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Later today the Obama Administration will reportedly announce major changes in the U. S. space program that may amount to the effective end of manned space flight after this decade. As a guy who has been trying to mount his own mission to the Moon I’m not yet sure how I feel about this. Maybe it is a great opportunity, but probably not.

The FY2011 federal proposed budget will be published with the following changes:

– NASA’s Constellation program to replace the Space Shuttle will be cancelled and all hardware development will be stopped including Ares 1, Ares 5 and Orion.

– The Moon is no longer the first stop in the exploration program, replaced by the so-called Flexible Path which really does not mean anything: “We are not sure where we are going, whether to the Moon, asteroids, empty space (Lagrangian points) or Phobos, so we will spend years and billions of dollars thinking about it while deferring any real mission development.”

– NASA human spaceflight will concentrate on International Space Station (ISS) flights, using commercially developed hardware (whatever that means: NASA has had zero success in relying on outsourced systems).

– There is no real post-ISS program. Maybe something will happen past 2020 but that is for the next administration to figure out.

Where NASA goes other space agencies will follow (the Europeans, Indians, even the Russians, possibly leaving only the Chinese still headed to the Moon). The Moon is out as a destination, considered by some as too hard and others as too boring. Over the next two years we will see a serious drop-off in interest expressed by various groups (like the Google Lunar X-Prize effort).

This has happened before: back in 1990s everybody was into Mars missions (NASA, other government agencies and private groups). When NASA lost interest in Mars around 2001-03 and turned to Moon other nations followed.

On one hand this pending announcement is terribly disappointing. There is a very high chance that we will see an end to U. S. human spaceflight within the next few years. But it was probably inevitable. NASA is too screwed up to do anything else without a major restructuring and that would require spending too much Presidential capital in this terrible economy.

My Moon mission, of course, is still on.

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Just in case you are an astronaut and need something to worry about, according to NASA there are 18,000 pieces of space junk the size of a basketball or larger right now orbiting the earth. That’s 18,000 chances to slam into the International Space Station (ISS), bump into a U.S. Space Shuttle, or plow into any of a number of satellites in low Earth orbit. Twice the ISS has had to be moved to avoid potential collisions and one other time when it couldn’t be moved the crew huddled in their Soyuz taxicab for danger to pass, with one such near-miss taking place just last week, which is what inspired this column.

I say it is time to clean up all that junk.

Space junk means everything from rocket upper stages weighing several tons down to the odd wrench lost in space by space-walking astro- or cosmonauts.  This stuff that got to space more or less by accident is now torquing above the ionosphere at around 17,000 miles-per-hour, which would be worse if nearly all the junk wasn’t going in the the same direction.  Friction and gravity will eventually bring all the space junk back to earth, but that could take centuries.  So I say simply to avoid any more space junk stories in USA Today, we ought to find a way to get rid of the stuff.

It won’t be easy.  We can’t shoot it down, because even if we are accurate enough to hit the junk all we are likely to accomplish is blasting it into lots more smaller pieces that will need tracking.  We could shoot it with high-powered lasers, but unless we were able to vaporize the debris completely, all we’d be doing is boring very nice holes in it.

Nope, we have to gather the stuff and bring it back to Earth.  But how?

I propose a space garbage scow.

My garbage scow would use a very fine net to capture the debris and hold it.  The net could be built from kevlar, but this week I’m making everything from carbon nanotubes, thanks, so that’s what we’ll use.  Nanotubes have the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any material and would allow us to make a very large, very light weight net.  Our point here is to make the net light rather than strong, since our capture speeds will be low and the lack of gravity ought to make it easy to keep the junk tethered together.  The point of making it strong, then, is so it can be light enough to be big enough to maybe gather all the junk — all 18,000 pieces — into a single scow.

I imagine a seine purse-style net, if you know your commercial fishing.  Launch the net into an inclined polar orbit generally higher than the space junk to be harvested.  The polar orbit will ensure that eventually the scow will go over every spot on the Earth as the planet rotates below, but it also means the scow will eventually cross the path of every piece of space junk.

Here’s where we need an algorithm and a honking big computer, because this is a 3-D geometry problem with more than 18,000 variables.  Our algorithm determines the most efficient path to use for gathering all 18,000 pieces of space junk.

I haven’t yet derived this algorithm, but I have some idea what it would look like.  We’d start in a high orbit, above the space junk, because we could trade that altitude for speed as needed, simply by flying lower, trading potential energy for kinetic.

