March 2006

Spacex launched their First Falcon 1 rocket this month, after 4 false starts. Even though they'd just done a static engine burn and checked everything out thoroughly, the rocket followed the maiden launch tradition and spread itself around the place in an impressive fireball. The Falconsat payload, originally due to have been launched on one of the cancelled shuttle flights, was also lost. Satellites are not generally given parachutes. Hopefully, SpaceX will get their act together as the Falcon is intended as the first of a series of semi-reusable rockets, getting bigger and bigger until they give a heavy lift capability. The US needs a reliable launcher while they are developing the replacement for the shuttle, and clearly can't afford to pay NASA to do the job.

The problem is that the shuttle sucks. NASA budget, that is. The numbers show that in the last 2 years and at a cost of US$10 billion NASA managed to launch 7 astronauts to the International Space Station. If Russian tourist astronaut launches had been used, this would have cost US$140 million and left a few billion over for launching umpteen unmanned resupply missions. NASA's stubborn reliance on the ailing shuttle and it's cutting of the projects intended to replace it is going to cost it big time. Now NASA has a lot of international commitments to complete the International Space Station, and no alternative to propping up the shuttle with some more money. It's stubbornness has left it with no other vehicle capable of docking with the ISS, even if they can get things into the right orbit. But with the US budget on a war footing, all the real money is locked up in the military research projects. These are increasingly being seen as a way of developing technologies and moving large amounts of money around without the tedious necessity of disclosing the details of either to the public. Accordingly, NASA's budget “increase” has consistently failed to cover the costs of inflation and unanticipated disasters such as hurricane Katrina throughout the Bush administration. It;s workforce now numbers fewer than 20,000.

This contrasts with the efforts of the Chinese government, where 200,000 workers are engaged in the task of getting to the moon by 2017. Even US Congress-critters are starting to acknowledge that not only is there another space race on, but the US is in great danger of losing it.

Not all the NASA budget news is bad. The unmanned DAWN mission to the larger asteroids Ceres and Vesta looks likely to go ahead, at a cost of US$446 million (picture on the right courtesy NASA and UCLA). It was previously canned due to budgetary and performance issues – investigators found 25 things that needed fixing - but the cheque came through and it should be able to fire it's xenon ion engine all the way out the the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. All being well, the probe is hoped to compare the differences between the two bodies, which are thought to have formed at different locations in our solar system. The science budget has basically been pillaged to supply funding to the rocket that will replace the shuttle for manned launches. Supreme Chancellor Bush says they're going to the moon with it, but the funny thing is they've cut the budget for the NASA department that figures out how they will survive once they get there. Most curious.

Brazil gets its first astronaut on the ISS, Marcos C. Pontes ,and in keeping with the national spirit he's taking up a football (real football – soccer) jersey as well as the national flag. It appears that as far as the Brazilians are concerned the two are probably interchangeable. He went up on a Russian Soyuz, continuing the faultless flight record to the ISS for that craft, along with the new ISS crew, Russian Pavel Vinogradov and American Jeffrey Williams, and is expected to be there for 9 days while the other two will stay up there for 178 days. He comes back down with the previous crew in an older Soyuz, but while they are all there the ISS has enough people to actually do research rather than primarily concentrating on station maintenance – the existing crew has already set out his workbench for him so he can get everything done in the time allotted. In the process, they found the 4 missing air scrubber cartridges that they need to run their Orlan spacesuits. They took time off to photograph the shadow of the moon as it crossed the Earth during the recent eclipse (more on that in a bit). Russia has also offered to help Brazil rebuild its launch facilities after a disastrous explosion in 2003 which killed many Brazilian rocket scientists.

So did you really believe for a minute that the Sky satellite outage was caused by a solar eclipse? Yeah, right. The solar eclipses affected only a small area of the Earth, and the shadow of this one fell along a track going from South America, over Africa and up into the Middle East and India - not even on the right side of the Earth to affect our satellite. In any event, eclipses generated by the Earth happen on a regular basis and the satellites have batteries to cope – the eclipse by the moon only lasted 4 minutes in the few places it touched the Earth (see the track in the NASA image on the left, note: no NZ) and eclipses caused by the Earth last much longer. Evidence points to a faulty thruster, and the originator of the “solar eclipse” story needs to come clean as a probable producer of bovine manure.

Richard Branson's bid to take tourists into space on his Virgin Galactic fleet hit the news again. He has signed up a good few celebrities for the £114,000 excursion, which is expected to roughly halve in price as the venture gets going. Such notables as Sigourney Weaver, Victoria Principal, and Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Dave Navarro have booked up for the first flights in 2008. Coverage in the seedier side of the press has been guaranteed by one of the Virgin reps saying that breast implants might be banned. A great media ploy, and excuse to show oversized mammaliary glands on the inside pages, but scientifically groundless and it does make them look like a right bunch of t-- er, incompetents.

As there are only 6 passenger seats on the first flight, the initial passengers will be selected by lottery – though Branson himself intends to bag a seat. The inaugural flight is intended to depart from New Mexico, but Dubai is also being considered as part of an operation that Branson optimistically envisages as running up to 20 flights a day.

This edition is also on the web, just point your web browser to http://olliver.family.gen.nz.   vik@olliver.family.gen.nz
"We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers
can delay the launching of a space rocket" - George Carlin