February 2005

Welcome back, spacefans. As usual, things have been moving in the space race while we've been enjoying the holidays and getting over the worst of our rash new year's resolutions. The old Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is having a real struggle surviving a concerted effort by US government-issue beancounters to kill it off. I particularly object to this concept because there are not even any real plans in place for the HST's replacement, or even a replacement for the things that only Hubble can do. Since scientists figured out how to correct its squint, it's led a kind of charmed life, surviving a series of incidents that must have sent some ground crew off for a break at the Happy Hills Holiday Home For The Slightly Cracked.

Well, Hubble was going to be ditched because they couldn't control it with less than three gyroscopes, and only four still work. Rather than replace them and risk another shuttle explosion on the return trip, it was deemed safer to send up a small rocket to nudge Hubble down to destruction. A robotic repair was suggested, but turned down - against howls of protest – because it was assumed to be too likely to fail. So some bright spark in NASA started work on some clever software to control the HST with only two gyros, and last week they made it work.

True, it's not as easy to point now because they need to see some landmark stars in the sky before they can get into a steady position. But it will allow Hubble to go back to full-time observing again, and have one spare gyro left. If all goes well, it might work until as late as 2008. It might even outlast the remaining Space Shuttles.

By then, Robert Bigelow expects to have a space hotel up there – but not actually occupied until 2010. As Launchpad reported last December, Bigelow has put up a prize pool for the first American craft capable of making repeated flights to his hotels and docking with them – though he is talking to the Chinese. The prize is US$50 million, of which Bigelow puts up half, and is being referred to at the moment as the “American Space Prize”. That's about what it currently costs to send three people on one round trip to the International Space Station.

Bigelow's CSS Skywalker (CSS is Commercial Space Station) is an expensive, armoured, inflatable sausage. Unlike most sausages, it is 14 metres or so long, and about 6.5 metres in diameter. That's roughly the volume of three family homes, once you've reserved space for the extremely sturdy sausage skin that will stop as much space junk as 75mm of solid aluminium. The design is a development of NASA's Transhab (above left, courtesy NASA);you're not going to pop this one with a fork, and he's going to cluster them for safety to make the Nautilus station.

Because it is designed to go up in a package only 5 metres in diameter, Bigelow can use cheaper launches. The increase in size from 5m to 6.5m may seem trivial, but actually gives about 70% more usable volume inside. Plus the astronauts can inflate and fit out the thing without having to don a spacesuit. With a strap-on rocket engine called a multi-directional propulsion bus (MDPB) Skywalker can change its orbit or even go on a trip to the moon. Now there's a good opportunity for Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic airline.

One thing that potential astronauts may wish to consider is their tendency to develop kidney stones. I've had them, and it's the kind of pain you would wish on your worst enemy. A recent experiment done by NASA in a bioreactor that mimics the effects of weightlessness found that they could get nanobacteria (there's one on the right) to reproduce 5 times faster up there in space. Now these nanobacteria are a sore subject with many scientists who regard them as too small to possibly exist. Seeing as the things have been found living inside calcified kidneys, clogged arteries and may even cause some heart attacks, others take the view that our theories about what can be alive need a rethink.

Remember the signs of life that were reported to have been found inside a Martian meteorite? Well, those were said to be fossil nanobacteria remains. So if NASA is growing these things, a good few theories in the medical, scientific and spaceflight books might need rewriting.

The Cosmos solar sail (shown neatly packaged on the left) was supposed to be sent up in March, but some leak checks and the late arrival of a vital transmitter has held things up until sometime in April. All being well, the solar sail will be launched from a Russian submarine on a converted ICBM, and may spend several months performing manoeuvres before the sail material degrades. As nobody has done anything like this before, any measured movement of the satellite caused by the sunlight will be considered a successful result.

As the Year of The Rooster progresses, we'll see the return of the Space Shuttle to the skies sometime in May, as it works out its last few missions. But moving along are the Chinese, who plan to put two people in orbit for about a week using their own Long March 2F/Shenzou combination some time in September to October. They're happy to work with the US, and would doubtless like to share some of the experience the US has built up on spacewalks as they work towards their own spacewalk sometime in 2007. Sun Laiyan, director of China National Space Administration, met with NASA's Sean O'Keefe in Washington last December for the first inter-agency meeting since 1996, and Sun said he believed the talks paved the way to further bilateral relations.

Finally, the Opportunity rover on Mars is still going strong, and it came across a pile of mangled heatshield that it had dropped off during its fiery entry. NASA researchers have taken photos of the bits and even used a micro-imager on some to see if it behaved as expected – the edges of the remains show how far it charred through. Armed with this unique knowledge, they might be able to lighten future shields and leave more room for cargo.

This edition is also on the web, just point your web browser to http://olliver.family.gen.nz.   vik@olliver.family.gen.nz

"Van Roy's Law: Honesty is the best policy - there's less competition.

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