Buzz Aldrin’s Mission to Mars, A Book Review

I am reading the new book Mission to Mars, My Vision for Space Exploration, by Buzz Aldrin.  The book is a very good read, and for those of us who know Buzz, it is pretty much as we expect and have heard from Buzz for years.  There is some good information in the book and it is hoped that this will help to stimulate discussion on the subject.  Following is my blow by blow review of the book while I read it….

The book opens with Buzz and president Obama on Air Force 1 headed to Florida for Obama’s one major speech on space.  If you are a Mars or a Lunar advocate the speech was not satisfying as the focus of the speech was away from the Moon, but not to Mars, rather to an asteroid mission for humans.  Those of us who know some of the inner workings understand that this is because there is no budget for any lander, lunar or otherwise.

Buzz does help to perpetuate the common myth and wrong interpretation of the Augustine 2008 commission that the Bush plan for the Vision for Space Exploration which morphed into the Constellation program was underfunded (p94).  You have to look no farther than the NASA Concept Exploration and Refinement (CE&R) contracts of 2005 to see the original plans did not require this level of funding.  In searching, I find it amazing that you cannot find the CE&R contract reports online easily anymore.  However, this AIAA paper goes into some of the issues regarding how architecture choices drive the cost.  The Constellation program that came after the departure of Bush’s handpicked leader (Sean O’Keefe), requiring multiple heavy lift vehicles and a Battlestar Galactica style lunar lander that killed the program and this must be repeated every time the Bush “unaffordable” myth is trotted out.

Buzz opens with a call for something that I completely agree with, which is his Aldrin cycler design.  The Aldrin cycler is a true spaceship that continuously operates in space, cycling between the Earth and the Moon or the Earth and Mars.  While others came up with this as well Buzz has done the heavy lifting to put this concept out over the last 20-30 years.  He makes a great quote here… (p37)

Long ago the sound barrier was penetrated and tamed.  Now we need to break through the reusability barricade, one that has been perpetuated, in my view, by the greed of government bureaucracy and corporate industry…

The problem is that he is relying on these same people and on positive political forces to set up a sustained vision for Mars colonization by humans.  Our politicians today are for the most part incapable of understanding the value of this all important vision that Buzz and the rest of us have in this area.

Where I disagree with him, as he knows, is in his blunt evaluation that the Moon should be some part of an international camping trip where we bring all of the countries of the world together.  He uses the Antarctic research sites as his analogs frequently but the fact of the matter is that this internationalism does not work even there.  While there is a lot of cooperation, each nation has its own facility.  Even on ISS the Japanese consider their Kibo module to be sovereign Japanese territory.  What makes me crazy is that Buzz says this… (p89)

…In short, our celestial neighbor in gravitational lock, the moon, can be tapped to help create a sustainable economic, industrial, and science generating expansion into space…

YES!, however Buzz wants to hand it off to the rest of the world?  Inconceivable!

Buzz Basics in Technology

Buzz has a laundry list of technologies that are a good start for Mars.

Aerocapture, which is using the atmosphere of planet to slow a spacecraft down.

Radiation protection,  we don’t want to fry the humans, which is going to get more difficult with the coming extremely low solar activity over the next decades.

Life support, self evident yep and trying it out on ISS makes perfect sense…

Redundant Systems, absolutely, as well as advanced diagnostics and repair!

Inflatable structures, a good thing to have but possibly distracting

Landing systems, absolutely as gravity sucks and takes a lot of fuel as well as precision navigation for landing as he states.

However, this for Mars this is far more about the mission there than actually staying there.  To add to his list.

Energy Systems, the life and death of developing Mars is how much electrical and thermal energy is available.

In Situ Resources, that this keeps getting left off the list is inconceivable!

In Situ Manufacturing, this is what turns a science project into mankind’s second home.

Robotics, mankind’s ultimate force multiplier for off planet civilization.

Buzz goes on to talk about some initial flights to Mars and some interesting information that I did not know, which is that the Martian moon Deimos has ten months a year in sunlight.  This helps in the beginning with solar power.  Buzz has some interesting graphics related to his plans in the color plates but unfortunately you need a magnifying glass to read them.  I found a link on his site to at least one of them though.

Homesteading the Red Planet

I absolutely love the idea that Mars exploration and development by humans be a one way affair.  After first hearing about this idea a few years ago I have grown to completely embrace it as a core value myself for Mars.  Finally on page 174 Buzz mentions the word ISRU, without which colonizing Mars is a fools errand.  In a very interesting observation Buzz recounts that that Bruce Mackenzie’s team at the Mars Foundation has investigated making plastics like ethylene, derived from the atmosphere of Mars along with hydrogen.  That is very interesting (p181).

Buzz talks about Bob Zubrin’s Mars Direct architecture (p184) which I very much like as well as the use of in-situ resources starts in the beginning and is a core value, rather than something that comes later.  This page is also where I get irked in that Buzz just offhandedly states (from Mars Direct) that;

In the first year of implementation, and Earth return vehicle is launched to Mars, arriving six months later.  Upon landing on the surface, a rover is deployed that contains the nuclear reactors necessary to generate rocket fuel for the return trip.

This is another version of “then a miracle occurs” which so irks me so much when the development of Mars is discussed.

Thoughts

As a fellow space architect I really like Buzz’s book.  It does not go much farther than other books of the genre but since it is written by one of the surviving 12 Apollo surface astronauts it carries his significant weight behind it.  I have always admired Buzz over the years for his single minded dedication to teaching the world of the continuing value of the human exploration and development of space.  While he and I disagree on what the initial target should be we share a common goal.  I know that this book is written for the general reader and that details are to be left for interactions with stakeholders and politicians.  However, I must discuss one final lament about the book.

What is needed now is a practical roadmap to getting to Mars and colonizing it in a sustainable manner.  It is quite clear that unless a miracle occurs our current generation of political leadership does not think far enough ahead to understand the macro-societial benefits that Buzz talks about.  This is tragic in that in microcosm the development of the Moon or Mars fits within a macrocosm of discussion related to our own terrestrial civilization.  The problem of colonizing and building a sustainable Martian civilization has many commonalities with building a sustainable planetary civilization here on the Earth.

The first and most important resource for Mars or the Earth is energy.  This is glossed over for Mars (just deploy the reactors!) or misunderstood here on the Earth (green fixations that solar panels and wind turbines can power a planetary civilization of 9  billion people).  An in depth discussion of the Energy required to support a prosperous colony of 50, 100, or a thousand people on Mars is desperately required as it will start to bring clarity to Martian development as well as sustainable development here on the Earth.  We need a discussion of how a manufacturing infrastructure would be set up on Mars as without it homesteading Mars is impossible.  Then an examination in detail of what we know about the resources and how they would be developed.  In the end this is why I advocate the Moon in that in my opinion it is the combination of lunar and martian industrialization that are going to be the critical advances that help us to build a sustainable and prosperous planetary civilization here on the Earth.

Buzz I salute you for your book and that it opens the door for a new generation to learn about Mars and why it is important.  However, like Moses at Rephidim where Aaron and Hur had to hold up his arms in order for the children of Israel to win a fight, we need to hold his arms up and help to flesh out the vision presented.  There have been so many crucial advances in the past five years in the areas of robotics, 3D printing/manufacturing, and computer resources that simply must be integrated into our planning for Mars and the Moon.  Time for another book I guess!

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, Original Data For Science Posterity

Note:  This is a cross post of an original article of mine that was posted on the site wattsupwiththat.com today.  Thanks to Anthony Watts and his readers for their support.

