Space Technology

Current space technology is similar to what it was 50 years ago.

This headline would have been a more exciting headline in November 1972 but this headline is from November 2022: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-artemis-i-launch-nasa-moon-20221116-prso4hn42fhutfyunsowzm7gmu-story.html . Except in 1972 men were landing on the moon and walking around.

Firecrackers, cherry-bombs, and M-80s, NASA celebrates with bigger rockets than what they used 50 years ago. Meanwhile, three private individuals: Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk used their own money to do what the government space agency ignored for 50 years. 

To the question posed to Quora, what does NASA actually do, is a response by Robert Frost which outlines the eight objectives of NASA. Here is an excerpt of that comment:

“NASA exists to do what private industry will not or cannot do. The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 established NASA and tasked NASA with the following eight objectives:

(1) The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;

(2) The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles;

(3) The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies and living organisms through space;

(4) The establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes.

(5) The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere.

(6) The making available to agencies directly concerned with national defenses of discoveries that have military value or significance, and the furnishing by such agencies, to the civilian agency established to direct and control nonmilitary aeronautical and space activities, of information as to discoveries which have value or significance to that agency;

(7) Cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations in work done pursuant to this Act and in the peaceful application of the results, thereof; and

(8) The most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities, and equipment.

Which of those objectives look like profit centers for private industry?”

The social climate changed 50 years ago. Government agencies were inundated with a flood of social policies irrelevant to department function, crippling performance. It’s unclear if the eighth objective has been violated by intrusive social action. A conversation into this is a distraction to significant technological discovery. This is written as a complaint of frustration. The frustration is only about the intrusions of irrelevant social programs that cripple the natural tendency for human advances. The past fifty years, however, has produced the most expensive photo gallery in the world, NASA has taken phenomenal pictures.

Space technology presents an open frontier for technology. A national organization of aeronautics is extraneous; astrophysics, astronomy, and physics are more appropriate fields of scientific study for space travel.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs preforms very significant work in space travel. JPL established the ability of a space craft to utilize gravitational force of planetary bodies as a methodology to increase vehicle speed. What has it garnered? With the launches of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977, JPL used gravity and exceeded its slated mission of a close fly-by of Neptune in 1989. In August of 2012, Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space.

The most recent use of gravity motion was designed by NASA”s Goddard Space Flight Center / John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The Parker mission used the attractive force of gravity to attain man’s fastest speed: 430,000 mph.

The emphasis here is in noting that the use of gravitational force with space technology is imperative. The slow pace of rocket technology with chemical-based explosion propulsion is embarrassingly wasteful. This is to say that a rocket’s trajectory encompasses a single direction, whereas the release of energy in a chemical explosion is 360 degrees.

Space technology is a wide open field for discovery.