Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/pc/text/spacedig/v09_3/v9_388.txt

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Subject: SPACE Digest V9 #388

SPACE Digest                                      Volume 9 : Issue 388

Today's Topics:
 Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM) Project (Fact Sheet) (Forwarded)
              Re: Hubble Space Telescope
    Re: URGENT -- SPACE STATION FUNDING VOTE ON TUESDAY!!
               postmortem on L5
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 21 Apr 89 16:41:49 GMT
From: trident.arc.nasa.gov![e-mail]  (Peter E. Yee)
Subject: Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM) Project (Fact Sheet) (Forwarded)


           ADVANCED SOLID ROCKET MOTOR (ASRM) PROJECT

     The Advanced Solid Rocket Motor project is intended to
substantially improve the flight safety, reliability and
performance of the Space Shuttle's Solid Rocket Boosters for the
many years in the future that the Shuttle will remain a principal
U.S. launch vehicle.

     Key objectives of the project are to achieve significant
improvements over the current Redesigned Solid Rocket Motor in
the areas of:

   o  Flight safety design margins;
   o  System reliability, through enhancements in motor quality
      and reproducibility;
   o  Booster performance, along with the related aspect of
      Shuttle payload capacity; and
   o  Reduced overall program cost, through increased efficiency.

     In terms of performance, the Shuttle's projected 12,000-
pound extra lifting capability with the new motors will enable
additional payload deliveries equivalent to 2.4 Shuttle missions
per year, above the currently planned maximum of 14 per year.

     In addition to improved safety, reliability and performance,
the next-generation booster project promises several broad
national benefits.  For example, it will strengthen the nation's
existing technology foundation as a base for future advances in
solid fuel propulsion.  It will help promote a competitive solid
rocket motor industry and reduce Shuttle operational costs.

     Substantial improvements are possible because of great
technological progress made by the solid rocket motor industry
since the current Shuttle booster was designed.  Some of the most
significant strides have been in process control technology and
automation, which enable achieving a high degree of product
reproducibility and reliability.

     These improvements will be incorporated in modern production
facilities that are to be built for the Advanced Solid Rocket
Motor project and which will have a capacity of producing up to
30 motors per year.  The facilities are planned for construction
at the Yellow Creek site in extreme northeastern Mississippi,
which is NASA's preferred site for the hardware production.

     Additional specialized facilities will be built at the John
C. Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Miss., NASA's
preferred location for ground testing of the motors.  It also is
planned that part of the effort will use NASA's existing
facilities at the Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans.

     The Advanced Solid Rocket Motor development program is
expected to take approximately 5 years, with first use of the new
motors in a Shuttle flight possible by 1994.  The cost of design
and development is estimated at just under $1 billion, exclusive
of facility costs, which are estimated at between $200 and $300
million.  The design and development cost will include delivery
of rocket motors for six Shuttle missions (which will save $170-
180 million currently being paid for the old-technology motors).

     Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages
the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor program for NASA.

Evolution of ASRM

     Since 1977, the Space Shuttle has consisted of a manned
reusable orbiter, an expendable external tank for its liquid
propellants, and two recoverable and reusable solid rocket
boosters.  Each booster comprises several subsystems, the largest
of which is the solid rocket motor with its igniter and nozzle.

     In 1986, following the Challenger accident, NASA contracted
for a redesigned solid rocket motor, which would incorporate a
number of design changes determined to be necessary before the
Shuttle could return to flight.  The redesign effort was oriented
toward providing a motor that is safe to fly, while at the same
time keeping impact to the Shuttle launch schedule at a
minimum.  Therefore, the redesign was based on use of existing
hardware wherever possible, without compromising safety.

     To meet its longer-term solid rocket motor requirements,
NASA in March 1987 presented to Congress an acquisition strategy
and plan.  The plan analyzed three options:  recompeting the
redesigned solid rocket motor; continuing single-source
procurement of the redesigned motor; or proceeding with an
Advanced Solid Rocket Motor, which had already been the subject
of NASA-funded studies by industry.

     NASA recommended the third option, and in October 1987,
through the NASA Authorization Act of 1988, Congress indicated
its approval for that approach.  In March 1988, NASA published an
acquisition plan detailing how it would implement the Advanced
Solid Rocket Motor program.  With issuance of the request for
proposals in August 1988, the procurement began in earnest.
Evaluation of proposals has been under way since November 1988,
and selection of a prime contractor is expected to be announced
this month (April 1989).

