Andrew Chaikin Lecture at OMSI in Portland, Friday January 22nd! January 14, 2010
Posted by Nick Azer in Andrew Chaikin, OMSI, Picture of the Week.1 comment so far
Preeminent lunar historian, lecturer. and expert Andrew Chaikin (author of A Man on the Moon and the current occupier of my coffee table, Voices from the Moon) is going to be making an appearance to discuss the LCROSS results—and give a guided tour of the Moon–here at OMSI in my native Portland, OR on Friday, January 22nd at 7pm! The event is free with a $2 suggested donation.
I’ll be there in person to check it out, and if you have the money, there’s a spiffy $250 Space Gala fundraiser the next day (being 26 and scraping by in typical PDX fashion, no gala for me this time ;) )
This all leads up an OMSI’s new, extensive future-of-space exhibit: “SPACE: A Journey to Our Future“. You’ll be able to tour a replica of a future lunar camp (!), build an Ares rocket, inspect actual rocks from Mars and lunar meteorites, and more… I’m pumped about the lunar base bunk beds! :) The exhibit runs January 30th-May 31st, 2010.
Picture of the Week: A Mysterious Development… November 25, 2008
Posted by Nick Azer in Lunar Development Corporation, lunar land use planning, NASA, Picture of the Week, private sector, public-private partnership, Sherlock Holmes.Tags: Picture of the Week
3 comments
This relatively unassuming rendering caught my eye when searching for something completely different (the International Lunar Network–features coming soon on that), and it was a small detail in the image that struck me, and sent me on a magical mystery tour of the web for more info:
Up on the carrier there, the label (in this NASA rendering) says:
Lunar Development Corporation.
As a 24-year-old with an Urban Planning degree, seeing such a particular phrase on a NASA rendering really got my attention. And what I’ve found has surprised me: this ‘Lunar Development Corporation’ could not only be a massive player in our colonization of the moon, but this reference on an official NASA image has proven to be highly mysterious.
A quick search on “lunar development corporation” dug up some gold (or helium-3, if you will):
- A detailed paper on public-private partnerships (PPP), including the concept of a singular Lunar Development Corporation (I’ll provide a full analysis of this paper as a marquee feature within the next two weeks);
- A mildly dated (February 2007) article from Space.com on methods of solidifying public; investor; and other support for lunar plans, which it notes could (in part) be accomplished by instituting “a public-private lunar development corporation” (again, singular).
Among other things, mostly odds and ends.
This became extremely strange upon finding the original source of the image; I first encountered it via a mostly unrelated ThomasNet article. Then, after some digging based on the ThomasNet description, I found the image in the Wikipedia article on Moon Colonization.
Taking the hunt to NASA itself, a search for “lunar development corporation” on their main site turned up….nothing. Hmm. I then applied my method for finding that Wikipedia repeat of the image to NASA’s new official images site, NASAImages.org, and found the image with a full (and revealing?) description.
The archived image’s original source is this page, which has the same description alongside it.
That description is potentially very revealing, by just how unrevealing it is. Nowhere is the appearance of “Lunar Development Corporation” mentioned, as the brief text talks only about the rover and cargo lander.
A search on NASA’s site for “lunar development corporation” turns up only a brief mention of “the new Houston-based Lunar Development Corporation” being listed as founded apparently by the Artemis Society‘s Gregory Bennett (a bio which does not mention this LDC in any form), and a Google or other search turns up no official site or mention of the entity in any form..
…yet it appears on the cargo lander on this official NASA image.
This may be explained by a small detail, from the end of the image’s description:
“This image was produced for NASA by John Frassanito and Associates. Technical concepts from NASA’s Planetary Projects Office (PPO), Johnson Space Center (JSC). “
Here’s the website for John Frassanito and Associates, but a search for “Planetary Projects Office” and/or alongside “Johnson Space Center” turns up…nothing (except more concept images). NASA has a plethora of official sites for its various departments, but yet this Houston space center’s “PPO” does, apparently, not.
