The NASA Budget, Continued

This is a follow-up to my blog from yesterday on President Obama's budget. I've finally gotten caught up on my news reading, and assuming the reports are correct, here is my take on things. Please refer to the disclaimer above as far as the relationship of my opinions to NASA, my employer, or any other space-related organization...this is Bart, Private Citizen, writing.

• Killing Constellation: The President has proposed a budget that would drastically scale back or delay the schedule of the Constellation Program, which was tasked with going to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Constellation has several major components, including launch vehicles (Ares), a crew exploration vehicle (Orion), a lunar lander (Altair), surface systems (hardware like power and habitat systems needed for living and working on the Moon), extra-vehicular activity (EVA--spacesuits), and ground systems. It takes a lot of money, in normal-person terms--not Department of Defense terms--to design, build, test, and field all this stuff. It also takes time. The less money you give these activities, the longer they take or the less likely it is that they will be done at all. Having not seen the budget, I can only guess that Constellation has either received a total cut or enough of a cut that any NASA-run return to the Moon would not happen until my five-year-old niece is old enough to start complaining about her kids' taste in music.
• Increasing Funding for Commercial Launches to the International Space Station (ISS): This is actually a smart idea and could/should have been done by the Bush Administration. Right now the only way to get human beings and the stuff they need to live and work on ISS is by the Space Shuttle, which will be retired after ISS is completed; crew/cargo launches by the Russians; or cargo launches by the Europeans' Automated Transfer Vehicle or, soon, Japan's cargo vehicle. But really, once Shuttle is retired, the only nation capable of flying people to and from the space station after 2011 will be Russia. This reality is just now occurring to normal (i.e. non-space) people. So what are the options?
  --Build a new rocket to replace the Space Shuttle. NASA has been doing this since 2005, in the form of the Ares I crew launch vehicle. Ares I, on its current development schedule, will not be ready to send astronauts to ISS until 2015 according to NASA plans. A presidential review panel thought that it would be more like 2016-2017. That would mean depending on Russia, et al., for at least five years, but at the end of that time NASA would again be able to send people up there.
  --Rely only on international partners until the ISS retires.
  --Encourage/pay for American private-sector aerospace companies to build launch vehicles (rockets) and spacecraft (crew capsules) to get astronauts and cargo to ISS. Some of this is already being done under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which was designed to help new companies--outside of the usual big players like Boeing and Lockheed Martin--develop these capabilities. Two companies are getting money under COTS, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences. SpaceX is the only company of the two developing both a launch vehicle, Falcon 9, and a spacecraft, Dragon.
  
  If the Obama administration is proposing more money for COTS, which seems like an easy funding vehicle since it already exists, that money could go a couple different directions:
  --Accelerating SpaceX and Orbital's work.
  --Paying to modify Boeing/Lockheed rockets (now built under a joint operation called United Launch Alliance) to launch a Dragon or Orion capsule to ISS. This money, reportedly $6 billion, could go toward "human rating" the Atlas or Delta launch vehicles, essentially adding some more bells and whistles to them to make them safe and reliable enough to put humans on top of them.
• Extending ISS Operations: This, too, makes sense. Under current plans, ISS would be completed in 2010 and then only enjoy four or five years of full-scale science and engineering operations before being closed down and deorbited (dropped into the Pacific). This presents several problems, including the difficulty of safely deorbiting a 400,000-pound space station and violating the international agreements the U.S. signed, which said that we would keep ISS operational for ten years after full assembly, which would be 2020.

Now a more ambitious person might ask, "Why don't we fund Constellation, COTS, and ISS?" A more pragmatic person--say, a politician--will stick his or her finger in the air, try guess which way the political winds are blowing, and guess (correctly) that the public isn't interested in government spending on a Moon mission "when there are so many more important things to be done here on Earth," like creating jobs. Let's pause for a moment, and savor the tragic irony of that position. Contrary to the public perception that money spent on NASA is wasted on "space," money spent on space hardware is spent mostly on salaries for people, products, and services on EARTH: high-education, high-paying jobs that would result in industrial and consumer spending now and technology advancement and spinoffs in the future.

