Interpreting the Decision to Build the Space Shuttle

Wernher von Braun once supposedly told his colleagues: “We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.” Whether true or not the statement reflects what has been viewed for the last forty years as one of the traditional difficulties of the space program, the problem of navigating the vicissitudes of Washington politics.

I have been wrestling for some time with the question of why human spaceflight? Yes, it’s exciting and it offers a measure of scientific and technological return. It also offers the only methodology for avoiding extinction on this planet; something that will most assuredly eventually happen if humanity remains on planet Earth, it’s just a question of when. But human spaceflight has an exceptionally low priority for most people, to the extent that NASA’s budget has been eroding over the years and it can no longer invest sufficient dollars to assure the development of the new technology necessary to continue the human spaceflight agenda in the post-Space Shuttle era.

This has prompted me to explore the decision to build the Space Shuttle in the early 1970s for analogies that might be useful in helping to understand the current debate over the future of human spaceflight. I’m working on an article that will analyze the interpretations of the decision to build the Space Shuttle.

In essence, the Space Shuttle initiative was caught up in the paperwork of the nation’s policymaking process in a series of extremely rigorous reviews and redefinitions during its adoption period. The result was a launch system strikingly different from what NASA had envisioned during the late 1960s. The forays and rebuttals, bobs and weaves, ins and outs of these studies and reviews informed the ultimate direction of the shuttle program. Despite its tastiness, like Bismarck’s sausage the policymaking process that resulted in the Space Shuttle was not pretty to watch. The interpretations of this process offered over time have also been less than pretty to watch, although they too have served a valuable role in helping to make sense of a complex, murky story.

There are arguably three basic interpretations of the decision to build NASA’s Space Shuttle that have come to dominate the discussion of human spaceflight since the end of the Moon landings in the early 1970s. These interpretations have found use among historians and other social scientists as they seek to understand the process whereby the Space Shuttle gained political acceptance, policy analysts as they have engaged in the public policy debate, and various special interest groups that find use for perspectives from all three interpretations to support myriad objectives. These three basic analyses of the Space Shuttle decision may be characterized in this way:

1. Orthodox Interpretation: The Space Shuttle represented a “next logical step” in space transportation, science, and technology. It embraced space exploration as a modernist, advantageous activity, and emphasized the positive attributes of cutting-edge technology for the progress of the nation. In this interpretation, the Space Shuttle served essentially as a part, but only one part, of a broader infrastructure for proposed missions to the Moon and Mars. This position in explaining the Space Shuttle decision was dominant from the latter 1960s until after the vehicle entered flight status in the early 1980s.
2. Revisionist Interpretation: A noticeable minority position from the point that the Space Shuttle was approved by Richard Nixon in 1972 argued that it was a waste of federal government money and other resources that could more effectively be used in other objectives. With the Challenger accident, and the questions it raised about the shuttle program, this interpretation began to take on majority status. For some the decision to build the Space Shuttle embodied a “policy failure” on the part of politicos, the space community, and the general public. For others it was emblematic of a bankrupt national agenda that had emerged from the activist federal government during the social revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s. For still others, it epitomized a “40 year mistake” that led space exploration efforts down an inappropriate path when there were other more viable options not pursued.
3. Neo-orthodox Interpretation: In something of a return to the orthodox interpretation, but with a twist, this interpretation employs ideas drawn from the “social construction of technology” theory in historical studies to help explain the Space Shuttle decision. While beliefs about technological progress was important in considering the decision, the concept of heterogeneous engineering—recognizing that technological issues are simultaneously organizational, economic, cultural, and political—goes far toward helping to understand the process that led to the approval of the program.

Space shuttle Atlantis is seen through the window of a Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA) as it launches from launch pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center on the STS-135 mission, Friday, July 8, 2011 in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Atlantis launched on the final flight of the shuttle program on a 12-day mission to the International Space Station. The STS-135 crew will deliver the Raffaello multipurpose logistics module containing supplies and spare parts for the space station. Photo Credit: (NASA/Dick Clark)

What do you think of the framework on this historiographical discussion. does the tripartite typology work for helping to understanding the adoption of the Space Shuttle as NASA’s post-Apollo human spaceflight program? Does it help to illuminate, or perhaps obfuscate, understanding? Finally, how have each of these three interpretations been deployed to explain it before pointing the direction toward future avenues of research on this subject? I would welcome thoughts on this.

