The Chinese Space Station

While the United States recovers from problems with access to the International Space Station (ISS), yesterday China launched a mock component so it could practice maneuvering for a future space station.  The component, named "Heavenly Palace-1," will circle the earth for two years while manned and unmanned dockings are tested.  China will be the third national to have a space station after the United States and Russia should it realize its goal sometime around 2022.

In the meantime, three crew members from the ISS successfully returned to earth on September 16.  The replacement crew is scheduled to return to the ISS on November 14 aboard a Soyuz 28 spacecraft.  If the Russians have trouble meeting this schedule maybe we can hitch a ride with the Chinese.

Hollywood and the Moon: The Undiscovered Country?

In general, the public's mood about our moon has been "been there, done that."  The Apollo missions gave us the opportunity to explore the moon surface, bring back samples, and grab a new perspective on this beautiful planet of ours.  So what do we expect to find on the moon today?  Well, we are still interested in finding pockets of water and the origin of the moon is still somewhat of a mystery.  Is it the remnants of a collision between the earth and a Mars-size planet?  Did the earth have two moons at one time?

This month NASA launched the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) on a Delta II rocket.  GRAIL will map the gravitational field to better understand the nature of the moon and its evolution to what it is today.  This follows a number of other recent missions, such as the June 2009 launch of an Atlas 5 rocket, which allowed NASA to begin the process of locating new landing sites for future moon missions using the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, while also checking for water using the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. 


So with these past explorations and new questions, you would think we have enough science to create a few interesting stories about the moon.  Not really.  If you look at two summer movies you will see different spins on the Apollo missions, both of them pretty crazy.  First, you have Transformers:  Dark of the Moon, where the entire moon mission was to salvage an alien spacecraft from Cybertron that crash-landed on the dark side of the moon.  Then we had Apollo 18, a movie that covers the supposedly last Apollo mission designed to place sensors on the moon to detect Soviet ICBMs.  Of course, things went awfully wrong. 

Interestingly enough, NASA set up a page on Apollo 18 to comment on the film footage and the veracity of such a mission.  I am hoping this was some fun publicity and not any real concern on the part of the space program that Americans could be confused.  The NASA statement points out "There never was a DoD-dedicated Apollo mission and no astronauts named Anderson, Walker or Grey were ever selected for NASA's astronaut corps, as the movie depicts, or failed to return from the moon."  Are you convinced now?  In fact, it is odd that the film used the astronaut names Benjamin Anderson, Nathan Walker and John Grey rather than the names of the astronauts originally slated for the mission (of course, this was just a proposed rotation schedule):  Richard Gordon,Vance Brand, and Harrison Schmitt.

This makes me wonder if it is time for NASA to deny some other ideas spinning around Hollywood these days.  For instance:

--  Moon (2009):  Does NASA have plans to mine Helium-3 on the moon with clones?
-- The Dark Side of the Moon (1990):  Does the dark side of the moon have a link with the Bermuda Triangle?
-- Cat-Woman of the Moon (1953):  I think you know the question here.

The Risks of the Space Program

So what are we to make of the August 24th failure of Blue Origin's spacecraft failure?  We should not be surprised that spacecraft will occasionally fail when we are testing new ideas and concepts.  So in that sense there is little to surprise the space community.  However, I am surprised that it took an intrepid reporter to even learn about it rather that the company coming clean immediately.  Not all that encouraging when NASA is funding this company. 

On September 2nd, Blue Origin's website reported the failure, noting

...last week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet. A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle. Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we're signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job. We're already working on our next development vehicle.

This is a simple upbeat version of events, which is what I would expect from any forward-looking organization.  So why the delay?  I would hate to see our private sector programs go the way of the Chinese and Russians where only successes get reported.  We need to know about the good and bad since this is the learning process.

Let's get back to work and keep testing and trying.  We need these projects to get our astronauts back into low-earth orbit.  With the recent failure of the Russians in this area, we need as much redundancy as we can muster.