Introduction

The foundation of all observational science is data.  This is true whether the data is temperature measurements from ground networks, satellites, or any other thing in nature that can be observed, quantified, and recorded.  After data is recorded it must be archived so that future researchers who seek to extend or question conclusions drawn from that data can go back to the original source to replicate results.  This is a fundamental premise of the scientific method, without it we can make no reliable statements about nature and call it science.  This is true whether or not the subject is climate change, planetary motion, or any other scientific discipline.  This missive is about the supremely important subject of data archival and how you the reader can support our lunar data archival project.  First a historical digression.

The Importance of the Recording and Archival of Scientific Data

In the era before computers and the Internet, data archival was the responsibility of the scientist who obtained and recorded scientific observations.  Johannes Kepler used Tycho Brahe’s archived records of meticulous observations of planetary motion to calculate the elliptical orbit of Mars and thus developed his laws of planetary motion.  After the laws were published, anyone could check Kepler by going to the observatory and do their own calculations based on the archived data.  The archived work of Brahe and Kepler underpinned Sir Isaac Newton’s formulation of his theory of gravity.  Without archived data, Newton would have had no basis for his calculations.  A scientist’s archives, stored at institutes of learning, has been the standard method of preserving data and results until the era of the computer.

Data Archiving in the Modern Age

In recent times a structural deficiency has emerged in the sciences related to the storage, archiving, and the availability of original data.  Beginning in the world war two years and exploding afterward, scientific data in many fields of the physical sciences began to be obtained though electronic means.  Strip charts, oscilloscopes, and waveforms from analog and digital sensors began to be fed into calculating programs, and results obtained.  These results were and are used to develop and or confirm hypotheses.  This exploded in the 1960’s and has continued to where today it is ubiquitous.  However, there has been a decoupling in the scientific process regarding the recording and archiving of data and the ability to replicate results.  The following example is just one of a legion of problems that exist in this realm.

In the 1960’s when data was obtained and fed into the computer, the data was often truncated due to memory limitations and computational speed of computers of the era.  For example a paper was published by NASA as NASA TM X-55954 entitled:

The Radiation balance of the Earth-Atmosphere System Over Both Polar Regions Obtained From Radiation Measurements of the Nimbus II Meteorological Satellite;

This is probably the first definitive study of the radiation balance of the Earth-Atmosphere system published in the space era.  Figure 1 is a figure from that paper:

Figure 1:  Radiation-Balance  of the Earth-Atmosphere System Derived from Nimbus II MRIR Instrument 1966

This is an important paper in climate studies as it was the first paper to quantify the radiation balance based on data from satellites.  However, the question is, where is the original data was fed into the computers to come up with these results?

Recovering the Nimbus II HRIR Data

In the paper the primary data used to produce the temperature gradients was obtained from the Medium Resolution Infrared Radiometer (MRIR) that flew on the Nimbus I-III meteorological satellite, the first satellite to carry this high quality of sensor.  Where is that data today?  I actually don’t know much about the MRIR data but I do know quite a lot about the High Resolution Infrared Radiometer (HRIR) that was a companion experiment on the early Nimbus birds.

During the missions the data from the spacecraft was transmitted in analog form to ground stations where it was recorded and from there it was sent for processing at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt Maryland.  Figure 2 shows the design of the HRIR instrument and the computerized method of processing of the data:

Figure 2a, 2b: HRIR Calibration and HRIR Data Processing

Looking at Figure 2a on the left you see that a laboratory calibration was done against a known blackbody target.  An in flight calibration standard was measured at the same time and a reference calibration for the instrument obtained.  The same in flight calibration reference blackbody (shown in the upper left) is scanned on each swath (a swath is a line of recording representing an 8.25 x 1100 km section of the Earth), providing a continuous means to maintain calibration of the instrument in flight.   Figure 3 shows a trace of a swath of HRIR analog data:

Figure 3: Nimbus HRIR Swath Trace With and Without Calibration Stair Step

In 2009 my company, as a result of our work on the 1966 Lunar Orbiter data, was contracted by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) to take raw Nimbus HRIR data, correct errors, and translate it into a modern NetCDF-4 format so that it could be used in studies of pre 1979 Arctic and Antarctic ice extent.  The HRIR data had been digitized by the diligent effort of NASA Goddard scientists who had retrieved the surviving tapes from the federal records center.  Since no tape drives exist anymore that can read the tapes, a company was contracted to use an MRI type machine to read these low data density tapes.  This worked remarkably well and the data from over 1700 of these tapes were provided to us.  However, it turns out that the data tapes do not have the original analog data.  It turns out that the original analog tapes no longer exist.

The digitized data that we used are, as best as we can tell, is an intermediate product derived from the IBM 1704 computer processing. The swaths no longer have the calibration stair step or sync pulses but each one does have a metadata file with geo-positioning data.  We reprocessed the data and re-gridded it to comply with modern Net-CDF4 conventions.  The HRIR images produced are then used by the NSIDC to find the edges of the polar ice.  We took the files and translated them into .kml files for display on Google Earth with dramatic effect.  Our work is described in an AGU Poster (IN41A-1108, 2009).  Figure 4 is a .kml file mapped in Google Earth.

Figure 4: Google Earth .kml File of the Nimbus II HRIR Data, August 23, 1966

This image is centered near Indonesia.  Bluer temperatures are colder and clearly show the Monsoon clouds.  The contrast between the ocean and Australia is clearly evident.  Colder temps in the Himalayas are seen as is the heat of the Persian gulf and the deep cool temperatures of the clouds in the upper right from typhoon Helen and Ida. The HRIR data can be used for many purposes but due to the loss of calibration, only a relative comparison with modern IR data can be obtained.  This also renders replication of the findings of the radiation balance paper nearly impossible.  So, what the heck does all of this have to do with Lunar images?

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP)

In 1966-67 NASA sent five spacecraft to orbit the Moon as a photoreconnaissance mission to scout landing sites for the Apollo landings. Today’s reader must remember that prior to these missions mankind had never seen the Moon up close. The first three Lunar Orbiters were in a near equatorial orbit and the last two in polar orbits for general mapping. Each carried two visible light cameras, a 24” focal length instrument obtaining images at about 1 meter resolution, and an 8” focal length instrument at about 5-7 meters resolution on the on the lunar near side.  The images were recorded on 70mm SO-243 photographic film which was processed on board.  This film was then scanned with a 5 micron spot beam that modulated an analog signal that was transmitted to the Earth.  This is shown in figure 4:

Figure 5: Lunar Orbiter Image Capture, Scan, Transmit, Storage and Print Process

The images were captured on the Earth via two dissimilar processes.  At the lower left, of the most interest to our project, was the recording of the pre-demodulated combined raw analog and digital data on a 2” Ampex FR-900 Instrumentation tape drive.  The second process demodulated the signal to produce a video signal that was sent to a long persistence phosphor called a kinescope.  The resulting image was photographed by a 35mm film camera.  The 35mm film strip positives were then assembled into a larger sub-image that was filmed again to create a 35mm large negative that was processed to create a 35mm print that was used by the photo analysts to look for landing sites.  However, as one might suspect, there was degradation of the quality of the images in going through this many steps.

I was aware of this quality reduction as I had worked with the film records in the late 1980’s at the University of Alabama Huntsville.  At that time I had researched the tapes but was informed that the tapes were unavailable, though rumors were that someone was digitizing them.  However, this never happened and all the archived images, such as the excellent repositories at the USGS in Flagstaff Arizona and at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPI) in Houston were derived from the films and were the only high resolution images of the Moon available.

