How Can We Improve Schools Without Testing?

     The people of the United States will never open the Space Frontier unless we improve the quality of our public schools.  For over a decade, the federal government has tried to do this by demanding accountability from the schools for their students’ scores on standardized testing.  Forget this reliance on testing.  A better way to judge the effectiveness of each high school is to look at their graduates. If 20% of each year’s graduates are admitted to 4-year colleges, and if 95% of that group earns a bachelor’s degree within five years, that high school’s faculty is doing an adequate job.

     To increase that percentage of college admissions, we need to give K-8 students an incentive to put their best effort into learning.  Congress could provide that incentive by passing a mandatory US Job Corps requirement for all high school students who drop out or who graduate but are unemployed and not admitted to college within six months of graduation.  This US Job Corps would be a government-sponsored, military-style program with gender-separate facilities that provide the following:

-   Barracks accommodation

-   Government-issue clothing

-   Mess hall food service

-   Military medical care

-   Daily physical, but weapon-free, non-combat training

-   Forty-hour workweek in yard or building maintenance or in food service at US government properties.

Job Corps members would have access to remedial academic classes during their free time.  They remain in the program until their work experience and reputation allows them to be hired by private contractors and they earn enough money to rent an apartment with access to mass transit to get to their jobs.  Then they “graduate” from Job Corps.

When students know that putting in just seat time for twelve years to receive a high school diploma will result in being “drafted” into the mandatory Job Corps, they will probably put good effort into learning.  Student effort and competent teachers equal good schools. 

Can We Ever Have a Commercial-free Christmas?

     Yes, we can.  We just move off-planet to the Space Frontier.  There are no shopping malls out there—at least not for the next few decades.  While interplanetary people could still shop online, they won’t be making purchases from amazon.com or other such retailers because the cost of shipping will be many times more expensive than the cost of the item purchased.  Besides the prohibitive cost of shipping, there is also the fact that homes in space settlements will not have the extra square footage to store tons of stuff.

     Does no Christmas shopping mean no Christmas?  Not, at all.  If we look back to the days of our great-great-great grandparents, we can see how well they celebrated Christmas without being overwhelmed with shopping lists and crowds of people crammed in stores as well as being crushed with credit card debt.  At that time, most people went home to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with their family, either immediate or extended.  They put the children to bed on Christmas Eve and then brought in the Christmas tree and decorated it simply.  Early—very early—on Christmas morning, the children dashed downstairs before daylight trying to catch Santa Claus putting their gifts under the tree or in their stockings or shoes by the fireplace.  This was the one and only time of the year they ever saw Santa and the first time they saw the Christmas tree.  Their excitement woke up the adults who sleepily joined the children as Santa left.  The adults lit the candles on the tree for a few minutes while everyone sang a Christmas carol.  Then the adults lit the kerosene lamps and extinguished the candles.  Grandpa or Grandma handed out Santa’s gifts to the children who were breathless with anticipation.  Each child received one gift from Santa.  He or she eagerly hoped that the gift would be what each one had asked for in a hand-written letter to Santa weeks earlier.  Once opened, the gift was cherished and enjoyed not only for the rest of the day, but also for the rest of the coming years.

     Then everyone enjoyed a huge, delicious, homemade breakfast followed by more Christmas carols, probably at church, and then the adults played card games and/or checkers.  A magnificent Christmas dinner crowned the day.  The celebrations continued for several days with families visiting at each other’s homes, making music and playing games.  It was wintertime and the farming was finished for the year, except for the daily chores, which were dispatched quickly with care.

     Space people will probably celebrate Christmas in a way similar to that just described.  They will borrow one-and-a-half-meter tall, living evergreen trees from the Agricultural Complex of their settlement on Christmas Eve and decorate them simply.  (They will keep the Christmas trees in their homes for only a few days before returning them to their “outdoor” environment in the Ag Complex to keep them alive and well for next year.)  The children will place their space boots by the airlock hatch with care for treats from Santa before they are ushered off to bed. 

