Royce's Random Thoughts

 Fifty years ago today, a small, two-man vessel landed on the surface of the Moon. The great effort behind this feat began as a political stunt by the United States to outshine its perceived rival, the Soviet Union. The end result was one of the truly transcendent moments in human history. Nothing like it had happened before.

And for fifty years, nothing like it has happened since.

That last sentence was deliberately negative, which is an easy path to take when considering human spaceflight. Growing up in the 70's, especially when I began to read sci-fi voraciously, it was easy to see the supposed future ahead of us. We'd have moon colonies mining Helium 3 for fusion reactors, we'd land astronauts on Mars. We would have massive O'Neill cylinders rotating majestically in orbit at L5, as orbital workers built the first solar power satellites feed energy to a hungry Earth. And from there we would move outward, to Jupiter, Saturn, to the stars themselves.

That didn't happen. Space, as the saying goes, is hard. It is utterly hostile to fragile humanity, which is a specialized organism designed to survive in a narrow band between the ground and the sky, on a single world, in a single solar system, two thirds of the way up a spiral arm in an unremarkable galaxy, in a universe larger than our small evolved monkey brains can really comprehend.

The idea of pioneers in rocket Conestogas moving outward to colonize the solar system as we colonized America (but without the Native American genocide) was a pipe dream at best, self-delusion at worst. Rockets are vastly more complicated and expensive beasts than covered wagons, and Mars isn't Kansas.

But it's also disingenuous to complain that space exploration stopped for fifty years either. We just did it using robots and satellites. No one can look at the achievements of Voyager, Viking, Pioneer, Pathfinder, Galileo, Mars Surveyor, Curiosity, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and especially the Hubble Space Telescope, and tell me weren't exploring. We now have detailed maps of every world and major moon in the Solar System. We have proof of water on Mars. We have proof of exosolar planets orbiting other stars, some with the potential of life upon them. And we look at the ice covered surface of Europa, and are making tentative plans to drill deep within it, perhaps to discover Earth isn't the sole abode of life around our star.

All of that was accomplished by engineers and scientists, but none of it by astronauts. Turned out, we didn't need them.

That's another disingenuous argument. The Space Shuttle was an expensive and dangerous beast, built on compromises and (some) ill considered engineering choices, and it never really reached its potential until the last ten years of its life span, when it was used to construct and service the ISS, and it never left Earth's orbit. But the science it provided during its lifetime was as invaluable as any we received from Curiosity and Sojourner.

The dreams of the 70's are very much dead. Helium 3 is a scam. Solar power sats are unneeded with the rapid decrease in the price of ground based solar cells and lithium batteries. L5 colonies were a pipe dream, an expensive suburbia to get away from Those People, at the height of concerns over urban decay. Mars remained out of reach and far too expensive, as NASA no longer commanded the resources and budget of an entire nation. It's not the future I was promised.

But it is still a bright and remarkable future. In recent years, with the rise of reusable boosters, we seem tantalizing close to the point of reaching orbit and maybe the moon on a regular and relatively expensive basis. Ultimately that might not pan out. But if it doesn't, it wasn't because we stopped trying.

Because making james_nicoll cry is a hobby.

[Poll #2039970]

A not terribly complete list…

Dr. Skippy will not…

1. Claim, “It worked in Kerbal Space Program!”
2. Change all the last names on the ISS crew manifest to “Kerman”
3. Use Kerbal Space Program in ANY portion of standard testing regimens.
4. Climb onto the Saturn V display waving a cowboy hat and yelling “I’m Slim Pickens!”
5. Mix up Imperial and Metric measurements when calculating the orbital approach to Mars.
6. Attempt to drink visiting Russian cosmonauts under the table.
7. State “A little radiation never hurt anyone” during the next Solar Flare Alert.
8. Attempt to build a time machine in order to “Go back and pants Senator Proxmire.”
9. Use the spare CanadaArms for Robot Arm Wrestling.
10. Taunt the RosCosmos officials about their Mars probe failure rate.
11. Attempt to jump a canyon with a Mars rover.
12. Use SRB’s for the annual 4th of July fireworks display.
13. Use the Lunar Rover prototype in a “Gangham Style” music video parody.
14. Attempt to drift race the Lunar Rover prototype.
15. State, “I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that” when astronauts are attempting to re-enter the station after an EVA.
16. Hum the Blue Danube Waltz during docking operations.
17. Use clips from “Armageddon” when making a presentation about Near Earth Objects.

For Hellhound: "Too many farts"

* * *

05/23/15
TO: Mission Control, Houston
FROM: Mission Commander, ISS
CC: Mission Control, Star City
SUBJECT: Modification to scheduled Progress supply flight.

In recent days it has become apparent that the Zariya module's filtration unit has been going through filters at a 20% faster rate this mission than in previous. In order to accommodate this, we request an additional ten filters be added to the next re-supply flight. To compensate for the weight increase, we strongly recommend the removal of the Meal, Dinner: Chili Bean Delight from the flight.

Don't laugh. It's not like we can open a window up here.

Rocket powered sky crane drops a rover onto Mars without a moment of human intervention. Surrrrre.

"Who let Gerry Anderson in the planning room?"

Mundane science fiction can be a pretty hard sell for a TV series. Without the striking visuals plus the cheap, easy and quick travel of Star Trek or Stargate: SG 1 and can be downright dull if handled incorrectly, and there are a million ways to handle in incorrectly.

Actually, that's the whole problem. Space, in the words of autopope, is shit. If you're going anywhere aside from LEO or the Moon it's going to take a minimum of serveral months travel, with at least a half-dozen people jammed into a space the size of a couple of caravans, travelling through an environment that is empty of road hazards or interesting visual landmarks, but can kill you in a dozen invisible ways from oxygen loss, to radiation poisoning to simple health problems that are irritated into major crises by the effect of zero G. That can be milked for drama, in increasing historonic ways, but in the end it doesn't get across one of the most basic concepts of modern space exploration. That is, it's a seriously complex endeavor involving hundreds, of not thousands of people, not just a few jut jawed heroes, that despite the lack of glamour is still worth doing.

Some of the more recent examples can be disheartening. The Cape has the advantage of NASA support, but was stuck with soap opera drama. The failed pilot Plymouth had a more interesting premise (small American town moves up to a failing Moon colony to take it over) but was stuck with the old He3 canard. More recently we had Defying Gravity which had a nominally hard science premise but quickly degenerated into Lost style mumbo jumbo.

I think we need a different example to inspire people. Not the soap opera of The Cape or the space opera of Star Trek. We need a program that can simultaneously show the complexities (and occasionally the absurdities) of creating a manned space mission and more importantly show why it matters. What we need, in other words, in the space equivilent of The West Wing.

Just wish I knew how to do that aside from having a ton exposition spoken very earnestly while walking down hallways...

China releases a concept animation of their recent space station launch.

Set to a very recognizable tune...



It's only fair I suppose. Lord knows we've done it often enough.

Scenario: A slightly modified Space Shuttle is launching from Vandenberg AFB with a light cargo (6,000 lbs) heading up into a polar orbit to redevous with a space station orbiting at an altitude of 1,000 km.

Question: How much extra fuel would be required for the OMS engines to reach that altitude?

Just trying to figure something out for my next book.

Forty-two years ago today, mankind walked on the moon for the first time. Tomorrow, the Space Shuttle lands for the last time, after thirty years of service.

I look up at the Moon and wonder, when will we be going back, and who will that be?
-Apollo 13, final line