The Plutonium Problem: Who Pays For Space Fuel?

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November 8, 2011

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NASA

NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, seen in this artist's concept, will use 8 pounds of plutonium-238 as its power supply. That's a significant portion of the remaining space fuel. NASA and the Department of Energy have offered to split the costs of producing the fuel, but Congress has so far opposed that arrangement.

When NASA's next Mars rover blasts off later this month, the car-sized robot will carry with it nearly eight pounds of a special kind of plutonium fuel that's in short supply.

NASA has relied on that fuel, called plutonium-238, to power robotic missions for five decades.

But with supplies running low, scientists who want the government to make more are finding that it can sometimes seem easier to chart a course across the solar system than to navigate the budget process inside Washington, D.C.

Plutonium-238 gives off heat that can be converted to electricity in the cold, dark depths of space. It's not the same plutonium used for bombs. But during the cold war, the United States did produce this highly toxic stuff in facilities that supported the nuclear weapons program — although those facilities stopped making it in the late 1980s.

"Because the United States has access to plutonium 238, we are the only country that has ever sent a science mission beyond Mars," says Len Dudzinski, the program executive for radioisotope power systems at NASA headquarters.

Dudzinski says NASA has used these plutonium-powered systems for famous missions like the Voyager probes. "In fact, we've got Voyager now with over 30 years of successful operation," he says. "It is the farthest manmade object from Earth that NASA has ever sent out."

Besides Voyager, plutonium fuels the Cassini probe, which is orbiting Saturn, as well as the New Horizons mission, which is headed to Pluto.

The pounds of plutonium loaded onto the soon-to-be-launched Mars Science Laboratory represent a significant fraction of a dwindling inventory. "I can't tell you exactly what that fraction is," says Dudzinski. "The Department of Energy knows the exact amount of plutonium that we have, and they don't ordinarily share that number publicly."

But the shortage is public knowledge and has been for years. For a while Russia sold us some of the material, but that source has dried up too. In 2009, a report from the National Research Council warned that the day of reckoning had arrived and that quick action was needed.

Enlarge NASA

NASA's Voyager spacecraft, seen in this artist's concept, runs on plutonium-238. It's the farthest man-made object from Earth NASA has ever sent out.

NASA NASA's Voyager spacecraft, seen in this artist's concept, runs on plutonium-238. It's the farthest man-made object from Earth NASA has ever sent out.

The Debate Over Cost-Sharing

Space exploration advocates point out that it will take years to get the plutonium production process started, so delays now could have consequences later.

Jim Adams, deputy director of planetary science at NASA, says that with budget pressure slowing the pace of exploration, there's enough of the fuel for NASA missions currently planned through the end of this decade, to around 2022. "Beyond that, we'll need more plutonium," he says.

If NASA doesn't get it, he says, "then we won't go beyond Mars anymore. We won't be exploring the solar system beyond Mars and the asteroid belt."

"It takes at least five years to get enough for one spacecraft," says Bethany Johns, a public policy expert with the American Astronomical Society who has been lobbying Congress on this issue. "So there's a long time between turning on the on switch at the facility and then actually producing enough that can be handled by humans to put into a spacecraft."

NASA has made some progress in helping the Department of Energy develop plans to restart production, says Adams. "We have worked with the Department of Energy to supply up to $5 million this fiscal year," he says.

But the agencies have run into trouble convincing Congress to accept their plan for how to deal with the costs.

The price to restart production is expected to be $75 million to $90 million over five years. And NASA and the Department of Energy want to split the bill between them. That's how they've done this sort of thing in the past, because even though NASA will use the plutonium, only the Department of Energy can make and handle this nuclear material.

But some key decision-makers don't like that cost-sharing idea. Lawmakers in Congress have refused to give the Department of Energy the requested funds for this project for three years in a row.

Earlier this year, Representative Adam Schiff, D-Calif., pleaded with his colleagues to reconsider during an appropriations committee meeting. "Does anyone in this room think that we don't we need the plutonium 238? Does anyone not want to continue to do deep space missions?" Schiff asked. "Well, the Russians won't give it to us, and we don't have enough of it."

But others said if NASA wants the stuff, NASA should pick up the whole tab. They said putting half of it under energy's budget would mean taking money away from other kinds of nuclear research.

Schiff argued that $733 million dollars was being allocated to nuclear energy research and that dedicating $10 million for the plutonium project shouldn't be a big deal. "This has got to get done," Schiff urged. "All we're quibbling about here is whether it's paid for by NASA completely or it's paid for by DOE completely, and both agencies have said what makes sense is to split it down the middle."

But the majority of his colleagues were unconvinced. Given the opposition in Congress, officials say they need to rethink things and figure out how much NASA can legally pay for under the Atomic Energy Act.

As things stand, experts don't expect production of new plutonium to be fully up and running before 2020.

"Our perspective is, we don't really care where the money comes from, as long as we get the money," says Johns. "Because we need to start immediately."

