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All sorts of interesting links out there, space-wise and otherwise, so let's roll...

October 4-11 is World Space Week. Back in 2003, I ran the NSS campaign to get letters about WSW in the top 100 newspaper markets in the U.S. WSW is a worldwide, U.N.-sponsored event to get students to learn about and celebrate benefits gained from space exploration.

Interesting blog on organizational culture at NASA and what reactions people can get when they ask questions in a meeting where senior officials ask if there are any questions. If you find yourself getting fired or just "in trouble" because you take management at their word about asking questions, then you should pull the ripcord and bail out.

A few items from the Down Under Defense Expert (DUDE):

• Interested in calculating "great circle" routes for airliners? Give this site a shot.
• YouTube video on "God-fearing" (general) vs. "non-God-fearing" (military) aviation.
• What a 737 looks like when its engine interacts with a flock of starlings (the Flock of Seagulls was on tour).
• Want to buy silver? Try this site.

Did you know that we were all doomed? Since the "Y2K" fracas didn't materialize, the latest doomsday year is 2012, when the Mayan calendar supposedly ends or heralds the end of the world. A trailer for a movie along this theme is now in theaters. Fortunately, even reviewers can see how over-the-top and nuts this is. I plan on having a party on January 1, 2013. The sane are welcome to attend.

From Jeff Foust: The Augustine Panel is due to have another public meeting, this one by telecon. The fact that they're having this meeting is a sign, sayeth Foust, that the final Augustine report will be delayed further.

From Lin: An article from FoxNews on how Obama's new "pay czar" is looking to curb or cut executive pay. My feeling is still this: it's none of government's business. This is a corporate governance issue. If you're an employee of a large multinational and you don't like how much money your CEO is making, buy one share of stock. This gives you the right to speak at a stockholder's meeting and speak your piece. Or, if you're not an employee, buy stock anyway. Make your voice heard. Build coalitions of other stockholders. Raise polite, legal, and rational heck. Show how corporate compensation practices are draining profitability and irrationally rewarding poor performance. Get the guidelines rewritten--with an eye to remembering that good compensation attracts the best and brightest, stupid compensation will result in a government takeover. There are ways to fix things that do not require Barack the Merciful to enter the fray and buy your company.

From my AIAA news feed, a couple of articles/editorials reflecting on the five-year anniversary of SpaceShipOne winning the X Prize Cup, one doubting, one more optimistic.

Oh yeah: I've got a short piece on ScienceCheerleader.com re: NASA's internet outreach efforts. Just enough to whet the whistle, more or less.

Also, I haven't done an update on my little e-niece Morgan lately. Her mom, Ame, is now reporting that she's working on home-schooling Morgan. I recommended that Ame take a look at a post on my site re: science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) resources for home schoolers. Morgan, bless her heart (sheesh! I've been in the South too long), has been going through a lot of medical madness, and those long periods of downtime keep her out of step with her peers and their learning. I commend Ame for doing what Morgan needs help doing. She's welcome to ping me anytime if she has questions. If I don't know, I'm willing to put in the time and research it.

The Revolution Might Not Be Televised

One of the cool things about living in Huntsville, Alabama, especially if you're a space geek like me, is that you've got relatively easy access to very smart people who know a lot about building things that go into space. One of those very smart people is a member of the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5), former member of Project HALO, and now president of a private space company, Orion Propulsion: Tim Pickens.

Pickens was the guest speaker at this month's HAL5 meeting, and as usual he drew a crowd. Part of that might have come from the title of his talk: "Greening the Aerospace Community," in which he talked about developing green(er) propellants for getting rockets into space. He talked about aerospace companies looking for the "Holy Grail" of rocket propellants--they want the maximum energy for the minimum mass (what rocket scientists would call "high specific impulse"). Orion Propulsion is testing a methane-oxygen engine, using a cadre of college students from University of Alabama-Huntsville.

