Last night, probably around the time I was writing my previous post on the subject, Philae’s batteries dropped below operational levels and the lander entered what is called an idle mode — not completely dead, but no longer functioning, with all of its scientific instruments and most of its onboard systems shut off. Its primary mission is over after 57 hours on Comet 67P. However, before “going to sleep,” Philae did transmit all of its data, including results from the drill test, which ESA scientists decided to attempt after all. Also, engineers went ahead with the attempt to rotate the lander and managed to turn it 35 degrees, bringing a larger solar cell into the light. Current is flowing, albeit slowly, and its possible — if unlikely — that the batteries will recharge enough to awaken the lander at some point in the future. In the meantime, the mission is being called “hugely successful,” in spite of the various setbacks.

The Rosetta orbiter still circling above is now backing into a higher orbit and will continue to study 67P for the next year, hoping to learn more about how comets actually work and, of course, what they’re made of, as the comet comes into close approach around the sun and grows a tail. As comets are believed to be leftovers from the formation of our solar system nearly 5 billion years ago, it’s hoped that Rosetta’s data will provide insight into how that process took place, and perhaps whether comets had anything to do with the origin of life here on Earth.

You can read more detail about Philae’s mission in ESA’s wrap-up here. And here are a few other interesting little tidbits:

• The web comic xkcd did something cool on Wednesday, a series of cartoons created throughout the day to illustrate illustrating Philae’s descent and landing in real time, and which all flow together to create a “virtual flipbook.” I am amazed at the poignancy and warmth xkcd’s creator pulls out of simple line drawings. Even though it’s silly to anthropomorphize a machine with no actual personality or intelligence, you can really imagine Rosetta and Philae having these exchanges of dialog and emotion.
• I reported the other day that Comet 67P was two-and-a-half miles across and shaped like a duck, but what does that really mean? Well, take a look at this graphic that superimposes the comet over downtown Los Angeles…
• And finally, here’s a video from ESA depicted the long journey of Rosetta and Philae, from their mutual launch back in 2004 through the projected end of the mission a year from now, in December 2015:

Look at what we did. Not too bad for a bunch of clothes-wearing apes, eh?

Sorry for the silly title. That’s just how I roll sometimes.

Anyhow, if you haven’t been following the story, there’s been a lot of news from Comet 67P since the Philae lander made its giant leap for robotkind on Wednesday, and some of it, I’m sorry to say, is quite disappointing. But first, here’s this:

Photograph: European Space Agency/AFP/Getty Images

Photo by ESA/Rosetta/Philae/ROLIS via CNES

That image above is an up-close-and-personal look at the surface of a comet, taken this morning by a tiny lander called Philae moments before it made contact with that ancient chunk of ice and rock. Philae spent 10 years traveling through deep space to make this rendezvous, carried aboard the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe. After a circuitous route that required a couple of slingshot maneuvers past Mars and Earth, as well as fly-bys of two different asteroids, Rosetta finally came alongside Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, some 311 million miles from Earth, back in August. Since then, it has been slowly moving in closer, mapping the comet’s terrain as it went. And then this morning, it released Philae for a seven-hour journey down to 67P. Other space probes have done close fly-bys of comets, and we even slammed a projectile into one back in 2005, but this is the first time we’ve gently set anything down on one.

