Space Innovation: Our Future at Risk?
FYI,
"The Real Promise of Japan's Asteroid Mission
- Even if it fails to bring back sample, its innovation should inspire"
MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10400707/
: Somewhere beyond the far side of the Sun, a battered Japanese space
: probe is struggling to make its critical condition clear to
: controllers back on Earth so they can diagnose the latest problems,
: develop another set of "work-around" procedures and implement them
: by remote control. The project’s goal, to return from a years-long
: interplanetary odyssey with samples from an asteroid, has been
: teetering on the edge of failure for most of the trip, but the
: Japanese control team has always been able to work something out
: before.
: Even if that goal does slip through the team’s fingers, however,
: the enormously innovative and resilient mission promises to deliver
: perhaps an even more important cargo back to Earth: a renewed
: interest in far-out high-risk imaginative space technology
: demonstrations.
: In recent years, it’s been up to private groups, or small
: "sideshow" space teams, to attempt some of the most innovative
: advances for future space capabilities. The “big agency” groups
: such as NASA and the Russian Space Agency have been spending their
: money elsewhere, laying future plans based on ideas that are
: decades old. Whether “Apollo on steroids” (as NASA's moon return
: project is often called) or the Russian ‘Kliper’ spaceship (which
: appears to be a cut-and-paste amalgam of upgraded hardware that was
: first flown in the 1960s), these projects have one glaring aspect
: in common: a lack of imagination.
: Imagination drove the Japanese designers of the Hayabusa in its
: flight to snatch samples of the asteroid Itokawa. Imagination drove
: the private Planetary Society to try, and soon try again, to deploy
: a "solar sail" in space. Imagination drove a small Russian team
: with European funding to attempt to perfect “re-entry on an
: airbag,” the inflatable heat shield technology that might be able
: to step in and replace major functions of the retiring space
: shuttle fleet in the next decade.
: These projects have run into trouble, as truly pioneering projects
: often do, drawing smarmy press comments and sniping criticism from
: the "big boys" in space. Those are the same "big boys" who have
: usually been too timid (and too afraid of bad press and angry
: lawmakers) to divert a fraction of their budgets into far-out
: stuff.
: NASA has done a few projects of this type — Deep Space 1 and Deep
: Impact are honorable examples, as is the Pentagon's Clementine
: project — but NASA has too often shied away from the higher-risk
: efforts. When it has tried them and they have failed, as with the
: 1999 Mars fleet debacle, officials are all too willing to let the
: blame fall on lower-level workers ("they mixed up English and
: metric units") rather than accept the real verdict of top
: management misjudgment.
: That may changed with a new NASA program called the "Centennial
: Challenges," which is starting to offer funding for private space
: technology demonstrations. Perhaps it will establish adequate
: funding for bold experiments while insulating the agency from the
: embarrassment of the inevitable setbacks. If Hayabusa’s inspiration
: can encourage the expansion of this new program, it will have made
: an extremely important delivery back to Earth.
: However, he added that there was a potential relevant development
: in NASA. “As part of their new Centennial Challenges program, the
: space agency is considering a prize to be awarded for the first
: solar sail flight,” he reported, although current prizes are only
: for Earth-based technology demonstrations.
: Another highly innovative space device with tremendous potential is
: also struggling both with peripheral technical problems, bare-bones
: budgets, and a general lack of respect. It’s the decades-old
: concept of “landing on air” on return from space.
: The inflatable descent system replaces a traditional solid heat
: shield with an insulated heat-shield-shaped balloon, which is not
: only lighter, but also is smaller until it is deployed for the
: descent. The balloon can also widen further during final descent to
: decrease impact speed to a parachute-like touchdown.
: Ten years ago, the European Space Agency began funding a Russian
: project to modify one of its space vehicles to serve as a cargo
: return vehicle from the international space station. The Russians
: had developed an inflatable braking device for their Mars probes,
: and had suggested a beefed-up version could survive entry into
: Earth’s atmosphere.
: The project became known as the “Inflatable Reentry and Descent
: Technology” (IDRT), or just the “Demonstrator.” One test flight in
: 1999 was close to perfect — the small payload canister and the
: larger rocket stage both survived the searing heat of high-speed
: entry without the weight of traditional metal, ceramic, or tile
: shielding. Instead, high-temperature fabric pressurized by nitrogen
: formed a serviceable shield.
: Success with this project could quickly lead to deploying similar
: inflatable landing devices to the space station, where they could
: bring samples back to Earth in the long gaps between Soyuz and
: shuttle flights. With slight modifications, the device could serve
: to bring a person back to Earth, perhaps in a medical emergency.
: And with an expanded version of the device, larger objects
: — including shuttle payload bay sized modules — could be safely
: returned even after the shuttle itself ceases operations.
: These imaginative projects need encouragement, and they need the
: respect they have already earned, albeit without wide recognition.
: As with the other far-reaching projects, they can help make the
: space future more than merely an extrapolation (and rehash) of the
: past.
: The bold attempts by Hayabusa, Cosmos-1, Demonstrator, and others
: have underscored what the poet said, that "Man's reach should
: exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" Today we can modify it,
: based on these projects: in space, our reach SHOULD exceed our
: grasp, because that's what the heavens are FOR.
--
Mark Reiff <markreiff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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