tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74697623642560540602024-03-19T01:47:23.076-07:00JacksMarsSince I was a young child Mars held a special fascination for me. It was so close and yet so faraway. I have never doubted that it once had advanced life and still has remnants of that life now. I am a dedicated member of the Mars Society,Norcal Mars Society National Space Society, Planetary Society, And the SETI Institute. I am a supporter of Explore Mars, Inc. I'm a great admirer of Elon Musk and SpaceX. I have a strong feeling that Space X will send a human to Mars first.Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.comBlogger5120125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-71408356199381544162024-03-19T01:46:00.000-07:002024-03-19T01:46:24.081-07:00Accelerating Starship
Starship launch
Starship/Super Heavy lifts off March 14 from SpaceX’s Starship site in South Texas. (credit: SpaceX)
Accelerating Starship
by Jeff Foust
Monday, March 18, 2024
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When Starship lifted off Thursday morning from SpaceX’s launch site at Boca Chica, Texas, the one question on most people’s minds was this: how far would it get this time? Its first flight, nearly 11 months earlier, ended four minutes after liftoff when the tumbling Starship/Super Heavy stack was detonated by a flight termination system; the liftoff had, in the process, made a mess of the pad because of the lack of a water deluge system (see “Grading on a suborbital curve”, The Space Review, April 24, 2023).
“Really the point of today’s test is to try to get as much data as we can so we can inform the next iteration of the design of Starship, work those things into flight test number four, and new objectives there that will eventually get us that glorious rapid reusable future that we so badly want,” said Bharadvaj.
The second flight, in November, made it through staging, only to suffer separate failures of the Super Heavy booster on its descent back to the Gulf of Mexico and the Starship on the final phases of its ascent (see “Starship flies again”, The Space Review, November 20, 2023). SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in January that the Starship upper stage caught fire when venting excess liquid oxygen late in the burn. “If it had a payload,” he said at a company event at Boca Chica, “it would have made it to orbit because the reason that it actually didn’t quite make it to orbit was we vented the liquid oxygen, and the liquid oxygen ultimately led to a fire and an explosion.”
SpaceX later explained that it carried excess liquid oxygen “to gather data representative of future payload deploy missions and needed to be disposed of prior to reentry to meet required propellant mass targets at splashdown.” In that same statement, SpaceX said the Super Heavy booster had a blocked liquid oxygen line to its Raptor engines during its boostback maneuver “that eventually resulted in one engine failing in a way that resulted in loss of the vehicle.”
Those issues, certainly, would be addressed for the third flight, alternatively called Integrated Flight Test (IFT) 3, Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 3, or simply Flight 3. The question was how much further the flight would get.
“We have some really ambitious goals for today’s test, but really the point of today’s test is to try to get as much data as we can so we can inform the next iteration of the design of Starship, work those things into flight test number four, and new objectives there that will eventually get us that glorious rapid reusable future that we so badly want,” said Siva Bharadvaj, one of the host of SpaceX’s webcast of the launch, just a few minutes before launch.
The rocket got off the ground without incident: a clean countdown, with the only delay caused by ships (shrimpers, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell later said) in restricted waters offshore. Two minutes and 45 seconds after liftoff, the vehicle successfully completed “hot staging,” where the Starship upper stage ignited its engines while still attached to Super Heavy, a move designed to increase performance by avoiding any gap in thrust.
As Super Heavy descended towards the Gulf of Mexico, Starship continued its ascent. Eight and a half minutes after liftoff, Starship shut down its six Raptor engines, having reached a speed of neatly 26,500 kilometers per hour. “Nominal orbit insertion,” launch controllers said.
Strictly speaking, Starship was not in orbit. The vehicle was flying a suborbital trajectory, but one that was different from that planned for the first two flights, which would have had Starship splash down near Hawaii 90 minutes after liftoff. This flight was going on a higher trajectory that would bring it down over a stretch of the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes after liftoff. The change in trajectory, the company said, would allow it to carry out additional tests, in particular a brief relight of Starship’s engines, without jeopardizing public safety.
“Congrats to SpaceX on a successful test flight! Starship has soared into the heavens,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson.
Other tests included opening the vehicle’s slot-shaped payload bay doors, dubbed “Pez” doors like the candy because they are designed for the ejection of Starlink satellites, one or two at a time. Another test planed for the in-space phase of the flight was a propellant transfer demonstration, where liquid oxygen would be transferred from one tank inside Starship into another, a step towards vehicle-to-vehicle propellant transfer needed for Starship to go to the Moon and beyond.
During this phase of the flight, SpaceX provided live video of Starship coasting above the atmosphere, slowly rolling, set to, of all things, elevator music. All seemed to be going well until the planned Raptor engine relight, which did not take place a scheduled about 40 minutes after liftoff. The engine burn was not needed to return to Earth, the company emphasized, and the company later said the engine burn was called off “due to vehicle roll rates during coast.”
That roll became a bigger concern as the vehicle began reentry about five minutes later. Some tiles could be seen coming off the vehicle as it approached the upper atmosphere at nearly 27,000 kilometers per hour. Remarkably, a camera mounted on a flap continued to send high-definition video via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites as Starship plunged deeper into the atmosphere and the vehicle was enveloped in plasma.
“This is the first time that we’re getting to collect this reentry data and understand how these 18,000 hexagonal heat shield tiles are working together to protect the belly of Starship,” said SpaceX’s Kate Tice on the webcast. The rolling, though, suggested that parts of the vehicle not protected by those tiles were also being exposed to the heat of reentry.
Finally, about 49 minutes and 30 seconds after liftoff, video and other telemetry was lost from Starship as it descended through an altitude of 65 kilometers. Fifteen minutes later, around the time that Starship was planned to splash down in the Indian Ocean, SpaceX declared that Ship 28, the company’s designation for the vehicle, was lost.
As for Super Heavy, the booster was descending towards what SpaceX called a “soft splashdown” in the Gulf of Mexico. But the vehicle appeared to lose some control in the final few kilometers of its descent. “Super Heavy successfully lit several engines for its first ever landing burn before the vehicle experienced a RUD,” SpaceX later said, using its terminology for “rapid unscheduled disassembly” or explosion. “The booster’s flight concluded at approximately 462 meters in altitude and just under seven minutes into the mission.”
“To make it that far, to demonstrate the controlled reentry up to that point is pretty darn good,” Bharadvaj said shortly after the Super Heavy booster was lost. “That’s something we can learn for the next one.”
Starship reentry
Starship returned live video of its reentry even as it was enveloped in plasma. (credit: SpaceX)
Picking up the pace
Flight 3 did not achieve all its stated objectives, but clearly went further than the previous two flights. That was enough for SpaceX to declare the mission a success: “HUGE congratulations to the entire team for this incredible day,” Shotwell posted shortly after the end of the mission.
