Space For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  The reason it took so long to send an American woman into space wasn't blatant sexism. At first, of course, NASA was looking for American heroes; sexy, patriotic, all-American boys that would keep the money flowing in. A dead female astronaut would have killed the program. But aside from that, there was a serious problem with female waste disposal. Men could easily urinate into a tube. Egesta wasn't quite as easy to handle, but that would only be an issue a few times a mission. A woman astronaut would need to urinate dozens of times on even a short mission. This necessitated a new method of urine collection, and the only thing NASA could come up with, was in fact a space toilet. But as you might imagine, it's a bit difficult to test zero-g waste disposal. NASA sure tried, sending up various designs in the Vomit Comet, a plane that flies parabolic arcs, creating weightlessness for forty seconds at a time. You try pooping on command in forty seconds. Aside from the problem of designing and flying a new waste disposal system, there was the simple problem of space. The Apollo capsule just didn't have room for a space toilet.

  But when the Space Shuttle came along, there was a wealth of internal space. So starting with the shuttle, the space toilet came online, and that meant that women could fly in space. This is why you didn't see a female American astronaut until the 1980's. The Soviets had put the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, but that was in the early 60's, on board a Vostok capsule, the Soviet equivalent of the one-person Mercury capsule. Her solo mission lasted just under three days. If a female astronaut, launched for propaganda purposes, soiled her spacecraft, there would be little consequence aside from her floating in her own filth for a few days. The second woman in space was also a Soviet, Svetlana Savitskya flew aboard a Soyuz in 1982, and was the first woman to walk in space. The Soyuz spacecraft actually has a space toilet, built into the Orbital Module, which is discarded prior to re-entry. The first American woman in space was Sally Ride, who flew first in 1983. At this moment, there have been 56 female astronauts. All of them flew on either a Soyuz or the Space Shuttle, except for Valentina Tereshkova, the first, and Liu Yang, the 56th and most recent, who was the first Chinese woman to fly into space, riding aboard Shenzhou 9.

  The Chinese Shenzhou capsule is essentially the same as the Soviet/Russian Soyuz, though currently it is believed to be an independent creation, not merely a back-engineered knockoff. In other words, the history of female space exploration has closely followed the development of space toilets because they can't aim their pee very well. It's easy to forget about the human factor when it comes to advanced technology like spacecraft, but the human factor is very important.

  “I'm also the first private black astronaut,” Tim says as they huddle by the window, looking out.

  “I thought it was African-American,” Travis says.

  “Whatever the PC term is,” Tim replies.

  “I'm African-American too,” Kingsley says.

  “But you're not black,” Travis says quizzically.

  “Do I really need to explain this one to you?” K asks.

  “Hey K, are you the first South-African in space?” Tim asks.

  “Nope, not even the first private South-African,” K replies. “Mark Shuttleworth beat me.”

  Mark Shuttleworth, just another one of those Internet whiz kids, was the second guy to pay for a ticket to space after Dennis Tito. Ironically, Mr. Shuttleworth was not allowed to fly on the shuttle, as NASA looks down on the whole enterprise of paying passengers. The Russians however have flown seven space tourists, all on the Soyuz capsule and for a price between $20 and $40 million. The fifth private astronaut, Charles Simonyi, flew twice, paying $60 million for a combined 29 days in space. The last ticket, sold in 2009 to Guy Laliberte of Cirque du Soleil fame, went for $40 million and that bought him a whopping eleven days in space, or a price of around $3.6 million dollars per day.

  If Kingsley and SpacEx can attract customers and keep a healthy manifest, they would never run out of millionaire and billionaire customers. A Griffin could theoretically hold seven people from launch to landing, though that would be a cramped mission and would not last long on the amount of consumables carried, nor would there be much space to move around in. With a crew of two and five passengers paying $25 million each for a total of $125 million, they would turn a $5 million profit right now before any further cost savings or reusability were factored in.

  Of course, if they couldn't quickly fix their current predicament, SpacEx may never launch people into orbit again.

  After four complete orbits, the software fix was uploaded from the ground and in a tense moment, the crew tried their make-shift fix. The nitrogen tetroxide Heimlich maneuver worked like a charm, opening the valves one at a time and bringing all four thruster pods online. Kingsley celebrated by pulling up his panel and tweeting “Griffin no longer drifting, active control restored. #Griffin6aintnoApollo13 #spacetweet.”

  They would find out later that the supplier that provided the valves for the NTO lines had switched to a slightly different valve without telling SpacEx. This valve, when cold, could shrink just enough that it would get stuck closed, needing a higher pressure kick to open it than specifications called for. This meant that had they tried an abort, the sudden command to fire the thrusters at full blast would have opened the valves and they would have been fine. Kingsley would immediately change suppliers when they figured out that the company had provided them with a different product without even notifying them of a change.

