The Bewilderness

Euronauts become noughts

The shrinking ambitions of Europe and the United States are witnessed in more obscure programmes. Grandiose ambitions are tempered and then disowned. Such becomes the European manned space programme that never was.

Jean-Yves Le Gall, chief executive of launch-services provider Arianespace, agreed in an interview that an all-European manned space effort is off the table. "It's a dream," according to Mr. Le Gall, "but it's not realistic."

The dream was part of the doumentary word creation that all bureaux embark upon. Westerm dependence upon Soyuz has led to a scaling down and abandonment of co-operation, as their management of vehicle development truly sucks.

The agency's chief also said that by failing in the past to set up robust international space-transportation partnerships, Europe and the U.S. "made a collective mistake." As a result, Mr. Dordain said, "we now face the not very comfortable situation" of being totally dependent, at least for the next few years, on Russian technology to reach the international space station.

It is untrue to say that the European dream of manned spaceflight has ended. It never began.

National Space Boondoggle

Once we had the British National Space Centre. This was based in swindon and was funded to the sum of 230 million pounds, most of which formed Britain's contribtion to the European Space Agency. Not much that was national there. This has now been replaced by a National Space Agency, centralising all space expenditure. Accrding to the move, this is a first for Britain, and was probably announced for the PR effect.

When we see that the private space industry is worth six billion pounds, one must demand the privatisation of the space centre. Should it not be a privately financed association? That is 230 million pounds for deficit reduction...

Space: the great equalizer

Space has not lost its appeal for national greatness. Rivals for great power status find it difficult to compete on military terms in a world of globalised rules, whatever rhetoric their elites may use about a 'peaceful rise' This has a special appeal in Asia where rivals jostle and demand symbols that denote equality or superiority to contemporary superpowers and past empires.

India's space agency has said it will launch its first manned mission to space in 2016.

A senior official of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) in Bangalore said that two astronauts would take part.

"We are preparing for the manned space flight," Isro Chairman K Radhakrishnan told reporters.

"We will design and develop the space module for the manned mission in the next four years," he said.

If great powers are going to waste billions of dollars on why they are as good as the Russians or the Americans, then at least space is less fraught than the alternative: weapons of mass destruction.

Shooting up to low earth orbit

Jules Verne would derive some satisfaction from this new engineering project: a cannon to shoot payloads into low-earth orbit. As a proposal, the project requires financing, but is a valuable alternative to the current systems that we use: state backed and one time only:

Hunter's proposal is to operate the "Quicklauncher" from the ocean near the equator, where the Earth's faster rotation will help launch payloads into space. The cannon would float, with 490 m (1,600 ft) of it below the surface, where it would be stabilized by ballast. Operators would be able to swivel it as required to deliver the payload into different orbits.

Hunter plans to test a 3 meter prototype in a water tank in February, and a full-size cannon could be built within seven years, if Quicklaunch can raise the required $500 million. While this is a sizeable upfront cost, the potential savings in the long term are substantial, because the cannon is reusable. Its use would significantly reduce the cost of keeping the International Space Station in orbit.

For humans, the effect would be similar to benchpressing a falling house. Ebay tag is $500,000,000.

Clouds at cape canaveral

Having returned from points south in Florida, here is a photo of the Astronaut Memorial at Kennedy Space Centre: the reflection of the clouds reminded me of the peaceful environs and the blue skies overlooking these memories

Son of concorde

On the back of Virgin Galactic come forecasts of sub-orbital flights as an equivalent to Concorde: flying through space to reach Sydney in two and a half hours, travelling at 4,600mph. The year when this may come to fruition is given as 2015. But, as Jeff Furst of Futron has pointed out, this is an aggressive schedule:

"You would need something that is durable and usable many times over.

"There is also the regulatory aspect. Would it be done by an agency responsible for aviation or space?"

My gut feeling is that we shall not see a critical mass in private space travel encompassing space tourism and sub-orbital flight. Successors to Concorde may pass through the dreams of aeronauts but there are plenty of stories that seek to obtain this mantle. Most revolve around new variants of supersonic jets, updated to accommodate contemporary technology, and fuelled by rumours rater than kerosene.

Spaceship Two, excellent news

It has taken longer than expected but Burt Rutan and Richard Branson have finally unveiled Spaceship Two, the launch vehicle for their Virgin Galactica sub-orbital tourist venture. The plane has been built by Scaled Composites, using a related design to the launch vehicle, Spaceship One, that contributed to the Ansari X Prize.

