The President of Free Space, Part 2: Legacy of George Bush

September 02, 2008

The inertia that defines the George Bush presidency may be a blessing for the space program. I’m not saying that facetiously. For all I know, Bush’s passivity (some may say willful blindness) may be a skill he
has honed throughout his life, like a parent practicing patience. The Iraq flak at least should have taught him the dangers of going off half-cocked.

I refer to presidential candidate John McCain’s request for Bush to suspend the shutdown of the space shuttle program, pending further study (post election.) McCain is listening to folks who are 1) scared of losing their jobs; and/or 2) outraged that America, the leader of the free world, the king of off-planet pursuits, will soon be in the unseemly position of depending on foreigners for rides to space.

Personally, if McCain is such a maverick and really concerned that riding in Russian spaceships is poor form, especially with Russia thumping its neighbors, I think he should look into using Chinese spaceships to taxi crews to the space station. I’d bet that would get the Russians attention.

The fact is that unless the military has a secret space plane, or someone in the commercial sector lets loose a fly-pod, there will be five or more years when this country will have no means to launch people into orbit. That’s the price we pay for choices already made. It may be of some consolation to know that the people who FLY the shuttle for a living believe it is in the country’s best interests to let it die. It’s become a Terri Schiavo.

Chances are, the Bush space legacy will be a boon for whoever wins the presidency. All Bush has to do is do nothing and the shuttle shutdown will continue undisturbed. If it gets too uncomfortable in the gap -- the years between the shuttle’s retirement in 2010 and the debut of a replacement ship in 2015 or so -- the new prez can honestly claim it’s not his fault, though the last thing we need in this country is another poster child for victim mentality.

Finally, rather than mooning over the past and trying to delay the inevitable, McCain could rally around space workers who have taken the plunge into new careers and explain how their big brains and disciplined behaviors are now helping businesses create new economic engines to drive this country out of recession. It happened once before after the Apollo program. Obama has been making good use of its progeny to wind McCain’s clock. It’s called the digital revolution.

The President of Free Space, Part 1

(George Bush waves good-bye to a television picture of astronauts in orbit after a congratulatory phone call. White House photo by Paul Morse.)

No Rest for the Myth-Makers

August 28, 2008

This is probably a bad thing for a Discovery Channel columnist to admit but I don’t watch TV much. I was curious, however, to see how the guys on Mythbusters were going to tackle a rather irritating contention that the United States never landed on the moon.

Parts of the show are pretty goofy, but I enjoyed watching a chop-chop version of the scientific process in action. I hope I’m not ruining the ending for anyone who missed it last night and wants to catch a re-run, but Mythbusters says the only hoax going on is the one put forth by people who say the moon landings are a hoax.

Unfortunately, this probably won’t make a whit of difference to anyone who doesn’t ascribe to rationality and logic -- the foundations of science, even science-lite like Mythbusters -- and it’s concerning that these attributes have waned faster than the bull market.

Leaving aside the really big issues like creationism/intelligent design vs. evolution (Hey, Mythbusters: will you take THAT on??), let’s ponder for a moment the renewed call to keep the space shuttles flying so we don’t have to depend on those pesky Georgia-stomping Ruskies for rides to the space station.

Although it’s nice to see presidential candidates caring enough about space exploration to squeeze it into their busy days, the latest volley by John McCain seems a bit like a soft-boiled egg.

His call to President Bush to suspend plans to retire the shuttle (at least until after the election, says my sardonic side) because we just don’t know if we can trust our Russian partners pretty much misses the fact that we’re already beyond wedded. We’ve merged. Whether Russia flies our astronauts or not really doesn’t matter since that house in space can’t be divided.

For example, we can go on flying the shuttle to the station until the next accident, but it won’t change the fact that the spaceships standing by to transport crewmembers home in case of an emergency are Russian-made, Russian-operated, Russian-owned. The United States made the decision years ago to leave lifeboats to the Russians.

The new ships being developed to replace the shuttle CAN be used as lifeboats too, though the primary design driver is to get them to the moon.