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Predicting When Space Junk Will Come Home To Earth

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This weekend, a defunct German satellite is scheduled to crash to Earth, just a month after a NASA satellite did the same. NASA orbital debris scientist Mark Matney and Phil Plait, author of the Bad Astronomy blog, discuss whether engineers on Earth have any say when—or where—objects fall.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, host: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Sometime Saturday night, a defunct German X-ray satellite named ROSAT is going to come screaming through the atmosphere on its way to impact on the Earth's surface. The chances of a piece of this thing, or any piece, will hit somebody, well, somewhere on the surface of the Earth, one in 2,000. The chance it'll hit you in particular, are, of course, much lower. So you can crawl out from underneath that table.

Deja vu? Just last month, a NASA satellite did the same crashing act, diving into the Pacific. We put all this stuff into orbit. You know that old saying about what goes up, has to come down, eventually, right? Or can we do something about it? What do you think? Our number is 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK.

Let me introduce my guests. We'll be talking more about this whole event and what we can do and how much junk is there up there. Mark Matney is an orbital debris scientist - get that kind of job - at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Matney.

MARK MATNEY: Good to be here.

FLATOW: You're welcome. Phil Plait is an astronomer and author of Bad Astronomy blog for Discover Magazine. He's based in Boulder, Colorado. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Plait.

PHIL PLAIT: Hi, thanks for having me on.

FLATOW: Here there. Phil, tell us about this German satellite. What did it do? Why - is it still working? Why is it coming down?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

PLAIT: Well, ROSAT is short for the Roentgen Satellite. Roentgen, with an umlaut over the O, was a German scientist who discovered X-rays. And the satellite was named after him because it observed the sky in X-rays. And it was an astronomical satellite that observed exploding stars and galaxies and all kinds of high-energy violent events like that.

It was launched by NASA in 1990, served for many years, did great work for the astronomical community. There was a glitch many years ago that shut it down. It's been in orbit ever since. And now its number is up.

FLATOW: And do we know when exactly it's coming down?

PLAIT: Well, we don't know exactly, because it's very difficult to know exactly when a satellite's going to come down. The Earth's atmosphere is hard to model. It's very thin up there, 100 miles or more up, but it exists. And sometimes it's a little bit denser, sometimes not, and the satellite might be tumbling, and so it makes it very difficult to know exactly when it's come down - it's going to come down, excuse me.

But what you said is pretty good: It should be coming down sometime this weekend. As time goes on, the predictions will get more accurate.

FLATOW: Mark Matney, just how much junk is up there?

MATNEY: Well, it turns out that the United States Space Surveillance Network, which is mostly our military asset, spends all of their time looking at space, and they track something - they have a catalog of about 16,000 objects in Earth orbit right now. And those are objects larger than about a softball in size.

FLATOW: And do we expect all of them to someday come down?

MATNEY: Most of them. The ones that are out of geosynchronous orbit probably will not anytime soon. But all of the ones that are in the first several thousand miles, eventually - first several thousand miles from the surface of the Earth, will eventually come down, but it's a very strong function of how high they are. The higher they are, the less atmosphere they encounter, and the slower they'll come down.

FLATOW: So somebody is keeping track of every single one of these little pieces?

MATNEY: Well, down to a certain size. Radars can only see down to a certain size, and it's about 10 centimeters, about four inches. And that's the catalog. And, in fact, we also keep track of those in case we need to move the Space Station out of the way, which it periodically does.

FLATOW: And could pieces be coming down all the time, the tiny pieces that we just don't know about?

MATNEY: About once a day, something in orbit that we catalog and track re-enters the Earth's atmosphere.

FLATOW: Once a day?

MATNEY: Once a day, but most of them are very tiny, and they burn up upon re-entry. About once a week, an intact object comes in, a rocket body or a satellite. So it happens pretty often. I actually did a quick set of numbers because I came - before I talked to you today. And there have been something like 4,000 objects, actually more than 4,000 objects larger than one ton, that have re-entered the Earth's atmosphere since the beginning of the Space Age.

FLATOW: We haven't heard about 4,000 (unintelligible).

MATNEY: Most of them you don't hear anything about.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Mark, what do you think about that? I'm sorry, Phil, what do you think about that?

PLAIT: Those numbers sound about right. It's funny to hear it that way because you start to think oh my gosh, the sky is falling. But, in fact, what this is telling you is that it's very rare for us to even know about these things coming down. And people tend to panic when they hear that a satellite is coming in, something like ROSAT, or the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, which came in last month.

But in fact, these aren't that big of a danger. It's certainly something to be aware of, but it's not something to panic over.

FLATOW: Are there big pieces of this ROSAT going to survive the trip through the atmosphere?

PLAIT: Actually yes. ROSAT...

FLATOW: Wait, wait, you just told me not to be afraid.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

PLAIT: Well, the point here is that the Earth is really big, and these pieces are really small, and you occupy an extremely small part of the surface area of the planet. So even with 4,000 of these things coming in over the past 50 years, we've only had instances, I think, one person who had a little, tiny piece of metal bounce off her shoulder.

