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John Lanchester provides some fascinating facts about space travel in a very entertaining and informative piece in September’s London Review of Books. For example, while trying to get across the level of risk involved in travelling to the moon he says: “Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins – the latter being the man who orbited the moon in the command module while the other two members of Apollo 11 walked on the surface – both estimated the probability that the moon-walkers would return alive at about 50 per cent; a fact each of them kept to himself until afterwards”. No wonder that the next trip to the moon is not scheduled until 2020, a half a century after the last one in 1972.

It’s also considerable in terms of achievement when you acknowledge the computer power available at the time. Says Lanchester: “If two or three people near you have a mobile phone, you’re currently in possession of more computing power than those famous, much-photographed banks of Nasa hardware”.

But Lanchester makes a very forceful and funny point about the failure that is the Space Shuttle. The fact that the Space Shuttle looks like an aeroplane is very deceptive. In fact, it’s just a can with people in it attached to a big stick of dynamite, he says. Or ‘Spam in a can’ according to Chuck Yeager. Unlike the adaptable speeds of an aeroplane “the solid-fuel launch rocket [of the Shuttle] can’t be switched off or throttled back once it has been ignited. So basically, the shuttle astronauts are sitting attached to a fucking great bomb”.

An aeroplane has a glide ratio of 15 to 1. That means that if the engines cut out at 35,000 feet it will continue to travel 15 meters forward for every meter it falls, giving the pilot about 100 miles to land it.

However, as Lanchester puts it: “the shuttle on its unpowered descent – bear in mind that it isn’t flying – has a glide ratio of 4 to 1. That means it is dropping out of the sky, and those soothing images of it coasting in to land are highly deceptive: that thing is falling out of the sky with the aerodynamic panache of a giant can of baked beans”.

The starting point for all this is the news that Nasa have awarded a consortium headed by Lockheed Martin, those dashing princes of the military-industrial matrix, the contract to build the ‘next generation of human-manned space rocket’. Despite the fact that everything to do with the Space Shuttle is considered out of date it’s a little disappointing to find out that the new Orion design ‘is a return to the old model of a space rocket, with a capsule on the end of a giant stack of boosters.

Read the whole thing here.

In other space related news:

Iranian/US Telecoms entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari today became the first female space tourist, paying up to $20 Million for the privilege.

According to news round-upers Monsters and Critics the lift-off was a head turning experience:

“The businesswoman went through the lift-off eyes wide, as footage from NASA, the US space agency, showed. Worried that she was becoming overexcited, Russian controllers told her professional companions to calm her as they embarked on the two-day journey to the station.

'If she carries on turning her head so frantically it may affect how she feels and spoil her first days in orbit, and we want her to receive maximum enjoyment from the flight,' flight director Vladimir Solovyov said”.

Shhh, amateurs!