  It's the kind of mis-communication that could kill. The supplier runs out of one product, but has another similar one that fits the same specs, so they supply that, thinking it will do the same job. But the basic specs don't tell the whole story, like what happens when the valve is in zero-g or extremely cold or rattled by a launch. In any case, SpacEx would have done extensive testing had they realized they were using a different part, but the SpacEx technicians hadn't even noticed that the valve was different, since it appears the same on the outside. One technician had noticed the part names didn't match, but when he opened the box, he thought he was looking at the correct valve, a part he had installed dozens of times in other capsules, and thus assumed the part was correct and the label on the box was wrong.

  With control restored they continued on the flight plan. They performed an orbital rendezvous with a phantom target at the ISS's orbital inclination, thus proving they could perform the maneuvers necessary for meeting up with the ISS. Along the way, they documented the view inside the capsule and out their windows with an HD camera which would be used to create a film for prospective tourists.

  After their rendezvous, they performed a plane change burn, they raised and lowered their orbit, gathering data on the atmospheric drag experienced at different altitudes. They tested the SpacEx space food, which was developed by a team of four that were former NASA employees. In zero-g, you get clogged up with mucus, which makes your sense of taste degrade in the same way it does when you have a bad cold. Thus things seem to have less flavor in space and this is often compensated for by adding ample amounts of hot sauce. It's an informal joke on the ISS that the world's first space currency is Sriracha.

  After five days in space, mission accomplished, they returned to their suits, strapped in to their seats, burned retrograde, slowing the craft just enough that it was no longer going fast enough to fall around the Earth, instead intersecting the upper atmosphere near Guam. They discarded the Griffin trunk, which would harmlessly burn up, along with the solar panels that provided them electricity during the journey.

  Tim piloted the capsule through re-entry, though that meant he was just baby-sitting the auto-pilot. Unlike the shuttle, the Griffin has little control during re-entry. Like Apollo, all the Griffin can really control is rolling the capsule while always keeping the blunt heat-shield pointed down stream. The capsule actually produces lift, as the center-of-gravity is slightly off center from the axis-of-symmetry. By rolling the capsule, the pilot can point the lift-vector in any direction perpendicular to the dire
ction of travel. The Griffin re-entry flight plan has two sections. The Griffin comes in on a shallow trajectory, getting down to around 300,000 feet, slowing down considerably. The capsule then pulls up, rising back into the upper atmosphere, on a slightly upward arc. This keeps the thermal load on the heat shield down, giving it a short break. The Griffin then comes back down, kind of like re-entering a second time.

  In Apollo, the Command Module discarded its Service Module before re-entry and thus was unable to do much to change its trajectory once re-entry began other than producing lift when in contact with the atmosphere. If that first dip into the atmosphere is not done correctly, the Apollo could skip off the atmosphere like a rock on a pond and head off into space. Since the Service Module had already been jettisoned, the Command Module lacked any ability to change it's trajectory after that dip into the atmosphere. It wouldn't skip off and never come back, as they say in the film Apollo 13, but it might skip off and head into an uncontrolled orbit which would likely result in the capsule re-entering somewhere else, at almost certainly the wrong angle, resulting in the capsule's fiery destruction. For the Griffin, with onboard engines that could perform launch-abort or powered landing, it could screw up the dip into the atmosphere and skip off and still survive by performing a burn with those engines. It wasn't foolproof, as a wrong enough re-entry could change their trajectory too much to be compensated for, or they could re-enter too steeply, in which case, those engines would be useless to stop their destruction.

  It took ten minutes of rockets burning to get the Griffin capsule up to orbital velocity, and with most of that kinetic energy still on board, the Griffin dives back into the atmosphere at very nearly orbital speed. All of that kinetic energy has to be dissipated somehow. It's actually not friction with the atmosphere, but isentropic heating of the air molecules in the compression waves surrounding the capsule going Mach 20. The Griffin coming back to Earth has a mass of about 7 metric tonnes, 7,000 kg, or 15,400 pounds. The average car in the United States weighs about 4,000 pounds. Imagine a sedan traveling at 100 mph slams on the brakes and comes to a screeching stop. How hot will the brakes be? Pretty hot. That's because the kinetic energy of a heavy vehicle has been turned into heat energy due to the friction of the brakes. Now just repeat this experiment 120,000 times and you'll generate about the same amount of heat as a Griffin re-entering. Kinetic energy is equal to half the mass times the velocity squared. So as speed doubles, kinetic energy quadruples. So when you get up to velocities like 17,000 mph, you're talking about a tremendous amount of kinetic energy, and thus a whole lot of heat to be dissipated.

  The heat shield of the Griffin capsule is made of a material called PICA, which stands for Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator. PICA was developed at NASA Ames in the 1990s to protect the Stardust sample-return capsule. Stardust was a probe that collected dust from the coma of a comet. The mission required that the sample-return come back to Earth at a re-entry speed of about 28,000 mph. SpacEx licensed the technology from NASA and worked to make it cheaper and easier to manufacture. Their new-improved version is called PICA-EX, and costs a tenth of the price of standard PICA. PICA-EX is extremely light-weight, and has an extremely low coefficient of thermal conductivity. That is to say, you can put a small layer of the material between you and a blast furnace and you won't feel the heat.