These decisions were not made lightly. They stemmed from the highly acclaimed work of the board that investigated the 2003 Columbia disaster, which went above and beyond the call of duty by not only proving the equipment breakdowns that triggered the accident and the blind spots in managers’ mindsets that nurtured false assumptions, but also recommendations on what to do next. Topping the list? Retire or recertify the shuttle. The board determined NASA had been flying the ships without keeping up on how real-world conditions, as opposed to engineering models and simulations, were affecting them.

Like most of us individually, NASA learned the hard way. Being of sound mind and limited budget (recertification was estimated to be about as expensive as creating new ships), NASA pushed for the shuttles retirement so it could use the funds for a new endeavor.

Rational, logical --- and, unfortunately, becoming passé.

(Photos: NASA)

Guess Who's Coming to Visit?

July 14, 2008

There’s a long list of topics to discuss at the big International Space Station partners meeting in France this week: payloads for the shuttle's last nine flights to the outpost; two mini-research modules Russia wants to attach; bunking arrangements for when the crew size doubles next year -- and my personal favorite: what to do about uninvited guests.

Now I’m being blatantly ethnocentric here and looking at the prospect of visitors solely from NASA’s point of view, which seems a bit like the proverbial housewife putting up with the husband’s relatives. Sure, NASA needs her Russian hubby, particularly since he’s got the only car service running after the shuttle retires, but just how far does this arranged marriage bend?

Russia, which has embraced capitalism as no entity in the U.S. government  has dared, has cut a deal with a Virginia-based firm to supply spaceships and pilots to ferry paying passengers to the station. Russia has been running a small-scale tourist transport service since Dennis Tito forked over $20-plus million for run to the ISS in 2001.

NASA was none-to-pleased with the stunt and begrudgingly “allowed” access to the ISS only when it became apparent that it had no choice. But Tito and the handful of entrepreneurs who followed his footsteps (Skylab astronaut Owen Garriott’s son Richard, millionaire computer game developer, is set to become tourist space flight participant No. 6 in October) hitched rides on Soyuz capsules that were needed to change out resident space station crewmembers. The new gig would add three folks at a time for independent research, educational, commercial or other programs.

Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson tells me he’d like to fly a commercial Soyuz once a year beginning in 2011. (He declined to reveal a target price for each excursion.)

NASA learned of the plan last month the same way most folks did: from a press conference. The initial response was polite, but muted. One program manager did let slip that he thought commercial Soyuz trips marked “a radically different” way of operating.

I’m sure they’ll work things out though, for in this world of uncertainty, NASA has indeed staked a claim in at least one final frontier: There’s no divorce in space.

Caption: Dennis Tito suiting up to become the first fare-paying passenger in space. (Photo: Space Adventures.)

No Atheists in Space

July 10, 2008

Think you had a rough day? Imagine this: You and a roommate step outside your house, which happens to be orbiting 217 miles above the planet, and head over to the rocket ship that is supposed to take you home in another three months. The last two crews flying aboard these capsules hit the ground hard, off-course and out of radio contact with rescue teams and Mission Control.

By “ hard” I mean that instead of just feeling like an elephant was sitting on your chest -- which I’m told is what a normal Soyuz landing of two- to three times the force of Earth’s gravity is like  -- the last two crews re-entered the atmosphere on ballistic trajectories, briefly enduring more than eight times the force of Earth’s gravity. This on the heels of six months of weightlessness.

The Russians haven’t figured out yet what’s gone wrong, but they suspect the last section of the Soyuz that is supposed to jettison prior to re-entry is hanging on a bit too long, sort of like the famed hanging chads of Florida. We're living with that legacy.

So, in the pursuit of information to help solve the puzzle, cosmonauts Sergei Volkov, the space station commander, and lead flight engineer Oleg Kononenko, dutifully donned their pressurized spacesuits and bailed out for a six-hour spacewalk, the first for both. It wasn’t a pretty assignment.

