The Spy Satellite That Was Never There

One of the problems with the early series of spy satellites was simply this: Every photo frame counts. And many of the photographic frames returned by the early CORONA satellites were of cloud-covered sites. It was accepted as a risk that the weather wouldn't always cooperate. The automatic control worked well enough that pictures were only taken during daylight, but whether the actual meteorological conditions would allow collection of useful intelligence was something that would only be known once the film capsules were recovered and developed.

What they really needed was a way to determine -- in real time -- if a target's lighting and cloud cover would allow a useful picture to be taken. And in the early 1960s, the only way that was known to actually do that was to have a man on the scene to make that call.

This was the genesis of the project that became known to the public as the military's Manned Orbital Laboratory. To the public, it was a military space station for scientific research and experiments.

It also had another designation, one kept a close secret for many years. Its actual payload was called Key Hole 10, or DORIAN. It was in development from 1963 to 1969, when it was cancelled.

Why was it cancelled? Not necessarily because it was big and heavy -- its successor, KH-11, wasn't exactly slim or cheap. It was because computers and communications had become good enough that the "man on the scene" could be a technician in Sunnyvale, California; as opposed to an astronaut in orbit.

Details were few and far between. Even up to a few years ago very little was known about its actual layout. Little by little, that began to change.

First came the leaks. Nothing says locked up forever. Alert enthusiasts pored over publicly-available pictures -- there always were some -- and made some educated guesses based on what was known about its size and weight. The external dimensions were known, for example. And the payload capacity of its Titan IIIC booster were also fairly well-documented. From that, you can figure out what it could and couldn't lift into a Sun-synchronous orbit from Vandenberg AFB. Little by little, more information came out.

And then, NRO recently declassified a whole bunch of material.

This makes for fascinating reading.

For one, even nearly fifty years later, there are labels and even whole pages still redacted. We can speculate why, but the obvious conclusion is that even so many years down the road, those might give away currently-relevant capabilities.

For another, even though they settled fairly early on an entry hatch through the modified Gemini heat shield, and even did a flight test to make sure it would work, they always had a "Plan B" for the astronauts to get back in the return capsule.

Yet another, the original MOL was just the beginning. There were follow-on plans for version capable of being resupplied in-orbit, using uprated Large Diameter Core (LDC) Titan boosters.

In the end, though, the Nixon Administration decided the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze. A TV camera and an encrypted radio link could let a ground-based technician decide what was worth spending a frame of film on, obviating the need for a crew. Soon the film capsules themselves would be rendered obsolete.

But that wasn't the end of the military space station. As the Soviets often did, they decided that anything the Americans spent that much money on was worth trying at least once. The space stations Salyut 2, 3, and 5 were actually Almaz military reconnaissance stations. The two key differences between Almaz and MOL were that the Almaz stations were serviced by Soyuz capsules launched separately, and that the Almaz stations were armed. Not that it made that much difference. Having lost one station to launch failure, and finding that the two flown versions didn't actually do that much, they dropped the idea as well.

In the end, though, the longest-lasting legacy of the MOL program were the men selected to fly it. Seven of them were selected by NASA when the project was cancelled. Six of them became Space Shuttle pilots and commanders, one became a mission specialist. One of them, Richard Truly, became Administrator of NASA between 1989 and 1992. One of the MOL astronauts not selected by NASA, James Abrahamson, would go on to run the Strategic Defense Initiative from 1984 to 1989.

The End of the Beginning

Fifty-six years, six months, and fourteen days.

That sounds like a long time, and in terms of a single human life, it is. But in terms of humanity's lifetime, it's barely a blink of an eye. And I think that's the proper context, because it's the length of an era that ended today. By the time I finish writing this, I expect that we will have heard, one way or another, about whether or not the New Horizons spacecraft survived its encounter with Pluto. That encounter brings to a close the first era of humanity's exploration of the Solar System.

I place the beginning of this era on the first of January 1959, with Luna 1's flyby of the Moon. Luna 1 had been intended to hit the Moon, not fly by. But since these were early days yet, barely more than a year after the very first Earth satellite, rockets and guidance systems weren't all that reliable. Nevertheless, it became the first man-made object to enter heliocentric orbit. It's still out there, somewhere.

Venus, being the closest planet to Earth, was an obvious choice for our first planetary mission. Mariner 1 was intended to be the first, but again, guidance systems were still fairly new and not entirely reliable. The range safety officer had to hit the big red button when the Atlas-Agena booster decided it wanted to go for an unplanned excursion. They'd learned a thing or two, though, and in those early days they tended to plan these missions in pairs. If one of them didn't work, the other one probably would. And so it was that Mariner 2 became the first to fly by Venus on the fourteenth of December in 1962.

Staying with the pattern, the next target became the next farthest planet from Earth: Mars. And the script looks remarkably similar -- Mariner 3 was intended to be the first, but ... No, it wasn't the guidance system this time. This time, the payload shroud failed to open properly, and the spacecraft couldn't get any sunlight on its solar cells. The spacecraft limped along on battery power for a bit, then died, and drifts in eternal Solar orbit. Again, though, this is exactly why they planned these things in pairs. Mariner 4 came off without a hitch, and flew by Mars exactly fifty years ago today, returning the first-ever close-up pictures of another planet.

From 1965 to 1973, there was a bit of a drought of "firsts", partly because Project Apollo soaked up a bunch of time, money, and talent... But also because the next steps were going to be really difficult. And besides which, they had something pretty clever in mind, and had to wait for the right opportunity.

The next pair of probes to launch were Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, bound for Jupiter. "Wait," you may ask, "isn't Mercury closer?" Well, sure. But Mercury is also really, astoundingly fast. And that makes it a fairly tricky target. They had an idea, but they weren't 100% sure it would work. Anyway, the Jupiter launch window opened up first in any case. In December of 1973, Pioneer 10 gave us our first close-up look at the biggest of the planets, its system of moons, and its terrifyingly powerful radiation belts.

But we hadn't given up on Mercury. No, even though we'd have to do some pretty fancy work with a pool cue to get us there. Mariner 10, the last of its series, launched in November of 1973, and pioneered a technique we'd use again and again in the future: the gravity assist. We couldn't build a rocket powerful enough to fling a probe by Mercury -- well, we could, but no one was willing to allocate a Saturn V to the mission -- so we'd hitch a ride by Venus and steal a small bit of its momentum to get us the rest of the way. This gives us a twofer: two planetary visits for the price of one. Four, actually; Mariner 10 flew by Mercury three times. First in March 1974, then again in September 1974, and again in March 1975.

