Solar Sail Craft Shipwrecked!

This may be the first incidence of a cosmic 'shipwreck' in the original sense of the word. The Planetary Society has been sending me what I always considered spam ever since I got my first issue of "Astronomy" magazine many years ago. I would always just throw out their requests for membership (read: money and lots of it) because I thought they didn't really do anything worth while. But apparently they were funding something completely revolutionary that would have been a step in the right direction. Apparently though it is begining to look like maybe we weren't meant to launch a solar sail powered space craft.

In 1999, Russia launched a similar experiment with a sun-reflecting device from its Mir space station, but the deployment mechanism jammed and the device burned up in the atmosphere. Russia tried again in 2001, but the device failed to separate from the booster and burned in the atmosphere.

Perhaps there are other forces at work here than we scientists like to admit? Or maybe a more reasonable explaination is that Russian sucks at putting things in space (although thier human record is pretty impressive). Think about it; all three attepts to put test solar sail technology in space have failed because of Russian hardware failures.
I had previously posted on SpaceAlumni.com a comment about the failure that went something like this:

ICBM Technology Fails to Deliver Payload! Today, a sad day. During the Cold War, a very happy day that would have saved lives. Just an interesting way to look at things...How many ICBMs has Russia launched successfully carrying space bound payloads anyways? It sounds like such a good idea, just wondering how it is going for them.

The comment came from an interest I had in Russia's use of Cold War ICBMs as launch vehicles for commercial and private satellite launches. Though it sucks that Cosmos 1 was lost because of booster failure, it was Russian ballistic missile technology that failed, technology that was at one point meant to destroy us. I just find that interesting.

Getting Space Exploration Right

To all you who don't recognize the title to this post, it is from Robert Zubrin's article of the same name. It was published in spring of 2005 as an answer to Bush's Vision for Space Exploration. The Mars Society links to the article on their website. While alot of the aerospace community, space scientists, enthusists, and general "space geeks" support Bush's plan, there are few who actually understand what it entails and what it means, in its present form, for the future of space exploration. Robert Zubrin is one of those few. He is famous for his Mars Direct proposal, and has certainly proven himself qualified discuss such matters.

This well written, informative article by Zubrin challenges everything about the Plan, questions thouroughly the goals of the space program, and presents a very logical technical approach neccessary for the successful implementation of the Moon-Mars objective. I highly recommend you read it, as I have a feeling I will be refering to it frequently in my entries.

The Article is not meant to dispell the Bush plan as crazy or unattainable. Rather, it is more focused on how to make Bush's ultimate goal (sustained presence in space, on the moon, and on Mars) a reality. What this entails boils down to mainly timetable changes. Where Apollo put a man on the moon in 8 years, Bush proposes 16. This, Zubrin says, is unacceptable technically, politically, and fiscally. This, of course, is not the only thing wrong with the plan, but Bob Zubrin goes into much more detail than I care to get into right now, so I encourage everyone to read the article first. I will post more analysis later.

Coming across this article has made me change my approach to how I wish to present my personal Vision. Progress is being made, and I will post some preliminary ramblings soon. I have noticed however, after reading further details on the Mars Direct proposal, that I am more intregued with the science and technical aspects of getting to and living on Mars than the political aspects. This blog was intended to outline my ideas of what space exploration needs not in terms of technology but in terms of politics, so I will try to maintain this goal through the rest of my posts.

Insight on why the Space Program has Failed after Apollo

Today I read something very interesting in a comment on a post from spacepolitics.com. The comment was made on a post about NASA administrator Michael Griffin cleaning house. I will have to get permission to post the full transcript here, but it was so well thought out that I thought I should mention it so more people will read it. It is about why the space program has failed to do anything of much note in the years since Apollo, and it hit some of my feelings toward space exploration right on the nose. As I have said before, I am developing a vision for space exploration and I think the comment I am refering to here will turn out to be one of the major building blocks used in my project. So again, keep coming back here and I will keep developing my ideas.

The comment I am refering to that I think you all should read is in this article, a comment made by Dfens on June 15 at 1:55 pm , to which I responded on the 16th. Please read it and be enlightened.

The Project begins

I had alot of time to just sit and think today, mainly because my office doesn't give me any work to do. So what I ended up doing for a couple of hours after lunch was writing a draft of my ideas on what space exploration needs, and how to accomplish them. It's slow work as I am not the best with the English language, and I don't know much about politics, but I am trying my best and I think it will be a pretty good article when it is complete. Just stay tuned...

In other news, I think I have a cold. I've been sneezing all day and my nose is constantly running. It's either A) just a cold, or B) Alergies. If it is A, I'll be over it shortly, but if it is B then I might be alergic to the cat which would kind of suck. I'll let you know in the next week how it goes, or if it kills me I guess I won't be letting you know. Great, now my dad is giving me a hard time about it. Don't most parents want to help you when you are sick? My dad just blames the sickness on ME. Just like how he makes fun of me for getting worse grades than my girlfriend. Gotta love him...goodnight folks.

A Little Something from the Master

I came upon another quote I found appropriate for this blog by one of my favorite authors, and perhaps the person who excited me the most about the possibilities of heading off into space.

The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space. - Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space, 1951

And with that, we can now delve into the mind of a rocket scientist who has a dream, and that dream is Space...

Humble Beginings...

Well, here it is. The first post of the SpaceCadet. I knew one day I would fall victim to the word of blogging. After reading over a few other blogs, I saw how wonderful and powerful a blog could be. It just seemed like it was time...

Over the past couple of days, while sitting in my cube at work, I have been doing alot of research into the future of space travel and the pros and cons to exploring outerspace. This promted me to write down some ideas about what the world needs in the way of a vision and goal for space exploration. And so, this blog. Over the course of my stay in cyberspace, I will be adding these ideas as posts on my weblog, for everyone to read and comment on. Many posts will start out as nothing but ramblings and discourses in 'what-if' scenarios, but I hope that some day they will develope into a comprehensive plan, a guide, to space exploration and the future of the human race outside the Earth's atmosphere.