------------------------------

Date: 12 Apr 89 14:29:49 GMT
From: stsci![e-mail]  (Jim Sims)
Subject: Re: Hubble Space Telescope

HST will OFTEN be pointed at the Earth (the HSP even has an EARTH-CALIB mode)
You won't 'burn-up the sensors' unless you point it at the sun...
 (of course the data probably won't be worth much since it won't focus at
  -only- 200 miles & the target is REAL bright compared to most of what it was
  designed to look at)



--
    Jim Sims      Space Telescope Science Institute      Baltimore, MD
             UUCP:  {arizona,decvax,hao,ihnp4}!noao!stsci!sims
    ARPA:  [e-mail]                           SPAM:  SCIVAX::SIMS

------------------------------

Date: 21 Apr 89 19:57:31 GMT
From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: URGENT -- SPACE STATION FUNDING VOTE ON TUESDAY!!

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (John McKernan) writes:
>... NASA is a government bureaucracy and so is by its nature
>inefficient. Furthermore, government is the only current source of the amount
>money needed to build large scale space hardware (with the possible exception
>of unmanned satellite launchers)...

This is tautological.  Government is the only current source of the amount
of money needed to build large-scale space hardware THE GOVERNMENT WAY.
Of course, if you ask the government, they will assure you that it's the
only way.  Even though doing the same things privately costs an order of
magnitude less.
--
Mars in 1980s:  USSR, 2 tries, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
2 failures; USA, 0 tries.      | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 21 Apr 89 21:08:47 GMT
From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: postmortem on L5

Readers may recall that I commented, a few months ago, on the L5 Society's
prolonged illness and eventual demise-by-merger.  A little while later,
I got the following as mail from Keith Henson.  He included a covering note
saying it was okay to post it if I felt it would do some good.  I think
it might; at the very least it's fascinating history.

Note that it's definitely one man's view, and that I don't necessarily
agree with it all.  The occasional typo and misspelling are as I received
it; out of a combination of respect for source material and laziness, I
haven't made any attempt to fix them.

-------------

Postmortem on L5  (Editorial note.  This was rejected by the new
NSS publication--too spicy.)


"O'Neill Testifies Before Congress--. . . Target dates for this
proposal are the establishment of a construction site in 1982 and
completion of the initial L-5 community of 10,000 people in 1988.
The first (SPS) power would be beamed to earth in 1989." *L5
News*, Vol. 1, #1


   By H. Keith Henson, (Officially) a Founder of the Society.


The dust has settled after the merger and the name change attempt
has been discredited.  Has the promise of the merger been
fulfilled?  Is the human habitation of space cause better off?

No way.

Membership drifts downward from a level only half that need to
support NSS unless continually pumped up by expensive membership
drives. Volunteers are in short supply. *Space World* is insipid
to the point of nausea.  *Ad Astra* (the new publication) faces
similar prospects. The space shuttle flies again, but there
is no sense of direction. Malaise hangs heavy over NSS and the
rest of the space community is not much better off.

How different from the "good old days" when (in spite of the fact
that we never accomplished much) the Society grew and waxed in
influence on a combination of enthusiasm, intense personal
dedication, and sacrifice.

What changed?  Is there anything we can do to recapture the
spirit of that era?  Is there anything (before reaching the holy
grail of nanotechnology) we can do that would help bring about
the human habitation of space?

Far from being a rhetorical question, tentative answers to these
cultural dynamics questions can be found using the new mental
tools of memetics.* Those who are upset by the "N" word or the
"M" word should stop reading here.  For the rest, a little
history is in order.

-----------
footnote If you are not up on memetics, see "Memetics, the
Science of Information Viruses" in *Whole Earth Review* Winter
1987 or the Science Fact article in the August 1987 issue of
*Analog*.
-------------

The space colony dream (a meme) grew in the mind of Dr. Garard
O'Neill from his own work, that of his students, and fragments of
previous dreams (Tsiolkowsky, Cole, Bernal, and others) in the
late sixties and early seventies.  In September of 1974 (the year
that also saw the first small conference at Princeton) Dr.
O'Neill' space colony meme made the big time (small b) with a
publication in the September 1974 issue of *Physics Today*.