In 2007 quite by accident I read a newsgroup posting that Nancy Evans, a retired JPL researcher, was retiring from her second career as a veterinarian and had a four FR-900 tape drives that she wanted to give away.  I later found that she was the responsible official at NASA JPL in the 1980’s that had saved the original Lunar Orbiter analog tapes and that they were still in storage at JPL.  I contacted Nancy and JPL and she was willing to donate the tape drives and JPL was willing to loan the tapes to NASA Ames were we had donated facilities to attempt to restore the tape drives and read the tapes.  I raised a bit of funding from NASA Watch editor Keith Cowing.  We loaded two trucks with the 1478 tapes weighing over 28,000 lbs and the four tape drives weighing a thousand pounds each and drove to NASA Ames.

The reason that previous efforts by Nancy Evans and engineer Mark Nelson from Cal Tech had been unsuccessful was that NASA was not convinced of the value of the original data.  I had known of the tapes before but we had to quantify the benefits to NASA before we could obtain funding.  We found the money quote as we called it in an obscure NASA memo from 1966.  This memo said in brief (figure 6):

Figure 6: NASA Memo Regarding Superiority of Mag Tape Lunar Images

This had originally been suggested by NASA contractor Bellcomm employee Charles Byrne as a means to improve the methods that would be used to analyze landing sites for the dangers from large boulders and to analyze the slope of the landing sites.  If rocks were too big or the slope more than eleven degrees, it would be a bad day for the crews seeking to land.  With this memo in hand NASA headquarters provided us with initial funding to get one tape drive out of the four operational and to see if we could produce one image.  We had three questions to answer.

1. Could we get a 40+ year old tape drive operational again?
2. Even if the tape drive is operational, is there any data still on the tapes?
3. Even if there is surviving data, is it of higher quality than the USGS and LPI archives of the film images?

Suffice to say we answered all three questions in the affirmative and in November of 2008 we unveiled to the world our first image, which just happened to be the famous “Earthrise” image of the Earth as seen from lunar orbit from August 23, 1966.  The original image and our restored image is shown in figure 7:

Figure 7: Earthrise 1966 and Earthrise 2008!

The improvement in dynamic range we found from the documentation was a factor of four due to the reduced (250 to 1 on film vs 1000 to 1 on the tapes) dynamic range of the ground 35mm film.  The raw data also preserves the sync pulses used to rectify each line of the data and when we used oversampling techniques (10x in frequency and bit depth) we can produce much larger images (the Earthrise image at full resolution is 60’ x 25’ at 300 dpi).  With modern digitizing cards and inexpensive terabyte class drives this became a very manageable affair.  For more information, this link is from a lunch presentation that I gave at Apple’s worldwide developer conference (WWDC) in 2009. Here is a link to an LPI paper.

Where We are in 2013

After our success NASA headquarters Exploration Systems Mission Directorate provided further funding.  However, since ours was basically an unsolicited proposal that funding was limited.  Each of the Lunar Orbiters (LO) acquired approximately 215 medium and high resolution images.  The most important images are from Lunar Orbiter II, III, followed by LO-V, then I, then IV.  The reason is that LO-II and III have the best high resolution images on the near side equatorial region.  The digitized raw images best preserves the data in a form that can then be integrated into a multilayer dataset that best compares with today’s data which we have done on an experimental basis.  In contrast to the Nimbus HRIR data the LO data fully preserves the calibration marks, which are on the tapes every 22 seconds.  LO-I lost its image compensation sensor early in the mission resulting in blurred high resolution images.  The medium resolution images are fine though they are less relevant for comparison purposes due to their lower resolution. LO-V has almost all of its high resolution images at 2 meters, thus being a good comparison to LRO.  The lowest priority are the LO-IV images, which were obtained from a much higher altitude than the other missions and are thus of mostly historical value.

Our project has successfully digitized 98% of the LO-III images, with only six images lost to tape related causes (erased tapes), while we have found several images that are not in the existing USGS and LPI archives.  We have so far digitized about 40% of the LO-II images, and about 10% of the LO-V, LO-IV, and LO-1 images.

We Need Your Help

We are today raising funds through the crowd funding site;

http://www.rockethub.com/projects/14882-lunar-orbiter-image-recovery-project

We are doing this as we do not expect further NASA funding and there is only a limited amount of time still available to digitize these tapes.  The FR-900 tape drives use a head with four iron tips that rotate at 15,000 rpm.  These heads are in direct contact with the tapes that are moving by at 12.5 inches per second, creating a sandpaper effect that quickly wears the heads down.  Here is a video from a couple of years ago with a tour of the lab, which by is in an old MacDonald’s at the old Navy Base at Moffett field CA.  Only a few dozen tapes can be played before the heads wear out, necessitating a refurbishment that costs well over $7000 each time.

We also have to pay our engineer to maintain the drive, our students to manage, assemble, and quality check the images as well as myself to manage the project, operate the tape drives (I worked in video production for years and thus do the operations and real time quality control during image capture).  We are also preparing this data for subsequent archiving at the National Space Science Data Center though we also have the images archived at the NASA Lunar Science Institute and at our www.moonviews.com site where anyone is welcome to download them.  We also have a Lunar Orbiter Facebook page that you are welcome to join.

Scientific Value

The images that we are producing and the raw data will be available to anyone for their own purposes.  We have students who have been doing real science of comparing the LOIRP digitized images with the latest images from the NASA LRO mission.  Why is this important?  Since the Moon has no atmosphere, even the smallest meteors impact the surface and make a crater.  With a resolution on both LO and LRO ~one meter we can examine the lunar surface in detail over thousands of square kilometers over a period of almost half a century.  We can then see what the frequency of small impactors are on the Moon.  Not only does this provide information for crew safety while out on the surface of the Moon, it provides a statistical representation of the asteroid risk in near Earth space.  The bolide that exploded over Russia is thought to represent a risk of a one in one hundred year event.  What if that risk is higher?  Our images, coupled with the LRO LROC camera images can help to better bound this risk.

Our project has been honored by congress and our images were used in a presentation by NASA to the president in 2009 and were part of a package of NASA photos provided in the inaugural package this year.  We have had extensive coverage of our efforts in what we have termed “techno-archeology” or literally the archeology of technology.  Many of these links are at the end of this article.  However, with all of that it is a very difficult funding environment and that is why we need your help.

What is on the Crowdfunding Site

We are offering a lot of stuff for your donation on the site.  We have collectable and historical images that were printed back during the Apollo era for varying price ranges.  We have models of the Lunar Orbiter with a stand, suitable for your desk.  We have microfilm from the original photographs and if you cannot afford any of that, you can just make a donation!

This is what we call citizen science, the chance to have a part in an ongoing effort to archive data that can never been archived again.  Our tapes are gradually degrading and the tape drives cannot function without heads.  Our engineering team is comprised of retired engineers who won’t be around forever.  NASA JPL in 2008 estimated that to recreate what we have would cost over $6 million dollars.  We have done what we have done with a tenth of that amount of money and with your generous donation we will complete our task by the end of this September.

The Big Picture

Stories like ours regarding the actual and potential loss of valuable original data is not a rarity.  Due to funding cuts to NASA on October 1, 1977 they turned off the Apollo lunar surface experiments that we spent billions putting there.  The majority of the data that was obtained up until the experiments were turned off was in great danger of being lost.  Retired scientists and interested parties at NASA recently put together a team that retrieved these records from as far away as Perth Australia and the NASA Lunar Science Institute has a focus group dedicated to this effort.  Sadly some of this data is still in limbo and may indeed be lost forever due to poor record keeping and preservation of the original data.

