Thursday, December 29, 2011

Space - Farewell, shuttle: Now the space race takes off again

Farewell, shuttle: Now the space race takes off again

 The last stand of Atlantis (Image: NASA)
The last stand of Atlantis (Image: NASA)

Atlantis has landed and the shuttle programme is over but it is far from the end of US space flight. As private ventures breathe new life into it, NASA is starting to think big again

Editorial: "The next space race"
See more: "Farewell shuttle: 30 years of space flight in pictures"

IF ATLANTIS launches as planned on 8 July it will be the last shuttle flight in the US fleet's 30-year history. The country that put the first man on the moon four decades ago will be forced to bum rides on Russian Soyuz vehicles to reach the International Space Station (ISS). It's quite a comedown, and you could be forgiven for thinking the sun is setting on US space flight. Yet for the private ventures breathing new life into space exploration, it could be the start of a golden era.
"We are an exploring people," says Robert Dickman, a retired US general who directed the air force's space programme and is now director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. "We will be the leading spacefaring nation - unless we get so hidebound into doing things we've done before that we don't want to do anything new."
NASA administrator Charles Bolden insisted last week that the US would continue its dominance of space. "We are not ending human space flight," he said. "We are recommitting ourselves to it."
Others disagree. "It's not clear to me what the future for America in human space flight is," says Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. "We have a working space transportation system that's being dismantled and there's nothing for certain following it."
That's where private companies come in, say Dickman and others, who see commercial space capabilities blossoming in the post-shuttle era, which they believe will push science and technology in new directions. It is NASA, its $18.7 billion budget the object of political wrangling between Congress and Barack Obama's administration, which faces the bigger challenge.
Private companies are well out of the blocks. SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, headed by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, has been in the spotlight with recent test flights of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon space capsule, which the company hopes to use to run a space taxi service for NASA astronauts to the ISS (New Scientist, 18 December 2010, p 12).
And it is not the only one. Boeing is working on a crew capsule of its own, called the CST-100, with a view to winning space taxi business not only from NASA but from Las Vegas company Bigelow Aerospace too.
Headed by billionaire Robert Bigelow, the company plans to operate private, inflatable space stations and has orbited a couple of scaled-down prototypes already. Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace claims that the stations will enable technology development that simply would not happen on the government-run ISS.
Companies developing things that could benefit from experiments in microgravity, such as biotechnology and new materials, are not flying them currently because they would need to wait years and pay a high price to put them on the ISS, says Gold. Bigelow stations will change that, making it quicker and cheaper to carry out experiments, as well as offering greater privacy for companies working on proprietary technology, he claims.
Some smaller space tech start-ups are seeking to make a profit from other opportunities in the post-shuttle era of human space flight. For example, Altius Space Machines, based in Louisville, Colorado, is developing a sticky robotic arm to help guide spacecraft together for docking, traditionally a complex and delicate operation.
The robotic arm will not revolutionise human space flight on its own, but Altius hopes it will fill a future need for the automatic docking of spacecraft with orbiting fuel stations - and that this ability will in turn make it easier to send astronauts to the moon or beyond (New Scientist, 1 August 2009, p 8).
But some say that the "golden age" promised by the space companies is far out of proportion to what they have accomplished so far. Critics point to Musk's claim that SpaceX could send people to Mars in 10 to 20 years, when it has not yet produced a human-rated crew capsule, and Bigelow's vision of putting private outposts on the moon.
"Call me sceptical," says Spudis. "I've been in the space business a long time. I've seen how things are promised and what is delivered. I hope they succeed, but that remains to be seen."
So if private companies can successfully run space taxi services to low-Earth orbit, what role is left for NASA? Many say it should focus on exploration beyond low-Earth orbit, whether that is to the moon, Mars, asteroids or elsewhere.
But there are differences over how best to get there. Congress wants NASA to start a programme to develop a powerful new rocket by 2016 akin to the Saturn V that took astronauts to the moon. The idea is that it could be used for missions beyond low-Earth orbit (New Scientist, 24 July, p 4). Yet the Obama administration is seeking instead to focus NASA on new technologies. It has recently gained an unlikely ally (see "Conservatives want Tea Party in space").
No one knows what will happen to NASA's budget with the retirement of the shuttles. Some estimates have put the cost of each shuttle mission at as much as $1.5 billion - NASA itself reckons $450 million - and NASA has been drawing up wish lists of technologies it would like to use the spare cash to create, such as nuclear-powered rockets for trips to Mars and vehicles able to reach Earth orbit using power from ground-based lasers. From 2012, NASA wants to put $1 billion per year into tech development, but a Congressional budget blueprint passed last year would halve that.
An optimistic Dickman, for one, sees no limit to what can be achieved if NASA develops new technologies to replace old and inefficient chemical rockets. "We got to the moon, but we couldn't go any further with that technology," says Dickman. With new technologies, NASA will "allow us to go to the moons of Saturn or Jupiter and really explore the solar system - and someday go further than that".
See more: "Farewell shuttle: 30 years of space flight in pictures"

The graphic on this story was updated at 11:30 on 11 July 2011

Conservatives want Tea Party in space

IT SOUNDS like an afternoon snack for astronauts, but Tea Party in Space is actually a conservative activist group trying to reform US space policy.
"I'm not trying to kill NASA," says the group's president, Andrew Gasser, a retired US air force officer. But the group is urging politicians to rein NASA in on tasks that it could pay the private sector to do instead, like building vehicles to ferry astronauts to the ISS.
Tea Party in Space recognises there are some things NASA can still do best. "What NASA is really going to need to focus on is technology development," says Gasser, citing nuclear-powered rockets for transporting humans to Mars, and orbiting fuel stations as examples.
The group's message seems to be resonating. Newt Gingrich, who is seeking the Republican presidential candidacy, made remarks to that effect in a recent debate. Gingrich's candidacy is foundering for unrelated reasons, but the comments suggest sympathy for Tea Party in Space's position among some more mainstream conservatives.
Even some Democrats support the ideas of Tea Party in Space. Senator Mark Warner wrote on 2 July to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, "to encourage NASA to initiate a competitive bidding process for the propulsion component of the new Space Launch System".

http://www.newscientist.com/

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