Private Ventures

Looks like NASA is starting to finally get real (H/T Instapundit)

For decades, NASA kept a tight fist around the construction and operation of the spacecraft that ferried its astronauts and hardware into orbit. Sure, an army of private contractors actually built the vehicles, but NASA oversaw the designs—and always kept the pink slips. Now, however, the agency seems to be shifting course, as NASA officials insist that the budding commercial spacecraft fleet represents the only way the United States can realize its dreams of solar-system conquest on schedule and at an affordable cost.

Because of a new focus for NASA's strategic investments—not to mention incentives like the Ansari X Prize, which spurred the space-tourism business, and the Google Lunar X Prize, which could do the same for payloads—private-sector spaceships could be ready for government service soon, says Sam Scimemi, who heads NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. "The industry has grown up," he tells PM. "It used to be that only NASA or the Air Force could do such things....."

....."I'd like for us to get to the point where we have the kind of private/public synergy in space flight that we have had for a hundred years in aviation," Griffin said. The spirit of private enterprise is crucial to the future of space exploration, he acknowledged. "I see a day in the not-very-distant future where instead of NASA buying a vehicle, we buy a ticket for our astronauts to ride to low Earth orbit, or a bill of lading for a cargo delivery to space station by a private operator. I want us to get to that point."

Hauling cargo represents the grunt work of space exploration and, dominated by the space shuttle, it has long gobbled millions of dollars of NASA's budget. The agency's new vision hands that duty off to private companies that, freed from government paperwork, can do it more economically. This would free up more of the NASA budget for space exploration missions, Scimemi says.

And this is exactly what NASA should have been doing for years. The NASA monopoly on government-backed space missions has always seemed silly particularly, as the story notes, since all of the components and crafts were being built by private contractors.

As we have seen time and time again, privatization of certain government functions gives the taxpayer more flexibility, more options, and a better product with less overhead, less bureaucracy, and lower costs. Let's just hope that NASA's newfound vision of the space program not only spreads to other agencies at the federal and (hopefully) state level, but also survives the next Presidential administration. I have a fear that such innovations will suffer under a Democratic administration....

50 Years

It has been nearly 50 years since the launching of Sputnik, and even today it's hard to imagine the enormity of the event:

Fifty years ago, before most people living today were born, the beep-beep-beep of Sputnik was heard round the world. It was the sound of wonder and foreboding. Nothing would ever be quite the same again — in geopolitics, in science and technology, in everyday life and the capacity of the human species.

The Soviet Union had launched the first artificial satellite, a new moon, on Oct. 4, 1957. Climbing out of the terrestrial gravity well, rising above the atmosphere and into orbit, Sputnik crossed the threshold into a new dimension of human experience. People could now see their kind as spacefarers. Their enhanced mobility might someday prove as liberating as the first upright steps of hominid ancestors long ago.

The immediate reaction, though, reflected the dark concerns of a world in the grip of the cold war, a time of fear and division in which the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, stared each other down with the menace of mass destruction. Sputnik altered the nature and scope of the cold war....

...The Russians clearly intended Sputnik as a ringing statement of their technological prowess and its military implications. But even they, it seems, had not foreseen the frenzied response their success provoked.

Read the whole fascinating thing. Compare the reactions from 1957 it to the ho-hum reaction to the Chinese launching their first astronaut into orbit a few years back. Can you imagine what the reaction would be today to an event of such magnitude, say a surprise Chinese expedition to Mars? Would the be such wonder?, Would there be such fear? Would the administration launch and immediate plan to put a man on Mars in a hurry (and would protesters complain about Bush's demonic plan to conquer a sovereign planet?)

It is amazing to think that a government run program actually went from ideas on a blackboard of launching an inanimate object into space to landing a man on the Moon in 12 years. But given NASA's current propensity for mismanagement and cost overruns, the future of meaningful space travel will likely fall with private industry. But that does not mean that the lessons from Sputnik are not worth reliving, sharing, and considering as we move forward with the next fifty years of space exploration.