Wednesday’s Book Review: “Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet”

Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet. By K. Maria D. Lane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Illustrations, acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. 266 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. ISBN: 978-0-226-47078-8. $45.00.

Mars has long held a special fascination for humans who pondered the planets of the solar system—partly because of the possibility that life might either presently exist or at some time in the past might have existed ­there. Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli published a work in 1877 that laid the foundation for the belief in canals on Mars. His map of Mars showed a system of what he called canali, in Italian this meant “channel” and carried no connotation of being an artificial feature. Even so, the word was commonly translated into English as “canal” and began the speculation that Mars held life that were changing the planet’s features for their own purposes.

American astronomer Percival Lowell became interested in Mars during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and built what became the Lowell Observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona, to study the red planet. His research advanced the argument that Mars had once been a watery planet and that the topographical features known as canals had been built by intelligent beings. Over the course of the first forty years of the twentieth century others used Lowell’s observations of Mars as a foundation for their arguments. The idea of intelligent life on Mars stayed in the popular imagination for a long time, and it was only with the scientific data returned from probes to the planet since the beginning of the space age that this began to change.

Begun as a dissertation written at the University of Chicago, Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet offers a fascinating analysis of the phenomenon of canals on Mars and the personality of Lowell and his detractors in arguing about these astronomical observations. K. Maria D. Lane, now on the faculty of the University of New Mexico, provides six succinct chapters that explore the Percival Lowell arguments about an inhabited Mars and his speculations on the nature of its society. Lane comments that in part because of the efforts of astronomers like Lowell the people living between about 1880 and 1910 had a “functionally dominant (if not universal) understanding of Martian geography as arid, inhabited, and irrigated” (p. 13). In Lane’s estimation this perception came because of the emphasis on geographical knowledge, especially cartography, in shape public perceptions in the United States.

The author makes several important points about this process. First, she lays out a very compelling case for a de-emphasis of the “canali” to “canal” misinterpretation that has dominated explanations of how the story of artificial canals perceived on the Martian surface might have originated. Instead, she finds that the authority of both Schiaparelli’s and Lowell’s maps proved the deciding point. Both emphasized long straight, dark lines on the planet’s surface that seemed to delineate some type of artificiality. Even without the translation issue, the power of the image burned the idea of canals into viewers’ brains. Lowell’s persistent beating of the drum for intelligent beings having built those canals proved decisive in shaping ideas about life on the red planet over the decades. The scientific community squared off over this debate, with most of the academic astronomers questioning Lowell’s conclusions, especially when their own observations did not match his own for clarity in depicting the lines on the planet’s surface that Lowell said were canals. This conclusion is a very important contribution of Geographies of Mars to the literature about Mars in the American imagination.

Some of Lane’s other findings are also significant. For example, she includes a chapter on observatories as places remote, unforgiving, and hard to reach. With the move in the latter half of the nineteenth century of astronomers founding observatories in tops of mountains, with Yerkes, Lowell, and Lick observatories all in wilderness settings in high places on the Earth, the sense of adventure and hardship conjured in the minds of Americans raised the status of those who worked in those places. In essence, these activities were hard and, therefore, those who engaged in them were dedicated scientific explorers and their conclusions were to be embraced. All of this played into a developing cult of expertise that the astronomers enjoyed. Such claims as made by Lowell about Mars, therefore, enjoyed ready acceptance in part because of this development. As Lane concluded, “In the era of Mars debates and the popular canal sensation, however, a metropolitan-versus-mountain dichotomy provided the critical means of differentiating among the credibility of observatories, astronomers, and hypotheses. The higher, the more remote, the more rugged, and the more sublime, the better” (p. 95).

Likewise, the astronomer as hero, not unlike the intrepid explorers of the poles during the same era, lent a certain credibility to their hypotheses not possible previously. Lowell’s mountaintop sitting at his observatory above Flagstaff, and the heroic nature of his observations, lent credence to his arguments about the possibility of canals and therefore sophisticated life on the red planet. And he played it for all it was worth.

Finally, Lane offers interesting and quite appropriate findings concerning the speculations about the life on Mars that Lowell offered. Lowell insisted that Mars was a planet on the verge of extinction because of the scarcity of water. He rationalized that the only way it could hold on was through the creation of a hydraulic society in which the best minds of that society ran everything for the benefit of all. The organization and structure of every institution associated with Mars, Lowell reasoned, reflected this need to control the environment. In such a situation, he continued, society’s greatest minds conspired to create a hydraulic civilization under their suzerainty. In order to flourish on Mars they had to create a society that was dependent upon large-scale waterworks—productive (for irrigation) and protective (for flood control). This not only made the planet habitable, it brought urbanization and wealth there as well. There were other examples of this in world history and Lowell applied the example of ancient Egypt as the first of this type of civilization.

These ideas reflected Lowell’s concepts of Progressivism and government by the best and the brightest to ensure the success of all. Lane makes the case that this was very much a perspective reflective of European colonialism. The British of India undertook massive public works projects with the purpose of transforming the subcontinent from what they considered the backward civilization that they encountered when they first arrived there. Lowell’s Mars was essentially a test case for the envisioned “benign American empire [that] would be based on rational-scientific decision-making entrusted to a technocratic elite” (p. 177). At sum, his analysis of civilization on Mars served as a brief for American colonial activities worldwide.

Geographies of Mars is an excellent, quite original take on the Martian canals question. It deserves a place on the shelves of all historians and social scientists interested in the place of Mars in the American imagination.

Greetings Earthlings, This Day Belongs to the Planet and All Who Live Here

It’s time to stop and ponder the needs of the Earth on this beautiful spring morning. April 22 is Earth Day. In commemoration, I have highlighted a blog post I wrote a few years ago about the photograph of the whole Earth taken by Apollo 17 in December 1972. Check out the post here.

The whole Earth disk taken during the Apollo 17 lunar mission in December 1972.

Demoting Pluto

The artist’s rendition shows the newly discovered planet-like object, dubbed “Sedna,” in relation to other bodies in the solar system, including Earth and its Moon; Pluto; and Quaoar, a planetoid beyond Pluto that was until now the largest known object beyond Pluto. The diameter of Sedna is slightly smaller than Pluto’s but likely somewhat larger than Quaoar.

I would like to revisit in this blog post the 2006 decision of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) demoting Pluto as the Solar System’s ninth planet to “minor planetary” status. It caused a furor both inside the astronomical community and among many in the general public. This really wasn’t surprising, however, Pluto’s status as a planet had been a point of debate among astronomers for at least a decade before this action.

Neil deGrasse Tyson famously excluded Pluto from the Solar System display at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and Brian Marsden and others campaigned to demote it. Caltech astronomer Mike Brown wrote a wry book in 2012 infamously titled, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, to sum up the rationale for the decision. This decision, of course, was predicated on advancing knowledge about the outer Solar System and the Kuiper Belt of small and icy bodies that reigned there. Marsden, Tyson, Brown, and others succeeded at the IAU meeting in 2006, having Pluto and other bodies of similar size reclassified as “dwarf planets.”

The rationale for this decision rested on the advances in scientific understanding made in the first half of the decade; especially the discovery of three additional bodies of similar size in the Kuiper Belt—Eris, Makemake, and Hauemea—as well as the asteroid belt body named Ceres. At its simplest the conundrum revolved around whether to designate these other bodies as planets or to exclude Pluto from the list as well. After a tortured process, not a little controversy, and numerous false starts the IAU announced the creation of the “dwarf planet” category and assigned these newly discovered bodies along with Pluto to it.

The idea of a region of the outer solar system with large orbiting bodies, no called the Kuiper Belt, first gained currency in 1992 with the detection of a 150-mile wide body, called 1992QB1. Several similar-sized objects were discovered thereafter, confirming that a belt of icy objects once theorized by Gerard Kuiper did indeed exist. The planet Pluto, discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, is only the largest member of the Kuiper Belt. Other named objects soon joined Pluto, including 1992QB1, Orcus, Quaoar, Ixion, 90377 Sedna, and Varuna.

