Lancewen Posted July 5, 2012 Report Posted July 5, 2012 This article caught my attention. It shouldn't be necessary for a private company to seek public financing to do what our government should be doing. The B612 Foundation will use its deep-space craft to map the orbit of every potentially Earth-smashing asteroid for the next hundred years. This morning at the California Academy of Sciences, a team of former astronauts, space scientists, NASA alums, and other concerned citizens of the solar system announced an unprecedented initiative to place a solar-orbiting telescope in deep space. The B612 Foundation wants to map the inner solar system’s asteroid inhabitants and chart their orbits over the next hundred years. And to do so, it will build, launch, and operate the first privately funded deep space mission in the history of human spaceflight. As a privately undertaken spaceflight enterprise, the Sentinel Mission is an ambitious undertaking. But B612 (the name of the foundation comes from the fictional asteroid that is home to the title character in the French literary classic The Little Prince) CEO Ed Lu is surprised that it has taken this long for someone to do this. There are entities watching the sky, like NASA’s Near-Earth Object program, which has logged nearly 10,000 objects--90 percent of the estimated objects larger than a half-mile across. But according to B612, there are a half million more asteroids larger than the one that devastated the Tunguska region in northern Russia in 1908. Of those, we’ve mapped only one percent. Sentinel aims to map the rest. The infrared telescope will be launched into a heliocentric orbit sometime later this decade that will at times place it 170 million miles from Earth. It will scan the entire night half of the sky every 26 days, identifying every moving object. In just 5.5 years, B612 plans to have mapped the orbit of 98 percent of all near earth asteroids--more than half a million objects total. The B612 Foundation didn’t originally set out to map asteroids. The group formed out of a one-day meeting in 2001 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center addressing potential asteroid threats. It set about bringing awareness to the potential asteroid threat and seeking means of deflecting a killer asteroid should one ever be detected. But within a few years, it became apparent that humans can’t deflect what they can’t see. “All along we had assumed that someone somewhere was going to undertake the first step of actually mapping and locating all of the objects crossing Earth orbit,” Lu told Popular Science. “So we had been pushing for step 2: deflection. But it soon became clear that no one was going to do step one. The budget situation in Washington didn’t bode well, and in Europe it was even worse. We realized that if anyone was going to do it, it would have to be us.” B612 marks something totally novel for the private space industry, in that it isn’t a commercial venture. It’s something more like space philanthropy. In 2001, a privately-funded deep space mission was unthinkable. There were no privately owned launch vehicles. The logistics of both placing a telescope in deep space orbit and managing the data flow and computation of the data were daunting. The costs would be truly astronomical, and the return on investment--besides potentially saving the world--would be nil. But while giving a talk at Google’s campus a few years back, an audience member challenged Lu on the idea that a private institution couldn’t raise the hundreds of millions needed to fund a space mission purely through fundraising. The costs of powerful infrared sensors had come way down since 2001. SpaceX had created a viable private launch vehicle. The cost of the on-board computing power necessary to drive a space-mapping telescope had fallen precipitously. It was only in 2011 that B612 as an organization realized that if philanthropies, municipalities, and universities can raise $200 million at a time for new art museums, academic buildings, or stadiums without so much as batting an eye, a fundraiser to potentially save humanity from a dinosaur’s fate is completely doable. All that has led up to this morning, when B612’s principals announced that they have raised enough money to fund the design of their Sentinel spacecraft and set a launch goal of 2017 (a second window in 2018 is also available). The optimal place from which to view Earth’s orbit and the things that cross it is from a place somewhere around Venus’s orbit, between 0.6 and 0.8 astronomical units. It will get there via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will set it on course for a “slingshot” around Venus that will bring it into into a final orbit that will carry it anywhere from 30 million miles away to up to 170 million miles away. The spacecraft itself will be manufactured by Ball Aerospace (Lu described the telescope as a mash-up of the Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes, both designed by Ball). At just 25 feet long Sentinel isn’t huge, but its 20.5-inch cryo-cooled infrared telescope won’t miss much. It’s wide-field, 24-million-pixel view will map asteroids down to 100-feet across--the kind that aren’t necessarily species killers but that could still do significant damage (an asteroid just a few tens of feet across could potentially cause a Tunguska-like airburst that could flatten an area the size of a small city). The result will be not only the first privately-funded deep space mission, but also the first space mission undertaken as a kind of amped-up Kickstarter project (but one that’s not for profit). It will provide the first real data trove logging the positions and orbits of all the bodies whipping around the inner solar system, something public space enterprises have yet to provide. Further, the data flowing back from Sentinel (which will be managed by NASA’s Deep Space Network) will be made public. NASA and other space agencies can use it to pick out targets for exploration or study. Commercial entities like the upstart Planetary Resources can tap it to discover potential targets for asteroid mining. And of course, with a 100-year map of every potentially deadly asteroid out there, everyone will rest a little easier. “The key is adequate warning,” Lu says of the killer asteroid threat. “People understand that we can prevent such a thing if we have decades of warning. The key is the decades of warning.” http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-06/first-privately-funded-deep-space-mission-will-chart-all-asteroids-inner-solar-system#comment-140360 Quote