For the reader of climate science related sites most of you are well aware of the issues associated with the adjustments of original data in the field of climate science.  The integrity of science is preconditioned on the ability to replicate results and the archival of data and the preservation of that original data is one of the highest priorities in science.  We are doing our small part here with the Lunar Orbiter images.  One of our team members is Charles Byrne, who just happened to be the one who wrote the original memo that resulted in the purchase of the tape drives.  In talking with Charlie he never in a million years thought that a generation later he would be able to work with the original data.  He has developed several algorithms that we are currently using to remove instrument related artifacts from our images.  Charlie is still doing original science with Lunar Orbiter images and is the author of the near side mega-basin theory.

One of the reasons that I started thinking about original data was that at the same time I was working with the forth generation lunar orbiter film in the late 1980’s Dr. John Christy was working just down the hall from me at UAH recovering satellite data from the 1970’s that for all practical purposes was the genesis of the era of the climate skeptic.  Did he think that his work would have had such a long lasting effect?  Just think, did Brahe in his wildest dreams think that his meticulous work would lead to the theory of gravitation?  We don’t know what may come in the future from the raw data that we are preserving but we do know that having an original record from 1966-67 could not be replicated at any price and with your support we will preserve this record for posterity.

A selection of published Articles About Our Project

http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10004237.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/22/destination_moon/print.html

http://www.sciencebuzz.org/buzz-tags/dennis-wingo

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090505-moon-photos-video-ap.html

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/22/nation/na-lunar22

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/LOIRP/index.html

http://boingboing.net/2012/07/12/inside-the-lunar-orbiter-image.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10097025-52.html

Apple Worldwide Developer Conference Slide Show

http://www.slideshare.net/kcowing/presentation-by-dennis-wingo-on-the-lunar-orbiter-image-recovery-p…

Wikipedia Page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_Image_Recovery_Project

LOIRP Gigapans

http://gigapan.com/profiles/loirp

Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project Crowdfunding….

Note to WordPress readers here.

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project of ours was approved by rockethub much quicker than we thought.  It went live days earlier than we thought so we are going forward now with it.   We are trying to complete this task by September 30th as the ability to keep the project going is coming to an end with no forthcoming NASA funding.  There are lots of goodies that you can get as a reward for your donations.  Please check out the website and here is our pitch…

http://www.rockethub.com/projects/14882-lunar-orbiter-image-recovery-project

We are looking for people to help us complete the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP). We call this technoarchaeology - mining the past to support science in the future.  Between 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five Lunar Orbiter missions to the Moon. Their mission was to photograph the lunar surface to help identify future Apollo mission landing sites.  The spacecraft carried 70mm photographic film which was developed automatically in lunar orbit aboard the spacecraft.  The developed film was then scanned with a light beam and this modulated a signal which was sent back to Earth.

Each image was archived on analog data tape and printed out as photographs for use by the Lunar Orbiter analysis team.  In addition to looking for landing sites, the Lunar Orbiters also produced several stunning photos unlike anything ever seen before. Of note are the “Earthrise” image taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 and the “Picture of the Century” – an oblique view inside the crater Copernicus, taken by Lunar Orbiter 2.

Our imagery was featured prominently on the editorial page of the New York Times and a statement honoring our success was made on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and entered into the congressional record. Our “before” picture of the Apollo 11 landing site was featured with an “after” image taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of the same location at the official 40th anniversary celebration of the Apollo 11 mission. In early 2013, one of our images was featured in materials handed out in the official package at the Presidential Inauguration.

By using these old images of the Moon and ones taken recently, we can offer a time machine of sorts whereby changes in the lunar surface over the past half century can be identified.  We have also used our project as a way to preserve these historic images in a way befitting their importance to the human exploration of the Moon.  Our students have also done original science by comparing our highest resolution images with the latest high resolution images of the Moon to look for changes that could indicate quakes, meteor impacts, or volcanism.  But more work remains to be done.  This is where you come in.

Over the past 5 years, we have been given a number of things relating to the Lunar Orbiter program by original participants in the program. We were most fortunate to receive a number of photographic printouts used during the landing site evaluation process from the personal collections of Don Wilhelms and Don Davis. They donated these materials with the expressed intent that they be used – including by sale or auction – to support our work at LOIRP.    I have added images from my personal collection of microfilm images.

Your generosity will allow us to get up to five tape drive heads refurbished, which are necessary to run the tapes as the tapes act like sandpaper to grind the heads down.  Your generosity will also allow us to pay our engineering team that maintains the 1960’s tape drives, plays the over 700 remaining tapes that we have (at one hour per tape), processes the digital data (over 20 terabytes so far), creates the images (over 600 so far and another 850 to go), and does the paperwork to provide the images to the National Space Science Data Center where they will be archived for the science community.  The images are also provided on our public site (www.moonviews.com), via our Facebook page athttps://www.facebook.com/groups/17596829126/ and follow us at twitter (#LunarOrbiter).  These images will be provided at full resolution for free to anyone that wants them as this data was originally obtained with tax dollars and we wish to provide these to as many people as possible.

We are asking for your support. As an incentive we can offer you several things: depending on your generosity, we can provide one of the original 1960’s era printouts donated by Don Wilhelms and Don Davis. No two are a like – and all are guaranteed to be authentic.  Secondly, we offer you the satisfaction of helping us retrieve these images in a fashion that allows them to be used once again in the exploration of the Moon today and in the future.

Published Articles About Our Project

http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10004237.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/22/destination_moon/print.html
http://www.sciencebuzz.org/buzz-tags/dennis-wingo
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090505-moon-photos-video-ap.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/22/nation/na-lunar22
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/LOIRP/index.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/07/12/inside-the-lunar-orbiter-image.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10097025-52.html

Apple Worldwide Developer Conference Slide Show

http://www.slideshare.net/kcowing/presentation-by-dennis-wingo-on-the-lunar-orbiter-image-recovery-p…

Wikipedia Page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_Image_Recovery_Project

LOIRP Gigapans

http://gigapan.com/profiles/loirp

Space Abhors a Policy Vacuum; Part II, Expanding the Vision, Developing a Consensus

Part II: An Expanded Strategic Vision For the Nation, Not Just NASA

As discussed previously there is a frequent equality in reports from various government chartered studies and reports between developing a strategic direction for NASA and developing one for the nation.  This approach is decades old and it is my opinion that it is a false equivalency that is at the root of why we have not obtained a national consensus in developing a strategy for space.   Broadening the scope of the discussion by using the intellectual foundation of spacepower theory will be further explored here to illuminate a different basis for obtaining the desired national consensus.

Its the Economics Stupid…….

The above paraphrase of an old political quote is apt in describing the approach to developing a strategic space direction for the nation within the contextual framework presented here.  To recap, Jon Sumida’s excellent opening chapter essay in Toward a Theory of Spacepower used the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan who wrote the definitive early text on how seapower influences the history and power of a nation (military seapower theory and how that is intertwined with the economic power of a nation).  Sumida translated the treatment of this subject by Mahan into the space realm.  Here is a restatement of the pertinent questions related to a national strategic space policy and a further illuminating quote from Sumida’s chapter:

Mahan’s major concerns and his questions about them can be restated in terms of spacepower as follows:

• What is the economic significance of the development of space activity, and to what degree does future American economic performance depend upon it?
• What are the security requirements of space-based economic activity?
• What role should the U.S. Government play in the promotion of space-based economic activity and its defense?
• What kind of diplomatic action will be required to support space-based economic activity and its defense?

Mahan’s writing about seapower suggests the following answers. First, activity in space will, in manifold ways, have large and growing economic effects, and will therefore be highly significant for the economic future of the United States. Second, the security requirements of space-based economic activity will involve costs that are beyond the means of any single nation-state, including the United States. Third, U.S. Government policy can support the economic development of space and contribute to the defense of such activity, but the dynamics of both will be largely determined by private capitalism and other nation-states with major interests in the space economy. And fourth, American diplomacy should encourage international economic activity in space and be directed toward the creation and sustenance of a multinational space security regime.

Thus the question becomes does space contribute to the economy of the country or is it a perpetual sink of funding.  It is well known that we have a commercial space industry that stands apart from NASA and it is treated in the world of strategic policy as a completely separate entity.  However, this is not the case when you look at it from the integrated point of view of the Space-Mahanian construct.  Thus a short overview of this industry is appropriate.

Space Market Segments

In looking at the broader context of the space economy it is instructive to look at the segments of the industry and their revenue.  This is just recently started to include human spaceflight and thus begins the crossover between what has in the past couple of decades seen to be completely different realms.

Communications

It is an undisputed fact that space activity today is economically significant.  In the Futron 2012 State of the Satellite Industry Report the global space communications industry generated $289.8 billion dollars in revenue in 2011 alone.  Figure 1 shows this in relation to the overall telecommunications industry:

Figure 1: Global 2011 Satellite Industry Revenues as a Proportion of the Telecommunications Industry

The Futron report further states that the global satellite industry revenues grew by 175% from 2001 through 2011, a 10.7% growth per year.

GPS (GNSS)

Communications is not the only industry segment that is seeing growth.  The GPS (or as the evolution goes GNSS) industry growth has also been remarkable.  While most numbers for GPS revenues are behind paywalls, a 2011 report by NDP consulting on the Economic Benefits of Commercial GPS in the U.S. and the Cost of Potential Disruption provides some astounding numbers.

….the direct economic benefits of GPS technology on commercial GPS users are estimated to be over $67.6 billion per year in the United States. In addition, GPS technology creates direct and indirect positive spillover effects, such as emission reductions from fuel savings, health and safety gains in the work place, time savings, job creation, higher tax revenues, and improved public safety and national defense. Today, there are more than 3.3 million jobs that rely on GPS technology, including approximately 130,000 jobs in GPS manufacturing industries and 3.2 million in the downstream commercial GPS-intensive industries. The commercial GPS adoption rate is growing and expected to continue growing across industries as high financial returns have been demonstrated. Consequently, GPS technology will create $122.4 billion benefits per year and will directly affect more than 5.8 million jobs in the downstream commercial GPS-intensive industries when penetration of GPS technology reaches 100 percent in the commercial GPS-intensive industries…..[emphasis added]

This is from a military funded satellite constellation that did not exist 23 years ago.  Note that the above numbers are only for U.S. sales, the multiplier on a global basis is at least 5x.

Remote Sensing

In the commercial remote sensing world the growth has only started in the last decade.  Figure 2 is a modified version of a chart from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report on commercial remote sensing:

Figure 2: Commercial Remote Sensing Revenue Growth 2004-2009 (latest public data)

The recent growth in yet another sector points to a robust future in the major space segments of the commercial markets.  Thus when you look outside of the NASA bubble, the satellite market is an increasingly important segment of our economy.

Commercial Cargo and Crew

A recent organic development at NASA has been the development of the market for cargo for the International Space Station (ISS) which will eventually lead to a further market for crew.  A lot of the impetus for this began in the space advocacy community, enabled by the passage of the Commercial Space Act of 1998.  The Act has as its policy statement:

The Congress declares that a priority goal of constructing the International Space Station is the economic development of Earth orbital space. The Congress further declares that free and competitive markets create the most efficient conditions for promoting economic development, and should therefore govern the economic development of Earth orbital space. The Congress further declares that the use of free market principles in operating, servicing, allocating the use of, and adding capabilities to the Space Station, and the resulting fullest possible engagement of commercial providers and participation of commercial users, will reduce Space Station operational costs for all partners and the Federal Government’s share of the United States burden to fund operations.

This is fully consistent with the NASA original act and its 1984 modification that the NRC report includes in its report. The NRC report also indirectly references the Commercial Space Act of 1998 in describing the relationship of the NASA Commercial Cargo and Crew contracts. The NASA contracts for commercial crew are having a large influence on the market for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) launches.  This is show in figure 3, which is the latest (2012) forecast by the FAA on launches and payloads to LEO between 2012-2021:

Figure 3: LEO Payloads and Launches 2012-2021 (From the FAA Report)

Fully 50% of all commercial launches into LEO in the next ten years will be for commercial crew and cargo.  This is an astounding change considering that prior to 2012 that number was zero percent.  This emphasis on commercial crew and cargo by NASA has a twofold rationale.  The first is that with the end of the space shuttle, the United States no longer has a means to fly crew or cargo to the ISS.  This hardly is a leadership position.  The second is that the NASA system built with the traditional contracting methods (Orion and the Space Launch System [SLS]) will not fly humans to the station until late in the second decade of the century if then.

With two successful flights of cargo to the station, newcomer aerospace company SpaceX is showing that it is possible for a non traditional procurement method initiated with a non legacy company with its own funding, can provide the government with services that it otherwise cannot obtain through its own contracting methods.  This has profound implications going forward and a great opportunity to meld the efficiencies of the commercial world with NASA’s core flight programs.

The Current State of Affairs and Ideas for a Consensus Strategic Space Policy.

The Current State

Rather than a strategic plan, it seems that what we have today is the organic growth of capabilities that have been enabled by various interests within the government.  Decades ago it was the investments by NASA and the DoD in communications satellite capabilities that gave birth to what is now a vibrant industry.  It was the investment in a military capability (GPS) to provide accurate positioning information for military purposes that has given rise to the GPS industry that day by day further permeates our lives. It was the investments and risk taking in contracting by the DoD that enabled the relatively new commercial remote sensing industry to reach critical mass of revenue that allows for further growth.  It has been the impetus of the Commercial Space Act of 1998 and NASA’s ability to enter into other transaction contracts (funded and non funded Space Act Agreements that side step the Federal Acquisition Regulations) that are bringing about a new era in the commercial support of human spaceflight.

What we have as a state of play today is clearly a hodgepodge of disparate interest within the government looking for ways to lower costs and create new capability within budget constrained environments, bringing a defacto strategic space policy into play, at least for activities in Earth orbit.  Thus we have the foundation, based in successful organic policy development, to answer question 3 posited by Sumida above as question 1 has already been answered. (it is outside of the scope of this article to talk about defense or diplomatic themes)

What role should the U.S. Government play in the promotion of space-based economic activity and its defense?

Breaking the Funding Barrier

One of the biggest problems that new technological approaches and systems have is that space is capital intensive, has a high perceived risk, and the Venture Capital and other private investment means are risk averse and unwilling to make big bets on space, for the most part that is.  Elon Musk’s SpaceX has raised capital but not until Musk had risked tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of his own funds due to his passion for space.  Most good ideas don’t have this foundation but have a similar potential for game changing developments.

A question inevitably arises related to the incumbent aerospace companies.  They could do these things, but the experience is that they are far more wedded to evolutionary change, and they also rely on the government to provide the funds that allows them to bleed some off for new ideas.  The fact is that most large aerospace corporations simply are uninterested in any new venture that the government does not pay for, and even then after it is done, the record is that they don’t exploit the new capability for commercial purposes.

The biggest deterrent to this is that the government itself has a conservative streak, preferring to bet on more established players, the third and fourth tier companies that still have a bit of entrepreneurial impetus.  While this does provide some means of bringing new capabilities to bear, it also sets the stage to block new ideas.  Thus further incentives must be provided.

Tax Policy

One such incentive is based in tax policy, to help shift the balance from risk to reward.  This has been the basis of my advocacy of the Zero G Zero Tax legislation, that would remove from taxation the companies that do things in space beyond the current activities of communications and remote sensing.  I wrote about this subject for various publications and a link to one of them is here.  Please read for background information.  The bottom line is that it provides incentives for investors that help them shift their risk/reward calculation for providing funding for high risk ventures.  Even this is probably not enough and brings to mind other forms of direct government incentive to develop the economic potential of space.

