Moving Fast and Breaking Starships

Not being retired, I can't drop everything I'm doing and run down to Boca Chica at the southern tip of Texas and wait till Elon Musk's SpaceX organization decides to launch a Super Heavy booster with a Starship on top of it.  But I'd like to, as it's a shorter trip than the drive to Florida to watch launches at the Cape. 

 

But it turns out that if I was looking for a spectacular aeronautical display, Florida would have been the better place to watch last Thursday's launch from, which took place after sundown that evening.  The Super Heavy booster did its job, successfully separating from the Starship second stage, and even returned safely to the launch pad as designed.  But an "energetic event," as the controllers termed it, happened inside the Starship shortly thereafter, shutting down several of its engines, destabilizing it into a spin, and causing it to explode.  Numerous posts to social media from Florida and the Caribbean show a constellation of flaming objects streaking across the night sky.  According to Reuters, a car in the Turks and Caicos Islands was slightly damaged by a piece of the rocket that fell out of the sky.  But not to worry—SpaceX says there were no toxic materials in the debris.  Nevertheless, the Federal Aviation Administration stopped flight takeoffs from several Florida airports briefly because of "space launch debris," and launched its own investigation into the failure. 

 

According to a Wikipedia article on the Starship, there have been eight flight tests so far of the integrated Super Heavy booster and Starship orbital vehicle, beginning in 2022.  Three (the fourth, fifth, and sixth) were entirely successful in the sense that both rockets took off and landed intact under control.  The first three and the last two, including last week's test, ended with at least the Starship blowing up, although the booster seems to be working more reliably. 

 

Characteristically, Musk termed the latest test a "minor setback."  Maybe it's minor to one of the world's richest men, but to people in Florida and the Caribbean, a small but non-zero chance of having a piece of rocket come down on your head is perhaps something more than minor. 

 

Comparisons between SpaceX's exploits and the NASA manned spaceflights of the 1960s are inevitable, at least to someone like me who lived through them both.  The Falcon 9 spacecraft, which was the first significant rocket to be introduced by SpaceX, was first launched in 2010, and it was not until ten years later that the company risked putting people on it.  By then it had proved to be one of the most reliable orbital workhorses ever designed, so the risks were reasonably well known. 

 

Although the U. S. space program started off with an embarrassing failure—the December 1957 attempt to orbit a satellite after the Soviet Union beat us into space—it quickly recovered and to my knowledge, there were no major rocket explosions, certainly none with people aboard, until the famous Apollo 13 lunar-orbit service-module failure, which almost left the astronauts stranded. 

 

So we can regard the last two Starship failures as growing pains, perhaps, and look forward to many more before the track record improves to the extent that anyone smart enough to train as an astronaut will be willing to step aboard for a ride.  The question now is whether we should put up with falling space debris indefinitely while SpaceX works the bugs out of its rockets.

 

So far, no one seems to have raised any show-stopping objections.  SpaceX and Musk are formally at the mercy of the FAA, which has to approve each launch and has the power to shut down the entire operation if they decide that the hazards to the public are too great.  Fortunately for Musk, Floridians are used to having rockets around, and there are enough former space-business employees and military personnel in Florida that having a few fireworks fly over now and then doesn't seem to bother them in any major way.  If SpaceX had chosen an orbital path over New York or California, on the other hand, we would probably have heard a lot louder protests and a call to cease and desist.

 

As long as Musk doesn't run out of money, SpaceX will keep trying with the Starship, and once the bugs are worked out the rocket's built-in advantages will come into play.  The goal is to get the cost of each launch down to $10 million or less, which is a factor of ten less than it currently costs.  But there are a lot of fundamentals in place already.

 

Take fuel, for instance.  Instead of using exotic and hazardous fuels such as hydrazine, the engines burn liquid oxygen and liquefied methane, which is the same stuff that people with natural-gas hookups burn in their stoves.  Both the fuel and the oxidizer are relatively cheap and common industrial products. 

 

The rockets themselves are reusable, and ideally will return to the launchpad like all the old sci-fi stories said they should.  What isn't commonly appreciated these days is the spectacular recent advances in automated control systems that both make autonomous drones possible, and amazing feats like rockets landing themselves on launch pads without human intervention.  Such tricks simply weren't safely possible in the 1960s or 1970s, but we have the technology to do it now and SpaceX is using it.

 

I hope that the SpaceX engineers figure out exactly what's making the Starship blow up, and remedy things so that we can have a row of ten or more flawless takeoffs, orbital trips, and landings.  I suspect something on the order of that kind of track record will be required before any humans are allowed on board.  By then, maybe I'll be retired and have the time to go down to Brownsville and hang out for a few days, waiting to see the next successful launch of a Starship.  And if I want to see any fireworks, I'll just buy them myself.

 

Sources:  I referred to the Reuters report on the latest Starship launch and failure at https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacex-launches-eighth-starship-test-eyeing-ships-mock-satellite-deployment-2025-03-06/, and the Wikipedia article "SpaceX Starship."

SpaceX Versus the Astronomers: Starlink In the Telescope Crosshairs

 

Elon Musk, who no one has accused of being shy and retiring in his corporate ventures, is engaged in deploying what he hopes will be some 40,000 low-earth-orbit satellites to form what he calls a Starlink system to provide internet service to underserved areas of the globe, and also presumably to make money.  So far, several thousand of the mass-produced satellites have been launched in batches of dozens at a time, although a recent geomagnetic storm caused an early demise for some of the newest ones as the resulting denser atmosphere at their orbital heights dragged them to a fiery death.

 

The satellites are comparatively small—about 500 pounds (220 kg) and about the size of a table—and burn up completely when they de-orbit, so we don't have to worry about pieces of them falling on our heads.  But the folks who are worried about the ones staying in orbit are astronomers, who are already seeing little bright Starlink satellite dots streak through their telescope fields of view, especially when they try to observe close to the horizon near dusk or dawn.

 

For some time now, the astronomers have been trying to garner attention for their plight, which only promises to get worse as other commercial space firms compete with SpaceX, Musk's company, to gain low-earth-orbit communications satellite market share.  Last week, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a sort of United Nations of astronomy, announced the organization of the Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Skies from Satellite Constellation Interference.  For once, the name of the new organization doesn't form a cute acronym, which perhaps bespeaks the seriousness of the endeavor.

 

The reason they call it both dark and quiet is that communications satellites, by nature, emit electromagnetic waves, usually in the microwave radio spectrum.  And although astronomers are provided with protected bits of the electromagnetic spectrum in which no radio emissions are allowed, these tend to be fairly narrow slices surrounded by wide bands where communications-related emissions are permitted.  Radiotelescopes use the most sensitive and delicate radio receivers on the planet, and they are not designed to reject nearby out-of-band interference very well.  If one of the Starlink satellites happens to sweep through the narrow beam of a radiotelescope, the satellite's emissions are likely to mess up the astronomy receiver in an unpredictable way.

 

And of course, visible-light telescopes pick up the Starlink satellites easily, even if the satellites are painted black.  One recent report in The Independent (UK) says that astronomers are seeing their visible-light exposures messed up with Starlink tracks an average of once every ten days.

 

So far, the problem is at a manageable annoyance level.  But multiply it by ten or more, and just the Starlink satellites will interfere seriously with a lot of astronomical projects, including the search for killer meteorites that might bring a premature end, not only to Starlink, but to everybody who could use it as well. 

 

It's an interesting problem in engineering ethics, if you want to view the situation through that lens.  In this corner, you have the public that would presumably like Internet access but lives too remotely for it now, and SpaceX wanting to provide that service with Starlink.  And in that corner, you have the IAU saying that what Starlink and similar firms are doing could raise havoc with a large portion of their activities.  

 

Historically, when you have a conflict between an entire industry and another popular institution such as astronomy, a third party such as government or an international organization has to get involved.  This is the way that radioastronomers obtained their reserved slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, by pleading with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) for them and making effective arguments, possibly together with a little political diplomacy. 

 

Now that the commercialization of space has been going on for at least a couple of decades, we are seeing the kinds of conflicts that led to the formation in former years of the ITU for radio.  Although nobody "owns" the low-earth-orbit region of space in an exclusionary sense ("this is my two quadrillion cubic meters and you can't send your satellite into it"), it is clearly a limited resource, just like the electromagnetic spectrum, and we are now seeing an increasing need for some kind of global regulatory body to adjudicate issues such as the one that has arisen between SpaceX and the astronomers, represented by the IAU.

 

Something similar came about when transoceanic flights became routine and different countries had to arrange for protocols of using flight routes and standards for international airports.  The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), whose present embodiment dates back to 1947, arose as a part of the United Nations to perform these duties. 

 

The UN currently has a couple of branches dealing with space: the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs and a registry of objects launched into orbit.  But neither of these outfits appears to have the regulatory clout needed to deal with disputes between a brash private firm bent on networking the Earth with 40,000 satellites, and a bunch of scientists who have little money for lobbying and whose main argument is that if you clutter up our telescopes too much, there's a teeny little chance that we'll miss seeing a meteor that will creep up on us and destroy civilization.

 

So far, the astronomers are just having to deal with the problems that Starlink causes them on a case-by-case basis.  And ultimately, it's quite possible that most cutting-edge observational astronomy will move to outer space anyway, as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope promises to beat anything you can do with earth-based telescopes.  As a global culture, we may find that turning the night skies into shimmering collections of satellites and ruining them for astronomy is a reasonable price to pay for letting the most remote tribe in the world livestream SuperBowl C (100, if you're rusty on your Roman numerals).  But if that happens, I think we will have lost something that will be hard to get back.

 

Sources:  I referred to a report on The Independent's webpage at https://www.independent.co.uk/space/astronomers-elon-musk-satellites-asteroids-b2009163.html, a BBC report at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60317806 about satellites lost to a geomagnetic storm, and the Wikipedia articles on the ICAO and the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs. 

SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts At Last

On Saturday, May 30, American astronauts flew into orbit on an American-made space vehicle for the first time since 2011.  SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket carried Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, both veterans of the old Space Shuttle program, inside the Dragon capsule, and once the capsule separated safely, the first stage returned automatically to earth and landed intact on a barge to be reused.  Meanwhile, the Dragon capsule has been catching up to the International Space Station (ISS) where, assuming the docking goes smoothly this morning (I'm writing this Sunday), the astronauts will stay for the next several months.  The return flight in the Dragon capsule is planned to end in the ocean, a mode of re-entry that hasn't been done for over forty years. 

Many news reports remarked on the contrast between the good news of a successful launch and the general tone of recent U. S. news events:  the COVID-19 virus and all its consequences, riots over police brutality, and so on.  But this is nothing new. 

The space race between the U. S. and the USSR over who would get to the moon first was conducted during what was probably the most tumultuous decade in the last half of the twentieth century.  The 1960s were not exactly peaceful:  the Vietnam War, antiwar protests, race riots, and the sexual revolution are just a few items of turmoil that come to mind.  But amid all the strife, America found the will and the capability to land men on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Engineers are not much into symbolism.  But space exploration carries a heavy load of symbolism, and it's worthwhile considering what that means in light of the huge effort and expense that sending people into space entails.

In retrospect, the Apollo program was mainly a way to carry on the Cold War by peaceful means.  Its extraordinary expense was justified not for scientific reasons, although there was some useful science done.  But being the first nation to put men on the moon would show our technological superiority to the world, and in an age dominated by technology, that achievement had implications that everyone understood.  It took a couple more decades for the USSR to crumble away, but it did.  Nevertheless, in their rough-and-ready way, the Russians maintained their ability to travel into space despite all kinds of political reverses, and once the Space Shuttle program outlived its usefulness, America turned inward with regard to space and paid taxi fare to the Russians to put people on the International Space Station.

When one asks about the ultimate motivations of the younger generation of space cadets—Elon Musk being their spiritual leader—the answer isn't as clear-cut as it was for my generation.  Nationalism pure and simple doesn't seem to be a big factor, although Musk is enough of an American to take pride in the fact that the rocket was made here and launched from here.

To be sure, profit is a motive as well.  That's why the fact that SpaceX and not NASA was the builder of the rocket is so significant.  It may be the case that SpaceX is a long way from turning a profit with direct commercial space activities, as opposed to government-subsidized projects such as the ISS launches.  But with ideas such as asteroid mining around, it may be that some of the next great fortunes may be made in space. 

If I had to guess, though, I'd say that the new space explorers see themselves taking part in a long-term project that will end up putting significant numbers of people out in space, in places that will be just as habitable as Earth, if not more so.  Every so often I come across a student who wants to get involved in the space program somehow, and there's often a kind of glitter in their eye when they talk about it.  The phrase "manifest destiny" has fallen under a cloud in recent years, as its original meaning that the United States was destined to conquer the whole midsection of the North American continent has been taken to be insensitive to the people (and animals) who were already here.  But presumably, displacing natives is not a big problem in the solar system, at least.  And believing that humanity is fated to found colonies on other planets, and perhaps beyond the solar system, seems to be close to an article of faith for many space enthusiasts.

It's interesting that the word "fate" came up in a quote from Musk himself as he commented on the successful launch yesterday.  Remarking on the contrast between Saturday's successful launch and the earlier attempts that were scrubbed by weather conditions, he said, "Today, I don't know, it felt like just the fates were aligned." 

Without putting undue weight on what may have been just an offhand remark, I think it's interesting that the leader of the company that launched Americans into space for the first time in nearly a decade attributes success to the fates being aligned. 

Musk mixed his metaphors, for one thing.  The usual phrase is to say that the stars are aligned, which harks back to the time when astrology—forecasting auspicious times and events by observing stars and planets—was every bit as respectable as forecasting the progress of pandemics is today.  And the Fates were mythological goddesses who presumably determined one's lifespan and, well, fate in life.  Either way, he was saying that despite all the highly technical and cross-checked planning involved, there is an element in the venture that wasn't under human control.  But we don't believe in Fates or astrology any more, do we? 

It depends on what you think life and the world are about.  If the most one has to look forward to is playing a brief role on a stage where your only hope of immortality is to make a big splash that will be remembered by future generations, then living a Musk-like life makes some sense, especially if humanity is fated to live among the stars.  Then you will be viewed by future generations as a Columbus (if that name isn't too offensive any more), or someone equally famous for venturing out to discover and eventually populate new worlds. 

But if everything we do and are is owing to a supernatural Ground of existence, namely a God who is intensely interested in what we puny humans do, then one has a different perspective on things.  It still may be worth while to explore space, and even for some people to live there.  But other priorities and other goals may intervene.

Sources:  I viewed the pre-launch clip and read the accompanying news copy about the SpaceX launch at https://apnews.com/da66485df4d82c055ce9d6b84a20e450.

The Moon, Mars, or Stay Home?

This coming Saturday marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first landing of humans on the moon.  I remember staying up late in my bathrobe and watching the blurry images on our old black-and-white tube-model TV as Neil Armstrong first set foot on the dusty surface.  I was no more moonstruck than most fifteen-year-olds were at the time.  I enjoyed the attention that engineers and high technology were getting as a part of the space program.  But the geopolitical forces that led up to the space race in the first place and the reasons why the U. S. government was spending so much money on it were things I was almost completely ignorant of. 

NASA is still very much with us, though almost a shadow of its 1960s self in terms of its percentage of the federal budget.  The questions of whether and how to spend the many billions of dollars it would cost to either return to the moon with manned spaceflights, or eventually go beyond the moon to Mars, will inevitably rise as we look back on what turned out to be a basically one-trick achievement.  This is not to belittle the incredibly complex and, overall, well-executed program that took men to the moon.  And if you want to connect the dots that go from the lunar landings to the Star Wars research initiatives to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, you can view the Apollo program as the most successful battle in the war against global communism, a war that the West won without starting a nuclear conflict. 

But all that is history, and now the world faces the question of what to do next in space.  The answer depends on which country you ask.

China makes no secret of the fact that they want to land Chinese citizens on the moon and establish a permanently-staffed lunar base.  That is also the goal of one version of plans that NASA has been discussing.  According to an article in Physics Today, during the Obama administration NASA examined the costs associated with setting up a manned lunar base:  $60 to $80 billion.  Faced with such a price tag, the agency instead proposed a plan involving lunar orbiters, landing on an asteroid, and eventually getting to Mars, but it attracted little support and became a dead letter.

More recently, Vice President Pence announced plans to land both men and women on the moon by 2024, but Congress refused to add the $1.6 billion needed for NASA to start planning for such an early date, so it looks like the political climate is more of a problem than any strictly technical issues.

As the barnacles of bureaucracy keep accreting on the U. S. ship of state, achievements of the past look even more impressive than they did at the time.  Taking the technology of 1961, when many if not most electronic systems used vacuum tubes, and moving it forward to the point that we landed men on the moon and got them back safely in only two Presidential election cycles, was truly a stunning achievement. 

But the country was more unified then, and nations that are deeply divided have problems uniting around any goal that isn't clearly for immediate self-preservation.  Nevertheless, it's possible that younger people could unite around a space program that manages to establish a permanent outpost on another planet.

In my work as an educator at the college level, I run across students who, despite their precociously mature and somewhat cynical attitudes, show their support for space efforts by their desire to work for bold, exciting companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin, the Jeff-Bezos-funded space firm.  I suppose it's the latest version of the pioneering spirit that led adventurous Swedes, Poles, and Englishmen to endure the hardships of a transatlantic voyage in the age of sail to explore and settle the unknown territories of the New World.  We've pretty much run out of that sort of thing on this planet, so the moon or Mars is the next frontier, as the old Star Trek series used to tell us.  It's no coincidence that the peak of that show's popularity was the late sixties, although its descendants have a cult following that continues to this day. 

Science fiction is one thing, but taking a substantial fraction of a nation's gross domestic product and spending it on sending a few people out of this world is not to be undertaken lightly, even if it is privately funded instead of paid for by governments.  It's the same kind of thing that the Egyptians did when they built the Pyramids, and it's no accident that most of the great construction achievements of the ancient and medieval world—pyramids, tombs, temples, cathedrals—involved religion in some way.  With those who reply "none" to the pollster's question about religious belief increasing in our U. S. population, it seems pointless to hope that an explicitly religious motive could be found to unite people behind a new effort to go to either the moon or Mars. 

But as the quasi-religious devotion of some Trekkies to the Star Trek franchise shows, some entirely secular things can become a religion for some people.  A lot of the folks who work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have a kind of religious fervor about their jobs.  And a good many Silicon Valley types believe with an almost religious conviction that once we overheat this planet we'll have no choice but to load up our interplanetary U-Hauls and move to another one. 

The danger in that kind of thinking is that it can begin to inculcate the attitude that any sacrifice in the present is worth doing for the future paradise that awaits.  Though I don't see any sign that this is happening yet, one could imagine a dictatorial government forcing its people into grinding poverty for the sake of a space program that at most could benefit a few dozen individuals directly.  The same sacrifice of present goods for the ever-receding magnificent future was the way that Communism tempted (and still tempts) people to do highly immoral things right now for the sake of imagined future generations.  The way things look now, we're in little danger of doing that in the U. S., but it might happen in China. 

If we do land on the moon by 2024 (only five years from now), I will be happy to watch a full-color, 4K-definition image of someone young enough to be Neil Armstrong's grandson (or granddaughter) set foot on the moon for the second time.  But I'm not placing any bets on it, and not just because I'm not the gambling type, either.

Sources:   Physics Today's article "Quo Vadis, NASA:  The Moon, Mars, or both?" by David Kramer appeared on pp. 22-26 of the July 2019 issue. 

Radiation: The Unsolved Problem of Space Travel

These appear to be great times for future space travelers.  Commercial rocket outfits such as SpaceX are thriving, the Dutch organization Mars One is still refining their pool of potential Martian astronauts for a flight presently scheduled for 2032, and National Geographic's "Mars" docu-drama TV series has intermingled interviews with space experts and a dramatic portrayal of what an actual flight to Mars might be like, complete with death-defying crises. 

Then along comes Charles L. Limoli, a radiation biologist at UC Irvine, with his mouse brains shot full of holes, as he describes in an article published in the February 2017 issue of Scientific American.  They're not holes you can see with the naked eye—just tracks of ionization damage caused by nuclear particles intended to simulate the damage caused by cosmic rays and solar particle radiation that a typical years-long round trip to Mars would involve.  The bad news Limoli has is that when you take smart mice and shoot their brains with that much radiation, it damages certain fragile parts of the nerve cells:  the dendritic spines.  And they don't grow back.  So even high-IQ mice who get zapped in a NASA particle accelerator designed to simulate the type of radiation that astronauts will be exposed to, end up with what amounts to a mouse form of Alzheimer's.  The performance of these mice in certain mouse intelligence tests (don't ask me how they figured out how to do that) fell to only 10% of what it was before the zapping.  And the damage seems to be permanent, at least in mice.

So what, you say?  We'll just shield the space capsule.  Think again.

The more energetic a particle is—the faster it's going and the heavier it is—the harder it is to shield against.  Turns out that galactic cosmic rays, which are one of the two main kinds of radiation astronauts on deep-space missions will encounter, are the highest-energy particles known, with many of them having more energy than the most powerful earth-bound particle accelerators can produce.  The only practical radiation shielding presently used involves putting a lot of heavy stuff—concrete, steel, lead—between you and the radiation.  On earth, this isn't such a problem if you happen to have a disused salt mine handy—you just go underground.  But weight is the enemy of space travel, and a rocket that was shielded well enough to reduce cosmic-ray fluxes to something comparable to what we encounter on earth (shielded as it is by its magnetic field and atmosphere) would be prohibitively heavy.  We are talking shield thicknesses of many feet, all around the living areas of the vehicle. 

So at present, all these nice dreams of people spending years in deep space are still only that—dreams.  Based on the work of Limoli and others, sending astronauts on an unshielded rocket to spend a year or more in deep space would likely turn their brains into Swiss cheese, radiation-wise, with dire consequences that would affect everyone on board.  I don't know about you, but I can't think of a more depressing end to a space flight than to have everybody turn into candidates for assisted living in a matter of months.  And that's just if we try to get to Mars.  If the astronauts somehow manage to get there without losing their minds, the first thing they'd have to do would be to dig a deep burrow to shield themselves, or apply whatever unknown shielding technology they used on the trip to the newly established colony as well.

Space optimists look at this problem as just another speed bump on the road to Mars.  There may be medical ways of alleviating some of the damage that radiation causes to neurons.  But any such treatment is far in the future, and prospective space travelers need it now.  There is even less likelihood of finding a lightweight way of shielding against high-energy cosmic rays.  The physics of the problem has been well understood for decades.  In principle, you could use magnetic fields to create a shield, but the field intensity to deflect such particles is absurdly high—even the superconducting magnets in  today's MRI machines, which have to be carefully isolated from any ferrous object, probably wouldn't do the job.  And if you don't do something, you're condemning your space travelers to virtually certain mental decline.  Of course, some may think that this is just a risk we have to take.

Having watched the entire National Geographic "Mars" series over the Christmas holidays, I noted a disturbing tendency on the part of some enthusiasts for what I would term secular millennialism.  The religious millennialists called the Millerites were followers of William Miller, who convinced both himself and many others that he had figured out when the second coming of Christ would occur:  Oct. 22, 1844, about ten years ahead of when he was writing.  In the years leading up to 1844 he accumulated a large following who sold their farms, businesses, and houses and gathered in small groups, waiting for the big day.  In what became known as the Great Disappointment, nothing unusual happened, either then or later.

Secular millennial movements such as classical Marxism exact arduous and even painful sacrifices today for a promised millennial paradise tomorrow—and somehow, tomorrow never comes.  Some present-day promoters of deep-space travel have convinced themselves that the future of the human race lies not on Earth, but on Mars or other places where we'll be able to start over again and do it right.  If you really believe this, it's going to affect your attitude toward life on Earth.  After all, if we're just going to move soon, why paint the walls? 

It's not clear at this point whether radiation will pose a "deal-breaker" problem to deep-space travel.  I suppose if we get clever enough about orbital assembly stations, we could eventually manage to build a rocket that could carry enough conventional shielding to protect astronauts on their way to Mars.  But that does not seem to be in the current plans of many space enterprises. 

If somebody started calling for volunteers, or even offered lots of money, for people to jump off a thousand-foot cliff without parachutes "just for the experience," I hope we would find a way to shut them down.  That hasn't happened so far with Mars One, the Dutch outfit that is currently selecting people to go on a one-way trip to Mars.  But if by the time astronauts gets to Mars, their brains are so fried that they don't know where they are, it would be a shame for everybody—especially the astronauts and those who put them knowingly into a situation that was going to end badly. 

Maybe we'll figure this one out, but in the meantime, any time I see someone promoting manned deep-space flight, I'll be wondering what they plan to do about radiation.  And so far, I don't see anyone taking it seriously enough.

Sources:  Charles L. Limoli's article "Deep-Space Deal Breaker" is on pp. 54-59 of the Feb. 2017 edition of Scientific American.

SpaceX Scores a First

The history of the U. S. A. in space changed in a fundamental way last Friday when the commercial firm SpaceX delivered its first payload of cargo to the International Space Station.  SpaceX's capsule Dragon successfully docked with the station and delivered much-needed supplies and equipment, a task formerly performed by the now-defunct Space Shuttle.  This culminates plans that go back officially to at least 2006, when NASA signed a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Agreement with the firm.  CEO and primary financial backer Elon Musk said the achievement was "just awesome."

