Science & Technology
Space Activities Archive
THE BUDGETARY IMPLICATIONS OF NASA'S CURRENT PLANS FOR SPACE EXPLORATION.
Congressional Budget Office. April 2009.
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According to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), its current plans will require an average of $19.1 billion of funding annually from 2010 through 2025, with the Constellation program accounting for about half of the total by 2017. Under its current plans, the agency also intends to conduct 79 new robotic science missions through 2025, requiring funding of $4.7 billion annually, and to perform aeronautics research, at a cost of about $460 million annually.
AA09111
Brooks, Michael SPACE STORM ALERT: 90 SECONDS FROM CATASTROPHE New Scientist, no. 2700, March 21, 2009, pp. 31-35
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A recent report by NASA and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences warns that plasma storms from the sun - commonly seen in northern latitudes as auroras - pose a serious danger to electric power grids. A plasma incursion from a severe space weather event would cause rapid changes in the Earth's magnetic field, and would induce massive direct currents in long-distance high-voltage power lines, causing transformers to melt from the overload. The author notes that such an event took place in 1859, and caused severe disruptions in the telegraph networks. Today, industrial civilization has unwittingly "sown the seeds of their own destruction," as modern systems are completely dependent on electric power for food delivery, heating, cooling and refrigeration, water, sewage disposal and pharmaceuticals. A serious plasma storm could knock out hundreds of transformers within seconds, putting millions of lives at risk, and such an event would take months to recover from. The author notes that the U.S. is not alone in facing this risk - Europe is vulnerable, and China is building a 1000-kilovolt electric grid, twice that of the U.S. grid.
AIRPORT WILDLIFE MITIGATION - 'BIRDSTRIKE NEWS YOU CAN USE.'
Embry Riddle Aeronautical University. Web posted January 20. 2009.
Full Text: [PDF format, 8 pages]
The study suggests changes needed to effectively reduce the hazard of 35,000 birdstrikes a year.
[Note: contains copyrighted material]
SHUTTLE TO CONSTELLATION TRANSITION.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Web posted April 2, 2008.
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The transition from Space Shuttle to Constellation over the next few years provides a rare opportunity to reinvigorate the Nation's space exploration capabilities. During that time, NASA's greatest challenge and top priority will be to safely fly out the remaining Space Shuttle missions, complete assembly of the International Space Station (ISS), and honor commitments to our international partners prior to retiring the Shuttle in 2010, all while developing the new Constellation space systems and preparing them for flight as soon as possible after the Shuttle's last mission.
NASA: AGENC HAS STEPS TOWARD MAKING SOUND INVESTMENT DECISIONS FOR ARES I BUT STILL FACES CHALLENGING KNOWLEDGE GAPS
U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO), October 31, 2007
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One of the first steps in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) efforts to implement the President's plan to return humans to the moon and prepare for eventual human space flight to Mars is the development of the Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle. It plans to conduct the first human space flight in 2015. However, the agency is seeking to speed development efforts in order to reduce the gap in our nation's ability to provide human access to space caused by the Space Shuttle's retirement in 2010. GAO was asked to assess NASA's progress in developing the knowledge needed to make sound investment decisions for the Ares I project.
PREVENTING THE FORWARD CONTAMINATING OF MARS.
Committee on Preventing the Forward Contaminaton of Mars, Space Sudies Board, Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences. National Research Council. 2005
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Over the coming decade, NASA should develop and implement new measures to detect and eliminate microorganisms on robotic spacecraft sent to Mars to prevent possible contamination of the planet, says a new report from the National Research Council. If microbes aboard a spacecraft were to survive the trip to Mars and grow there, they could interfere with scientific investigations to detect any life that might be native to Mars.
SPACE ACQUISITIONS: STRONGER DEVELOPMENT PRACTICES AND INVESTMENT PLANNING NEEDED TO ADDRESS CONTINUING PROBLEMS. [GAO-05-891T]
United States Government Accounting Office (GAO). July 12, 2005
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GAO was asked to testify on problems relating to the Department of Defense's (DOD) space system acquisitions. GAO Found that the DOD work on the acquisition of space-based capabilities over the last several years has been conducted on two levels. Firstly, reviewed most of the major space system acquisitions to determine their status at different points in time…DOD has had to re-assess the need to acquire that particular system and the soundness of its acquisition strategy. Secondly, have analyzed the common and causal factors for these poor acquisition outcomes.
Overall, GAO have found that DOD has been unable to match resources (technology, time, money) to requirements before beginning individual programs, setting the stage for technical and other problems, which lead to cost and schedule increases. Specifically:
- Requirements for what the satellite needed to do and how well it must perform are not adequately defined at the beginning of a program or are changed significantly once the program has begun.
- Technologies are not mature enough to be included in product development.
- Cost estimates are unreliable-largely because requirements have not been fully defined and because programs start with many unknowns about technologies.