On Christmas morning, there will be one gift per child from Santa—a gift that was homemade or secretly manufactured locally.  Parents will exchange single gifts.  There will be Christmas music at home or in the Christian assemblies or both.  Everyone will enjoy eating the traditional foods and treats of Christmas, except chocolate ones.  Growing cacao plants in the Ag Complex will be difficult and the settlement’s survival will limit crops to the essential ones for delicious, nutritious, greatly diversified and well-balanced meals.  Upporting chocolate from Earth will be too expensive.  Instead of over-indulging on chocolate, people will enjoy music and games and parties.

The more I think about Christmas in space, the better it looks.  It sounds more fun and festive than the current ordeal endured by so many people on Earth, who after being bombarded by seemingly unceasing Christmas commercials and TV Christmas specials, struggle with long shopping lists for gifts and then with wrapping and delivering all of them while wondering if the gifts will be liked, if they’re the right size and kind, if they’ll be duplicated, etc. etc., and then finally paying for all of them.  On the Space Frontier, the main focus will be celebrating with family and friends who share food and fun.  I can hardly wait to be part of it.    

Can People Live Without Plants?

     Over the long term, people as well as animals cannot survive without plants.  They provide us with food, re-oxygenate the air, absorb carbon dioxide which helps the Earth’s atmosphere maintain thermal equilibrium—now at risk of imbalance from the excessive release of carbon dioxide--, clean pollutants out of dirty water, and stabilize soil with their roots to prevent erosion.  From the plants’ point of view, animals and humans are parasites.

     Those parasitic humans lucky enough to raise edible gardens in their back yards find September and October to be delicious months.  The pleasure experienced from picking and eating homegrown, vine-ripened tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, artichokes, cantaloupes, raspberries, grapes, pears and apples positively affects a profound psychological satisfaction in a human being.  There is a many millennia-old relationship between fertile soil and human gardeners.  That’s why people have harvest festivals, like Oktoberfest, to celebrate that ancient and recurring contentment with good food.

     Contrast this enjoyment of the fruits of the Earth with the situation of the six test subjects in the Mars-500 Experiment at the Moscow-based Institute for Medical and Biological Problems.  They are confined within a “set of windowless steel capsules” and live on canned food while pretending to be en route to and from Mars.  Canned food ought to keep them alive for five hundred plus days, but will they be able to cope psychologically with the deprivation of fresh fruits and vegetables for that long?

     Back in the 1980’s, a research group put together the Biosphere II Project near Tucson, Arizona to see if people could survive sanely in a sealed, artificial structure containing plants and animals.  If it worked, then such an environment would be a good way to live off-planet.  On December 27, 1988, my husband and I traveled to the Sun Space Ranch Conference Center to participate in a Biosphere II educational program.  The Biosphere II structure was still under construction.  We toured the building site, the temporary greenhouses and animal shelters with their collection of flora and fauna for the jungle, savannah, high desert, ocean, and farm biomes to be installed inside the Biosphere II.  These ecosystems would recycle the air, water and food for the human occupants for three years in the same way as they do it globally on the planet.  If the Biosphere II succeeded in Arizona, then space pioneers would want to build such mini-biospheres for themselves on the Moon, Mars and in large space structures at libration points in planetary or solar orbits.

     A few years after our visit to Biosphere II, a group of test subjects entered it and were sealed inside for the three-year experiment.  Unfortunately, a few months later, the group developed health problems when the oxygen level of the sealed structure gradually declined.  The researchers outside the Biosphere II strove valiantly to find the cause the of the oxygen depletion.  Eventually, the situation became dangerous and the experiment was halted as the occupants left the structure.  After months of analysis, the researchers discovered that the concrete in the structure’s floor and lower walls was still curing and absorbing more oxygen out of the sealed atmosphere than the interior plants could replace.  This was a valuable lesson that would not have been learned without running the simulation. 