This proved good practice for the main event. Remember Pioneer 11? Pioneer 11 followed up its Jupiter encounter with an encore at Saturn in September of 1979. But even that was merely a warm-up. Another pair of probes were coming through, and in scientific terms they were armed for bear.

Bar none, the single spacecraft that broke more trail than any before or since just about has to be Voyager 2. Both Voyagers flew by both Jupiter and Saturn. And both were launched at a very fortuitous moment ... a moment when the four giant planets line up in such a way that one trajectory can link them all. Voyager 1's Grand Tour was cut short, though, to give it more time to give Saturn's moon Titan a close-up look. It would be left to Voyager 2 to take it all the way home. In addition to Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in January 1986, and Neptune in August 1989. No one has been to either one since.

After this, there was another period of drought ... for much the same reason. The outer planets are hard to get to. It would be almost a quarter-century before we finally got around to finishing out the initial reconnaissance of the Solar System. Dawn has been cruising around the Asteroid Belt for quite some time, first orbiting Vesta before flying over to take up station around Ceres. I won't dwell on that, though, especially since I've so recently written about it.

Which brings us to what we've been watching this last month or so.

Pluto has been, at most, a vague blob. What we didn't know about it was ... well, about everything. Once we'd found its moon Charon we could get some idea about its mass, but we were never entirely sure how big it was. Or precisely what it was made of. Or what it looked like. But even if we never hear from New Horizons again, what it's already found has utterly revolutionized our knowledge of the outskirts of our system. Even if we can't call it a planet anymore, there can be no doubt that these are worlds. Even if we never get another byte of data, what's already been gathered will keep scientists busy for years.

I don't have to write any more about that hypothetical though. Because we have a hard lock on a healthy ship. And over the next sixteen months, at an agonizing 4K bits per second, New Horizons will empty its tape recorders into our data banks.

I can scarcely imagine what it's seen these last twenty-four hours.

Soon, I won't have to.

What Could Have Been

Way back in the earliest days of the Apollo Program, they had no clue how to do the job they'd been handed. When President Kennedy laid down the gauntlet to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, America had a grand total of fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds of spaceflight experience, and didn't even have a man-rated orbital rocket yet.

The most obvious, and in some ways the technically safest approach would be to build a ginormous rocket and lift the whole thing -- lander, earth-return stage, and capsule -- all in one heave. They called that approach Direct Ascent.

In the end, they decided against that approach. As it happened, if you split the earth-return capsule totally apart from the lander, you could save weight on both. That means you don't need such an enormous rocket, and the overall project cost is lower.

And besides which ... the Direct Ascent version of the Apollo 13 scenario is grim. No separate LM spacecraft means no lifeboat, and no lifeboat means three dead astronauts.

But we can still imagine what might have been. Seferino Rengel has used the Orbiter space simulator to visualize what it would have looked like.



Looks great ... but, on the whole, it's just as well we didn't go this route.

The great thing about Orbiter is that you can take a walking tour of designs that never were. You can appreciate the aesthetics, and sometimes come to a realization about why we didn't take that branch. Direct Ascent was just one example. Another example is the Lockheed Star Clipper. The pilot in me looks at that beautiful lifting body and drools ... but the engineer looks at that fuel tank layout and screams "Foam strikes ahoy!"



Another great thing about Orbiter is that we can imagine things that we could be doing, but for whatever reason aren't. Take the Grand Tour, for instance. When I was young, I assumed that this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, that you'd never see such a fortuitous alignment again. Not so fast! For Jupiter and Saturn, at least, that alignment repeats every so often, and you can get one of Uranus or Neptune into the act as well. Such an alignment is available ... oh, right about now. Had we been more alert on the trigger, we could have something like Eris Explorer on deck and ready to go.



The mission plan is breathtaking in its vision, and optimism. The Eris encounter would be in 2051. I'll be 84 years old, making the bold and possibly unwarranted assumption that I last that long. When we go -- and we will, I'm sure of it -- the senior scientists and engineers on the project will simply have to accept that they won't survive to see the project come to fruition. They will have to hand it off to a new generation to bring it all together at the target. They'll have to assume that the organizations will still be viable entities throughout the entire duration of the mission. That the sponsor governments will stay the course, and provide funding for the whole course.

I find such optimism encouraging. When we plant a field that our sons and daughters will harvest, we make an investment in their future. And we can't invest in a future that we don't believe in.

National Engineers Week is February 22nd through the 28th. If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you can read this in English, thank a veteran. But if you can read this on a computer, thank an engineer.

In Memoriam

High Flight

(Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee, No. 412 Squadron RCAF, KIA 12/11/1941)

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

In respectful memory of:

Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White II, Roger Chaffee: Apollo 1, 1/27/1967

Vladimir Komarov: Soyuz 1, 4/23/1967

Major Michael J. Adams, USAF: X-15 Flight #191, 11/15/1967

Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, Viktor Patsayev: Soyuz 11/Salyut 1, 6/30/1971

Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Ron McNair, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis: Challenger, 1/28/1986

Rick Husband, William McCool, Dave Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark, Ilan Ramon: Columbia, 2/1/2003

Michael Alsbury, VSS Enterprise Flight PF04, 10/31/2014

Requiem aeternam donum est, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Two Bad Days, One Good One

Flight test is a harsh, unforgiving business.

Modern computer modeling can sometimes give you an incorrect appreciation of this. You think you have all the angles figured. You think you've accounted for everything. You think you've analyzed the stresses down to the last nut, bolt, rivet and weld. But there's a small problem ... one of the unfortunate implications of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is that every model is necessarily incomplete. That is, the only complete model of a thing is the thing itself.

So ... the only way to find out how the thing behaves is to go try it out for real. To try it in the real world, where there are few (and sometimes only one) way to succeed, and innumerable ways to fail.

That's not always a bad thing, by the way; failure can be instructive. But those lessons sometimes come with a staggeringly high price tag.

On the 28th of October, Orbital Sciences Corporation had an Antares launch vehicle sitting on the pad at Wallops Island in Virginia, set to carry a Cygnus resupply pod to the International Space Station. The Antares rocket's first stage is powered by two AJ-26 rocket engines. The AJ-26 is a repackaging by Aerojet General of the Soviet-built NK-33. Originally, the NK-33 was intended to be the main engine for the N-1 lunar booster, with thirty in the first stage and eight in the second stage.

Someone ... oh, God, someone should have thought this through. Because the N-1 "flew" four times, without much variation in the outcome.



