Robert Lawrence was selected as an astronaut for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory project, which was announced in 1963. If the MOL project sounds unfamiliar, it’s because in the end it never flew.
And because it was all, in the way, a giant lie.
The program existed, and astronauts like Lawrence trained for the mission which would supposedly put up a series of small, single use space stations that would orbit the Earth for 40 days at a time. At one end of this mini-station would be a Gemini spacecraft, which the two astronauts on board would use to return to Earth at the end of the mission. The station itself would eventually fall into the atmosphere and incinerate.
But the MOL wasn’t quite what the public was being sold. It was presented as a program that would show men could handle long space missions — and there was a discussion around military missions. But really, what made MOL attractive to the government at the time was using these low-flying, polar-orbit stations as manned spy satellites. The program was eventually cancelled because it was demonstrated that unmanned satellites could do the job much more cheaply.
Still, work on MOL didn’t all go to waste. Included in the planning for these small stations were systems and ideas that made it into later craft. The MOL program even included development of the “Astronaut Maneuvering Unit,” a precursor of the Manned Maneuvering Unit that allowed Shuttle astronauts to perform untethered space walks.
However, before the program was cancelled, Robert Lawrence was killed in the crash of a training jet. Lawrenced, an expert pilot, was in the backseat acting as a instructor for a flight test trainee. The trainee was able to eject and survived. Lawrence did not.
When you’re remembering those astronauts that NASA lost over the years, keep Robert Henry Lawrence on the list.
NASA News
Water on the Moon
The idea that there is hidden water on Mars seems reasonable, in no small part because there’s considerable visible water on Mars, in the form of ice that is seen at the poles and frost that has been seen in some images. But the Moon is astoundingly dry. Even the rocks brought back from the moon are completely missing the integral water that would be found on terrestrial equivalents. Prospecting for Lunar water would seem like a difficult task.
But it’s been long understood that most of Earth’s water likely arrived in the form of icy comets, and those comets also smack into the Moon. Sometimes, they hit in areas where special properties allow that ice to remain — such as in deeply shadowed craters near the Lunar South Pole. These “cold traps” might also slowly collect the few water molecules that are generated through other processes. But new evidence from a pair of missions (ISRO’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper and NASA’s LCROSS) suggests that the Moon’s water may be more widespread than previously expected, and that concentrations of water at the poles may be smaller.
This is likely bad news for those who hoped that water ice might exist on the Moon in localized quantities great enough to support mining this material to produce water, oxygen, and fuel for missions on the Moon and beyond. The latest results suggest that the water is not only more spread out and less concentrated, but more difficult to get at.
The new finding of widespread and relatively immobile water suggests that it may be present primarily as OH, a more reactive relative of H2O that is made of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom. OH, also called hydroxyl, doesn’t stay on its own for long, preferring to attack molecules or attach itself chemically to them. Hydroxyl would therefore have to be extracted from minerals in order to be used.
Space Launch System engine test
NASA’s big rocket is still a couple of years away from appearing on a launch pad, but one of the engines got a workout this week.
Operators powered one of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) engines up to 113 percent thrust level, the highest RS-25 power level yet achieved, during a test on Feb. 21 at Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Miss.
You can get a look at the engine test in local coverage. The RS-25 is an upgraded version of the engine that served as the Space Shuttle Main Engine and generates over 400,000 pounds of thrust. The Space Launch System will carry four RS-25s along with a pair of solid fuel boosters.
Hubbard observation suggests ‘new physics’ at work
Dark matter, dark energy, dark … solutions. The way that galaxies hang together, as well as the way that they move apart, continues to involve a lot of very large scale ‘huh.’ And more accurate measurements of expansion rates generated from Hubble observations are only serving to emphasize that there may be something at work that’s entirely new to us.
That's because the latest Hubble finding confirms a nagging discrepancy showing the universe to be expanding faster now than was expected from its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang. Researchers suggest that there may be new physics to explain the inconsistency.
One suggestion is that dark energy — whatever it is — is actually growing stronger over time. Another idea is a new class of undetected, and speedy, particles grouped under “dark radiation.” That’s a lot of dark.
Other Space Agency News
Jaxa observed a tanker spill in the East China Sea and imaged the spreading spill using their ALOS-2 / PALSAR-2 satellite.
ESA announced a deal with Canada that will convert their SWARM project from a trio of satellites to a quartet. SWARM will look at space weather and Earth’s magnetic field. Also, an investigation into an Ariane 5 rocket that wandered away from the programmed flight path on Jan 25 and eventually lost contact the ground station, concluded that the rocket was given bad coordinates, directing it over 20 degrees off the target path.
ISRO lunar problem Chandrayaan-1 carried the Moon Mineralogy Mapper. It was the spectrometer onboard the Chandrayaan-1 that allowed the study on lunar water seen above in NASA News.
News from the Manufacturers
Bigelow is best known as the creators of the inflatable module that’s currently attached to the International Space Station. That module has now been attached to the ISS for over two year, giving the astronauts an extra 16 cubic meters of living space and providing a test of Bigelow’s materials. But the company has ambitions that are … ambitious.