Even leaving aside the historical-first aspect of this landing, it’s an incredible feat of navigation. Consider: 67P is only two-and-a-half miles across, and it’s speeding around the sun at roughly 85,000 mph. Imagine trying to hit a target that small and that fast in all that infinite emptiness with a spacecraft — Rosetta — that’s only 105 feet across its solar-panel wingspan. The mind boggles. And then there are the problems of actually landing on a comet. For one thing, 67P isn’t even a sphere, like a planet. Most of the descriptions I’ve read compare its shape to a rubber duckie: two irregularly shaped “lobes” stuck together. Because it’s so small, it has hardly any gravitational pull; Philae weighs only half an ounce when it’s on the surface of 67P. And the comet is outgassing, meaning its icy components are evaporating and venting off into space, which means, in that super-low gravity, that the comet can literally blow Philae away. To counter this, Philae has a cold-gas thruster on top intended to hold it against the comet’s surface while two anchoring systems — harpoons and ice-screws in its landing pads — dig in and make the lander fast. Unfortunately, it appears that these systems didn’t work quite as hoped: the thruster failed to properly pressurize as the lander was preparing to depart Rosetta, and the harpoons did not fire once it reached the surface. Last I heard, ESA scientists were still trying to verify whether or not the ice-screws had attached themselves, which means the lander could be just floating alongside the comet, or in danger of drifting away from it. But it definitely did make contact… in fact, it appears that Philae bounced and settled back to the surface at least once, so it made contact a couple of times.

Communications with the lander have been intermittent, for undetermined reasons, but ESA has confirmed it is on the surface, and it is functioning, so with luck we should start getting some interesting data back any time. Philae carries a suite of 10 scientific experiments, including a drill to take a core sample and an onboard laboratory to analyze it. Its primary mission is scheduled to last a couple of days, then — depending on how well the lander is able to recharge its batteries — a secondary phase will begin that could last until March of next year, after which conditions will likely be getting too hot for it to continue functioning as 67P plunges toward the sun.

I’m excited to see the planned panoramic photograph of the landing area, but in the meantime, feast your eyes on this gallery from The New York Times, including lots of shots of the comet taken as Rosetta approached.

One final thought: As exciting as this landing has been, a friend of mine lamented over on Facebook earlier that there was a time when this would have been an American achievement instead of a European one. I understand what he was getting at. I’m not really prone to nationalism myself, but when it comes to space stuff… well, I do take a lot of pride in the fact that it’s an American flag up there at Tranquility Base, and that we were the first nation with a reusable spaceship. But as someone else pointed out on that Facebook thread, it’s better for the countries of the world to work together on missions like this than to compete like we did in the Cold War days. (NASA did, in fact, contribute to the Rosetta mission.) For one thing, sharing the costs is the only practical way around the enormous expense of space exploration. But more generally, I also think it’s simply right that we all work together for this. If space exploration is truly “for all mankind,” if our ultimate goal is to make humanity an interplanetary species, then all of humanity needs to be involved and represented in what we’re doing out there. The first moonbase or Mars colony, ideally, ought to include Americans, Europeans, Asians, Indians… and  Russians… Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and yes, Muslims, too. This is the ideal established by Star Trek and Babylon 5, and it’s the one I dream we’ll achieve. Chances are we won’t, of course. I’m not so naive as to believe reality isn’t going to end up a lot messier than Star Trek ever was, and there will no doubt be some ventures where nations cooperate and others where they don’t. (I foresee that asteroid mining, if it works out, will probably be intensely nationalistic and/or corporate, with different organizations laying claim to specific rocks… hopefully peacefully, but not necessarily…) But hey, let’s at least try for the dream. It worked out pretty damn well this morning, didn’t it?

Astronauts on the International Space Station submerge a sealed GoPro in a blob of water. Awesomeness ensues:

Space is hard – but worth it. We will persevere and move forward together.

–Richard Branson, founder and CEO, Virgin Galactic

Last week was a tough one for commercial spaceflight.

Last Tuesday morning, an unmanned Antares rocket, operated by a company called Orbital Sciences Corporation and packed with supplies and experiments bound for the space station, exploded in a spectacular fireball seconds after rising from its launch pad. The latest report I’ve found indicates the launch safety officers deliberately detonated the rocket after its first-stage propulsion system failed, as a precaution to keep it from going down over a populated area. The cause of the failure is still under investigation. This was the third of eight cargo missions Orbital is contracted to perform for NASA; the company’s competitor SpaceX will reportedly fill the gap created in the resupply schedule. Also affected by the Antares disaster is Planetary Resources, the company that wants to mine the asteroids; its Arkyd 3 test platform was aboard the doomed rocket as well. You can read more about that here, if you’re interested.

