Today I received a phone call from my brother in the UK. After a long day of work, he had switched on BBC TV for some light entertainment – and there I showed up on screen, holding up an antenna to try to listen for an old satellite! It was a repeat of the Coast Series 2, highlighting UK coast-related activities, places and history. The Isle of Wight, where my activity was filmed, used to be the home of the Black Arrow launcher development and test. This launcher successfully launched the Prospero satellite into orbit from Woomera, just after the programme was cancelled by the UK government. It gave the rocket a 100% satellite launch record though! One of the last actual rockets is still on display in the Science Museum in London, awaiting someone to rescue it, fix it up and send it on its way to space!

The museum at the old lighthouse and fortifications on the Isle of Wight still has some fading pictures and a few satellite and rocket scale models on display. Maybe the BBC programme will cause enough excitement to have a UK launcher again. For the moment it is either the Ariane, Russian, or US rockets, placing the UK at a disadvantage.

The same is true for where I live now, on another coast: the Pacific one, near Vancouver. Canada doesn’t have its own launcher either, but at least there are a few space projects happening.

Up we Go.

Last week the most reported event was a rocket crash into Kazakhstan, taking its Japanese communications satellite payload with it. Lots of poisonous rocket propellant in the steppes, which, although empty of regular imhabitants in the drop zone, are not always empty of scrap metal dealers. Let’s hope that they realise that this time they’d better leave the metal to be recovered by the Russian rocket forces. Not only to save themselves from the poison, but also to allow the investigators to look at as many scraps from the rocket as possible, to try to figure out what actually happened, and how to prevent this from happening again.

Tis week also saw a demonstration of a Photon Engine. This could become a very efficient rocket engine, allowing planetary travel to happen much quicker (visit the stars one day?). At the moment the engine has a thrust of 35 microNewton. That is about 3 millionths of the lift that you produce while holding a kilogram of sugar. So, on Earth is would not be much good, but if you can put it in space with a regular rocket, then while floating high up, such a force, or maybe a bigger version, or very many of them, would slowly start to push it along, and make for some impressive speeds after say a few weeks or months of accelleration.

If we could make it to Mars in a few weeks, we would not have to deal with all the long-term medical issues that the currently estimated 6 month transfer would involve. Weightlessness is bad for the bones and muscles, and when at Mars there’s no welcoming committee with a stretcher, like there is for the space station crew when they return to land after their six month stay. Less chance of a quick frying by a solar storm too.

Now for a better way to just get off the Earth’s Surface, with more reliable and less expensive rocket ships: we will keep working on that one too.

Seeing the volume of logs bobbing along the Fraser River in Vancouver, it should not have been a surprise to find such swiss cheese expanses in BC’s woodlands. However, I was taken aback by the scale of nibbles those mice loggers have taken around, for example, Golden, BC. Canada’s westernmost province is roughly four times the size of the United Kingdom, with forests covering approximately two-thirds; that’s big lumber business. One might not worry about a few holes in the 59 million hectares of forest, but on top of fires and commercial harvesting currently averaging around 200,000 ha a year, the province lost almost 9 million hectares of trees to mountain pine beetle in 2005.

When earth observation satellites provide imagery of natural and man-made disasters, the extent of damage can be quickly monitored, and automatic algorithms can detect and measure the size of any type of ground cover. This enables planning to have accurate inputs, allowing forecasts to be regularly updated without having to send out armies of people to look at every field and plot of woodland.

When the conflict in Darfur first hit the headlines, the UN found that the only maps of this vast area (think Texas size) were a few sketches made by World-War 2 German bomber pilots. A small satellite with a wide-angle camera quickly imaged the region, allowing a map with information about vegetation (cooking firewood!) water, and other information to be made.

I’ve been known to say that Space Is Big. Mainly with regards to the unlikely chances of one’s satellite being hit by a piece of space junk. It is so Very Big that a void was recently discovered to be over a billion light years across! However, when the first recorded hit of a working satellite by a known piece of orbital debris was of a satellite close to my heart, I wondered at the limitations of statistics. Having not only created most of the mechanical design, from overall thoughts to detailed parts and instructions, I physically put a lot of it together, too. It was one of 28 launched satellites that I have – in most cases – been involved in from the initial twinkle, through to launch, to its last beep high up in space. 

Those fun days of actually touching space hardware, and one-year projects from concept to launch, where have they gone? I suppose it depends on being in the right place at the right time:  I recently talked to a colleague, who, after twenty years in the space business, had never actually seen a project through from the start to the final end of it. He had either joined the project halfway through, or had to take on more pressing tasks along the way.

The right place at the right time…now what was I saying about the likelihood of a collision in the vastness of space??

Last week’s Small Satellite Conference in sweltering Utah was very enjoyable, with the usual efficiency that this conference hosts and the customary mix of satellite talk, catching up with friends, a bit of mandatory marketing, and a few student groups showing off their ability to put together a cubesat kit. 

It was the first time I’d been back in a few years and it was good to see the many familiar faces of colleagues as equally dispersed around the world as I am. A lot can happen in two decades of small satellite development, both to the world at large and the individuals behind it, so it’s always a pull when the old crowd gets together like this.  

I was particularly touched when an old friend, and fellow former Schriever Chair, presented me with a decal that had flown on the Space Shuttle:

With the town of Logan getting probably half its yearly alcohol sales from the conference alone, I look forward to the next one! Not that so much is consumed per se – most attendees are sensible space engineers, after all -, but with every hotel room in the entire town taken up, and late bookers having to stay an hour’s drive away across the Wasatch mountain range, there’s clearly a squeeze on the locals.