     What will be the unexpected lessons learned from the Mars-500 Experiment in Moscow?  Can humans remain healthy and sociable for five hundred twenty days without the presence of plants and what they produce?  The people at the Antarctic Science Station near the South Pole cope with the long, harsh winters of bitter cold with only a small greenhouse of edible plants at their facility.  People on the ISS manage for six months with minimal resupplies of fresh food.  Even if the six test subjects in the simulated Mars mission make it to the five hundred and twentieth day, will a space ship without edible plants producing fresh air, clean water and fresh food be the best way to travel across the Solar System? 

Interplanetary ships do not need to be large replicas of a mini-Earth with jungle, savannah, high desert and ocean biomes; but, in my opinion, they do need to have ample edible gardens for human life support.  Where is the experimental project to find out how many and what kind of edible plants it takes to keep a human alive 24/7 and in touch with his or her ancestral and psychological link to fertile soil?  An exclusively artificial environment for humans may lead to madness.  There is a reason that humans seek green surroundings.  When we go to space to stay there, we need to bring plants with us.         

How Long Can a Human Group Survive in Isolation?

     The answer to that question is essential to whether or not the Space Frontier will ever be opened, and that answer is happening now.  On August 23, 2010, the newspapers reported that the thirty-three miners trapped deep in the San Jose Mine in Chile for seventeen days had found an emergency shelter and all of them were alive.  A fifteen-centimeter (ten-inch) wide borehole drilled from the surface down to the sheltering chamber became a lifeline for sending capsules, called palomas (doves), of food and water as well as oxygen down to the men.  The mining company is now digging an escape tunnel less than a meter in diameter down to the trapped miners.  It will be at least four months before the escape tunnel is completed. 

     Unlike this unplanned test of human survival in isolated confinement, another test of human endurance in isolation began last June 3, 2010 at the Moscow-based Institute for Medical and Biological Problems in Russia.  This planned experiment—a Mars Mission simulation—involves six men living in a confined space on canned food and recycled water and air for five hundred twenty days.

     Besides the fact of unplanned versus planned and the time frame—one hundred twenty days versus five hundred twenty days--, there are additional differences between the two situations.  In the Russian experiment, the test subjects were selected from a large field of applicants, presumably for their psychological stability.  In the San Jose Mine, the trapped men are ordinary miners, trained to do demanding labor in a hazardous environment.  While they were aware of the possibility of lethally dangerous accidents happening, the collapsed shaft that trapped them was unexpected.  They probably had not been trained for living in isolated confinement for a long period of time.

     The physical conditions in the Mars Mission Simulation are clean, sanitary and air-conditioned with assigned mental and maintenance tasks and Internet connections with the outside world and their families.  In the emergency shelter of the San Jose Mine deep underground, the men have to cope with unrelenting heat, dust and grime for days to come and very limited audio contact with their families and no Internet.  Most of us can endure an extended work shift of sweat, dust and grime as long as we know a hot shower and a clean bed will be available when the shift is over.  No such luxury is in store for the trapped miners.  Clean laundry is probably impossible as well.  How can they possibly stay healthy in those conditions?

     Even more difficult than coping with the physical conditions will be the long hours of waiting and waiting for the completion of the escape tunnel.  Unlike the men in the Mars Mission Simulation who have assigned duty lists five days of each week, the trapped miners have to create activities from very limited resources to keep themselves occupied day after day for an undefined length of time.  Nearly everyone else on the planet who works and lives in artificial environments for extended periods of time—like US Navy submariners on “boomers”—can count down on the calendar to the last day of the mission.  The trapped miners cannot do that; they can only hope to get out “some day in the future.”  Like submariners, they have to watch the clock to know when one day ends and another begins.  Also, like submariners, they have next to no personal communication with their wives and families.  What’s happening at home day by day?  They have no way to answer that question.  Unlike submariners whose daily schedule always keeps them busy except during sleep periods, the trapped miners have to wrestle constantly with boredom without getting on each other’s nerves to the point of conflict and violence.  If depression eventually overcomes hope, anger may erupt and cause havoc.  How can each one in the group maintain their individual sanity for four months or longer?

