Gingrich made a public announcement yesterday promising a permanent base on the moon by the end of his second term.

You may agree or disagree with Gingrich on other issues, but if you are a space enthusiast it's hard not to get excited about this bold statement. It's such a bold plan, he might actually face significant resistance from his core constituents.

In my humble opinion, one of NASA's biggest failures of is the failure to plan long term goals in space, and by long term goals I don't mean send another robotic probe to Mars next years and Jupiter the year after that. The key to space conquest is to establish a permanent presence in space, with the eventual goal of building on that presence to extract resources and build useful infrastructure.

ISS is a multi billion dollar toy. The Shuttle was reusable, but it did a job that could have been done more safely and with lower cost with a traditional rocket. Neither of these mega space projects moved us forward in our long term goal to exploit the wealth of our solar system; Building a permanent base on the moon will.

Arthur C. Clarke once commented that the most amazing thing about man landing on the moon is that we didn't go back. The resources of the moon include aluminum, titanium, and oxygen that can be extracted from the regolith. Glass and glass brick can also be created by melting regolith at high temperatures. Hydrogen and Helium 3 are also present in trace amounts in the regolith, and there is strong evidence for substantial deposits of water ice in permanently shadowed craters near them poles. All these resources can be used to both establish a foothold in space and extend our reach into the outer solar system. The cost of a manned mission to Mars might be mitigated by the availability of some of the resources needed already in space.

You can make a lot of excuses for why NASA never planned a mission like this, but if Gingrich can maintain political support for lofty goals, it would change shape the future of our nation.

Are we destined to become the pioneers of the next phase of human civilization, or a footnote in history of a fading industrial giant?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16536598

#100yearpredictions

The BBC had a fun little article on the predictions for the next hundred years.  I think some of them are on the mark (Ocean farming, enhanced brains) while others are well off the mark (control the weather)

Here are my predictions for the world in 100 years.

First my top 5 predictions:

1. Space Colonies:
We will have viable self sustained colonies off earth (Mars or the Moon).  Not large colonies, but self sustaining none-the-less.

2.  Life Expectancy Explosion:
We will exceed the mark of extending our life expectancy by an additional year every year (we have been headed in this direction for a hundred years already and it isn't showing any signs of stopping).  Which implies that for some they can live "forever".  The limiting factor will become the brain and how long we can keep it functioning, resilient and young.

3. Nature will prevail and flourish:
Wild lands will proliferate: Population will have peaked in 2060 at 8.5 billion and have reduced to 7 billion by 2112.  Genetically modified food will enable the feeding of the population on less arable land per person than at any time in history.  Meaning as the population drops from 8.6 billion to 7 billion the Earth will have more wild lands returned to it on a yearly basis than taken, in fact this process will begin before the peak of 8.6 billion, we already see it in the developed world.

4. Energy use will both explode and be sustained:
Energy use will be 100 times the energy use of 2112.  We will however have developed the necessary technologies to handle the energy needs.  Carbon fuels will still make up a large percentage (30-55%, closer to 55%).  Green energy will still make up an small percentage (5-15%, closer to 5%).  The solutions will be nuclear based, whether safer fission or viable fusion (30%-65%, closer to 50%).  The only potential green power would be off earth solar, but that is unlikely.

5. We will still have personal cars, but they will be smart:
Smart cars will be everywhere, but flexible, attached to the world GPS system (whatever it is called then).

Now some brief comments on the predictions made at the BBC:

1. Oceans farmed extensively:
Makes sense to me - 9/10

2. Thought communication:
If you consider a form of thought enabled texting as thought, then 10/10.

3. Thanks to DNA and robotic engineering, we will have created incredibly intelligent humans who are immortal.
Naa, there will be some enhancements, but immortal super beings?  nope 4/10

4. control the weather.
In a word no -  0/10.

5. Antarctica will be "open for business"
Well 100 years is a long time, but Antarctica is a very hard place to live and work.  All other avenues of resource extraction will need to be exhausted before this expensive undertaking is done.  That isn't going to happen in 100years.  Unlikely 2/10.