Anyway, recycling old rocket bits is Orbital's stock in trade. When they found a bunch of perfectly good rocket engines sitting in a warehouse, someone thought "Score!" Which is how two ex-Soviet engines ended up in an American rocket. Engines, by the way, that were notorious for trying to eat their own turbopumps. Which is more or less how this happened.



At some point you have to wonder if the actual purpose of the NK-33 was the conversion of fuel and structure into shrapnel and combustion by-products. Needless to say, Orbital is now looking for a new engine for Antares. (Addendum, 27Dec14: I'd have expected them to look for a non-Russian engine, but ... yeah, they're using another Russian engine. On the upside, the RD-181 is built in the same factory as the RD-180. The RD-180 has proven fairly reliable so far. On the downside, this puts Antares at the mercy of whatever the hell Putin decides to pull this month. They may yet regret this choice.)

The good news is that nothing was hurt, apart from OSC's pride. The same can't be said for the test mishap suffered by VSS Enterprise.

On October 31st, VSS Enterprise dropped from its White Knight Two carrier airplane for its fourth powered flight, and its thirty-sixth flight overall. Virgin and Scaled Composites had, by all accounts, been pursuing a long and fairly conservative flight test program, expanding the flight envelope bit by bit with each new powered flight. It should have been a fairly routine outing. The full NTSB report won't be available for some time, but what seems to have happened is that the copilot hit the "feather" switch too soon, while the rocket engine was still burning. The sudden nose-down pitch caused the ship to break up in flight, killing both crew on board. (Addendum, 27Jan15: Rarely have I been happier to have been wrong. Peter Siebold, while seriously injured, was not killed in the crash.)

I'm reserving judgement, here. I don't know enough about how it operates ... but it does seem to me that switch should have a guard of some kind. By way of comparison, on the C-130, the paratrooper "jump" light switch has a metal flange that will not allow you to turn that light on unless you've already opened the jump door. And maybe there's already something like that there, and the crew got confused.

Truth is, we just don't know yet, and probably won't know until the report is released.

There is some good news to go along with the bad, though. In early December, there was a test flight of the new Orion crew capsule. NASA looks like they've shook off whatever was ailing them back in their Ares-1X days. On December 5th, a test version of the Orion spacecraft was launched on a Delta IV Heavy booster on a two-orbit test flight. The launch and re-entry both came off without a hitch.



I had heard Ares-1X described as "a low-fidelity test of a bad design." It's not really fair to say that of Orion. Orion took two passes through the Van Allen radiation belts, and the Delta second stage fired a second time on the last orbit, to accelerate into re-entry. The peak deceleration was 8.5 times the force of gravity. This was a fairly rigorous shakedown cruise. It was a legitimate test that NASA could have failed.



They didn't.

Now, it's probably still true that Dragon V2 will beat a manned Orion into space, because Orion is paced by NASA funding and Dragon is paced by the whims of an eccentric billionaire, but once it does fly, Orion will be a top-notch ship. Of that, I'm very confident ... and a few years ago, I wasn't.

Flight test is a harsh, unforgiving business. Its lessons are paid for in blood. But we do learn, and in the end, the lessons are worth it.

"A 21st Century Spacecraft"

A week or so ago, we finally got a look at the long-anticipated manned version of the Dragon spacecraft. Originally, we were expecting something not too dissimilar to the existing Dragon. We've seen it presented like this:

Designs often change, though; what we saw a few weeks ago looked like this:

The unveil event can also be seen on YouTube, if you haven't seen it yet. I'm not going to talk about it much, but here it is in case you're interested.

A few non-obvious points:

First: This gives us something we haven't had in a long time, if ever: a manned spacecraft with a crew abort option throughout the flight envelope. We had that after a fashion with Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Mercury and Apollo had a launch escape tower, and Gemini had ejection seats. The Shuttle had its own ... special problems. First of all, while the SRBs burned, you had no options. None. As I say sometimes, if something goes wrong before you punch those things off ... well, the Chaplain briefs that Emergency Procedure on Sunday mornings. And the Return to Launch Site abort wasn't much better. In simulated aborts, I've heard they got the Orbiter back about one time in three. They got the crew back somewhat more often, two times in three. Not. Good. But now, we'll get a fully controlled, accurate landing capability, available throughout ascent. This is much better.

Second: I find the relocation of the solar cells interesting. Look at the proposed Falcon Heavy for a minute:

I ran the numbers a while back, and a Falcon Heavy can put a nearly-full Falcon second stage plus Dragon payload in Earth orbit. The second stage has enough juice left for Translunar Injection, Lunar Orbit Insertion, and Transearth Injection. That said, I wasn't sure how the "wings" on the current Dragon would hold up under thrust. Well, that's a moot point with Dragon V2. Now that the cells are mounted flush against the outer wall, it's all good. Clearly, they're looking ahead to using V2 with the heavy-lift version.

Third: Seven seats. And, they look like pretty nice seats. 

Hand-tooled leather available as an upgrade option.

As I've said before, seven seats is what you really want for ISS crew change-out. Six space station crew plus one pilot. More to the point, we will no longer need to rely on the good graces of the Russian government ... good graces that we're having more and more reason to doubt.

Fourth: A proper, modern "glass cockpit" instrument panel, with the most critical functions having manual back-ups. I didn't see a standby instrument cluster in that middle area, but by the time they ship the first unit I wouldn't be surprised to find one there. Standby instruments are important, people...

In any case, now we know what it'll look like. If all goes well, next year we'll find out how it flies.

Ten Years!

Ten years ago, the rover Opportunity landed on the surface of Mars. It was expected to last at least 90 Martian days. At this point, it's lasted about forty times that long, and looks to be good for still more.



In the ten years Opportunity has been on station, we've gathered an immense amount of data, and made several amazing discoveries. Some of them have been confirmations of things long suspected, others took us by surprise. Ten years ago, it was still an open question whether or not water had ever flowed on Mars; now, it's proven fact. Ten years ago, it was highly speculative to say that Mars ever had the necessary conditions for life. Now, while it's not proven for sure yet, the facts are lining up in favor. Between them, Opportunity, Spirit, and Curiosity have been chipping away at the unknowns, revealing a world more complex that we'd imagined, with a richer past than we'd suspected.

In other recent news, we turn our eyes outward to the Asteroid Belt. European scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered something surprising about the dwarf planet Ceres. It seems that it periodically ejects plumes of water. While we'd suspected that Ceres was at least partially made of ice, this provides confirmation. Fortunately for us, the Dawn spacecraft is already on its way, having left Vesta a while back.

