More ideas for space missions

I’ve done a few posts – A fun idea for a moon mission and A Space Junk Prize – about space missions I would fund if I had a few billion dollars I didn’t know what else to do with.  The point of these missions – printing bricks on the moon and putting up satellites as targets for companies to attempt to deorbit them – wouldn’t be to have some big flashy mission that gets all the news, but would do the boring groundwork to help further humanity into becoming a spacefaring civilization.  I was wondering what other missions I could think of, and this is what I came up with.

Solar shield

There is an idea, that if we can’t get enough greenhouse gases out of our atmosphere soon enough, we could put a giant mirror in space to reflect enough of the sunlight to cool the Earth.  One version is for one giant mirror, while another is for thousands of smaller mirrors working together.  My idea is a test for the second.

I figure there would be at least three small spacecraft – launched on different rockets so if there is a launch failure you can still test with two – that would each fly out to the L1 point and deploy a ten-meter shield.  Possibly, each spacecraft would have different shield materials or deploying patterns so we can test what works best.  The whole point of the test would be how these solar shields react and if we can control several spacecraft flying in close formation.  These wouldn’t be big enough to make any effect combating climate change, but if we ever needed to do this then we’d have some real-world data. 

This whole idea of climate engineering is very contentious, with some saying we need to be doing something now, to others saying we need to conduct tests so that if we do decide we need to do something we’ll have some idea of what to do, and still others saying we shouldn’t even do any tests.  As a complex issue, there isn’t a simple answer.  And if it’s any help, the data we’d get – formation flying, unfolding techniques, whatever – could easily be applied to other space activities that don’t have anything to do with climate engineering so it wouldn’t be solely a climate engineering mission.  Although that probably wouldn’t matter.

More space junk ideas

I thought of the solar shield idea, but I didn’t think that was enough for a blog.  So I wondered what else I could do, and I went back to thinking about space junk and wondered if there was another project that would help us combat that.  What I came up with would be a mission that would give us some real-world data on the smallest of space junk.

The mission would be a cubesat put into a very low orbit, one likely to only last six months or so.  This cubesat would have a telescoping rod twenty, or thirty centimeters long.  The end of this rod would be an electromagnet.  Attached to the magnet – by a small bit of metal – would be a fleck of paint one centimeter square with some design on it.  The rod would telescope out, then wait twenty or so minutes to make sure any vibration had damped out.  Then the electromagnet would be turned off and the rod retracted. 

On the cubesat would be a camera with a flash, that would take a photo every five minutes or so.  All this depends on how much memory the cubesat has and how often it can downlink the data.  The onboard computer would use the design on the fleck to figure out the distance to it and it would have tiny gas thrusters to try to stay within so many meters of the fleck.

The point of all this would be to see how flecks of paint actually interact with the near-vacuum of the upper atmosphere.  We probably don’t have much data on this.  Ideally, the cubesat could stay close enough to see if the fleck just disintegrates when the air density gets so high, if it burns up like a meteor, or if it slows down gradually enough that it just falls out of orbit.  But in reality, with the different drag between a fleck of paint and a cubesat, the cubesat might run out of fuel trying to stay close enough to see what happens.  In that case, and if the cubesat will still be in orbit for a month or two, then maybe it could be used as a target for the more aggressive methods of deorbiting satellites: ways that might cause the satellite to break up.  In higher orbits that would just make the space junk problem worse, but hopefully any debris resulting from the test would deorbit within a few weeks. 

At first, I figured such a mission could be jettisoned by a Cygnus as it was getting ready to deorbit, because I figured it wouldn’t be worth it to use a rocket to put such a small satellite into such a low orbit, but then I realized that one of the main things of science is repeating experiments to see if we get the same results.  So instead of a rocket putting one cubesat in a low orbit, it could put ten or however many will fit.  Some of these could have identical paint flecks, to see if similar things happen, or maybe thicker flecks, or maybe instead of a fleck of paint it could be a screw or some other random bit of junk the cubesat may have a better chance of staying close to.

