Potpourri CX

Friday night, and I've got an inbox to clear out. Consider yourself warned.

What has the space program done for you lately? Check out the NASA Spinoff site.

Extra credit info from Hu: The X-37B is scheduled to fly in April 2010.

Want an opportunity to help the space program? The letter posted here is being passed around Capitol Hill to get members of Congress and President Obama to support a markup of $3 billion to NASA's human spaceflight budget. This is necessary if we are going to get the Constellation Program on the right track. Truth be told, NASA needs an extra $3B per year for the next 20-30 years or more to develop a truly useful exploration program that pushes the boundaries of technology and sends humans to really cool places. But heck, you've got to start somewhere.

This press release from my NASA PAO feed deserves to be quoted in full:

From: NASA News [mailto:hqnews@mediaservices.nasa.gov]
Sent: Monday, November 02, 2009 5:52 PM
To: NASA News
Subject: NASA and X Prize Announce Winners of Lunar Lander Challenge

Nov. 02, 2009

Sonja Alexander
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1761
sonja.r.alexander@nasa.gov
RELEASE: 09-258

NASA AND X PRIZE ANNOUNCE WINNERS OF LUNAR LANDER CHALLENGE

WASHINGTON -- NASA will award $1.65 million in prize money Thursday to a pair of innovative aerospace companies that successfully simulated landing a spacecraft on the moon and lifting off again.

NASA's Centennial Challenges program will give a $1 million first prize to Masten Space Systems of Mojave, Calif., and a $500,000 second prize to Armadillo Aerospace of Rockwall, Tex., for their Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge flights. The competition was managed by the X PRIZE Foundation.

The Northrop Grumman Corporation is a commercial sponsor that provided operating funds for the contest to the X PRIZE Foundation. An awards ceremony for the winning teams will be held at noon on Nov. 5 in room 2325 of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington. Journalists should contact Sonja Alexander at 202-358-1761 for more information about the ceremony.

The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge involves building and flying a rocket-powered vehicle that simulates the flight of a vehicle on the moon. The lander must take off vertically then travel horizontally, flying a mission profile designed to demonstrate both power and control before landing accurately at another spot. The same vehicle then must take off again, travel horizontally back to its original takeoff point and land successfully, all within a two-hour-and-15-minute time period.

The challenge requires exacting control and navigation, as well as precise control of engine thrust, all done automatically. The rocket's engine must be started twice in a short time with no ground servicing other than refueling. This represents the technical challenges involved in operating a reusable vehicle that could land on the moon.

The prize purse is divided into first and second prizes for Level 1 and Level 2. Level 1 requires a flight duration of at least 90 seconds on each flight and Level 2 requires a duration of at least 180 seconds. One of the landings for a Level 2 attempt must be made on a simulated lunar terrain with rocks and craters.

Masten Space Systems met the Level 2 requirements by achieving accurate landings and captured the first place prize during flights of their "Xoie" (pronounced "Zoey") vehicle Oct. 30 at the Mojave Air and Space Port. Masten also claimed a $150,000 prize as part of the Level 1 competition.

Armadillo Aerospace was the first team to qualify for the Level 2 prize with successful flights of its Scorpius rocket Sept. 12 in Caddo Mills, Tex. Armadillo placed second in the Level 2 competition, earning a $500,000 prize.

The average landing accuracy determined which teams would receive first and second place prizes. The Masten team achieved an average accuracy of 7.5 inches while Armadillo Aerospace's average accuracy was 34 inches.

The events of the past two months have brought the four-year Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge to a conclusion. All $2 million in prize money has been awarded.

"The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge has had its intended impact, with impressive performances by multiple teams representing a new generation of aerospace entrepreneurs" said Andrew Petro, NASA's Centennial Challenge program manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These companies have demonstrated reusable vehicles with rapid turnaround and a surprising degree of precision in flight, and they have done all this at a much lower cost than many thought possible."

Four teams had been in pursuit of the 2009 Lunar Lander Challenge prizes during the competition that opened in July. The BonNova team dropped out of the competition last week. Unreasonable Rocket, a father-and-son team from Solana Beach, Calif., conducted flight attempts during the final days of the competition but did not complete any qualifying flights.

In the Level 1 competition, Armadillo Aerospace previously claimed the first place prize of $350,000 in 2008. Masten Space Systems qualified for the remaining second place prize on Oct. 7, 2009, with an average landing accuracy of 6.3 inches. Because there were no other qualifying Level 1 flights this year, the Masten team will receive the second place prize of $150,000.

NASA's Centennial Challenges program's goals are to drive progress in aerospace technology that is of value to NASA's missions; encourage participation of independent teams, individual inventors, student groups and private companies of all sizes in aerospace research and development; and find innovative solutions to technical challenges through competition and cooperation.

