Sunday, July 16, 2006
CATCHING UP OFF EARTH
What with mundane matters like the possible beginning of the next World War, I've been remiss in noting some important developments where things really matter -- off Earth.
The shuttle mission to ISS has proceeded to its next-to-last day in an impressively trouble-free manner. Except for the extremely minor APU fluid leak that's being watched, it looks like NASA pulled off an extremely good mission. I'm a well-known NASA skeptic with little or nothing good to say about the STS. But when they do well at it, I'm the first to be happy.
I watched a good deal of all three EVAs in real time. With all my carping about NASA, the shuttle and their space station, one thing I readily admit is that NASA has really figured out how to do EVA well. In the beginning, this turned out to be a much harder problem than the original space visionaries like Willy Ley and von Braun had imagined. The EVAs in the Gemini program were plagued by very low productivity, because the problem of working in zero-G in bulky, baulky space suits was a lot harder than just putting on a cool-looking space helmet, strapping on a rocket pack and stepping outside to tighten up a few bolts. But over the period of only a very few years, NASA went from pretty scary trips outside the pressurized can that involved tumbling astronauts blinded by sweat from exertion to what they now accomplish -- very productive work in relative comfort and safety. My hat's off to the people who accomplished that with little or no public support.
Meanwhile, a more important development for the long term is the so-far completely successful launch and deployment of Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable test spacecraft. This system is an outgrowth of an inflatable "hab module" that was once planned for the ISS but, like so many smart things in that program, subsequently abandoned. Bigelow didn't give up, and now they're well on their way toward demonstrating that the independent space industrial community can build and fly real hardware. My money's on Bigelow to be the company that does what I've envisioned for many years -- build and deploy relatively inexpensive, modular space habitat structures. The ISS modules like Destiny and the MPLMs should have, could have been that. But it took visionary entrepreneurs to make it really happen.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:31 AM
|
|
