Manned spaceflight
Like children of the 1960's I believed that by the time I was an adult, spaceflight would be routine. And that by the time I hit retirement, the cost of going into space would be low enough that non-millionaires would be able to afford it. I had solid hopes of getting into the Astronaut corps once I got out of college.
The Astronaut idea came to a halt when I developed certain disqualifying medical conditions, I could still be a payload-specialist but only just. Then it turned out that the degree that I got in college was not a hard science degree like I'd need, but the far less useful (from a scientific point of view) computer science degree. So, I wasn't going into space in the prime of my years.
Unfortunately, the rest of the aerospace industry hasn't kept up with desires. The Ansari X-Prize is doing good work in creating civilian space technologies, but those are still a decade or two away from real-world use, and multiple decades from profitability. NASA is facing continual budget cuts, as big-science is seen as big-pork in an era of record setting deficits.
The space shuttle is now limited to flights only to the international Space Station. A shuttle replacement is on the drawing board, but research into a replacement system was shelved a few years ago due to lack of funding. Right now it looks likely that there will be a few years between the end of the Shuttle program and the beginning of the replacement program, years that the United States will have no native manned presence in space. Hopefully by that point either the ISS will be built up enough to be able to withstand that, or relations with Russia will be improved enough that we can work with them to facilitate ISS resupply.
What can help is a redefinition of 'spaceflight'. The Ansari X-Prize defines the edge of space as 100km altitude (about 62 miles, or 327,000ft). What the X-Prize contenders have to do is send three people (or weight equivalent) above that line twice within two weeks. This is seen as spaceflight, for you are above the atmosphere at that height.
Suborbital flights such as that could be a real boon to the transportation industry. The 1980's saw lots of plans for a "hypersonic transport system", the Concord being an example of a "supersonic transport system". None of them came to fruition. A suborbital ballistic flight such as those being performed by X-Prize contenders could lay the groundwork for getting to Tokyo from New York in five hours or less. So long as the price was right, it could compete against conventional airlines that fly under 45,000ft.
Alternately, such technologies could be quite useful for the satellite industry. Most of a booster's fuel is to get it to the edge of space. If the portion of the booster that gets it that high can be made to be reusable, it greatly reduces the cost of getting a kilogram into orbit. The throw-away portion is reduced to the bit that gets it from the edge of space to the correct orbit, a much less Herculean task. Cheaper cost-to-orbit numbers are a prime goal for the entire space industry as it greatly reduces the barrier to development.
On the other hand, humans in orbit performing science is an area that is still threatened. There are many arguments against having humans on-site for orbiting laboratories, as the state of robotics has improved to the point that a lot can be done remotely. Secondly, humans-in-space require very heavy and extensive life-support systems that can potentially dwarf the science-payload of whatever. One of the chief criticisms of the ISS is the fact that not enough science can be performed around station-keeping activities (something that is even more true now that only two crewmembers can be on board due to Soyuz constraints). Technologies developing out of X-Prize contenders won't get to development in time to help the ISS, so the Government will have to foot the bill to support the thing. And I have a sneaking suspicion that such will not be done, and the ISS will be deorbited once the Shuttle program is concluded.
By the time I'm in The Home the world might finally be getting a start on building a Space Elevator. This is grand engineering on a nearly unimaginable scale. What a space elevator is, is a station in geosynchronous orbit tethered to a ground station. The tether is then used to ship up material. Due to the nature of it, it could potentially provide a very cheap cost-to-orbit. The downsides of the system are several, including the requirement that it be on the equator, the fact that the tether itself would be on the order of 257,000 miles long, and failure of the tether could be called "really a lot very bad." One of the not frequently discussed up-sides is that a tether that long that happens to be at all conductive could pull energy out of Earth's magnetosphere in enough quantity to run itself and possibly have enough left over to power any local electrical grids.
But that isn't going to happen until materials science manages to create a cable strong enough to withstand the stresses, and some government or coalition of governments comes up with the $300bn it'd take to build the system. But a guy can dream. Perhaps I'll see something like that before I can't understand what I'm looking at.
