It is with a heavy heart, but realism prompts me to debunk the current timeline of the international institutional space community, to bring a man and a woman to the Moon by the year 2024.

The main reason being politics and bureaucracy, not technical issues.

First of all, the SLS launcher that is pushed by the US Senate, as the only way that humans will be able to travel beyond Earth Orbit. This is a false narrative even endangering lives of future astronauts. With Soyuz, Boeing's Starliner and SpaceX' Crew Dragon coming online in 2021, there is and will be a safe way to get astronauts out of Earth's deep gravity well. We have the ISS now, and this is a much safer place for astronauts to transit to spacecraft that could bring them onwards to the Moon, instead of sitting on top of a new massive rocket.

Cost estimates for SLS, once operational, range from $800M to $2B per launch. This is clearly not sustainable and such launcher will never get a cadence where the proven reliability will enable the opening of the next frontier. SLS is not reusable as Falcon-9 and, for example, it will destroy the 4 very expensive Shuttle derived RS-25 engines, each launch. It will have a massive lift capacity but with in-orbit assembly, that we trained so well for with the construction of the ISS, this capacity can be matched with distribution of the payload to existing and reliable launchers.

The current estimate is that the first test flight of SLS will be in 2021, but more likely it will be 2022. The 2nd flight of SLS should immediately take two astronauts in an orbit around the Moon. I mean, this is not going to happen. At some point in time, some responsible person will stand-up and will be pointing at the risk of killing the astronauts on a government rocket that has only flown once! My guess: a second uncrewed SLS testflight would be needed.

In the current plan, the third flight of SLS will take the astronauts to a Space Station in Lunar Orbit, dubbed Gateway. This version of the SLS supposed to have a to-be-developed Exploration Upper Stage (EUS). My guess is, that before astronauts are put on top of the EUS, there will be at least 1 uncrewed test flight with SLS and EUS. From what I know, the EUS is still on the drawing table. It has been proven many times that it will take significant time to bring rockets from drawing table to launchpads. 

This Lunar Gateway is really needed in the current scenario, to be able to bring astronauts to the Southpole by 2024. This Lunar Gateway should be operational at least a few months before the end of 2024, let's say summer 2024. The Gateway design has been studied by the International partners for a while, but I have still not seen a solid baseline design. I just cannot believe that first elements will be launchable in three years time. Maybe a bad example for many reasons, but the Russian Nauka MLM module, to be launched to the ISS in the next year, if that happens, has been on the launch manifest since the mid nineties... And now we just, launch like a bunch of these modules in 3.5 years time to Lunar Orbit? No.

Some people in the US administration push for a Lunar landing without the Gateway. Of course that can be done, but I just don't see US congress approve the massive funds needed to redo the equatorial Lunar landings by the Apollo programme some 50 years ago, just to make America great again for the Trump administration.

It is very likely, that the next US president, will refocus again on the why and what of Space Exploration. Hopefully, the Lunar Human Programme continues but even then, a Human landing by 2028 will be a challenge.

Thought that the ZapRead platform would be the fitting platform for the announcement of my new start-up: Bitlinq.space.

With the increasing surveillance of networks by nation states, and large tech companies keeping track of your every move on the internet, a niche market pops up for subscriptionless censorship resistant global communication. My new company aims to launch a small cubesat sized satellite with a payload containing a Lightning Node, as a gatekeeper for a user programmable store-forward tranceiver. The Lightning Node in Space enables the service to become subscriptionless without losing a business model. Secondly, users on the ground can build their own user terminal from non-SatCom specific or proprietary components, which employs an unlicensed portion of the Electromagnetic spectrum for communication to and from Space.

Users within certain geofenced areas, enabled by anonymous donors to the Lightning Node in Space, can use the system free of charge. An additional service being contemplated for further implementation on board the bitlinq payload, is a space based node for Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) based on Decentralized IDentifiers (DID).

Also a synergy could be created with the Blockstream Satellite API. A combination with Bitlinq could create uncensored internet access anywhere on the globe, within either firewalled regions or non connected regions at all. 

For more up-to-date information on Bitlinq, follow us on twitter.

It is just crazy to realize Elon Musk and his company pull this of. Build up the largest rocket ever in no-time. It dwarfs the majestic Saturn-V that brought men to the Moon. I am just not mentally ready to see it actually fly.

Elon Musk will give a presentation about all this beautiful shiney stuff on saturday evening (September 28). In the meantime, NASA Adminstrator Jim Bridenstine sent out some snarky comments:

For those in the unknown, SpaceX is one of the Commercial Crew suppliers and indeed, they are behind schedule. That nevertheless is dwarfed by the behindness of the Schedule of NASA's own rocket programme: SLS. As such, the Elon Musk fanboy club is now full force on twitter taking the piss at Jim Bridenstine. Popcorn is out!

Update September 7, 2019: unfortunately, the VIKRAM Moonlander crashed. Communication with the lander stopped at an altitude of 2.1 km. It probably lost attitude control in relation with using the main engine.

Below is the live feed from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on the landing attempt of the VIKRAM Moonlander, as part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission.