So where does this leave us? If the President gets his way--and don't count on that--the extensive launch facilities at Kennedy Space Center would be converted to support Falcon 9, Atlas V, or Delta IV launches to ISS. The rocket-designing workforce in Huntsville, which is eager to build Ares I and the much larger Ares V for exploration missions, would be looking for jobs at ULA in Decatur. A bunch of people in Houston currently supporting Space Shuttle missions would lose their jobs, but those helping build Orion would keep theirs, and eventually NASA would again need mission control operations to support Orion missions to ISS. But for now, a lot of jobs in Florida and Alabama and Texas would be shifted to other duties or cut outright. In an economy with 10 percent unemployment, such a decision, on top of killing America's long-range ambitions for space exploration, would not be particularly popular with some segments of the electorate.

Others, like my friends at the Space Frontier Foundation (SFF), are thrilled that the government is finally getting out of the "space operations" business. I've had my moments of doubt on that issue myself. In an economy that is healthy and with a workforce that's aging, retiring the Shuttle made sense--the older folks could retire and make room for the young punks eager to prove their stuff in the marketplace. And yes, there are things the private sector can do better, like keep their eyes on the ball programmatically. They don't argue every year as to whether their goal is to make money or not. Even if management and employees change regularly, everyone knows the business is there to make money.

The government, meanwhile, has an argument about the budget every year. Some years, they want to focus on increasing employment in Florida; other years they want to spend more on environmental monitoring; in more forward-thinking years, they want to spend money on fundamental research into aerospace, space science, planetary science, and other forms of astronomy; and sometimes they think it's a good idea to send people into space. It's a chaotic way to run a business, which is why governments are not the natural mechanism for exploiting space as a long-term concern. However, exploration is an iffy proposition for businesses. Payoffs are hard to determine. Obtaining funding for purely speculative ventures is difficult or impossible without a guaranteed return on investment. Governments are also now the only organizations willing or able to fund blue-sky engineering projects like single-stage-to-orbit rockets, in-space nuclear propulsion, or large-scale outposts in orbit or on the Moon.

The previous two paragraphs explain why I have no problem with a "mixed fleet" or "mixed economy" in space. There are things government does very well, like fund basic research and development, which offer no payoff or incentives to the private sector to accomplish. This would include things like building new exploration launch vehicles or launch vehicle technologies. Government also can fund basic infrastructure, like the first outpost in low-Earth orbit, on the Moon, or at the bottom of the sea. It is also responsible for maintaining the peace, collecting taxes, and regulating things like civil law and consumer protection. The building of ISS, Constellation, space telescopes, and NASA research centers, along with setting up the Office of Commercial Space Transportation fit these functions quite well. However, there are things that private enterprise can do much better, like improving efficiency in routine, known services, such as launching cargo and (eventually) crews to ISS. The private sector can better design, build, test, and field smaller products and services for known applications, like spare parts, accounting services, or employee cafeterias. Private businesses are also best at improving upon and mass-producing new technologies once the basic principles are known.

The sticking point for the SFF is Ares I, which they see as competing with Atlas, Delta, etc. And on a purely apples-to-apples comparison of capabilities, they might have a point: Ares I and human-rated commercial rockets would both be able to launch human beings to ISS. However, while the private sector sees that capability as redundant (true), government sees that as a strategic (national security) capability, which exists outside of questions of profit or loss. Let's say, for example, that Russia and the U.S. start a diplomatic tussle, and the U.S. government no longer considers American crew members on ISS "safe." Uncle Sam would want the on-call ability to launch a rocket to ISS to retrieve those crew members. Would a private-sector comapany, its investors, or its insurers allow a private rocket and spacecraft to head into a situation that likely spelled a danger to, and loss of, company property? Possibly--but only if government was the insurer--at which point we've got a nationalized space prgoram, which was exactly what the private sector guys are trying to avoid. So: there are reasons to have a government-built and -operated rocket that can go to ISS.

But SFF overlooks the primary purpose of Ares I, which is to support missions, in tandem with Ares V, to the Moon, asteroids, Mars, or wherever. If Congress can get access to ISS more cheaply via Delta IV, they will take it...but others will still want Uncle Sam to be able to do it, just in case.

And lastly, the big point I hear the rocket guys in Huntsville argue all the time is that no private company has launched a crew or cargo ship to ISS, leaving out the important word: yet. Until that "yet" happens, the private sector needs to cool its jets, so to speak, on making claims of superiority over NASA; meanwhile, NASA needs to accept that eventually they will lose their monopoly on human access to Earth orbit. Assuming the 2011 Obama budget passes as written, the private sector will have to, as my friend Tom Olson put it today, "put up or shut up." And in the meantime, a bunch of aerospace workers in Florida, Alabama, and Texas could be facing a very tough 2011.

This ain't over.

Ares I-X Rollout

I try not to talk about my day job much because quite frankly I like to keep my work life separate from my blogging life, but today is a little different. After three years or so of writing conference papers for the Ares I-X flight test, I watched the rocket actually roll out to the launch pad today and it is now a week away from lifting off. This is a major deal, not just for NASA (or me), but for the country as a whole. We've needed something to inspire us for awhile...something beyond politics, something we could all look upon with pride, as an actual achievement. Ares I-X just might be it--the first test flight (but not the last, if I can help it) of the Constellation Program.

Why is this flight important? Allow me to backtrack a little bit, to when we lost the Space Shuttle Columbia. People in the media, in the White House, and in the general public were asking, "Is going into space worth all the risk? All they ever do is go around in slow-motion circles in that space station up there." The Columbia Accident Investigation Board took the nation and its leaders to task for not doing something more ambitious. After all, if astronauts are going somewhere new and exciting--doing something worthy of a spacefaring nation--then yeah, any heroic losses might be deemed acceptable.

The Bush Administration came out with the "Vision for Space Exploration," which gave NASA the mission of restarting Shuttle (safely), finishing the International Space Station (ISS), building a new crew exploration vehicle, and building a base on the Moon in preparation for more ambitious missions to Mars. They theoretically promised NASA increased funding to do the job, with LOTS more funding after Shuttle retired. In 2005 NASA got a new administrator, Mike Griffin, who put together a study to decide what vehicle types would be best to execute the series of missions Bush tasked NASA to accomplish.

The study came up with new rockets that would eventually be known as the Orion crew exploration vehicle, Ares I crew launch vehicle, and Ares V cargo launch vehicle. Ares I would launch crews into low-Earth orbit (LEO) to support both ISS and missions beyond low-Earth orbit. Ares V, a rocket bigger than the Apollo-era Saturn V, would launch a lander into orbit along with an upper-stage rocket that could send the lander and the crew off to the Moon, asteroids, wherever. This two-launch concept is what NASA has been building for the last four years.

Ares I is the rocket being built now. It's needed first, and soon, because we're planning to retire the Space Shuttle as soon as the ISS is completed. Now there's a lot of debate going on in Washington about whether to keep Ares I, Ares V, Orion, and the rest of what's called the Constellation Program. The Obama administration tasked the Augustine Human Spaceflight Review Panel with reviewing the current plans and making recommendations about what to do next. Will we continue with Constellation? Turn over low-Earth orbit to commercial companies and international competitors? Or something else entirely? The Panel doesn't have the final word--Congress and the President do--so if you care about whether America keeps doing great things with people in space, it's not too late to have your voice heard. The Congressional switchboards are always open. :-)

So where does Ares I-X fit into the picture? Ares I-X is the first development test for Ares I. It's not a full-up launch vehicle, as it lacks an upper stage, a five-segment solid rocket booster for the first stage, and an Orion spacecraft on top. But the point of the test is not to get into space, the point of the flight is to get the beast to lift off and fly in the proper way and direction, under control, within the atmosphere. While the rocket might look like many others you've seen (long and cylindrical, pointy end on top, fire coming out of the bottom), Ares I does in fact have a different design from any rocket tried before. The upper half of the rocket is about six feet wider than the bottom. A human-rated rocket has never flown with only a solid rocket motor for the first stage. So there are a few things that this rocket will test that engineers haven't done before. They need to:

• Fly and control a rocket that is dynamically similar to the Ares I
• Test the separation system that splits the first stage from the upper stage and see how the rocket reacts to that separation.
• Test larger parachutes on a much longer five-segment motor (the Space Shuttle boosters have four segments and are shorter and lighter than Ares I's first stage).
• Control the rocket's roll and also see how much roll a single-solid first stage can create.
• Build and test new ground operations equipment and procedures for a rocket that is quite different from the Space Shuttle.

All of this must be done new for the first time in nearly 30 years. The very first flight of the Space Shuttle had a crew on board because they needed people on board to fly the orbiter home--but that was a huge risk at the time. Development testing allows NASA to go back to the more incremental form of testing that Wernher von Braun favored--where you test part of the rocket, make sure it works, and then test the next stage--before putting people on top of it.

Ares I-X has a four-segment solid rocket motor from the Space Shuttle's inventory and a hollow fifth segment simulator that both simulates the length of the Ares I first stage and houses most of the avionics that control the vehicle. The upper stage, crew module, and launch abort system are all simulator hardware, shaped to look as much like Ares I as was possible when the design was conceived three years ago. The upper sections also have hundreds of sensors aboard that will measure temperatures, pressures, vibrations, noise, winds, and any other forces that could affect this rocket in flight. Some of the data these sensors collect will be transmitted down to the ground "live," and some will be stored on board in that first stage avionics module and will be picked up when the first stage splashes down in the ocean.

What can you expect to see on this flight? If all goes well--and there are hundreds of people working around the clock at Kennedy Space Center right now to ensure just that--the first stage will ignite just like the Shuttle's boosters, and the rocket will move upward past the tower. It should take about six seconds from the time the hold-down posts release until the aft skirt clears the tower. Once past the tower, the roll control system (RoCS) will rotate the rocket 90 degrees to orient the rocket the way Ares I would fly and to point the antennas so they can send their data to receiving stations on the ground. After that, the rocket will continue accelerating upward and outward at Mach 4.7 (over 3,500 miles per hour) toward the Atlantic, the booster firing for about two minutes, just like Shuttle.

Then, just over two minutes into flight, a ring of explosive charges on top of the first stage will ignite and a set of smaller rockets on the aft skirt of the first stage will fire forward to split the first stage from the upper stage and pull it backward. The upper stage will continue downrange like a cannonball, and eventually fall into the ocean. The first stage booster will fall toward the ocean, and the main parachutes will open when it's about 3 miles above the ocean. Total mission time, just over five minutes.

And that's it? I can hear people ask. Yeah, but anyone who has ever been to a live launch will tell you that that's plenty of excitement for five minutes. And it's a bunch of things we haven't done before with a rocket that has never flown before. Are there dangers? Are there risks? Are there things that can go wrong? Of course, because it's a test, and it's never been done before. But jeez, what's life without a little risk? And if we really want to set America back on the path to being an exploring, spacefaring nation, it's definitely a step in the right direction.

The launch window opens at 8 a.m. Eastern Time (12 noon Greenwich Mean Time) on October 27, and lasts for four hours. Tune in, and have a look at what your space program has been up to while you've been ignoring it. They just might surprise you.

Oh, yeah...I will heading down to Florida to support Ares I-X starting Thursday. Is this a cool job, or what?

Latest on Ares from The Futures Channel

The second installment of The Futures Channel's profile on Ares can be found here. These folks do a pretty good job. The first part in the series is here.

Random Reading

Here are a variety of things that have crossed my path in the last week or so. Commentary will come to me eventually.

