal, and in full compliance with all OSHA, EEO, FAR, ISO, DCA, and DRA regulations.

The current NASA administrator, within the shackles imposed on him by the government and culture in which he is imbedded, has grabbed the opportunity to keep American manned spaceflight alive in some manner. He needs to be supported in this in any way possible. American readers - write to your Congressman today and tell them you do not support the ‘go slow’ approach to replacement of the shuttle!

PS This entry is dedicated to those of you who think Pausanias is an unrealistic twerp who is also undermining the only chance for human exploration of space to continue!

The shuttle is safe except for this foam problem. Of course what has destroyed each shuttle - or for that matter, the cause of nearly every aviation and automobile accident - is not what you’re aware of and watching for, but what you’re not aware of. The shuttle uses the same technology and practically the same structural and systems design margins as expendable launch vehicles. For these we have a database of thousands of launches. From this experience, it can be said with confidence that the shuttle will catastrophically fail on at least 1% of the missions. Certainly the cause next time it will not be foam or O-rings, but some other system.

NASA is negligent for not fixing the foam problem. Basically NASA spent billions confirming what they already knew, that there was nothing that could basically be done with the issue. Any solution would require fundamental changes which could just lead to other, potentially worse problems. For example, the insulation could be put inside the tank, as was done with the Saturn S-IVB stage. Or you could dispense with the foam and just keep topping off the tank. But that could just cause other problems (loose foam in the fuel lines - and remember all the big ice chunks falling off the Saturn V in the slow-motion launch pictures?) The only real solution would be to abandon the shuttle design for an in-line booster design - which is essentially what the CaLV/CLV Ares-1/-V that are to replace the shuttle are.

Everything would have been OK if NASA had only been allowed to develop the 100% recoverable two-stage original shuttle design instead of the compromised partially-recoverable design. One can assuredly say that if the 100% reusable shuttle had been built, the program probably would have been cancelled in the 1980’s. The SSME shuttle main engine was supposed to be 100% reusable, good for ten missions without inspection and 50 missions between overhauls. Instead it turned out to have a shorter component life than the ‘expendable’ F-1 and J-2 engines of the Saturn V that it replaced, and require 100% inspection and repair after each mission. The compromised shuttle design that flew used only three of these engines. The 100% recoverable monsters used 14. The SSME’s have flown 345 times (counting three per mission) and experienced problems resulting in engine shutdown 2 times (not counting pad aborts). That means that the 14-engine design would be experiencing an engine shutdown in 8% of the missions. Can anyone imagine the expense, the headaches, the failure modes, the unending billions that would have been expended in trying to solve such problems?

The reusable design had other severe problems. NASA’s foam problems are at least partly related to fuelling and defuelling the main tank several times in tests or scrubbed launches prior to the real thing. Each fuelling cycle brings the tank and its insulation down to -259 deg C, then back to Cape Canaveral local temperature and humidity. These thermal cycles cause expansion and contraction of the metal, freezing and unfreezing of humidity in foam voids. This cannot be avoided. What kind of problems would a 100% reusable shuttle have in going through 100’s of fuelling and defuelling cycles? Add to that re-entry cycles with a hot structure after landing? What kinds of metal or insulation failure problems would all of these contraction and expansion cycles create? It is hard to believe that this would not have been a major problem, requiring replacement of the entire booster or orbiter at regular intervals.

Then there is the heat shield issue. The orbiter of the fully-recoverable design would have been had a much lower density on re-entry due to the volume of the empty hydrogen tanks. This would have lowered the load on the orbiter’s heat shield, making the engineering problem less acute. But the design NASA favored still used the same heat tiles selected for the orbiter design that flew. NASA imagined that these could be standard and glued onto the lower wing surface like bricks. It turned out, for aerodynamic reasons, each of these 27,000 tiles had to be individually shaped and machined. The problems with this heat shield design are, and remain, one of the main issues of the shuttle program. Now for the fully recoverable design, the under wing surface would have been four times greater - and the number of tiles, and the problems, that much more. This alone would have resulted in the cancellation of the fully recoverable design.

