Pluto Day!!!

Some of us have been waiting a really long time for the New Horizons flyby of Pluto (it launched almost a decade ago). However, what we are going to see today is basically NOTHING, other than an endless string of NASA press conferences about how they don't have anything to tell or show us.

New Horizons must first be aimed at Pluto (and it's companion planet Charon; apparently NASA has officially stopped calling it a "moon") in order to get photographs and other data during the flyby. Closest point of approach to Pluto will be at 4:49am pdt, but it will continue photographing and collecting data on Pluto for at least several hours after the flyby. Then New Horizons will realign itself to aim its antenna back toward earth. It will first send a short ping to tell the mission team that the spacecraft made it through the Pluto system without mishap, and that the data was collected and is safely in NH's memory banks. This ping will take about four and a half hours to travel from Pluto back to Earth at the speed of light.

Then New Horizons will begin transmitting its preliminary data package. These will include low resolution (about the quality of a JPEG) images of Pluto and Charon during the flyby. Due to the highly attenuated signal crossing some three billion kilometers of interplanetary space, the baud rate of the transmissions will be maddeningly slow. Once received on earth they must be processed and analyzed.

Wednesday (15 July) at noon pdt, NASA will hold a press conference and release the first series of low resolution photos. This is the first new NASA press conference for this mission that will have any real information in it. High resolution photos are forthcoming, but will take about nine months to arrive.

Childhood's End

There's a lot going on right now in the realm of space exploration. The Dawn mission to Ceres is getting very interesting, the New Horizons mission will reach Pluto and Charon in two weeks; this is all huge, and I haven't posted anything here at all about any of it for a couple of months, due mostly to simple writer's block. Sad about that, and hoping to do better.

So, this morning the SpaceX CRS-7 Dragon/Falcon 9 cargo mission to the International Space Station failed. Notably it was the third failure of a cargo vessel to the ISS in the past eight months, after the Orbital ATK Antares back in October and the Russian Progress 59 in April. In the scheme of such things, this really is not a big deal. The ISS crew have enough provisions until October, and there's another Progress flight scheduled for this Friday. Nobody was hurt, and out of nineteen total Falcon 9 launches since 2010, one catastrophic failure is right at the 5% failure rate which is the rough median for orbital launches.

So, why does this feel like such a monumental blow to the commercial space program, and to spaceflight in general? Rockets explode, it's one of the things they do. When the Antares exploded, spectacularly, last fall, it made the news of course, and people speculated about whether or not Orbital would survive. But nobody speculated about whether or not spaceflight itself would survive. That would have been crazy. But today I've seen that speculation in the media, in chat rooms and other online forums, in all kinds of places that are populated by people who actually understand spaceflight. In the NASA press briefing this morning you could feel that current as well, even though they did a very good job of presenting the rational analysis of this being just another rocket explosion. You could even see it in Charlie Bolden's demeanor this morning. I felt it too.

The difference is not in the scope or magnitude of the loss of the Falcon 9 rocket. We lose rockets. The difference is that this is SpaceX.

For several years now there has grown an idea that the brilliant Elon Musk was doing what no other entity had ever been able to do before. That the founder of Pay Pal was somehow smarter than all of the engineers at NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, Boeing or Lockheed, and had figured out how to make spaceflight safe and affordable when all of the others had failed. With each successful Falcon 9 flight this became easier to believe, largely because we really wanted to believe it. Even Musk's competitors watched him to see if they could emulate his success.

Underlying this was sometimes a sense that SpaceX didn't know what they didn't know, and that through trial and error they would eventually come to look more like Boeing, Lockheed and other "old space" companies. But, we wanted this to not be true. We wanted spaceflight to be as easy, safe and affordable as Musk believed it to be.

Today we learned that Tsiolkovsky doesn't play favorites. And in many ways, today SpaceX finally became a real, grown-up rocket company. And we who follow spaceflight have had to grow up a bit as well.

Ad astra.

Orion Rising

Flawless launch, flight, re-entry and splash down. Nicely done, NASA. Welcome home. We've missed you.

And, a huge shout-out to United Launch Alliance as well. 

Orion Flight Test Profile

Pole Position

 

Orion EFT-1 on top of Delta IV Heavy, launch time 4:05am pst.