New article by Steve Cook (Manager of the Ares Projects) on Ares management practices: http://appel.nasa.gov/ask/issues/33/33s_owning_product_and_process.php

Also, some very cool pictures of the Constellation Program ("Yes, America, we DO have a space program..."): http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/progress_on_nasas_constellatio.html

What is the G-20? http://www.g20.org/about_what_is_g20.aspx

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen

How to Handle Difficult People, with Sue Hansen

The Space Renaissance Forum

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

Bank CEO rips on the TARP program: http://www.twincities.com/ci_11722986?source=most_viewed

Online source for hard science fiction: http://www.mikebrotherton.com/diamonds/?index

Escape from Hell, the sequel to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Inferno, is available for sale.

Some Miscellaneous NASA Stuff

Here's an education program I hadn't heard of before: High Schools United with NASA to Create Hardware (HUNCH): http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/programs/descriptions/HUNCH.html

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Oh yeah: and the Ares Projects have a three-year progress video out there for the taxpayers' edification (the emphasis is there because there are some folks out there who believe Ares is still in the "drawing board" stage). If you'd like to see it, click here (link modified 1/12/09). It's about 18 minutes long, so be patient with the download time. My buddy Jason did a hell of a job on condensing three years into that amount of time, and the video people did their usual outstanding job showing actual progress toward the Moon.

The New Era of Space Continues

The Indian space agency has launched its first probe toward the Moon, Chandrayaan-1: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7679818.stm. Good for them!

Chandrayaan-1 was developed, in part, with assistance from the U.S., as one of its onboard instruments was built by NASA. Data from this orbiter will most likely help Constellation pick future landing spots for our astronauts (though, of course, any discoveries made will be confirmed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter).

Between the cooperation in space and the recent deal on nuclear power, the U.S. and India are fundamentally shifting the shape of politics in South Asia, as the two largest democratically elected governments on Earth are now seen as cooperating, if not actual allies. This is a huge change after the Cold War, when socialist India was much closer to the Soviet Union. Having finally embraced capitalism, India is now moving closer to the U.S. This is to our advantage, especially given the potential threat of China--on Earth or in space. We could do a lot worse, and this country could use all the allies it can get!

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In the course of my job today, I got to listen to the following speech by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=29544. It was an interesting topic--integrity--for a man who many pundits seem to assume will not have a job come the next administration.

Obviously Dr. Griffin has felt wounded and insulted by the criticism the Constellation Program has endured for the last four years. However, the speech also served as a reminder to the NASA internal audience: the proper functioning of a government bureaucracy requires behaving with integrity.

That said, Griffin remained "on message." He stated that the current Constellation architecture will continue. Is it perfect? No, but it is the best architecture given the constraints the agency had to operate under and the requirements the Constellation mission had to use.

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Griffin's speech was given at the American Astronautical Society's Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium here in Huntsville. The first panel of the morning--the one that most concerned my day job--was the Ares panel. After that was Griffin's luncheon speech and then a panel on the other parts of the Constellation Program, including the Ares V cargo launch vehicle, the Altair lunar lander, and Orion crew exploration vehicle. Wayne Hale, former Space Shuttle Program Manager, had a great and sometimes hilarious presentation on exploration and science.

The best speech I heard all day came from John Horack, Manager of the Science & Mission Systems department at Marshall Space Flight Center. I've heard Horack speak before, but he hit a sensitive spot for me today, as he discussed the "why" of human exploration. I have some notes, but they don't begin to capture the man's delivery or message. I'm hoping to get a copy tomorrow to pull some actual quotations, but I'll try to give some of my impressions now.

He spoke about the fact that space exploration is one of the few things this nation does that exists to create a better future. This is important when so many governmental actions exist to prevent negative consequences. He spoke of the need to build a better future, and how NASA exemplified that need. He spoke of how Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, still decided to fund the Transcontinental Railroad, and how that investment "made the future that much better." He spoke about the need for a better future, and challenged the audience to explain to their children, if we cut the space program completely, why we believed America would no longer exist or that the future would no longer be better for them. It was fundamental stuff, things we probably don't hear often enough, and things I obviously needed to hear. I promise to post some better quotations from Horack's speech as soon as I can obtain them.