Finally, the 800 pound gorilla in the recoverable designs were the abort scenarios. The booster and orbiter were designed for vertical takeoff, and then to fly back to base after they had consumed their propellant. In case of an abort on the way to orbit, they would have to be flying with most of their propellant aboard. In abort scenarios this would have to mean wing loadings many times the design loads - undoubtedly the wings would have snapped off. This is not even to mention the problems with separation of the piggy-back vehicles in the case of max-Q or other aerodynamic loads or conditions except for the optimum design conditions for separation.

Finally, these spacecraft would have the same fundamental problem as the shuttle, being designed using the same technology and design margins, meaning even if the several-times-worse SSME and tile problems could be overcome, they would still also fail around 1% of the time. And like the shuttle, they had no provision for crew escape, and therefore would have been just as deadly.

So in retrospect the shuttle design that was chosen was indeed the correct one, at least in comparison to the fully recoverable design. What all of these reflect is the hubris of NASA at the time of the shuttle decision. NASA believed that their reliability engineering process would make rocket technology that had only hundreds of hours of operating time behind it, as reliable as aircraft technology, that had millions of hours of operating time and corrective action, and higher design margins. This belief was the triumph of hope over reason. The high success rate of a dozen Saturn launches had lulled NASA into a false sense of confidence in the maturity of the technology.

The ISS/Station Alpha/Fred/Freedom/Space Base was initially supposed to be part of a space infrastructure. This would consist of a reusable earth-to-orbit shuttle, reusable conventional and nuclear shuttles between earth orbit and the moon and Mars, and a space station for maintenance, refuelling, and assembly of those shuttles. The shuttle was the only bit funded, and then only partially reusable.

After shuttle development was completed NASA secured funding for a space station. But without the reusable interplanetary shuttles, it could really have no purpose. So NASA, NASDA, and ESA, went back to the old canard of justifying the station as being necessary to develop all of those awesome zero-G technologies that would supposedly revolutionise life on earth (the ones Richard Feynman pointedly noted he hadn't heard of during the Challenger investigation).Forty years of spending on those awesome technologies have came to zilch, nada, nichevo, nichts, zero, nothing. But bureaucracies must march on like robots blindly following their assigned tasks. So even though NASA has itself kind of forgotten about the whole thing, ESA and NASDA are clamouring to have their multi-billion dollar programs 'completed'. Their modules designed to study those dead-end technologies must be operated briefly before the station is inevitably abandoned.

Meanwhile NASA, like a child with a short attention span, has again put itself in the space exploration business. The station, now a readily available tool to solve a lot of the technical issues involved in human space exploration, is not a significant part of that plan.

While NASA has spent thirty years studying ad nauseum the effects of zero-G on the human body, no significant work has been done on the fundamental things that need to be answered to allow manned deep space exploration. This could be answered in the next few years through imaginative new experiments taking advantage of ISS components:

• Artificial-G. Four decades have shown that zero-G is bad news to the human body. It has also shown that astronauts living in zero-G for months at a time are going to have a hard time getting around upon arrival at Mars or return to the earth. The obvious conclusion is that artificial G, produced by spinning the living spaces during transit, will be necessary fro the health of the crew and their ability to function on arrival. This research can only be done in space. Ground-based experiments have only resulted in insoluble controversies. The following need to be solved before once can even design an interplanetary spacecraft:
  • What minimum radius of spin arm is necessary to provide the artificial G while preventing problems for the crew with balance and inner-ear disorders?
  • Is the deterioration of the bones and muscles under zero-G arrested by living under 1/6 G (moon gravity)? Or 40% G (Mars gravity)? Or are the effects still negative, but proportional to the G-force? Or is there some other relationship?
  • Is the ideal profile for flight to Mars to start out at 1-G, reduce to 40% G at arrival on Mars, then the same in reverse for the return? Or is it better to have 1-G all the way? Or something else?
• Super-reliable, leak-proof systems capable of storing and reliquefying cryogenic propellants for years need to be designed, developed, and flown for a couple of years in earth orbit.
• Long term human colonization will require reliable, long-term artificial ecosystems that will convert carbon dioxide to oxygen, regenerate water, and provide food for the crew. These need to be developed, then tested for years in 1/6 and 40% G.
• Human deep space exploration needs to be profoundly low-tech. When you are talking about expeditions lasting for years away from resupply, you cannot have sophisticated systems needing spare parts from earth. If you're going to live on another planet indefinitely, you cannot have anything that cannot be replaced locally. To that end, power generation systems, life support systems, spacecraft orientation systems, surface rover systems, all have to be constructed of mechanical components that can be repaired and even fabricated from raw metallic stock carried aboard, and eventually smelted locally.