Because of my long standing and locally known interest in space
development (thanks to the late Robert Heinlein) and my more
recent concerns about preceived resource limits, Dan Jones, an
occasional rock climbing partner of mine with a PhD in physics
knew I would be interested--infectable, nay, I was actively
seeking infection with a meme like this.  He brought me a copy of
Dr. O'Neill's article within hours of that issue reaching Tucson.
(The "Colonies in Space" article ranks high on the list of "most
xeroxed" in the world.)

After reading it, I immediately tried to find anything else that
had been published on space colonies. The only other material
available was an interview with Dr. O'Neill that had been
published in *Mercury* about the same time.  He mentioned a small
conference on space colonies that was being planned at Princeton
the following May. Despite the fact that I was nearly broke from
starting a business, had never been to a conference before, or
given a paper at a meeting, or even been on the campus of an Ivy
League school, I was so motivated by the meme that I made it to
the 1975 Space Manufacturing Conference, and, with my former
wife, gave a paper on space agriculture that covered all the
major points involved in environmental control and growing food
for thousands of people in space. (Much of the paper, I must
admit, was cribbed from Heinlein's *Farmer in the Sky*).  Perhaps
half of the major players in the post '72 space movements found
out about the space colony dream, were similarly affected, and
were drawn to that conference.

A few months before the conference, Dr. O'Neill had melded into
the space colony dream the solar power from space (SPS) concept
invented by Dr. Peter Glaser (he holds the soon-to-run-out
patent).  This was the last major ingredient needed to put the
space colony meme into an intensely infective form, at least for
some people. Energy from space provided a rational for building
colonies in space, especially in the memetic environment induced
by energy crisis of the early seventies.  Ideas with far less
promise (but shorter time and size scales) *were* converted into
reality. Anyone driving through the California passes can see
them, vast fields of windmills built on tax breaks.

At the conference, Dr. O'Neill gave a Spook-like presentation on
building SPS's and space colonies (literally) from moon dust.
His studies (rational enough to be published in *Science*) made
it seem logical that the habitation of space with all that
attractive new land could be started by a short term industrial
development project of 10 to 15 years.  For those of us raised on
science fiction, (at least for those who would actually go into
space if we were given the chance) the space colony/SPS meme was
terribly compelling.

The '75 SMF conference was a intense, almost religious,
experience. It will be a bright spot in the memory of the "world
savers" who were there as long as any of us are left alive to
remember it. I hope that somewhere a tape survives of the
impassioned banquet speeches, and the dire warnings from shell
shocked NASA representatives that if Proxmire got wind of this
craziness he would "kill the Shuttle."

The space colony idea inspired a vast outpouring of effort from
those of us who "caught" it. Summer studies ('75, '76 and '77)
put the design into a form that has not changed noticeably in the
last decade. Mid-1975 saw the abortive start of "High Frontier,"
and in September the less-than-auspicious founding of the L5
Society.

Late in '75 the fledgling Society put in an appearance at the
"Doom and Gloom" Limits to Growth conference near Houston. Our
star was Dr. Peter Vajk who (in the process of folding in energy
from space to the computer models) had begun to suspect that the
Limits to Growth models were "cooked."  I wouldn't mention LTG,
but the growth in popularity of one meme often depends on the
cultural environment (or memetic ecosystem) set by other memes.
The space colony/SPS prospects of nearly limitless energy and
materials stands in stark contrast to LTG. Though I can't prove
it, I think that the LTG "dreary, limited, hopeless future" meme
created a cultural environment where a contrasting meme of
bright, exciting prospects such as space colonies/SPS could
infect those dismayed by the LTG meme.

In 1976 the space colony/SPS idea began to spread widely. Those
most infected joined the L5 Society.  L5 grew beyond the first
two hundred or so who had direct contact with Dr. O'Neill. The
Society made its first appearance at a World Science Fiction
convention (MidAmericon) at the urging of the noted science
fiction author, and later L5 activist, Dr. Jerry Pournell. A
letter in Playboy by science fiction author Robert Anton Wilson,
promotion by Dr. Timothy Leary (who had independently come to the
conclusion that we needed to leave the planet) and a continuing
series of articles in magazines and newspapers were significant
factors in the spreading of the space colony idea and the growth
of L5 that year.

Funding for space colony/space manufacturing/extraterrestrial
resources studies never amounted to much, but SPS funding under
the Department of Energy peaked at about $10 million a year in
the late '70s. Several companies, notably Boeing, worked on it.
The L5 Society got involved in one of those glorious waste of
money by a liberal administration, a study of how the space buffs
felt about SPS.

The end of the SPS funding came in 1979.  I still have a plastic
portfolio dated April 22-25 1980 from a national conference that
was held in Lincoln, Nebraska to officially report on the success
of the technical and economic studies, and unofficially moan
about the political end of a project that had been kicked back
and forth between NASA and DOE, and died on the rocks of cheaper
oil and four year planing horizons.

With the SPS economic rational gone, the believability of space
colony dream suffered. As prospects for near term space
habitation faded, the rational for an L5 Society faded, but the
publicity stirred up by the Moon Treaty fight kept the moribund
Society growing in numbers (if not dedication) for some time.

In July of 1979 the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses
of Outer Space reported out the long awaited Moon Treaty for
ratification by the member states.   Defeating the Moon Treaty is
generally considered to be the peak of L5's influence.  In a
nutshell, a meme (the treaty) which evolved in the minds of a
number of international lawyers to socialize the resources of
the universe clashed with the frontier-libertarian-free
enterprise space colony memes carried in the minds of a lot of L5
members.  So far, the treaty-meme has lost.

Jerry Driggers, an aerospace engineer much taken by Dr. O'Neill's
ideas (he gave a major paper at the '75 conference and was at all
the summer studies) took over as L5 president right in the middle
of the Moon Treaty fight.

The ebbing of the energy crisis made it unlikely that SPS funding
would be resumed any time soon. With no other hook to hang space
colonies on, Jerry made a conscious choice, to direct the Society
away from space colonies and into the NASA political support
role--particularly pushing for the space station-- that NSI
should have filled, but never did very well. Since then, the
focus has been reaching the broader base of space support at the
cost of diluting the intensity.

In retrospect (and certainly with no blame on Jerry Driggers) I
think this was a serious mistake.  The meme of expansion into
space by government projects involving a few astronauts has wider
appeal, but the appeal is quite weak. It motivates only a very
few civic minded techno-nerds to work hard for it compared to the
number of us who will bust ass even for a remote prospect that
they could personally go into space.  Long ago Dr. O'Neill
attributed the attractiveness of his ideas to the personal
opportunity factor. (see *The High Frontier*, pg 251.) This
change in focus, or if you will, meme switch, pulled the heart
out of L5 and put NSI and L5 into almost the same memetic
"ecological niche."  It made a merger, or the demise of one of
the two almost inevitable.

The two organizations were also put into direct competition for
financial resources.  Jerry's attempts to raise money for the
Society from the aerospace industry (which had long supported
NSI) to support this redirection of effort was a failure, and a
personal disaster.  It is easy to see why he thought the
aerospace industry would provide support. L5 had come to national
attention over the Moon Treaty*, and Jerry had the help of Dr.
Thomas Paine who was head of NASA during the Apollo landings and
Lee Ratiner, a negotiator for the government on the Law of the
Sea treaties and hero of the Moon Treaty fight.  But it is hard
to invade someone else's niche. The aerospace companies were
comfortable with NSI.  Even if NSI didn't accomplish much, it was
unlikely to embarrass them, and the same could not be said of L5.

During the early years, the space shuttle (one of the keys to
O'Neill's space colony dream) kept falling further and further
behind its projected flight date.  This hurt the believability
factor as well. While it finally started flying in 1981 it never
reached the projected flight rate, and the cost per pound lifted
to orbit has continued to soar, especially since the Chalenger
blew up. While "extraterrestrial materials multiplier" might
compensate for the rising cost, it doesn't look like cargo space
to Low Earth Orbit to start a manufacturing facility could be
obtained from NASA for any price.  It is fairly clear that some
other--perhaps non-governmental--transportation will be needed
to colonize/industrialize space.

--------------
(footnote)
(NSI never took a stand on the Moon Treaty, I have been told that
NSS did take a formal position against the treaty about a year
after the merger, but I am uncertain where this was reported.)
--------------

No reason to go, and no way to get there. Does this glum picture
leave us with any hope? What would induce people in the US or
elsewhere to tap the resources of space, and coincidentally give
the space nuts among them a chance for at least a weekend in
orbit? A few years ago, I considered the SDI project the only
current possibility, but SDI seems less and less likely, not
because it isn't a better idea than the alternatives, but because
the idea has become stale, and the perceived threat of nuclear
war has declined.  Also, the current proposals do not require
extraterrestrial resources, and that is the *only* way (prior to
nanotechnology) that more than a handful of people will get into
space.

My current best guess is that concerns about the greenhouse
effect will bring the SPS meme back into popularity. This country
isn't going to tolerate hotter and hotter summers if there is
anything we can do about it. SPS is the only option for baseload
electric power currently known that makes no acid rain, carbon
dioxide, or nuclear waste. The greenhouse effect is also a long
term concern, longer than the time scale on which space industry
could be established. This should insulate the memes on which the
project will depend from losing influence over four year
political cycles and short term fluctuations in the price of
energy. The August 30 *San Jose Mercury News* carried a long
article by the well known science writer William J. Broad
discussing SPS as a greenhouse solution. This might be an early
sign of a resurgence of the SPS meme.

Of course, SPS built from earth resources, perhaps by robots,
won't help us space buffs get off the mudball either.  The idea
of building SPS out of extraterrestrial materials has to become
the accepted approach. The physics/engineering/economics seems to
be favorable, but there are problems.  Foremost is the
mind-boggling number of steps required to get from today to SPS
power through manufacturing facilities based on extraterrestrial
resources.

The environment in which the space colony/SPS meme grew during
the early days of L5 just wasn't fertile enough to get itself and
those who believed in it into space.  In memetic terms we could
say the idea did not infect enough people long enough, and strong
enough, for the economic and political factors, like those that
built the windmills (taxmills?) to come into play.  But the space
colony/SPS idea did spread far enough for it to be considered as
a solution to a another perceived problem a decade latter.

Last summer I visited Grand Coulee dam, a project in its day as
ambitious as SPS (and coincidentally it produces about the same
amount of power as *one* SPS.)  The people who promoted Grand
Coulee dam worked on it for decades, promoting it primarily to
lift water for irrigation on the fertile, but dry, plateau. It
was finally built for another reason entirely, to provide jobs in
response to P(a great depression, and secondarily to pump water
(few at the time thought that much electric power would ever be
needed). It was pressed into use to supply electricity to Boeing
during WW II, and now it is mostly used to supply peaking power
to the Northwest.

There are no Columbias left to dam, but geosync can hold enough
SPS's to entirely phase out the use of coal.

Can we do anything to speed the acceptance of SPS from
extraterrestrial material? Will the environmental groups take
over promoting SPS?  Should we leave it to them? I cannot answer.
Memetics is far from an exact science, and behavior of a meme in
the "meme pool" of human culture may be like other unpredictable
(that is chaotic) systems.  After an epidemic (memetic or
otherwise) gets started, its short term course can be predicted
with considerable accuracy.  It is also possible to say that the
environment (low immunity for example) is conducive to an
epidemic. But a community can go on for an unpredictable time
before one actually happens.

In a similar way, the SPS/space colony idea is out there, and the
memetic environment might be changing in ways that improve its
chances for infecting large numbers of people strongly enough for
it to become reality.  This leads to an interesting possibility.
Maybe we should not be talking about the SPS solution just yet.
It might be better for us to terrify everyone by talking about
140 degree summer heat, hurricanes of 250 miles per hour, and
introduce the SPS solution to this nightmare only after the
public is in a panic.

If SPS were to be promoted from within the NSS, the narrow focus
of NSS on a NASA space station would have to be changed. It is
not obvious to me that the existing governmental agencies
concerned with space are appropriate to build or even oversee
building "solar power dams" in space.  NASA is a trembling shadow
of its former glory, and the shuttle is not the vehicle for the
job of building a solar power industry in space. The traditional
approach is to abandon the old and start anew. Perhaps in a few
years we will be hearing about SPS planing by the straight
shooters at DCDC, the Department of Carbon Dioxide Control.

Postscript on "Postmort"

"Our clearly stated long range goal will be to disband the
society in a mass meeting at L-5."
                                      Ibid.

Did I *really* think an organization with the audacious goal of
disbanding at a mass meeting in space would actually accomplish
that?  Immaterial.  Without exciting and ambitious goals people
never accomplish anything.
-------------
--
Mars in 1980s:  USSR, 2 tries, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
2 failures; USA, 0 tries.      | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry [e-mail]

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V9 #388
*******************