The discovery of these many objects, nearly as large as Pluto and occupying the same range in the outer solar system, led to the IAU decision in 2006 to redesignate Pluto a “dwarf planet.” The first members of the “dwarf planet” category were Ceres, Pluto, and 2003 UB313. Astronomers agreed that the following criteria defined a planet: (a) it is in orbit around the Sun, (b) it has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) it has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

If the IAU meeting where the astronomers decided this was contentious it was nothing compared to the uproar coming thereafter from the general public. Some refused to accept it—protests took place at several locations, state legislatures passed resolutions refusing to accept it, and memorials appeared at the Pluto displays at museums and science centers around the U.S.—at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., someone hung black crepe paper around the display on Pluto in the “Exploring the Planets” exhibition and others left cards and flowers on the floor before the panel. At the same time, some put a decidedly political slant on the 2006 decision, asserting that it could be blamed on resentment by many other nations of the world for America’s unpopular foreign policy in Iraq.

But the IAU decision made a lot of sense once one pondered the situation. It pointed up well the manner in which the scientific method worked to further understanding as new discoveries and analyses required modification of what we thought we knew about the natural universe.

From the point that Percival Lowell was searching for a fabled Planet X in the early twentieth century, a mythical ninth planet whose gravity affected the rest of the solar system, astronomers knew something was out there as yet undiscovered. They thought in terms of a single body, a planet, although scientists have learned since that time that the mass of the Kuiper Belt accounts for the perturbations measured  by Lowell and others.  Clyde Tombaugh’s 1930 discovery of Pluto, as well as its embrace by the American public, seemed to settled the matter for a while. Pluto was Planet X, or so many thought, but as refinements of the planet’s size and mass proceeded it appeared more and more that there had to be something bigger than Pluto in the outer solar system. Over time the identification of what became known as the Kuiper Belt containing thousands of bodies, some even larger than Pluto, demonstrated that Pluto’s status as a planet needed to be reassessed.

After years of debate among the scientists advancing knowledge of the solar system, the case of Pluto finally emerged as a major agenda items at the IAU in 2006. There some 2,500 astronomers gathered to reconsider how to define planets and their place in the Solar System. There were rivalries, priorities, disciplinary loyalties, and the like that  played into the decision to reclassify Pluto as a “Dwarf Planet.” Much of it had to do with how scientists defined the problem and what type of science they conducted, and whether or not they were liberal or conservative not in their politics but into their perspective on scientific nomenclature.

People gather to protest Pluto’s loss of status as a planet, September 1, 2006.

Not a little about the deliberations were humorous. As reported by science writer Alan Boyle about the tenor of the IAU meeting: “Mercury may be a burnout case, and Mars isn’t what it used to be. Venus is a hottie, but she’ll make your life hell. With Saturn, it’s all about the rings and the bling. Jupiter takes himself waaaay to seriously. Uranus won’t stop with the off-color puns, while Neptune’s jokes will leave you cold. But Pluto? Now that’s one funny planet!”

In the end, at the IAU meeting scientists did what scientists do best, fought like cats and dogs over important issues and came to a consensus that makes sense of the scientific data as then understood. That’s what happened in Prague in 2006 as the IAU struggled, perhaps a bit too publicly, in deliberations over the definition of a planet.

The decision-making process concerning Pluto at the IAU in 2006 was an impressive object lesson in how the scientific method works, as ideas are brought forward and shot down until something that best explains what is known about the natural universe is crafted. No other method of dealing with knowledge works so well. At some level I was sorry to see Pluto demoted, but this process has led to better understandings of planetary science and how and why decisions are made.

After I got used to the idea of only eight planets in the solar system, along with thousands of other smaller bodies, the story of the Prague meeting is actually comforting. It speaks to the manner in which we can live in a fact-based universe and make changes to beliefs long-held.

Wednesday’s Book Review: “Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down”

Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down. By Dave Zirin. New York: The New Press, 2013.

