Samizdata

Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne has been repaired. As you may remember, the portside gear lock failed and the strut collapsed on landing after the historic first private rocket-powered supersonic flight on December 17th 2003. The recent March 11th test was an unpowered drop test. Beside the reported objectives it is likely they wanted at least one unpowered test to be certain of the gear and airframe repairs. As my flying instructor used to say, the most dangerous time to fly an aeroplane is the day you get it out of the shop at the local FBO.

Objectives: The twelfth flight of SpaceShipOne. Objectives included: pilot proficiency, reaction control system functionality check and stability and control and performance of the vehicle with the airframe thermal protection system installed. This was an unpowered glide test.

Results: Launch conditions were 48,500 feet and 125 knots. All systems performed as expected and the vehicle landed successfully while demonstrating the maximum cross wind landing capability.

According to a ‘knowedgeable aerospace source’, there is still a lot of envelope to test before they get to a ‘hot’ re-entry.

Rutan holds the distance record (non-stop around the world) and will soon hold the alititude record. A speed run would net him the third leg of the triple crown. This makes one wonder if the ablative they are using could handle the severe heat loads of ultra high-speed flight for long enough to allow such a record attempt.

It is perhaps something for Rutan to think about after he wins the X-Prize… and before he sends SpaceShipOne to join Voyager in the National Air and Space Museum.

There is now a web site for the commission which is to create the implementation plan for the new space policy. We would like to see them relying on private sector developments for transport and for lunar exploration and settlement.

Times are changing. We have a major policy opportunity. We can quite possibly move things in our preferred direction: private operation. Although it is lovely to talk about how we would do space exploration in a perfect libertarian society, we do not live in that world. We have to deal realistically with the hand we have been dealt.

I think we have at least a couple pairs going into this one.

Dana Rohrabacher (R-Ca) has just introduced a bill to clarify language in Federal law relating to commercial human spaceflight.

I must admit there is much about this which truly grates on me as a libertarian. But the realist/entrepreneur side of me recognizes Dana is doing us a good turn. He is easing existing law to make life easier for X-Prize entrants.

Under current law, every launch requires a license. Under the Rohrabacher bill, a single permit appears to cover all flights until the vehicle is ready for commercial operations. Ideally, I would like a single permit to cover all normal commercial operations as well. It seems silly to have vehicles which can take off and fly a suborbital job on a half-day notice and yet require months of effort for the approval to do so. I do not think commercial aviation would have accomplished very much under such a regime. Perhaps we can talk Dana into doing something about this problem when it arises in a year or two.

The other interesting point is his treatment of liability limitation. He has continued the existing law in this area but has laid out a path for removing the government from this loop entirely. My libertarian side would say “get rid of it now”, but my spacer side recognizes the complexity of the insurance issues for the infant field. In a litigous society like the USA, human spaceflight would be uninsurable without this fiat ceiling… despite the fact that a SpaceShipOne or similar craft could do very little damage in the worst of cases. The details of the liability situation would require discussion of FAA regulations which are far too complex for me to reduce to a few bloglines. Let it suffice for me to say US X-Prize entrants are quite happy to have such limitation right now… and I am quite happy to see it phased out as insurance companies become more familiar with the Insurable Risks involved.

I do not have time for a really detailed study of this law. I do know from personal contacts (an ex-staffer for one) Dana Rohrabacher is very familiar with the issues and is pro-commercial space. I have also heard he started off on the libertarian side of the fence but went Republican and drifted a bit out of our quadrant. Still, he is about as good as they come outside of Ron Paul.

The issue is now open to discussion amongst the exceedingly knowledgeable space entrepreneur wing of the Samizdata commentariat.

This post is not going to be about “NASA screwed up, how come after 40 years we still have a space ‘program’ and not a space industry, NASA is drifting off focus and no longer has a clearly defined mission, etc.” I will leave it to someone else to write that column, because Rand Simberg (or our own Dale Amon) could do it a lot better than I could anyway.

What I do want to talk about is: how the way information is organized and presented can make a difference in how it is received – and how bureaucracy can sometimes stand in the way of effective data organization and promote cluttered thinking. When we lost the Challenger in ’86, it should have been clear that it was unsafe to launch the shuttle on that cold January morning. NASA had plenty of data to suggest that it was not prudent to launch that day – the problem is that the data was not refined into a conclusive answer, but rather was shrouded by poor communication and bureaucratic ass-covering.

Edward Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale and author of several brilliant texts on graphic design and the visual display of quantitative data, has made the Challenger accident a centerpiece of his traveling seminar. His exegesis of the Challenger disaster is available in his book Visual Explanations (Graphics Press, 2001).

In hindsight, it was quickly determined what caused the Challenger to fail: the poor cold-weather performance of the rubber O-rings in the field joints that held sections of the solid rocket boosters together. In a memorable session of the Rogers Commission (the group that investigated the Challenger disaster) the late Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, conducted a dramatic experiment. He affixed a C-clamp to a sample of O-ring material, dropped it into his glass of ice water, and then removed the clamp, revealing that the O-ring rubber lacked resiliency when cooled to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. (See photo below.) → Continue reading: Reflections on NASA’s grim anniversaries

The US bureaucracy’s space branch (NASA) wants to scrap a Shuttle flight to carry out a servicing on the Hubble telescope. A petition has been started by Fernando Ribiero, a Brazilian, to “Save the Hubble“.

As one commenter on the site points out, it is easy for someone living outside the USA to demand that US taxpayers’ money and US lives be risked in a leaky Space Shuttle. For all sorts of American reasons there is a petition but only Americans can sign.

Surely the answer is obvious: privatise Hubble!

I am sure someone could set up a website taking credit card donations to pay for the upkeep of Hubble. Without the NASA inter-departmental bickering, it should be feasible for a few dollars per subscriber a year. I for one would consider this a far preferable use of my money than most government schemes I can think of.

If no trips to service the Hubble telescope are made, it will cease operating by 2007. At some point after that we can assume that the telescope would come crashing down to Earth (statistically not going to do any damage). So the privatisation method I would suggest is that used by the British government to dispose of the Trustee Savings’ Bank in the late 1980s. A price was set, to encourage some sorting out wasters from serious operators and the net proceeds were used to boost the bank’s capital. A variation of this method should keep Hubble up for the next 10 years.

Thirty-seven years ago today Astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chafee and Ed White died in an on the pad test of an Apollo capsule.