I recently saw the hour-long BBC documentary called "Moon for Sale" first broadcast in 2007. The filmmakers interview both Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and Ed Mitchell (Apollo 14), who take fairly opposite positions on the proposed future exploitation of Helium-3 resources in lunar regolith in order to fuel advanced fusion reactors (leapfrogging relatively inefficient and tricky deuterium-tritium fusion technology to [second generation] He3-deuterium or even [third generation] He3-He3 fusion).  It's an excellent and entertaining introduction to a very interesting subject that I will be writing about in greater detail soon.

But a short teaser:

Gerald Kulcinski (also in the BBC film) is Director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the leading He-3 fusion researcher. He has said elsewhere that his biggest problem in dealing with both NASA and the U.S. Dept. of Energy in getting support for funding to build a larger prototype reactor is that NASA says, essentially, "Sure, we can get you He-3 from the moon. Very do-able. But you'll never get fusion technology to work." And DOE says, essentially, "Developing He-3 to He-3 fusion technology is very do-able, but you'll never be able to get He-3."

Mr. Right Hand, I'd like to introduce you to your future best friend, Mr. Left Hand.

In the meantime, check out the video.

Wherefore art thou?

No postings lately because I've been trying to figure out A. how to use both WordPress and TypePad, and B. which I like better. For all the hoo-haw about WordPress, I think TypePad seems easier, but I may change my mind.

Anyway... stuff is a-brewin'.... In the meantime, amuse yourself with a map of my world travels. (Or not.)

Cover that lamp post!

A bit off topic, but this seems like a worthy little project to raise public awareness of the impact of light pollution. 

I remember growing up in Dallas in the early 1970s (yes, I'm dating myself) and having no trouble seeing the rings of Saturn on a medium-sized telescope. When I visit there now, no way you could have the same clarity of seeing. And the problem is getting worse. According to the International Dark Sky Association, outdoor lighting is increasing by 4% a year in the U.S. - faster than the rate of population growth. This unfortunate side effect of urbanization is wholly unnecessary (there are better ways to install outdoor lighting that minimize upward leakage) and wasteful (8% of U.S. energy use is for outdoor lighting, most of which doesn't go where it's intended).

Arthur C. Clarke believed America was misallocating its human capital by creating too many bankers and lawyers.

Arthur C. Clarke apparently believed America's smartest people were wasting their time on banking, law, and insurance instead of the space program:

...I came across a searing indictment by Clarke on the American capitalist system. After observing that the structure of American society may be unfitted for the effort that the conquest of space demands he continued, "No nation can afford to divert its ablest men into essentially non-creative and occasionally parasitic occupations such as law, insurance and banking". He also referred to a photograph in Life Magazine showing 7,000 engineers massed behind a new model car they had produced as ‘a horrifying social document’. He was appalled by the squandering of technical manpower it represented.  

http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2011/03/arthur-c-clarke-science-fiction-and.html

Especially in light of the post-mortems of the 2008 global financial meltdown, when it became apparent that the best and the brightest mathmaticians out of Harvard et al. were being hired by Wall Street to engineer extremely complicated algorithms for derivatives trading, it's kind of hard to argue with his point. In the early 1980s there was a strategic shift in America away from manufacturing and towards the so-called FIRE (financial, insurance, and real estate) sector. More complicated than we need to go in here, but this obviously had profound consequences (both good and bad). There is certainly a very compelling case to be made that this strategic shift needs to be corrected for the general health of the American economy, and not just because it would benefit U.S. human spaceflight. 

There was a very interesting article in Harper's Magazine a couple of years ago on this (FIRE) subject, but the gist is that we have misallocated our human capital towards relatively non-productive (but get-rich-quick) sectors like finance, in order to achieve what was putatively thought to be a more efficient allocation of resources in a global economy. In other words, this was the first stage of Globalization: we do the white collar stuff and let the Less Developed Countries manufacture stuff. If we want to change strategic direction, we should do it for other reasons and not just because we want to build cool spaceships that go to Jupiter.


Hat tip: Amazing News http://newtstuff.blogspot.com/2011/03/arthur-c-clarke-believed-americas.html

Well, that's one strategy...

Despite the general ideological proclivity under Soviet communism to undermine individual initiative, compared with the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs, the Soviet approach to safe and effective systems engineering for their early spacecraft involved the creation of (let's just say) very high incentives for individual engineers:

"[The Voskhod-1] was so cramped that the cosmonauts could not wear spacesuits. The story goes that one of the engineers warned the chief designer, Sergei Korolev, that the slightest leak of air would kill those on board. Korolev's solution was to appoint the engineer as one of the cosmonauts, figuring that this would help motivate him to make the capsule as safe as possible. All three cosmonauts survived the mission - although others were not so lucky."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9420752.stm

Budget woes for NASA interplanetary missions

Penny wise and pound foolish. I'm tempted to make a political comment about the current budget negotiations, but I will refrain. For now.

"We do not have enough money in the planetary program, by any stretch of the imagination, to fund a full-up Europa mission, a full-up Mars program, a full-up New Frontiers program, a full-up Discovery program and a full lunar program," Ed Weiler, the chief of NASA's science directorate told reporters.


Nevertheless, NASA officials say they will restructure the planetary program to match a projected budget reduction, even if the cuts aren't as deep as the White House proposed in its notional numbers. "We can't afford to keep everything," said Jim Green, director of NASA's planetary science division."

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1103/17flagship/

Food science challenges for NASA missions to Mars

NASA study concludes - as we kind of knew - that current food systems are inadequate for long-duration spaceflights without compromising crew members' health and performance. There was a good episode of Nova Science Now on this subject a month or two ago. Seems that blueberries are a magic food in helping to prevent DNA/cell damage from cosmic radiation.

But still:

"If we go to Mars, we need a five year shelf life of food and that means we need to start looking at new technologies to start preserving the food," said Michele Perchonok, Advanced Food Technology Manager at NASA and one of the study authors.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110305133527.htm

For long-duration missions like Mars, I don't see how there's any way around the need to grow some of the food in the spacecraft. And for that, we're going to need a much bigger capsule than Orion.


Calling Bigelow...

This is a test.

Yep. Starting a new blog. I'll be using either WordPress or Movable Type (still deciding) for the real deal. This is just a placeholder to figure out how to set up a basic layout, decide what features it will have, etc. So this is all very Beta. Pre-beta even. Not ready for the soft opening.

But for the record: This blog will focus on new emerging national space programs - particularly China - as well as the old warhorses U.S. and Russia, NewSpace/commercial space (i.e. emerging non-state space actors), international space cooperation, the future of manned and unmanned space exploration and observation, space policy, and the hows and whys of space technology as it relates to environmental problems here on Earth. And a little bit on the Apollo program. Just because.


What's going to be so special about a new space blog, and why should you check back later? I've got decades of experience working in the field of science and conservation, with a regional speciality in the Asia-Pacific region, so I'm coming at this from a somewhat unique angle. I'm Google-able if the suspense is starting to kill you.


So bear with me as I get it set up. I'll have a dedicated URL, logo, semi-coherent structure, all sorts of other bells and whistles and fun little fandangos, so watch this space.


Aloha.

Preventing the Andromeda Strain on Mars

Whatever happened to the clean rooms I remember seeing as a kid when they were preparing Voyager for flight back in the Seventies? Or am I having a Philip K. Dick-ian implanted memory of this?

Protecting Earth and space from people (Boing Boing)