The Astronaut idea came to a halt when I developed certain disqualifying medical conditions, I could still be a payload-specialist but only just. Then it turned out that the degree that I got in college was not a hard science degree like I'd need, but the far less useful (from a scientific point of view) computer science degree. So, I wasn't going into space in the prime of my years.
Unfortunately, the rest of the aerospace industry hasn't kept up with desires. The Ansari X-Prize is doing good work in creating civilian space technologies, but those are still a decade or two away from real-world use, and multiple decades from profitability. NASA is facing continual budget cuts, as big-science is seen as big-pork in an era of record setting deficits.
The space shuttle is now limited to flights only to the international Space Station. A shuttle replacement is on the drawing board, but research into a replacement system was shelved a few years ago due to lack of funding. Right now it looks likely that there will be a few years between the end of the Shuttle program and the beginning of the replacement program, years that the United States will have no native manned presence in space. Hopefully by that point either the ISS will be built up enough to be able to withstand that, or relations with Russia will be improved enough that we can work with them to facilitate ISS resupply.
What can help is a redefinition of 'spaceflight'. The Ansari X-Prize defines the edge of space as 100km altitude (about 62 miles, or 327,000ft). What the X-Prize contenders have to do is send three people (or weight equivalent) above that line twice within two weeks. This is seen as spaceflight, for you are above the atmosphere at that height.
Suborbital flights such as that could be a real boon to the transportation industry. The 1980's saw lots of plans for a "hypersonic transport system", the Concord being an example of a "supersonic transport system". None of them came to fruition. A suborbital ballistic flight such as those being performed by X-Prize contenders could lay the groundwork for getting to Tokyo from New York in five hours or less. So long as the price was right, it could compete against conventional airlines that fly under 45,000ft.
Alternately, such technologies could be quite useful for the satellite industry. Most of a booster's fuel is to get it to the edge of space. If the portion of the booster that gets it that high can be made to be reusable, it greatly reduces the cost of getting a kilogram into orbit. The throw-away portion is reduced to the bit that gets it from the edge of space to the correct orbit, a much less Herculean task. Cheaper cost-to-orbit numbers are a prime goal for the entire space industry as it greatly reduces the barrier to development.
On the other hand, humans in orbit performing science is an area that is still threatened. There are many arguments against having humans on-site for orbiting laboratories, as the state of robotics has improved to the point that a lot can be done remotely. Secondly, humans-in-space require very heavy and extensive life-support systems that can potentially dwarf the science-payload of whatever. One of the chief criticisms of the ISS is the fact that not enough science can be performed around station-keeping activities (something that is even more true now that only two crewmembers can be on board due to Soyuz constraints). Technologies developing out of X-Prize contenders won't get to development in time to help the ISS, so the Government will have to foot the bill to support the thing. And I have a sneaking suspicion that such will not be done, and the ISS will be deorbited once the Shuttle program is concluded.
By the time I'm in The Home the world might finally be getting a start on building a Space Elevator. This is grand engineering on a nearly unimaginable scale. What a space elevator is, is a station in geosynchronous orbit tethered to a ground station. The tether is then used to ship up material. Due to the nature of it, it could potentially provide a very cheap cost-to-orbit. The downsides of the system are several, including the requirement that it be on the equator, the fact that the tether itself would be on the order of 257,000 miles long, and failure of the tether could be called "really a lot very bad." One of the not frequently discussed up-sides is that a tether that long that happens to be at all conductive could pull energy out of Earth's magnetosphere in enough quantity to run itself and possibly have enough left over to power any local electrical grids.
But that isn't going to happen until materials science manages to create a cable strong enough to withstand the stresses, and some government or coalition of governments comes up with the $300bn it'd take to build the system. But a guy can dream. Perhaps I'll see something like that before I can't understand what I'm looking at.
posted by Corwin at 10:09 AM
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