You know, this makes me feel sorry for poor New Horizons.

When New Horizons launched, it was a mission to fly by the farthest known planet, Pluto. While enroute, Pluto was demoted from planet to dwarf planet. Which was still OK, since New Horizons would still be the first mission to a dwarf planet, right? Um, no. Turns out that while New Horizons will fly by Pluto in July of 2015, Dawn will reach Ceres in January.

Some people just can't buy a break.

Anyway, it's wonderful to know that we can still build things that last. Voyager, launched way back in 1977, still checks in regularly with Earth. Opportunity still soldiers on after ten years driving around in the Martian dust. And just next year, we'll get our first close-up views of not one, but two dwarf planets.

These are great days, ladies and gentlemen. And we've barely begun.

Fourteen for '14

Once again, we've broken the shrink-wrap on a brand-new calendar. We've seen off a grizzled old Father Time to a well-earned retirement, and welcomed in a smiling Baby New Year -- who, clearly, had no clue what he's in for. But he'll learn soon enough. Probably by, say, noon two days ago. And with that, we'll dive right into fourteen not-so-random thoughts for the New Year.

One: Holy God, Mr. Kim's a bad-un. We knew he was crazy. What we didn't necessarily know until now is that the guy has one hell of a mean streak. We probably should have gotten a clue last year when he had someone executed by mortar -- yes, machine-gunning wasn't enough, they used artillery -- for failing to observe a decent period of mourning for his late father. Then, he had a former girlfriend executed. And late last year, we found out that he had his uncle executed as well, for an alleged putsch-in-progress. Well, now details have leaked about the method. Kim Jong-Un had him thrown in a cage with 120 starving hounds. Along with five of his top aides. It's ... less than encouraging, knowing that someone with these kinds of anger issues even has a nuclear button to push. It's a little more reassuring to know that he's still got a ways to go before they can air-mail a batch of instant sunrise to anyone outside of North Korea.

Two: Nut-cases like Li'l Kim are why theater missile defense is still a damn good idea.

Three: I'm provisionally going to call Number Four from last year proven. The key wording here is, "for a sufficiently generous definition of Earth-like." The closest thing to an Earth-like planet found so far, GJ 1214b, is a lava planet with an atmosphere containing zinc sulfide, postassium chloride ... and water. Still, the fact that we can actually sense its atmospheric composition from 33 light years away -- thirty-three light years! -- is phenomenal. Stupefying, even. On the plus side, Kepler-62e and -62f are about the right size, and about the right distance from their star ... but they're about 1,200 light years away, so it'll be a while before we have enough data to be sure. Again, wording is important: by the terms I laid out last year, that's close enough.

Four: Now, to raise the stakes: We'll find a true Earth-twin, and soon. Right size, right place in its solar system, right atmospheric composition, and yes, oceans of liquid water. Our instruments get better every year. I don't seriously expect it to happen this year ... but I didn't expect Number Four from last year to be proven out so soon, either.

Five: Research at the University of Twente has revealed a new way to wind superconducting cables that will vastly extend their productive life within a fusion reactor. You can read the whole paper here. Solid information about other ongoing projects is still kind of hard to come by. Since the Polywell project is run by the Navy, and the Navy is playing its cards close to the vest, we won't know more until they decide to exercise a contract option to continue the research. Still, it's worth keeping an eye on. Fusion's been a tough nut to crack. But if we can figure it out, our energy problems are just about over.

Six: One researcher, Joe Eck, has produced a superconductor that keeps its superconducting properties up to a temperature of 38C, or about 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Soon, they'll be pushing Tc up to values that will be useful for long-distance high-voltage power lines. Provided, that is, that the material is amenable to use in that capacity. The obvious advantages of superconducting power lines will lead someone to take up that challenge. As I've written before, we lose about two-thirds of the power we generate between the power plant and the end user. Meaning that, if we had superconducting power lines, at a stroke we'd triple the amount of deliverable electrical power. When I first started writing about this, it was a highly speculative prospect. Now, it's just a matter of time.

Seven: The three items above, together, lead me to the conclusion that while concern about our power future is still warranted, panic isn't. Relax, guys. We've got this.

Eight: VSS Enterprise, the successor to SpaceShip One that Burt Rutan is building for Richard Branson, made two powered flights last year, both going supersonic. On the second test flight in September, they tested the "feathering" that they will use for deceleration and descent from flights above 100km altitude. About 370 people have put a deposit down on their ticket, and 80,000 more are on the waiting list. No, I'm not one of them -- the quarter-million-dollar ticket price is too rich for my blood. Besides, the price is bound to come down sooner or later. The reason I'm writing all this is simple: after a few test flights to expand the flight envelope, I expect them to go for broke this year, all the way up to the Big Black. A steady stream of paying customers will follow, and the REAL Space Age will be well underway.

Nine: Meanwhile, Elon Musk looks on and says, "Suborbital? That's cute." DragonRider has passed its initial design reviews with NASA. SpaceX has announced a target price of $140 million, or $20 million per seat if all seven seats are used. So far, SpaceX hasn't announced any space tourist initiatives yet. Their primary customer for DragonRider is NASA, aiming to muscle Soyuz out of the crew rotation business. But the implication is obvious. If Branson proves that a market's there, someone will put two and two together, and pick up a phone to give Mr. Musk a call. It's only a matter of time, now.

Ten: The first astronaut of NASA's Group 20, Michael Hopkins, is aboard the International Space Station, and will be until March 2014. I find it remarkable that it only took two years after completion of training for the first member of Group 20 to get a flight. Then again, it has been four years since selection... Amazingly enough, there was a selection for Group 21, and it completely escaped my notice. The eight astronaut candidates selected in June will join the 47 astronauts currently on the active list. It looks like they're on a four-year rotation now, so we should look for Group 22 to be chosen in June 2017.

Eleven: Total radio silence so far on Johan Bruyneel's arbitration hearing, in the wake of last year's Armstrong scandal. Although, really, it's not fair to call it the Armstrong scandal, since Lance wasn't doing anything anyone else wasn't already doing. He rubbed a lot of people the wrong way by (a) turning all the dials up to 11, and (b) being a total jerk-ass about it. Everybody and his dog was cheating during those years. Mind you, he richly deserved to lose those titles, and no one else really deserved to pick them up. Still, once the decision is released, I expect the other shoe to drop. We know who, what, when, where, and why; we do not know how. How was he able to avoid the testing protocols so long and so well? And how far did the corruption go? We'll probably learn more in the year to come.