In a sense, this is going back to the beginnings of the space program, to that envisioned by von Braun in the 1940's. Before solar cells, digital computers, complex control systems, they envisioned exploration being guided by humans. Human navigation between planets using sextant and slide rule. Pressure-fed rocket engines. Artificial-G stations and interplanetary spacecraft. Solar dynamic power generation. All of these need to be developed - even if the explorers will only feel safe using high tech, they will need all of these low-tech methods anyway to ensure their survival as back-ups once the high-tech systems fail.

Science fiction writers have long theorized that inhabitants of the moon or Mars might be unable to return to earth - unable to bear the G-forces. This is likely true - or would it be possible through weeks or months of reacclimatization in an artificial 1-G environment on the way back to earth? This needs to be understood.

Manned spacecraft historically experience massive weight growth between conception and first flight. Mercury was 50%; Gemini 20%; Apollo 40%; the Shuttle 20%. The current overweight problems are primarily related to the switch in propellants from Liquid Oxygen/Methane to storable N2O4/MMH. Part of the increase is due to the very slightly lower-performance of the storable propellants. A lot of it is an indirect recognition of future weight growth, a result of switching to better-understood mass requirements for engines and propellant tanks. In any case, this suggests two points:

1) Absent designing a smaller modular CEV in the first place (that could be configured to be lofted by an existing booster), design the CLV with at least a 33% margin for the CEV mass. . In the worst case, you'll end up with a CLV that can deliver some useful payload to low earth orbit in addition to the CEV;

2) Don't get hung up on the mode debate. NASA is shucking bricks trying to make the masses work out. Look, the CaLV and the trip to and the moon will probably never be funded, or at least not until the CEV/CLV are flying. By then NASA may not exist or be under more sane management. Even if the first return trip to the moon does go ahead, and it does take place according to the mode selected, it doesn't mean NASA is locked into that mode for building a base. The mode can be altered if the spacecraft designs are overweight or the boosters are underperforming. They can be altered again if the spacecraft's weight can be shaved after they've flown a few and can judge where it is overbuilt.

It seems to be forgotten that the design of the Apollo CSM and Saturn V were frozen and development had been under way for a couple of years BEFORE THE MODE WAS SELECTED. The same booster and spacecraft could have been used for lunar orbit rendezvous, earth orbit rendezvous, lunar surface rendezvous, or direct flight. Since 1960 a few additional modes have been added - polar orbit rendezvous, L1 or L2 Lagrangian point rendezvous. All that means is that there's more in the mix, more alternatives when the time comes. If you design for any mode, the worst that may happen is that the spacecraft will have more capability than needed for the selected mode (the Apollo CSM's engine was oversized for the lunar orbit rendezvous mission used; the Apollo CM capsule was oversized for a direct lunar landing; the Saturn V was too small for a direct flight mission, but the right size for any of the other modes).

The CEV is likely to be the only American manned spacecraft for decades. So build a CEV that can be refuelled in orbit, with propellant tanks sized for several possible modes. Build a CLV that can take 33% more mass than that required for the station resupply version of the CEV. Build the cheapest shuttle-derived CaLV that makes sense (Shuttle-C instead of the in-line vehicles NASA is considering). Then worry about the lunar landing modes when the time comes.

(Kennedy's) Apollo program killed manned deep space exploration stone dead, for at least four decades and probably many more.

Apollo may have been driven by the Cold War, but it was an emanation of American popular culture at that moment in time. .. in the end, it was theatre, the most mind-blowing theatre ever created, at around . $13 a year per American, astonishingly cheap theatre.

In recent years broadband Internet has made it possible for original documents to be made available to a wide public. NASA, thank goodness, has had some budget available to do this with its archives, which have become an inexhaustible source of massive documentation on previously unknown or obscure plans and programs. On the other hand, Russia has gone the other way, restricting availability to historical materials that were briefly available in the 1990's.

So whither the Encyclopaedia Astronautica? Things are changing. Wikipedia is becoming the central Internet source for encyclopaedic information. Do a Google search on a space-related term, and for the common words, Wikipedia will show up first. The Encyclopaedia Astronautica will only show up at the top of the list or (often) as the only valid entry for more obscure terms. It is only a matter of time until someone rephrases all of the articles on this encyclopaedia and adds them to Wikipedia, which will then always come up first in the web searches.