The Northop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge is one of six Centennial Challenges managed by NASA's Innovative Partnership Program. The competition was managed for NASA at no cost to the taxpayer by the X PRIZE Foundation under a Space Act Agreement. NASA provided all of the prize funds.

For more information on Centennial Challenges, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ipp/innovation_incubator/cc_home.html

Congratulations to Masten Space Systems!

Did you know Mercury had seasons? That's just one thing the Mercury MESSENGER probe has been discovering during its flyby missions.

Speaking of planets, it's getting crowded in the sky--32 new extrasolar planets (that is, planets outside our solar system) have been discovered.

A Look At NASA’s Social Media Program
http://searchengineland.com/a-look-at-nasas-social-media-program-28932

From Doc: This is just wild...someone has taken the time to do a visual diagram of the primary characters in several epic movies or movie series (Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc.) and their proximity to each other over the course of the story. The character lines for Twelve Angry Men are just a hoot.

There's an educator's conference on Apollo at the Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC, November 10.

After all the fun we had with triboelectrification on Ares I-X, this t-shirt was pretty funny.

And that, as they say, is that. Have a splendid weekend. Please pray for the families of those shot and killed at Fort Hood.

Potpourri XCIII

Let's get to it. I've got French lessons to catch up on!

Thomas Sowell has a hard-hitting piece on Obama's inexperience.

A variety of stories from my AIAA news feed:

• A Boeing plant in South Carolina is voting on whether to keep the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union in their shop. That will not make Obama happy.
• NORAD is conducting an exercise to prepare for the Vancouver Olympics. I didn't realize al-Qaeda had an air force.
• NASA has selected the crew for what could be the last scheduled Space Shuttle flight. It's real, folks, regardless of what the Augustine Panel decides.
• French wine growers are benefitting from satellite imagery.
• NPR has a story today on NASA's Student Airborne Research Program.

Paul Spudis has a good editorial on sustainability in space exploration. The problem is that there are two kinds of sustainability in the space business: technical and political. And the technical, if "boring" to the electorate or their elected officials, will not be politically sustainable. However, a politically exciting and sustainable program might leave behind little that is reusable.

Liberal Camille Paglia, a still-strong Obama supporter, has torn into the Democrats' handling of the healthcare bill. This is not a good sign.

The United Nations Secretary-General says we have four months to act or global warming will doom us. By "act," he means sign a climate treaty in Copenhagen that will cut greenhouse gas emissions. Right. After one of the coldest summers in the history of modern record keeping.

I am in the process of reading the House healthcare bill, but it is a long, painful slog, and I have other things to read as well. In the meantime, I commend this analysis by a classics professor to your attention.

More on the Blue Brain project. Gotta wonder about the Singularity.

Potpourri XCI

Your first bit of thought provovking content for the evening: a Foreign Policy Research Institute review of Gulf War I that is worth reading.

Norman Augustine was interviewed on NPR recently. His responses are still vague, so we'll just have to wait and see...maybe we'll know something by Wednesday.

What did you get out of the space program? Here are some examples.

What is the actual unemployment rate? Depends on how you count who qualifies as "unemployed." While we've hit a new low in expectations when we see it as a positive sign that the unemployment increase has dropped, the President might not be out of the woods quite yet.

A Missouri car dealership is giving away a free AK-47 with each truck purchase. It must be true: I saw it on CNN (via YouTube). This is a little different from Cash for Clunkers.

Transforming NASA, Continued

In response to my own question...

Assuming the agency makes this transformation, what should NASA do? This is a question for the agency and its employees, but also the taxpayers and our elected leadership.

First, we must accept the fact that NASA's mission derives from the mission and policies of the United States Government, however constituted. For the sake of discussion, I will borrow a premise from Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles:

The State will maximize the opportunity of its citizens.

This definition uniquely directs and constrains the direction of government agencies like NASA. From here, I would propose the following mission objectives for the agency:

• Exploration: Send human and robotic explorers to celestial bodies never previously visited.
• Science and Technology Incubation: Provide facilities and test beds for basic science and technology research, with the results being available to all.
• Technology Transfer: Identify direct-application and "spinoff" technologies derived from space hardware to solve problems and improve life on Earth.

This list, however brief, is still general enough to allow for the Constellation Program, building the first Moon base, and developing in-space technologies. If the list appears a little too brief for some, once the Shuttle retires, these will be NASA's primary missions anyway. Still, I've striven to give the list more of a NACA feel to it, which would follow neatly from the notion that government should exist to maximize opportunities for its citizens, not do everything for them. Basic facts about the nature of the universe should be available to all; what people make of those facts is the business of individuals and corporations, with the government protecting innovations and inventions through patents and copyrights.

*

Feel free to throw out your own premises. The top-level exercise of describing "what sort of space agency we want" also helps constrain and describe what sorts of transformation need to occur with the agency. Let the contemplation continue.