MATNEY: It was a piece of insulation. It didn't even hurt her.

PLAIT: Yeah, right. And I actually, I've seen a rocket booster re-enter. I thought it was just a very bright meteor, but then the next day I found out it was a booster. So these things happen without us knowing about it. And with ROSAT, we do know about it, and some things we do know about in advance, and ROSAT was a famous satellite.

It weighs about two-and-a-half tons, which makes it about a third of the size of the satellite that came in last week – last month, but ROSAT is going to fall apart a little bit more. So there should be 30 pieces or so that will probably hit the ground intact. They have to understand how the spacecraft is put together and make models of what can survive re-entry, but the number they come up with is approximately 30.

Most of these are only going to weigh a couple of pounds. However, the mirror assembly of ROSAT, the thing that actually focused, if you want to say that, the X-rays, the part that saw the X-rays, that will probably come down intact, and that weighs a lot. It's actually well over a ton. And it's going to come in intact and hit the ground.

Now, the good news for that is that's one piece falling over an entire planet, and the Earth is 70 percent water, and what's land is relatively inhabited. So again, like you said at the beginning, the odds of anybody getting hit by any of these pieces is a couple of thousand to one against.

FLATOW: Mark, is there any way to know if, you know, as it gets closer to actually getting close to the Earth, to put out a warning sign if it's going to get over some piece of land, tell people to watch out?

MATNEY: Well, even in the final hours of any re-entry, there's still a great deal of uncertainty, and basically we can narrow it down to the last few revolutions, but those revolutions cover a significant chunk of the Earth's surface. So in a sense - just to give you an example, in the UARS' case, about a day before, we were pretty confident it wasn't going to fall over North America. But then something changed on the spacecraft and changed its drag slightly, and as a result, the final orbit, some of them did pass over North America.

Fortunately, it landed in the ocean, but that just shows you how difficult it is to predict the final stages of these re-entries.

FLATOW: Would it be possible to actually shoot the thing down if you could see it was going to go to a bad place?

MATNEY: Well, in principal you could. If you recall, we did that with USA193, but the concern there was it had a tank full of toxic hydrazine, quite a bit of it actually, and there was a great concern that that would fall in a populated area and create a very large cloud of toxic gas. Because the odds are so small on these re-entries, and the effort and expense to actually intercept something is pretty extreme, these standard re-entries really don't warrant that kind of mitigation.

FLATOW: Well, you know, shouldn't there be a policy that if you put something up in space, you should clean up after yourself?

MATNEY: Well, actually we've been moving in that direction. Both of these spacecraft, UARS and ROSAT, were launched in about 1990. But since about 1995, our knowledge of re-entries has gotten a lot better, and internationally, we've been moving - a number of different space-faring countries have been moving in directions to try and design their spacecraft, that if it has a risk on the ground - we've developed the computational capabilities to compute those risks. If the risk exceeds a certain value – that the value we use in the United States is one in 10,000, that you really ought to think about changing the design of your spacecraft, make it out of metals that won't survive re-entry or perhaps put an engine on it or extra fuel so you can do a targeted re-entry and drop it out over the Pacific Ocean where it won't hurt anyone.

We did that with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. We re-entered it over the Pacific Ocean, and yes.

FLATOW: So designing them more to control re-entry a bit.

MATNEY: Yes, to try and target where you're going to put it in. The other thing is something we call design for demise, and that's what I mentioned. You talk to the engineers from the very beginning, and you say look, you need to design your spacecraft not out of these materials like titanium and steel that are likely to survive re-entry but see if you can use some other metals that will disintegrate upon re-entry.

FLATOW: Phil, do the sun cycles - you know, we know the sun has period cycles - does that affect where these things might fall?

PLAIT: Bizarrely, it does. When the sun is active and has a lot of sunspots, there are a lot of solar flares and coronal mass ejections that blast out subatomic particles, the Earth's atmosphere puffs up in reaction to these when they hit us. And it's a tiny effect.

But these satellites are orbiting up there where even a tiny effect over a long period of time can affect them. As I understand it, ROSAT was originally thought to burn up last year, but the Earth's atmosphere has been relatively calm because the sun has been quiet.

We had a very long, quiet period from the sun, much longer than usual. It's just now starting to ramp up. 2013-2014 is when we're going to start seeing a lot of solar activity again, although there's been a little bit.

So yeah, it's odd to think that satellites might come in because of the sunspot cycle, but there you go.

FLATOW: So if you need this weekend to have a party, a ROSAT party, everybody comes as a satellite, some Sputnik or something - Telstar

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

PLAIT: I'm the one that's having a ROSAT re-entry party, actually.

FLATOW: I know someone would have one. And what would a party like this be like? Do people do come dressed as satellite debris? Could you be, you know, a canister, a booster rocket?