And it bears noting how Horack introduced himself: "Hi, I'm John Horack, and I'm a scientist." There's this bizarre competition between science and engineering within NASA, but you hear none of that from Horack, even when I'm sure some of his programs have taken budget hits to pay for Shuttle or Constellation. He believes in exploration and what it can do for science, and that goes a long way toward helping others see the potential for cooperation and synergy. Now the cynic in me should probably qualify this, and say, "He says he believes in exploration," but jeez, why go to all the trouble? Why put one's best thoughts and words toward ideas one doesn't believe? Anyhow, I liked his speech a great deal, and given some of the negativity I've heard and expressed lately, I probably needed it.

Enough With the Despair, Already!

For the last week or so, I've started hearing rumblings--ugly thoughts--from people at my day job and off the clock. It seems, as the political silly season draws closer, folks are having less and less positive to say about the viability of NASA, the Constellation Program, Ares, et cetera. And if it isn't people I know, it's people I read, piling on story upon editorial upon blog on how NASA is screwed up, is doing things wrong, is doomed to failure, and the next President will use those excuses to kill the program. Enough already!

The news is now bad enough that my friends and family, who don't normally pay attention to, or give a fig about, NASA or space are now emailing or calling me to ask, "Are you okay?" Meaning: "Is your job safe?" Here's the standard answer I've been giving, not just because I'm trying to prevent friends and family from worrying, but because I believe it to be true:

1. Ares is not going to be completely canceled because the U.S. needs to access the International Space Station.
2. We need to replace the Space Shuttle; we retire airliners when they get to be the Shuttle's age (when was the last time you saw a 727 flying?), and airliners are flying in a much more benign flight regime than Shuttle.
3. We are not going to leave low Earth orbit (LEO) to the Russkis, the Chi-Coms, the Euros, etc. The onset of "the gap" in U.S. human spaceflight will probably do more to get the government to pay attention and spend money on NASA than the anticipation of the gap. Americans don't like to lose. The next "space race" might not be as dramatic as the first one, but it will happen, one way or another.
4. My best guess right now, as I've stated before, is that Constellation's budget will be cut, but not totally. Again, we need access to ISS. We might not get to the Moon, but we do need to see that we get to LEO. And if the next president actually DOES decide not to go to the Moon, maybe enough people will notice enough to get mad about it.
5. If Constellation's budget is curtailed, space is not going away. There are commercial operators out there. There is space science. There is military space. Bottom line: Space isn't going anywhere, and neither am I.

Apollo 11 + 39, Ares I-X, etc.

The odds are probably better than 50-50 that if you're reading this blog, you were too young to remember Apollo 11, or weren't even born yet. I myself was two weeks away (or thereabouts) from becoming a live-born citizen of the United States. Still, the event is worth commemorating. We live in the world after Apollo 11, so it's difficult to understand the mindset of the time.

In 1969, the space age was 12 years old. Human beings had only been in space for 8 years, and there was a very real threat that the Soviet Union might beat the United States to the Moon. We had never been there before. When President John F. Kennedy called upon the nation to the goal of "landing a man on the Moon, and returning him safely to Earth," the U.S. had had 20 minutes of human spaceflight experience. The folks at NASA, then only three years old as an operating entity, were charged with the largest peacetime engineering project since the building of the Panama Canal, and they'd been given nine years in which to do it.

More suspense was to be had besides the challenge of the race itself. The Mercury capsules flew on top of the Redstone rocket, named for the arsenal and the red clay to be found in northern Alabama. Redstone was not powerful enough to launch human beings into orbit. The next, bigger rocket in the Mercury program, Atlas, had the power, theoretically to get men into orbit, but they had a frightening tendency to explode.

The fuel for Atlas, like Redstone, was RP-1, a refined version of kerosene, and liquid oxygen (LOX), the element we breath, brought down to a couple hundred degrees below zero. In addition to being ultra-cold, LOX is super-flammable, causing things to burn much more rapidly than the would in air alone. If the Saturn V were to explode, it would have the explosive equivalent of just over half a kiloton of TNT, the equivalent of a small nuclear warhead.

