Tag Archives: space flight

What You Need To Be An Astronaut.

Last weekend’s space school featured a talk from a very nice Ph.D contemporary of mine about what goes into astronaut training and the qualities needed to become an astronaut. This talk did exactly what it was supposed to — got the kids in attendance fired up the prospect of becoming involved with the space program – and was far more interactive than my talk, which was basically a dreary narrative on where in the solar system we might end up colonising if we could ever be bothered1. However, there were a couple of points where I had to physically restrain myself from heckling her since it was a rather saccharine view of astronaut training and you’re basically not allowed to be cynical when your job is to inspire kids to do science. So I’ll just talk about it here instead: these are some of the other things you need to be an astronaut, but which they don’t usually publicise because they have an image to maintain, dammit.

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The Future Of Spaceflight.

Rockets suck. This is a thing that we have established here; they’re terrifically awful ways of getting into space that are only used because nobody has really come up with anything better. There’s all sorts of ideas for wacky drive systems once your spacecraft is actually in space – ion drives, solar sails, Bussard ramjets – but these all sidestep the real problem facing future space travel, which is that you have to get out of the Earth’s gravity well first. This is not easy; even though the Earth is pretty small for a planet it’s still the heaviest of the four terrestrials and has what is to us a very hefty gravitational pull.

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A Brief History Of Spaceflight, Part Two.

On Monday there were words about the various types of manned spacecraft we’ve flung into orbit (and beyond). Particularly discerning readers will have noticed that the vast majority of them — Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo – were designed and launched within a single decade between 1960-1970. Since then we’ve had exactly one new manned space vehicle: the Space Shuttle. Manned spaceflight has been more or less left to stagnate by national governments, but there are promising signs that the next decade may be as groundbreaking as 1960-1970. Are governments becoming interested in spaceflight again? Hardly. The US government is still dragging its feet over the design and development of the MPCV, while I’ve heard very, very little about the proposed replacement for Soyuz (on the other hand that doesn’t really need replacing since it does what it’s supposed to extremely well). No, what’s going to be exciting about the next ten years is the opening up of human spaceflight to a variety of commercial efforts.

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A Brief History Of Spaceflight, Part One.

Following on from why the Space Shuttle sucked, I’m going to do a little summary of manned spaceflight – both where it’s been, and where it’s going.

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You Have Discovered Rocketry.

Warning: post contains moderately difficult algebra along with hints of calculus. But don’t worry, it’s not that bad.

Rockets are kind of sucky for getting into space. Right now, though, they’re all we’ve got.

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Why The Space Shuttle Sucked.

The space shuttle flew its last mission in July 2011, signalling a temporary end to America’s manned spaceflight capability. NASA has been working on the Shuttle’s replacement, Project Orion (no, not that Project Orion) for seven years now but it’s yet to get off the drawing board in any serious way and projections that it’s going to make the first unmanned test flights in 2014 are extremely optimistic, so this is a state of affairs that’s likely to continue for at least half a decade or so. You won’t have been able to hear it amongst all the dewy-eyed wall-to-wall coverage about the last space shuttle flight heralding the end of an era, but a significant portion of the space scientist community could be seen muttering “Well thank god that’s over with” after Atlantis touched down on the runway at Kennedy Space Centre.

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