6. One single worldwide currency.
No.  Centralizing currency goes against local economic control.  You need a world government and a world economic body with regulation control before you could even attempt this.  That would completely suck and drive a horrid amount of poverty.  1/10

7. We will all be wired to computers to make our brains work faster.
In some way or in many ways I think this is inevitable. 9/10

8. Nanorobots will flow around our body fixing cells, and will be able to record our memories:
eh...The jury’s out on nanotech for something like this, 2/10.  If a sci fi writer can write about it doesn't mean it's gonna happen.

9. We will have sussed nuclear fusion:
Always a pipe dream, never a reality.  4/10

10. There will only be three languages in the world - English, Spanish and Mandarin:
Never.  Too many people, too many countries.  1/10

11. Eighty per cent of the world will have gay marriage?
Until you solve islam, this is a pipe dream.  0/10

12. California will lead the break-up of the US:
More likely that Texas will leave than California.  California can't afford to leave.  If it did it would turn into Argentina overnight.  Bankrupt and a banana republic. 1/10

13. Space elevators will make space travel cheap and easy.
Pipe Dream.  A cool pipe dream, but still a pipe dream. 1/10

14. Women will be routinely impregnated by artificial insemination rather than by a man:
When sex is so fun and the ability to get pregnant so easy, why would we need to have an expensive procedure to replace it?  2/10

15. There will be museums for almost every aspect of nature, as so much of the world's natural habitat will have been destroyed:
I refuse to be pessimistic about this.  The environmental movement has made incredible strides in preserving the wild and at least in the Capitalistic west it has done a great job of saving and rebuilding endangered species.  Low probability.  2/10.

16. Deserts will become tropical forests:
Cool idea, how do we make it pay, how do we pay for it?  But a feasible engineering task.  5.5/10  Just a little better than half.

17. Marriage will be replaced by an annual contract:
Truly a first world prediction.  But maybe a plurality in the minority of first world countries.  2/10

18. Sovereign nation states will cease to exist and there will be one world government:
Zero percent chance.  The bigger the government, the worse it is.  I hope for the opposite.  0/10

19. War by the West will be fought totally by remote control:
8/10 - sure looks headed that way.

20. Britain will have had a revolution:
Kicking out the progressives from govt. would be a great start.  but I don't think there will be a revolution.  2/10

Dawn has entered the LAMO phase of the mission at Vesta. During LAMO, gravitational measurements are made and the GRaND instrument is used to collect high energy neutrons. Together, these observations will help identify what Vesta is made of. This could identify if Vesta contains large amounts of water or other materials.

1. The Kepler mission detects the first Earth size planets orbiting a sun like star, Keppler-20e and Kepler-20f, December 20, 2011. The two worlds are much too close to their sun to be habitable, but it is still an amazing discovery.
2. The Dawn spacecraft arrives at Vesta to begin a 12 month campaign to study the second largest asteroid in the solar system, July 15, 2011
3. The space shuttle Atlantis last flight July 8, 2011, marking the end of the shuttle program.
4. NASA announces the endof the Sprit MER mission May 25, 2011
5. After 2,767 sols on Mars, the Opportunity MER arrives at Endeavor crater on August 5, 1011
6. NASA announces presence of flowing water on mars August 5, 1011
7. Russia’s Phobos-Grunt mission to the smaller of Mars’ two moons fails. This would have been a terrific mission. One of the main mission objectives was to return a sample of the moon Phobos to earth, which would have been a great acheivement if the mission had not failed.
8. China launches Tiangong-1 space station 29 September 2011
9. NASA announces SpaceX cargo mission to ISS.
10. SpaceX announces plans to partner with Paul Allen and Burt Rutan to launch a rocket from the largest aircraft ever built

Wikipedia has a more complete list of spaceflight activities in 2011

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324#section-2.3.2

2.3.2 - 418 I'm a teapot
Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout.

Geek Humor, a complete and well defined schema submission to the w3c for HTCPCP/1.0. Brilliant!

HTCPCP of course is the well known acronym for “Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)”.

NASA announced today that SpaceX will conduct a COTS demonstration flight to dock the Dragon capsule with ISS. The target launch date is February 7 2012. They also announced SpaceX will be allowed to conduct both COTS 2 and 3 demonstrations in the same flight. The demonstrations will include first maneuvering safely near the space station, and finally maneuvering to within a few meters, where the capsule will be engaged by the ISS robotic arm and docked to the station, at which point the capsule will be opened and astronauts will enter the capsule and unload cargo.