PLAIT: Well, I dressed as Hubble for a Halloween party many years ago. So it's not that hard. But the problem is when do you throw the party? You may not know until a day in advance, as Mark said, and you've got to realize these satellites are moving very rapidly. Orbital speed is about five miles per second.

So if you're off in your calculations by a minute, that's 300 miles. So we don't know where it's going to come down because of that, and in fact these estimates of when it's going to come down are still plus or minus, you know, a day at the moment, although they'll get much better over the next 24 hours or so.

FLATOW: Well, you gave me a good idea. This being Halloween coming up, if you dressed as a piece of the ROSAT satellite, no one could say you weren't, right? I mean, their analysis of your metallurgy...

PLAIT: Well, if you want to walk around with a 1,600 pound mirror wrapped around, yeah, I guess that's your - or 3,000 pounds, I suppose.

FLATOW: All right. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today, and we'll be watching that satellite with you.

PLAIT: Thank you.

MATNEY: Thank you very much.

FLATOW: You're welcome. Mark Matney is an orbital debris scientist at NASA, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. And Phil Plait is an astronomer and author of Bad Astronomy blog for Discover Magazine based in - he's based in Boulder.

So you now have an excuse of what to do - how to dress up for Halloween with the ROSAT if you'd like to. We're going to take a break and come back and change directions. We're going to talk about the future, a future without oil, running on clean energy, biofuels. Can we do it by 2050? My next guest thinks so. Amory Lovins will join us after this break. Stay with us.

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Predicting When Space Junk Will Come Home To Earth

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

This weekend, a defunct German satellite is scheduled to crash to Earth, just a month after a NASA satellite did the same. NASA orbital debris scientist Mark Matney and Phil Plait, author of the Bad Astronomy blog, discuss whether engineers on Earth have any say when—or where—objects fall.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, host: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Sometime Saturday night, a defunct German X-ray satellite named ROSAT is going to come screaming through the atmosphere on its way to impact on the Earth's surface. The chances of a piece of this thing, or any piece, will hit somebody, well, somewhere on the surface of the Earth, one in 2,000. The chance it'll hit you in particular, are, of course, much lower. So you can crawl out from underneath that table.

Deja vu? Just last month, a NASA satellite did the same crashing act, diving into the Pacific. We put all this stuff into orbit. You know that old saying about what goes up, has to come down, eventually, right? Or can we do something about it? What do you think? Our number is 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK.

Let me introduce my guests. We'll be talking more about this whole event and what we can do and how much junk is there up there. Mark Matney is an orbital debris scientist - get that kind of job - at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Matney.

MARK MATNEY: Good to be here.

FLATOW: You're welcome. Phil Plait is an astronomer and author of Bad Astronomy blog for Discover Magazine. He's based in Boulder, Colorado. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Plait.

PHIL PLAIT: Hi, thanks for having me on.

FLATOW: Here there. Phil, tell us about this German satellite. What did it do? Why - is it still working? Why is it coming down?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

PLAIT: Well, ROSAT is short for the Roentgen Satellite. Roentgen, with an umlaut over the O, was a German scientist who discovered X-rays. And the satellite was named after him because it observed the sky in X-rays. And it was an astronomical satellite that observed exploding stars and galaxies and all kinds of high-energy violent events like that.

It was launched by NASA in 1990, served for many years, did great work for the astronomical community. There was a glitch many years ago that shut it down. It's been in orbit ever since. And now its number is up.

FLATOW: And do we know when exactly it's coming down?

PLAIT: Well, we don't know exactly, because it's very difficult to know exactly when a satellite's going to come down. The Earth's atmosphere is hard to model. It's very thin up there, 100 miles or more up, but it exists. And sometimes it's a little bit denser, sometimes not, and the satellite might be tumbling, and so it makes it very difficult to know exactly when it's come down - it's going to come down, excuse me.

But what you said is pretty good: It should be coming down sometime this weekend. As time goes on, the predictions will get more accurate.

FLATOW: Mark Matney, just how much junk is up there?

MATNEY: Well, it turns out that the United States Space Surveillance Network, which is mostly our military asset, spends all of their time looking at space, and they track something - they have a catalog of about 16,000 objects in Earth orbit right now. And those are objects larger than about a softball in size.

FLATOW: And do we expect all of them to someday come down?

MATNEY: Most of them. The ones that are out of geosynchronous orbit probably will not anytime soon. But all of the ones that are in the first several thousand miles, eventually - first several thousand miles from the surface of the Earth, will eventually come down, but it's a very strong function of how high they are. The higher they are, the less atmosphere they encounter, and the slower they'll come down.

FLATOW: So somebody is keeping track of every single one of these little pieces?

MATNEY: Well, down to a certain size. Radars can only see down to a certain size, and it's about 10 centimeters, about four inches. And that's the catalog. And, in fact, we also keep track of those in case we need to move the Space Station out of the way, which it periodically does.

FLATOW: And could pieces be coming down all the time, the tiny pieces that we just don't know about?

MATNEY: About once a day, something in orbit that we catalog and track re-enters the Earth's atmosphere.