NASA, whose interest in Starship is nearly as high as SpaceX’s, agreed. “Congrats to SpaceX on a successful test flight! Starship has soared into the heavens,” Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, said.
That interest is from the $4 billion in contracts it awarded to SpaceX to develop lunar lander versions of Starship for its Human Landing System (HLS) program. That lander is currently scheduled to take NASA astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 on the Artemis 3 mission in late 2026. (An uncrewed demonstration, using the same architecture, is projected for late 2025.)
“With each flight test, SpaceX attempts increasingly ambitious objectives for Starship to learn as much as possible for future mission systems development,” Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s HLS program manager, said in a NASA statement after the launch, noting the flight “allows both NASA and SpaceX to gather crucial data needed for the continued development of Starship HLS.”
“I’m very excited about the fact that we’ve got four sets of Starships and Super Heavies basically already built at Starbase, ready to go for the next flights,” said SpaceX’s Cummings.
That included the propellant transfer test that took place while Starship coasted above the atmosphere. That test was part of a NASA “Tipping Point” technology demonstration award to SpaceX, and the agency said it was working with SpaceX to review the data collected, including how the propellant moved between tanks in microgravity conditions and how the vehicle could settle the propellant into the destination tank to ensure a smooth flow into the Raptor engines.
“Storing and transferring cryogenic propellant in orbit has never been attempted on this scale before,” said Jeremy Kenny, manager of NASA’s Cryogenic Fluid Management Portfolio, in a statement. “But this is a game-changing technology that must be developed and matured for science and exploration missions at the Moon, Mars, and those that will venture even deeper into our solar system.”
It is also, of course, a critical technology for SpaceX, since Starship’s HLS design relies on refueling in orbit in order to go to the Moon. How many launches is not clear: a SpaceX official said in January that the company expected “ten-ish” refueling launches for a Starship HLS mission (see “Twenty years of chasing the Moon”, The Space Review, January 15, 2024), while NASA officials last fall suggested the number was closer to 20. The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, in its annual report in January, pegged the number at “approximately 15.”
Even if the number of refueling flights comes in the lower end of that range, it will nonetheless require a drastic shift in Starship operations by SpaceX, launching vehicles in quick succession to minimize propellant boiloff in orbit. That will, in turn, make reusability a necessity.
SpaceX is preparing to accelerate flights. Even before Flight 3, Musk said that a fourth flight could take place “shortly thereafter” as the company stockpiles ships and boosters.
“I’m very excited about the fact that we’ve got four sets of Starships and Super Heavies basically already built at Starbase, ready to go for the next flights,” Nick Cummings, senior director of program development at SpaceX, said at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference in February.
That will require support from the FAA, which said it would require SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation after last week’s flight before allowing additional launches, just as it did after the first and second flights.
At the conference, Kelvin Coleman, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, said approvals for subsequent launches would depend on exactly what happened with Flight 3, but added he was aware of SpaceX’s interest in increasing flight rates. “They’re looking at a pretty aggressive launch schedule this year,” he said, with “at least nine” launches proposed for 2024. “We’ll work with them to get them back going as soon as they can.”
The concept of nine or more Starship launches this year is, on one hand, remarkable given the sheer scale of the vehicle. However, it’s also a reminder, like a Starship accelerating towards space, of how much faster SpaceX has to go to meet its own expectations as well as those of NASA.
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-60558256993653020672024-03-19T01:43:00.000-07:002024-03-19T01:43:38.173-07:00Book Review- The Longest Goodbye
movie poster
Review: Space: The Longest Goodbye
by Jeff Foust
Monday, March 18, 2024
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Space: The Longest Goodbye
directed by Ido Mizrahy
87 minutes, not rated
NASA is offering people a chance to go to Mars—or, rather, “Mars.” The agency announced last month they were accepting applications for its second year-long mission in its Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) project. Participants, who NASA says must be “healthy, motivated U.S. citizens or permanent residents who are non-smokers, 30-55 years old, and proficient in English,” would not, of course, go to Mars, but rather spend the year in a simulated Mars habitat at the Johnson Space Center, following on the first CHAPEA mission that started last June and is scheduled to wrap up this summer.
The film, especially in the second half, tried to fit in a lot of additional material that either seems extraneous or lacks detail.
CHAPEA is the latest in a long line of simulated space missions by NASA and others intended to study, in part, how a small group in confined quarters can live and work together. There have been so many such simulations that some question why NASA is even doing CHAPEA. “What uncertainty exists about what’s going to happen when you lock people inside a room for a year?” asked J.S. Johnson-Schwartz, a philosophy professor and space ethicist, in a recent New York Times article that examined those studies using the ongoing CHAPEA mission as a frame. “Just because the room is painted to look like Mars doesn’t mean it’s going to change the results.”
The studies of, and interest in, the effects of isolation in long-duration spaceflight continue, though, as demonstrated in the new documentary Space: The Longest Goodbye. The movie, available for rental or purchase on several platforms now and slated to broadcast on PBS in May, explores the challenges astronauts face on the International Space Station being separated from their families for half a year as part of planning for eventual longer missions to Mars, but tries to cover too much in less than 90 minutes.
A key part of the film is the experience of NASA astronauts Cady Coleman and Kayla Barron, who each spent about half a year in space. Coleman flew in 2010–2011, when her son was in elementary school, and the film includes extensive clips from video conversations she had while in space with her son and husband, as well as more recent interviews with them. Barron, who previously served on submarines in the Navy, was on the ISS in 2021–2022; we don’t see as much of her outside of NASA videos (perhaps because she is still an active astronaut) but the film does interview her husband, an Army officer.
Had the film stuck to those accounts and related items—like a study by NASA psychologists where ISS astronauts kept journals to keep track of the highs and lows of their stays in space—it would have done a good job highlighting the challenges of being isolated in a confined spacecraft for months at a time. But the film, especially in the second half, tried to fit in a lot of additional material: how NASA helped rescue trapped Chilean miners, the role virtual reality could play in long-duration missions, tests of a German robot called CIMON (basically a chatbot designed to float inside the station), and even whether we should just give up dealing with isolation and have the astronauts hibernate on the journey to Mars. The segments either seem extraneous or lack detail: the segment on VR, for example, suggests loved ones on Earth could transmit messages that astronauts could experience in VR, but doesn’t make clear why that would be better than a simple video message, since time delay would make interactivity impossible.
“In the next decade, NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars,” it declares at the beginning, which is clearly false: NASA would be doing well to get humans to Mars by 2040.