     Then there is the pressing need to stay physically fit and become slim.  Unless the miners achieve an eighty-seven centimeter (thirty-five inch) waist, they will be too fat to move through the escape tunnel.  Most of us find it difficult to motivate ourselves to exercise and lose weight while living well on the surface of the Earth.  Knowing that you have to do that in order to escape being buried for the rest of your life is motivational.  However, as the seemingly interminable hours of hot, dusty, grimy confinement creep by day after day for months on end, can that motivation be maintained?

     Finally, the biggest difference between the test subjects of the Mars Mission Simulation or submariners on a duty mission and the men trapped in the San Jose Mine is the element that materially separates them from the rest of the world.  In the Russian experiment, it is only a heavy door locked from the outside.  If a lethal emergency happens inside the simulation, the confined men only have to call for help and the door will be opened.  In a “boomer” submarine, the barrier that isolates the crew is hundreds of meters of ocean.  The captain, however, can give the order to surface at any time.  For the trapped miners, there are over seven hundred twenty meters (two thousand, two hundred fifty-seven feet) of solid rock between them and the cold, dry Atacama Desert on the Earth’s surface.  It will take four months, or longer, of constant drilling with diamond-tipped drills to open an escape tunnel.  This is no simulation.  There is the real possibility of failure to get the trapped men out alive.  That realization--in addition to the fragile lifelines of oxygen, water, food, limited communication with their families and the outside world as well as the struggles to stay healthy, fit and slim, to overcome boredom and depression and to maintain social peace and sanity—means extraordinary courage is required for months of survival and eventually an escape from the mine.  The psychological weight of that rock barrier is immense.  If their courage fails, they lose everything.  If their courage sustains them until they reach the surface, then we will know that opening the Space Frontier is possible because that will take the same kind of courage. 

Why Isn't Nuclear Power Green?

The U.S. public suffers from anti-nuclear power hysteria for two reasons:  they believe it isn’t safe and no one wants radioactive waste, that harmfully irradiates its environment for up to fifty thousand years, stored in their backyard.  Even though five point four million cubic yards of coal ash spilled across three hundred acres of land into the Emory River in Tennessee in 2008—creating a toxic and carcinogenic mess that is still not cleaned up—the public has not reacted with anti-coal hysteria.  Why is there a double standard?

Anti-nuclear hysteria over the safety issue is irrational.  The U.S. Navy has safely propelled much of its fleet with nuclear power for decades by stringently following safety rules.  The radwaste storage issue is more difficult to solve.  Obviously, there is no place inside the biosphere to store it safely.  It needs to go outside the biosphere into space, which is already an environment naturally filled with hazardous radiation.  And no, we do not leave it with all the other orbital debris in LEO.

Here are the five steps for storing radwaste in an out-of-the way, but still retrievable location, in space:

If the radwaste is not solid, we glassify it before shipping it, wrapped in lead insulation, by truck to a New Mexico spaceport from which unmanned SSTO spacecraft—like the Graham Delta Clipper almost built by McDonnell Douglas two decades ago—launch into space.  Robots load the radwaste as cargo on an unmanned Clipper, which is tele-piloted to LEO.

The Clipper approaches an orbital depot in LEO, which consists of a command module centrally attached to a transverse cylinder to which a docking port module is attached at one end, a habitation module is attached in the middle, and an OMV hangar module with a satellite repair room is attached to the other end.  This complex is shaped like a short-handled trident—a spear with three prongs.  Flying separately in formation with the complex are a propellant storage module and an unmanned hangar module with two robotic arms for arriving tele-piloted Clipper spacecraft to dock.

Space workers in the depot’s command module tele-operate the robotic arms on the unmanned hangar module to unload the radwaste cargo from the Clipper, and attach to the cargo an internal guidance system and enough PAMs to launch it to escape velocity towards the planet Venus.  The Clipper returns to New Mexico for another cargo.

The radwaste cargo swings by Venus for a gravity assist and repeats this maneuver around Earth and Venus as often as necessary to acquire adequate energy to coast out to Jupiter.