WhiteKnightTwo is a dual-hull quad-engine aircraft roughly three times larger than the original WhiteKnight. WK2 employs a different tail construction, using a cruciform instead of the WK's "T" style. The engines and cockpits are also located in different areas compared to the original WhiteKnight.

WK2 is the world's first all-composite full-sized aircraft. Everything apart from the engines and landing gear is constructed from ultra-lightweight composite materials. Even the newly patented flight control cables are made from carbon fiber.

Although the preparatory phase for Virgin Galactica has taken longer than planned, (with 270 prospective customers), this marks another public step into Newspace. Launches are planned between 2009 and 2011. It takes longer to start and then moves forward more swiftly than expected. Faster please.

UK in space

Looking at the British space programme results in quiet satisfaction that this was one area where civil servants did not choose to hose taxpayers' money. They seemed to have learnt their lesson after Concorde, leaving such red ink to the Ministry of Defence. The government's space programme, subordinated to the European Space Agency (ESA), is showcased by the British National Space Centre.

With such a small programme, the scientific community has specialised in small satellites, developing comparative advantage in a particular area. The aim of Micro Satellite Applications in Collaboration (MOSAIC) was developed between 2000 and 2005 with new micro satellites lauched into orbit.

The UK is pioneering the development of these new technologies and techniques, which aim to show that a simple, economically-built spacecraft can achieve the same high-level results as traditional satellites.

Using small satellites, scientists can build and launch new satellites faster and much more cheaply. It could have a huge impact on the future of space missions and significantly reduce the cost of using satellite technology on Earth. It's therefore vital for our economy that we maintain our momentum and remain one of the world's leading manufacturers of this technology.

The MOSIAC programme resulted in two missions to develop this technology: TOPSAT (2005) and the Disaster Monitoring Constellation.

Costing just £14 million TopSat is many times cheaper than traditional satellite missions. Experts believe that with TopSat, we are looking at the future of satellite technology - a more cost-effective future, with better results.

It aims to show that a simple, economically-built spacecraft can achieve the same high-level results as traditional satellites. The TopSat platform will form the basis for future projects such as SSTL's involvement in RapidEye, a constellation of small satellites for relatively high-resolution optical observations. 

The secret of keeping the cost down is the design of the craft itself. To ensure it stays as compact as possible, Top Sat has no extendable solar panels and very few moving parts anywhere on board.

Yet, when one looks at the depth of government involvement, one finds that Rapideye is a German company, that the satellites will be built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) and that the main contractor is a Canadian government agency. The links between the government subsidised outposts in Europe and the New Space movement are provided by Elon Musk's financial interest in SSTL.

Therefore, the British National Space Centre trumpets the innovation of a subsidised private space company and maintains an understated profile in the global world of the space movement.

The new space race

NASA has published its plans for a lunar outpost -only fifty years after they stopped geology. Will private sector efforts beat them? And all the other state programmes? This is the new space race: lumbering dinosaurs versus nimble and visionary entrepreneurs.

The word for world is ?

When we finally begin to probe beyond the solar system in the millennia to come, unless mankind magics up an FTL device, we will find that the variety and diversity of planets is far greater than we have imagined, according to a new study by MIT, NASA and Carnegie.

In the Star Wars movies fictional planets are covered with forests, oceans, deserts, and volcanoes. But new models from a team of MIT, NASA, and Carnegie scientists begin to describe an even wider range of Earth-size planets that astronomers might actually be able to find in the near future.

Sara Seager, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.; Marc Kuchner, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; Catherine Hier-Majumder, Carnegie Institution of Washington, (deceased); and Burkhard Militzer, Carnegie, have created models for 14 different types of solid planets that might exist in our galaxy. The 14 types have various compositions, and the team calculated how large each planet would be for a given mass. Some are pure water ice, carbon, iron, silicate, carbon monoxide, and silicon carbide; others are mixtures of these various compounds.

"We're thinking seriously about the different kinds of roughly Earth-size planets that might be out there, like George Lucas, but for real," says Kuchner.

No doubt planets or asteroids could eventually be called after celebrities, like the citblocks in Judge Dredd's Mega-city One.  Asymmetrical  asteroids in wildly eccentric orbits will be  reserved for  Jade goody, Britnet Spears, Peter Docherty and so on.