Some would say this would just be me burning money, but hopefully we’d get some interesting data out of it.

Random Story – The naked neighbor

This is just an odd little story from my life.

My first apartment was in this old building that had been split up into six or seven apartments.  The first floor on this building must have had ten-foot-high ceilings at least, because it was a very long staircase up to the second floor.  I spent way too long trying to describe the second floor set up, so I decided to just make this little diagram.

 

You go up the stairs, to a landing, where there’s a door to an apartment.  There’s another apartment, tucked back in a little nook of some sort.  To get to my apartment, I had to go down the hallway and up another set of stairs. 

Anyway, I believe I had just gotten back after going home for Christmas, so it was early afternoon and I was tired from driving for six hours.  I was trudging up the stairs carrying a bunch of stuff, when I hear a noise.  I look up, and I see the neighbor from Apartment 2.  Well, I see a hairy gut and a hairy leg.  Fortunately, the area in between was behind the corner of the nook.  But, I only saw him for a second, because he rushed back into his apartment.

I didn’t want to know, and tried to forget about it, but the next day he knocked on my door and through broken English said he was sorry and that he had been drunk.  We laughed, and I hoped that would be the end of it.

A couple months later, I think I was at a friend’s playing poker, and it was 3 in the morning when I finally got home.  I was walking up the stairs, when I heard a noise and looked up.  And that’s when I saw a hairy ass rush back in the apartment and slam the door.  After that, I kept telling myself, “If you’re going up the stairs and hear a noise, DO NOT LOOK UP.”

I don’t know if he was a nudist trapped in a clothed world, or if he just got naked when he got drunk.  I’m pretty sure those were the only three interactions I had with him.  For which I’m glad. 

The Uncapped Pen, at last!

 

Over a decade ago, I had the idea of putting together a collection of stories dealing with writing: authors arguing with their muse, or struggling with having too many ideas, or too few, or whatever.  But for reasons, I set it aside, until a few years ago when I figured I’d finish it.  Well, it took longer than expected, and just as I was about to put the final polish on, there was a writer’s strike.  While I’m not a member of the Writers Guild of America, it felt wrong to publish a book about writing during their strike.  But since the strike is over, I’ve now published The Uncapped Pen.  You can find it on Kindle for $3.99, or equivalent.

Short story – “Dust to Dust”

Warning, while not graphic, this story does contain content that many will find disturbing.

“Dust to Dust”

Three juvenile delinquents stood in the small waiting room when Maria Cuevas walked in carrying three small buckets.  She walked up to the nearest boy whose name tag read “Cyril Motlanthe” and handed him a bucket.

“What’s this for?” Cyril asked, not taking the bucket.

“Did you eat breakfast this morning?” Maria asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then this is for when you puke.” When Cyril still didn’t take the bucket, Maria said, “You either puke in the bucket, or stay and mop the floor.”

Cyril glanced at the other two kids with a smirk before snatching the offered bucket. 

Maria then handed buckets to Soad Kaya and Vladimir Kopacz who only grinned when they took theirs.

Maria stepped back and looked at them.  “My name is Maria Cuevas.  I’m the Assistant Plant Manager here.  Now I don’t care how you screwed up to get sent to the Pedogenesis Department, or as we call it PedDep, on Career Day.  Instead of going to the hydroponic farms, or to Apollo to study governance, or one of the spaceports to watch a launch, you were sent to the department you’ve probably never heard of before.  But PedDep is one of the most important departments on Mercury.  It’s also the shittiest.  Which makes it the perfect place to punish those convicted of minor offenses.”

“So why are you here?” Soad asked, to grins from her compatriots.

Maria chuckled.  She had lost track of how many such youngsters had stood before her, thinking they had asked such an original question.  “Oh,” she replied, “I guess I’m a bit of a sadist.” She paused to let that sink in a bit, before adding, “I don’t know how many kids I’ve seen standing there thinking they’re so tough and important, only to watch them leave with their shoes squishing with vomit.”

That wasn’t the kind of response they had expected.  It knocked some of the arrogant glow from their faces, replacing it with the slightest touch of green.

“Now,” Maria continued, “when you discovered you were being sent to the Pedogenesis Department, did any of you bother finding out what we do here?”

“You make dirt,” Vladimir said.

Maria stepped forward and glared down at him, even though he was only a few centimeters shorter.  “How old are you?”

Vladimir glanced at the other two then replied, “63 Revs.”

“If you were an adult I would slap you.” Stepping back she told all of them, “We do not use the ‘D-word’ here because it is too base.  In PedDep we create soil.”

Maria watched the three share confused looks with one another, then said, “Follow me,” and led them into the Main Shredding Room.  The room was ten meters by five with double doors on each of the short sides.  Along the long wall opposite of the door they entered, was a metal panel that could slide up and down.  It was up and blocked the view of the shredder and what was to be shredded. 

Maria let the kids look around the nearly bare room before beginning, “In simplest terms, soil is a combination of minerals from rocks and organic matter.  Every day, over a kilometer’s worth of tunnels are excavated around the planet.  Any metal or mineral useful for industry are extracted from the debris, we collect what we want, and the rest is dumped up on the surface.  So we have plenty of rock minerals, but very little organic matter.  It wasn’t much of a problem for the first colonists because they set up hydroponic greenhouses which don’t need soil.  While most of our food is still grown hydroponically, it’s hard to make a hydroponic football pitch.  So all the public parkland on Mercury is planted in soil we make here.  As well as all the potted plants people have in their homes, since soil for them is just easier than a bunch of little hydroponic systems.

“At first, soil was made using ground up rocks mixed with composted sewage and plant wastes; those being the only sources of excess organic material in the early days.  But humans weren’t the only animals to come to Mercury.  Early colonists brought chickens, rabbits, even goats.  Their manure is also used to make soil, but what were we to do when those animals died, or were butchered for meat?  All those bones and organs like brains and lungs became a new stream of organic material to create soil.”

Maria pointed to one of the double doors.  “Through there,” she explained, “is the Receiving Room where material to be processed is loaded onto a conveyor belt.  The belt comes in to here,” she patted the metal cover and continued, “where it comes to our first shredder.  The shredders are a series of rotating drums with diamond coated teeth.  In a couple of minutes this first one can chop a truckload of animal carcasses into chunks no bigger than ten centimeters by two.  Further drums breaks things down into pieces only a few millimeters in size.  These are the first steps of turning waste organic material into soil.” As Maria had spoken, the kid’s faces had lit up.  It was somewhat disturbing how the Career Day kids always seemed interested in watching stuff be shredded.  But she knew they would quickly change their minds.

“Every few days we process a truckload of animal carcasses from the various farms and butcher shops around the planet.   We also handle animals from the zoo as well as pets.  But there is one other item we process which you’ll see today.

“Some people,” Maria explained, “usually for religious reasons, request that when they die they be put out onto the surface.  When the sun rises, it incinerates their body and their atoms can be carried away by the solar wind across the solar system, even out into interstellar space.  Other people, knowing of our constant shortage of organic matter for soil, choose another option.”

Maria pushed a button and the metal panel dropped away.  Behind thick safety glass was a conveyor belt leading to the two massive drums, all motionless.  On the belt lay three naked, human corpses.  The youngest was over eighty Earth years old. 

“You’ve got to be joking,” Soad said.

“Why would I joke about such a solemn business?”

“They’re people,” Soad said.

Maria waited for a moment, then stated, “They were people.  Now, they’re just several hundred kilos of dead, organic matter.”

Maria turned away from the kids and explained, “Their families have already said their goodbyes, so we can get started.” She hit another button and the two drums began spinning.  Despite the thick glass, a low whine came into the room.

Once the drums got up to speed, the conveyor belt began carrying the corpses towards them.  Maria was watching the conveyor belt and seconds before the first body went in she heard the distinctive sound of someone vomiting behind her.  This was quickly followed by two more.

Maria waited until the three bodies had gone through before turning around.  All three kids were standing at the opposite wall with their backs turned.  Maria frowned when she saw several splashes of vomit that had missed the buckets.

With a sigh, she went to a storage cupboard and grabbed three new buckets.  She told them to set their buckets down and take a new one.  While Soad and Vladimir didn’t look anywhere near the Shredder, Cyril just glanced at it and retched into his new bucket.  That almost made Soad and Vladimir vomit into theirs.  Maria rolled her eyes and went back to the cupboard and got three more buckets.  Maria had learned long ago it was better to leave even partially filled buckets with their odors behind. 

She led the kids into the next room.  Here, the smaller shredders made smaller pieces, but they were set close enough together that one couldn’t really see what was being shredded.  Not that the kids even looked.

“At this stage of the process,” Maria explained, “water is added to the material stream creating a slurry.  This makes further processing easier.”

Something about that made Vladimir retch. 

After grabbing a new bucket from another cabinet, Maria led them down a flight of stairs to the next room.  “Here the slurry comes to series a settlement pools,” she explained.  “In this first one, bits of bone, teeth, beaks, hoofs, whatever fall to the bottom where they are recovered.  There really isn’t much we can do with them – any minerals that we could extract we already have plenty of from excavating tunnels – so they are ground into a powder which is then usually mixed in with cement for use in general construction.”

Before leading them to the next stage of the process, she said, “If it makes things easier, from this point on you’ll just being seeing material from earlier runs.  The last load we ran yesterday came from a chicken farm.”

In the next room there were a couple of technicians checking some equipment.  They shared a brief smile with Maria about the look of the kids.  While they still looked a tad green, they’d apparently already vomited everything in their stomachs. 

Maria pointed through a thick window at a five meter long cylinder.  It was on a slant, with the bottom a meter lower than the top.  “That’s the Solid Separator Cylinder.  Inside is a smaller cylinder with walls made of a very fine mesh.  The remaining material from the settling tanks it pumped in at the top, and the inner cylinder rotates at a high speed.  The centrifugal force squeezes most of the fluids through the mesh and into the outer cylinder where it’s collected.  The remaining material – or pulp – falls out of the bottom onto a conveyor belt.”

Maria pointed to a technician working near the cylinder, but she wasn’t sure if any of the kids even looked.  “Do you see that technician?  They’re wearing ear protection because the Separator is very loud when it’s running.  The reason we can’t hear it is because,” here she tapped the window, “this isn’t just one window.  The Separator is actually in its own room that’s surrounded by a two centimeter vacuum gap.  A vacuum is the best sound proofer in the universe.”

Vladimir actually chuckled at that, which brought a slight smile to Maria.

“The fluid that is collected,” she continued, “is pumped into huge storage tanks.  Its processing is pretty interesting, but can only be done when the sun’s in the sky.  Up on the surface, we’re still some two weeks from dawn, and I doubt you want to wait that long.  But once the sun rises, the fluid will be pumped under pressure through specialized pipes on the surface.  Inside the pipes, the fluid will be heated to several hundred degrees.  The intense heat breaks apart most of the chemical bonds of the complex molecules.  In goes a mix of blood, fats, even microbes, and out comes a stream of carbon dioxide, methanol and other smaller molecules.  They’re sorted and collected to be used however they are needed.  Even the iron from the hemoglobin in blood is collected, but more as a way to keep it from contamination other processes than for industrial use.

“Our next stop is to view some of the composting rooms.” Maria led them down another flight of stairs and along a short hallway.  The room they entered was five by twenty meters.  Along one long wall were five observation windows, each looking into a circular room.  Each contained a mound of dark material.  In one room, a slowly rotating blade was turning over and mixing the mound, while water was being sprayed onto another.

“Like with the Solid Separator Cylinder, the composting rooms are separated from the rest of the facility with vacuum gaps.  But it’s not for sound insulation, but odor insulation.  You may think your stomachs are empty now, but if you caught a whiff from any of those rooms you’d be surprised what you’d dredge up.” Over the last few minutes, the kids had been starting to look better, but that comment checked that.

“In the Composting Rooms we mix three streams of materials.  There’s the pulp from our Separator, there’s plant wastes from either the parks or hydroponic gardens, and there’s partially treated sewage.  The sewage plants take part of the sewage stream and send it to the hydroponic gardens and we get the rest.  But we don’t just throw everything we have together.  Soil to be used to grow grass on a playground is different than that needed to grow grass for a pasture, or soil used to grow trees.  There are different nutrients in the three material streams, so we adjust the amounts of each depending on what type of soil we need to make.

“Into the pile we add various bacteria which start to break down, or decompose, the material.  This turns complex structures like plant stems or flesh into small bits plants can use to grow.  The decomposition process releases heat which helps to kill off any pathogens that arrive through any of the streams.  The rooms are monitored to make sure the piles are at a temperature and oxygen level to the bacteria’s liking so they keep working.”

Maria pointed at the mound being watered.  “That pile started a week ago.  In less than a Rev, it will be turned into a rich compost.  Once it’s fully composted, it will be baked just to be sure no pathogens survived.  Then it can be used to help fertilize what’s already been planted, or it can be mixed with rocks ground up in a separate processing stream.  We then have a basic soil ready to fill in the parkland of new tunnels.”

Maria shrugged.  “That’s a quick overview of Soil Creation 101.  I could show you all of the various processes, but I’m sure you’ve seen more than you care to.  If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you where you can clean up and I’ll answer any questions you have.”

Five minutes later, they all sat in a small conference room.  The kids had washed their faces, and Maria had gotten herself a cup of coffee.  Taking a sip, she asked, “Now, do you have any questions?”

None of the three had been looking at her, but now Soad did and asked, “Why did you show us that?”

Maria took another sip of coffee before answering.  “For most of human history, humans lived in small bands of usually related individuals.  These tribes only survived if all the members knew that they could trust and rely upon one another.  That was also true for the early space colonies where one idiot screwing around could have killed everyone.  You three,” Maria’s finger swept passed all of them, “are idiots screwing around.  I don’t know the details of your cases, but the usual reason kids are sent here are for bullying the other students, selling narcotics, disorderly conduct, shit like that.  While stuff like that won’t kill everyone on the planet, it’s still thought best to nip such actions in the bud.  The reason we hold on to some bodies to run through on Career Day is to show screw-ups like you that some people – even in death – are doing more to advance life on this planet than you are.”

“All I did was cheat on a test,” Cyril said.

Vladimir barked out a laugh.  “You hacked the system to change your grades.”

After a moment, Cyril explained, “That’s a kind of cheating.  But being forced to watch someone be … shredded for that seems a tad cruel and unusual.”

“I thought you all turned away,” Maria said.  “Nobody was forcing you to watch.”

“Semantics,” Soad said.

Maria shrugged.  “True.” She looked at Cyril and said, “So, instead of just facing the consequences of not studying, you decided that the rules shouldn’t apply to you.  Back in the tribal days, someone like that was usually banished.”

“So seeing people being turned into … soil is supposed to keep me from hacking?”

“No.” Maria let the kids look confused while she took another sip of coffee.

“Then what was the point?” Soad asked.

Maria smiled.  “All three of you are from the Celaeno Corridor, yes?” After the three nodded, Maria continued, “The central park of Celaeno was planted about ninety Revs ago.  I can’t be certain, but it’s most likely that some of the first people to set foot on Mercury went into the soil there.  In life they opened up a new world.  In death, they gave us a way to make oxygen, and flowers, and a place for children to run and play.”

Pointing in a random direction, Maria said, “The majority of adults in the tunnels know what we do here, but they don’t want to think about it.  They want to think that soil is … just something that happens.  They don’t want to think about what, or who, goes into the soil because it reminds them of their mortality.  Thinking about one’s mortality makes one wonder what mark they’ll leave on the world.  At some point growing up, most people realize that their only bit of immortality will be in how they are remembered.  There are few Shakespeares and Gandhis who will be remembered for thousands of years, but even they will fade away in time.  Most of us just have to do our best with our families and friends and try to leave the world better than we found it. 

“So why show you people being shredded when you’re not yet adults?  In the hopes a large dose of mortality will make you reconsider your lives.  Just remember that one day – sooner than you would like – you’ll die.  Will you be remembered as a jerk who didn’t play by the rules, or will people actually miss you?”

Maria pointed at the door.  “Go out that door and turn to the left and you’ll be back at the entrance.  Whether you go and make the world a better place or not is all up to you.  Choose wisely, for you only get one shot at it.”

A big week for lunar exploration

If all goes as planned – and it’s space flight so that’s a big IF – next week will be a big week for lunar exploration.  First off, on Monday we’ll see the landing of Luna 25.  Luna 25 is the first Russian lunar mission since Luna 24 in 1976, back when it was still the Soviet Union.  Then on Wednesday, India’s Vikram lander will land, which is part of the Chandrayaan-3 mission.  If successful, India will become only the fourth entity to land something on the moon, after the Soviet Union’s Luna 9 in February 1966, the US’s Surveyor 1 in June 1966, and China’s Chang’e 3 in December 2013.  And we hopefully won’t have to wait another decade for the fifth entity, because on Friday/Saturday Japan will launch the SLIM mission, which will land in a couple of weeks or months (I couldn’t quickly find any info on how soon it would land.) So in six days we could have two landings and the launch of another lander.  And there’s like a dozen more lunar missions scheduled to launch by the end of 2024.  I wish all the teams luck.

Random Story – The burning bush

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Years ago, I lived in this apartment complex.  I’m a bit of a night owl, and I would often take a walk around the complex late at night/early morning to clear my head or think through some story elements.  Anyway, one night, it was probably around midnight, I turned a corner and started down this parking area, and I saw something flickering at the end.  It took a bit to figure out, but I eventually realized that one of the decorative bushes at the entrance to the parking area was on fire.  It might not have been that big a deal, but this bush was right next to an electric pole. 

Now, cell phones were a thing then, but I didn’t have one.  So I scrambled for several minutes trying to find someone with a light on.  I eventually found an apartment, and told them to call the fire department because a bush was on fire.  Now, their apartment didn’t face the fire, and I think English was their second language, but I got the point across. 

I went back to the bush, and a couple guys joined me.  By now, the fire had mostly burned out, and they stomped most of it out.  A couple minutes later, a cop pulled in, and he had a fire extinguisher and put it out.  He figured someone threw their cigarette in there and it was dry enough to burn, although it might have been smoldering for hours.  A couple minutes later, a firetruck pulled in, and they gave it a quick hose down to really make sure it was out.

So that’s my story of encountering a burning bush.

Random Story – The Joke Off

This is just an odd little story from my life.

In high school, there was a group of six or seven of us who shared a table at lunch.  One day – I’m pretty sure it was a Monday – either I or my friend Jason told a joke.  And then the other told a joke in reply.  And pretty soon, we had started a joke off, to see who could tell the most jokes.  I believe it went on for five days during lunch, that’s why I think it started on Monday because I don’t think we went over a weekend. 

While we started strong, by the end we were scrapping the bottom of the barrel.  I think one joke I came up with was, “What do you get when you cross an orange and an orange?  An orange.” Between groans, the “judges” accepted that as a joke, but they allowed Jason to do a similar joke, I think his dealt with apples. 

After five days, everyone was tired of jokes, and I think we just declared it a draw.  I’m pretty sure I would remember if I won.

Right now, I probably only know a dozen or so jokes, so I can’t remember how I went five days telling jokes.  I almost wish someone had recorded what jokes were told.  Of course, the majority of them were most likely in poor taste, so it’s probably best no records were kept.