The documentary also mentions analog missions, but in a weirdly oblique way. “The following events occurred at a Mars simulation facility,” the film states. “The visuals were filmed at a similar facility, at an undisclosed location.” The events are clearly what took place on the sixth and last of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) simulations in early 2018, which ended just a few days into an eight-month stay when one participant was electrocuted and briefly hospitalized. One of the HI-SEAS participants, Sukjin Han, is interviewed in the film, but the film never explains why they don’t give the specific details about the incident. The “undisclosed location” used for the visuals in the film appears to the Mars Society’s Mars Desert Research Station in Utah.
That gives the documentary a rushed, at times sloppy, feel. “In the next decade, NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars,” it declares at the beginning, which is clearly false: NASA would be doing well to get humans to Mars by 2040. The film also depicts a lone Orion spacecraft heading to Mars, as if the crew would be cooped up inside the small capsule for the entire journey. (The sloppiness extends beyond the content of the film itself: a publicist for it emailed me at least three times to promote it, addressing me as “James.”)
The concerns about isolation and confinement on a long-duration missions, to the ISS for six months or to Mars for up to three years, are clear, but not necessarily intractable, as Coleman herself suggests in a comment—or confession—about her time on the station at the end of the documentary: “If I could have spent another six months, I would have stayed in a minute.” The merits and needs of further isolation studies continue to be debated, but for those who want to get away from it all, NASA is accepting applications for the next CHAPEA mission until April 2.
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-53432823070072514092024-03-18T05:22:00.000-07:002024-03-18T05:22:23.536-07:00Is the origin of Oumuamua solved? Harvard astrophysicists say, no<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/Oi0i9iJP4Zw?si=j1dlFV4qjy9BY8oU" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-5070665359328961892024-03-18T04:36:00.000-07:002024-03-18T04:36:06.234-07:00Harvard Astronomer Avi Loeb answers questions about the universe #ufo<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/XKvAsTrNu-E?si=owHTglfBoQsDjHYA" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-41876598430913517632024-03-17T16:32:00.000-07:002024-03-17T16:32:21.087-07:00Members Only LIVESTREAM!! (Recorded)<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/wrLThIvVI4c?si=_CAFQpdtQcqUVB4Z" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-67109137268549212072024-03-17T16:03:00.000-07:002024-03-17T16:03:15.691-07:00SpaceX Starship already the most revolutionary rocket ever built? ANGRY...<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/Q0-pA-L-2xA?si=ZkM-ToBjnWDz98Ts" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-39442691822539825862024-03-17T07:45:00.000-07:002024-03-17T07:45:12.183-07:00Elon Musk shocking revealed $100M Starship's Gigantic factory is being b...<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/CbmLImvM1CI?si=yGz3jaYIdESUKeWl" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-32089178401462082272024-03-15T09:21:00.000-07:002024-03-15T09:21:21.907-07:00ANALYSIS: SpaceX Starship takes a spectacular leap forward!! But IFT-3 ...<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/HdYR6CxhXko?si=fLbBOI6AaS0I_kND" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-48088825374767886762024-03-14T09:28:00.000-07:002024-03-14T09:28:19.253-07:00Starship launch live from Margaritaville!<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/onPqTLkXWU4?si=yoOnwhGTN_7HkWl0" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-58602917455377157622024-03-14T04:35:00.000-07:002024-03-14T04:35:47.375-07:00IFT-3 LIVE Watch SpaceX Starship LAUNCH To Space!!!!!<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/J5r0R6oiRqI?si=Z1xfWi0fiNS447r7" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-40225952862923123132024-03-13T15:47:00.000-07:002024-03-13T15:47:36.940-07:00BREAKING: Starship launch license granted from FAA<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/0gG6RQClbdE?si=w8H_ghJT2djk-09m" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-88963400084871471492024-03-13T11:13:00.000-07:002024-03-13T11:13:12.570-07:00MY 1st EVER Starlink stream at Starbase in from of Starship!<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/cumNFFsrXEI?si=zbfYcvytkawNLlL0" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-14654137795319054622024-03-13T04:32:00.000-07:002024-03-13T04:32:27.099-07:00It's mind-blowing! What the SpaceX president just did shocked the space ...<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/-rvwScRZj3E?si=LPiw25b-dwEkIdn8" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-5891828235680014192024-03-12T12:41:00.000-07:002024-03-12T12:41:48.941-07:00NASA SLS is better than SpaceX Starship!! An alternative view.<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/57T_Za12SiM?si=LfFRFvTF36CRUU2v" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-21006771680139810742024-03-12T10:56:00.000-07:002024-03-12T10:56:15.371-07:00Elon Musk Explains Starship in 10 Minutes<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/pb3Y0DwQiio?si=WESiX0Jw9JSmEspA" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-13511595598808739792024-03-12T09:22:00.000-07:002024-03-12T09:22:37.839-07:00The Difficult Early Life Of The Centaur Upper Stage
Centaur
A Centaur V upper stage being hoisted into position to be integrated with a Vulcan rocket ahead of the Vulcan’s first launch. (credit: ULA)
The difficult early life of the Centaur upper stage
by Trevor Williams
Monday, March 11, 2024
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On January 8, the first Vulcan rocket by United Launch Alliance successfully placed the Peregrine lander on a trajectory bound for the Moon. This lander then experienced propulsion problems that prevented a lunar landing attempt, but the Vulcan had performed its task perfectly. The upper stage of the Vulcan, the Centaur V (V signifying 5, not Vulcan), is a high-energy upper stage that contributes to the Vulcan’s impressive performance for planetary missions and others. It is a greatly expanded version of the Centaur stage that has flown for more than 60 years: Vulcan was the 271st Centaur launch. However, the early phases in the development of the Centaur were distinctly rocky and did not suggest that it would become such a workhorse. In fact, problems during development severely disrupted America’s planetary mission plans, leading to none other than Wernher von Braun threatening to kill the stage.
Early development of high-energy upper stages
In the 1950s, the Air Force became interested in the development of upper stages that used high-energy propellant combinations [1, p. 187]. This work was initially motivated by the goal of increasing the range of ballistic missiles, but later by analyses that showed how important high-energy upper stages become when trying to put spacecraft into challenging trajectories such as geosynchronous transfer orbit or lunar and planetary transfers. Upper stages with lower efficiency propellants, such as kerosene and liquid oxygen, work well for low Earth orbit, but penalize the overall launch vehicle performance for these high-energy orbits.
Problems during development severely disrupted America’s planetary mission plans, leading to none other than Wernher von Braun threatening to kill the stage.