The dragon capsule will of course be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This COTS demonstration flight will be the first privately funded spacecraft in history to dock with ISS. This will also be the first commercial ISS cargo mission, and will pave the way for future manned Dragon flights. The stated goal of Dragon and Falcon 9 has always been to launch astronauts into space, including carrying astronauts to the ISS.

Since the cancelation of the shuttle program, government funded aerospace companies and their supporters in congress have warned the United States would become dependent on foreign space programs for access to the space station. While it’s true the Dragon is not yet certified to carry astronauts, this demonstration flight will show that we are not dependent on foreign powers for access to space. All NASA needs to do is get out of the way and allow American entrepreneurs to do what they are best at – to innovate and build the future!

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/nasa/nasa-backs-off-its-document-that-riled-private-space-6617870?click=pm_latest

Essentially NASA backed off from installing a group of burdensome bureaucratic rules/people/process over the private companies.  They did this ostensibly because they lacked funding but in reality because Elon Musk told them not to do it.

Go Elon!

In Seattle today, Paul Allen and Burt Rutan announced plans to build the world’s largest aircraft. Using a design similar to space ship one on a massive scale, the plane will be used to launch a rocket into orbit. They also announced the rocket would be built by Elon Musk’s Space X.

Allen, Rutan and Musk are truly a dream team for privately funded space ventures. Allen and Musk together built a the spacecraft that won the X Prize, and Musk has built the first privately funded rocket capable of putting a payload in orbit.

The plans call for a truly incredible feat of aerospace engineering. Space ship one was amazing, but was only capable of achieving a small fraction of the velocity necessary to reach orbit. From the beginning Rutan has been clear that reaching orbit would be his eventual goal, but it was obvious that the White Knight / Space Ship One would have to be scaled up massively to achieve this goal. And that is exactly what they intend to do. The carrier plane, which will be designed by Rutan, will be the largest aircraft ever built. Yes, even bigger than the spruce goose. It will have a 380 foot wingspan, weigh 1.2 million pounds at takeoff, be powered by 6 747 engines, and will be designed to carry a booster rocket weighing almost half a million pounds.

The sheer scale of the project boggles the mind. If anyone can pull this off, they are the team that can do it. Two of the most successful entrepreneurs of the 20th century teaming up with the man who has build more unique aircraft and probably achieved more aeronautical “firsts” than anyone in the history of aviation, except maybe the Wright brothers.

But the best part is watching a new, privately funded, American space industry taking off. While NASA is cutting funding for an antiquated, bloated space pork industry, a new, modern, entrepreneurial industry is taking off in its place. If NASA had ever gone to congress with the idea of building a 1.2 million pound hybrid rocket / plane... (Wait, they did that didn’t they?)

Perhaps that is beside the point. The best part is with a team like this, we will continue to lead the world into a new age of space exploration. Where only a handful have been before, soon the rest of us will follow.

In 2008, the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft discovered what may be an entrance to a lava cave in the Marius Hills region on the moon. It has long been theorized that, during the moon's volcanic past, lava tubes may have formed large caverns. Sergei Krikalyov, head of the Star City cosmonaut training center, has recently suggested the Russian space agency is considering using lunar caverns as part of their plans to build a permanent base on the moon. These caves could protect from asteroid impacts and radiation, making a permanent base on the moon more viable.

A permanent base on the moon would be an important step towards the exploration of the solar system. Lunar resources could be harvested and used to support future missions to Mars, the asteroids, and beyond.

Boeing has anounced plans that could make the unmanned X-37B robotic space plan a reusable, manned vehicle. The X-37B is a small vehicle, only 29 feet long and about 11,000 pounds. Boeing has propsed a larger X-37C, which could carry 6 astronauts. Although no launch weights have been disclosed, the proposed X-37C would be launched on a conventional launch system and could be launched from a variety of platforms, possibly including the SpaceX Falcon heavy

Could this be a replacement for the space shuttle? It seems to combine the best of both worlds. A reusable manned spacecraft that lands like and airplane, being launched on a low cost platform like the Falcon Heavy.