A little more hunting at the Johnson Space Center site turns up a reference that the PPO became the “Planetary Missions and Materials Branch”, a search for which, again, fails to turn up an official site. Searching the JSC’s site brought up more odds and ends, including a newsletter (Lunar News issue number 62) from 1998, so it looks like “Planetary Mission and Materials Branch” may have been a name that was changed again, though to what, I’m not sure.
In fact, closer inspection of the original image’s page confirms it is from 1994.
So after all that adventure, it may just be an old and outdated concept. Still, the prominence of the “Lunar Development Corporation” on the rendering (and others, it turns out), combined with the dual facts that the rendering is from “technical concepts, and the lack of mention of the Corporation in the image descriptions despite it being so readily apparent in them, suggest that “Lunar Development Corporation” was an element of the technical concepts not entirely intended to be released; e.g., an innocuous leak.
I’m going to do some further investigating, sending off some emails, and I’ll post an update in the very near future about whether the Lunar Development Corporation could be something currently being worked on (as it is featured in concept images that are alongside much more current ones in the galleries). Stay tuned… :)
Picture of the Week: MoonOne, A Space Odyssey November 17, 2008
Posted by Nick Azer in Google Lunar X Prize, lander, NASA, Odyssey Moon, Picture of the Week.add a comment
Picture of the Week: Hail CESAR November 10, 2008
Posted by Nick Azer in European Space Agency, Picture of the Week, rover, Youtube.add a comment
That is a picture of the CESAR rover, which won last week’s ESA Lunar Robotics Challenge. Built by a student team from the Bremen University, the rover completed the task of descending down the steep slopes of a 15-meter deep crater, grab a soil sample, and return it (all in darkness).
Check out the CESAR site for details from the team on their rover (and their experience), and below is a Youtube clip of the victorious little guy conquering a hill in practice:
The lunar surface is a challenging environment, and it’ll be a lot of fun to see the variety of designs for rovers that come along, and to see them in action there within the next few years :)
Picture of the Week: Finally Got a Plasma October 29, 2008
Posted by Nick Azer in Fusion Power, Helium-3, ITER, KSTAR, Picture of the Week, South Korea.2 comments
That is an image from the Korea Times (by way of Gizmodo) of the first plasma generated by South Korea ‘s KSTAR (Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Reactor) fusion reactor.
The experiment back in June produced 2 1/2 times more plasma than anticipated, which was good news for the project and for other, similar projects, like the high-profile ~$7-14 billion ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) reactor being built in France.
Fusion power is considered a leading motivation for moon colonization, as a primary fuel for it (helium-3) is rare on Earth, but plentiful on the Moon. Seen as an ultimate power source, fusion power could be a solution to certain problems that may crop up in the next 50 years.
Last year, South Korea announced plans to launch a lunar orbiter in 2020 (similar to the craft just launched by India), so they could be getting ahead of the game with their early development of the fusion side of things.
Picture of the Week: So You’s Comfortable In There? October 14, 2008
Posted by Nick Azer in Int'l Space Station, Orion (craft), Picture of the Week, Russia, Soyuz, space tourism.add a comment
That is the interior of the Russian Soyuz craft, that is currently in the news for carrying the 6th space tourist, video game developer (and son of an astronaut) Richard Garriott, to the International Space Station for a few weeks (a trip that has it’s own web site).
The Soyuz, once the space shuttle is retired in 2010, will actually be the vehicle American astronauts will have to hitch a ride on (or, as appears to be the case now, the craft NASA will be buying from he Russians for our use) to get to the ISS and into space in general until the development of the Orion craft is completed.
For more on space tourism, check out Space.com’s whole section on it.
Picture of the Week: Festival Coming Soon October 5, 2008
Posted by Nick Azer in Chang'e, China, Helium-3, Mythology, Picture of the Week.add a comment
That is that first Chinese photo of the Moon, taken by their Chang’e-1 (嫦娥一号) Lunar orbiter craft last year, as part of an imaging/exploration mission (including for concentrations of helium-3).