The rockets flying with the stuff needed to be pressurized and made of materials enough to withstand the nature of fuels; the forces of acceleration, vibration, and noise as the vehicle ascended into the sky; and the odd tendencies of materials to behave differently in space. The journey itself was risky, but the engineers making the rockets and their early-model computers found the solutions to make it all happen, leaving the next challenge: getting a human being to actually set foot on another world.

The Moon has been with us for all of human history, for as long as Earth itself has been in existence--around 4.6 billion years. In our brief time here, we'd looked at it, studied it, written songs about it, and made some strange guesses about who might be living on it. Earlier NASA probes and the Apollo 8 mission had all but confirmed that life didn't exist there. Baked by the sun without benefit of an atmosphere, pelted for eons by asteroids large and small, the Moon had daytime temperatures of 250 degrees during its 14-day "day," and -250 degree temperatures at night. The distance to the Moon, nearly 240,000 miles, is so far that it takes one-and-one-quarter seconds for radio transmissions to reach Earth.

We had to take our own air with us, along with machines to filter our air and wastes and water, as well as food for the journey. Actually touching the Moon in its natural state was impossible. We had to build custom-made suits of armor with 17 different layers in them to address everything from boiling heat to freezing cold to astronaut comfort to holding in air to survive in the hard vacuum.

And we did it. Two fighter jocks piloted past their original landing place and manually selected and landed their spacecraft after their computer overloaded. They had less than 30 seconds' worth of fuel remaining when they shut down the engine. A flat, Midwestern voice drawled back to the anxious people in Mission Control, "Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Waves of relief and triumph swept through the control room and throughout the world. A couple hours later, that same Midwesterner, a laconic test pilot from Ohio named Neil Armstrong, became part of history forever by becoming the first man to set a footprint on the Moon. In a transmission that was either garbled by static or flubbed by nervousness, Armstrong said, "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." That was July 20, 1969. Armstrong and Aldrin stayed on the Moon for less than three hours and then began the long journey home.

Until a human being sets foot on Mars in the next century, no single moment will demonstrate human accomplishment so elegantly and greatly. We live in a world now that takes the Moon landings--and there were five more of them over the next three years--for granted. What's worse is, because we stopped exploring other worlds (reaching for greatness), there is now a substantial group that doesn't believe we did it in the first place. We have spurned greatness for tackling simpler issues much closer to home. And while some of those things perhaps needed to be done, who can say how many bigger problems we might have been willing to tackle if we had kept the same faith that made us believe we could put a man on the Moon in nine years and then do it. With luck, spirit, and determination, human beings will return to the Moon. With a little more money and a lot more dedication, those human beings will again be Americans. We need the spirit of Apollo to guide our efforts as we reclaim the role of a frontier nation.

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Today, of course, the world is different. We live in a time of unprecedented technological progress, innovation, and comfort, thanks in part to the trails blazed by Apollo. And yet we no longer go into space. We don't perceive a deadly rival to stir our competitive spirts. We don't see the rush or sometimes even the need for a human space program. The Constellation Program has been in existence for 4 years, and that existence is precarious because the taxpaying citizens still don't want to spend money on greatness, but are quite comfortable spending on comforts here on Earth. The space program is just a line item to be given a pittance in the next federal budget. Space must be marketed of all things, using practical benefits alone because greatness, competition, and national security are not seen as part of its existence anymore. Yet other nations want to do what we have done. They want the strength, prestige, advancement, and progress that we enjoyed from Apollo because they know it was real. They know that, given enough incentive, unity, and commitment, Americans really can do any project they set their minds to...if only we wanted to.

It took the deaths of seven Space Shuttle astronauts to get us out of our near-Earth lethargy and reach once more for greatness. The reasoning being: if we're going to lose astronauts in space, shouldn't they be dying for more than just a trip to Earth orbit? So now we're building Moon rockets again, at a slow clip given the limited budget and low priority of space exploration today, but we are at least returning to the path of greatness. That gives me hope. I just hope it will be enough.