A key parameter that measures the performance of a rocket engine is its specific impulse, which is proportional to the exhaust speed of the rocket. The design choice that is most important in determining specific impulse is the fuel/oxidizer pair that the engine uses; other design parameters, notably combustion chamber pressure and nozzle area ratio, also affect it, but to a far lesser extent. Fuel and oxidizer combinations with high specific impulses that were studied in the 1950s included hydrazine/fluorine, hydrogen/fluorine, and hydrogen/oxygen. Hydrogen/fluorine showed promise, but an incident in a Lewis Research Center test chamber in May 1958 illustrated the practical problems that can result from the fact that fluorine reacts readily with virtually any material. A small leak through a stainless steel joint produced a column of fluorine that reacted “with everything in its path” [1, p. 198], including the joint, a pipe, and the water vapor in the air. This helped to reinforce the conviction of Abe Silverstein, the key NASA proponent of high-energy propulsion, that the hydrogen/oxygen combination was the preferred option.
Kelly Johnson
Kelly Johnson with U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. (credit: US Air Force)
One apparent hurdle was the difficulty of producing and handling large quantities of liquid hydrogen. Even as late as the early 1950s, liquid hydrogen was still basically a laboratory curiosity, dealt with (carefully!) in very small quantities. However, in early 1956 Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the legendary chief designer of the Lockheed Skunk Works, submitted a proposal to the Air Force for a supersonic successor to the U-2 spy plane: this would be propelled at over Mach 2 by a jet engine modified to operate on liquid hydrogen [2, p. 170]. This necessitated that Lockheed learn practical ways to produce and store liquid hydrogen: Johnson put Ben Rich in charge of this development. Rich soon learned that the current state of the art of operating with hydrogen was not adequate, and so Lockheed developed new approaches. The new reconnaissance aircraft design was called the CL-400, with the overall program being referred to as Suntan. Pratt & Whitney was responsible for the development of the Suntan engine: first was a J-57 turbojet modified to run on liquid hydrogen, and later the Model 304 engine. Suntan was classified at a level above Top Secret, with only 25 employees at the company being cleared to see the details. As a result of this level of classification, the total cost of Suntan is unclear: it has only been pinned down to the range $100–250 million [1, p. 165].
After further work, it became clear to the developers that the CL-400 would have an inadequate range of about 2,000 kilometers. This was a consequence of the low density of liquid hydrogen and could not even be remedied by making the aircraft larger than it already was, which was roughly the size of a baseball diamond. Consequently, Johnson told the Secretary of the Air Force “I’m building you a dog” [2, p. 177] and voluntarily pulled out of the project in 1957.
A key byproduct of Suntan, though, was that the significant challenges associated with taking liquid hydrogen from a laboratory curiosity and turning it into a practical propellant that could be produced and stored in large quantities had been solved. In addition, Pratt & Whitney, a division of United Aircraft Corp., had gained significant experience in operating liquid hydrogen engines, although turbojets rather than rockets. When interest in developing high-energy rocket engines surfaced, this experience was key to the development of hydrogen/oxygen engines. (One hurdle was that, since Suntan was so highly classified, rocket developers were not initially aware of the progress that had been made.) Pratt & Whitney’s work on the modified J-57 and Model 304 turbojet engines provided a good background for their subsequent development of the RL10 hydrogen/oxygen rocket engine that was used in the Saturn I launch vehicle as well as the Centaur.
Centaur vs. Saturn
The Saturn I and the Centaur were developed at roughly the same time and, although the products of two very different rocket design groups, interacted quite significantly. The Saturn I came from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Redstone Arsenal—later becoming NASA Marshall Space Flight Center—in Huntsville, Alabama, while the Centaur was produced by the Convair Division of General Dynamics in San Diego as an Air Force project. These two groups embodied contrasting approaches to launch vehicle design.
A key byproduct of Suntan, though, was that the significant challenges associated with taking liquid hydrogen from a laboratory curiosity and turning it into a practical propellant that could be produced and stored in large quantities had been solved.
The Saturn I was the first step by Wernher von Braun’s team in developing the Saturn rocket family that culminated in the Saturn V lunar launcher; the Saturn IB, a modified Saturn I with different upper stage, fell in between. The Saturn I first stage, the S-I, burning kerosene and liquid oxygen, was made up of grouped, stretched tankage from their earlier Redstone and Jupiter rockets: it was sometimes jokingly referred to as “Cluster’s Last Stand” [3, p. 80]. This approach made possible rapid development but did not lend itself to structural mass efficiency. The Saturn I second stage, the S-IV, burned high-energy propellants: it was powered by six Pratt & Whitney RL10 hydrogen/oxygen engines. It had been recognized by this point that, as stated by a Douglas Aircraft Co. engineer [3, p. 162]: “The combination of hydrogen and oxygen for propellants made the moon shot feasible. Its use in upper stages results in a significant increase in performance over the propellant combinations of oxygen and kerosene then in use in first-stage boosters”.
Saturn I
Saturn I test flight configurations. (credit: NASA)
By contrast, an underlying goal in the design of the Centaur, powered by two RL10s, was structural efficiency. It was developed by the German-American engineer Krafft Ehricke to be a second stage matched in size, mass, and design philosophy to the Atlas rocket that was designed, also at Convair, by the Belgian-American engineer Karel “Charlie” Bossart. Both used the pressurized stainless steel structure that was pioneered for the Atlas: this extremely lightweight structure did away with strengthening stringers, propellant tanks internal to the rocket skin, and so on, and gained its stiffness from internal pressurization. To protect the structure from corrosion in the humid, salty air of Cape Canaveral, it was sprayed with the 40th iteration of a “water displacement” material that was made up of various hydrocarbons: this was later sold commercially as WD-40 [4, p. 143].
Centaur
Centaur stage during assembly, 1962. (credit: NASA)
If the pressure inside an Atlas were lost, it could crumple under its own weight: this occurred on the launch pad several times over the years. This engendered a certain amount of friction with von Braun’s team with their very different structural design philosophy: Bossart in a 1974 interview described the structure of Saturn rockets as being “built like the Brooklyn Bridge” [4, p. 169]. An example of these disagreements took place in 1961, when key members of von Braun’s team visited Convair. Willie Mrazek, von Braun’s chief of structures, got into a disagreement with Bossart, which led to them going over to a discarded Atlas tank that was used for testing. Bossart handed Mrazek a heavy rubber-coated lead mallet and invited him to “whack” the Atlas, to see if he could damage it. As described in [4, pp. 169–170]:
Mrazek gave it a tap and checked to see if the metal was dented.
“No, Willie, belt it!”
He hit it harder, and Charlie urged, “Willie, stop fiddling around. Hit the damned thing!”
This time, Mrazek gave it a strong blow, and the hammer bounced off the stiff metal surface and flew out of his grip, knocking his glasses off and landing 15 feet away. Muttering German curses under his breath, he inspected the tank and still could not find any sign of a dent.
