It wasn’t long ago NASA administrators were lamenting ongoing cuts to the world’s leading space agency’s annual budget were putting the US at risk of falling behind its competitors.
No one remembers, but in the 1960s the line item for NASA made up more than 4% of the federal US budget. Once a few footprints were made in space, however, the shine was off the moon rock. A decade later, NASA’s budget had been slashed by two-thirds in real dollars, and only briefly topped 1% of the federal budget again over the next 50 years.
Today it hovers around 0.5%, which still translates to more than $20 billion a year in funding. Indeed, the Biden administration proposed allocating nearly $25 billion to NASA in 2022 to support moon exploration and more.
As craft go up, costs come down. It can cost up to $400 million to lift some United Launch Alliance ships off the ground. That’s one reason why NASA is so interested in its so-called Venture Class of launch vehicles, smaller vessels that carry smaller payloads but lower risks, especially to the bottom line if they end up cone down. These rockets are priced at a few million dollars apiece, chump change, especially for those, ahem, explorers named Branson or Bezos.
More than a dozen companies in the US alone have been launched to deliver humans and cargo above, and NASA has carved out a few hundred million dollars of its budget to support such efforts.
There’s a lot going on over our heads. Russia, China, Israel, India, and Luxembourg (!) have joined the US in launching moon missions, and more than a dozen countries have at least 10 satellites now orbiting Earth. More than 4,500 satellites are currently traversing the skies, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. (See their database here: https://bit.ly/3oQkv4i.) The skies, it seems, are the new Manhattan.
Jokes aside, space is serious stuff. So serious, in fact, NASA quietly warned one of those private launch providers that its non-geostationary (a fancy word for “moving”) orbit satellite system is a risk to the NASA space missions, including manned operations such as the International Space Station. NASA was responding to SpaceX’s plans to launch some 30,000 satellites to orbit later this year. For its part, the space agency is tracking about 25,000 objects in orbit (not all are manmade), of which more than 6,000 have a perigee – the point in the orbit of the moon or a satellite at which it is nearest to Earth – of less than 600km. Based on the letter, dated Feb. 8, NASA looks to be pushing back, citing possible risks to its ongoing missions and even human life.
“SpaceX’s Gen2 expansion,” the agency wrote, “would more than double the number of tracked objects in orbit and increase the number of objects below 600km over five-fold, without factoring in growth from other proposed constellations. An increase of this magnitude into these confined altitude bands inherently brings additional risk of debris-generating collision events based on the number of objects alone. NASA anticipates current and planned science missions, as well as human space flight operations, will see an increase in conjunctions [read: collusions].” Such an increase, NASA asserts, could also degrade the images captured by the Hubble telescope, while also obscuring ground-based telescopes that survey for Earth-bound asteroids. (Two days after the letter was submitted, SpaceX lost nearly an entire fleet of 49 satellites right after launch due to a solar storm. Don’t look up, indeed.)
As retired astronaut Paul Lockhart notes, technology drives economics. NASA proposes SpaceX prove out its collision avoidance system as a condition of its launch. Such developments have obvious corollaries to terrestrial uses. Besides sensors, we can expect major advancements in robotics, communications, additive manufacturing (space travelers may need to print their own food), virtual reality, among other technologies, all of which need to be designed and engineered here on Earth.
The future of space is no longer up in the air, but making products – and profits – remains a high-risk venture. Organizations like the Printed Circuit Engineering Association offer the training and guidance from minds experienced in high-reliability electronics design and manufacturing. Join us at PCB East (pcbeast.com) in April in Marlborough, MA, or at one of our local chapter meetings, and take advantage of the printed circuit pioneers.
Mike Buetow is president of the Printed Circuit Engineering Association (PCEA) (pcea.net); This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