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And speaking of marketing space, NASA is beginning to take steps to reach that generation of kids who never knew Apollo except as museum pieces. The first test flight of Ares I, the crew launch vehicle that will get astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft into orbit, is happening in spring 2009. NASA.gov has been around for awhile--and has had some success reaching the public, as the Mars Rover web sites have gotten millions of hits. However, I myself have not always been able to find what I'm looking for on NASA.gov. Others prefer to get their information in different ways, like through social networking web sites. Well, the Ares I-X flight test now has a presence on MySpace as well as Facebook.

The hope is, if Generation Y won't come to NASA, NASA can where they are and learn to speak their language. The I-X team got one of their Gen Y interns to put together the sites, and after some internal negotiating with the NASA Public Affairs Office (PAO), they're now a reality. Targeted marketing (though NASA doesn't like to use that word) just might begin to bear fruit. Social networking, blogging, and other internet-based outputs are no longer side shows, but soon to become the primary output channels for public information. The days of three TV networks and three major newspapers are over; the internet thrives on content, and if the PAO isn't providing that information clearly or copiously enough, people will go to sites like NASAWatch and NASASpaceflight.com to get their information, and those sites aren't so positive about NASA activities. Better to allow more individuals to share information with the public -- as long as it's not sensitive but unclassified (SBU), proprietary, or subject to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) -- than to have people leak things out just to be spiteful.

In any case, the Ares I-X sites are a hopeful sign. If more people are aware of the flight test, they might pay more attention, care a little more, get a little more excited, support the Constellation Program a little more, and (wild thought) vote in such a way that the program continues and accelerates. Sometimes it's the little things that get things moving. Here's hoping the Ares I-X (and other NASA programs') social networking sites are just the little things we need.

Back from Boston

This is a short post because I'm wiped out. Ten hours to get back home. Why? Well, normally I'm willing to accept blame when I do things that cause plans to go awry. However, today's misadventures I have to lay at the collective feet of USAirways. Let's start with my first flight of the morning, which was going to be Boston-Charlotte. Ehhhhhh! Wrong! UScare changed my flight to Boston-Washington because my BOS-CLT segment was delayed. Would've been nice if the skycap had told me that.

Then I get to DCA (Washington-National, which some of us call Reagan National to irritate the locals), where I've got a two-hour layover. No problem. I check the monitors for my gate, go get lunch at Friday's, then grab a seat at the gate listed on the monitors (Gate 25). It gets to be around 3:57, and there's no plane at the gate. WTF, over? So I go check the monitors again: the DCA-HSV flight moved to Gate 36. Anyone care to guess where that gate was? If you guessed the concourse I was just in, you'd be correct. And unlike some airports that allow you to go through security only ONCE, DCA makes you do it for every concourse. So I missed my plane.

The gate agent was helping another Huntsville passenger with the same problem. The agent didn't realize her error, as she said, "I made an announcement here before the plane left." Right. You made an announcement at the NEW gate. Where was the fa-king announcement at the previous gate announcing the departure change? Any compensation forthcoming? Of course not. However, the agent at least booked me on the next flight, which left at 7 p.m. Another three hours in DC. Yippee skippee. It is then that I am informed that UScare has a shuttle bus to take passengers from concourse to concourse to avoid having to go through security twice. Wouldn't THAT have been a useful piece of information to know at 3:57 p.m.?! In a word, GAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!

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That said, I actually had a pretty good time in Boston. Managed to get in some sightseeing, got some business discussed for the Mars Foundation; had an enjoyable dinner/chat with my sister's buddy Lynn; bought a couple souvenirs; took NO pictures (because I'm lazy and didn't feel like lugging around the camera or having it stolen); and picked up some useful information about Ares at the JANNAF conference I was actually there to attend. I always get suckered in by those Northern cities in the spring and summer. Occasionally I need to visit in winter to remind myself of why I live in the South.

I had 178 emails awaiting me when I got home, and no doubt I have more awaiting me when I get to the office tomorrow. However, since the company is so adamant about sticking to my 40 hours, tomorrow will be a short day. Huzzah!

More ranting later, I'm sure.