Dave Zirin does certainly not have writer’s block. He has been churning out books virtually every year since 2005 when he published What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States. He gives voice to my frustrations with his leftist take on sports, politics, and society in modern America. Zirin is at his best, as in the case with this book, when he does not try to write history but instead comments on current issues. Too often, unfortunately, Zirin’s historical work is a bit less sophisticated than I would like. That is not the case with this book. He focuses in Game Over on a series of recent events in the incursion of politics into sports, mostly in the U.S. but also with some discussion of events elsewhere.

The book opens with a narrative of how NFL and NBA owners both sought at essentially the same time a massive transfer of the proceeds of these games from players to the owners. This is greed run amok, not unlike the greed that led to the global meltdown in 2007-2008. The NFL owners locked out the players, but the players’ association was able to draw connections to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and helped themselves get past the general meme that billionaires and millionaires were duking it out over who got more of the lucrative NFL pie. The players especially tied themselves to the thousands of service industry workers who made they livings at the stadiums, bars, restaurants, and other work associated with game day. By emphasizing that the players were working stiffs, albeit well-paid ones for very short average careers, as opposed to those who own the teams and suck local communities dry in stadium deals and exploit workers across the board, the players gained the upper hand in negotiations. NBA players failed to make those connections and eventually caved to the owners demanding more of the take that the NBA generated.

Zirin then discusses a variety other issues, including the Olympics and the manner in which cities place themselves in hock to support this outrageous use of funds when other services suffer, the place of soccer in the Arab Spring uprising of 2011, and the World Cup. He is at his best when reporting on the Joe Paterno acquiesced Jerry Sandusky predatory and horrific practices at Penn State, on the NBA’s and NFL’s (but not MLB’s) opposition to the anti-immigration stance of Arizona, and questions of racism and sexism in sports.

Overall, this is a very fine book. I look forward to other contributions by Dave Zirin to the issues of social justice opened in the sports arena. I should add that a terrific foreword by an appropriately irate Michael Eric Dyson opens the book and contributes to the sense of struggle that we all should be engaged in.

Redirect: “5 Changes in Space Travel Since Yuri Gagarin’s Flight”

On Friday, April 12, 2013, journalist Luna Shyr wrote a good story for National Geographic  Daily News entitled ”5 Changes in Space Travel Since Yuri Gagarin’s Flight.” Of course, I like the story in part because she quoted me in the piece. But beyond that, it is a good discussion of the striking differences between that pioneering experience and the generally mundane aspects of human spaceflight in Earth orbit today. As we recognize Yuri Gagarin’s flight into the unknown of space 52 years after the fact is it appropriate to reflect on these changes illuminated by Luna’s article. Enjoy.

The Place of Theater Re-Creations in Museums

I would like to call your attention to an article by Susan Evans, “Personal Beliefs and National Stories: Theater in Museums as a Tool for Exploring Historical Memory.” Just published paper in April 2013 issue of Curator: The Museum Journal. This is the written form of a presentation given in December 2011 at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, as part of the Danish Network for Memory Studies conference. The full article is located here.

This article documents the work and creative thought that went into a program offered at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History entitled, “The Time Trial of John Brown.” The article abstract states in part: “Using the Time Trial approach as a case study, this article reveals that interactive theater in museums can provide a platform from which audiences assert their own historical understanding while learning firsthand about their role in creating a shared knowledge of American history. As the role of museums evolves in the twenty-first century, new attention must be paid to this personal process of examining and creating history and memory through performance. It is through performance and participation that history and memory are both examined and created by the audience.”

This type of programming is really a powerful educational methodology. I’d very much like to see this duplicated in other places, especially at the National Air and Space Museum where I work. These programs are definitely leading the field and deserve replication elsewhere.

Wednesday’s Book Review: “Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight”

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight. By Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Hardcover with dustjacket.  344 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. ISBN 978-0-8032-1610-5. US $34.95.

Should spaceflight in the United States be dominated by government organizations and controlled by the priorities of national policy or should it be a commercial activity undertaken by private firms engaged in profit making? That is an important question and most assuredly one worthy of exploration. I had hoped this book would treat this theme; but instead it is history written for advocacy about the virtues of private spaceflight versus of the ineffectiveness of government programs. Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom have presented here a rosy, once-over-lightly history of commercial space activities from the earliest days of the space age to the present. Those satisfied with such a work will be rewarded by Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight.