Another engineer who had a similar “hit the tank” experience was James Fletcher, who at the time worked at Ramo-Wooldridge and later went on to serve twice as NASA administrator. He “thought he might do more damage by hitting the tank with a glancing blow, but instead he sprained his wrist” [4, p. 132].
people
Wernher von Braun, Karel Bossart, and Krafft Ehricke. (credit: NASA)
Krafft Ehricke had worked at Peenemunde from 1942 to 1944 under von Braun, after serving in Panzers and being wounded twice. Although he credited his transfer to Peenemunde for saving his life, he did not really see eye-to-eye with von Braun, at least partially because Ehricke was enthusiastic about the use of hydrogen as a fuel and von Braun was deeply skeptical. Even so, Ehricke rejoined von Braun under Operation Paperclip, first at Fort Bliss, Texas, from 1947 to 1950, then in Huntsville from 1950 to 1952. He then left to work at Bell Aircraft in 1952 to 1954 and joined Convair in 1954. There he initiated the project to develop the Centaur as a high-energy upper stage sized to turn the Atlas into a highly capable space launcher, although it has been said that he was stronger as a visionary than as a manager [5, p. 380]. Centaur was initially an Air Force project but was transferred to NASA when it was created in 1959. Huntsville (i.e. NASA Marshall) was put in charge, which was not a recipe for success given von Braun’s resistance to the use of pressurized tanks and liquid hydrogen. In fact, in February 1962, after further Centaur delays caused by bad wiring, von Braun wrote in a note to Kurt Debus: “I’m about ready to suggest to blow up the whole darn project.” [5, p. 380].
Effects of Centaur delays on planetary missions
Meanwhile, the problems encountered in the development of the Centaur were having severe effects on planning for interplanetary missions. NASA Headquarters and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) began in early 1960 mapping out what became the Mariner series of spacecraft to explore Venus, Mars, and Mercury. Assuming that the Atlas-Centaur would be ready in time, this plan started with a large (885-kilogram) “Mariner B” spacecraft performing a Venus flyby in 1962 [6, p. 34]. Unfortunately, though, several explosions of Centaurs in ground tests in 1960 and early 1961 made clear that the proposed timeline was not going to be possible. In addition, the payload capability of the early Atlas-Centaurs was found to be lower than previously predicted.
In February 1962, after further Centaur delays caused by bad wiring, von Braun wrote in a note to Kurt Debus: “I’m about ready to suggest to blow up the whole darn project.”
Consequently, the 1962 Venus flyby was revised over the course of only 11 months [6, p. 40] to use a lighter (204-kilogram) spacecraft launched on the smaller Atlas-Agena launch vehicle. Since this spacecraft was a stripped-down development of the 367-kilogram lunar Rangers that were also launched on Atlas-Agenas, with mass reduced to allow an interplanetary mission, it was termed internally the “Mariner-R” while, externally, it was called Mariner 2. It performed the first successful flyby of another planet in December 1962, determining the extremely high temperature of the surface of Venus. The subsequent Mariner 4 and 5 (“Mariner C”) spacecraft were also launched on Atlas-Agenas until the Atlas-Centaur was ready for use from Mariner 6 onwards.
The Agena upper stage was originally developed as a key component of the CORONA reconnaissance satellite [7, p. 34]. It was considerably smaller than the Centaur, and with lower performance: it had a diameter of 1.5 meters (5 feet) rather than 3 meters (10 feet), a propellant mass less than half that of the Centaur, and a specific impulse only about two thirds the Centaur value as a result of its use of hypergolic propellants (hydrazine and nitric acid) rather than hydrogen/oxygen. Consequently, the performance of the Atlas-Agena for planetary missions was much lower than that of the Atlas-Centaur.
Ranger and Mariner
Ranger 7 lunar probe and Mariner 2 Venus probe (“Mariner-R”), both launched by Atlas-Agena. (credit: NASA)
Agena and Centaur
Atlas-Agena (left) and Atlas-Centaur (right). Note the different sizes of the two upper stages relative to the Atlas. (Credit: NASA)
In response to the Centaur development delays, Marshall in September 1962 proposed replacing the Atlas-Centaur for planetary missions with a Saturn I equipped with an Agena third stage [6, p. 48]. At this point, it appeared likely that the Saturn I would make it to orbit before the Atlas-Centaur, so this replacement was expected to save time. Original plans for the Saturn I had included using a slightly modified version of the Centaur [3, p. 159] as a third stage, termed the S-V, although this was only ever flown in dummy form, with water-filled tanks, on the first four suborbital launches. The proposal to add an Agena was therefore somewhat in keeping with the original plans. It appeared acceptable to JPL, but NASA Headquarters vetoed it. Instead, Centaur management was transferred to NASA Lewis Research Center, the director of which was the hydrogen/oxygen proponent Abe Silverstein.
It is interesting to note that, while a Saturn I-Agena would have had a payload capability roughly equivalent to that of the Atlas-Centaur for planetary missions, it would have had a launch mass nearly four times as great. This inefficiency is a reflection of its much less capable upper stage. A modern parallel exists in the Space Launch System (SLS): its current upper stage, the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, is essentially a Delta IV five-meter-diameter upper stage, and is smaller than optimal for a launch vehicle of this size. It is to be replaced by the Exploration Upper Stage, with nearly ten times the propellant mass, which will increase the trans-lunar injection payload capability by about 40%.
Centaur success
The transfer of Centaur management to NASA Lewis was a key turning point in the development of the Centaur. The first Atlas-Centaur test launch, on May 8, 1962, was a failure, but the first under Lewis management, carrying no payload, succeeded on November 27, 1963. Interestingly, the Atlas-Centaur ended up beating the Saturn I to orbit: this only took place on January 29, 1964. Several other Atlas-Centaur failures followed, but its first key operational use, to launch the seven Surveyor lunar landers in 1966 to 1968, was entirely successful.
The transfer of Centaur management to NASA Lewis was a key turning point in the development of the Centaur.
Following this, the Atlas-Centaur became increasingly used for communication satellites (e.g. Intelsat 4s), astronomy satellites (e.g. OAO-2 and HEAOs 1-3), and finally Mariners 6 through 10. By way of a performance comparison, the Mariner 2 spacecraft to Venus, launched on an Atlas-Agena, had a mass of only 204 kilograms; Mariner 10, a mission to Venus and then Mercury that was launched on an Atlas-Centaur, had a mass of 503 kilograms. Pioneer 10 to Jupiter and Pioneer 11 to Jupiter and then Saturn were also launched on Atlas-Centaurs, as were the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and Multiprobe.