As if losing the Antares wasn’t enough of a blow, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo then broke up during a test flight on Friday, resulting in the death of one of its pilots and serious injuries to the other. It appears the rocket plane’s braking system somehow deployed earlier than it should have, although investigators still haven’t said conclusively that was the cause of the accident, or have any idea of why the system deployed.

Predictably, there was an almost immediate torrent of op-eds and online commentary denouncing private space operations (Time had a memorably galling headline, “Enough with Amateur-Hour Space Flight“), and even calling for an end to manned spaceflight altogether. “People are dying!” the cries go. People could die, if something like that Antares blast happens to, say, a crewed Dragon capsule. To which I reply, yes, they are. and they could, and that’s tragic… but how many sailors died during the Age of Exploration? How many would-be colonists did not survive the passage from the Old World to the New? How many pioneers fell while crossing the Great Plains, or didn’t make it through their first harsh winter of homesteading? How many early aviators died trying to figure out how those new-fangled (and by our standards, appallingly fragile) aeroplanes really behaved?

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not heartless, and I certainly don’t mean to be glib about human lives. I regret and mourn every life lost in the cause of furthering a human presence in space. I certainly wouldn’t want to lose my own life in such an accident, or a friend or family member’s. But I firmly believe those deaths are honorable and meaningful. Because I believe passionately in the cause they died for.

Whenever this subject comes up, I always think of a moment from the original Star Trek series, a scene that’s come to be known to fans as the “risk speech”:

Now, obviously Captain Kirk’s soliloquy here is tailored to the details of a specific storyline. When he says “risk is our business,” he’s referring to the crew of the Enterprise, and to Starfleet, and the risk he’s speaking of is first contact with the alien species of the week. But what I hear in these words from a 46-year-old television segment is nothing less than my vision of the entire human race. Risk is our business, as a species. I believe the urge to explore, to wander, to want to know what’s over the horizon, is built into our very DNA. Pushing back new frontiers is dangerous… but as Kirk says, the possible returns are immense. Too immense to ignore, whether you believe we need to get off this rock in order to preserve our species in the event of a planetary-scale catastrophe, or you think there’s money to be made from the resources out there, or if, like me, you just think exploration is a worthy enough goal in itself, simply for the sake of seeing what’s out there..

Virgin Galactic isn’t in quite the same category as the Apollo missions, of course. The company’s raison d’etre is to take well-heeled customers on a brief thrill ride, and nothing more. SpaceShipTwo isn’t even capable of reaching orbit — its flight plans are all merely trampoline hops up to the edge of space and back — and I’ll confess I’ve been pretty dismissive of this venture compared to, say, SpaceX and its long-term goals of sending people to Mars. (I’ll also confess that I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about Virgin Galactic if I thought there was a chance in hell that I could one day afford one of its trips.) But in the wake of this accident, I’ve done some thinking, and I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter if SpaceShipTwo is just a rich man’s folly, because the more human beings we actually put up there in the black, even if they’re only there for a few minutes, the more we become a space-faring species. And by figuring out how to do it efficiently, safely, and cost-effectively for this one purpose, we learn things that can go toward other applications. Perhaps suborbital hops like this could someday shorten travel time for ordinary civilians like myself. Perhaps there are problems we haven’t even identified yet that will be solved by things we learn now.

Look, Richard Branson, the founder and CEO of Virgin Galactic, said it perfectly in the tweet I quoted at top of this entry. Space is hard. Getting there is hard, at least with our current approach. We’ve been in this place before, after the loss of space shuttle Challenger, when everybody was stunned to suddenly realize what a rocket ship actually is: a massive load of high explosives. And again after the loss of Columbia, when everybody realized it’s as difficult to come back from space as it is to get there. That’s just how it is, at least until someone invents an antigravity drive like we see in all the movies, or builds a working space elevator. We’ve just got to accept a certain amount of risk if we’re going to open this particular frontier. And I think we are going to open it, and that we should. I think we’re going to find we really don’t have any choice. And given the economic realities of our age, we’re going to need private enterprise to be a part of the opening process. So forget all this talk of abandoning space, or just leaving it to NASA. Let’s just suck it up, find out what went wrong with the Antares and SpaceShipTwo, mourn our losses, and then move on…