At the same time, while it was actually possible to keep up with the release of new information in the 1990's, and add it as it became available to these pages, which is certainly no longer the case. While the actual number of spacecraft built and flown declines, the number of proposals for new ones has increased, thanks to the Internet. It costs no money at all for a company trying to get into passenger or orbital launch business to create a web site, put up some snazzy graphics of questionable designs, and see if any customers or investors might be lured in. The release of historical NASA documents in pdf format continues in a deluge. Only in the area of historical Soviet space projects has the tap been turned off. Regrettably we will never know the final complete and true story behind the Soviet manned lunar program of 1964-1974 or their Star Wars program of the 1980's. We evidently will never see drawings of the various Korolev and Chelomei space station, lunar, and Mars expedition projects. No photographs of the models or mock-ups of their unrealized lunar bases and space stations.

So what is the future direction of this site? First, to continue to provide original unique content, or investigation into neglected areas of space history. Notable here will be attempting to document the lives and work of the industry engineers who are the creative force behind spaceflight, but given little due in the United States and Europe (but deified in Russian and China). Second, to provide increased electronic access and links to original source materials relating to the encyclopaedia entries. We've started this at our Data Page.

Of course, it may be that in top secret a parallel system that really works may exist, at least for anti-satellite purposes. But what few hints exist in that regard indicate a ground-based radio-wave system would be used to disable enemy satellites.

The Israelis gave up on hit-to-kill and used fragmentation warheads on their Arrow missile. The US doggedly pursued and claims to have perfected hit-to-kill on the PAC-3, but the number of test launches is very low by historic standards. So why do the intercontinental ballistic missile folks, with even less time to react and less likelihood of an accurate intercept, persist in hit-to-kill?

Just wondering..

So quit mucking about and instead fly the remaining ISS missions with minimum crews willing to accept this level of risk. Quit stuffing each mission full of seven astronauts. Or if this is politically untenable, fly the shuttle unmanned in order to deliver remaining ISS elements and use the Soyuz for ISS crew rotation. NASA has now been freed by Congress to order as many Soyuz as needed until the CEV flies (if ever). But somehow, wind the shuttle up as quickly as possible and move on to something safer. These endless delays only increase the likelihood that the shuttle will never fly again, and the ISS never completed.

That said, the author of the Aviation Week article did attempt to weave together a lot of materials into a single program narrative that in fact probably relate to several different black programs. But the technical aspects of the program described are not as weak as some critics may suppose. So my personal vote is that the thing is easily in the realm of technical feasibility. I would think that Aviation Week's editors had good assurances from someone in the know of the accuracy of the article before running it. Only (possibly a long) time will show if the program ever resulted in a manned spaceplane reaching space or orbit, therefore requiring the history on this site to be rewritten.

The total lack of response in the outside world to the story can only indicate the complete lack of interest by the general public and body politic in aviation and space these days. The aerospace industry has become as commonplace to them as the motor vehicle industry and even less interesting. This is yet another sign that those thrilling days of yesteryear - when baby boomers and their fathers before them had models and pictures of the latest and hottest airplanes adorning their rooms - are gone forever.

The parallels to the shuttle program are like an icicle in the heart. The shuttle was only one part of a grand 1969 NASA vision of giant space stations, lunar bases, and Mars expeditions. After 40 years the shuttle managed to get only part of the way into the space station part of that vision. Now the CEV was part of a grand 2005 NASA vision of lunar bases and Mars expeditions. And it may survive only as a way of completing that same 1969-era space station.

The next step will be to dump the CLV and use a Delta IV or Atlas V Medium as the launch vehicle for earth orbit missions. It has to be emphasized that the CLV is not sized to send the CEV toward the ISS. It is, rather, designed to take the CEV plus 9.3 tonnes of propellant into orbit to rendezvous with much larger lunar spacecraft. That 9.3 tonnes of propellant has no other purpose but to send the CEV back from the earth toward the moon at the end of a lunar orbit rendezvous mission. For earth orbit missions, 6.3 tonnes of the propellant carried will have no purpose at all. The NASA CEV design has no means for converting this excess capacity into useful payload that can be delivered to the station. NASA lamely states that it could be used for 'station reboost' - but the propellant necessary for this is one tenth the amount delivered.