Twelve: It'll be interesting to see how well Lolo Jones does in bobsled. Bobsled and luge are my two favorite winter sports. But as you might have noticed, I have a thing for speed, and these are just about the two fastest muscle-powered sports there are.

Thirteen: Another season, another 8-8 finish for the Cowboys. I can haz new GM? Yeah, like Jerry's gonna fire himself. Maybe next year ... but probably not.

Fourteen: But wait! The primaries are coming up for the 2014 Texas Gubernatorial election! So far, the only entrants I've heard of are Wendy Davis on the Democratic side, and Greg Abbott for the Republicans. Presumably, there's going to be some competition, but my gut feeling right now is that it'll be Abbot vs. Davis in November. I'll dig into more detail on that in coming weeks, but this could be a fun one. Also -- looks like Governor Perry's ginning up for another run at the Republican nomination in 2016. No, don't laugh. His performance last time was an aberration. If he manages to show up properly prepped and briefed, he could spring an unpleasant surprise on his competitors.

And that's it for now. Happy New Year, all! And thanks for reading.

And Then There Was One

The second American to orbit the Earth, Scott Carpenter, died yesterday of complications from a recent stroke. And so it becomes that the oldest Mercury astronaut, John Glenn, is the last one left.

Scott Carpenter took what we might call an unusual road to his 1959 appointment. While he was a graduate of the Navy's Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, he came to it as a pilot of P2V patrol planes, not of high-performance jet fighters. But a test pilot is a test pilot, someone figured, and he was in extraordinarily good physical condition.

It's tempting to say that his unusual path played into the difficulties experienced during the Aurora 7 mission, specifically the late retrofire and the resulting 250-mile overshoot of the landing zone, but that's probably unfair to Carpenter. Scratch "probably", I think it is unfair. Granted, the same kinds of control system problems happened on Gordon Cooper's flight, if not in a more severe form, and Cooper landed closer to the primary recovery ship than anyone else did. But, Carpenter's flight plan was jam-packed with experiments and tests, which may well have distracted his attention from other matters. If you look, you will no doubt notice that the last two missions had a vastly reduced experiment load, possibly for this very reason.

Nevertheless, Chris Kraft reportedly said that Carpenter would never fly for him again. And, he never did. Kraft's opinion might have had something to do with it, but a medically-grounding injury suffered in a 1963 motorcycle accident probably had a lot to do with it as well. Surgeries in 1964 and 1967 were unsuccessful, leading to Carpenter's resignation from NASA in 1967.

Not that he was done with exploration. Carpenter participated in several of the Navy's underwater research programs, spending 28 days underwater on SEALAB II, and serving as a director for SEALAB III.

Fair winds and following seas, Commander Carpenter.

How Old Is It?

Space ... it's big. Really big. And it's getting bigger all the time.



Case in point: recently, the American Geophysical Union reported that the Voyager 1 spacecraft had left the Solar System, based upon a press release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Except, that's not quite what the JPL press release said. What JPL said was that Voyager had entered a new region of space, but hasn't quite left the Sun's influence yet. They're still waiting for the final sign, the direction of the magnetic field lines, to tell them that Voyager has crossed over into genuine interstellar space.

It won't be the first time we thought a spacecraft has left the Solar System. Back in 1983, Pioneer 10 crossed the orbit of Neptune, at that time the most distant planet from the Sun. Back then, the common thought was that that was the border. But the more we learn, the farther back the border is pushed.

(Incidentally, Neptune is once again the most distant planet from the Sun, now that Pluto has been demoted to a dwarf planet. But that's neither here nor there ... except that asking whether or not Pluto should be a planet is still a good question for starting a bench-clearing brawl at an astronomical conference.)

Likewise, the Universe itself gets bigger and older every time we look at it.

NASA and the European Space Agency have released the latest results from the Planck Space Telescope, launched in May 2009. Its mission was to expand on the work already done by the earlier COBE and WMAP probes. Basically, what they're trying to do is to capture the Universe's very first light, or what's left of it. As the current theory holds, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe cooled down enough to become transparent. That's as far back as we can see with any of our telescopes. COBE made the very first map of the microwave background radiation. It broadly confirmed the theory, but turned up some interesting results. To wit, the background radiation is lumpy, non-uniform. The patterns, if there were any, might yield some interesting clues as to the nature of the early Universe. So the WMAP mission was launched as a follow-up, with more sensitive instruments. WMAP was stunningly successful, and its map of the background radiation provided proof for the Lambda-CDM model of the early Universe. We still don't know what that "cold, dark matter" is, but the data provided by WMAP matches very closely with what's predicted by the theory. The Planck spacecraft was launched in 2009 to provide a more detailed data set, which was expected to refine our knowledge still further.

So far, Planck is delivering the goods.

The new map of the microwave background radiation is the most detailed yet, able to display structure and features no one imagined could be seen. For one, the data refines our estimate for the age of the Universe. The new estimate is about 100 million years older than we thought it was, or about 13.8 billion years old. Also, the Universe is not expanding quite as fast as we thought it was. There's less dark energy and more dark matter than we'd previously measured. (Not that we know what the Hell either one of those are, mind you.) But that's not even the most baffling bit.

This is.

Against all expectations, the Universe looks fundamentally different in one direction than it does in another. There's an enormous cold spot. If it's a genuine structure, and not an artifact of measurement, it's the biggest thing ever seen by humans. Some irregularities were visible on the WMAP data, causing Roger Penrose to hypothesize that those irregularities could be signs of a previous Universe, "echoes" of the last Big Crunch.

They said Penrose was mad. Maybe they were wrong?

We don't know yet. It's going to take a long time to digest just what all this means. No current theory accounts for the Cold Spot. Which means someone is going to have to cook up a new one that will. That won't happen tomorrow, or next week, or maybe even next year. But it will, and it'll be fascinating to find out what the implications are.

Video Del Fuego, Part LIX

A while back, a friend sent me a link to a really great video recap of the MER-A rover, Spirit, and its journey to Mars. It's exceptionally well-made, and covers all the fiddly bits they had to get right before they could go for a drive.



Now, you may ask why they didn't do it that way for the new rover, Curiosity. There were a number of reasons, most of them dealing with the fact that Curiosity weighs just under a ton. Getting a ton of moving parts to Mars in one piece was ... interesting.



Sadly, Spirit got stuck in 2010, and hasn't been heard from since. But its twin, Opportunity, is still in working order, and still returning useful data. The original two rovers had been planned to last for a 90-day mission. So far, Opportunity has lasted 35 times longer than that. With that track record, it's a good bet that Curiosity should last long enough to exhaust its RTG power supply, giving us pictures and data from the Martian surface for years to come.