The actual landing is foreseen to happen on Friday September 6, 2019 at 22:20 European Standard Time.

United States President Donal Trump was at it again on his favorite outlet Twitter. On August 30 he posted a highly detailed picture of the unfortunate aftermath of an Iranian Safir rocket on the El Khomeini launchpad.

Analyis of the picture, shows that it is not the original digital datafile. It has clearly been photographed as scatter from the flash from the camera is visible in the center. In the top left hand, some details have been blacked-out, and this is perfectly straight, so this points at a digital operation performed on the data file from the camera with which the photo was taken.

Obviously not obvious for the president, based on this picture, the highly classified performance of a clandestine US satellite has been revealed. Based on the shadows from the poles and the known geolocation of the El Khomeini launchpad, the time of observation can be determined, plus or minus a few minutes. Based on the ellipticity of the observed launchpad, which is circular, based on Google Maps pictures, in combination with the compass in the top right, both the azimuth and elevation of the observation can be fixed.

Using freely available tools for Satellite Orbit simulation like STK, and the knowledge from the Amateur Spysat community, one could quickly identify the USA 224 satellite as being a so-called KeyHole satellite. Conclusion is that the photo that Donald Trump twittered, was taken from a distance of 382 km. As from Google Earth, the launchpad is 60 mtr in diameter, one could conclude that the resolution is at least 10 cm per pixel, or even better as it is a photo of a photo.

Using some basic optical diffraction limit equations from a bachelor physics class, reveals that the Keyhole satellites have an aperture of at least 2.4 mtr, which is of course no surprise as this is also the Hubble Space Telescope aperture. In 2012, the US Spy Agency NRO, that operates the KeyHole satellites, already passively hinted that this was (at least) their aperture diameter, as they offered NASA an unused telescope to be used for its future WFIRST infrared telescope. Another revealing item is the image quality of the picture, clearly the NRO has some clever algorithms, and maybe even adaptive optics on-board, to counter the effects of turbulence on sunlight propagation through the atmosphere. Below the resolution of 50 cm from Low-Earth Orbit this becomes a cumbersome subject.

So back to the politics. Why on Earth would Donald Trump show off this incredible capability? As president, he has the right to declassify such information, but nonetheless, this will not stop Iran from trying to reach Orbit with an Earth Obervation satellite (and of course at the same time obtaining a ballistic missile capability). As Trump basically always lies, one starts to suspect that the opposite has happened, i.e., the US (or their local ally Israel) has destroyed the Safir Launcher.

Internal to the US, to me, revealing this picture is clearly a middle finger to the US Intelligence Community who he believes is behind a lot of attacks since he was a presidential candidate. 

In any case, IMHO it shows that Donald Trump is category 5 ...... (please fill in the blanks) and should be impeached ASAP.

PS: more info on the analysis of the photo via the twitter thread from Cees Bassa and the blog by Marco Langbroek. 

Space is the willing background scenery of many Hollywood blockbusters. Heroism is all around and the vastness and emptyness of space can give you the creeps. For spacegeeks like me however, there is also a different genre of friday-night entertainment. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 human moonlanding, let's look at my top 5 inspired-by-Apollo-movies:

The right stuff (1983) shows the fabric of which the first space man have been made of. Be aware though that there were woman made of the same fabric in those days, as the Netflix documentary Mercury 13 rightly shows.

Hidden figures (2016) tells the story of black female mathematicians that played critical but invisible roles in doing the calculation of flight trajectories for Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.

Apollo 13 (1995) is a dramatization of the aborted Apollo 13 lunar mission, starring well known spacegeek Tom Hanks.

Apollo 18 (2011) is about an Apollo mission that actually never happened. After Apollo 17, President  Nixon axed the Apollo programme and the remaining Saturn 5 rockets ended up at three musea. Warning: Movie is scary at times.

Operation Avalanche (2016) continues on the Capricorn One (1978) line of thought to suggest the Apollo moonlandings were fake. Best documentary to watch after this movie is Dark Side of the Moon (2002), on the claim that it was Stanley Kubrick who filmed all of it in Hollywood. Make sure to watch untill the end otherwise you risk becoming a Lunar Landing conspirator and you might risk getting a punch in the face by Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin.

The High Frontier by Gerard O'Neill is a book that was gifted to me in 1998 by Dr. James Burke, a retired Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) veteran and a livelong Space Advocate from the Planetary Society. I have read bits and pieces over the years, but now I made it from cover to cover during my holiday on the island of Texel last week.

As the book was written in 1976, it tells a story of a post-Apollo era US Civil Space Programme looking for a new meaning after the grandiose cold war victory. In those days, the US Civil Space Programme, and particularly the Human part of it, was awaiting for the Space Shuttle to come online. A future is depicted in the book where maybe in the mid-90s there could be a first large sphere, orbiting the Earth (and the Sun) at the Lagrangian L5 region of Space. Hundreds of colonists would be living and working there to build Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) satellites, to provide the energy thirsty Earth of cheap energy. Everything would be build from Lunar and Asteroidal materials, so the deep gravitational well of the Earth would not bear its toll on the aspirations of the colonists.