So NASA continues its jaw-droppingly proud tradition of putting useless kilograms of mass into orbit at an expense of over $20,000 per kilogram. 117 shuttle missions have sent the shuttle itself, at a mass of up to 120 tonnes, into orbit and back. Net payload on each mission was only 20% of the total. This means that NASA has orbited over 10,000 tonnes of payload (the reusable shuttle) and brought it back to earth. The only purpose for this amazing feat was to recover the engines. These engines have been so un-reusable and so costly that they have cost more than just using expendable J-2 or M-1 engines in their place on each launch. 10,000 tonnes - enough to orbit a cruiser. Imagine the space stations, the lunar bases, the Mars expeditions that tonnage could have translated into!

Let's consider if NASA had not proceeded with the Shuttle, rather a lower-cost Saturn-derived equivalent. That would translate into a Saturn II upper stage powered by two 260-inch SRB's. Or it may have been cheaper and safer to just to keep the two-stage version of the Saturn V in production. Either way, those 113 missions would have cost no more than the same number of shuttle missions, but have delivered four to five times the net payload into orbit. Every one could have beeen accompanied by a nine-crew reusable Big Gemini space capsule. This is not to mention that the money NASA spent developing the shuttle and modifying LC39 would have been saved, translating into even more launches during the 1970's (which would have already established a moon base).

This - of course - is unfair 20-20 hindsight. The evolution of the shuttle from an all-reusable low-cost means of access to space to a misbegotten hardly-reusable high-cost means of access to space has been well documented. But it is clear that if NASA had gotten its all-reusable two-stage shuttle developed, it would have been even more of an economic disaster. For the design would have been cursed with the same really-not-reusable SSME's, the same labor-intense 'recycling' after each mission, not to mention the still-unknown effects of operating aluminium propellant tanks through repeated cycles of cryogenic hydrogen tanking and re-entry heat year after year.

It may be claimed that NASA could not have stayed in the manned spaceflight business without the shuttle. This may have been true from the point of view of lunar spaceflight. In the absence of a Soviet program to go to the moon, there may indeed have been no support for Apollo follow-on missions. But certainly the desire to keep up with the Soviets would have kept America in manned spaceflight. Ever more sophisticated Skylab space stations would have been flown. And if America had retained the Saturn V and Apollo, the Russians would certainly have been motivated to pursue a more aggressive space program, to continue their own lunar base and large space station plans. So not cancelling Apollo paradoxically would have provided the competitive political underpinning for continuing it.

But NASA cannot seem to get out of its own way any more. Even before the final specification is released, the absurdity of its CEV specification decisions, designed not to assure continued American human access to space but rather to preserve NASA's government employees, have lead to revisions. The use of methane fuel, put in with an eye to eventual (unfunded) Mars colonies, is to be dropped. The SSME-powered second stage of the 'stick' Crew Launch Vehicle, put in with an eye to preserving SSME production until the Cargo LV is needed for lunar and Mars colonies, is also in trouble. So now the first flight date of the CEV has slipped from 2010 to 2012 or beyond. There will be an inevitable gap in American human manned flight between whenever the last shuttle flight is and the first CEV flight.

Last night I had a vivid dream. The television news was announcing the latest shuttle launch. The talking head jabbered over the launch itself. When the camera came onto the shuttle, it was far away, and the crowd was counting down the seconds to SRB separation. Three seconds before separation, one of the SRB's prematurely flew away from the stack, followed by that awful white cloud. They've been killed, I cry to my wife. No, maybe not, she says. No, no, such an accident is not survivable, I say.

God willing such a thing will not happen. But the shuttle, the only supersonic vehicle ever flown by Americans with no crew ejection provisions, is an accident waiting to happen. Since the shuttle began flying, the shuttle has flown 114 times and killed 14 crew in two accidents. In the same period, the Soyuz has flown 53 times and killed nobody, despite one major accident. The difference - Soyuz has backup provisions for crew rescue at any point in a mission. This is not to say that the Soyuz has is completely safe. Several things can happen which might kill the crew for which there is no means of rescue (e.g. premature separation of the heat shield, failure of the parachute compartment to open). But at least they have that escape tower to pull them away from an errant booster in the early flight phases, and a reserve parachute to return to earth even if the primary fails.