UPDATE: This last week, NASA announced that while they haven't found life on Mars yet, they have found that once upon a time, Mars had all the right conditions. Not only that, this proves that all the essential materials are still there.

Far-Out Honeymoon

Earlier today, the second regularly-scheduled Dragon cargo delivery mission blasted off from Florida. Everything went normally, right up to just after the Dragon spacecraft separated from the second stage.



I cocked an eyebrow when I heard "abort passive" on the flight controller loop, because that couldn't have meant anything good. And it didn't: it meant that they were having trouble bringing the maneuvering thrusters on-line. Not permanent trouble, fortunately; they got things ironed out after a few hours. They got the solar panels deployed, and are on course for rendezvous on Sunday, only a day later than originally planned.

Which once again goes to show that this is a damned complicated business. You've got about a bazillion moving parts, just about every one of which has to work, or you're out of luck.

I say this just to introduce the weirdest idea I've heard of in quite some time: a proposal by Dennis Tito to send a married couple on a trip to Mars and back, leaving in 2018. I'm trying to decide if it's utterly insane or not.

It's possible, even if only just barely so. The proposed Falcon Heavy booster could put a Dragon spacecraft, a crew of two, and an inflatable habitat on an Earth-escape trajectory. And the math works out for the trajectory. As long as you get your trans-Mars burn done just right, you'll hit that sweet spot behind Mars that will swing you right back towards Earth. So yeah, the tools are there...

...except that we're still not entirely sure that we can keep two people alive, healthy, and sane for the 501 days it would take to get them back to Earth. It probably bears mentioning that once you've cast your Earth-escape stage away, you're committed for the whole trip. There's no way to abort if something goes wrong. It also bears mentioning that the longest single mission to date has only been 437 days and change. We can be fairly sure that the crew will survive microgravity for that long. We're far less sure about solar flares, or cosmic rays.

But how else are we going to know if people can survive deep space, unless we try? Ultimately, that's what makes this worth trying. Yes, there's a risk that we won't get them back. They're perfectly aware of that. This project will have plenty of volunteers, even so. The chance to be one of the two fastest humans alive, the chance to be the first to Mars, there are many who will consider that a prize worth the risk.

I won't be one of them. First, being cooped up for that long in a Kevlar balloon would drive me nuts. And second, your close-up view of Mars? It's going to be pitch-black. You'll see the sunlit side on your way in, and on your way out, but your flyby will be in total darkness.

Still, it may be worth a try, if they can raise the cash to make it happen.

Ten Years

Ten years ago, I was sleeping late on a Saturday morning, when I was awakened by a loud sound outside. I had no idea what it was. As soon as I turned on a TV, I found out:



I'm an alumnus of the University of Texas at Arlington. Our Master of Science program in Aerospace Engineering boasts two graduates who've flown in space, and I've met both of them. One is Robert Stewart, and the other was Kalpana Chawla.

And I find that I really can't say anything else about it. This one hurt.

Godspeed, Columbia.

Video Del Fuego, Part LVIII

Last time, I mentioned the progress SpaceX had made, not only in the first private spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station, but in their drive to become the first private company to fly astronauts to and from Earth orbit. All that said, the Falcon 9 is still an expendable rocket, meaning that they have to drop the spent stages into the ocean when they're finished with them. That's changing, though; Elon Musk's goal is for the Falcon 9 to become fully reusable.

They're getting a little closer to that goal.

This rig is a prototype for what will eventually become a fully reusable Falcon 9 first stage. After that, they intend to make the second stage reusable as well.

The importance of this is hard to over-estimate. Space travel is expensive only because it's so expensive to reach low Earth orbit. In terms of energy, once you're in Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System. If we can make that leg of the trip fairly economical, there's no limit to what we can do.

Besides, that looks like one hell of a ride.

Weird Worlds

The planet Mercury. At high noon, it's hot enough that lead would run like water. Just about the hottest place in the Solar System, excepting only the Sun itself. And just about the last place you'd go to look for ice cubes.

Except, of course, that you could keep a stash of them there. You'd just need to find the right place.

It's been a year for some really weird astronomy news. This week's highlight was confirmation of something long suspected. Like our own Moon, Mercury has polar craters that never, ever see sunlight. Even though the noontime sun is blisteringly hot, the eternal shadow of the polar craters gets cold, and stays cold. Vacuum is a very good thermal insulator. Radar data seemed to indicate it was a possibility, and that possibility was confirmed this week by the MESSENGER orbiter.

Not that this will ever have much practical use. Mercury is a horrible place to go for an ice run. In terms of energy, it's far easier to fling something into interstellar space than to put it into orbit around Mercury. But it illustrates nicely something Sir Arthur Clarke used to say: not only is the Universe stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.

Going a little farther afield, earlier in the year we had some interesting news from Mars. Last month, the rover Curiosity found some shiny things in the Martian soil. What kind of shiny things, you ask? Well, we don't know yet. Possibly a fairly mundane mineral, possibly something metallic. It will take some time to sift through the results. And even if there is gold in them thar hills, it'll be some time yet before we'll be able to go out and get it.

Mind you, people are working on ways to do just that. Take Elon Musk, for example. While his immediate goals are slightly more modest -- haul cargo to the Space Station, and later on, crew -- his ultimate goal is far more ambitious. What he really wants is to plant a colony on Mars. While it's an ambitious goal, and beyond our current abilities, it's something we'll eventually be able to do. Recent studies have revealed that Mars' atmosphere, while thin, is dense enough to provide enough protection from radiation that we could live on the surface. The radiation environment was really the last unknown. Everything else that a settlement needs is there: water, oxygen, carbon, metals. It'll be hard at first, but it's an important insurance policy for the species.

Going farther afield still, we can start looking at planets around other stars. It's hard to believe now, but only twenty years ago, we were still debating whether or not they were even possible. One of the projects I considered working on for my dissertation, way back when, was a numerical study on the theoretical stability of orbits in a binary star system. I had a gut feeling that if a planet were close enough to one or the other of the stars, the orbit would be stable enough that the companion star wouldn't perturb it and fling it off into deep space. As we've discovered time and again over the last twenty years, my hunch was right. And just last month, it was announced that we discovered a planet circling one of our nearest stellar neighbors, Alpha Centauri B. The planet, called Alpha Centauri Bb, is about our size. The similarities end there. Its year is just over three days long. It's 25 times closer to Alpha Centauri B than we are to our own Sun. While Earth pokes along at 30 kilometers per second, this planet screams across the sky almost five times faster. And, as you could imagine, it's hot. Noontime on Mercury is hot enough to melt lead. Noontime there is hot enough to melt steel. Needless to say, building a lander would be ... a challenge.