  Most aerodynamic engineers work with the ideal gas model, but at the high speeds and temperatures of reentry the gasses cannot be assumed to be chemically inert and stable. Imagine being a gas molecule, floating around in the upper atmosphere, and then an object flies through, coming right at you, at 14,000 mph. It's not just a simple matter of the gas molecules being pushed aside, the interaction is very complex, involving multiple shock waves, the gas molecules suddenly heating, reacting with each other, then suddenly cooling as they pass through the shock wave. This complicates the science of re-entry greatly.

  PICA-EX was developed to withstand temperatures as high as 3360 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1850 degrees Celsius. Aluminum melts at 1221 degrees Fahrenheit, and it's important to remember that materials lose strength at high temperatures that are below their melting point.

  SpacEx developed PICA-EX with a team of only five engineers and six technicians. They all worked in one section of the office space at SpacEx headquarters in Hawthorne. With the whole team in one place, and with the experts at NASA Ames who first developed the original material a phone call away, they worked fast. Daniel Rask, a NASA Ames employee, came to SpacEx to consult with the Thermal Protection Systems Team and familiarize them with some of the fine details of the PICA material.

  Kingsley met with his Thermal Protection Systems Team and Rask at the end of Rask's week-long visit in 2007. The team had been studying several materials for use on Griffin, and had yet to make a single prototype. Kingsley asked questions, listened to his engineers, asked Rask's advice, and in a thirty minute meeting, made a decision: PICA was the material. From that point on, the TPS team would spend their time focused on creating PICA-EX, finding ways of making it cheaper, simpler, more reliable, applying it to the spacecraft, and testing it over and over and over.

  Rask was shocked. He'd spent eight years working on the original material inside the NASA bureaucracy. Whenever a breakthrough was made, a new material invented, it would lead to years of studies upon studies, more years of testing, and then, even if the new technology worked perfectly, it would still take years of cutting through red-tape, meeting after meeting, up the chain of command until something might eventually be done. NASA is big and slow. SpacEx is small and fast. And it was brutally obvious in that one meeting. Rask caught up with Kingsley as he left that meeting, still in shock.

  “What do you mean it's PICA-EX?”

  “We're going with that,” K replied without breaking stride.

  “You can't just pick it like that...can you?”

  “I don't have decades to study these things. This material is our best bet, and I'm going all in, done deal.”

  “But... What if we're wrong?” Rask asked.

  “Daniel,” Kingsley said, stopping in the hall, “you're not in Houston anymore. We make decisions a little faster.”

  “I worked at NASA-Ames,” Rask said.

  “You know what I mean,” K said and keeps walking.

  Rask caught back up. “You know, I spent five years getting this material up to snuff, and then when we finally had one level of management pleased, we went up the ladder to the next rung of bureaucracy and this manager just told me that they didn't like ablative materials because they're not reusable and to go back to the drawing board. I couldn't believe it. I mean, this one manager wasn't interested in a material, no matter how revolutionary, how light, how cheap, how easy, because you had to replace it each time. I tried to argue with him, but it's just not how it works.”

  “I'm not NASA, and I'm not building Camels. You wanna work for me?” Kingsley asked.

  “Camels?”

  “A horse designed by a committee,” K replied as he arrived at his office. “Come in, have a seat,” K said, walking to the bar in the corner. “What's your poison?”

  “Poison?”

  “What do you drink?”

  “Is that an existential question?” Rask asked, still too shocked to think clearly.

  “That's the question of a man who needs some Kentucky Bourbon.” K handed Daniel a glass and sat down at his desk, taking a sip.

  “I don't understand.”

  “I gathered that much from your slack-jawed...jaw, I guess.”

  “What?”

  “You know, I've caught so much flak for this whole thing, SpacEx, Tezla. I got trade magazines calling me a pot smoking, pipe-dream artist. I got those ditzy people they pay to drink coffee during the day on TV, those people talk about how I'm some crazy, arrogant, know-it-all. How dare I, just some dot-com-bubble-wannabe, how dare I think I can design rockets. Before I started this company, I read every book I could find on space and rockets. I mean, I did that for
fun since I was a kid. But when I was thinking about really doing this, making this company, I went and met with any person I could find, every smart engineer, every astronaut. And I kept hearing the same things. All these smart people had great things, brilliant ideas about rockets. They all had dreams of what we could do, what could be, and all different ideas and visions of how NASA should be or should have been. While their ideas were different, they all had one thing in common: NASA's bureaucracy is what's in the way.

  I met with one of the original engineers on the shuttle project, this guy was on the team that designed the P-51 Mustang, the X-15 space plane, and there he was in the 70's working on the Space Shuttle. He's still alive, this crazy-awesome ninety year old with an eye-patch who helped kill Nazis and send Neil Armstrong into sub-orbit on a rocket-plane before he walked on the Moon. I mean, this guy is basically who I wanted to be when I was a kid. And there he was in the '70s, working at NASA, designing a giant rocket space plane that would be the backbone of our space program for four decades.