But the point is -- the shuttle may never fly again, or maybe sputter through only a few flights before someone throws in the towel on the entire program. NASA, like the Defense Department, has imposed so much bureaucracy, oversight, and pork-consciousness into its major program development process that it has become virtually impossible for the government to successfully develop any new aerospace vehicle. In the last two decades the American government has spent billions in serious pursuit of the X-30 National Aerospaceplane, the X-38 Crew Rescue Vehicle, the X-33 Shuttle Replacement, the X-43 reusable spaceplane, the Orbital Space Plane, and so on -- all cancelled without a single flight after years of development. The CEV seems to be on the same inevitable course. NASA Administrator Griffin's actions to cut through the acquisition study raindance and just go ahead and develop something are admirable. But it seems it cannot be done the way he wants, in the context of NASA's political structure, designing the CEV in a manner to ensure that each NASA Center has a piece of the action and can justify its continued existence. The only way to save American manned spaceflight is:

1 - Develop a CEV for four crew, designed solely for the return of crews from orbit. With a three-module Soyuz-type design, this can provide plenty of capability and still be within the payload of current expendable launch vehicles - Delta IV, Atlas V, Zenit-2, Soyuz FG, Ariane 5. This was the near-unanimous conclusion of the CEV subcontractors, which NASA chose to ignore.

2 - Forget about man-rating the launch vehicle. Instead provide the CEV itself with comprehensive, redundant crew rescue provisions so that the crew will survive no matter what the reliability of the booster it rides on. NASA's man-rated booster concept is a meaningless chimera. NASA has produced elaborate specifications that would require substantial redesign of existing expendable launch vehicles in order to be 'man-rated', followed by a very limited production run of this modified design. But statistics show that expendable launch vehicles not designed to this criteria are every bit as reliable as vehicles designed to it. The main driver in launch vehicle reliability is to build and launch a lot of a particular design without modifying it - something NASA's approach will not do. Would the crew feel safer on a man-rated launch vehicle of NASA's own design that will fly only a couple of times a year, or flying on a commercial booster with a 99% launch reliability record, in a CEV that provide an alternate means of crew escape, no matter what the failure of the booster or CEV?

This is part of a larger trend in the evolution of the human species. The generations of human explorers of unknown worlds, from 998 to 1969, had no practical means of comprehensively observing a place other than sending a man there to see for himself and report back. But the last half of the 20th Century saw the development of high-reliability electronics and complex computers. This allowed robots to be built, of ever-declining size and ever-increasing reliability, that could go to other worlds and send back data and multi-spectral images far more comprehensive than any eyewitness report. And as generations came and went that had been brought up with television, computers, video games, e-mail, chat rooms, the perceived necessity of direct personal experience in everyday life, let alone exploration, became ever less.

When von Braun and Korolev dreamed of human stations in orbit and expeditions to the planets, there was no other practical way to achieve this. Men would have to navigate and guide the spaceships. It just didn't seem possible in the 1950's that machines could be built that would function without breakdown long enough to operate on interplanetary flights. At the time of the Apollo moon landings, it still was a barely valid argument that humans on the surface could accomplish a lot more than the primitive robots of the time. But by the 21st Century, it is quite clear - humans are no longer the best way to explore the moon or planets. Robotic missions can be developed to do the same things that humans can do, and much more, at a tiny fraction of the cost of manned exploration. And the taxpayers, accustomed to exploring the world through nature programs on their big-screen high-definition satellite televisions, see no need to pay vast sums just so a select few can have direct personal experience of these places.

So what other arguments exist for manned space travel? The one advocated by Ray Bradbury in the lead quotation of this site is for racial survival. Not of our biological matter, but of the science, the art, the knowledge of the universe that our species has accumulated. Humans must colonise other worlds so that the loss of the earth will not represent the loss of all that humans have done. This is what makes intelligent life different from the rest of the universe, this precious cache of organized thought won at such enormous expense in the struggle against death and entropy.