But a flyby would be relatively easy. Relatively, I say; it'd still be damn hard. We've given some thought to how to get the job done, though. The first serious proposal for an interstellar probe was the Daedalus project, a design study run by (who else?) the British Interplanetary Society. The idea is being updated and refined under Project Icarus, named for the son of Daedalus, and run by the BIS and the Tau Zero Foundation. They began the design study in 2009, and expect to be finished with that phase in 2014. Not that they expect to have a currently-realizable design by then. We've got a long way to go before we have that capability. But they expect to be able to figure out what we need to do to get there from here.

It's a marvelous time to be alive. I know people who'd rather live in the past. Not me. This is my time: here, at the beginning, with untold wonders spread out before us, waiting to be uncovered. There's no place I'd rather be.

Video Del Fuego, Part LVI

Now that the election's over, I have more time for the finer things in life. One of them is Orbiter. It's a freeware spaceflight simulator that I've talked about from time to time.

You can do just about anything with it. Want to re-live highlights from spaceflight history? Want to try out one of the designs that almost made it? Or do you want to try something that might be just beyond the horizon? It's your choice. Plus, Orbiter can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. Some scenarios, you can just sit back and enjoy the ride. None of those involve the XR-2. The Ravenstar is definitely a pilot's airplane. I've flown it to orbit, but I've never managed to land the SOB in one piece.

But here's a guy who has:



And, as a bonus, an Apollo 11 re-do:



If you like flight sims, and you don't mind a bit of a learning curve, Orbiter is well worth a look.

Chasing the Dragon, Revisited

Mark your calendars, ladies and gentlemen. October 7th, at about 7PM EDT, the first of 12 regular cargo deliveries to the International Space Station will get underway. That is, if everything goes according to plan. Those of you who were here last time may remember that the launch window is pretty damned short. (I don't think I'll live-blog this one.) Still ... even with all of our problems, some pretty great things are happening. Despair is a sin. Here's how it finally went down last time:



And again, some music while we wait:



By the way, here's another date to mark down on your calendars: October 16th. Our man Donald has a new album coming out called Sunken Condos. He's been kind enough to put a preview out there for us:



This is good stuff, it really is, but I'd kind of like to see him get together with Mr. Becker again. It's been too long since Everything Must Go.

Watch That First Step...

If plummeting were an Olympic sport, Felix  Baumgartner would be a leading contender for a gold medal. On July 25th, he made the second test jump for the Red Bull Stratos project. He rode a balloon up to 96,640 feet, and jumped. Several minutes later, he popped his chute and floated down to a safe landing. Next up: the free-fall record.

I couldn't find an embeddable video, but here is the clip they posted on their own site. This is what they're aiming for, though:



But, I have to give an honorable mention to a man whose story I read about earlier this week. Cliff Judkins was a U.S. Marine Corps pilot, ferrying an F-8 Crusader fighter across the Pacific. What should have been a routine tanker rendezvous went horribly wrong. In short order, he experienced just about every kind of mishap you can have in an airplane. First, his engine failed. Then, it caught fire. If that weren't bad enough, his primary ejection handle failed, as did the backup. The manual canopy jettison worked, though. But his parachute didn't. Amazingly enough, he lived to tell the tale. Yes, you heard that right, he fell FIFTEEN THOUSAND FEET with NO PARACHUTE, and ... well, you don't exactly walk away from that, but after six months he was flying again.

Go here to read it. It's an amazing story.

The Real Space Age

Forty-three years ago today, we saw one of those moments that are true watersheds in history. Before July 20, 1969, humanity had only known one world; afterwards, it would forever know two. That said, for all its accomplishments, Project Apollo was always going to be a dead end. It was never going to lead to a long-term human presence on the Moon. There were a number of good reasons to go. One was the fact that no one had ever been, another was the fact that we didn't want the Soviets to get there first. But there just weren't very many good reasons in the early 1970s to stay.

One day, perhaps one day soon, that will change. The problem was always that there wasn't a clear way for anyone to make a profit out of it. Or if there was, the operating costs were so absurdly high that it just wasn't feasible. That's changing, slowly but inexorably. I've been saying for a while now that the center of gravity of the American space effort was shifting towards private industry. The successful mission in late May was an important signpost on that path. There will be more to come.



A while back, I made the statement that the real Space Age had just begun. Now, I'd like to take a few minutes to expand on why I think that's the case. SpaceX and companies like it are going to bend the cost curve to the point that proposals that were once ludicrously ambitious will become feasible. By way of example, let's look at two different proposals, one from about twenty years ago, and another more recent.

It's been speculated for a long time that ice could be hiding out in craters near the Moon's poles that never see sunlight. Vacuum is a very good insulator, and polar craters that are never sunlit can be very cold indeed. Water vapor that finds its way there somehow or other will freeze out, and never escape. The speculation was fanned to high heat by results from the Clementine probe in 1994, when a radar experiment returned reflections from polar craters that were consistent with ice sheets. Within the space enthusiast community, this solved one of the big problems attending lunar habitation: water. Hauling enough water up from Earth to sustain a settlement is hideously expensive. If there's a significant amount of water already up there, it simplifies things tremendously. But the problem remained, how do you finance the voyage to begin with?

Someone hit on the idea of financing it as an entertainment venture, at least initially. Sell the film rights. There'd be plenty of gripping, exciting footage from the mission. Then, once you're there, you can start up a mining operation. This was the beginnings of the Artemis Project, and of the Lunar Resources Company. I was never directly involved, as I was up to my earlobes in grad school at the time, but I kibbitzed on the discussion boards they had on GEnie. One suggestion was fairly well-received: I said that they should time the first mission to coincide with a lunar eclipse. I still think that's worth doing. It's a perspective no one's ever seen before. And, I think it'd be awesome to be able to see every sunset and every sunrise on Earth, all in once glance. They got an impressive amount of planning and preliminary design work done. That's about as far as they got.

What killed them, in the end, was transportation costs. With high-lift launches costing upwards of a quarter-billion dollars, there was no way on (or off) Earth that they were going to be able to drum up that kind of money. This is the same wall that every effort has run up against to date. Every time you have a plan that requires the fabrication of a lot of equipment down here that needs to be put up there, you run up against the fact that the cost of moving it from here to there puts the cost out of reach.

