Category: Space

On the heels of a predecessor saying otherwise, acting NASA administrator and The Real World alumni Sean Duffy says NASA will beat China to the moon, according to Julia Jester and Denise Chow at NBC News:

During an internal employee town hall Thursday, Duffy warned of “letting safety be the enemy of progress” when it comes to winning the new space race, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by NBC News.

“We are safety driven, and we should be safety driven, and FAA and DOT, we’re the same, but sometimes we can let safety be the enemy of making progress,” said Duffy, who also serves as Transportation Secretary.

“We have to be able to take some leaps. We have to be able to jump forward in our innovation and drive this mission, and there’s always a balance to that, but we can’t side on the side of doing nothing because we’re afraid of any risk,” he told NASA employees alongside newly named NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya.

A spokesperson for NASA said the agency remains committed to safety.

There have been times in NASA’s past where the “safety vs. progress” balance went too far in the wrong direction, and they usually end badly.

When Jim Bridenstine was named NASA Administrator during Trump’s first time in office, many folks (including me) were worried that a Congressional representative from Oklahoma was a bad choice, but by the time he was out of office, I think most people thought he had done a pretty good job at shepherding NASA through a couple of rocky years.

In the years since, he’s been working in the private space sector, and was recently questioned on Capitol Hill about where NASA is in its slow motion return to the moon.

Ryan Caton and Chris Bergin report:

In a pointed testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine expressed deep concerns about the complexity and feasibility of NASA’s Artemis program, warning that the United States is “highly unlikely” to land astronauts on the Moon before China due to challenges with orbital refueling and an ambitious architecture.

They go on:

Bridenstine highlighted the high costs and sustainability issues with NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, calling it “extraordinarily expensive”, but advocating for its continued use since it’s already developed. He also praised the recent “Big Beautiful Bill,” which secures funding for Artemis 4 and 5 missions using SLS Block 1B and the Orion spacecraft.

However, he stressed a critical gap: notably that the U.S. lacks a ready Lunar Lander.

Under NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) contracts, two vehicles are in development—SpaceX’s Starship HLS for Artemis 3 and 4, and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mk2 for Artemis 5.

I wish he had been more vocal about these issues when he was running the agency, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong now.

If you’ve seen Tom Hanks’ Apollo 13, you surely remember the scene where a group of guys dump a bunch of junk onto a table to figure out how to adapt air-scrubbing canisters meant for the command module to work in the lunar module that was keeping the crew alive.

Ed Smylie lead the work that solved the problem, giving the crew enough air to breathe to make it home. His contraption was literally held together with duct tape:

Michael S. Rosenwald, writing about Smylie for The New York Times:

The day after the astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise returned to earth on April 17, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon awarded NASA’s mission operations team with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In his remarks, he singled out Mr. Smylie and his deputy, James V. Correale.

“They are men whose names simply represent the whole team,” President Nixon said at a ceremony at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. “And they had a jerry-built operation which worked, and had that not occurred, these men would not have gotten back.”

For all the crappy things that 2020 brought, the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory continues to sting. Since its demise, the failure has been under investigation, and a recent report sheds new light on what happened:

Long-term zinc creep-induced failure in the 57-year-old telescope’s cable spelter sockets was the root cause of the telescope’s collapse, the report says. Sockets filled with zinc held in place a set of cables suspending the telescope’s main platform over the reflector dish. Gradually the zinc lost its hold on the cables and allowed several of them to pull out, leading to the collapse of the platform into the reflector.

The failure sequence began with Hurricane Maria, over three years prior to the collapse, according to the report. Indications of cable pullout were minimal before the hurricane. Large and progressive cable pullouts could be seen during post-hurricane visual inspections, observation of which should have prompted remedial action. Safety factor calculations made following the first cable failure did not recognize the accelerated time-dependent materials failure process governing the eventual zinc pull out.

This is the first documented case of long-term zinc-induced creep failure despite a long history of usage over a century, the report notes. A possible explanation for the accelerated zinc-creep is long-term low-current electroplasticity, induced by the electromagnetic waves from the Arecibo Telescope. It recommends that the NSF should offer the remaining socket and cable sections for study by the research community.

Emma Roth:

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn astronauts successfully performed a spacewalk, marking the first done by a private company. After depressurizing SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, the billionaire funding the mission, Jared Isaacman, emerged from the spacecraft early Thursday morning.

With his torso and head fully sticking outside the capsule, Isaacman performed tests on SpaceX’s new spacesuits, which are designed for increased mobility. “Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do,” Isaacman said during the spacewalk. “But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world.”

Isaacman’s Polaris Program is a huge St. Jude supporter. The dude is out here making history and trying to solve childhood cancer.

Boeing has a ghost in the machine.

Eric Berger, writing at Ars:

Following weeks of speculation, NASA finally made it official on Saturday: Two astronauts who flew to the International Space Station on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft in June will not return home on that vehicle. Instead, the agency has asked SpaceX to use its Crew Dragon spacecraft to fly astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth.

“NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with Crew-9 next February,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson at the outset of a news conference on Saturday afternoon at Johnson Space Center.

In a sign of the gravity surrounding the agency’s decision, both Nelson and NASA’s deputy administrator, Pam Melroy, attended a Flight Readiness Review meeting held Saturday in Houston. During that gathering of the agency’s senior officials, an informal “go/no go” poll was taken. Those present voted unanimously for Wilmore and Williams to return to Earth on Crew Dragon. The official recommendation of the Commercial Crew Program was the same, and Nelson accepted it.

Therefore, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will undock from the station early next month—the tentative date, according to a source, is September 6—and attempt to make an autonomous return to Earth and land in a desert in the southwestern United States.

As wild as this story is, it highlights why competition in space is so important. Had Boeing been the only partner in the Commercial Crew program, a lot of what has happened in the last decade would not have happened at all. Say what you will about Elon Musk, SpaceX has served this program well.