FLATOW: Once a day?

MATNEY: Once a day, but most of them are very tiny, and they burn up upon re-entry. About once a week, an intact object comes in, a rocket body or a satellite. So it happens pretty often. I actually did a quick set of numbers because I came - before I talked to you today. And there have been something like 4,000 objects, actually more than 4,000 objects larger than one ton, that have re-entered the Earth's atmosphere since the beginning of the Space Age.

FLATOW: We haven't heard about 4,000 (unintelligible).

MATNEY: Most of them you don't hear anything about.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Mark, what do you think about that? I'm sorry, Phil, what do you think about that?

PLAIT: Those numbers sound about right. It's funny to hear it that way because you start to think oh my gosh, the sky is falling. But, in fact, what this is telling you is that it's very rare for us to even know about these things coming down. And people tend to panic when they hear that a satellite is coming in, something like ROSAT, or the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, which came in last month.

But in fact, these aren't that big of a danger. It's certainly something to be aware of, but it's not something to panic over.

FLATOW: Are there big pieces of this ROSAT going to survive the trip through the atmosphere?

PLAIT: Actually yes. ROSAT...

FLATOW: Wait, wait, you just told me not to be afraid.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

PLAIT: Well, the point here is that the Earth is really big, and these pieces are really small, and you occupy an extremely small part of the surface area of the planet. So even with 4,000 of these things coming in over the past 50 years, we've only had instances, I think, one person who had a little, tiny piece of metal bounce off her shoulder.

MATNEY: It was a piece of insulation. It didn't even hurt her.

PLAIT: Yeah, right. And I actually, I've seen a rocket booster re-enter. I thought it was just a very bright meteor, but then the next day I found out it was a booster. So these things happen without us knowing about it. And with ROSAT, we do know about it, and some things we do know about in advance, and ROSAT was a famous satellite.

It weighs about two-and-a-half tons, which makes it about a third of the size of the satellite that came in last week – last month, but ROSAT is going to fall apart a little bit more. So there should be 30 pieces or so that will probably hit the ground intact. They have to understand how the spacecraft is put together and make models of what can survive re-entry, but the number they come up with is approximately 30.

Most of these are only going to weigh a couple of pounds. However, the mirror assembly of ROSAT, the thing that actually focused, if you want to say that, the X-rays, the part that saw the X-rays, that will probably come down intact, and that weighs a lot. It's actually well over a ton. And it's going to come in intact and hit the ground.

Now, the good news for that is that's one piece falling over an entire planet, and the Earth is 70 percent water, and what's land is relatively inhabited. So again, like you said at the beginning, the odds of anybody getting hit by any of these pieces is a couple of thousand to one against.

FLATOW: Mark, is there any way to know if, you know, as it gets closer to actually getting close to the Earth, to put out a warning sign if it's going to get over some piece of land, tell people to watch out?

MATNEY: Well, even in the final hours of any re-entry, there's still a great deal of uncertainty, and basically we can narrow it down to the last few revolutions, but those revolutions cover a significant chunk of the Earth's surface. So in a sense - just to give you an example, in the UARS' case, about a day before, we were pretty confident it wasn't going to fall over North America. But then something changed on the spacecraft and changed its drag slightly, and as a result, the final orbit, some of them did pass over North America.

Fortunately, it landed in the ocean, but that just shows you how difficult it is to predict the final stages of these re-entries.

FLATOW: Would it be possible to actually shoot the thing down if you could see it was going to go to a bad place?

MATNEY: Well, in principal you could. If you recall, we did that with USA193, but the concern there was it had a tank full of toxic hydrazine, quite a bit of it actually, and there was a great concern that that would fall in a populated area and create a very large cloud of toxic gas. Because the odds are so small on these re-entries, and the effort and expense to actually intercept something is pretty extreme, these standard re-entries really don't warrant that kind of mitigation.

FLATOW: Well, you know, shouldn't there be a policy that if you put something up in space, you should clean up after yourself?

MATNEY: Well, actually we've been moving in that direction. Both of these spacecraft, UARS and ROSAT, were launched in about 1990. But since about 1995, our knowledge of re-entries has gotten a lot better, and internationally, we've been moving - a number of different space-faring countries have been moving in directions to try and design their spacecraft, that if it has a risk on the ground - we've developed the computational capabilities to compute those risks. If the risk exceeds a certain value – that the value we use in the United States is one in 10,000, that you really ought to think about changing the design of your spacecraft, make it out of metals that won't survive re-entry or perhaps put an engine on it or extra fuel so you can do a targeted re-entry and drop it out over the Pacific Ocean where it won't hurt anyone.

We did that with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. We re-entered it over the Pacific Ocean, and yes.

FLATOW: So designing them more to control re-entry a bit.

MATNEY: Yes, to try and target where you're going to put it in. The other thing is something we call design for demise, and that's what I mentioned. You talk to the engineers from the very beginning, and you say look, you need to design your spacecraft not out of these materials like titanium and steel that are likely to survive re-entry but see if you can use some other metals that will disintegrate upon re-entry.