 

SCE to AUX

45 years ago today, this happened. Apollo 12, 37 seconds after liftoff, was struck by lightning, which wiped out all of its onboard electronics. The day was saved, the mission went on successfully. And "SCE to AUX" became t-shirt code for "I am the biggest geek in the room."

Kung Fu

If I wanted to fly to London from Seattle, it would cost me about $1300 round trip on a Boeing 747-8. On the other hand, if I needed to purchase a Boeing 747-8 for myself to get to London, that would cost me around $370,000,000. If I had to purchase my own Boeing 747-8 to fly to London, but I could only fly it one time and one way, and would need to buy a second 747-8 (which could also be used only one time) in order to get back to Seattle, now we're looking at almost 3/4 of a billion dollars just in aircraft alone, for a single round-trip flight to London. I like London, it's an amazing city, but not for that price. Divide $740,000,000 by 470 passengers and that comes down to about a million and a half dollars per person; still pricey but I personally know people who could do it, if they sold all of their stuff. If, instead of only using the aircraft for a single one-way trip we could use it over and over, in only six hundred trips at $1300 a seat we will have paid for the aircraft.

So, if I translate this for a colonization mission to Mars, in order to build any permanent colony of any size at all (on Mars, or the moon, or really anywhere) then I need my rockets to leave earth, land on Mars, leave Mars and then land back on earth, in more or less the same configuration it took off in. This is reasonable, but unfortunately this is not, to date, the way spaceflight has been able to work.

If we look at the Apollo/Saturn V moon landings as a baseline of the physics needed to send and return humans to and from another world, it is apparent that in order to reach space and return from it, a spacecraft must almost continually shed excess weight. Saturn V stood some two million kilograms on the launch pad, whereas the Apollo command module which ultimately splashed down weighed maybe a thousand kilograms. This is sloppy, expensive and wasteful, but it is the only way to get a payload of this size into space with current technology.

Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation;

in which the weight of the rocket and fuel at the beginning of the launch and at the end of the launch must not exceed the effective exhaust velocity of the rocket. With existing propellants, it is nearly impossible to lift a payload of any real size even to low earth orbit with only a single rocket stage.

So, almost certainly, the first spacecraft to land humans on Mars will be of this Saturn V-type design, either SLS/Orion, or something very much like it. For exploration missions, this is fine, albeit expensive. The advantage is, we already know how to do this. For a colonization mission, the spacecraft are going to need to be much more like a 747, as far as re-useability. Elon Musk is going to want his rockets back, so he can use them again. Simply piling up hardware on the Martian surface, or at the bottom of the Atlantic, is a lousy business model.

SpaceX has already developed a vertical takeoff and landing rocket prototype, called Grasshopper. It is elegant, but burns lots and lots of heavy propellant to be able to control its landings. It is noteworthy that to date, no SpaceX cargo rocket to the ISS has actually utilized this technology, opting instead for multistage rockets and parachute descents. Adding the fuel weight for a Martian descent and surface escape launch, and still having the delta-v to reach orbit, is challenging at best. But necessary, if Martian colonization is going to be available to anybody but the very, very wealthy.

To Europa, by Bush-Pilot

In retrospect, probably the single biggest flaw in the space shuttle concept was creating a spacecraft to carry crews and cargo at the same time. No other method of transportation typically works this way. Whether you're talking about aircraft, trains, ships or whatever, passenger vessels carry passengers and cargo vessels carry cargo. Yes, a large passenger vessel might incidentally take very small amounts of cargo, and once upon a time cargo ships might take a handful of passengers, but nobody was going to mistake a passenger vessel for a cargo vessel. Except, you know, Alaskan Airlines flights inside Alaska. NASA seems to be steering its SLS rocket in the direction of alternating flights between crews and very high-dollar cargoes, rather than trying to accommodate both in a single flight. It's a subtle but important next step in mainstreaming spaceflight into the transportation industry as a whole.

According to Chris Bergin at nasaspaceflight.com (probably the best free space blog in the world, and its attendant pay site L2 is without parallel) NASA has padded its newest internal manifest for SLS with flagship robotic missions to Mars and Europa, and single-launch space stations interspersed with Orion crewed missions, in order to boost the launch rate to at least one per year. Taking advantage of SLS's enormous speed for robotic missions to the outer solar system seems a very logical extension of this, and further integrates crewed and uncrewed space exploration into a single, more unified program. For deeper space exploration, the payload capacity to carry space telescopes which could dwarf the James Webb has interesting potential as well. This program is evolving into a deep-space workhorse, analogous to what the space shuttle was supposed to be for Low Earth Orbit. Interesting times.

