November 2011 Archives

SCI FI MOVIE 'CURSE' MAY HAVE KILLED OFF AMERICAN AIRLINES' FUTURE

 By David Todd

 As American Airlines files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, it may well be suffering from the "sci-fi movie curse of the airlines".  As science fiction film makers have found, predicting the future is fraught with hazard as those companies that are strong now may not be so in the future.  This curse usually results in such airlines which do appear usually not having any future at all.     For example, American Airlines appeared in the well regarded eco-science fiction drama Silent Running (1972) which starred Bruce Dern, some very sweet robots, and a lot of trees.   Of the airline, robots and trees....now it looks as if only the trees will survive.

 American Airlines is not the only victim of this curse.  In Stanley Kubrick's 2001 - A Space Odyssey (1968) the Orion shuttle which carried space passengers to the rotating Earth station was seen in the livery colours of the then great, but now defunct, Pan American World Airways (PanAm).  Perhaps PanAm was asking for it when it even actually took bookings for flights to the Moon.   

 It was not just this film that got it wrong about PanAm.  The dystopian vision of what future cities will be like in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) had massive illuminated advertising hoardings with PanAm featuring prominently.  It was not just Pan Am that was apparently cursed, some of the other companies that featured in the film such as Atari and Cuisinart also suffered financial difficulties.

So which airline/spaceline will actually be around to fly you to the moon?   Obviously, given its plans for suborbital spaceflight Virgin Galactic has to be a contender.  But whichever airline does make it into this brave new future, we do hope it is not one of the low cost airlines.  Let's face it, none of us want to have to pay for our oxygen as a surcharge.

 

 PanAm will now never be an orbital spaceline despite this colour scheme on the Orion III Space Clipper. 

Lump of cash or trip of a lifetime? IT people, it seems, would take the money.

Cambridge-headquartered software company Red Gate has had possibly tens of thousands of entries to its competition, open to database administrators, to win a suborbital flight with Space Adventures. For legal reasons, the winner can choose between the flight or a cash equivalent of $102,000, and though the DBA in Space competition remains open until 22 November, an ongoing survey of the company's Twitter followers has nearly two-thirds opting for the money.

Somehow, Hyperbola reckons this should be no surprise. While millionaires who can't decide whether to buy another Ferrari or not might just as well plunk out for a fairground ride with a difference, for mere mortals with a mortgage and recession angst the choice looks easy.

Preparations are well underway in Kourou, French Guiana for the maiden flight of the European Space Agency's new light launcher, Vega, on 26 January. According to ESA, installation of the 100 tonne solid propellant first stage on the pad began earlier this week, and the solid-propellant second and third stages will follow; by year-end and after the flight readiness review, the fourth-stage attitude and vernier upper module will be integrated.
In parallel, the Italian-built LARES laser relativity satellite payload - and six cubesats, are being prepared.
Vega is compatible with payload masses ranging from 300 kg to 2500 kg, depending on the type and altitude of the orbit required by the customers. The benchmark is for 1500 kg into a 700 km-altitude polar orbit.

Vega will lift off from the Spaceport's ZLV launch site, which originally was used for the Ariane 1 and Ariane 3 vehicles.

The medium-lift Soyuz and light category Vega will complement ESA's heavylift Ariane 5s to provide a range of launch options at Kourou.

A longer-term project is also underway, to develop a a high-thrust cryogenic engine that could form the basis of ESA's next-generation launcher. It will not fly until about 2025, but is intended to provide a medium-lift capability in a modular design, with a re-ignitable upper stage and options for strap-on solid propellant boosters offering extra thrust.

Russia's first planetary science mission in the 21st century is ambitious enough -- land a probe on Mars moon Phobos, take a soil sample ('Grunt' is Russian for 'soil'), and return it to Earth. After a fully successful launch the spacecraft entered its first orbit, and rather than burn its own thrusters to put it on course to Phobos, it stopped.

Controllers are as yet unsure why the thrusters have not fired. As the solar panels were not meant to deploy until the burn was finished, they have not deployed -- and the spacecraft is down to battiers with three days of power. Without power, it cannot run its flight control computers. Without the computers, any hope of a successful mission fades.

Reports are a bit confusing, as Roscosmos is not in the habit of continually briefing reports. Follow Russia space expert Anatoly Zak's updates and the relevant NASASpaceFlight thread for informed commentary.