An Article with everything

Space travel? Colonizing Mars (apparently we only have 46 years left to colonize Mars or humanity is doomed)? Evolution? Copernican theory? Human civilization has 5,100 years to live? It's all in today's article by John Tierney from the New York Times.

Read the whole thing....

An Escalating Superpower

Threatened missile attacks? Foreign policy squabbles? The US in the middle of it?

Yes, the US is in the middle of a foreign policy imbroglio that we did not start, over the plan to place missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic:

Nikolai Solovtsov, the commander of Russia's Strategic Missile Forces, said on February 19 that Russia may withdraw from a 1987 treaty with the United States limiting short- and medium-range missiles in Europe if the U.S. plan goes ahead.

Solovtsov also warned that hosting the U.S. shield could make the Czech Republic and Poland targets of a Russian missile strike.

"If there is a political decision [made by Russia] to withdraw from [the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty] that was signed between the United States and Russia, the Strategic Missile Forces will be capable of carrying out this task [targeting sites in the Czech Republic and Poland]," Solovtsov said.

This was one of the toughest comments yet by Russian officials on the issue since President Vladimir Putin warned of a "new Cold War" in a speech in Munich two weeks ago.

Yes, the Russians are opposed to us conducting military operations with our allies.

Putin continues:

Russia's president has said he doesn't trust U.S. claims that the system would be designed to guard the U.S. East Coast and Europe against missiles launched from "rogue nations" in the Middle East.

Which is a curious statement, given the fact that the system would only impact the Russians if the Russians were planning on attacking the U.S. or its allies in Western Europe. Which tells me that Russian foreign and military policy is reverting back to those pre-Glasnost and Perestroika days. That in and of itself is a good reason to support expanded missile defense capabilities.

I'm sure glad that President Bush feels looked into his soul and felt OK. That makes me feel better...

This is Cool

A Space Transporter for the Marines:

As any battlefield commander will tell you, getting troops to the fight can be as difficult as winning it. And for modern-day soldiers, the sites of conflict are so far-flung, and the political considerations of even flying over another country so complicated, that rapid entry has become nearly impossible. If a group of Marine Corps visionaries have their way, however, 30 years from now, Marines could touch down anywhere on the globe in less than two hours, without needing to negotiate passage through foreign airspace. The breathtaking efficiency of such a delivery system could change forever the way the U.S. does battle.

The proposal, part of the Corps's push toward greater speed and flexibility, is called Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion, or Sustain. Using a suborbital transport—that is, a vehicle that flies into space to achieve high travel speeds but doesn't actually enter orbit—the Corps will be able, in effect, to instantaneously deliver Marine squads anywhere on Earth. The effort is led by Roosevelt Lafontant, a former Marine lieutenant colonel now employed by the Schafer Corporation, a military-technology consulting firm working with the Marines. Insertion from space, Lafontant explains, makes it possible for the Marines—typically the first military branch called on for emergency missions—to avoid all the usual complications that can delay or end key missions. No waiting for permission from an allied nation, no dangerous rendezvous in the desert, no slow helicopter flights over mountainous terrain. Instead, Marines could someday have an unmatched element of surprise, allowing them to do everything from reinforce Special Forces to rescue hostages thousands of miles away.

I have a hunch that Congress will find a reason to make sure such a potentially useful tool never sees the light of day anytime soon...

Somebody Take Care Of This Please

Let's save the millions on promoting dollar coins and take care of this:

Scientists calculate that if Apophis passes at a distance of exactly 18,893 miles, it will go through a "gravitational keyhole." This small region in space—only about a half mile wide, or twice the diameter of the asteroid itself—is where Earth's gravity would perturb Apophis in just the wrong way, causing it to enter an orbit seven-sixths as long as Earth's. In other words, the planet will be squarely in the crosshairs for a potentially catastrophic asteroid impact precisely seven years later, on April 13, 2036.

I plan on being around in 30 years and am not particularly enthusiastic about getting vaporized by an asteroid traveling at 30,000 MPH. Saving humanity is, actually, one of those few government programs I could get behind...