We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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They have finally fired the ‘big gun’ in the air. A Janes newsletter reports:
Boeing reports ABL COIL’s first in-flight firing. The Boeing Airborne Laser (ABL) team has fired the system’s primary chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL) in flight for the first time, the company announced on 20 August. The firing, which took place at Edwards Air Force Base (AFB) on 18 August, was carried out with industry team mates Northrop Grumman (which makes the COIL), Lockheed Martin (which is responsible for the beam-control/fire-control system) and the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA)
I will have to go searching for a picture. This is seriously Buck Rogers!
I found more news here in the Boeing Press Release. The beam was fired into a calorimeter to measure it and was not sent outside the aircraft. They may attempt a missile intercept before the end of the year.
I picked up the following two items from a Janes newsletter and thought they might be of interest:
US military airborne laser passes first in-flight engagement The US military’s airborne laser (ABL) successfully completed its first in-flight test against an instrumented target missile on 10 August, the prime contractor Boeing said in a statement on 13 August. The US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is testing the viability of using the high-powered laser to destroy enemy missiles in the boost phase.
Standard Missile 3 Block IB cleared to begin flight tests The Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) Block IB programme to develop an improved missile for the US Missile Defense Agency’s sea-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System has completed its critical design review, Raytheon announced on 13 July. The new missile is expected to begin flight tests in 2010. SM-3 Block IB offers significant improvements over the SM-3 Block IA version currently deployed on US Navy Aegis cruisers and destroyers and Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyers to defend against short- to intermediate-range ballistic missile threats in the ascent and midcourse phases of flight.
So things are still plodding along on all fronts and all becomes simpler as technology improves. I still believe the key number for missile interception is the figure of merit I wrote of a long time ago: instructions per meter. That is the number of machine code instructions that a CPU can process in the time it takes for the relative positions of the target and the interceptor (or laser station) changes by one meter. When this number gets large, the targeting system has more time to ponder what is going on and more time to analyze fused sensor data. Another way of looking at it is that time effectively runs more slowly for the targeting software as the number gets larger.
This is yet another side effect of Moore’s Law. Our processing capabilities are growing to the point where either very sophisticated predictive programs may be used… or very unsophisticated and unoptimized programs will become ‘good enough’.
A few months ago I noted the importance of having good people selected for the top jobs at NASA under the Obama administration. I believed then, as now, that NASA and the current way of doing business is a fact of life for those in space business and the best we can hope for is folks in the power seats who are positive towards wholly private space ventures.
There has been much too-ing and fro-ing in Washington during the ensuing months over the role of private sector and the old socialist space model. Surprisingly (to some), the most anti-free market action came from a Republican, Senator Shelby from Alabama. He succeeded in reprogramming funds for the COTS-D program, aimed at enabling the purchase of Astronaut tickets to space in a commercial way, back to funding of the old NASA and Aerospace Design Bureaus model borrowed from the Soviets during the Moon Race. Republicans are no different from Democrats when it comes to the basics. They like the Space Kommisars when they represent jobs and campaign contributions in their district or State.
But change is overdue. There is simply no choice for NASA and everyone knows it. Most importantly, the people now in charge understand it and with the supporting Augustine Commission findings (one of whose members, by the way, is a long standing occasional Samizdata reader) that change is about to be implemented.
As I indicated in the title, the end results of all this appear to be even better than I had dared hope.
Next year in L5 anyone?
Excalibur-Almaz has announced its orbital tourism plans. They have built up a great team of astronauts, cosmonauts and contractors and are in the process of resurrecting a flight tested Russian military capsule and space station. They have a long way to go to get the thing flying again, but that is the point, it is ‘flying again’, not ‘flying the first time’.
I unfortunately must step lightly here as I was one of the persons in my company involved in some early consulting for them. NDA’s you know!
I can say that it is a very interesting project!
I have been sitting on this story for several years, ever since Gary Gaudet contacted me through the Samizdata comments section after a story I published about a Swordfish from the HMS Ark Royal being spotted on the ocean bottom near the sunken carrier. Since that time I have spoken with him several times as well as trading emails.
His Swordfish is in a somewhat drier and slightly more reachable location in the wilds of Nova Scotia. It will soon be brought in from the cold after resting where it ended its flying career after a walk-away crash in 1944. I spoke with him again this afternoon and with his permission I am bringing this story to a wider audience. It has been known locally for some time, but there has been an understandable desire not to attract undue attention until the aircraft recovery was at least imminent.
It may not look like much to the untrained eye, but to those of us who are Warbird afficionados, it is incredibly complete. There have been rebuilds to fly from wrecks recently dragged out of the Russian wilderness which were found in worse condition that this.
Fairy Swordfish Mk IV in Digby County, Nova Scotia.
Photo: Gary Gaudet
Although the Swordfish is a biplane, it used very modern construction methods and was an incredibly rugged aircraft. The ‘stringbag’ was still in use at the end of WWII and is much loved by those who flew her and all the youngsters like myself who built the Airfix model of this beautiful bit of British Naval Aviation history.
