What happened to that e-journal?

What e-journal?





Falcon 9 soft landing now with video (almost)







More info:

Rick on Mars Pirate Radio (round 2)

Well, it’s finally happened.  Again.



Asteroids and “blind luck”

[This article is taken from the April 28 issue of the RocketSciRick Update.]

Evidence has been increasing that the Earth has been pelted by asteroids more frequently that originally thought. In February 2013, an asteroid exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, injurying over 1,000 people – an event thought to happen roughly every 100 to 200 years. Then in November, scientists raised the estimate to once every decade or so. Finally, a few days ago, evidence from the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization was presented of major detonations in the atmosphere. Except they weren’t from nuclear explosions; the network had detected airbursts of asteroids in the atmosphere.

According to the B612 Foundation 26 asteroid explosions have been detected since 2001. These ranged from 1 to 600 kilotons of TNT equivalent. For comparison, the explosion on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. The 2013 explosion over Chelyabinsk was rated at 500 kilotons. The 1908 explosion of Tunguska, in Siberia, was in the range of megatons.

Ed Lu, a former astronaut and CEO of the B612 Foundation, said that “while most large asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire country or continent have been detected, less than 10,000 of the more than a million dangerous asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire major metropolitan area have been found by all existing space or terrestrially-operated observatories.”

“Because we don’t know where or when the next major impact will occur,” he said, “the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a ‘city-killer’ sized asteroid has been blind luck.”

The B612 Foundation has embarked on the Sentinel space telescope project to improve the detection of asteroids. Scheduled for launch in 2018, it expected to uncover 90 percent of asteroids larger than 140 meters across entering the Earth’s region of the solar system. It will also detect many as small as 30 meters across. The Chelyabinsk asteroid was 20 meters across and weighed 13,000 metric tons.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been building a catalog of asteroid impacts that may occur during the next century. Known as the Sentry Risk Table, it classifies asteroids by impact probabilities and likely size of the explosion, and provides possible impact dates. At the moment, no major explosions with any significant probability are on the list of 460+ objects. Then again, Chelyabinsk was not on the list. (But that was only 20 meters across.)

More info:
* B612 Foundation: https://b612foundation.org/
* Impacts since 2001 visualization: http://vimeo.com/92478179
* JPL Sentry Risk Table: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risks/

What’s that e-journal thing?







What is my impression of the process so far?





–Rick, your resident Silicon Valley space journalist

SpaceX CRS-3 and re-light after MECO

In spite of thundershowers just hours before, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon spacecraft launched on time at 3:25:21 pm EDT on Friday, April 18, and headed for rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS). The rendezvous dictated the length of the launch window:  1 second. In essence, any delay would have meant scrubbing the launch for the day. The launch was flawless.


Launch of Falcon 9 on SpaceX CRS-3 mission to ISS. April 19, 2014. (Image source: SpaceX)

For NASA, this is the third SpaceX Commercial Resupply mission (SpaceX CRS-3). It is one of 12 that NASA has contracted SpaceX to perform. These launches are conducted from Cape Canaveral, FL. The other CRS provider is Orbital Sciences, which launches its rockets from Wallops Island, VA, about 100 miles SE of Washington, DC.

This Dragon spacecraft had been heavily upgraded with new avionics and power so that it could accommodate new biological payloads to be sent to the ISS. A few hours before launch, under severe weather conditions, the SpaceX crew loaded the last of the time-sensitive payloads into the Falcon 9.  The whole assembly was then stood erect and the rocket loaded with propellant. The countdown was uneventful. The only concern was the weather, which amazingly was beginning to cooperate.

Following main engine cut-of (MECO) at 2:45 (m:ss) into the flight, the first stage was cast off, and the second stage took over the mission. But sometime later, the first stage came back to life. The stage turned around and the engine (well, at least one of the nine) was re-lit, cutting short the trajectory taking it far into the Atlantic. With most of the horizontal speed burnt off, the stage now fell into re-entry, subjected to plasma flow that does bad things to most materials. But after re-entry, some number of engines were lit again, slowing its descent further, and allowing landing legs to deploy about 10 seconds before hitting the water. Some 8 seconds after hitting the water, the on-board computers finally stopped transmitting when the stage went horizontal.

Meahwhile, back in space, the Dragon is due to dock with the ISS on Easter Sunday. The biologicals include a Vegetable Production System (VEGGIE), capable of producing salad-type vegetables in space; and the T-Cell Activation in Aging experiment, probing the cause of a depression in the human immune system in microgravity.  It also carries a laser communication experiment and 5 CubeSats for later deployment.

Unobtainium and investment

In my last post about “Requirements gone wild” (April 11), I mentioned the mythical material “unobtainium”, a notion that sometimes doesn’t sit well with people. This time, I’m going to do a reality check.

People sometimes seem to think that rocket science represents the pinnacle of human creativity. Watching a rocket launch is awe-inspiring. It is taken as evidence that anything the mind can imagine, human creativity can make real. I’m convinced that people who say that are really trying to say is that the human spirit, along with persistence, can accomplish anything; within a lot of human activity, that may be true.  But I’ve seen this used as a defense that some day we will have warp drive… just because we can imagine it today.  In the broader spectrum of how nature really behaves, this doesn’t hold up.

Fundamentally, science and engineering are about discovering and harnessing the laws of nature. We believe that the world is governed by a self-consistent set of laws of behavior.  We try to discover those laws, and sometimes we draw the wrong conclusions.  Nevertheless, we believe that nature itself is self-consistent in its behavior.  We can improve our understanding, but we cannot demand that nature contradict itself.  (Well, we can demand, but it won’t do any good.)

How well we understand those laws of nature is evident in the types of engineering we now engage in.  Sending a rocket to the Moon or detonating a nuclear device are both extremely dependent on our understanding those laws. Sometimes in engineering development, we don’t really know the answer.  So we have to do experiments to ask nature how it behaves under certain circumstances.  If we like the answer, we incorporate it into our design.  If we don’t, we go back to the drawing board.

“Unobtainium” is a code word for material that borders on violating the laws of physics.  In truth, we may not know how to create the material today.  It may cost us a couple of decades of major sweat to figure it out.  (I’m still waiting on nanotubes for digital circuitry with zero internal resistance.)  If it is possible at all, turning unobtainium into the obtainable takes non-trivial resources.  Sometimes, those resources are very expensive.If you are bringing VCs, angels, or other investors to the table, then what may be unique about your plan is how you convince yourself and investors that unobtainium really isn’t.  The business plan in part amounts to how you can prove it.  On the other hand, if investors smell unaddressed unobtainium (also known as “hand-waving”) in your plan, you can expect them to walk away.

I know.  I’m such a spoil-sport. :-/

As for warp drive, the notion is in fact being investigated, but as a possible extension of the current laws of physics, using devices whose behavior we understand in current physics.  (Look up “Alcubierre drive” and Harold “Sonny” White.)  This approach amounts to looking for more subtle behavior in what we would otherwise consider as “noise”.  Can we then tweak the signal out of that noise and harness it in a new way?  Time will tell. That time may be decades.  It may be centuries.  It may be never because nature doesn’t behave that way.  But it will be interesting to see what clues can be discovered on Earth in the next few years.