January 2018 - Page 2 of 4 - The Spacewriter's Ramblings

Gus Grissom’s Words Still Ring True

A memorial to fallen astronauts left on the Moon by Dave Scott and James Irwin during Apollo 15. It honors 14 astronauts who had died by that time and remains as a reminder of the astronauts aboard Challenger, Columbia, and others who have lost their lives during space exploration and training. Courtesy NASA.

Space exploration has its calendar of successes…and failures. Late January and early February each year mark the sad anniversaries of three major U.S. space missions that ended tragically with loss of astronaut lives. They commemorate the loss of the crew in the Apollo 1 fire on January 27, 1967, the Challenger mishap and seven lives lost on January 28, 1986, and the breakup of Columbia upon reentry and the loss of astronauts on February 1, 2002. Each one taught NASA tough lessons and forever proved Gus Grissom’s prophetic words right: “If we die, we want people to accept it,” he said. “We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”

His words came true not very long after he said them, underlining the fact that going to space is not easy.

The Loss of Life in the Pursuit of Space Exploration

The U.S. isn’t the only country to experience space tragedies. The Soviet Union lost a cosmonaut to a parachute failure in 1967 and three cosmonauts in 1971 when they asphyxiated on the way back to Earth after a mission. Those were serious blows to their space program, and details about what happened took a long time to come out.

Ground-training tragedies also struck the U.S. and Soviet Union. Apollo 1 was one such incident. There were also aircraft crashes that killed a number of astronauts in the U.S. and Soviet Union. One tragedy involved a fire in a pressure chamber. In each one, technical hubris came back to haunt the space program. It led to the mishaps that took people’s lives during space missions. That’s the nature of technology; it serves us well when we use it right. But, if we take shortcuts or cut costs or overlook possible problems, technology can come back to bite us in ways that we will never forget.

It Will Happen Again

It’s almost a certainty that others will die in space mishaps in the future. Loss is a part of the way forward, unfortunately. Space exploration is not an easy task. The technologies involved can fail, be sloppily built, or simply not be up to the task we thought they could. Moon missions, orbital missions, Mars trips, it doesn’t matter. It will happen. What defines us is our reaction to the next Challenger or Columbia or Apollo 1.

The painful evaluation after the fact defines who we are as space-faring civilizations. It doesn’t really matter whose space agency it happens to; it could be China or the U.S. or Russia or the Europeans or the Indians. The point is, these things will happen. Each agency will need to be honest about what happened so that future accidents don’t happen for the same reasons.

Knowing EXACTLY what happened and why is the ticket forward. It will help the next astronauts who put their lives on the line. Whether they are headed out to build a colony on the Moon, mine an asteroid, or set foot on the Red Planet, it’s the least we can do.

For those interested in learning more about the men and women who have given their lives in pursuit of space exploration, read the book “Fallen Astronauts,” by Colin Burgess and Kate Doolan. It’s a somber, well researched book and worth the time to read.

Musings on Exploration

Pluto north pole region exploration — The north polar region of Pluto, with canyons running vertically across the region, named Lowell Regio. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

We got another green light from the New Horizons mission this week, indicating its journey of exploration of continues. It means the spacecraft is alive and well, although mostly hibernating on its way out to its next target. The spacecraft is speeding along, continuing its headlong outward journey from Earth, exploring “new worlds” out there. If what it saw at Pluto is any indication, planetary scientists will likely have a few surprises in store.

Already, they’re puzzling over the shape of the next target world, 2014 MU69 (first spied by Hubble Space Telescope). Could it be two worlds in close orbit? A bi-lobed world in the deeps of the Kuiper Belt? We’ll all find out much later this year.

Targeting a Distant Planet

Pluto atmosphere exploration — Sunlight filters through and illuminates Pluto’s complex atmospheric haze layers. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Pluto has always been a target for exploration, although the launch windows don’t open very often. Heck, it wasn’t even discovered until early in the 20th century. Missions to the nearby planets didn’t begin until the 1960s, and the outer planets in the late 1970s.

Pluto started getting taken seriously as the most distant known planet in the late 1980s. Eventually, the New Horizons project was selected after a few tentative starts and a competition. In September 1989, a group of us students put together a Pluto Perihelion party to celebrate the planet’s closest approach to the Sun.

Over beers and volleyball, we got into a fairly heated discussion about when Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere would freeze out and fall to the surface. And, that was a concern for any mission that would head out that way. Would it get there in time to measure the atmosphere before it “fell down”? To be sure, that “freezing out” wouldn’t take place for many years, and we speculated when that might happen. It was a subject of much debate. We all had to wait until a spacecraft could actually get out there. But, no doubt about it, Pluto was definitely an object of fascination years before we got there with a spacecraft.

The Attempt to Demote a Distant Planet

Pluto also became an object of controversy. In the years since its perihelion, only a few months after New Horizons was launched, nobody expected the IAU to decide Pluto wasn’t a planet. That happened even before it had been explored. Most planetary scientists weren’t sure what to expect from a world so far out that it takes a decade to get there, even for a spacecraft that is the fastest ever sent. So, why pre-judge the world before it’s explored? I still wonder that to this day. Nothing about that “decision” made sense, except perhaps for the proffering of the term “dwarf planet” to cement Pluto’s planetary status.

Moving on to the Next Distant World

MU69 exploration and artist's concept — The Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 may be a double-lobed object or possibly a more spherical one with a chunk missing. The *New Horizons* spacecraft will fly by this object on December 31, 2018. Courtesy JHU/APL/SWRI/Alex Parker

Fast-forward to now, when we get those weekly “green lights” from New Horizons. It’s kind of heartening to know that a tiny outpost of human intellect is speeding out through the solar system, extending our senses to such a cold, dark, and distant region.

New Horizons has done a great deal at Pluto. However, it’s really just getting started in the Kuiper Belt. We’re ready for the next stop on the tour, even as we look back to see that the pesky Plutonian atmosphere still hasn’t fallen down. Even more fascinating, Pluto’s fascinating surface belies activity deep inside the planet.

What will 2014 MU69 tell us? I can’t wait to find out!

The Spacewriter's Ramblings

Monthly Archives: January 2018

Days of Remembrance for Space Exploration