Recently it was announced that the Trump administration has asked NASA to study the possibility of putting crew on the first SLS launch in 2019. If this comes to pass, it will entail sending an Orion capsule around the moon (and back, one would hope), the first time humans have left low Earth orbit in… well, a long-ass time.

What would be the scientific benefit compared the baseline plan of sending the capsule unmanned? Well… not a whole lot, especially given that the mission would be rather rushed. But the political benefits *could* be substantial. Assuming it’s a successful flight, it could be seen and sold as the return of America to having an actual space program (as opposed to the “hey, let’s go in circles a few times in an flying United Nations”). Two American astronauts will go back to the moon; not to land, of course, just to get within spitting distance of it. But almost certainly they will get there before any other nation could pull that off. One can of course argue that the US won the race to the moon in 1969, and anybody going there after all these years is a poor second… but in reality, the US has *long* since lost the direct experience and tribal knowledge that got Apollo tot he moon. Most of the people responsible for making Apollo work are dead or very, very retired. The US going back to the moon would be more like the US going for the first time, just again.

There are two obvious potential downsides to this:

Disaster. This could come in the obvious form of the crew being killed at any point during the mission. This could also come in the form of the changes in the mission causing so much trouble and delay and cost overruns that the entire launch gets scrapped. Remember, this flight, if it happens, will happen after the 2018 mid-terms. This flight will be Trumps’ baby, and, who knows, he could well be impeached by then.
How do you follow it up? It’s all well and good to fling some guys past the moon, but this could be done with a substantially smaller and cheaper system than SLS. A pair of Falcon 9 Heavies could certainly do it. The one thing that SLS brings to the party is massive lift capability, which in this case means the ability to send an actual lunar launder. But unless I missed a staff meeting… we have no lunar landers. We don’t even seem to have a real program to develop one.

SLS is meant to launch not only lunar missions but manned missions to Mars. Great! But there are no funded programs to develop actual Mars ships. Lots of people have lots of ideas for what SLS could launch. Some of the ideas are actually pretty good, such as very fast deep space probes, giant space telescopes, components for real space stations, etc. But none of them seem to have the most important feature any such idea needs to have: funding.

The first SLS flight, Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1) is already being assembled. So turning it into a manned flight would entail substantial modificationg to stuff already constructed… never an optimal solution. The second SLS flight, EM-2 scheduled for 2021, is intended to be manned and will have more advanced systems than will be available for EM-1. So it can be readily argued that making EM-1 manned is simply unwise. But the 2021 EM-2 flight would be after the inauguration of whoever wins the Presidential election of 2020. And does Trump – or anybody – really want President Warren to be in charge when NASA next tries to send men to the moon?

So here’s the calculation. NASA does this at Trumps behest, and it crashes and burns: this way leads to DOOOOOOM. NASA does this and succeeds: NASA is golden and Trumps scores points. Launch in 2019 and cement manned deep-space flight into NASAs schedule, or wait until 2021 when there’s a good chance that NASA will be controlled by an Administration that thinks that giant government spending programs are just awesome, so long as they don’t actually *build* anything.

Hmmm.

The Orion nebula lies real close to the celestial equator, which means that satellite sin geostationary orbt will tend to pass quite close to it. Here are some videos some people shot that show just that happening. It seems that the satellite I managed to photograph gong through the nebula was probably a geo-sat. Which is honestly rather astonishing… my new camera, a bog-standard commercial model that is a few years past being brand new, was capable of capturing a chunk of human engineering from a distance of more than twenty two thousand miles.

So, John Glenn was Americas first astronaut into orbit. For a time he was Hero Number One, and apparently considered so important for PR that he was essentially blackballed from going back into space for fear that were he to die it would’ve trashed national morale. The end result was that he didn’t get to fly into space again until he was an old man.

But consider another course of events. He flies to orbit, comes back a hero… and stays a flying astronaut. In that case, chances are good he would’ve gone up on Gemini and an Apollo (not necessarily the first lunar lander, but one of ’em).

