Kentucky Space

Morning frost on Mars

The Pheonix Mars Lander recently snapped this picture of the water frost near its landing site on the planet. One of the lander's solar panels is just visible at the bottom of this image.

Wayne

Celebrating Reformers Like Tom Whitehead

I learned with sadness that my friend and colleague, Clay (Tom) Whitehead passed away on July 23^rd at his home in Northern Virginia. Tom was a passionate believer in opening space as a normal industry, and will best be remembered pushing through Open Skies, which busted open the AT&T monopoly on communication satellites.

Obituaries in the Washington Post and New York Times failed to mention that Tom also served as chairman of PanAmSat, before the company went public. It was there that I served as an assistant to him, and enjoyed very much his wry sense of humor in the face of the never-ending, never easy battle to change the status quo in the space business.

As director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy from 1970 to 1974,  under the Nixon Administration, Tom forced through changes which allowed any company to launch its own domestic satellite. That’s something we all take for granted now, but until then only Ma Bell, or AT&T, controlled the commercial satellite business.

His political views were almost libertarian. When I worked with Tom he held a strong distrust of those in power and believed that competition was best for media and telecommunications.  His actions lead to the rapid growth of the cable business, as companies could launch their own satellites, develop their own content and lower the cost of data transmission.

Open Sky also resulted in the growth of the private launch business and the spectacular growth of communication satellites.

Glenn Garvin, writing in the Miami Herald, wrote that “you probably never heard of Tom Whitehead.” Garvin writes that without Tom and Open Skies, “you'd never would have seen Tony Soprano carry out a hit, or cheered or booed Bill O'Reilly or Keith Olbermann. You quite possibly never would have dialed a number on a cellphone or logged onto the Internet.”

It’s easy to speak of reform in the space business, far harder to accomplish. Tom was a rare individual who took his passionate beliefs in the free market and created a better system for all of us to enjoy.

Jeffrey

Carnival of Space no. 67

The latest Carnival of Space is now live at David Chandler's cool Discovery Channel Blog, Next Generation. Jeffrey Manber's post on China's Olympic Space Race found its way into this edition of the best collection of space posts on the Web.

David also recently wrote up a recent Kentucky Space high altitude balloon launch, so I was doubly pleased to see that he was hosting this week. Please go check out all the great carnival links!

Wayne

Prof. Bob Twiggs: CubeSats make space more accessible

At the recently concluded CubeSat Developers Workshop, Stanford Prof. Bob Twiggs, who developed the picosatellite platform, talked with Kentucky Space (bottom of this post) about how CubeSats make space much more accessible to university and high school students and how, because they make the most of budgets, aerospace companies and government organizations are also thinking small.

The Kentucky Space consortium's "KySat-1" is a CubeSat.

This interview took place outside immediately following the conclusion of the workshop, and on a couple of occasions the road noise and students walking by intrude uncomfortably, but the audio is still listenable and worth a few moments of your time.

Thanks, Prof. Twiggs, for taking a few moments to talk with Kentucky Space!

Wayne

Saturn's rings, sunlit

Released just yesterday, here is another natural color view of Saturn's rings returned by Cassini, the intrepid little spacecraft currently in its 80th tour around the planet and its moons.

Look to the lower left just inside the outermost ring where the shepherd moon Prometheus can be seen.

Wayne

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Wind tunnel plans for middle school students?

If anyone knows of a good set of plans for a wind tunnel to test dragsters, airfoils, etc. that would be appropriate in a middle school setting, please leave that information in the comments section of this post. A Jessamine Co. middle school pre-engineering teacher would appreciate the help.

Wayne

Podcast: Delfi update from Gerard Aalbers

Sunday, Delfi's lead software engineer, Gerard Aalbers, was kind enough during the CubeSat Developers Workshop to provide a brief update about C³ as well as Delfi's ambitious new project, n3Xt. Thanks Gerard!

Wayne

Podcast: Matthew Crook on the high capacity CubeSat launcher, "NPSCuL"

I saw this launcher Sunday at the CubeSat Developers Workshop and Matthew Crook from the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) was kind enough to describe it to me. The NPS CubeSat Launcher - pronounced "NPS-Cool" - will be capable of launching up to 50 individual cubes, or a combination in 3u and 5u configurations. A launcher on the opposite side of this picture would hold a satellite in the 6-pack configuration. Matthew Crook:

Wayne

China's Olympic Space Race

Commercial space pioneer Jeffrey Manber is an adviser to Kentucky Space. Find all of Jeffrey's posts under his name in the category cloud, lower right side of the Kentucky Space blog.

I was one of the estimated four billion viewers who watched the opening Olympic ceremonies. What struck me was the graceful and seamless integration of the long Chinese history of technology innovations, whether gunpowder, paper, movable type or the 15th century maritime explorations of Zheng He, with the great promise of China's future. And that future includes space exploration.

In one sense I was disappointed by the frequent references to China's space program during the event. For too long politicians of all spacefaring nations have used space exploration as a tool for advancing more fuzzy ideals such as political prestige or national pride. I've always felt that events like the Olympics should be about sports. And sending humans into space is about exploration. But maybe that's why I'm not a politician.

I'm more optimistic than many about the Chinese however. I believe that Beijing leaders require even space to meet certain economic valuations, as is true with all new industries in modern China. By that I mean it is fully expected that their Long March rockets will take significant market share in the launch market, and domestic satellite manufacture will grab a good part of the high-margin satellite communication business.

Looking further outward, Chinese officials I met with this April in Beijing stressed that their lunar program is hinged on the pragmatic value of lunar mining and other practical results. An indication of Chinese intent can be found aboard the Chang'E-1, the Chinese satellite now orbiting the Moon. One sensor crammed onboard the tiny satellite is a monitoring device for Helium-3, which, if mined on the moon and returned to the Earth, would be worth millions in energy dollars.

Far fetched? Not for Chinese political leaders planning decades out to satisfy the more than a billion Chinese consumers hunger for a middle-class life.

It worries me that we in the United Stats seem to have transferred our competitive juices from the "Soviets" and the Cold War space race to fears of a new space race with China. Why am I worried? Because we are running the wrong race with China. We are still thinking in terms of political prestige and they are thinking in terms of market share.

If I'm wrong, then fine, the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions for strategic concerns and political prestige. But if I'm right, than Washington has a bigger problem. Because the same country that has re-written the rules of manufacture on everything from computers to washing machines to cell phones is about, I believe, to do the same for satellites and deep space exploration.

That's the message I took away from the opening Olympic ceremony.

Let the real Race begin.

Jeffrey

CubeSat Developers' Workshop audio soon

I will have some audio posts from the CubeSat Developers' Workshop beginning tomorrow, so stay tuned. If you are taking the blog feed, which I highly recommend, then your feed reader should treat the files as podcasts.

Wayne