Over time, Bigelow Aerospace will manufacture a single station, launched on a single rocket that will contain over 2.4 times the pressurized volume of the entire International Space Station, and we intend for BSO to market and operate these also. A new manufacturing facility for these giant stations would have to be built in Florida, Alabama or other suitable location.
To support that target, Bigelow is planning to send up a pair of 330 cubit meter units in the next three years. This week they split off a new company called Bigelow Space Operations to manage sales and customer contact for their upcoming stations. Bigelow has also discussed putting one of their inflatable units in orbit around the Moon.
SpaceX successfully launched the PAZ advanced radar satellite for Spain from Vandenburg Air Force Base space complex 4, which is the company’s West Coast launch facility.
This flight, using an older Falcon 9 that had already made a flight. The flight also carried a pair SpaceX ‘Starlink’ satellites. Starlink is SpaceX’s proposed 1,200 satellite system that would provide high speed Internet almost anywhere on Earth without the long ping times and limited bandwidth associated with services using satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
This launch also included SpaceX’s first attempt to recover not just the booster, but the payload fairing, but catching it in a giant net attached to a ship.
Off the California coast, a boat called 205-foot boat called Mr. Steven, owned by a company called SeaTran, attempted to catch the Falcon 9’s fairing (the casing on the top of the rocket that holds its payload) as it fell back to Earth. According to a Tweet from Musk, the boat missed the fairing "by a few hundred meters."
The attempt was only partially successful this time. SpaceX will slightly increase the size of parachutes on the fairing to improve the chance next time around. With a cost of $6 million, SpaceX hopes to capture and reuse the fairing, which would be a significant reduction in their launch costs.
It’s easy to think of ULA as the “un-sexy one.” After all, smushing together Lockheed Martin and Boeing’s space divisions is just intrinsically less interesting than the activities of the nimble new guys on the block. But rather than think of ULA as dinosaurs, think of them as guys with over 300 successful launches under their belts … who are hopefully starting to wake up to the idea that they no longer have a monopoly on getting things to go up.
ULA has now taken over operations of Lockheed’s Atlas V, which remains both a reliable and extremely flexible launch system — they can strap on up to five solid fuel boosters — and that flexibility, along with a launch record beloved of insurance companies, is still landing contracts for ULA. Though take a look at the schedule below. In just about every spot that now says Falcon 9, that would have been an Atlas V launch a few years ago. ULA can’t like that.
The truth is that an Atlas V launch costs over $100 million. A Delta IV launch is above $150. And when you can buy a ride on a Falcon 9 for $62 million — and falling — it’s becoming harder and harder to justify the extra dollars for a ULA flight.
The response of ULA to Space X already eating their lunch and others hungrily eyeing what happens when the long term, mostly government, contracts that now sustain ULA run out is supposed to be a rocket called Vulcan. Vulcan uses an improved version of the ULA’s extremely long-in-the-tooth Centaur as an upper stage. The Centaur design goes back to the 1950s. That’s not exactly an inspirational note on ULA’s ability to conceptualize new designs. The bottom of the stack — the Vulcan — is an new design based around Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine (or possibly engines from Aerojet Rocketdyne, things are still not finalized) and the fuel tanks from a Delta IV. But … when it’s done, ULA will still have a rocket that costs more to operate and follows the same one-time-use model of their existing fleet. And that rocket will loft less than a Falcon Heavy.
ULA is counting on contracts for launching humans to the ISS using the Boeing Starliner capsule on top of an Atlas V as a revenue stream, but the first uncrewed flight isn’t scheduled until this August, and with Trump threatening to cut off ISS funds, that may not be a long-term source of funds.
Upcoming Launches
Feb 25 — Hispasat 30W-6, Falcon 9, Space Launch Complex 40
Delayed from Feb. 22. Communications satellite will provide broadband and television to Europe, North Africa and parts of the Americas.
March 1 — GEOS-S Mission, Atlas V, Space Launch Complex 41
Geostationary weather satellite that will improve monitoring of wildfires, cyclones, and other hazards that threaten the western United States, Hawaii, Alaska, Mexico, Central America and part of South America.
Mar 20 — TESS Mission, Falcon 9 Full Thrust, Launch Complex 39A
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite designed to look for exoplanets that pass in front of 200,000 nearby stars.
MAR 18 — Iridium Next 41-50, Falcon 9, Space Launch Complex 4E
Commercial communications satellites. Multiple satellite deployment.
Mar 22 — USIP 2, Terrier-Improved Malemute
Suborbital sounding rocking lofting scientific payload.
Mar 6 — O3b mPower 4, Arianespace Soyuz
Delayed from March 1. Arianespace Soyuz using a Fregat ‘space tug’ upper stage. Fourth set of mPower communications satellites.
Mar 21 — ISS Crew Mission 55, Soyuz MS
Delivering three person crew, Oleg Artemyev (RU, commanding), Drew Feustel (US), and Ricky Arnold US) to International Space Station.
Mar 15 — Apstar 6C, Long March 3B
Communications satellite to geosynchronous orbit over Asia-Pacific. Mobile broadband, cellular, and broadcast bands.
Mar 15 — GSLV-F08, GSLV Mk II
A geosynchronous satellite launch on the updated version of India’s purpose-built Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle. Communications satellite.
Feb 24 — IGS 6, H-IIA
Optical reconnaissance satellite for Japanese government.