Orion Rising

The first Orion space capsule is complete, today. The United States of America once again is in possession of a crew-rated spacecraft, the first since the retirement of the space shuttles. In the words of Joe Biden, this is a BFD.

Russian Roulette

The malfunction and then detonation of the Antares/Cygnus cargo spacecraft at Wallops on Tuesday is now being tied to the use of refurbished 1960s Soviet vintage AJ26 rocket engines. I'm not going to speculate on whether or not this is the case; I suspect that the age of the engines had very little to to do with the accident, but I have no evidence to back this up either way.

What is more conclusive is that chemical rockets remain A) the only means we have of launching any payload into low earth orbit and beyond and b) dangerous as hell.

A little bit of sloppy number crunching, looking just at the space shuttle program. Five orbiters totaling some 130 launches, two of which failed catastrophically. That's about a 1.5% failure rate. Scaled up to commercial aircraft, that's about 20 major airline disasters every single day. At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. By itself.

This is a serious problem for true commercial spaceflight. If the ground crew cheered every time a Boeing 737 took off or landed safely, nobody in their right mind would fly in Boeing 737s. For routine commercial spaceflight to be feasible, we need something which works reliably every time it flies. Highly volatile chemical rockets probably are not the answer.

One possible answer floating around (sorry) is lighter than air craft. The idea of riding a dirigible into space, at first glance, seems a little absurd. But John Powell of JP Aerospace has demonstrated how a hypersonic dirigible could reach the International Space Station, and beyond. Another possibility is using less volatile hybrid (HTPB/N2O "rubber and laughing-gas") rockets, but these have yet to reach the 100 km Kármán line, much less low earth orbit. But better propellants and/or oxidants may be found, which are still reasonably stable. Until then, what we have looks less like science than theology. And if part of your routine flight-plan includes "pray real hard," you're not yet ready to fly grandma to the moon.

Cargo to Crew

This is the ULA Delta IV Heavy that will launch the Orion spacecraft on its uncrewed maiden voyage this December.

This raises the issue of the difference between rockets for cargo flights into low earth orbit versus crewed flights to the same destinations, and specifically why we can't just use the same rockets for what is nearly the same job. It turns out that modifying an existing cargo rocket for crewed flight is a fairly involved exercise.

The reason is safety, mostly. Rockets have an unhappy propensity for exploding, so any crewed vehicle must be able to safely escape an explosion. Part of the solution is a Launch Escape System, which is simply a small rocket on top of the spacecraft to pull it away from the main engines and fuel tanks in the event of a catastrophic failure. Here is an example, with an Apollo space capsule.

Cargo rockets take the shortest, fastest and simplest (hence closest to vertical) route to orbit that their engines allow, with little consideration for the massive changes in g-forces that the cargo is subjected to. Humans need a slower and gentler ascent. Also, cargo rockets maximize the distance they coast upward unpowered between stages, and by launching essentially vertically the exhaust remains below them. Neither of these are problematical so long as the launch proceeds normally. However, if the LES needed to deploy at certain parts of the launch trajectory (such as at the top of one stage's coasting before the stage above it ignited, or the first few seconds of a launch when the huge exhaust fireball is below the rocket), the LES would be unable to safely extract the spacecraft. These time intervals in which the LES cannot launch the crew safely away from an exploding rocket are called "black zones." Every crewed rocket has some, but the goal is to minimize both the amount and duration of these. One method for accomplishing this, for example, is to launch the rocket in a lower parabola so that for most of its flight to orbit, the spacecraft does not have its own exhaust gasses below it.

The currently used Delta IV, Atlas V and SpaceX Falcon rockets are all presently being modified for commercial crewed flights. Each of these rockets will be discussed here in greater detail, as this series progresses.

From Russia, With Love

So, there's really no better place to begin a series about the current race for human spaceflight, exploration and colonization than to discuss the realities of human spaceflight right now. As of this morning, our total presence off of planet earth right now is five men and one woman on board the International Space Station. I'll talk lots about the ISS in a later post, but I wanted to start with the rocket which got the crew to the ISS today, the venerable Soyuz.