The Centaur was then adapted for use on other launch vehicles, for instance the Titan IIIEs used to launch Vikings 1 and 2 and Voyagers 1 and 2. Convair (by then General Dynamics) designed a stretched Centaur to launch spacecraft for the proposed Grand Tour of the outer planets [8, pp. 31-33]: the proposed design is somewhat reminiscent of the Centaur G-Prime version that was at one point planned to launch the Galileo Jupiter probe. There was also a proposal for a Centaur space tug to supplement the Space Shuttle [8, pp. 33-35].
Mariner 10
Mariner 10 Venus probe launched by Atlas-Centaur. (Credit: NASA)
A total of 271 Centaurs have been launched to date, with the latest Centaur V version for the Vulcan containing nearly four times the propellant mass of the original Centaur. And, unlike the Atlas, which changed to a design with stiffeners for the Atlas V version, the Centaur V still has pressurized tanks.
References
Liquid Hydrogen as a Propulsion Fuel, 1945-1959, J.L. Sloop, The NASA History Series, SP-4404, 1978.
Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of my Years at Lockheed, B.R. Rich and L. Janos, Little, Brown and Company, 1994.
Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles, R.E. Bilstein, The NASA History Series, SP-4206, 1980.
Bossart: America’s Forgotten Rocket Scientist, D.P. Mitchell, Mitchell Publishing, 2016.
Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, M.J. Neufeld, Vintage Books, 2007.
On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet, 1958-1978, E.C. Ezell and L.N. Ezell, The NASA History Series, SP-4212, 1984.
Eye in the Sky: The Story of the Corona Spy Satellites, ed. D.A. Day, J.M. Logsdon and B. Latell, Smithsonian Institution, 1998.
Centaur, General Dynamics Convair Aerospace Division booklet, Jan. 1971.
Trevor Williams in an orbital dynamicist who grew up following the Apollo missions, and has long been fascinated by space history.Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-90245483185761902272024-03-12T09:17:00.000-07:002024-03-12T09:17:12.740-07:00India Introduces Its First Four Garganyaan Astronauts
astronauts
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi greets the four Gaganyaan astronauts at a February 27 event. (credit: Press Information Bureau)
India unveils its first set of Gaganyaan astronauts
by Jatan Mehta
Monday, March 11, 2024
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After four years of secrecy, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on February 27 the first four astronauts selected to fly on the country’s initial set of human spaceflight missions mid-decade via ISRO’s ambitious Gaganyaan program. The selectees are all test pilots and Group Captains: Prashanth Nair, Angad Prathap, Ajit Krishnan, and Shubhanshu Shukla. They have received extensive training in India and Russia, and at least one of them will receive advanced training in the US at NASA facilities sometime this year. The announcement of Gaganyaan astronauts is a great time to review India’s progress in putting people in space.
With Gaganyaan, India aims to send its people to space using its own rockets, capsules, and associated technologies. India hopes to clinch this Yuri Gagarin moment of its own by end of 2025, but delays are expected.
But first, where are the women astronauts? When asked, ISRO says women aren’t in this astronaut batch because being a test pilot was a key requirement, and India had no female test pilots at the time of selection. Well, that might be true, but India does have the highest global percentage of female airline pilots. The fighter pilot number is increasing, too. More firmly, Susmita Mohanty convincingly argues in a piece for The Print how the arbitrary selection criteria doesn’t hold water when compared to initial female astronaut selections worldwide. I agree when Mohanty says: “We have missed a great opportunity as a nation. We could have created history.”
For the benefit of global readers, here’s a brief primer on Indians that have already been to space. Rakesh Sharma was the first Indian to visit Earth orbit, where he spent seven days in 1984 aboard the Soviet Salyut 7 space station. Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian woman in space, held a US citizenship when she flew in 1997 on the Space Shuttle Columbia, the same vehicle Chawla was aboard in 2003, too, but which was destroyed during atmospheric reentry, killing Chawla and her crewmates. Sunita Williams is an Indian-origin but US-born astronaut who is set to fly to the International Space Station again this year aboard the first crewed Starliner flight by Boeing as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program.
With Gaganyaan, India aims to send its people to space using its own rockets, capsules, and associated technologies. The first crewed Gaganyaan flight will carry no more than two of the four aforementioned astronauts to a 400-kilometer low Earth orbit, where they will spend three days in the Crew Module. If successful, India will then be only the world’s fourth nation to indigenously send humans to space, after Russia, the US, and China. India hopes to clinch this Yuri Gagarin moment of its own by end of 2025, but delays are expected.
India’s crawls and leaps toward indigenous human spaceflight
For well over a decade, ISRO had been inching towards some baseline technologies necessary to even plan such a massive feat, despite roadblocks and delayed funding. The Indian government finally formally green-lit the human spaceflight program in 2018. Progress on technological components has been faster ever since, with 2022 featuring a successful integrated parachute test demonstrating safe capsule splashdown in the event one of the three main chutes failed to open. More parachute tests followed last year, including tests specific to drogue chutes.
For well over a decade, ISRO had been inching towards some baseline technologies necessary to even plan such a massive feat, despite roadblocks and delayed funding.
In February 2023, ISRO began practicing sea recovery trials with a representative crew module, which simulates the mass, center of gravity, size, and externals of the actual Crew Module. In April 2023, ISRO completed human-rating the liquid-fueled Vikas engine after an extensive test period of three years, demonstrating higher structural margins, better health monitoring, off-nominal recoveries, and redundancy in many of its associated systems. Two Vikas engines power the core stage of the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3), India’s most powerful rocket and the vehicle of choice for sending astronauts to space. Likewise in February 2024, ISRO completed human-rating LVM3’s CE-20 cryogenic upper stage engine after a comprehensive set of 39 engine tests.
In May 2023, ISRO qualified the Crew Module’s propulsion system, which will provide controlled atmospheric descent to complete each Gaganyaan flight and bring astronauts back home. In case of an abnormal launch, the same system will keep the crew module stable between a height of 3 to 70 kilometers. In July 2023, ISRO successfully tested the Service Module’s propulsion system (video), which features five 440-newton engines and 16 100-newton reaction control thrusters. During Gaganyaan missions, it’s the service module that will inject astronauts in the Crew Module into orbit, circularize it to a 400-kilometer altitude and maintain it, and eventually provide the deorbit maneuver for the crew module before separating from it.
abort test
Launch of a representative Gaganyaan crew module and its attached escape system on October 21, 2023 for an abort test. (credit: ISRO)
ISRO then conducted a successful abort test in October 2023, which means the crew escape system can safely carry astronauts away from the launch vehicle in the case of an emergency. S. V. Krishna Chaitanya has reported that ISRO’s next step is to better test aspects of the crew module’s parachute system by dropping a representative module from an altitude of four kilometers using a heavy-lift helicopter. This will be followed by another abort test where the escape system will lift the module away while the rocket is on the launchpad itself to simulate pad emergencies. ISRO did conduct one such test in 2018 but this redo is necessary because there have been substantial design changes to Gaganyaan since.