The authors begin with a discussion of the cult-like activities of Gerard O’Neill and his plans for creating colonies in space. He insisted in the 1970s the that possibilities for human colonies in free space seemed limitless, as he calculated the technical issues of energy, land area, size and shape, atmosphere, gravitation, and sunlight necessary to sustain a colony in an artificial living space. Rather than live on the outside of a planet, settlers could live on the inside of gigantic cylinders or spheres of roughly one-half to a few miles in each dimension. These would hold a breathable atmosphere, all the ingredients necessary for sustaining crops and life, and include rotating habitats to provide artificial gravity.

While the human race might eventually build millions of these space colonies, each settlement would of necessity be an independent biosphere with trees and lakes and blue skies spotted with clouds along each colony’s inner rim where all oxygen, water, waste, and other materials could be recycled endlessly. Animals and plants endangered on Earth would thrive on these cosmic arks; insect pests would be left behind. Solar power, directed into each colony by huge mirrors, would provide a constant source of nonpolluting energy. Enthusiasm for this possibility prompted many to embrace spaceflight as something everyone would eventually engage in, and lead humanity to settlements throughout the cosmos.

O’Neill was an iconoclast, but no more so than Robert Truax, the rocketeer who believed he could build a commercial rocket that would open the space frontier to everyone. Truax, a career Navy officer, had worked briefly with Robert Goddard during World War II on rocket technology and then went on lead the American Rocket Society and pursue a succession of rocket development efforts. In 1966 he founded Truax Engineering to develop a sea launch system as well as other rockets over the years. He never got very far with these efforts, although he did build the rocket used by Evel Knievel in his attempted jump of the Snake River Canyon.

These are mere preludes to the bulk of Realizing Tomorrow, which focuses on the efforts beginning in the 1990s to advance private space activities. Unlike the stories of O’Neill and Truax, some of those later efforts have proven successful, if only moderately so. There is a lot of Sturm und Drang about these efforts, but thus far the accomplishments have been modest. In the remainder of this book authors Dubbs and Paat-Dahlstrom emphasize the rise of entrepreneurial rocket companies, space tourism organizations, the X-prize in the 1990s, as well as the flight of SpaceShipOne in 2004.

The tone throughout this book is hopeful, suggesting that there is a straight line path from early ideas to the success that they believe is on the verge of being realized. A handful of key events provide the skeleton on which to hang this optimism. The first is the enticing of Russia to support entrepreneurial space activities and selling seats on Soyuz spacecraft to space tourists, the first of which was Dennis Tito who gained fame in 2001 for flying to the International Space Station over the objection of NASA. Since then there have been several additional paying space tourists, each contributing more than $20 million toward their flights. At that price tag the market for this form of tourism is limited.

A second hopeful event was the 2004 flight of SpaceShipOne which took the Ansari X-Prize as the first privately developed vehicle to fly into suborbital space twice within two weeks. This unleashed a wave of investment to build suborbital space tourism vehicles and Virgin Galactic Inc.’s SpaceShipTwo may fly in the near term, according to the authors. This passenger vehicle would be carried to high altitude by a carrier aircraft, and then launched for a quick ballistic flight above 100 kilometers (the “official” beginning of space). In the next few years there seems good reason to believe that sub-orbital space tourism will become a reality, according to Dubbs and Paat-Dahlstrom.

What also seems clear, but is less well-explored in this book, is that space tourism for the foreseeable future will remain the province of wealthy thrill-seekers, essentially the same class as those who climb Mount Everest, rather than the masses who dominate the current $600+ billion per year tourism industry. A tiny elite of multi-millionaires may continue to fly aboard Soyuz capsules to Earth orbit, but the reality is that orbital space tourism is many decades away absent a major breakthrough in space access. Until that happens we will be able to count the number of orbital space tourists on our fingers for years to come.

The authors also make much of SpaceX’s efforts to develop new launch vehicles that will lower the cost of space access. This company, the creation of Elon Musk, according to the authors, challenges the normative approach to space transportation and may well open the space frontier to many more players. They also emphasize Robert Bigelow’s efforts to develop inflatable orbital habitats, two of which has been launched and tested.