First Kononenko couldn’t get himself strapped to the crane that would put him in position to work on the Soyuz, so eventually he just hung on for the ride. Then it took four hours of hard work open a locking mechanism and remove a bolt that engineers want the crew to bring back with them for analysis on the ground.

One thing about this bolt: It’s explosive -- has the blast capability of an M-80 firework, which I personally have never handled, but I know would make me the coolest and stupidest mom in the world if I got one for my teen-age son.

If that’s not sporty enough, there was the open-bladed serrated knife Kononenko used to slice through insulation to get at the bolt. (Remember these guys are essentially wearing a balloon.) And oh, by-the-way, watch out for those Soyuz thrusters, Mission Control repeatedly reminded the spacewalkers. The rockets may hold traces of highly toxic fuel. Wouldn’t want that in the airlock.

When reporters asked about the wisdom of having astronauts handle live explosives or housing the device onboard the space station, NASA program manger Mike Suffredini offered this perspective:

"We dream of a lot of wild things to do and after much analysis, sometimes we do them and sometimes we don't. In this case, both safety communities thoroughly looked at all the data surrounding this. So we have quite a bit of confidence we're perfectly safe for the crew to both remove the power connector from the charge, remove the pyrobolt from the mechanism and bring the pyrobolt, in the blast canister, inside. This has been done with all the rigor we would expect for a system that was critical like this."


Still, I’ll bet I wasn’t the only one holding my breath at 6:44 p.m. EDT, when Volkov handed off the ordnance to Kononenko to put inside a blast-proof canister.

“It is in,” he said through a translator. “Thank God.”

Caption: Oleg Kononenk training for the spacewalk.

Homecoming photos

April 27, 2008

I stumbled upon several unpublished photos taken after the rough Soyuz landing last weekend by a NASA photographer. This first one is of Steve Lindsey, the head of the astronaut office and space station program manager Mike Suffredini consulting a map after the capsule veered nearly 300 miles off course:

Here's what the rescue scene looked like:

A closeup of the capsule, now the focus of an official inquiry:

The most experienced astronaut in U.S. history looking not-so-shabby despite a landing that left her feeling 10 times the force of Earth's gravity for a few minutes during descent:

But still in need of a shoulder or two to lean on:

And finally (and I'm not sure where this fits into the sequence) a great juxtaposition of Earth and space:

Rough landing

April 21, 2008

An investigation is under way into why the Russian Soyuz capsule carrying NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and guest researcher Yi So-yeon landed more than 250 miles short and nearly three times harder than planned. It took the Russian recovery team a half-hour to find the capsule, which was burnt from overheating during its steep plunge through the atmosphere. It was the third so-called ballistic return of the capsule with a space station crew. Whitson and her crewmates were able to climb out of the Soyuz unassisted while they awaited rescue. The spacecraft is believed to have set off a grass fire at touchdown. Photo by Reuters.

It’s not as if Peggy Whitson, the NASA astronaut returning from a six-month stay aboard the International Space Station was lacking excitement and adventure in her life. During her stint as commander, the 48-year-old biochemist oversaw five different flight engineers, two guest researchers, three shuttle crews, each of which added new rooms to the station, and then the arrival of Europe’s first unmanned cargo ship. She also conducted five spacewalks and somehow managed to make the whole mission look easy and fun.

Whitson surely could have done without the crash landing of the Soyuz capsule which because of a technical glitch dove through the atmosphere much steeper than planned, subjecting the crew to 10 times the force of Earth’s gravity -- nearly triple the usual force. But what was really unnecessary were the off-color comments of yet another Russian official regarding women in space. Whitson, you may remember, was given a going-away gift by her Russian hosts of a whip.

Noting that Whitson was accompanied by another woman aboard the capsule -- with females outnumbering men for the first time ever aboard a spaceship -- Anatoly Perminov, head of the the Russian space agency Roskosmos, cracked that perhaps the landing was rough and off-target because of a superstitious belief that woman on vessels are bad luck.

Course that doesn’t explain the botched landing of the previous, all-male, crew, but as a colleague once joked: “Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.”

Welcome home, Peggy. Times, unfortunately, have not changed much.