Soyuz is like the Volkswagen Beetle of the world's space programs; small, simple, reliable, and basically unchanged since 1967. 121 crewed launches as of today; I think that's more than all of the rest of the world's crewed space launches combined. Soyuz exemplifies the Russian model of "low-tech solutions to high-tech problems," the spacecraft has always had the look and feel of something that could have been built as a weekend project in someone's garage. I kind of love this spacecraft.

Space Race 2020, Introduction

This is the first new post of a new series I'm calling "Space Race 2020," although I will very likely go back and reflag some earlier posts with it. This is what really inspired me to start blogging regularly again, after a bit of a hiatus. We are entering a very exciting time in space exploration, and I really enjoy geeking about it online. Why 2020? Partly because it is the nominal end-of-mission date for the International Space Station (although I won't be terribly surprised if it continues flying crewed missions for another decade beyond that), partly because it is a target launch date for a number of upcoming programs, but mostly because it sounded better than "The New Space Race," and I'm lazy and won't have to change it for another six years or so.

In the series I intend to talk about both the challenges ahead and the hardware being developed to meet those challenges, and focus on both big players like NASA and much smaller independent players as well. I'm specifically going to look at the immediate future of this decade and the next, meaning realistically probably no further afield than Mars. Well, maybe Ceres or Europa, if someone gets really ambitious.

So, quick disclaimers. I do not presently work in any part of the aerospace industry, and I do not own shares in any part of the aerospace industry, nor am I in any way affiliated with any particular part of the aerospace industry. I do live in Seattle, which is the home of Boeing, and also Blue Origin. I previously served aboard submarines which carried and launched both Poseidon C3 and Trident C4 missiles, and spent a fair amount of time at Port Canaveral for ballistic missile testing and telemetry (and incidentally got to see a number of space shuttle and satellite launches in the process), but my specialty was navigation, not weapons. The last time I was directly or even indirectly involved with the design, development or deployment of any rocket that did not have the word "Estes" on it somewhere, Ronald Reagan was president. I am a US citizen and a veteran of the US Navy, so naturally I have some bias toward American space programs, but my main thrust is to see successful human spaceflight under all and any flag. Russia, China, Japan, India, the European Union and other governmental agencies, and also the various commercial and otherwise independent space ventures, all are contributing to our exploration and eventual colonization of the solar system, and will be covered here in various detail. Also, my age informs my biases. I was barely old enough to watch (and be enthralled by) the Apollo moon landings, and it is my great hope to be able to watch the first humans land on Mars as well. Also, selfishly, I would very much like for the cost of commercial spaceflight to become affordable to the point of experiencing it personally, while I am still young enough to do so. Nothing too extravagant; if I can get over the Kármán line before I'm 75 or so, I'll call that a win.

The race is on.

America's Second Space Station

Part of the new NASA SLS/Orion program is a new space station at the Earth/Moon L-2 Langrangian orbit, literally beyond the far side of the moon. It is called Skylab II. Like the original Skylab concept, it is built out of the liquid hydrogen tanks of a single SLS launch, as opposed to the ten years and 115 flights required to build the ISS. With this same technology NASA will be able to quickly (and relatively cheaply) deploy space stations with more living area than the ISS, basically anywhere in the solar system. Charlie Bolden's master plan is starting to emerge here. It's actually kind of brilliant. And it's starting to look a helluva lot like Wernher von Braun's.

By naming this "Skylab II" I think NASA is implicitly acknowledging that the International Space Station is and always was mostly a Russian endeavor, more "Mir II" than "Freedom," more "Beta" than "Alpha." This isn't a bad thing; were it not for the Russians and Roscosmos right now, we would not have any human presence in space at all, and the ISS would be just an empty and decaying shell of space junk, if it had ever existed at all. But I am very happy to see the US back in the game.