But as we have understood the earth's past and future better, this argument seems more dubious. If survival of the species is the issue, the most economical method of survival of our collective knowledge would be to build a self-contained, hardened, large-scale habitat somewhere on the earth. For if earth were to experience an ice age, runaway global warming, nuclear winter, a massive plague - whatever disaster that can be conceived - conditions on earth would still be much more hospitable then on any other planet in the solar system. So construction of a human colony on earth capable of autonomous survival, whether in Antarctica, the bottom of the ocean, or Wapakoneta, Ohio, would be much less expensive than building the same thing on the moon or Mars. And there are certain catastrophes - a nearby supernova, gamma burster, black hole, whatever - that could wipe out mankind no matter where they were located in the solar system.

So Bradbury's argument doesn't hold up, unless you manage to colonise a good part of the galaxy. It may be argued that human nature being what it is, such a global storm shelter on the earth could never be maintained over time in the face of the absence of the sure-to-come but very-rare catastrophe, whereas a colony on the moon or Mars would have no choice but to continue. But the same argument could be applied to any government-supported off-earth colony as well. There were many, many failed attempts to colonize the New World. Off-earth colonies could also be abandoned or wiped out before they have a chance to propagate. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

So the only assured way that people will naturally move out into the universe and preserve our collective knowledge through the actions of individual persons, not states. These persons will have to want to do it, and be able to afford to do it. Nobody climbs mountains or goes to the North Pole for exploration's sake anymore. But thousands do it as part of an adventure sport. No European travels the Silk Road, or tours fair Petra or Palmyra or Macchu Picchu disguised as a Circassian merchant any more. But tens of millions do it as part of their cheap package tours. So it seems the colonization of space shall depend on people wanting to do it for some reason, and the cost being low enough for them to be able to do it.

So this is where space tourism comes in. This is the only reliable, sustainable (dreadful word) way to the stars. It cannot be achieved through NASA or RKA or CSA. Maybe Branson and Rutan can start it. If they, or some other commercial visionaries, can extend it to orbit using low-cost technology, as embodied in the Quick Reach/CXV combination, then space hotels would surely follow. Vacations on the moon would not be far behind. Once you've done that, Mars is dead easy - as vacation adventure travel, rather than a government works project. It has to be something small colonies of utopic space zealots could afford ("I had a house in San Diego that became worth $ 2 million. My company laid me off. So I sold the house, joined the Marsies and headed for Syrtis Major").

So the road to space may not be guided by per aspera ad astra but rather caveat emptor..

First, that the moon-landing / moonbase scenario with the greatest safety, operational flexibility, and lowest practical energy requirements was the L1 rendezvous scheme. The manned CEV re-entry vehicle would be launched toward the Earth-Moon L1 Lagrangian point, and rendezvous and dock with a lunar lander. The lander could proceed from there to a landing site at any point on the moon, and later return to L1. These departures and returns could be made at any time, from the earth or the moon - there were virtually no launch window constraints at either end. The lander could be reusable, being refuelled at L1 by tankers from the earth. The same L1 assembly point could be used later as a depot for propellant generated on the moon, and as an on-ramp onto the interplanetary superhighway towards Mars and beyond.

The only schemes with a lower delta-V requirement were the equatorial lunar base / equatorial lunar orbit rendezvous scheme (operationally nearly useless) and the direct landing/direct return scheme (which would require development of a Nova-class super-booster).

Instead, NASA's preferred scenario requires both earth- and lunar- orbit rendezvous, with massive launch window constraints, and maximum delta-V to ensure 'anytime return' of the crews.

Secondly, several reports concluded that the only sensible mass requirement for a CEV was 8 to 9 tonnes. Used with a three-module Soyuz-type spacecraft scheme, this would be sufficient to take four crew into space, conduct up to 1.6 km/s in manoeuvres in order to get to L1 and back, and re-enter the earth's atmosphere from lunar distances. A CEV of this mass could be launched directly to L1 by an existing Delta IV Heavy and launched into low earth orbit for ISS missions by any commercial ELV (e.g. Delta IV, Atlas V, Ariane V, Proton M, Zenit-3SL, H-2A). For the lunar exploration plans of NASA (two missions a year), it made no sense to develop a heavy-lift booster or to keep the expensive shuttle component lines open. Furthermore, use of the Delta IV and Atlas V by NASA would double or triple production of EELV Common Booster Cores for both vehicles, fulfilling their original traffic models, and allowing them to be competitive in the commercial market with the Ariane V.