PS: There is ever so much more to this story than I have time to write this afternoon. I have hopes Gary Gaudet will drop by the comment section and regale you with more of the story: he has been in contact with the family of the fellow who happened to have flown this very particular airframe!
Bill Whittle has a video report of his visit to XCOR on Pajamas TV. If you enjoyed my future history of yesterday, you will enjoy this vision of the current and the near future of New Space.
The New Space conference has been in progress all weekend and runs through tonight. Some idea of how the world has changed is that a bunch of free-market entrepreneurs are welcome at NASA Ames. This is partly because so many of the high positions in NASA are now taken by people who (mostly) agree with us, or at the very least see no other way NASA can continue to function. They need cheap access to space too and the ‘big boys’ are not delivering it.
My associate in space ventures, Rand Simberg, is there live blogging the event so please go take a look at what he has to say.
I am going to go very far out on a slender limb and tell you my thoughts on how things might play out over the next few decades.
First, NASA is in deep trouble. The Ares 1 is well behind schedule and the gap in their ability to take cargo and passengers to the space station has widened into a chasm. Ares 1 was pushed ahead by former NASA director Mike Griffin for two reasons. It was an effort to train younger engineers on a smaller manned vehicle design before all of the old folk retired and as a means to get to the space station when shuttle retired. Building Ares 5 as a first effort was correctly thought to be a bad idea. The problem is, Ares 1 seems to have become less an interim vehicle and more of a goal in itself. This is something one less enamoured of government would have predicted. I do not think Ares 1 will fly before 2015 and 2017 would not much surprise me.
So where does that leave us?
SpaceX has flown two very small expendable rockets of a new design with new engines. By itself that would be fun but not of much use for the long term. What is important is the commercial sense of this vehicle. It is cheap to build and cheap to fly as such things go, and more importantly for our topic today, it was the first step towards a bigger and more interesting expendable, the Falcon 9. This rocket uses a first stage cluster of 9 of the same engines as the Falcon 1 main engine and is big enough to deliver cargo to the space station. Given the clean performance of the most recent Falcon 1 flight, a second success in a row, I am going to predict they have this vehicle working by no later than the 2nd flight. That means a true commercial orbital cargo capacity by 2011, and possibly as soon as 2010.
But wait, there’s more. The cargo carrier is not just an expendable container. It has windows… for a reason. The Dragon capsule was designed and built as a manned craft from the start. After a few cargo flights SpaceX will have the operational data needed to risk placing people in it. That should happen within only a few years of the first successful flight of the Falcon 9. There is also a next generation rocket on the drawing board, the Falcon 9 Heavy, but let us leave SpaceX for now.
Although I know less about their efforts, Orbital Sciences Corporation should not be counted out in this market niche and time frame. It is entirely possible there will be two commercial package and personnel delivery companies operating in the space station environment by 2012.
Let’s look at Bigelow Aerospace. They currently have two inflatable habs in orbit. They have a 100% success rate on their orbital operations and have years of real flight data backing them now. Somewhere in the period of 2010-2012 they will be putting up the full scale unit. That one will contain a goodly amount of rentable pressurized and fully habitable volume in space. Their habitats have shown themselves to be rugged enough to survive years in space… but there is nothing special about them being in orbit. They can provide habitable volume in any low or no pressure environment. → Continue reading: How will it really happen?
Niklas Järvstråt has invested in a simulation of a lunar settlement using an old Swedish mine which he bought some years ago.
Just a short note to mention that the moon-mine inauguration and moon landing 40-year anniversary will take place tomorrow at Storgruvan, Nora, in the middle of Sweden. We will start the pumps and make footprints in lunar regolith simulant FJS-1, donated by Shimizu cormoration. Maria Aldrin, Buzz Aldrins great great great grandfathers great great great great great great granddaughter, will make the first footprint for the mine. We are looking forward to an interesting program of local and national interest, and a recorded well wishing message from the Romanian Space agency. Happy anniversary, all “lunatics” and space buffs!
Niklas is part of a world wide conspiracy to settle the moon and planets. Shhhh. Forget I told you that…
The Moon Society is looking Beyond NASA. While I would prefer a pure free market opening of the moon, the practicalities are that libertarian ideas are not globally influential enough to let us have our way. Peter Kokh discusses ideas that might at least let us get an opportunity to plant and grow the tree of liberty off world.
Today has been declared a space settlement blogging day and Samizdata is one of the participants. We hope you will also check out some of these sites for other stories on this topic.
Ad Astra… and may the high frontier be settled by free men and women, from whence ever they come.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and it seems only fitting to show what ‘Tranquility Base’ and the other sites look like today. NASA recently photographed the landing sites at high resolution.
Apollo landing sites 40 years later.
Photo: NASA
If you look closely at the Apollo 14 landing area, you can see the very off-road tracks made by the Lunar Rover.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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