GAO Recommends that DOD has attempted to address its problems in space system acquisitions, but, as our reports have indicated, there is still a critical need to adopt practices that would assure DOD:
- Separates technology development from acquisition;
- Adopts evolutionary approaches that pursue incremental increases in capability; and
- Guides program start decisions with investment strategies that identify:
- overall capabilities and how to achieve them, that is, what role space will play versus other air-, sea-, and land-based assets; and
- priorities for funding.
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Lorenzini, Enrico; Sanmartin, Juan ELECTRODYNAMIC TETHERS IN SPACE (Scientific American, vol. 291, no. 2, August 2004, pp. 50-57)
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There is growing interest in tethers, spacecraft consisting of two modules mounted at either end of a long electrically-conductive cable, as a means of generating low-cost electrical power while in orbit without the need for onboard fuel or nuclear power. The tether would generate electrical power by interacting with the earth's, or another planet's, electromagnetic field. A tethered spacecraft could also create its own artificial gravity by rotating around the imaginary center of mass in the middle of the cable; after a long space flight, it could generate thrust by interacting with planetary gravitational fields. Many experts believe that tethers could help clean up the large amount of manmade space junk in near-earth orbit by accelerating the rate at which debris would enter the atmosphere and burn up in re-entry.
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Belfiore, Michael
THE FIVE-BILLION STAR HOTEL (Popular Science, vol. 266, no. 3, March 2005, pp. 50-57)
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Robert Bigelow, who built the Budget Hotel empire from scratch, is exploring a new area of hotels that are literally "out of this world" -- and has founded Bigelow Aerospace, which will build the world's first hotel in space orbit. For one million dollars a night, guests can learn weightless aerobics, gaze at galaxies, and watch the Earth's oceans fly by. The technology to build the hotel comes from NASA, which abandoned the inflatable modules; Bigelow bought the patents and brought in engineers to continue the work. The main obstacle is being able to transport people to and from the hotel, so Bigelow has offered a 50-million-dollar prize to the company who can build a transport vehicle. A fan of civilian space exploration, Bigelow anticipates that his orbiting hotel will open in January 2010, and is taking reservations.
U.S. SPACE PROGRAMS: CIVILIAN, MILITARY, AND COMMERCIAL. [IB92011]
Marcia S. Smith.
Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service. Updated September 28, 2004.
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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conducts the most visible space activities in the United States. NASA's FY2005 budget request is $16.2 billion. NASA requested $15.5 billion for FY2004; Congress approved $15.4 billion. The loss of the space shuttle Columbia on February 1, 2003, and the future of NASA's human space flight activities is dominating debate about NASA. On January 14, 2004, President Bush announced a new exploration initiative that involves terminating the shuttle program in 2010 when construction of the space station is completed, building a new Crew Exploration Vehicle to take astronauts to the Moon by 2020, and redirecting U.S. research on the space station to support the goal of returning humans to the Moon and eventually sending them to Mars and "world beyond."
The Department of Defense (DOD) has a less visible but equally substantial space program. Tracking the DOD space budget is extremely difficult since space is not identified as a separate line item in the budget. DOD sometimes releases only partial information (omitting funding for classified programs) or will suddenly release without explanation new figures for prior years that are quite different from what was previously reported. The most recent figures from DOD show a total (classified and unclassified) space budget of $19.4 billion for FY2003, $20 billion for FY2004, and a FY2005 request of $21.7 billion. DOD space programs receiving special congressional attention include SBIRS-High (to develop a new early warning satellite), Space Based Radar, and NFIRE (in which a space-based "kinetic kill vehicle" may impact a missile as it makes close sensor observations of the missile's plume).
The appropriate role of the government in facilitating commercial space businesses is an ongoing debate. For many years, the focus has been on commercial space launch services, but commercial remote sensing satellites also pose complex questions in terms of encouraging the development of commercial satellites that provide high quality data, while protecting national security. President Bush signed a commercial remote sensing policy on April 25, 2003 that tries to strike a balance between those objectives.
AA04349
Burdick, Alan SEEDING THE UNIVERSE (Discover, Vol. 25, No. 10, October 2004, pp. 56-61)
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If living organisms are discovered on another planet, will they have arrived there on the spacecraft sent to find them? As rovers currently probe Mars and other missions are underway to Saturn's moons, scientists at NASA's Spacecraft Assembly Facility in California are implementing "an official planetary protection policy ... to shield the universe from the people exploring it." Current decontamination methods do not eliminate all microorganisms from the space probes under construction, and some microbes have adapted to and thrive in the harsh conditions of the assembly facility. By identifying and understanding these microbes, astrobiologists can assess their ability to interfere with the life-detection methods used by the spacecraft. And they are almost certain that one organism, Bacillus safensis, has landed on Mars aboard the rovers.
MILITARY ROLE IN SPACE CONTROL: A PRIMER. [RL32602]
Adolfo J. Fernandez.
Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service. September 23, 2004.