NASA has come in for a lot of criticism in these pages, but signing the agreement with SpaceX was a smart thing to do, especially now that events have vindicated the decision.  Of course, the larger hurdle of manned space flight remains in the future for SpaceX, and that job is an order of magnitude harder than hauling stuff, which is both disposable without moral qualms (other than the loss of money and time) and a whole lot easier to take care of in flight.  Humans in orbit require many times their weight of life-support and safety systems, which is one reason why the International Space Station is so much bigger than the Dragon capsule.  But let's give SpaceX its due and congratulate it on actually making money with a delivery to a manned space outpost.

Not that the firm is likely to be profitable yet in an overall sense.  Musk, a 40-year-old native of South Africa and founder of what became PayPal, is wealthy enough to afford to lose money for a while.  And it remains to be seen whether SpaceX will ever lead to a corporate space sector that profits from anything other than a few large contracts from governments.  In this sense, SpaceX is not that much different from the aerospace contractors that have been involved in NASA operations from the very beginning.

But Musk and SpaceX are now in the driver's seat, not NASA.  The Dragon was designed as well as built by SpaceX, and NASA is simply playing the role of a guy who wants some stuff moved, only instead of hiring a moving company to truck it across town, SpaceX made a delivery in orbit.

The hope is that firms like SpaceX will focus their organization and efforts on clear goals such as what Dragon just did, rather than running in all directions at once as we have so often seen NASA do in recent years.  Goal-directed behavior is not a guarantee of ethical behavior, or even success.  After all, the Nazis were very goal-directed, but their goals were evil ones.  But having a clear and measurable goal allows managers to answer the question "Do we need to do this?" easily and simply, and makes for good operational efficiency, a characteristic that NASA has been somewhat deficient in for the last few years.

Where does SpaceX go from here?  As I mentioned, there are plans for manned space flight.  Rocketry is a notoriously dicey field of engineering because full-up tests of entire systems are so hideously expensive.  If you build a radio, you can set it on your workbench and turn it on, and all it costs for the test is a few cents of electricity.  But to test a single-use rocket in a realistic way, you have to fire the thing and watch it go wherever it was designed to go—once.  If it works, you have to make sure you build the next one exactly precisely like the first, or else you can't be sure it will work as well as the one you tested.  This means that rocket design is not a business for the faint-hearted or under-funded soul.

Elon Musk is neither of these, and so we can look forward to SpaceX's next trick.  Every so often, I come across a student who has caught the space bug:  he or she wants to design rockets or even try out to be an astronaut.  Until recently, I listened to such people with decidedly mixed emotions, because the only business in town, practically speaking, was either NASA or a contractor tied hand and foot to NASA.  And the way NASA has been operating for the last decade or two, I was reluctant even to encourage such people.

But now that SpaceX is a viable organization and has proved itself in a big way, I would have no hesitation in recommending a career in commercial space exploration and related enterprises.  It's interesting that when NASA scored its greatest triumph, the July 1969 moon landing, Musk wasn't even born yet.  So clearly the generational torch is being passed, and that is a good thing.  The NASA way of doing things was good when NASA was fairly young, but Musk's SpaceX is a new start.  And Musk seems to be the kind of entrepreneur who benignly imposes his personality on his organization.  Such people can be hard to work for up close (witness the famed harsh perfectionism of the late Steve Jobs of Apple), but if the CEO's overall intentions are right, the organization can achieve a coherence and direction that makes it an attractive place to work.

Besides space, Musk has other interests, all of which he says he has chosen as ways of bettering humanity, which is what engineering should be all about.  His Tesla Motors has the eventual goal of making electric cars for the masses, although so far its only product is an expensive roadster.  And he has operated a charitable foundation for some years on the side.

It will be interesting to see whether Musk can develop to the extent of handing off SpaceX to other good managers as time goes on, rather than clinging to it after his usefulness to it has peaked.  He is presently chief technical officer as well as CEO, and that dual role doesn't seem likely to be sustainable for any length of time.  Let's hope that other entrepreneurs get into the space business to provide some healthy competition for SpaceX, and then we can say that we have truly made the transition from government-owned and operated space exploration to a full-up commercial model—that works.

Sources:  Besides the current news coverage of SpaceX's achievement reported by Associated Press, I consulted a news release by SpaceX at http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20120525 and the Wikipedia article on Elon Musk.