Growing scope and international interest
As part of an unprecedented set of broad-sweeping India-US agreements in 2023 centered around collaborative science and technology advancements, NASA will carry one of the four aforementioned Indian astronauts to the International Space Station later this year. NASA and private US companies have also shown interest in leveraging parts of Gaganyaan’s technology stack for a post-ISS future. Chethan Kumar reported last year that Blue Origin and ISRO are interested in using LVM3 to launch crew capsules to service Blue Origin’s upcoming commercial space station, Orbital Reef. Voyager Space announced similar intentions last year for its upcoming Starlab commercial space station, for which it has partnered with Airbus.
NASA and private US companies have also shown interest in leveraging parts of Gaganyaan’s technology stack for a post-ISS future.
The Indian government directed ISRO in October 2023 to create an Indian Space Station in Earth orbit by 2035, and even send the first Indian to the Moon by 2040. To realize these ambitions, the Indian Department of Space (DOS) and ISRO are developing a roadmap for crewed and lunar exploration, which will comprise an orbital module before the space station, a series of Chandrayaan missions, the development of a partially reusable Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV), and more.
roadmap
Screengrab of a notional integrated lunar and crewed exploration roadmap for India. (credit: S. Somanath / ISRO)
Despite India’s increasingly complex human spaceflight and planetary exploration ambitions for later this decade and early next, the fiscal year (FY) 2024–25 budget for its Department of Space (DOS)—which includes ISRO’s activities—improved only marginally from $1.51 billion last year to $1.58 billion; even if it may be the interim budget with the national election coming up.
Notably, DOS underutilized its space technology budget in FY 2023–24 by about $150 million, a trait the country’s Ministry of Science & Technology as a whole suffers from. As Mukunth points out in a post, this is but the latest example illustrating that increasing ISRO’s budget alone isn’t a solution in itself for continuing advances in space. Separately, as part of the broader national budget announcement, India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the availability of $12 billion dollars in interest-free loans over 50 years for Indian tech startups, including space ones, to tap into.
A version of this article was published by the author in his Indian Space Progress newsletter.
Jatan Mehta is a science writer passionate about space exploration and the Moon. He was the former science officer at TeamIndus Moon Mission. His portfolio can be found at jatan.space.Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-24149706830732545892024-03-12T09:13:00.000-07:002024-03-12T09:13:04.794-07:00The Psychological Challenges Of A Long Voyage To MarsThe psychological challenges of a long voyage to Mars
by Nick Kanas
Monday, March 11, 2024
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The Conversation
Within the next few decades, NASA aims to land humans on the Moon, set up a lunar base, and use the lessons learned to send people to Mars as part of its Artemis program.
Delayed contact with home won’t just hurt crew member morale. It will likely mean space crews won’t get as much real-time help from Mission Control during onboard emergencies.
While researchers know that space travel can stress space crew members both physically and mentally and test their ability to work together in close quarters, missions to Mars will amplify these challenges. Mars is far away—millions of miles from Earth—and a mission to the Red Planet will take from two to two and a half years, including travel time and the Mars surface exploration itself.
As a psychiatrist who has studied space crewmember interactions in orbit, I’m interested in the stressors that will occur during a Mars mission and how to mitigate them for the benefit of future space travelers.
Delayed communications
Given the great distance to Mars, two-way communication between crew members and Earth will take about 25 minutes round trip. This delayed contact with home won’t just hurt crew member morale. It will likely mean space crews won’t get as much real-time help from Mission Control during onboard emergencies.
Because these communications travel at the speed of light and can’t go any faster, experts are coming up with ways to improve communication efficiency under time-delayed conditions. These solutions might include texting, periodically summarizing topics, and encouraging participants to ask questions at the end of each message, which the responder can answer during the next message.
Autonomous conditions
Space crew members won’t be able to communicate with Mission Control in real time to plan their schedules and activities, so they’ll need to conduct their work more autonomously than astronauts working on orbit on the International Space Station.
Although studies during space simulations on Earth have suggested that crew members can still accomplish mission goals under highly autonomous conditions, researchers need to learn more about how these conditions affect crew member interactions and their relationship with Mission Control. For example, Mission Control personnel usually advise crew members on how to deal with problems or emergencies in real time. That won’t be an option during a Mars mission.
To study this challenge back on Earth, scientists could run a series of simulations where crew members have varying degrees of contact with Mission Control. They could then see what happens to the interactions between crew members and their ability to get along and conduct their duties productively.
Crew member tension
Being confined with a small group of people for a long period of time can lead to tension and interpersonal strife. In my research team’s studies of on-orbit crews, we found that when experiencing interpersonal stress in space, crew members might displace this tension by blaming Mission Control for scheduling problems or not offering enough support. This can lead to crew-ground misunderstandings and hurt feelings.
One way to deal with interpersonal tension on board would be to schedule time each week for the crew members to discuss interpersonal conflicts during planned “bull sessions.” We have found that commanders who are supportive can improve crew cohesion. A supportive commander, or someone trained in anger management, could facilitate these sessions to help crew members understand their interpersonal conflicts before their feelings fester and harm the mission.
Time away from home
Spending long periods of time away from home can weigh on crew members’ morale in space. Astronauts miss their families and report being concerned about the well-being of their family members back on Earth, especially when someone is sick or in a crisis.
Researchers could simulate the outbound and return phases of a Mars mission by sending astronauts to Gateway for six-month periods, where they could introduce Mars-like delayed communication, autonomy, and views of a receding Earth.
Mission duration can also affect astronauts. A Mars mission will have three phases: the outbound trip, the stay on the Martian surface, and the return home. Each of these phases may affect crew members differently. For example, the excitement of being on Mars might boost morale, while boredom during the return may sink it.
The “disappearing Earth” phenomenon
For astronauts in orbit, seeing the Earth from space serves as a reminder that their home, family, and friends aren’t too far away. But for crew members traveling to Mars, watching as the Earth shrinks to an insignificant dot in the heavens could result in a profound sense of isolation and homesickness.
Having telescopes on board that will allow the crew members to see Earth as a beautiful ball in space, or giving them access to virtual reality images of trees, lakes, and family members, could help mitigate any disappearing-Earth effects. But these countermeasures could just as easily lead to deeper depression as the crew members reflect on what they’re missing.
Planning for a Mars mission
Researchers studied some of these issues during the Mars500 program, a collaboration between the Russian and other space agencies. During Mars500, six men were isolated for 520 days in a space simulator in Moscow. They underwent periods of delayed communication and autonomy, and they simulated a landing on Mars.