NASA administrator Charlie Bolden, pilot of the space shuttles Columbia and Discovery, and commander of the space shuttles Atlantis and Discovery, seems to be shifting NASA's narrative away from the space shuttle and ISS, and toward SLS/Orion as a continuation of the Saturn V/Apollo program. It isn't a bad narrative. When the SLS program was first announced, it looked a lot like a Saturn V + spare space shuttle solid boosters + a rebuilt Apollo space capsule + a lot of duct tape. It looked like we were planning to go to Mars on a rocket built out of spare parts. But SLS/Orion has evolved a great deal since then, both as an actual spacecraft and as a concept, and as the cornerstone of a new, rather bold space exploration program. I wasn't a huge fan of the Ares/Constellation program, not for any technical reason, but because I wanted to see NASA's budget spent more on unmanned probes deeper into space. The Mars landers and rovers have changed my opinion on this. From Viking to Curiosity they have performed amazing science. But realistically, all of the science performed on Mars combined since 1976 could have been accomplished by one reasonably bright human in one reasonably productive afternoon. It's time to get boots on the ground. SLS/Orion is going to make that possible, soon. Charlie Bolden's "rocket to everywhere" is rapidly becoming a very fine piece of hardware, indeed.

Spirit of St Louis and the DC 3

On Tuesday afternoon NASA announced that the Boeing CST-100 spacecraft and SpaceX Dragon V2 spacecraft would become the replacements for the space shuttle program, and begin ferrying US crews to the International Space Station and other destinations in low earth orbit by 2017. NASA's SLS/Orion program will take the lead on deep space exploration, to asteroids, Mars and beyond. NASA itself seems to be abandoning the moon altogether, but Bigelow Aerospace seems hell bent on colonizing it on their own, which is excellent. Exciting times, for those who care about such things.

I think that the combination of brash, innovative SpaceX and solid, competent and experienced Boeing will be an excellent one. Elon Musk has made it very clear that his goal is to build a city (not research facility, or colony; "city") on Mars soon enough for him to retire on, with or without help from NASA. Boeing is looking to corner the market on cheap, safe and utterly routine spaceflight; to do for spaceflight what they've already done for commercial jet air travel. In their own ways, each goal is incredibly ambitious, and fully achievable with the teams involved. I'm really, really happy to see these two moving forward in realizing commercial spaceflight.

Space Launch System, a reality check

In the past few days I've seen several discussions (based, so far as I can tell, much more on politics than any real science) about how the new NASA Space Launch System (crewed spaceflight to the moon, Mars, asteroids and beyond) should be abandoned, either in favor of the old Constellation/Ares program or Elon Musk's SpaceX program. Some of the arguments put forward have been patently absurd, so I made a quick graphic here to illustrate why.

So, the Ares I (Bush administration) program was abandoned because Ares I was grossly over budget, years behind schedule and had absolutely nothing to show for any of this. The very large R&D budget had all been spent on the R, with nothing left over for D. The later-to-be-developed Ares IV and Ares V rockets showed more promise, but were scrubbed along with the Ares I.

The SLS (Obama administration) Block I, like Ares IV and V, is based partly on "legacy" Space Shuttle hardware. But in order to meet the congressional mandate of having this off the launchpad by 2017, NASA heavily relied also on legacy hardware from the Saturn V. No new hardware means no R&D; SLS Block I is, amazingly, actually a bit ahead of schedule. The SLS Block II spacecraft, which rely in turn on SLS Block I technology, are essentially the Ares IV and Ares V. See illustration for comparison.

Arguing that Ares is a better platform than SLS is akin to arguing that Muhammed Ali was a better boxer than Cassius Clay.

SpaceX, meanwhile, has been fantastically successful so far at launching uncrewed cargo vessels to the International Space Station in low earth orbit, and by 2017 the Dragon Rider spacecraft will be taking crews to the ISS as well. But the Dragon program is basically a redux of the old NASA Gemini program. Which is excellent, and inspired even, but the transition from Gemini to Apollo was one of the most expensive undertakings in human history. Musk could sell a thousand Teslas a day and not be able to build something capable of taking humans to Mars. It is not possible to simply "scale-up" from an earth-orbital spacecraft to an interplanetary (or even translunar) one; the Soviets tried this with disastrous results. Musk has discussed the possibility of developing a rocket to Mars, and I believe he has the know-how to do it. But it's not on the drawing boards yet, it doesn't even exist as a power-point presentation, and I have yet to hear a plausible answer to the question of how he would pay for it.