NASA ignored these compelling conclusions. Instead, they cherry-picked a feature or two from each contractor's proposal, then plunged ahead with their own CEV design - a six-crew, 23-tonne monster that could only be launched by NASA-proprietary launch vehicles. But NASA's plans, it develops, are already in trouble, entering the complexity-weight-cost-complexity-weight-cost death spiral that has killed off the X-30, X-33, and X-38. The final requirements for the CEV have not even been released, and it seems NASA's design is already in deep trouble.

First, the plan to use liquid oxygen/methane propellants is evidently to be dropped. Reliable N2O4/MMH storable propellants will be used instead, at least in the initial Block I vehicle for space station resupply. This makes the chance of NASA meeting its schedule a bit more likely, but at the expense of having to develop two versions of the service module.

Second, NASA cannot get its oh-gly 'stick' booster design to deliver enough payload to get its monster CEV into orbit. NASA's version of the Stick seemed to have been conceived with the sole purpose of keeping the shuttle production lines open for a decade until the need for the Cargo LV heavy lifter would supposedly develop. The original STK design used a five-segment shuttle RSRM booster motor, topped by a new cryogenic Lox/LH2 stage powered by a J-2S engine. This at least had the merit of getting a proven expendable upper stage motor into production that would be very useful in future manned lunar and planetary exploration. Instead, NASA decided to use a four-segment booster, seemingly to justify a monster upper stage over-powered by a 'modification' of the horrendously complex and expensive SSME Space Shuttle Main Engine. This would be expensively modified to make it capable of ignition in zero-G and space - which the J-2S already could do. Now, surprise, NASA finds its four-segment booster can't get the CEV into orbit, and its SSME development will be more difficult and expensive than originally thought.

Of course, if NASA really thinks it is safe to continue ground handling of loaded solid rocket motors, and to trust human crews to launch vehicles that use them, it would be much more logical to forget the expensive cryogenic upper stage and just use a three- or four-stage solid booster, consisting of stages of various lengths of shuttle booster segments, and a high performance solid final stage. Such a design would be capable of getting the CEV into orbit,. and eliminate the need for all cryogenic handling facilities at the Kennedy Space Center. But then, NASA's objective never has been to reduce costs - just to keep the present contractors and its staff employed.

NASA's current plans will lead nowhere other than the elimination of America's human spaceflight capability. The only way to stop this is to introduce a little competition. Why can't just 10% of NASA's CEV budget be taken away and given to DARPA, John Hopkins, or Lawrence Livermore in a trust fund, to be allocated with minimal oversight to t/Space+Rutan or SpaceX+Rutan, to develop one of the order-or-magnitude lower-cost, safe access to space designs, like the CVX? It would be a little insurance that could make sure there is a way to get Americans in space after the impending collapse of the shuttle program and inevitable half-decade delays and overruns that will result in a NASA.

I was watching an old episode of Jay Leno's Tonight Show, made after John Glenn's shuttle flight. The STS-95 crew was on, a true rarity in recent decades. The crowd went nuts over these 'American heroes'. It is true the totally commercialized American media no longer books guests unless they have a new movie or TV series or book to flog. But maybe NASA could cancel its bo-ring and use-less educational outreach programs and hire some Hollywood publicists and agents to get some real face time with the public?

NASA has perfected the astronaut selection process to the point where they get incredibly intelligent, educated, experienced, competent, fit over-achievers. The competition for the few available flight slots makes them excellent bureaucratic team-players, who never get out of line and never rock the boat. It might be incredibly unfair, but maybe instead recruiting young, inexperienced photogenic types with movie-star charisma would do more for the program. The Soviet Union did this in a way, recruiting young pilots with the idea of developing a cosmonaut profession rather than recruiting highly educated engineering test pilots. Or perhaps interested young Hollywood stars could be recruited directly.

Maybe not this year, but someday, and soon - here's to Christmas on Mars!

Government subsidies were necessary to get improved roads, railroads, and commercial aviation going. Where is the modern equivalent? Today's space entrepreneurs, rather than being assisted, have to fight a hostile government bureaucracy that puts every possible impediment before them. Cancel NASA, grant one third of its budget to space entrepreneurs as subsidies or prizes, and perhaps we will be on the Interplanetary Superhighway to Mars within a decade. That was how the transcontinental railroad was quickly built.