Dragging the net behind a little unmanned spacecraft my idea would be to go past each piece of junk in such a way that it not only lodges permanently in the net, but that doing so adds kinetic energy (hitting at shallow angles to essentially tack like a sailboat off the debris).  But wait, there’s more!  You not only have to try to get energy from each encounter, it helps if — like in a game of billiards or pool — each encounter results in an effective ricochet sending the net in the proper trajectory for its next encounter.  Rinse and repeat 18,000 times.

It won’t always be possible, of course, to gain energy from each encounter, but that’s why we start in a higher orbit, so as energy is inevitably lost it can be replenished by moving to a lower orbit.

By the same token I think we would logically start with smaller bits of space junk so the net would gain mass steadily over time, then do the same again at each lower altitude.  Eventually the net would have corralled hundreds of tons of debris, carrying it down into the atmosphere where atmospheric friction would eventually burn it all up in a spectacular visual display that would create a thin ring of fire all around the Earth.

It’s a crazy idea, sure, but it could work.  For all the worrying we do about space junk hitting astronauts or rockets as they launch, we could pretty easily get rid of it all.  Small to big, high to low, all it would take is time.  How much time?  If the scow orbits every 90 minutes and it takes an average of a dozen orbits to set up the capture of each piece of space junk, that’s 18,000 * 90 * 12  = 19.4 million minutes or 36.9 years to get it all.

Funny, that’s about how long it took to put all that crap up there in the first place.

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I have a mouse in my RV.  Or as many correspondents have told me I have MICE in my RV, because the concept of a solitary mouse is beyond their considerable experience.  This month my wife, three young sons and I (and of course the mice) are in California, mainly touring in our 1996 Winnebago.  We tour, we fix, then tour some more. The old Winnie was never built for 107-degree desert temperatures and neither was I.  So since we’re broken-down waiting (again) for the fixit man to come, I think this might be a good time to update my readers on a few old projects.

But first let me say that in an RV that has both Verizon and AT&T wireless data service, in California at least, Verizon is better — substantially better.  More bars in more places, indeed!

1) Whatever happened to NerdTV?  We made a season for PBS back in 2005-2006 then shot a second season in 2007 that was never aired because of pesky ownership issues and people still wanting to be paid.  The show itself has morphed a bit and will reappear with a new name and an exciting new weekly format this fall as a co-production with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.  It will be available for streaming online and may appear in some form on television, too, possibly even with PBS.  Look for an announcement on this soon.  And if your big-to-bigger company wants to sponsor the first season (36 shows!) let’s talk. But I’ll warn you this is a professional production that isn’t cheap to make and we’d prefer a single sponsor.  Still, as the old shows continue to show, the content ought to be timeless.

2) And what happened to Bob’s disk drive project with its stainless steel foil platters?  The idea, remember, was to dramatically reduce the rotating mass with several attendant advantages: 1) lower cost; 2) dramatically lower power; 3) higher performance, and; 4) greater shock resistance.  An iPod with this new type of drive ought to easily run 3-4 times longer on the same battery.  A data center could see storage-related power consumption decrease by up to 85 percent.

Yeah, but what happened?

It took time to develop the stainless steel foil, itself.  Most of the other parts come straight from any disk drive maker’s parts bin but the foil required lots and lots of R&D which was done primarily for nothing — no money — which means it took longer than we would have liked.  But that work is now pretty much complete, the foil is indeed smoother-than-smooth, and a pilot production plant is being built in Japan thanks to the recent entry of a Silicon Valley investor whose name you would recognize.  Look for licensed products to appear starting in 2010.  Interestingly improvements in flash drive technology haven’t particularly hurt the market opportunity, either, since the foil is WAY cheaper and video applications are driving mobile storage requirements up faster than flash prices are coming down.

3) Finally, whatever happened to my plan to land rovers on the Moon?  Am I ambitious or what?

The Moon project, which was originally intended to vie for the $20 million Google Lunar X-Prize, has been moving forward slowly but quietly.  It’s a little harder to do, you see, when there isn’t a $20 million payday at the end, but it became quickly clear to us that there is unlikely to be any winner of that Google prize in the five years ending in 2012 as the contest is currently structured.

Team Cringely, on the other hand, still expects to reach the Moon by 2011 and will by fall have a number of announcements on that front including major technical alliances, major corporate sponsorships, and a global TV deal.  And this is no stunt: we’re working with NASA’s Goddard Space Center to answer a long list of important scientific questions until we use-up our 24th and last rover.

So it’s a busy summer, but mainly we’re wondering now if the 107-degree heat will drive out those mice?