One of the more unusual chapters in human spaceflight history has come to an end with the return to Earth of the first-ever manned mission to Mars.

Or, at least, with the formal end of a "full-length, high-fidelity simulation of a human mission to our neighbouring planet". That is, six "astronauts" have opened the door to an isolation capsule at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow and stepped outside. Since closing that door 520 days ago, this dedicated crew have simulated a mission to Mars, including launch, interplanetary cruise, landing and excursion, and return home. To make the trip seem as real as possible, communications with the crew were even delayed for several seconds to simulate the time lag in radio chatter that would be experienced in a spacecraft at immense distances from Earth.

Now, for a few more days, they will enjoy some private time and relaxation before talking to the media on 8 November in Moscow; their mission continues into early December, as they go through an exhaustive series of debriefings, tests and evaluations to collect the mission's final data.

The Mars500 project may sound a bit mad, but its purpose is to answer a question absolutely critical to any future attempt to actually visit the red planet - could a human crew actually cope, psychologically and physically, with such a prolonged separation from home?

The simulation was rigorous, by a crew which could reasonably be selected for a real trip to Mars. 

On board were French composites engineer Romain Charles and Italian electronics engineer Diego Urbina, who has trained at the European Space Agency's astronaut training centre and participated in projects including a 2010 Mars Desert Research Station exercise in Utah. From Russia, Sukhrob Rustamovich Kamolov is a surgeon and isolation-conditions specialist, Alexey Sergevich Sitev is a navy diver who has trained astronauts for weightlessness, and Alexandr Ergovich Smoleevskiy is a military physician and flight medicine expert. China's Yue Wang is another medical doctor and astronaut trainee.

As ESA director Jean-Jacques Dordain noted as the Mars500 astronauts emerged from isolation, any real mission to Mars will necessarily be an international effort. To resolve technical issues like long-term life support with no supplies from Earth, adequate fuel supplies for the journey and protection from solar storm radiation will be a massive challenge taxing even the collective efforts of many nations. Coming up with the money to do it, of course, may be even more challenging.

But in the meanwhile early indications are that a crew, at least, could pull off its end of the bargain.

On 31 October, a Long March IIF launched from the Jiuquan launch site in western China. The successful launch carried a Shenzhou 8 capsule, which, though capable of carrying taikonauts, was empty.
On 2 November the capsule docked with Tiangong 1, a space station test bed, making China only the third nation to bring two spacecraft together in orbit (excluding international collaborations like Apollo-Soyuz and ISS).
Despite outwards congratulations from the US government, the general reaction to China's spacefaring has largely been one of suspicion (and occasionally outright hostility). Not that the US government as a whole is afraid of China, but there is enough to drive policy towards exclusion.

Take as an example the recent Congressional hearing, in which Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), to name one, is vociferous in denouncing any collaboration with China, despite that such collaboration is already legally banned. The result is that NASA is barred from sharing innocuous data with the Chinese government, or even meeting with Chinese representatives. Another result is that China is banned from docking with the ISS -- possibly not a deciding factor but certainly an influence on the Chinese decision to build a competing space station, which should be finished by 2020, the year that ISS is due to deorbit.

Bob Bigelow, speaking at ISPCS in Las Cruces, gave a controversial talk in which he posited that China is preparing to lay claim to much of the moon and Mars. His solution is to get there and lay claim first.

One might be reminded of the Red Scare from the Cold War, when any Soviet move was an escalation, and so was any potentially adverse move by anyone else, for that matter. The US reaction resulted in both positive (landing on the moon, rapid technical development) and negative (nuclear bombers on alert, several wars); in any case, in retrospect it often turned out to be a serious overreaction, and sometimes provocation. The Soviets did this as well, believing they were under essentially the same threat we believed ourselves to be under.

There are opportunities for collaboration, for trust-building measures that the US is wilfully ignoring. Competition can be a great thing, but too much competition and the results play out in other areas. In scientific and economic realms, US institutions are busy forging bonds in China that affect the policy of both governments. Space can be a unique, mutually beneficial stage for collaboration or geopolitical trust-building measures; instead it is currently a measure of distrust and fear. China is not an enemy on the scale of the Soviet Union, nor really even a peer competitor. It is puzzling that so many people seem to believe otherwise.