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This report reviews Department of Defense (DOD) military space control efforts and related policy and resources. Since the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. military forces have become increasingly reliant on space resources for communications, intelligence imagery, weather, warning, navigation, and timing. Asserting that U.S. space assets have become an integral part of today's warfare, the Department of Defense (DOD) has begun to emphasize the importance of protecting these resources. Although U.S. military space systems have been relatively unchallenged, military leaders anticipate increasing threats to these systems, because they provide a significant military advantage.
DOD defines space control as "the combat, combat support, and combat service support operations to ensure freedom of action in space for the United States and its allies and, when directed, deny an adversary freedom of action in space." DOD space control initiatives are embryonic and mostly represent legacy resources used for space surveillance. The DOD budget, however, identifies early stages of developing counterspace measures.
Military space control efforts, like many other facets of military space, are in a significant phase of transition. The ability of the United States to harness "space power" may be critical to victory on the battlefield, especially as information dominance becomes more pervasive in the ensuing evolution of network centric warfare. Congress might be faced with decisions involving the projection of military operations into space, survivability of space systems, and DOD programs to promote a continual awareness of activities in space.
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Lemley, Brad GOING UP: SPACE ELEVATOR (Discover, vol. 25, no. 7, July 2004, pp. 32-39)
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The expensive, inefficient and dangerous business of rocketing humans and cargo into space would become obsolete if proponents of the "space ribbon" are correct. A tremendously strong carbon-nanotube composite band, three feet wide, as thin as paper, could stretch thousands of miles into space, anchored at the bottom by a refurbished oil-drilling platform located on the Equator, and at the top by a counterweight station, and would be kept aloft by the centripetal force of the earth's rotation. "Climbers" -- ascent vehicles with tractor-like treads -- would be powered by a laser beam aimed at photovoltaic arrays mounted on their underside, from the anchor station, which would probably be located off the coast of Ecuador, a relatively lightning-free zone. The cost, estimated at between USD 6-24 billion, would be within the range of many national governments, as well as some private companies. The gradual ascent on the space ribbon would be a far cry from the stomach-churning, multiple-G-force ordeal of rocket flight. If it works, says the author, "it means nothing less than a revolution in human destiny."
AA04154
Horvath, Joan C. BLASTOFFS ON A BUDGET (Scientific American, Vol. 290, No. 4, April 2004, pp. 92-97)
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Dozens of small, private companies are developing reusable launch vehicles for flights to suborbital altitudes. Designed to launch payloads of a few kilograms for less than one million dollars, the developers see a ready market in the university space research community whose projects are currently launched as secondary payloads on much costlier conventional rockets. Others see a market for tourists to experience suborbital flight for less than $100,000. More than 20 companies are trying to win the $10-million X Prize that will be awarded for taking three people into suborbit, returning the vehicle to Earth and then reusing 90 percent of it to launch again within 14 days. Legislation is pending to determine whether winged, rocket-powered launch vehicles should be licensed like rockets or required to follow a lengthy, more-costly procedure to be certified like passenger aircraft. Commercial success also depends on dealing with U.S. government regulations on launch sites, safety, and liability for damages to third parties.
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Cowen, Ron A NEW FLIGHT PLAN, BACK TO THE MOON (Science News, Vol. 165, No. 11, March 13, 2004, pp. 170-172)
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In the thirty years that have passed since the manned Apollo moon missions, relatively little technology has been deployed to study the moon's topography, gravitational field, and overall composition. There has never been a full-fledged remote sensing mission to the moon. More manned and robotic missions appear necessary to meet President Bush's goal of building a closed life support system on the moon in preparation for the manned exploration of Mars and beyond. In addition to promoting technical innovations, planetary scientists believe a study of the moon's geology, which has remained largely unchanged in the 4 billion years since its creation, will add to the knowledge of our solar system.
SPACE SHUTTLE: FURTHER IMPROVEMENTS NEEDED IN NASA'S MODERNIZATION EFFORTS. [GAO-04-203]
United States General Accounting Office (GAO). February 13, 2004.
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The Columbia tragedy has accentuated the need to modernize the 20-year-old space shuttle, the only U.S. launch system that carries people to and from space. The shuttle will now be needed for another two decades. As it ages, the spacecraft's components will also age, and it may become increasingly unreliable. GAO examined the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) plans to upgrade the shuttle through 2020, how it will identify and select what upgrades are needed, how much the upgrades may cost, and what factors will influence that cost over the system's lifetime.
NASA's estimate of the total cost to upgrade the shuttle-$300 million-$500 million a year, or a total of $5 billion-$8 billion through 2020-is reasonably based but could be significantly higher, as it does not include potential projects such as a crew escape system. It will be difficult for NASA to make an accurate estimate until it firmly establishes the basic requirements (such as life expectancy) for the shuttle and the process for selecting shuttle upgrades. A number of potential changes could significantly increase the cost of shuttle upgrades, including responses to the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB).