June 2004

Things are getting mighty busy these days, particularly with the X-Prize – US$10m for the first private craft to fly over 100km twice in a fortnight, if you've not heard of it yet. The Scaled Composites team headed by Burt Rutan appears to be leading the pack. A couple of weeks before publication, they sent their SpaceShipOne up aboard the White Knight carrier craft, and let it fire its rocket engine to take it up to a height of 65km. NASA Awards its astronauts “wings” for flights over 80km. The flight went well, except that the navigation console computer crashed and had to be rebooted; not quite Star Trek material, but getting there.

China's space program had both good and bad news last month. The good news was that their next manned flight is going to be a two-person affair. With the modular design of their spacecraft, they can take a good supply of consumables along too. The bad news is that the lunar missions are currently off for financial reasons. It's possible that the Chinese were looking for a little more companionship from the international community on their flights, and are particularly disappointed the American government does not seem eager to join in on international missions. Things could get complicated very rapidly if the US won't join in projects involving ESA because of a Chinese contribution.

The Cassini-Huygens probe that is currently homing in on Saturn is a good example of a collaborative international mission. Although the mothership and launch are American, the Huygens probe and half of the 254 internationally recognized scientists on the science team are not. Data from the mission will be analysed by teams in 17 countries, and that data is now clearer than we can get from the best equipment on Earth. Over the next month, Cassini-Huygens will enter orbit around Saturn, with a lot of attention going into the moon Titan. It has the building-blocks of life on it, and consequently we want to have a peek and see what's cooking. Huygens will descend (hopefully in a controlled manner) to the surface, however damp it may be. We're expecting some of the surface to be covered in liquefied CNG with mucky organic compounds in it. It is conceivable that something has learned to wriggle in this muck, but Huygens probably won't tell us that. Cassini is already returning promising images, and will be targeting many other moons and the magnificent rings on the way to its observational orbit.

The Mars rovers are still functioning – not that the press have noticed much. A 10cm x 30cm rock ejected from one of the craters has been getting a lot of scientific attention from the Opportunity rover. The rock has got a lot of fine layering and “spherical concretions”, all of which indicates it formed in the wet. Meanwhiles, the other rover Spirit is headed for the hills at a mind-boggling rate of 124 metres per day. It might get there by mid-June, Martian weather and obstacles permitting.

On its own, NASA is not doing too well right now. It has so many people working on the safety side, it's starting to have a shortage of actual technicians – no real budget increase means staff have to be reassigned rather than increased. This is not helped by NASA's books failing to balance. Yes, even with the mighty resources of NASA attempting to consolidate its 10-division accountancy exploration programme, neither the US$2 billion or the mysterious black hole sucking it up have been found. That's 12% of their total budget. They still have commitments to fly another 30 flights to complete the ISS, though they're trying to reduce that as far as possible. If the planned 2010 retirement date is kept, and they get to launch it next year as planned, 30 flights would mean 6 flights every year. In their busiest launch period with all shuttles available, NASA managed 9 flights per year. It looks dodgy, doesn't it?

If they ever do get back to the moon, plans are for a longer duration mission with a larger crew. Mission times of 90 days are being mooted, which encompasses a whole lunar day/night cycle – 28 days. The crew size is being talked up too, perhaps as many as 6 people. A new craft is going to be needed to get all this to the moon, which as The Artemis Society has been pointing out for some time now is technically feasible but does need a budget. So far, the US administration is coming up with fine words, but no cash. Given the state of NASA's finances, it's going to be hard to argue with the bean-counters.

Europe continues to develop its own manned spaceflight capability based on the Ariane series of launchers, which were fortunately designed as being man-rated from the beginning. Plus, the Russians and ESA are starting to share launch facilities. The current focus is on the unmanned Phoenix space shuttle prototype (shown here after its flight on the right), which was test-dropped from a helicopter in Sweden in May, and landed happily courtesy of GPS guidance.

The German-designed craft weighs over a tonne, and is roughly 7 metres long – one sixth of the size of the final Hopper which is scheduled to fly between 2015-2020. Phoenix will probably undergo high altitude drop-tests from a balloon. Hopper will be launched from a 4km maglev track, similar to the high-speed magnetic trains in Japan. It is hoped that this will be significantly cheaper than firing off Ariane 5 rockets.

And finally, a load of crap about spaceship power supplies. Yes, someone has invented the “Dunnycell”^(TM). Running off pure crap, a remarkable fuel cell from a NASA-funded research team led by Dr. Bruce Rittmann of Northwestern University extracts usable electric power from geobacter bacteria. Which eat crap and produce a water/fertilizer mix. Well, actually they eat the sludge at the bottom of stagnant, stinking pools, so crap might at least be considered as variety in the diet. Some New Zealand pundits suspect that with the aid of enough cells, the entire Government Beehive buildings in Wellington could be self-sufficient in energy.

This edition is also on the web, just point your web browser to http://olliver.family.gen.nz.   vik@olliver.family.gen.nz
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the will of even a common man cannot be taken from him."- Confucius

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