So, for better or worse, SLS and the Orion spacecraft are America's space program right now, and there isn't a credible replacement for them in the foreseeable future.

Day of Remembrance

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or ever eagle flew — And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

High Flight — John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Apollo 1

27 January 1967

Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom

Challenger STS-51L

28 January 1986

Sharon "Christa" McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judy Resnik, Dick Scobee. Ronald McNair, Michael Smith and Ellison Onizuka

Columbia STS-107

1 February 2003

Kalpana Chawla, Rick D. Husband, Laurel B. Clark, Ilan Ramon, David M. Brown, William C. McCool, and Michael P. Anderson

Race to the Rocks

Now there are two companies competing to mine the asteroids. The race is on!

Ice Hockey

The European Space Agency is planning a mission to try to actually deflect an asteroid from its trajectory. This could be really important to us if we ever found a large asteroid to be on a collision course with earth. Good on them.

Asteroid deflection mission seeks smashing ideas

15 January 2013

A space rock several hundred metres across is heading towards our planet and the last-ditch attempt to avert a disaster – an untested mission to deflect it – fails. This fictional scene of films and novels could well be a reality one day. But what can space agencies do to ensure it works?

ESA is appealing for research ideas to help guide the development of a US–European asteroid deflection mission now under study.

Concepts are being sought for both ground- and space-based investigations, seeking improved understanding of the physics of very high-speed collisions involving both man-made and natural objects in space.

ESA’s call will help to guide future studies linked to the Asteroid Impact and Deflection mission – AIDA.

This innovative but low-budget transatlantic partnership involves the joint operations of two small spacecraft sent to intercept a binary asteroid.

The first Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, designed by the US Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory will collide with the smaller of the two asteroids.

Meanwhile, ESA’s Asteroid Impact Monitor (AIM) craft will survey these bodies in detail, before and after the collision.

The impact should change the pace at which the objects spin around each other, observable from Earth. But AIM’s close-up view will ‘ground-truth’ such observations.

“The advantage is that the spacecraft are simple and independent,” says Andy Cheng of Johns Hopkins, leading the AIDA project on the US side. “They can both complete their primary investigation without the other one.”

But by working in tandem, the quality and quantity of results will increase greatly, explains Andrés Gálvez, ESA AIDA study manager: “Both missions become better when put together – getting much more out of the overall investment.

“And the vast amounts of data coming from the joint mission should help to validate various theories, such as our impact modelling.”

Last week the 325 m Apophis asteroid passed close to Earth, and in mid-February the recently discovered 2012 DA14 space rock will pass closer than many satellites.

ESA is seeking to assess the impact hazard from Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) through its Space Situational Awareness (SSA) programme.

“AIDA offers a promising platform for the test and demonstration of different deflection methods,” adds Detlef Koschny, managing SSA’s NEO effort. “It is therefore important to ask the users early on what they’d like to do with a mission like this.”

For some time, ESA and its international partners have been studying missions to investigate asteroid deflection techniques.

The most popular concept involves a ‘hypervelocity impact’ – a collision at multiple kilometres per second, at such high speed that materials do not just shatter car-crash-style but are vaporised, turning even metal and solid rock into the hot soup of charged particles called plasma.

Such impact testing would help assess if asteroid deflection could be accomplished.

Increased knowledge of hypervelocity impacts would also have wider uses. Planetary scientists would gain fresh insight into our Solar System’s violent early history, including clues to the origin of life and the magnitude of extinction events.

And in practical terms, growing levels of orbital debris increases the risk of highly destructive hypervelocity impacts with critical satellite infrastructure or humans working in orbit. Studying this kind of impact will help to quantify the hazard and inspire protection techniques.

The AIDA Call for Experiment Ideas is being released on 1 February at http://www.esa.int/neo. For further information, see http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/NEO/High_impact_factor_space_R_D_AIDA_Call_For_Experiment

Rocket Science

The brilliant web comic XKCD explains the Saturn V heavy-lift rocket, using only the 1000 most commonly used words in the English language. Besides being funny, it's not a bad approximation of the challenges inherent in communicating in Chinook wawa (which functionally has only about 500 words), and it's also a surprisingly good tutorial on basic rocket design. Not sure how he derived "up goer" for the Roman god Saturn; probably "time god" or "time lord" would have been better, but then it might have been mistaken for a tardis.