Direct Incentives

Direct Incentives can take several forms and NASA’s work with the CCDEV and COTS provides one route.  Other routes can spring from NASA’s need to develop the capability to carry cargo and crew beyond LEO.  NASA has had some success in this by the offering of prizes to incentivize new developments.  The NASA Grand Challenges comes to mind but these need to be increased in both scope and funding.  Today the Google Lunar X prize has a $25 million dollar prize for the first commercial lunar lander.  Recent experience with the teams shows that this number is about a factor of four insufficient to allow the participants to raise the funding needed to actually be successful and build a sustainable enterprise.

Prizes, direct investment, public private partnerships, these are all methods for bringing about progress in space, which provides well paying jobs, increased economic activity and greater security for the nation.  However, at the end of the day, this organic growth of a policy is at the tactical or implementation level, what about the strategic policy?

A Simple, Direct, and Understandable Strategic Space Policy

The economic, industrial, and social development of the solar system is the policy of the United States in space.

This proposed statement is both generic as it is encompassing.  It is not that much farther beyond OSTP head John Marburger’s statement on space policy in 2006.  It is actually interesting that NASA’s 2011 Strategic Goals, Outcomes, and Challenges fit well within that goal.  However, that goal can also be seen as so lofty as to allow for not ever actually having to do it.  Thus there are several steps on the way that can flesh out the plan.  These could be.

The first step in the economic, industrial, and social development of the solar system is the ability to move humans and cargo around on an at will basis within the confines of the gravity well of the Earth and the surface of the Moon.  Additionally, a lunar infrastructure development will be enabled that will provide for the beginnings of a lunar industrial base to support further economic expansion.

This is our first step, and to harken back to the historical cast of the Mahanian construct, this is the same as ancient sea faring civilizations operating in the Mediterranean sea.  Since we are working toward ubiquitous transportation within this realm it opens up a lot of opportunities and capabilities for private enterprise.  This also starts the development of off planet resources in a manner that supports further outward development and reduces the cost and the complexity of a supply chain dependent on the Earth.

The second step in the economic, industrial, and social development of the solar system is to place permanent human settlements on Mars and enable a second outpost and civilization for mankind.

The NRC report pointed out repeatedly states that multiple presidents and NASA both want to send humans to Mars.  Besides science, no one at NASA or the administration (any of them since Apollo) have talked much about what these humans would do when they get there.  The most boring thing imaginable would be to watch a bunch of scientists walk around on Mars picking up rocks.

A very innovative architecture was postulated a few years ago that the trip to Mars by humans could be much more cost effectively carried out if the trip was one way.  There would be a LOT of volunteers and it is fully within the spirit of the strategic plan to do so.  Mars cannot be the sole province of science, the second possibly habital planet in our solar system is too important.  This would also work to develop an industrial base on Mars for further development.

The third step in the economic, industrial, and social development of the solar system, will be to extend mankind’s reach beyond Mars to the asteroid belt, the Moons of the Jovian worlds and beyond to the edge of the solar system.

There is absolutely no technical reason why these things cannot happen.  There is also every financial reason that the resulting expansion of mankind’s domain will bring vast new wealth to the Earth.  It is a simple fact that if the Gross National Product of the United States was $50 trillion a year rather than $15 trillion, that we would not be having these discussions about not being able to afford healthcare for our citizens or to keep Social Security solvent.  This takes us back to the core concept of the spacepower theory development that space is simply an extension of the land, the sea, and the air as a domain for economics, politics, and the development of the potential of all mankind.

Note:  Now that I am to the end of this, to me it begs further development.  Next time I will start from the three steps above and discuss how this could play out.  This is not a fantasy, nor is it discussing things multiple decades away.  We have real problems here on the Earth and developing the technologies to develop the resources of the solar system for the benefit of all mankind is a viable way to move forward with our civilization that will bring far more benefits than other proposed major social and industrial changes to our civilization that are based only on the resources and capabilities of our single planet.

Space Abhors a Policy Vacuum; The NRC Report and The Need for a Broad National Space Policy

NOTE:  This is Part one of a two part post….

In December of 2012 the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on NASA’s Strategic Direction, in response to a congressional mandate, conducted a study and published a report entitled; NASA’s Strategic Direction and the Need for a National Consensus. The mandate for their deliberations and report was as follows:

…..Notably, the committee was not asked to deliberate on what should be NASA’s goals, objectives, and strategy; rather, it was asked for recommendations on how these goals, objectives, and strategy might best be established and communicated…..

The question put before the committee was not what NASA should be doing but rather how NASA’s goals, objectives, and strategy might be established, presumably in a manner that will gain the support of stakeholders, including the public.

Vignettes from the Study…

The committee began by referencing the enabling law for NASA for guidance on what the agency’s role is in government.  Their evaluation was;

For the United States to be a leader in space, as required by the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act, it must be a country with bold ideas, science and engineering excellence, and the ability to convince others to work with it in the pursuit of common goals. Leadership depends on the perception of others that whoever is in the lead knows the way forward, is capable of forging the trail, and is determined to succeed despite inevitable setbacks…..

So NASA is supposed to be a (as opposed to the) leader in space.  However, NASA’s role is not to develop the strategic direction itself as it is a federal executive agency, it is the United States (presumed by the NRC committee to be the government) that must come up with the bold ideas, science, and engineering excellence and then convince others of this and lead into the future.

The strongest statement of the committee is that the government has not come up with a strategic plan that provides this leadership or that has the support needed to be successful. Their first conclusion and recommendation is;

Conclusion: There is no national consensus on strategic goals and objectives for NASA. Absent such a consensus, NASA cannot reasonably be expected to develop enduring strategic priorities for the purpose of resource allocation and planning.

Recommendation: The administration should take the lead in forging a new consensus on NASA’s future that is stated in terms of a set of clearly defined strategic goals and objectives. This process should apply both within the administration and between the administration and Congress and should be reached only after meaningful technical consultations with potential international partners. The strategic goals and objectives should be ambitious, yet technically rational, and should focus on the long term.

So there is no consensus on our strategic direction and objectives for NASA and thus the agency will continue as it has for a while now, muddling along with the various stovepiped interests within the agency continuing to fight for their individual agendas.  The recommendation is that the administration and congress should work together to develop one a strategic plan but in the hyper-partisan atmosphere of the current relationship between the branches of government this will be difficult.

This is obviously a recipe for continuing floundering because as the report also observes, NASA does not have the money (as the Augustine report also noted) to do what several presidents and NASA have said is the most important goal (not strategy, goal) for the agency which is the human exploration of Mars.  So the question becomes, is there a means whereby a consensus can be developed that comes from the outside of the government but is adopted by the government?

Where the NRC report Went Wrong

Referring back to the mandate of the NRC committee, its mandate was to establish how this national consensus and strategy might be established and communicated.  In their recommendation that a space policy be developed there is a continuing flaw in the philosophical underpinning that equates space with NASA and the development of a strategic direction as sole the province of the government as it relates to the civilian space agency.  Here is what the report says in this area….

…….If the United States is to continue to maintain international leadership in space, it must have a steady, bold, scientifically justifiable space program in which other countries want to participate, and, moreover, it must behave as a reliable partner.