Marketing Orion Propulsion
Pickens spent a great deal of his time promoting his company, perhaps rightly so. For a company with fewer than 40 employees, Orion has a lot of unique capabilities, including designing, building, and testing new rocket designs. They have contracts with commercial (Bigelow), defense, and NASA (Ares) customers, and are executing them. These include attitude control systems for Bigelow's "Sundancer" inflatable space station, roll control thruster systems for the Ares I crew launch vehicle built on a contract through Boeing, and a small-sat launcher for the Department of Defense. What's fun about Orion is Pickens' willingness to experiment on new hardware and designs, often on what would be a shoestring budget for a government project.

Origins of Orion: SpaceShipOne and Beyond
Project HALO's work on hybrid rockets (solid/HTPB rubber fuel, nitrous oxide oxidizer) caught the attention of Burt Rutan earlier this decade, when he was looking for a rocket engine that a pilot could turn on and off, like a jet engine. Hybrids allow that ability by shutting down the flow of oxidizer, killing combustion. Pickens and a couple of Project HALO team members headed out to Mojave California to supervise propulsion development for SpaceShipOne, the first privately built vehicle to reach space three times. On the strength of that success, Pickens was able to come back home to Huntsville and start, with the help of his wife, Orion Propulsion.

And Pickens is not satisfied with the remarkable progress he's made with his woman (wife)-owned business so far. He's excited by the challenges involved in designing fuel tanks that allow for long-term storage of cryogenic (super-cold) propellants, which are needed for NASA's Altair lunar lander. "Some folks say they're redoing Apollo. That's a lot of bull." He also believes in the usefulness of building completely reusable fly-back first stage boosters, which were considered for the Space Shuttle. But again, he thinks small-scale prototypes are the way to go: "If you can't build a small-sized model fly, you might as well not fantasize about building a big one."

A Vision for Space Hardware Development
As I noted in my blog on young people and the space business, it's this willingness to experiment that gives smaller, "New Space" companies like Orion a leg up on the big aerospace companies or NASA when it comes to recruiting a new generation of graduates coming out of the nation's engineering schools. One typical example came from Pickens' building of a high-voltage exciter, which he wanted to use for an engine igniter. The item he wanted to purchase from an established aerospace company cost $15,000 and weighed 3 pounds. There were features on the "legacy" hardware he needed, but the electronics were 30 years old and "clunky." So what Pickens' team did was take what he wanted from the other company's hardware "and put my stuff on 'em." Pickens' new unit cost $3,000 and weighs half a pound. "Multiply that out by eight or ten thrusters, and you're saving somebody a lot of weight."

Young people don't want to spend ten years of their life designing one tiny part of a very large and complex system; they want to get their hands dirty and have a hand in building the whole thing. Small-scale engines and experiments like Orion's liquid oxygen-methane engine are exactly what fresh-out-of-school engineers are looking for when they come to NASA, and don't always find. While following traditional paths to aerospace legitimacy such as joining a "mentor-protegee" relationship with Boeing and getting Orion AS9100 certified, Pickens has fought to maintain a "Skunk Works" type of environment at his company.

In the end, this was the message Tim Pickens had for his audience, more than talking about the values of environmentally friendlier propellants ("If you're going to fine me for my CO2 emissions, you better have a machine you can turn on to undo the emissions I made"). "I know why Elon [Musk, CEO of SpaceX] is trying to do everything in-house...You need to do some of things I've been a proponent of." And the way to do that, according to Pickens, is to start small, get your hands dirty, and be willing to fail. “We are not allowed to fail. No one wants to pay for that on their watch. Tax payers especially. Maybe this is an artifact of some programs gone bad! Private industry is allowed to try new things that might be different and risky, but the payoff could be huge.” No doubt we will hear more from Pickens and Orion Propulsion in the years ahead. I'm looking forward to seeing what revolutions they produce, even if no one outside the space community ever hears about them.