Check out this really interesting look from the China National Space Administration (CNSA) at the Chang’e-1 program and its goals, from the Chang’e project leader, Luan Enjie. He’s exceptionally well-spoken– here’s a great interview where he talks about his take on the differences from this space race (that I refer to as the “Base Race”) and the space rae of the 1950’s and 60’s.
The Chang’e program is named after the Chinese goddess of the moon, who (notably) only lives on the moon.
“The U.S. is the leader in deep space exploration.”
-Luan Enjie, opening statement of his description of the Chang’e-1 program
The way the Chinese space program has been rolling along in the past year, I think we could be seeing a ‘chang’e’ to that fact in the very near future ;)
Picture of the Week: Pinch Us September 20, 2008
Posted by Nick Azer in Bush, Constellation, economy, funding, NASA, Obama, Picture of the Week, private sector.add a comment
Yes, the Moon Colonization Picture of the Week is of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, President George W. Bush, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Christopher Cox. This might not seem on-topic at first, but unfortunately, it very much could be.
The event pictured is the announcement of the financial rescue package being put into place to stabilize the struggling American economy.
This package could potentially become extremely relevant (and rather ominous) to NASA, as this rescue could end up costing the government upwards of a trillion dollars, which in turn could then end up limiting government spending for some time. This crisis, as a result, could then become an eventual bane to NASA’s rather large amount of funding (and the particularly pricey Constellation program).
Luckily, there’s still other nations and plenty of private enterprise rolling along towards the Moon, so even if NASA takes a hit, the lunar surface should be plenty busy for some time to come. And as a matter of fact, Barack Obama’s space plan suggests he may attempt to utilize the private space sector as a way to spur the economy back out of this slump, and so in the end, the American space focus may simply shift, rather than slump; as any slack lost by a NASA spending decline could be readily picked right back up by American private enterprise.
It will be interesting to see how the unfolding of this rescue package ends up shifting America’s impact on the base race and the future of development on the Moon.
Picture of the Week: It’s A Miner Thing, and They’re a Miner King September 10, 2008
Posted by Nick Azer in Base Race, China, Fusion Power, Helium-3, Integration, Picture of the Week, Russia.add a comment
From the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Fusion Technology Institute (by way of the European Space Agency) comes an artist’s rendition of a Helium-3 miner.
Helium-3 is a resource that is rare on Earth, but plentiful on the moon. It’s drawn a lot of interest, including officially from China and Russia, as the primary fuel for fusion power, which is something of the ultimate power source: clean and efficient, one shuttle’s load of Helium-3 from the Moon would be roughly enough to power the United States for one year. And that’s just one load!
While fusion probably won’t turn up until around 2050, that’s about the time we’re expected to be running out of fossil fuels and potentially in need of a new energy source. So, the idea among Russia, China, the U.S., and potential commercial efforts would be to get a headstart on collecting the fuel by stockpiling it early, and developing some kind of dominance over the resource in order to gain leverage (and massive profits).
So, as a result, even though we might not be seeing fusion power itself for a while, we’ll be seeing (and hearing about) miners like the one above much sooner.
Picture of the Week: Oh, Chute! September 2, 2008
Posted by Nick Azer in NASA, Orion (craft), Picture of the Week, Youtube.add a comment
That is the result of a recent NASA test of its Orion craft’s (Orion being the replacement for the Space Shuttle) recovery-landing parachutes.
According to NASA’s report on the failed test, the parachutes on the actual craft worked fine, but the parachutes used to set up the test (e.g., the simulation) failed, causing the craft to fall faster than desired and resulting in what I’m sure was a lovely and distinctive “thump”.
Apparently this is a pretty common type of failure, and doesn’t represent a serious setback (though it did succeed in producing entertaining photos and video…and not to mention a lot of coverage).
Yes, video:
Luna C/I: Moon Colonization and Integration 