The above sentence in its implication says that a scientifically justifiable space program is the only means to continue its international leadership in space.  This has been the underpinning of all NASA related strategic thinking for the past thirty years but is it still tenable, is it still complete to say so?  It is my opinion that the answer is no and indeed it has never truly been the case and to think of space through this narrow lens is actually the reason that we have been unable to come to any kind of national consensus on space.  The key word in their mandate is national consensus, not just a presidential fiat or even a consensus between the congress and the president.  If we are to move forward toward a national consensus we must look beyond the scientific justifications for a space program and look at the broader aspects of national interest to underpin our reasoning.

Toward a Spacepower Theory of the Space Economy

In the years 2005-2008 I was associated with a research and writing effort carried out by the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University (NDU).  The result of this effort was a multivolume book called Toward a Theory of Spacepower. The book was a set of carefully selected essays on the subject of spacepower theory, which is the theory of how the environment of space is a realm for the actions of nations  and non national actors toward furthering their own interests.  The book was commissioned by the Secretary of Defense and is constructed taxonomically in the same vein as Clauswitz’s Landpower theory, and particularly in the vein of Mahan’s seminal book on Seapower theory called The Influence of Seapower on History 1660-1783.

This was a fascinating effort and I learned much about how people outside of NASA think about the subject of space.  Its about worldview and whenever the word “NASA” is used a certain worldview is imposed that then further defines all discussion on space.  However, if you impose the worldview of power theory and then look at space, something vastly different emerges, something that could be useful in developing a national consensus regarding space.  The reason that this can provide a firmer foundation is that the military theoretician, especially those that take the viewpoint derived from Mahan that actions of states (and private economic interests) to proactively operate in and protect their interests at sea (in our example space) helps to build the economy of the nation, which then increases the wealth of the people and thus builds a firmer foundation for the state itself.

The first essay in the “Toward a Theory of Spacepower” by Jon Sumida goes to the heart of building a workable premise for a national discussion on space policy. This premise formulated on the basis of a Mahanian political-economic outlook, which is far beyond simply building a strategic plan for a federal agency like NASA and helps to reformulate Mahan’s seapower theory questions into the space realm.

In his essay, Sumida reformulated the Mahanian seapower questions and concerns into their space analog as follows:

•  What is the economic significance of the development of space activity, and to what degree does future American economic performance depend upon it?

• What are the security requirements of space-based economic activity?

• What role should the U.S. Government play in the promotion of space-based economic       activity and its defense?

• What kind of diplomatic action will be required to support space-based economic activity and its defense?

I would posit that the mandate of the NRC study of  how the [national] goals, objectives, and strategy might best be established and communicated…..  is best addressed by answering the questions formulated by Sumida and not by an a-priori statement that a scientifically justifiable space program is the basis for the administration and congress to deliberate our future in space.

Brevity a posting in this type of format precludes going into these questions in this missive, but the follow on posting this will go into Sumida’s questions, using my own chapter in Toward a Spacepower Theory as the basis for my argument.

(you can read ahead if you want as the link to the spacepower theory book of essays is linked above).

How would you the reader answer these questions?

Part II, Broadening the Scope of a National Space Policy///

Skycorp—Out of the Closet

Who Me, Start a Company?

I usually keep my personal and professional lives separate but today is special.  I founded my company, Skycorp Incorporated in March of 1998.  I got the idea from Alan Steele’s book “Orbital Decay” and its successors.  Good science fiction, very realistic and very human.   In the book there is a company called Skycorp, based in Huntsville Alabama that was building a solar power satellite and a lot of other (if you read the rest of the books in the series) large space projects up to and including an O’Neil colony.  My thought was that this is the kind of company that I want to build and it was the crystalizing of my space interests that go all the way back to my early childhood and the Gemini and Apollo programs.  However, the reality of building a space company that can do those kinds of things is considerably different than my understanding and vision of the time.

The truth is that when I was a kid, even looking at the space race, I never dreamed about running a company.  I figured I would be a physicist working for NASA or some big company.  My friends kidded me and called me Spock (it was that era).  Where we are from in Alabama you go to school, grow up and then go to work.  Some go to college and then go to work.  A few start a small business and go to work and work more than if you are working for someone else.  We never had entrepreneurial role models.  Our family either went into the military, or worked at a company.  I didn’t find out until I was well into my 30′s that my great grandfather and grandfather were railroad engineers!

When I was in my 20′s a friend of mine in California and I started a company selling computers but quit doing it because business was booming and it was interfering with our skiing time.  It was a business model very similar to Dell’s.  During the 80′s I was a non degreed engineer in the California computer industry, which at that time was a meritocracy where the good were promoted.  We had a marvelous time but I wanted to do space.  When I applied for jobs in Aerospace (Rockwell, Boeing, Lockheed), I was either told that I could not do any design work without a degree (Boeing, Rockwell), or the job screening process (to work on Hubble as a test engineer) took so long that I turned the job down.  I turned it down partially because I was already in school.  Even though in the computer industry I had responsibility for entire technical departments, production lines, or large technical projects, I did understand that if I wanted to do space, it would take a degree.

The Plunge….

So, in 1987 I left the good jobs in the computer industry, moved back to Alabama, and went to school at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).  I am forever glad that I  lucked out and went to UAH because at the time there was still an amazing cast of characters that were still around from the Apollo era.  I was such a space nut that I had to get an apartment within sight of the Saturn 1 at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.  It was my inspiration and I used to spend a lot of time over there looking at the hardware.  At UAH many of the professors were from the Apollo era and some were the German rocket scientists that had left NASA and were into their third careers.

Since I had contacts in the L5 society (soon to become the NSS, merging with the Von Braun inspired National Space Institute, I was able to meet several of these people.  One that probably inspired me the most was Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, one of the fathers of American ion propulsion efforts.  He was at Teledyne Brown engineering working on drop towers for microgravity and was kind enough to take time to answer all of my questions about space and he schooled me on the value of ion propulsion to spaceflight.  I also met Konrad Dannenberg, Dr. Von Tiesenhausen, and many others.  I even met General Bruce Medaris (father Medaris, then an Anglican Bishop), Von Braun’s boss in the Army.  I also met and became friends with amazing people like Gordon Woodcock, Dr. Charles Lundquist, Dave Christensen, Dr. S.T. Wu and Dr. John Gilbert from UAH, and many others who build the hardware that took us to the Moon and beyond.  Here is a picture of Dr. Lundquist lecturing Von Braun and Oberth on orbital mechanics!

Figure 1: Lundquist Lecturing Von Braun and Oberth on Orbital Mechanics

The point is that I had an amazing group of mentors there in Huntsville that helped me look beyond the horizons that I had before.

I was able to get extremely low paying student jobs at UAH doing real hardware and science.  With my background in the computer industry and in the university environment I was able to do stuff that otherwise I would have had to have had a degree to do!  While this sidetracked my degree, making it take almost twice as long as it should have, I was able to work on a very wide range of hardware.  I built microgravity measuring systems for the Black Brant sounding rocket (CONSORT 1-6) and on an ill fated sounding rocket mission (JOUST-1).  I have my own ballistically implanted reef!.  I and my team that we started building of students at UAH did a lot of other projects as well.  This was all through Dr. Lundquist’s Consortium for Materials Development in Space (CMDS) and through Dr. S.T. Wu’s Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR)

In 1989 I was one of the early founders of the Lunar Prospector project, which later flew in the 1990′s.  We started our own small satellite project at the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDSAT-1).  We raised $6.5 million dollars in cash and in kind donations and it flew in October of 1998 as a secondary payload on the Deep Space 1 mission.  I flew the first MacIntosh as an experiment controller on the Shuttle on STS 46 in the Cargo bay and on STS 57, 60, and 63 in the SpaceHab module.  All in all a heck of a lot of flight experience.