If you haven’t heard, NASA recently awarded commercial contracts to two private companies, SpaceX and Boeing, to begin ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Assuming, of course, that their Dragon and CST-100 spacecraft, respectively, prove themselves safe for human occupants during the upcoming certification tests. But I don’t think anyone has much doubt that they will. The goal is for this “space taxi” service to begin within two years, by 2017.

This is a major deal for a couple of reasons. First, and perhaps most importantly, it will break the current U.S. reliance on the Russians to get our people into space, and given how shaky relations with Russia have been recently, the sooner we can do that, the better. But the other big thing is that, for the first time in the 50-some years since Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight, people will be going into orbit on spaceships designed, built, and operated by commercial entities rather than a government agency. (SpaceShipOne and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic tourism business don’t count, as they don’t go high enough to achieve orbit.) This is a major shift of paradigm, and potentially tantamount to the genuine opening of the Final Frontier.

However, that doesn’t mean NASA is getting out of the sending-humans-to-space business. While the commercial efforts (SpaceX’s Dragon, in particular) have drawn everyone’s attention in recent years, the agency has quietly continued development of its own next-generation spaceship, the Orion Crew Vehicle. And now Orion is about ready to make its debut, with an unmanned test flight scheduled for December 4. The capsule — which basically looks like a scaled-up version of the old Apollo command modules and is intended to carry astronauts deeper into space than ever before, possibly even to Mars — will be blasted into orbit aboard a Delta-IV heavy-lift booster rocket. It will circle the Earth twice, rising far above the space station’s altitude and passing twice through the Van Allen radiation belts, and then re-enter the atmosphere for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, all to confirm that the ship’s critical systems function as expected. (This is explained in more detail in a dramatic new video released by NASA last week.)

Now here’s the fun part: The venerable old space agency wants people to feel invested somehow in Orion, to give them a sense of participation in its flights, up to and including that trip to Mars, so it’s offering a chance for us all to ride along by proxy. Simply go to the “Send Your Name to Mars” website and register your name, country of origin, postal code, and an email address. The collected names will be encoded on a microchip that will travel aboard the Orion on this first flight as well as future missions. With each trip into the black, you’ll accrue “frequent flyer miles,” which I suspect will probably arrive in your inbox as part of a newsletter or something. Yeah, it’s a gimmick, and kind of a cheesy one at that, but I like it. I like the idea that some little part of me — even something as inconsequential as a few bits of data that represent the string of letters by which I identify myself — is going up there. I’ve done this before — my name and Anne’s are aboard the New Horizons probe that is now less than a year away from Pluto — and now my name and hers will be on Orion too. And just to prove it, here are our “boarding passes”:

I think you’ll probably be able to continue submitting names throughout the duration of the Orion program, however long that turns out to be, but if you want your name aboard the first test flight, you’ll need to register by Halloween, October 31.

Let the countdown commence!

I noticed this morning that I jumped the gun a bit when I posted my annual reflection on the anniversary of the first human footsteps on the Moon. I know, of course, that the Eagle landed at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969, but for some reason, I got my dates confused and I threw my post up on the 19th. So mea culpa on that.

Phil Plait, a.k.a. the “Bad Astronomer” (not “bad” as in “bad at his job,” but as in “bad-ass astronomer who years ago started a blog to discuss the astronomy mistakes in movies and the popular consciousness, which he called bad astronomy“), did not make that mistake. His annual post went out on the correct day, curse his hide.