FLATOW: Phil, do the sun cycles - you know, we know the sun has period cycles - does that affect where these things might fall?

PLAIT: Bizarrely, it does. When the sun is active and has a lot of sunspots, there are a lot of solar flares and coronal mass ejections that blast out subatomic particles, the Earth's atmosphere puffs up in reaction to these when they hit us. And it's a tiny effect.

But these satellites are orbiting up there where even a tiny effect over a long period of time can affect them. As I understand it, ROSAT was originally thought to burn up last year, but the Earth's atmosphere has been relatively calm because the sun has been quiet.

We had a very long, quiet period from the sun, much longer than usual. It's just now starting to ramp up. 2013-2014 is when we're going to start seeing a lot of solar activity again, although there's been a little bit.

So yeah, it's odd to think that satellites might come in because of the sunspot cycle, but there you go.

FLATOW: So if you need this weekend to have a party, a ROSAT party, everybody comes as a satellite, some Sputnik or something - Telstar

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

PLAIT: I'm the one that's having a ROSAT re-entry party, actually.

FLATOW: I know someone would have one. And what would a party like this be like? Do people do come dressed as satellite debris? Could you be, you know, a canister, a booster rocket?

PLAIT: Well, I dressed as Hubble for a Halloween party many years ago. So it's not that hard. But the problem is when do you throw the party? You may not know until a day in advance, as Mark said, and you've got to realize these satellites are moving very rapidly. Orbital speed is about five miles per second.

So if you're off in your calculations by a minute, that's 300 miles. So we don't know where it's going to come down because of that, and in fact these estimates of when it's going to come down are still plus or minus, you know, a day at the moment, although they'll get much better over the next 24 hours or so.

FLATOW: Well, you gave me a good idea. This being Halloween coming up, if you dressed as a piece of the ROSAT satellite, no one could say you weren't, right? I mean, their analysis of your metallurgy...

PLAIT: Well, if you want to walk around with a 1,600 pound mirror wrapped around, yeah, I guess that's your - or 3,000 pounds, I suppose.

FLATOW: All right. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today, and we'll be watching that satellite with you.

PLAIT: Thank you.

MATNEY: Thank you very much.

FLATOW: You're welcome. Mark Matney is an orbital debris scientist at NASA, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. And Phil Plait is an astronomer and author of Bad Astronomy blog for Discover Magazine based in - he's based in Boulder.

So you now have an excuse of what to do - how to dress up for Halloween with the ROSAT if you'd like to. We're going to take a break and come back and change directions. We're going to talk about the future, a future without oil, running on clean energy, biofuels. Can we do it by 2050? My next guest thinks so. Amory Lovins will join us after this break. Stay with us.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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Contest Seeks To Launch Student Space Projects

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October 14, 2011

Audio for this story from Talk of the Nation will be available at approx. 6:00 p.m. ET

The YouTube Space Lab competition is asking high school students to submit video proposals for space-based science experiments. Zahaan Bharmal, a Google executive who envisioned the competition, says that the winning entry will be performed on the International Space Station and streamed live on YouTube to the world.

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China Launches A Space Laboratory

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China launched an experimental spacecraft from the Gobi desert this week. The unmanned Tiangong-1 (which means "Heavenly Palace-1") is expected to orbit Earth for two years. Journalist Miles O'Brien discusses planned docking missions for the craft and China's space program.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, host: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. China launched its first space laboratory this week. The unmanned Tiangong-1, or Heavenly Palace-1, left the Gobi Desert yesterday, entered Earth orbit. China plans to launch another unmanned craft, and according to a Chinese state media statement, to, quote, experiment in rendezvous and docking and to eventually develop a space station. Sounds very familiar.

So will China one day have its own version of the International Space Station complete with astronauts? Maybe it's a step in going to the moon. Joining me now to talk more about it is my guest, Miles O'Brien. He's a journalist who's been covering aviation, space and science for 30 years. He's a science correspondent for "The News Hour" on PBS. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN: Ira, it's a pleasure.

FLATOW: My joy. What do you know about this spacecraft here?

O'BRIEN: Well, it's - you wouldn't call it a space race, would you, because the Chinese - I guess if you were measuring it in geological timeframes, yes, but they move in a very plodding way, a methodical way. And those who would suggest that there is some sort of new space race underway, frankly, I think, say so a bit wistfully, hoping there'll be another space race because, after all, it fueled a lot of expense and spending on this side to go to the moon.

FLATOW: Well, so they're not in a race with anybody, but they're going to be making progress, doing something, I would imagine.

O'BRIEN: Yeah, this is a key thing. To call this a space station is a bit of a stretch. It's not designed to keep people up there indefinitely, as the International Space Station does, now more than a decade, of course, in that case.

In this case, as time goes on, and as they add to it, they will tend it for longer periods of time. What's really crucial about this, Ira, is this will demonstrate to them and to the world that they can rendezvous and dock at a target. That's a significant piece of the space puzzle.

