This week's topics 

• Humans in space
• Why go to Mars?
• Artillery vs. aviation - or "Gagarin's difficulty"
• Strange stories about exotic technology
• A real space veteran 
• More Chinese moon plans
• Killer asteroids and comets
• Space servicing and formation flying - getting real

HUMANS IN SPACE
The trip to Genoa 21-23 March was really interesting. The workshop ” Humans in Space”, organized by the European Science Foundation, was attended by about twenty personalities in very diverse fields; medieval history, philosophy, air & space law, space science, space technology etc.

Why go to Mars?
I hope to sprinkle impressions from the workshop in this text in the future, but the most hard-hitting fact that I learned was from my old friend professor Gerhard Haerendel, a space physicist from the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching. He gave a talk on the search for life in space. Let me just quote one sentence from his presentation:

“…Since on Earth it took only a few 100 Million years for microbial life to develop and Mars seems to have had a stable atmosphere for a comparable period, it is very tempting to expect the existence of fossil life on Mars…”

Here is the reason you need to set off for Mars! But great care must be exercised not to contaminate Mars with microbes from earth. Humans are dirty mobile explorers.

Artillery vs. aviation - or "Gagarin's difficulty"
My own contribution covered many analogies between human spaceflight and other human endeavors, in particular the analogy with aviation. Let me just quote one passage from my talk:

“… In the Soviet Union the role of man in controlling spacecraft as pilots was an issue for debate. The first piloted spacecraft, the Vostok and the Voskhod, were almost entirely automatic with back-up manual control systems... While in the U.S. space program the astronauts were given primary responsibilities for these tasks, the Soviet designers largely continued their reliance on automatic systems. They saw the automation of spacecraft control as a complete replacement of human activity with automatic devices. The emphasis on automation in the Soviet Union has been ascribed to the fact that spacecraft were developed by “artillery men” and not by aircraft designers. The latter would have put emphasis on manual control in analogy with piloting aircraft while “artillerymen” had no such prejudice… In the United States spacecraft were developed by the organizations and companies deeply rooted in aeronautics.
 
So, even though only obliquely related to the functional role of man in space the issue of automatic or manual control is interesting to examine also in a political context. As far as I can remember there was an undertone in reporting about manned space flights in the 1960’s. The strong reliance of manual control by the United States was portrayed as a political statement – free man navigating freely on the New Ocean, in contrast to the passive Soviet cosmonaut carried along by the spiritless automaton of an oppressive society. Little did we know that the difference in approach may have had to do with the difference technical approach between two branches of military industry; artillery and aviation…”

There is even a story that the hand controller in Gagarin's spaceship Vostok back in 1961 looked like the joystick of a modern jet fighter, but the control inputs for yaw and roll were reversed compared to what is usual in airplanes, which caused problems when training for the flight. This is often attributed to the fact that Vostok was designed by the "artillery industry" and not an airplane factory! This may be an apocryphical story...

Strange stories about exotic technology
At regular intervals stories about secret air & space systems with very advanced capabilities surface. The most common such example is that of a “black” US aircraft “Aurora” powered by some kind of pulsed reaction motor flying at extreme speed. Pictures of strange-looking contrails have even been published in reputable aviation magazines. Now there is talk about 'Prowler', a secret space shuttle payload from 1990, that supposedly performed a series of automated rendezvous inspections of geostationary satellites, while 'stealthy' (invisible from Earth radar and optical observatories). Why is there an effort presently in the U.S.A. (and Europe, by the way) to develop such a capability in low-earth orbit if this capability existed seventeen years ago? Are we to believe that the purported “Prowler” was so secret that it has been entirely forgotten within the responsible agencies? One can be sure that some rather extraordinary “black” spacecraft have indeed been launched, but this particular story seems a bit hard to swallow.

A real space veteran
On 7 April the manned Soyuz TMA-10 spacecraft takes off from Baikonur for the International Space station. This is almost to the day the 40 th anniversary of the first flight of this spacecraft, which occurred 23 April 1967 when Vladimir Komarov was launched on Soyuz-1. His flight ended in tragedy the following day when his capsule was crushed when the parachute refused to open. Another fatal accident occurred in 1971 when three cosmonauts perished when their capsule lost cabin pressure during descent. Since then no such accidents have occurred with Soyuz and it has now been launched with people on board almost 100 times, i.e. one every five months! The unmanned cargo version, Progress, has been launched 110 times since 1978, i.e. one launch every four months! Hard to beat!

More Chinese moon plans
Scientists in Shanghai are said to be developing a nuclear-powered lunar rover for the country's first unmanned mission to the moon in 2012. It is designed to transmit video in real time, dig for and analyze soil samples, and produce three-dimensional images of the lunar surface. The picture from the news agency Xinhua shows the prototype which is 1.2 meters long and can move at a maximum speed of 5 cm/sec and an average speed of up to 100 meters/hour.

Killer asteroids and comets
At my favorite hunting ground on the Internet, the list server Friends and Partners In Space (FPSPACE), the defense of the Earth against cosmic objects that may hit it has been debated hotly the past week. Asteriods can be monitiored and predicted, but comets may change their paths as they sweep past the sun and on the next pass their trajectory may be hard to predict. Also, the time to change its course is very small. Wasn’t it a Comet impact that killed the dinosaurs, not an asteroid impact? At FPSPACE I found this link to a nice online asteroid impact simulator. The poster on FPSPACE says that it's frequently updated to take into account new data. Next time you hear in the news about a new killer asteroid you can check yourself how much damage it can do. have fun!

Flash: Space servicing and formation flying - getting real
Right now the US "Orbital Express" is flying in orbit and demonstarting this technology. Check here for example. Our own Swedish project Prisma to demonstrate this technology is described here.

Best Wishes
Sven Grahn