Approaching Jupiter, it receives a gravity assist that inclines its velocity vector ninety degrees to the plane of the Solar System and puts it into Solar Polar Orbital Storage. (Yes, NASA has already flown this trajectory with the Ulysses spacecraft, which launched from Earth on October 6, 1990.)  Putting the radwaste into SPOS virtually keeps it out of future commercial interplanetary space lanes.  However, if at some future time, there arises a need to retrieve it, the radwaste can be tele-piloted towards Jupiter for a reverse gravity assist and returned to the plane of the Solar System.

               *          *          *

Do we now have operational SSTO spacecraft like the Clipper or an orbital depot in LEO?  No, but if there were a market for delivering radwaste to SPOS, the private rocket companies could get the venture capital to build them.

Meanings of the acronyms above:  LEO, Low Earth Orbit; SSTO, Single Stage to Orbit; OMV, Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle (a space tug); PAMs, Payload Assist Modules

      

Why Does Each New Administration Change Space Policy?

Earlier this year, President Obama announced his decision to stop the Orion/Constellation Program--just after a successful test flight of the new Orion rocket—and also to stop America's Return to the Moon in order to cut Federal spending. This decision reversed the space initiatives of the Bush Administration. In his April 15, 2010 speech, President Obama amended his earlier space policy. Apparently, Lockheed Martin in Colorado--the company building the new Orion rocket--used its political clout to save local jobs and its contract with NASA. The president re-instated the Orion/Constellation Program to serve as a "Space Station Crew Emergency Vehicle" and perhaps eventually for a human mission to a NEO--Near Earth Orbit--asteroid as well as some other nebulous goals.

The new policy protects Lockheed Martin and job security for many NASA employees with the exception of the Astronaut Corps. In spite of their impressive achievement record of the last fifty years, the astronauts and the people who train them and provide their mission control may soon be filing for unemployment. Many of the people who want to see human settlements in space are unhappy with the new policy, except for a small group of private, commercial space companies like Space-X and their Falcon 9 which recently became among the first private rocket to make orbit. The news media usually--and fortunately--ignores this fledgling industry. These companies have big dreams for the commercial exploitation of space resources, especially those on the Moon. They also have realistic engineering, feasible flight-testing, and limited budgets that require accountability and eventually success. What they are short on is venture capital.

President Obama’s new space policy removes NASA as a competitor to COTS--Commercial Orbital Transportation Services--for these private, commercial space companies, especially to Low Earth Orbit. Getting to LEO reliably, safely and cheaply is the financial key to opening the Space Frontier to human settlement because if you want to go beyond Earth's orbital space, one half of the cost of your flight is spent getting to LEO. We do live at the bottom of a deep gravity well. Obviously, what is needed halfway to your destination anywhere in the Solar System is a depot in LEO with a human crew flying in formation with a propellant storage unit, which Boeing Company already has on the drawing board. Add to the LEO depot a satellite repair facility and OMVs--Orbital Maneuvering Vehicles, commonly known as space tugs that can be telepiloted from the depot through the Van Allen Radiation Belts to retrieve malfunctioning communication satellites from Geosynchronous Earth Orbit--and you significantly reduce the expensive insurance rates for launching com sats. Now we are talking money.

What private, commercial space companies need to build ground-to-space rockets and a depot in LEO--besides the absence of a government-funded competitor--are either tax breaks, such as tax credits, or guaranteed markets. One such market is flying radioactive waste from nuclear facilities in the U.S. beyond Earth's orbital space to SPOS--Solar Polar Orbital Storage. That would be a win/win for the Earth's biosphere now and reasonably priced transport to human settlements in space in the future. Develop reliable, regenerative life support systems--we already have good ideas how to do this--and we are ready to settle the Moon. Astronauts could dust off their resumes and go back to work. The space tourists would follow on their heels.

Note: For more information on SPOS, watch for my next blog.

Introducing myself

I, Dorothy Diehl, am a retired space educator and former planetarium teacher. I had hoped to see the Space Frontier open up to human migration during my lifetime. Because that is not going to happen, I want to share my thoughts about making it happen for my grandchildren and all of their generation. Some day, people will be at home in space.