Now, he always writes a thoughtful call-to-arms on this subject, but I thought this year’s sentiments were especially stirring… and timely, considering that the U.S. has been without its own human launch capability for three years and public interest in putting people in space seems to be at an all-time ebb, even as SpaceX and the other commercial companies, as well as venerable old NASA, are making huge steps toward getting us back up there. Phil’s entire post is worth your attention, but I especially liked his concluding paragraphs:

A lifetime ago (literally, as I was born just under two months after this photo was taken).

Whatever you might be up to today, take a moment… look up to the sky… maybe you’ll even see the Moon looking pale and small in the daylight… and think about we’re capable of as a society, and as a species.

I’m now officially two weeks late in commenting on this topic, but that’s apparently going to be the new reality around this blog, so let’s just pretend for a minute that it’s two weeks ago, okay?

So, did y’all watch the big unveiling of the SpaceX Dragon V2 spacecraft that I pinged you about? Yeah, I didn’t either. I was getting ready to go camping that evening. If you’re interested, you can see a recording of the event here; if nothing else, it’s kind of entertaining to watch Elon Musk doing a giggly, somewhat awkward impression of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark from the Iron Man movies (i.e., gazillionaire boy wonder making a slick pitch for some new technological marvel). But hey, you’re probably too impatient for the video, so let’s cut to the chase. Here’s the new ship, with Musk standing to the right:

My first impression is, well, that kinda cool. But while a lot of other space bloggers have been gushing about how cool and futuristic it looks, I find there’s something… ungainly about its shape, at least to my eye. Still, if it works as Musk says it will, its appearance will be pretty irrelevant, and its function may well turn out to be revolutionary.

The vehicle is obviously derived from the cargo-only version that’s been delivering groceries to the International Space Station for a couple years now; the big difference I immediately noticed is that the V2 has three large windows instead of the single, hatch-mounted porthole of its predecessor, a dead giveaway that this machine is built to carry human beings who might want to see what’s outside. The V2 also has a sleeker hull, without as many exposed seams or technical systems as the version-1 Dragon. And of course, there are those stubby little landing legs.

Yes, the rumors are true. Instead of splashing down in the ocean like every other U.S. spacecraft to date except the winged space shuttles, the V2 is designed to land on terra firma, descending on rocket thrusters and touching down “with the accuracy of a helicopter,” according to Musk. (There will be parachutes in case the thruster system fails.) The video I linked a moment ago includes a brief animation at about the 4:00-minute mark, showing how this is supposed to work.

Another interesting innovation that stands out (especially after watching the animation) is the retractable nose cone that conceals an extendible docking ring. I’m not sure any previous spacecraft has had such a system, unless you count (again) the shuttles, which carried a docking rig in their payload bays once the ISS was under construction. And in an interesting bit of corporate synergy, the Dragon V2 will be controlled with the very same digital touchscreen technology used in the Tesla Model S electric cars built by Musk’s other technology venture. I’m not too keen on those, to be honest; touchscreens and I don’t get along. Think about that old Simpsons episode where Bart sells his soul for five bucks, and then finds that automatic doors will no longer open for him. That’s me and pretty much any smartphone or tablet I’ve ever played with. I much prefer the satisfyingly solid snap of a good old-fashioned toggle switch or push button. But then, how could I not? Like the tagline says, I’m an analog kind of guy.

Mild reservations about the styling aside, the Dragon V2 looks pretty impressive, and I’m looking forward to seeing it actually fly and, more exciting, land. Musk’s goal is for this vehicle to achieve what my beloved shuttles never quite pulled off: quick, simple and, most of all, relatively inexpensive reusability. Let’s hope the V2 meets the goal.

The Dragon V2 is not technically “human rated” yet — it still needs to jump through certain hoops for NASA to meet that definition — and its first test flight may come as early as next year. NASA wants a commercial spacecraft ready to carry astronauts by 2017, and although I know a couple other companies are working to meet that deadline with their respective vehicles, SpaceX will likely get there first.

If you’re interested in further reading, the Bad Astronomer Phil Plait has a few thoughts here, and Ars Technica had some good technical (but not too technical!) detail in their article.

Photo source: SpaceX official Twitter feed