crewed spaceflight

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Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992 by Rick Houston, J. Milt Heflin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, private spaceflight, Skype

Goett rather than directly to NASA headquarters in Washington. It was not long before the concept for a separate $60 million complex that would employ an initial estimate of three thousand people came into being. Even then, the location of a permanent MOCR remained in doubt. Would it stay at the Cape, closest to where the country’s crewed spaceflight missions would begin? Surely, that would be the best bet. Goddard, maybe? That was where NASA’s earliest computers were located, plus it was a bonus—to some, at least—that it was located so close to the bosses down in DC. Or, finally, should the MOCR go where the rest of STG went and keep everybody in one place?

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Before launch, he went to Kraft for approval. He got it. The Americans now had the records for longest flight and the first rendezvous in space. Next up was an Agena docking, but that was a test that very nearly led to NASA’s first in-flight tragedy. The nastiest emergency in the young history of crewed spaceflight began innocently enough on 16 March 1966, when Gemini 8’s Neil Armstrong brought his spacecraft in for a smooth docking with an Agena Target Vehicle six hours and thirty-three minutes after he and David R. Scott had lifted off from the Cape. That elicited yet another round of cheers in the MOCR, but all-out chaos was about to break loose and the ground had absolutely no way of knowing about it.

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“In our theater of competition, the space theater, we were surprised and engaged at the beginning of the second quarter,” Lunney said. “We had won the day and the enemy left the field of competition at halftime. It went on for a long time after that in other fields, but not in ours.” Third-floor comm loops fell silent, its console monitors darkened. It would be nearly a full decade before another crewed spaceflight was flown out of that room, as control for all three Skylab missions, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, and the first four Space Shuttle missions shifted to the one a floor down. The third-floor MOCR had played a major role in the grandest adventure mankind had ever known, but in January 1986, it was to be part of NASA’s greatest tragedy to that point. 11 The End of an Era The roses came into the control room like clockwork, targeted to arrive on the day of landing for each of the 110 Space Shuttle flights that came after the Challenger accident.

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

“The Top 3 Reasons to Colonize Space.” Space.com, October 18, 2001. 28Interview with the author, October 2016. CHAPTER 4: THE FIRST SPACE AGE 29Marks, Paul. “One thing spacecraft have never achieved—until now.” BBC Future, June 1, 2016. 30Rhian, Jason. “Why Dream Chaser Didn’t Win the Bid for Commercial Crew.” Spaceflight Insider, October 14, 2014. www.spaceflightinsider.com/missions/commercial/lower-techni-cal-maturity-schedule-uncertainty-cited-nasa-select-dream-chaser-commercial-crew-program/. Accessed April 12, 2018. CHAPTER 5: DESTINATIONS 31The five Earth-moon Lagrange points are called L1, L2, etc. L1 is between Earth and the moon, and L2 is on the far side of the moon.

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Roscosmos: A state corporation responsible for the spaceflight and cosmonautics program for the Russian Federation. Roscosmos runs the majority of Russian (and previously Soviet) space programs. Shenzhou and Tiangong: Respectively, the collective names for China’s new space capsules and space stations to provide crewed spaceflight capability. SLS: Space Launch System, a large rocket being built by NASA primarily for missions beyond low Earth orbit. It is derived from technology designed for the space shuttle and Constellation programs, the latter of which were intended to return US astronauts to the moon. Constellation ran from 2004 to 2010.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

But partisans of market socialism have to set aside the reality that the goods and services produced in markets, even socialist markets, will still only be those that can turn a profit. And, as we have discussed, the set of things that are beneficial overlaps only in part with the set of things that are profitable. New classes of antibiotic, rural high-speed internet, and crewed spaceflight would all be as difficult to deliver under a socialist market as under a capitalist one, without significant, planned intervention into the market. Meanwhile, items that are profitable but actively harmful, such as fossil fuels, would still likely be produced. The anarchy of the market also inevitably suffers from duplication and overproduction, and their concomitant manufacture of economic crisis.

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

Kennedy, who had won election in 1960 in part by proclaiming that a “missile gap” prevailed between the United States and the Soviet Union (­after the election, the “gap” was shown to exist only as a projection of ­future numbers), called for American astronauts to reach the moon in a race that “we intend to win.” Fourteen months ­later, an assassin’s bullets took his life. Nevertheless, Kennedy’s vision of sending h ­ umans to the moon was eagerly ­adopted by his successor, Lyndon Johnson, who had be- Introduction · 5 come an early advocate of crewed spaceflight and had played a key role in the 1958 creation of NASA. Johnson’s policies ensured that NASA’s Texas center would provide the hub of h ­ uman spaceflight planning in the United States. For the next de­cade, ­those plans revolved around h ­ uman missions to the moon, with eventual triumphant success.4 ­Today the Johnson Spaceflight Center near Houston retains its central role in the United States’ efforts to promote h ­ uman spaceflight, but the five de­cades since astronauts last touched the lunar surface testify to how geopolitics have warped the application of reason to ­these efforts.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Blue Origin and SpaceX were run by tech wizards, algorithmic geniuses who trusted in mathematical power to eliminate human error, to one day render fallibility obsolete. Virgin was analog, and despite the futurism of SpaceShipTwo’s mission, the vehicle was relatively simple—cables and rods, no autopilot, no automation. The fate of the ship was in Stucky’s hands. Nichols was sure they were going to die: that was the hazard of crewed spaceflight. “If you want to build confidence in space, don’t try sending people there,” David Cowan, a venture capitalist who has invested in several commercial satellite companies, said. “Any failure will be a catastrophe.” The day was shaping up to be just that. Down on the runway, the lime-colored fire trucks were ready to go.

The Last Astronaut by David Wellington

augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, clean water, crewed spaceflight, gravity well, low earth orbit, megastructure, operational security, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, telepresence

Now you’re in charge of deep space probes.” McAllister’s face was sunburned and weathered and hard to read. There was no missing the pinched annoyance there, however. Had Stevens already screwed this up? “It’s my turn to correct you. I’m not quite so old as you may think. By my time we called it ‘crewed spaceflight.’ Not ‘manned.’” “Right,” Stevens said, closing his eyes in shame. “Right.” “At any rate, I believe I’m the person you wanted to talk to. Your message was a bit cryptic,” the old man said. Sunny cleared his throat. “2I/2054 D1,” he said. And that was it. The die was cast. No going back to the Hive, not now.

Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program by Melvin Croft, John Youskauskas, Don Thomas

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

Afterward, Garn sometimes had the opportunity to speak with them. True to course, Garn would remind them that he expected to fly on the shuttle. Bingham confessed, “It became kind of a litany. Everybody knew that he had every intention at some point of trying to get on board the space shuttle.” Hans Mark became a champion of human-crewed spaceflight when he met and worked with the legendary Wernher von Braun in the 1970s, eventually coming to support the inclusion of ordinary people flying on the shuttle. Perhaps helping Garn secure a spot would open the door for other passengers, perhaps even him? According to Mark in The Space Station: A Personal Journey, as late as mid-1984, he harbored his own dreams of flying into space on the shuttle.