Starting a Space Company

It was only after I was working at UAH and had worked on a lot of space projects that I realized that I probably did not want to work at Boeing or any other large aerospace company or NASA for that matter.  I worked with too many guys at MSFC who were great engineers but my student spacecraft was the first flight hardware that they had ever been involved with.  I also saw the politics and how a great space center (MSFC) was being systematically dismantled from Washington by leadership that had no idea what they were destroying.  We are still reaping the ill fruits of those decisions.

So, at about the time of my graduation with an engineering physics degree and a lot of flight hardware, I founded Skycorp.  I still had no idea what I was getting into…. Rather than go into a lot of gory details, I introduce to you, my reader, my company website…

http://www.skycorpinc.com/Skycorp/Home.html

I ask you to peruse the site and see what we have accomplished over what is now 14 years.  As this post is getting long I will leave you with my website.  I will do a separate post on my lessons learned in developing a space company.  If you look on my site you will see a lot of projects and the lessons learned in the pursuit of those projects is what I want to discuss next……..

For almost 15 years I did not do a Skycorp website.  I never found anyone to give it the look and feel that I wanted.  The exception is my favorite space artist Mark Maxwell, but I have always been so involved that I never took the time that it would take for he and I to do it as I would have had to have written all the text anyway.

Some of these projects people who know me, know about.  Some of them you don’t.  Some of them are still emerging and will go live soon.  It is beyond time for Skycorp to come out of the closet so to speak and after spending the time to develop this site, which will continue to develop, we are proud of the things we have done and look forward to the things that we will do!

Please let me know what you think……

Reclaiming Our Future in Space….

The Path of History

The above quotation was from an article critical of the space program in life magazine from August 15, 1969, barely two weeks after the return of the Apollo 11 from its historic journey.  It illustrates in a concise nutshell the disconnect between the goals of NASA and the perception of the value of space to American public in the late 1960′s.  How did this happen?  This disconnect has never truly been overcome and it must, because the money that was spent on the space program then, and since, has been the downpayment on the future of mankind.  How different these visions are!

Anyone today who understands the history of the period understands that money was not taken away from children and shot to the Moon.  Mrs. Reynolds, featured in Life magazine, could not understand why we were spending money on the Moon.  As those of us who know the media understand, the journalist of the day was using her statement as an illustration of an attitude that was becoming widespread at the time, which was that the government had lost touch with the people and that money was being spent on things of no concern to our lives.

The 1950′s

This shift in the perception of government was profound as it was rapid.  In 1960, the last full year of the Eisenhower administration, trust in government was probably at an all time high.  The former five star general and commander in chief of allied forces in WWII had successfully steered the United States through a very tough era in global politics and who actually ended one war (Korea) and kept us out of another one (Vietnam).  This while at the same time leading a revolution in the ability of the United States to wage war by investing heavily in advancing technology in aircraft, warships, nuclear power and space assets for reconnaissance.  At the end of the 1950′s defense expenditures were fully 50% of the federal budget, yet not one American had died in combat since the end of the Korean conflict seven years earlier.  All of this swiftly changed with the Camelot presidency and the era of LBJ.

The 1960′s

After the Sputnik moment of October 1957 space expenditures jumped for the military and the new civilian agency NASA. The 1960′s saw an even greater explosion of government activism in R&D as well as social programs.  Huge sums of money were spent not only on NASA but on military space development as well.  Few people know today that the development of the Thor (Delta), Atlas, and Titan and the satellites that flew on them for reconnaissance and communications cost the same order of magnitude as the Apollo Moon landing.  Eisenhower remarked on these expenditures in his farewell address and so did General Bruce Medaris (Von Braun’s Army boss).  This is while at the same time the expenditures for the Vietnam war were escalating rapidly

In 1957 federal spending on science, space, and technology totaled $122 million dollars. Nine years later FY 1966 spending in the same category was $6.717 billion dollars, a number that was not equaled until the Reagan administration in 1982.  As a comparison, Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services (ETESS) spent $479 million in 1957 and by FY 1966 this total had increased to $4.363 billion.  Most interesting, only four fiscal years later (FY-1970) the General Science, Space, and Technology budget had dropped to $4.511 billion mostly due to the Apollo draw down and the ETESS budget had increased to $8.634 billion dollars, almost double the budget that included NASA as well as all other federal science spending.  Other budgetary line items went up by similar amounts during this period while NASA and science declined. (source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals).

The rational that was given was that the budget was in a deficit and that we had to make sacrifices.  When NASA Director James Webb tried to get LBJ to reverse the direction of the cuts in the FY-1968 budget the reply was:

Under other circumstances, I would have opposed such a cut, [but] the times demand responsibility from us all.

I recognize–as also must congress–that the reduction in funds recommended by the House Appropriations Committee will require the deferral and reduction of some desirable space projects.  Yet in the face of present circumstances, I join with the Congress and accept this reduction. (Source: Defining NASA: The Historical Battle Over the Agency’s Mission)

This shift is understandable though if you consider it within the context of Mrs. Reynolds statement.  It wasn’t just her as the turmoil of the 1960′s, the racial problems, the Vietnam war, the problems with urban decay as it was called, all factored into a huge shift in priorities for the government.

2010′s

With the budget numbers in hand today it is quite simply that LBJ lied to Webb and NASA.  It was not an issue over the budget, it was an issue of priorities.  Here we are 46 years later and what do we have?  The same budget line for General Science, Space, and Technology this fiscal year has a budget of $30.991 billion dollars.  This is NASA, plus NSF, plus other general science and technology spending.  The comparative budget for the same ETESS segment in FY-12 is $139.212 billion dollars.   Again, it is not an issue of money, it is an issue of priorities.

The budget has been used time and time again as a means to bludgeon NASA into accepting lower budgets under the guise of deficit reduction.  However, as can clearly be seen in the budget data, the deficit has almost never decreased as a result of the cuts and the real issue is the allocation of national resources.  I would argue here that it is that allocation itself that is the problem.  Is our educational system improved over what it was in 1966?  Are our social services better?  Is employment training better?  Think about this, what if the budgets were reversed and during that entire time from FY-1967 until today, how would our nation and our world be different?

Historical Turning Point and an Alternate History

What if NASA’s budget and the General S&T budget followed the trajectory of the ETESS budget?  Here are a few charts from Von Braun and Webb’s FY 1966 budget hearings with  the Appropriations Committee of the House.

Figure 1: Payload Performance Increase for the NERVA Nuclear Stage on the Saturn V

Figure 2: Mission Capabilities Increase from the Use of the NERVA Nuclear Stage

Figure 3: NASA Clustered Space Nuclear Reactor Experiment (1964)

Figure 4: Artist Depiction of a Clustered Nuclear Stage in Orbit Around the Moon

Take a good look at figures 1-4.  These were not just charts that the guys in Preliminary Design at MSFC cooked up to sell a program, these were projects in progress when these presentations were made to Congress in March of 1965 for the FY-1966 budget, the last budget where NASA got what it wanted. (Source: NASA Authorization for Fiscal Year 1966; Hearings Before the Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, United States Senate, Bill S. 927)

Figure 5-11: AAP Graphics for Extended use of Apollo Hardware

These are all graphics, drawings, and designs that I have dug up during the course of my extended research on the subject of the 1960′s space program.  It is an absolute falsehood that NASA had no plans for space.  The problem was never the ideas or the follow through, it was the money and the reallocation of the Apollo program money to fund domestic social programs.

I leave the reader with one thought and question.  In the last almost half century and tens of trillions of dollars in social spending, are we better off than we would have been had we instead allocated just the ETESS money to space?  Today we would have the beginnings of a civilization on Mars, we would have lunar industrialization, we would have ubiquitous operational capabilities for humans anywhere in the inner solar system.

Think of that…..