Realizing Tomorrow makes the case that the United States is on an inevitable path toward greater access to space and a blossoming of activities in Earth orbit. Dubbs and Paat-Dahlstrom offer an overall Panglossian version of what has been taking place, that we live in the best of all possible worlds and that it is getting better all the time, forecasting a bright future for private human spaceflight. This development will increase opportunities for tourism, which takes up the bulk of their book, for research, or for other activities. There is little skepticism recorded in any of this, despite the fact that these efforts are being viewed with considerable skepticism by many in the space community. One may believe that this skepticism is predicated on outmoded thinking and twentieth century norms and is therefore easily dismissed; but one may just as easily conclude that those skeptical are reflecting their knowledge of just how hard it is to build and operate these space technologies.

A New Moon Race?

The LCROSS lunar impacting probe crashed into the crater Cabeus A, near the Moon’s south pole.

It’s amazing when you think about it. One might think that there is a new race to the Moon underway, this time with robotic spacecraft rather than astronauts and cosmonauts. There has been a small armada of space probes sent to the Moon by many different nations since the turn of the new millennium. Collectively, these spacecraft have revealed a much more interesting Moon than we thought was the case in the aftermath of the Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s.

Using remote sensing technologies ranging from visible light imaging to spectroscopy to laser ranging these spacecraft have revolutionized knowledge of the Moon and made it once again a fascinating place to visit. Among other discoveries, these robotic explorers have shown Earth’s nearest neighbor as a place where ice may well exist. For example, in 2009 NASA’s LCROSS probe, the Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite, confirmed the existence of water in a cold, permanently dark crater at the south pole of the Moon. This was just the latest of three different spacecraft indicating ice in deep craters on the lunar surface.

The spacecraft flown to the Moon since 2000 are listed below, along with their sponsoring nation and their dates of operation. This list first appeared in the March 2013 issue of the Lunar and Planetary Information Bulletin.

Lunar Scientific Missions since 2000

Country	Name	Launch Date	Status
ESA	Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology-1 (SMART-1)	September 27, 2003	Ended with lunar surface impact on September 3, 2006
USA	Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun (ARTEMIS)	February 27, 2007	Extension of the THEMIS mission; ended in 2012
Japan	SELENE (Kaguya)	September 14, 2007	Ended with lunar surface impact on June 10, 2009
China	Chang’e-1	October 24, 2007	Taken out of orbit on March 1, 2009
India	Chandrayaan-1	October 22, 2008	Two-year mission; ended after 315 days due to malfunction and loss of contact
USA	Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO)	June 18, 2009	Completed one-year primary mission; now in five-year extended mission
USA	Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS)	June 18, 2009	Ended with lunar surface impact on October 9, 2009
China	Chang’e-2	October 1, 2010	Primary mission lasted for six months; extended mission completed flyby of asteroid 4179 Toutatis in December 2012
USA	Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL)	September 10, 2011	Ended with lunar surface impact on December 17, 2012

Comment on Story: “How the Air Force and SpaceX Saved Dragon from Doom”

SpaceX Dragon berthing at ISS on March 3, 2013. Credit: NASA

Yesterday Ken Kremer published a story on-line at universetoday.com entitled “How the Air Force and SpaceX Saved Dragon from Doom.” He quoted liberally from an e-mail I had sent to Nancy Atkinson on March 5, 2013, when she contacted me about the problems with the last SpaceX launch and the Dragon capsule that successfully rendezvoused and docked with the International Space Station (ISS) in March 2013. The question was about what had been suggested was “the rather amazing recovery of the Dragon capsule.” My response was about how the engineers working on these flight projects have successfully resolved problems in their missions many times in the past and that these recoveries are less “amazing” than we might think when just considering this example with Dragon.

I didn’t know that my e-mail would be excerpted into this story, but regardless what I said was well expressed in this report. I do want to emphasize once again that the successful completion of the Dragon mission to ISS was really an example of the flight team doing what flight teams do best, solving problems and bringing missions to successful completions. Most of the time we don’t hear much about the problems, and even less about the often intensive efforts to resolve them, but they take place all the time. Check out this story and what happened to recover in this particular instance.