CraigD Posted July 6, 2012 Report Posted July 6, 2012 It shouldn't be necessary for a private company to seek public financing to do what our government should be doing.I think the B612 Foundation team is just reading the current fashion in national space programs like the US’s NASA – correctly, I’m fairly sure, given their combined experience with it. NASA, and the federal government that funds it, is currently much enamored with the business model of private companies building spacecraft, what goes in them, and what it takes to support them, in a fairly autonomous manner. NASA has always used private companies to build its spacecraft, and will remain a major financer of these companies. The latest fashion is mostly a matter of reducing NASA management and oversight of these companies. What I find promising about a private venture to protect humankind from extinction from above – an enterprise that seems to me at first glance to belong squarely in the “provide for the common defense” category of enumerated duties and powers of national governments – is that it may circumvents taxes, and in turn, the public perception that tax-paid space science and engineering is a waste of taxpayer money that would be better spent on more obvious, immediately needs, or perhaps given back to the taxpayers or not collected at all. B612 can sell their service the way any is sold, by advertising it to the public. Whether this approach can gather enough money, we’ll have to wait and see, but whatever money it gathers will, at least, have been done so with the explicit consent of those giving it. Quote
Lancewen Posted July 6, 2012 Author Report Posted July 6, 2012 I think the B612 Foundation team is just reading the current fashion in national space programs like the US’s NASA – correctly, I’m fairly sure, given their combined experience with it. NASA, and the federal government that funds it, is currently much enamored with the business model of private companies building spacecraft, what goes in them, and what it takes to support them, in a fairly autonomous manner. NASA has always used private companies to build its spacecraft, and will remain a major financer of these companies. The latest fashion is mostly a matter of reducing NASA management and oversight of these companies. What I find promising about a private venture to protect humankind from extinction from above – an enterprise that seems to me at first glance to belong squarely in the “provide for the common defense” category of enumerated duties and powers of national governments – is that it may circumvents taxes, and in turn, the public perception that tax-paid space science and engineering is a waste of taxpayer money that would be better spent on more obvious, immediately needs, or perhaps given back to the taxpayers or not collected at all. B612 can sell their service the way any is sold, by advertising it to the public. Whether this approach can gather enough money, we’ll have to wait and see, but whatever money it gathers will, at least, have been done so with the explicit consent of those giving it. I do like what they are doing, but I still think it's the governments business to protect us. It seems to me it's not all that great of an expense, considering what it will accomplish. Quote
Guest MacPhee Posted July 6, 2012 Report Posted July 6, 2012 I do like what they are doing, but I still think it's the governments business to protect us. It seems to me it's not all that great of an expense, considering what it will accomplish. Yes, that's how it should be. But - what is meant by "the government"? Is a "government" an individual entity? Surely not. A so-called "government" is just a bunch of politicians. And politicians are not very nice people. They're generally obnoxious, with big egos, tiny brains, and a lust for power. Why anyone votes for them baffles me. The point is - politicians aren't interested in protecting us. Only in satisfying their lust for power. Suppose almost the entire population of the world was killed by an asteroid-strike. Would the politicians care? No - not if the politicians survived, in underground shelters. So when they came out of their shelters, they found enough people left alive on the surface, to dominate and rule over. They'd be happy as larry. To expect power-crazed egomaniac politicians to do anything sensible in Space, or Science, is hopeless. Quote
Lancewen Posted July 6, 2012 Author Report Posted July 6, 2012 Yes, that's how it should be. But - what is meant by "the government"? Is a "government" an individual entity? Surely not. A so-called "government" is just a bunch of politicians. And politicians are not very nice people. They're generally obnoxious, with big egos, tiny brains, and a lust for power. Why anyone votes for them baffles me. The point is - politicians aren't interested in protecting us. Only in satisfying their lust for power. Suppose almost the entire population of the world was killed by an asteroid-strike. Would the politicians care? No - not if the politicians survived, in underground shelters. So when they came out of their shelters, they found enough people left alive on the surface, to dominate and rule over. They'd be happy as larry. To expect power-crazed egomaniac politicians to do anything sensible in Space, or Science, is hopeless. That's a somewhat harsh view of government, but even considering the bad reputation of politicians. Many of them have families of their own, and they wouldn't wish a devastated world on them if they were survivors. One thing the article does make clear, it is hard to focus on any methods to deflect asteroids if you haven't first identified all the possible threats. For instance if a smaller asteroid was identified, say only big enough to wipe out a large city and predicted to hit Earth in about 20 years. Even if you couldn't quite predict where it would hit. It would still serve to focus the attention of some of our best thinkers to come up with a timely solution, and coming up with the money to do so would surely not be a problem. We have the technology to get the job done, and not getting that job done is just plain stupid. Besides there will be side benefits to identifying all the asteroids for any private companies that might want conduct mining research for future asteroid projects. Quote
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