In his futuristic considerations of how this future could work, he makes an interesting statement on Money. He speaks about electronic money called SHARES (on page 9):

"...... Our housing, food, clothing, and the rest are purchased in SHARES (Standard High-Orbital Acquisition-units Recorded Electronically) so our Earth salaries just accumulate in the bank....". 

Could this quote be one of the first references for Bitcoin? I mean, O'Neill clearly understood that the colonists should be very smart, and that electronic money could best be used, instead of sending up coins and bills from Earth under the control of a Earth bank. A few pages later, he lists a number of principles that would be key attributes of technical solutions [in general]. One of these reads (on page 17):

"...A technical "improvement" is more likely to be beneficial if it reduces rather than increases the concentration of power and control...".

I don't think he specifically meant to address this principle for the SHARES concept, but my wild guess is that this highly intelligent man sure had some more ideas on the SHARES concept, than just the witty acronym.

One of the triggers for re-reading the book is because of a documentary that is being produced as we speak: Gerry.

There is a number of people that I know from my International Space University (ISU) network that are being (or have been) interviewed for Gerry: Rick Tumlinson, Peter Diamandis and Loretta Whitesides. Through the book, I have learnt about the Space Studies Institute (SSI) that Gerard O'Neill founded, and how this movement grew rather fast in the seventies. I also found that this organisation still exists as of today through this website but honestly, I think it kind of marginalized. I am curious to learn what really happened with this organisation, and why the whole in-Space manufacturing prophecy remained in the feasibility study paper phase? Why has no country demonstrated a basic Space Based Solar Power capability in the last 40 years? The International Space University (ISU) was founded in 1988 and is a thriving organisation. There is much overlap between the SSI and ISU. Why have they never joined forces? Was there ever an attempt? Just hoping here that the documentary will shed some light on these questions?

The book I was gifted, was issued in 1989, and has an appendix called Perspective - the view from 1988. The appendix seems driven by frustration that the US Civil Space Programme is not going the ways of the SSI. But he is not really harsh on the Space Shuttle programme whilst it has been clear now, that it was really the Space Shuttle programme that eated a lot of money away from the true High Frontier. Strangely, he doesn't mention the 1986 Space Shuttle accident at all, surely a key event in those days. Another strange thing is that, while he is very clear on Nuclear power (in his opinion Nuclear doesn't have a future in Space, and on Earth where it suffers from Environmentalism), strangely enough, he doesn't mention the Tsjernobyl nuclear disaster, taking also place in 1986. The questions arises: Where was Gerard O'Neill in 1986?

Another interesting thing I have learnt, is that he started a company called GeoStar in the 80s, and that he made the unusual arrangement to allocate 85% of GeoStar's founding stock to SSI. GeoStar was enabled by a patent by Gerard O'Neill and intended to be used for navigation of aircraft. The company ran into trouble and filed for bankruptcy in 1991. A tragedy is that Gerard O'Neill died in 1992 of Leukemia which was diagnosed back in 1985. He sure would have been a very interesting person to talk to in these days. 

This week is 50 years since the historic Apollo 11 human mission to the surface of the Moon. I have been very busy with the media over the last days who want to cover this anniversary. The more I talk about it, the more I get a bit angry.

I realize more and more, that Apollo 11 was too quick and too soon. Yes, it was a marvelous demonstration of US technical superiority. It showed the world that anything could be done, as long as you stick to doing it. The only thing is, after 6 Apollo missions to the Moon, humans basically stopped exploring Space apart from setting up shop in low Earth Orbit (LEO) with the International Space Station. We didn't put up a human base on the Moon. We didn't put boots on Mars. We didn't explore the Asteroids. That is all still in the future. Why? With the exponential growth of scientific knowledge and technical achievements since Apollo, it could have all been done, and bring humanity even more prosperity.

Apollo was driven by a political motive fuelled by the cold war. This motive has now disappeared but apparantly, that is what you need to accomplish these great achievements. That makes me sad.

Another thing that I find worrying, has to do with the historic recollection of how the Apollo programme came to be. People remember the great US architect for Apollo: Werner von Braun, and think he was just a great friend of Walt Disney. What they often don't realize, is that this man was the technical mastermind of Hitler's V2 bombs used in WW2. They were launched from the The Hague area, very closeby were I live, and cost the lives of many, in the factories in Germany, in the Hague and in London, the destination of the bombs. Yes, the US was one of the liberators that helped removing Hitler and his awfull Nazi's. But the US was also thinking about a future place in geopolitics, and for that, they captured the Nazi scientists that they could use, to help out on US National security agenda. Werner von  Braun was one of them, and it seems that a whitewashing for his past actions was done, and to make him into the Apollo hero that he became to be.

Unfortunately, I wasn't around for the ultimate human performance in the entire history of mankind: the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon on July 21, 1969. Nevertheless, I have quite some books and toys about it. I am counting down with #MoonlandingMemories on twitter untill July 21 and will be posting the pictures also here on Zapread.