If you're really going to be a player in space, you have to solve the rendezvous and docking problem, and that is not a simple problem. And so this is their target, if nothing else, to dock to. They'll fly a couple of unmanned missions to do that, and then at the end of 2012, the plan is to send some Jap(ph) - excuse me, Chinese taikonauts to spend a shorter period of time but eventually longer periods of time for later crews at this tended object.

FLATOW: Have they not expressed their desire to go to the moon someday?

O'BRIEN: Yeah, we've heard that. We've heard, you know, talk about maybe one day going to Mars. There's all kinds of grand aspirations there. They just have moved in a very slow way. Their first manned flight was back in 2003. They've flown three manned missions. Last one was in 2008. So they're moving in a slow process, but I guess in the context of Chinese history, it's a perfectly appropriate timescale, right?

FLATOW: Well, you know, the obvious question is we don't have a spacecraft to go to the International Space Station. The Russians don't have one now either. Why not ask the Chinese?

O'BRIEN: Why shouldn't we hedge our bets? Why shouldn't we be able to hail another taxi, as it were, right?

FLATOW: Exactly, exactly.

O'BRIEN: And this is - this gets into a lot of geopolitics, as you can imagine. The Chinese space program is pretty opaque to the rest of the world, to say the least. There are a lot of political considerations in play when you start partnering with the Chinese. The concern, of course, is that U.S. technology would be borrowed and not returned, so to speak, by the Chinese, and so there is reluctance to create the kinds of partnerships that you would need in order to have a Chinese spacecraft docking at the International Space Station.

Now, they haven't even proved they can dock yet. Now, we'll see. If they start docking at this tended object, and they succeed, maybe that will change. But the politics may not.

FLATOW: And I understand that on this space station are some International Space Station flags that were brought onboard.

O'BRIEN: Yeah, I mean, I think the Chinese, frankly, they would like to be a part of the International Space Station, if they had their druthers. But right now the politics don't work so well. The Chinese have a long and fruitful relationship with the Russian space program.

If you look at their manned capsule, the Shenzhou, it looks just like a Soyuz rocket. It's not a complete knockoff, it's a little bit larger, and the inside is modified to their liking, but the truth is the Russians and the Chinese have worked together. When I was in Star City years ago, there were some Chinese taikonauts there at the time. I was told to look the other way. It was kind of unofficial at that time.

And so they had this strong relationship. I think if the Russians were calling the shots, the Chinese might be part of the space station, but of course the U.S. has a say-so in that.

FLATOW: CCTV, the Chinese TV, released a video animation of the craft. And playing behind in the background was "America the Beautiful." How can that be a mistake?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

O'BRIEN: That is either some really strange irony, or somebody's in deep trouble today, Ira, and is in a cell right next to the Tiananmen Square tank guy or something. I don't know.

FLATOW: It was very funny. We were watching it on the Internet. So they're going to launch this second ship, something, as you say, to prove they can rendezvous with the space vehicle. No people will be onboard this one either. But this seems to be saying, if I hear you correctly, sort of planting a flag into a next generation of space travel.

They're saying we're here, we're not only eating your lunch in production of consumable goods, we're now getting into the space business.

O'BRIEN: Yeah, you know, you say the next generation, but in a way what they're doing seems to be a bit of an anachronism of another era. You knw, we sort of have been there and done this. But this is also, this is part of - the big picture here is Chinese, their view of superpower status and supremacy in the world.

And it is their view, I've talked to them over the years, trying to get in the door there and do some work there, it's kind of hard to get in, it is their view that this is a big part of, if nothing else, the geopolitics, the soft power that space exerts in the world.

FLATOW: Of course, they showed us some of their power years ago when they blew up a satellite, did they not?

O'BRIEN: And this is what gives people a little pause in the West. In 2007, the Chinese had a defunct weather satellite. For reasons no one fully really understands outside of the Chinese military - and it is a military-controlled program, let's not forget that - in any case, they lobbed a ballistic missile at their own defunct satellite and obliterated it, to prove they could do it.

But what was - the consequence of this was it created just thousands and thousands of piece of hazardous space junk in low-Earth orbit, and it also made an interesting statement about the Chinese program, how much is it a militaristic - how much is it about Star Wars, how much of it is about, you know, the space shuttle and the space station.

FLATOW: Of course all our astronauts were military people to begin with also.

O'BRIEN: Well, you know, I mean we make - of course Eisenhower was very clear when he created NASA, let's make it a civilian program. But it was populated by military people. So that might have been a difference without a distinction to the rest of the world, including the Chinese.

FLATOW: Well, Miles, thank you very much.

O'BRIEN: It was a pleasure, Ira.

FLATOW: For taking time to be with us. Miles O'Brien, who you can see on PBS, he's a correspondent for PBS and a science journalist, been on - on 30 years or so. You'll see his reports on "The News Hour" on PBS.

