Space News Sometimes I wonder about things I hear because they don’t seem reasonable. I just heard Israel is going to make a moon landing. It isn’t that I don’t think they are not capable of the science, its because they are a tiny country and I can’t help but wonder how in the world they can afford to do this. This is especially true since Israel has to devote so much of their money to national defense. In 2016 they had a population of 8.547 million people. New York City had a population that year of 8.538 million people. Could you imagine New York City having enough cash to send a vehicle to land on the moon? NASA killed their moon lander because of expense or was there another reason? Could we be financing Israel’s lander? Anyway, the cost must be around $500 million to $1 billion dollars minimum. There is a lot going on with the manned space program and unfortunately it is not all that good. Boeing and SpaceX are dueling for the honor of being first with a commercial ship which will take astronauts to the International Space Station and eventually the moon and maybe Mars. Presently the only manned flights to the space station are on Russian rockets and we are paying $70 million per seat to ferry our astronauts back and forth to the station. So far, we have paid the Russian $3.37 billion dollars for this honor. Right now, there are two different types of ships. One is only for cargo and the other is for humans. Boeing and SpaceX want to get their human carrying ships ready but have promised dates for this to happen which have not materialized. As with many things commercial companies are involved with the date to accomplish these goals keeps being pushed back. These companies have to pass strict certifications tests before they can receive a certificate allowing them to transport humans and so far, it look like 2018 will come and go before that happens. The Government Accounting Office is predicting 2019 as the earliest date for Boeing to get certified and probably 2020 for SpaceX. If the Russians didn’t want us to get to the space station they could simply not allow us on their rockets. Luckily the price is so tempting the service keeps going. We are saving money over the old space shuttles however. They cost us an average of 450 million dollars per flight to the International Space Station. There is a chance we have found the equivalent of amber. No, it is not tree sap which turned hard and trapped small animals and bugs but it might do the same thing but not on earth. I am talking about the “Ghost Dunes” on Mars. Scientists have found preserved sand dunes on the Red Planet and there is a chance what ever was in them might have also been preserved. Some think life could be there but I think there is more of a chance of finding preserved insects and animals if they ever existed. These could turn out to be the La Brea Tar Pits of Mars without the tar. Dunes supported early life on earth so the hope is they supported life on Mars. There is an added bonus to dunes on Mars, they would protect microbes from the radiation Mars receives on its surface. It will be interesting to check these things out. For the very first-time scientists on earth were able to track cosmic radiation back to the source. Some comes from the sun but other cosmic radiation comes from other sources. A high energy mass of radiation has been traced back to the Eta Carinae system which is approximately 7,500 light years away. A light year is the time light which travels at about 186,000 miles per second takes to travel a year. It sounds very fast but would be far too slow for meaningful space travel outside the solar system. A retired astronaut has stated rockets built by SpaceX, NASA and Blue Origin will never succeed in getting humans to Mars. That was quite a bold statement and one has to wonder what he knows that we don’t. He claims it has nothing to do with the technology and says the reason they won’t be used is the danger is too great. Here is what he said, “My guess is we will never go to Mars with the engines that exist on any of those three rockets unless we truly have to…” “I don’t think those are a practical way to send people to Mars because they’re dangerous and it takes too long.” The astronaut telling us is a man who has made three trips into space himself. He is the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. NASA wants to take care of tiny payloads launched into space so they have selected Phase Four in El Segundo, California for the task. They will focus on tiny and very small satellites. NASA is saying they will be able to save money using these small satellites, “With this contract, we will provide small satellites with the kind of affordable in-space mobility that will enable NASA to conduct a wider range of missions than currently possible” This company has also developed an electrode-less frequency thruster which can be designed for groups of small satellites and which can also be used to power larger spacecraft. China wants to get into manned space travel in a big way. Landing a rover on the moon whet their appetite even more. It is one way for their president for life to increase his prestige among his people, at least this is what he believes. China is going to recruit astronauts from their civilian population. Astronauts in China are called yuhangyuan. They want to get another space station up and have it completed by 2022 and they claim it will have a life expectancy of at least a decade. In 2020 they want to launch a mission to Mars which contains a rover and they also want to be the first country to land on the dark side of the moon. The truth is we have probably done this already but since it is secret China would get the praise. The Big Bang is a theory of how the universe started. It states a super atom burst and what came after was everything and it is said the results of the explosion can still be found in the background noise in space today. Not so fast said the late Stephen Hawking. He said nothing that may have existed before the Big Bang had anything to do with what came after. Wow that is a hard one to figure out. This doesn’t mean Hawking as brilliant as he was, was always right. There have been many theories on how the universe was formed and they have all been replaced and there is a good chance some day the Big Bang Theory might also be replaced, but for now it is the dominant theory.
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