Scientists learned a lot from that simulation. But many features of a real Mars mission, such as microgravity, and some dangers of space—meteoroid impacts, the disappearing-Earth phenomenon—aren’t easy to simulate.
Planned missions under the Artemis program will allow researchers to learn more about the pressures astronauts will face during the journey to Mars. For example, NASA is planning a space station called Gateway, which will orbit the Moon and serve as a relay station for lunar landings and a mission to Mars. Researchers could simulate the outbound and return phases of a Mars mission by sending astronauts to Gateway for six-month periods, where they could introduce Mars-like delayed communication, autonomy, and views of a receding Earth.
Researchers could simulate a Mars exploration on the Moon by having astronauts conduct tasks like those anticipated for Mars. This way, crew members could better prepare for the psychological and interpersonal pressures that come with a real Mars mission. These simulations could improve the chances of a successful mission and contribute to astronaut well-being as they venture into space.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Nick Kanas is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. For more than 50 years he has written about space psychology and psychiatry. He has been the principal investigator of several NASA-funded and ESA-sponsored international psychological research projects involving astronauts and cosmonauts in space. He received the Aerospace Medical Association Raymond F. Longacre Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in the Psychological and Psychiatric Aspects of Aerospace Medicine in 1999 and the International Academy of Astronautics Life Science Award in 2008.
Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted.Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-70493362163179398832024-03-12T09:05:00.000-07:002024-03-12T09:05:57.820-07:00Book Review-The New World On Mars
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Review: The New World on Mars
by Jeff Foust
Monday, March 11, 2024
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The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet
by Robert Zubrin
Diversion Books, 2024
hardcover, 320 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-1-63576-880-0
US$28.99
As soon as this Thursday, SpaceX will launch its Starship/Super Heavy vehicle on its third integrated test flight, after launches last April and November. On this flight SpaceX hopes, beyond avoiding the explosive ends of those earlier flights, to test a payload bay door and transfer propellant within Starship, key capabilities needed for that vehicle’s early missions to launch Starlink satellites and land humans on the Moon for NASA.
There are, in his view, no technological showstoppers to establishing human settlements on Mars.
However, the company has made clear that Starship’s long-term goal is to send humans to Mars, and in large numbers, fulfilling founder Elon Musk’s desire to make humanity multiplanetary. While Musk frequently talks about those visions, like having a million-person city on Mars by mid-century, he’s said little about how those people would live or what they would do there, considering them as minor details to be left to others.
In steps Robert Zubrin, who has been thinking about how to both get humans to Mars and how they could live there for decades. In The New World on Mars, he is willing to let SpaceX do the driving to get to Mars, focusing instead on aspects of life on Mars from building habitats to social and governance structures.
The first part of the book is focused on technological aspects of living on Mars: getting there, building places to live, growing food, and producing energy, among other things. Zubrin shares extensive details on all those areas, from calculations involving the rocket equation to formulae for producing critical chemicals. There are, in his view, no technological showstoppers to establishing human settlements on Mars.
What is so compelling about Mars—a world that makes the most inhospitable places on Earth seem like the Garden of Eden—that would drive people to live there, beyond saying that you’re living on Mars?
The second part of the book moves from the physical sciences to the social sciences, examining how people would live in these communities and how they would be governed. He shows a libertarian bent in these pages, contemplating societies that do away with many of the laws and regulations that he believes binds us today. It is, though, at other times a little more reactionary: he envisions Martian society discarding views of “romantic relationships being a form of self-realization, recreation, or game” in favor of “finding the right partner for a lifetime project of raising a family.” In this world, divorce would be “frowned upon” and those who cause it potentially penalized by law—not all laws are going away in this libertarian society—and women being rewarded through reduced tax rates for each child they give birth to, while encouraging them to stay in the workforce. (Implicit in this section of the book is that marriage on Mars would be a strictly heterosexual institution.)
For all the discussion of how people would live on Mars, there’s far less about what they would do. What is so compelling about Mars—a world that makes the most inhospitable places on Earth seem like the Garden of Eden—that would drive people to live there, beyond saying that you’re living on Mars? Zubrin, as he has stated in the past, suggests that the biggest export from Mars, at least in the early eras of settlement there, will be intellectual property: inventions that the Martian inhabitants develop to survive given limited labor and resources. While an intriguing idea, without knowing what those inventions are and their value it’s hard to build a business case for a Mars settlement. The other concepts he includes, such as producing luxury items, tourism, or providing suppliers for main belt asteroid miners, also seem either insufficient or only viable in the long term.
Zubrin makes clear in the book that he is not backing Musk’s grandiose plan of a million-person Mars city in three decades: he estimates it will take more than a century and a half to reach that population level through a combination of childbirth and immigration, adding that the population would likely be spread among many cities rather than a single Martian-tropolis. Yet, as the book demonstrates, both are driven by a vision of a substantial human presence on Mars, one that is backed by science and technology. Those who share that vision will find The New World on Mars reaffirming. Those who don’t may come away from the book seeing how people could live on Mars, but less convinced why one would want to go.
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-48405742564843375322024-03-09T11:20:00.000-08:002024-03-09T11:20:19.157-08:00What You Need to Know About SpaceX's Starship Flight 3: It's go time!<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/za-KApgZlsU?si=GzlJQnTvM3x7zqQf" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-22685261371995785322024-03-09T10:57:00.000-08:002024-03-09T10:57:12.918-08:00Collecting a Brand New CYBERTRUCK!!!<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/Ie5zFdqokvc?si=SI0IgrC8Xt0HjL6a" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-42572696194888990102024-03-09T10:36:00.000-08:002024-03-09T10:36:20.996-08:00Pentagon quietly reveals new UFO footage and photos! Why?<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/pBTWosraq2U?si=ohsN7oVDyCzpmmb2" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-69640014041054552672024-03-08T09:56:00.000-08:002024-03-08T09:56:35.573-08:00SpaceX Starship Launch 1 & 2 Recap ahead of IFT-3!<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/4ejA9VxyYkg?si=Lbb5EZV_z1-szD-6" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-31804088576325804852024-03-08T02:15:00.000-08:002024-03-08T02:15:04.632-08:00Top Sci-fi Noir Movies<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/CCi9093MLFA?si=2xSv-3XqSoP4m4cL" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469762364256054060.post-8361555899866072272024-03-07T10:43:00.000-08:002024-03-07T10:43:19.506-08:00Starship's NEW Planned IFT-3 trajectory by SpaceX!<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/kWKnQgAwhFU?si=QUaZPFdgHrgWkVh4" frameborder="0"></iframe>Jack Waldbewohnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05420664069634943811noreply@blogger.com0