Discovery News: Space Diary

Let's Steal the Soyuz

Well not “steal” it exactly, just do what Japan has done to our automobile industry, China to textiles and India to tech support. Import it, then re-label ‘Made in America.’ It’d be a neat way around the prohibition against buying Soyuz from the Russians, who are being punished -- not really -- for providing technology and dangerous ideas widely available on the internet to Iran, which is next door to Iraq and probably what the Bush Administration was really aiming for when they got us embroiled in the bruhaha over there.

And the U.S. really needs a spaceship because we can’t afford to fly the shuttles and simultaneously develop safer ships that can transport people to the space station as well as beyond low-Earth orbit, which we’ve been going ‘round and ‘round in since 1972, the last moon landing.

Unfortunately it took a national tragedy to buck up to the fact that the shuttles are too expensive and risky to fly forever, wonderful machines that they are. Problem is, it’s going to take five or six years to get the new crafts flying after the shuttles are retired. NASA has taken to calling this period “the gap.”

Leaving aside the fact that right now NASA is banned from purchasing Soyuz after its current exemption expires in 2011, the United State’s plan for staffing the space station during the gap is to get another exemption to buy more Soyuz. We’ll need twice as many as before, in fact because next year the size of the space station’s crew doubles to six. The Soyuz can hold three people.

Now comes the news today that Google co-founder Sergey Brin has plunked down $5 million for his own Soyuz so that he and another tourist can go visit space. (Apparently the Congressional ban doesn’t apply to private companies.) The firm arranging the jaunt will even hire a full-fledged Russian cosmonaut to pilot the rocketeers.

Which brings me to this: Why not import the Soyuz or get a license to manufacture them here? Florida, which just lost out to Virginia to be the launch site for a proposed commercially developed station cargo hauler, would be game. Might even get our Congressional delegation focused on an issue they need to be concerned with, like trade, economics and foreign affairs, rather than deciding if an Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer dark matter device should fly on the shuttle or not.

Just a thought ….

The Long Kiss Good-Night

With the addition of Japan to the growing abode in Earth orbit, it’s taking longer and longer for International Space Station crew to say hello and good-bye to ground control teams every day.

First there’s the wakup call from Mission Control in Houston. Then, the radio link passes to the U.S. science ground control team in Huntsville, Alabama.

A hop across the ocean brings Europe’s flight control center in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany in queue for an orbital tag-up, and then it’s on to Russia’s Mission Control Center in Korolev, a suburb of Moscow. Last up is the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Tsukuba Space Center, located outside of Tokyo.

At each stop around the world, flight controllers chat with the crew, giving instructions for the day, asking about developments and providing news from home. At night, there’s another round of talks to settle things down for the day and prepare for tomorrow.

NASA Comes of Age

The was something oddly comforting about the participation of NASA administrator Michael Griffin at the Pentagon briefing last week explaining the decision to shoot down a dead spy satellite from orbit.

The civilian space agency, the savior of a nation once terrified of a Soviet nuclear attack, has been floundering for decades, marked by two preventable space shuttle disasters and now mired in a risky and expensive undertaking to build a huge space station in orbit, a task many consider the most complicated engineering project ever attempted by humans.

While that in and of itself is a noble effort, the space station has never stoked public enthusiasm like the Apollo moon program. Maybe NASA was just ahead of its time.

Fifty years after the first forays beyond Earth’s atmosphere, with space well established as a staging ground for communications, reconnaissance and scientific research, NASA shared a dais with the deputy National Security advisor and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, lending its formidable and presumably impartial technical expertise to the unprecedented action the president wants to take to remove a spacecraft from orbit.

It is likely that millions of people who no longer follow the seemingly endless trials and tribulations of space station construction were suddenly aware that a space shuttle crew was in orbit. We were told the shuttle would land before the military strike to prevent the ship from flying through a cloud of wreckage as it re-entered the atmosphere that would result from the satellite’s destruction. We were told the strike would not endanger the space station, which orbits much higher than the planned target zone and which has astronauts and cosmonauts living in it full-time.

It is difficult to imagine Griffin’s immediate predecessors at this type of briefing, having neither the technical stature or political detachment to explain the nuances of rocket fuel toxicity or ballistic re-entry profiles.

Whether or not you believe the Pentagon’s rationale for removing the satellite -- to reduce the already miniscule chance of the satellite endangering populated areas -- or favor one of the alternative explanations -- a controversial and possibly illegal anti-satellite technology demonstration, or to prevent the spread of highly classified technology should intact parts of the satellite be salvageable -- NASA clearly had a seat at the grown-ups table.

Terra firma

A humble and soft-spoken Korean computer expert slated to be the first from his country to fly in space had a press debut on Tuesday at a briefing televised from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Ko San was at the end of a lineup of Russian and U.S. fliers, most rookies like himself, and all of whom will be heading to the space station in the next few months.

He spoke about the long training at Star City in Russia and how honored he was to have been selected to fly: “I think I was not the best one, but I am the luckiest,” were Ko’s gracious words. But what really echoed were the man’s wish for his divided country to rejoin and the poignant gesture he plans from orbit.

“I’m going to bring the soil of North and South Korea. I’m going to mix them up in space,” Ko said.

He launches in April with two Russian cosmonauts on a Soyuz rocket. South Korea is paying Russia about $28 million for Ko’s ride and 10-day stay on the station.