And that's the thing that's changing. New entrants into the launch market are going to bend the cost curve down to the point where ambitious projects become practical.

Earlier this year, a company calling itself Planetary Resources unveiled their plan to mine nearby asteroids for both metals and for water. They're not going to jump right into it, of course. First, they have to be able to spot likely candidates for exploration. Then, they have to get a close-up look. Finally, they have to develop an automated mining and processing unit. Accordingly, their first product is a small space-based telescope. It can be used to look both ways, down towards Earth and up towards space. That's their first revenue stream: people will pay to look at stuff. Universities will pay for telescope time for a variety of reasons. Not just astronomy departments, you can do a surprising amount of archaeology work from a high vantage point. But what Planetary Resources actually intends to use the Arkyd-100 for is to find and prospect likely mining targets. Then, the next step is to fit a small engine to such a telescope, and maneuver it towards such a target for a more detailed look. The last step is obvious: land, and begin digging up goodies. Metal for sale Earthside, and water for fuel.

The reason that they haven't been laughed out of the room yet is that the Arkyd-100 is small enough that it's going to be damn cheap to put one into orbit. They're piggybacking on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic project for their initial launches, from what I hear, and even if they weren't the Arkyd-100 doesn't weigh a whole lot. Maybe 100 kilograms. They can ride along on just about any satellite launch, for a relatively tiny fee. Eventually, they'll have to be the primary customer, because the mining plant isn't going to be especially small. But by then they'll have a nice bankroll to work with. And they'll have a choice of powerful and relatively inexpensive rockets to choose from.

If successful, they'll attract investors to the market looking for other angles to exploit. That's where things will get really interesting. Because many of our problems are problems of scarcity: not enough materials, not enough energy. There's plenty of both out there, once we learn how to get at it.

Forty years ago, we crawled out of our cradle. Now, we're learning to walk. Soon, we'll learn to run. I wonder what kind of adults we'll be, when we've grown up?

Catching a Dragon

As promised last time, here's the update for events since last Friday's launch attempt.

The problem with the center engine in the Falcon 9 first stage cluster was fairly simple: a faulty check valve that needed to be replaced. But, the check valve couldn't be replaced until the vehicle had been made fully safe, which meant offloading all of the fuel and oxidizer from both the first and second stages. That's a lesson we learned fairly early on in the Space Age. On October 24, 1960, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin ordered his technicians to fiddle around with a fully-fueled ICBM prototype. It was the last order he ever gave.



So, we just don't do that anymore. It pushed the launch back from Friday to Tuesday. But that's way better than having the launch pushed back to "whenever we finish rebuilding the launch pad, and get a whole bunch of new technicians trained."

In any case, Tuesday morning came around. The same sequence of events happened: they loaded fuel and LOX, and performed all of the countdown checks to verify that the ship was ready to fly. It came down to the final count, when they lit off all nine engines. As always they held the missile down to the pad until all nine engines reported ready for flight. And this time, they were.

(Embedded videos courtesy of SpaceX, originals and more available here.)

The nice thing about autonomous inertially-guided vehicles is that they don't need to see where they're going. So it doesn't matter what time of the day or night you fly. The down side to that is, you don't see much of anything interesting from the external camera views. The Falcon 9 vehicle performed flawlessly, in pre-dawn darkness, carrying the Dragon spacecraft to precisely the right orbit for its rendezvous with the International Space Station on Flight Day 4. Once the Dragon was in orbit, and had extended its solar panels, one big hurdle had been cleared.

Now, the waiting. As I've said earlier, space travel is a lot like baseball in that the participants spend most of their time standing around waiting for something interesting to happen. In this case, the waiting was necessary in order to synchronize the orbits of the Dragon with the Space Station. Now, if fuel is no constraint, and you don't care how much of it you use, the simple way to synchronize orbits is to figure out the angular distance in-plane between you and your target, figure out how much time it would take for the target to get back around to where you are, and then kick yourself up into an orbit that chews up exactly that much extra time. The problem is, no one ever has that much fuel to spare. So what we do is to put ourselves into a slightly lower orbit, which eventually puts us into a position to kick ourselves up into proximity with our target. It's a question of fuel or time, and time is something you don't have to pay extra Delta-V for.

This brings us to Thursday, the first "fly-under", where the Space Station crew tested their ability to issue commands to the Dragon spacecraft. These tests went very well, and the two spacecraft spent the next day or so in proximity operations. Dragon was in what we call an "osulating" orbit relative to the Space Station: relative to the Space Station, it looked like it was moving in an ellipse, sometimes going out in front, sometimes above, sometimes behind, and sometimes below. This demonstrated its ability to maneuver safely, and to stay well away when commanded.

Then, on Friday, the really tricky part: autonomous approach. I had the day off, so I tuned in to the CNN live feed online to watch this part. It was gripping TV in the same sense that a golf tournament is gripping TV: it wasn't. But seeing people do something completely new in real time is instructive, because there were a few glitches with the approach. It turns out that the LIDAR gear that Dragon uses to automatically find the right docking port was being confused by spurious reflections off of the Japanese module. They had to back off until they figured out how to deal with this problem. The solution they settled on was to reduce the LIDAR's field of view, so that it wouldn't be able to "see" the offending module, and could focus on the bits it needed to see. That seemed to fix things, and Dragon was able to move from its 70-meter hold position to a 30-meter hold position. At that point, Dragon was exactly where it needed to be, relative to the berthing port and robot arm. So, they issued the final command, which took Dragon to a 10-meter hold position. This put it in position for Astronaut Don Pettit to reach out with the robot arm, and grab a Dragon by the tail, so to speak.

And there was much rejoicing.

On Saturday morning, they opened the hatch, and started to unload the cargo. Over the next week, they filled up the Dragon with trash, experiments, and return equipment to be sent back to Earth. Then, on Thursday, the Dragon spacecraft undocked from the Space Station. Shortly after that, it fired its thrusters to re-enter the atmosphere, and then splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. This video was captured from the chase plane, a U.S. Navy P-3 Orion. At the beginning, you can see the Dragon falling beneath its two drogue parachutes. The drogues don't do a whole lot to slow the ship down, but they do stabilize it as it descends. A few minutes later, the main chutes deploy, slowing the vehicle for splashdown.

Two up, two down. Not bad for the new guys on the block.

I'll go into more detail next time, but it's hard to over-state the importance of what's just happened. Suffice it to say that the real Space Age has just begun.