Big space update
Okay, space news.
So launch costs have gone up everywhere with possible benefits for private space.
Russia's rockets had been heavily subsidized under the USSR, which is breaking down, and all the old bread and butter craft in the US like Atlas and Titan are running out of parts that are simply not being made anymore or are discontinued entirely. With the only remaining launchers being Ariane and Atlas 5, which are both large-scale, and a few Indian and Chinese rockets (and good luck getting those), we are stuck looking at the rocket equivalent of using a semi to carry a couple of two-by-fours. The classic bazooka fly swatter situation. That sucks generally, but there's an interesting upside in the private spaceflight market.
Bigelow Aerospace, one of my top five private companies to watch, has announced that they will not be launching their middle of the road module and will instead be bumping up their Sundancer fully habitable module. So we may see the 11th, and first non-governmental, space station in orbit by 2009 instead of it's original 2010 launch date. This makes for a boring manifest for the coming year from that company, but a major uptake in overall plans. The possibilities are endless for these spacecraft. Unlike the heavier, clunkier, narrow focus stations currently in orbit, these are cheap, light, more resistant to micrometeorite strikes, and endlessly expandable in application. It has even been suggested that a rocket could be strapped to one or several modules and launched toward the moon or mars, a feat not cost-effective for the dead-weight rigid body stations currently on orbit (no offense ISS). This means the comfort of a two to three bedroom house for a trip that currently features three to six people in a glorified tin can on a two day road trip. And to launch a full half a decade before NASA even has started working on their own moon vehicles in their 'Constellation' program makes me wonder.
Advantage number two to the rise in costs is that low-cost providers like SpaceX, Masten, or Rocketplane Kistler are given practically a free ride into the market. These companies offer pennies on the dollar launches with innovative tools made in-house (so no more parts shortages) that are safer, cleaner, and equally efficient. With NASA, Roskosmos, JAXA, ESA, and numerous private satellite providers delaying, shrinking, or cancelling plans due to costs, it's like free money to the New Space movement. So I watch with bated breath as another of my darling companies, SpaceX, gears up for their first non-test launch in October with a real-deal payload, and preps their Dragon for a 2k9 or 2010 launch to the ISS. I feel as though I'm watching the very nature of space-flight shift away from the government pork contracts of yore. And I say let the titans fall.
In other news, the two crazy little bots on Mars are still trucking around after weathering the brunt of a storm that would make Katrina look like a summer breeze. These are the machines that just won't die. One of the engineers on the program compared it to buying a car that is intended to go 100,000 miles and getting 10,000,000 out of it. And with two US orbiters one European orbiter taking notes from above, we've got enough data coming down to make up for the multitude of failures in past Mars missions and then some. The MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), as you may recall from a prior note, had sent more data on Mars than all other systems combined before it even got all the way there. We've mapped 100% of the surface with this hot-rod of a craft and 5% of it at resolutions small enough to note the stripes on a beach ball. And we just launched a new kid on the block meant to probe the polar regions for signs of organics and other interesting finds.
What a wild time to be a space cadet.
Meep out.
So launch costs have gone up everywhere with possible benefits for private space.
Russia's rockets had been heavily subsidized under the USSR, which is breaking down, and all the old bread and butter craft in the US like Atlas and Titan are running out of parts that are simply not being made anymore or are discontinued entirely. With the only remaining launchers being Ariane and Atlas 5, which are both large-scale, and a few Indian and Chinese rockets (and good luck getting those), we are stuck looking at the rocket equivalent of using a semi to carry a couple of two-by-fours. The classic bazooka fly swatter situation. That sucks generally, but there's an interesting upside in the private spaceflight market.
Bigelow Aerospace, one of my top five private companies to watch, has announced that they will not be launching their middle of the road module and will instead be bumping up their Sundancer fully habitable module. So we may see the 11th, and first non-governmental, space station in orbit by 2009 instead of it's original 2010 launch date. This makes for a boring manifest for the coming year from that company, but a major uptake in overall plans. The possibilities are endless for these spacecraft. Unlike the heavier, clunkier, narrow focus stations currently in orbit, these are cheap, light, more resistant to micrometeorite strikes, and endlessly expandable in application. It has even been suggested that a rocket could be strapped to one or several modules and launched toward the moon or mars, a feat not cost-effective for the dead-weight rigid body stations currently on orbit (no offense ISS). This means the comfort of a two to three bedroom house for a trip that currently features three to six people in a glorified tin can on a two day road trip. And to launch a full half a decade before NASA even has started working on their own moon vehicles in their 'Constellation' program makes me wonder.
Advantage number two to the rise in costs is that low-cost providers like SpaceX, Masten, or Rocketplane Kistler are given practically a free ride into the market. These companies offer pennies on the dollar launches with innovative tools made in-house (so no more parts shortages) that are safer, cleaner, and equally efficient. With NASA, Roskosmos, JAXA, ESA, and numerous private satellite providers delaying, shrinking, or cancelling plans due to costs, it's like free money to the New Space movement. So I watch with bated breath as another of my darling companies, SpaceX, gears up for their first non-test launch in October with a real-deal payload, and preps their Dragon for a 2k9 or 2010 launch to the ISS. I feel as though I'm watching the very nature of space-flight shift away from the government pork contracts of yore. And I say let the titans fall.
In other news, the two crazy little bots on Mars are still trucking around after weathering the brunt of a storm that would make Katrina look like a summer breeze. These are the machines that just won't die. One of the engineers on the program compared it to buying a car that is intended to go 100,000 miles and getting 10,000,000 out of it. And with two US orbiters one European orbiter taking notes from above, we've got enough data coming down to make up for the multitude of failures in past Mars missions and then some. The MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), as you may recall from a prior note, had sent more data on Mars than all other systems combined before it even got all the way there. We've mapped 100% of the surface with this hot-rod of a craft and 5% of it at resolutions small enough to note the stripes on a beach ball. And we just launched a new kid on the block meant to probe the polar regions for signs of organics and other interesting finds.
What a wild time to be a space cadet.
Meep out.