O'BRIEN: When dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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Space Junk Will Fall To Earth This Week

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Enlarge NASA

This artist's conceptual image provided by NASA shows the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS.

NASA This artist's conceptual image provided by NASA shows the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS.

It looks like a giant piece of biscotti covered with gold foil and pipe cleaners. But it's really a decommissioned weather satellite the size of a bus that NASA says will probably fall to Earth by Friday, oh, give or take a day.

Most of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (or UARS) will burn up as the spacecraft plunges into the lower atmosphere, but some pieces may survive and strike the ground nearly anywhere between 57 north latitude and 57 south latitude. That's pretty much anywhere on the continents and oceans. Antarctica appears to be safe.

 

In its risk assessment, NASA says the possibility of somebody getting hit by something is small, but it estimates 26 "potentially hazardous objects" from the UARS may survive the flaming return, and not all of them will be lightweight.

Washington Post blogger Joel Achebloch says this is the biggest piece of space debris to come back to earth in 30 years and it should create a big light show. If only they knew where to look. This week, NASA will start offering daily briefings on the satellite's position.

The bloggers at Space.com remind everyone that most of the Earth is covered with water, so chances are greater that space debris will plunge into an ocean. It's hard to predict where and when, because the UARS's orbit is falling a lot faster than people expected. Solar activity is blamed. This warms up the atmosphere and increases drag on the satellite, cutting its flight shorter.

NASA says the UARS blasted into space in 1991 aboard the space shuttle Discovery. It aided scientists studying the Earth's ozone layer, and other aspects of the planet's upper atmosphere. (HT: Bill Chappell)

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HEALTH MANAGEMENT. NASA Unveils Next Generation 'Monster' Space Rocket

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Artist concept of SLS launching.
If things go without a hitch, NASA said its newly unveiled Space Launch System could take its first manned test flight in 2017.
The new rocket design looks a lot like the Apollo era rockets that took American astronauts to the moon, but NASA said the new rocket is much more powerful than any other rocket they've made before and in conjunction with the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, already in development, it could set up astronauts for deep space exploration. The SLS will be NASA's first exploration-class vehicle since the Saturn V took astronauts to the moon.
"We're investing in technologies to live and work in space, and it sets the stage for visiting asteroids and Mars," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said at a news conference.
 Enlarge NASA
Artist concept of future destinations.
NASA Artist concept of future destinations.
At the unveiling of the plans, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) called it a "monster rocket."
According to the AP, Nelson put the cost of the program at $18 billion over the next five years.
"Will it be tough times going forward? Of course it is," Nelson said at the press conference. "We are in an era in which we have to do more with less — all across the board — and the competition for the available dollars will be fierce. But what we have here now are the realistic costs that have been scrubbed by an outside, independent third party."
The Houston Chronicle's SciGuy compares this new rocket to the old ones:

... The new space launch system will be much bigger and far more powerful. It will be able, initially, to lift as much as [154,000] pounds of cargo into space, nearly three times as much as the space shuttle, which had a capacity for about 50,000 pounds.
This is enough to lift space capsules, astronauts and the supplies they will need for voyages to the moon and possibly beyond.
The announcement comes after weeks of wrangling between the U.S. Senate and NASA and the White House. In the end the Senate seems to have gotten what it wanted, an affordable heavy lift system ready to fly by 2017.

"President Obama challenged us to be bold and dream big, and that's exactly what we are doing at NASA. While I was proud to fly on the space shuttle, kids today can now dream of one day walking on Mars," Bolden said in a press release.
NASA has a very technical description of the rockets, but the big thing to remember is that this new rocket marks a return to liquid technology:

The SLS rocket will incorporate technological investments from the Space Shuttle program and the Constellation program in order to take advantage of proven hardware and cutting-edge tooling and manufacturing technology that will significantly reduce development and operations costs. It will use a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propulsion system, which will include the RS-25D/E from the Space Shuttle program for the core stage and the J-2X engine for the upper stage. SLS will also use solid rocket boosters for the initial development flights, while follow-on boosters will be competed based on performance requirements and affordability considerations. The SLS will have an initial lift capacity of 70 metric tons (mT) and will be evolvable to 130 mT. The first developmental flight, or mission, is targeted for the end of 2017.

Update at 2:36 p.m. ET. On The Money:
Money will determine whether that 2017 date is realistic, reports The New York Times. The paper says "if the space agency's budget remains flat, providing about $41 billion between now and 2025, then the first manned flight would not occur until 2021, and the rocket would fly only once every two years, and NASA would not finish the 130 metric ton version until after 2030."
The Times also adds that NASA does not yet have plans on how it could use the vehicle.
Update at 3:04 p.m. ET. How Much Can This Thing Carry?
A reader asks if this is really bigger than Saturn V, which was able to carry about 260,000 pounds into space. According to numbers the agency gave the AP, at its peak this rocket might be able to cary up to 150 metric tons into space. That translates to 331,000 pounds. If you take the 130 mT published on NASA's site that translates to 287,000 pounds; still more powerful than Saturn V.

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