My question to ponder: let’s say on his first mission to the moon – call it “Apollo 4,” because “Apollo 1” didn’t burn up on the pad Because Reasons – something goes wrong and the crew is lost. America’s Greatest Hero dies in the course of the mission, out in deep space.

OK, we can all agree that this would be a bad thing on a human level. But from a *political* point of view… would losing the Great Hero and two Red Shirts out in space, rather than a trio of Red Shirts, have *necessarily* trashed the space program? When Challenger was lost, the crew were, as far as the public was concerned, a bunch of folks nobody knew (and one supercargo teacher that a lot of folks knew). Certainly not mid-60’s John Glenn level of celebrity. But even so, they all became national heroes instantly, and their memory helped to keep the Shuttle program going. So it seems to me that losing a national hero on the level of Glenn would *not* be an inevitable death knell to the program, but perhaps a *spur* to the program.

Thought?

I’m tellin’ ya… SpaceX could make some extra scratch by duct taping some lawn chairs to the outside of the top of Stage One and selling those seats to paying customers (space suit rental extra).

A SpaceX Falcon 9 is due to launch a space station respply Dragon from launch pad 39A with a land-landing of the booster. Watch it live:

http://www.spacex.com/webcast

First night I took astrophotos I tried to see what I could get of the Pleiades. Sadly, they don’t come through all that well compared to telescopic photos, but at least you can see ’em. On first glance I could see a satellite pass reasonably close to them – not as close as the Orion satellite, not really worthy of note. But on closer review, you can make out a second satellite trail… much shorter streaks, much fainter, much less uniform in brightness, sometimes not visible at all. This indicates something at a higher orbit and probably tumbling. I expect it’s less “satellite” than “piece of debris,” but who knows. This particular trail *did* pass through the Pleiades, but I didn’t catch that, my first photo being several seconds after the passage.

The second satellite is just barely visible shooting out of the right of the Pleiades. It seemed that the best way to display this so it was visible was with an animated GIF. Since it turns out to be a 2 megabyte image file, I’ve put it past a “read more” break so it doesn’t clog up the blog. The animation is a bit clunky since the series of photos was a bit stuttered.

So once again I was puttering around outside tonight, pointing the new camera at those mysterious lights in the sky. Most interesting result came from pointing the new camera fitted with the old 300mm lens at the Orion nebula. With the old Nikon D5000 camera and this lens, the nebula was recognizable, but looked like garbage. Now it’s recognizable and still nowhere near publication-worthy, but for just lookin’ at purposes, it’s not half bad. In order to get the shot with only a few seconds exposure, the ISO on the camera was cranked up to over 20,000, which is moderately impressive.

These photos might have been worth a single note on this blog, but you’ll notice that there are three essentially identical copies posted below. The reason why there are three is this: if you look kinda close, you can see a satellite pass straight through the nebula. I suppose it’s no more special than a satellite passing through any other patch of the sky, but actually nailing a known astronomical object just seems kinda cool.

Stacking the three images produced a slightly improved-quality version, reducing some of the noise. To really improve the image quality would require a motorized equatorial mount to track the motion of the stars; this would allow a longer exposure at lower ISO.

So is this sort of amateurish astro-photography of interest?

Because why not, here’s an early NASA promotional brochure, “Space … The New Frontier,” sharing a few similarities with the “Spacecraft” book previously posted. Again nothing too exciting, but a possibly interesting look at pro-spaceflight propaganda/information from 1964.

In advance of a project a little ways down the road, I have procured a new camera (Nikon D5500), and have been running it through its paces. Last night I did some night sky photography, catching a whole lot of satellites. Upon reviewing the photos, one satellite seemed to do something a little odd. As far as I can tell it’s not due to the camera screwing up in any way.

Because why not, here’s a link to a complete PDF scan of the “Vistas of Science” book from 1961, “Spacecraft.” Nothing too exciting… a book meant for kids. But it was a book meant to explain spacecraft to kids in a era when the future looked particularly bright for spacecraft.

Cynicism alert: one might be tempted to wonder why this has remained available on the NASA technical report server. Shouldn’t it have been removed as an ITAR risk?