Fill 'er up ... in space?

The panel reviewing NASA's long-range plans is giving a new boost to the old idea of setting up orbital fueling stations for spaceflight. If the space agency and the White House go down that route, it would mark a dramatic change in direction for future journeys beyond Earth orbit.

Some would say that's just what the nation's space effort needs.

The idea of setting up a permanent infrastructure for travel in deep space was floated on Thursday during a hearing in Cocoa Beach, Fla., conducted by the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee.

Panel members who have been focusing on future travel beyond Earth orbit spoke favorably of the fuel-depot idea, and it's likely to appear as one of the options in a final report that's due by the end of August. It will be up to NASA and the White House to decide which option to pursue and how much money to spend. (The current ballpark figure is $80 billion over 10 years.)

Basically, here's how a fuel-depot system would change the spaceflight situation:

Spaceships currently have to carry all the fuel they'd need for an entire trip at once. That was the case for the Apollo-Saturn missions of the 1960s and the space shuttle missions of the past 28 years.

If fuel depots were built in orbit, however, spaceships coming up from Earth's "gravity well" could fill 'er up and continue their journey with a full tank of gas (or, say, liquid oxygen and hydrogen). Alternatively, you could design a different sort of transfer vehicle, optimized for making the trip from one orbital spaceport to another rather than launching and landing.

That would lighten the load for launch vehicles leaving Earth, since they wouldn't have to carry all the fuel for a long trip at once. And it might reduce the need to develop a new heavy-lift vehicle like the Ares V. You could get by instead with a smaller booster, launched empty and fueled up in orbit.

"It really is a game changer," Jeff Greason, chief executive officer of California-based XCOR Aerospace and a member of the review panel, was quoted as saying in a New York Times report on the hearing.

The idea has been floated before. As the Apollo program was winding down, planners at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama touched upon orbital fuel depots as a key piece of space infrastructure for deep-space flights. At the time, the space shuttle was little more than a twinkle in the space agency's eye.

"An orbital modular propellant storage depot, supplied periodically by the space shuttle or Earth-to-orbit fuel tankers, would be critical in making available large amounts of fuel to various orbital vehicles and spacecraft," NASA said in 1971. (The artwork above conceptualized how the system might look.)

NASA's space ambitions didn't pan out the way those planners planned. The cost of building the infrastructure for those deep-space trips was deemed too high, with too little payoff. As a result, no manned spacecraft has gone beyond Earth orbit since Apollo was shut down.

Five years ago, when President George W. Bush announced a new goal of returning to the moon by 2020, NASA turned to an "Apollo on steroids" approach that passed up orbital refueling. The plan did call for a maneuver that would link up moon-bound crews with their fueled-up transfer vehicles, however.

Now the Bush-era vision is being reviewed by Obama-era officials, and many of the previously laid plans are open for discussion again. Panel members laid out five scenarios for future trips beyond Earth orbit (which I previewed earlier this month):

• Lunar base: Basically the current return-to-the-moon plan, which calls for setting up a permanent base.
  
  
• Lunar global: No manned base, but a combination of quick visits to the moon ("sorties") plus robotic missions.
  
  
• Moon to Mars: Lunar landings conducted primarily as rehearsals for Mars landings.
  
  
• Mars first: Just focus on eventual Mars landings, don't return to the moon.
  
  
• Flexible path: Start out by sending astronauts to platforms that are at stable points spread from Earth orbit to lunar orbit to Martian orbit (on Mars' moons, for example), plus near-Earth objects. Then send robots from those manned platforms to the surfaces of other worlds (down into the "gravity wells"). Don't send astronauts down onto the moon or Mars right off, but see how things go.

The last option sounds most conducive to the fuel-depot approach, and it also meshes best with the international space station's current role. In fact, Transterrestrial Musings' Rand Simberg suggests that using the space station as a fuel-depot test bed is such an attractive idea it might be worth the cost of changing the station's orbit.

Simberg also links to a host of other commentary about the panel hearing in general and the fuel-depot idea in particular. One of the best links goes to a white paper at Selenian Boondocks discussing how the concept could boost American industry and commercial space development. You'll find still more to sink your teeth into over at RLV and Space Transport News as well as the Space Coalition Blog.

For a skeptical view of the fuel-depot idea, check out Rob Coppinger's comments on the Hyperbola blog.

In addition to the "how" and "where" questions surrounding human spaceflight, the panel members took on the question of "why" - something we've talked about in the past. (You do remember the five E's, don't you?)

Here's how MIT aerospace professor Edward Crawley answered the "why" question during Thursday's hearing:

"Our ultimate objective should be viewed as the exploration and eventual extension of human civilization within the solar system. We have to keep our eye on the big prize. This will take a long time, but the time has come. The political alignment is here to allow this to be a goal for our nation, and it's a goal worthy of a great nation."

XCOR's Greason added a kicker to that comment, according to Irene Klotz's account for Discovery.com: "I know this sounds terribly ambitious and dramatic, but if that is not the point of human spaceflight … then what the hell are we doing?" Greason asked.

What the heck should we be doing in space? I'm going to be a bit out of the loop this weekend, discussing this subject and many others at the SpoCon science-fiction convention in Spokane - but if you leave a comment below, I'll try to add it to the mix as soon as I get a chance.

In Japan, Machines for Work and Play Are Idle

KITAKYUSHU, Japan — They may be the most efficient workers in the world। But in the global downturn, they are having a tough time finding jobs.

Japan’s legions of robots, the world’s largest fleet of mechanized workers, are being idled as the country suffers its deepest recession in more than a generation as consumers worldwide cut spending on cars and gadgets.

At a large Yaskawa Electric factory on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, where robots once churned out more robots, a lone robotic worker with steely arms twisted and turned, testing its motors for the day new orders return. Its immobile co-workers stood silent in rows, many with arms frozen in midair.

They could be out of work for a long time. Japanese industrial production has plummeted almost 40 percent and with it, the demand for robots.

At the same time, the future is looking less bright. Tighter finances are injecting a dose of reality into some of Japan’s more fantastic projects — like pet robots and cyborg receptionists — that could cramp innovation long after the economy recovers.

“We’ve taken a huge hammering,” said Koji Toshima, president of Yaskawa, Japan’s largest maker of industrial robots.

Profit at the company plunged by two-thirds, to 6.9 billion yen, about $72 million, in the year ended March 20, and it predicts a loss this year.

Across the industry, shipments of industrial robots fell 33 percent in the last quarter of 2008, and 59 percent in the first quarter of 2009, according to the Japan Robot Association.

Tetsuaki Ueda, an analyst at the research firm Fuji Keizai, expects the market to shrink by as much as 40 percent this year. Investment in robots, he said, “has been the first to go as companies protect their human workers.”

While robots can be cheaper than flesh-and-blood workers over the long term, the upfront investment costs are much higher.

In 2005, more than 370,000 robots worked at factories across Japan, about 40 percent of the global total, representing 32 robots for every 1,000 manufacturing employees, according to a report by Macquarie Bank. A 2007 government plan for technology policy called for one million industrial robots to be installed by 2025. That will almost certainly not happen.

“The recession has set the robot industry back years,” Mr. Ueda said.

That goes for industrial robots and the more cuddly toy robots.

In fact, several of the lovable sort have already become casualties of the recession.

The robot maker Systec Akazawa filed for bankruptcy in January, less than a year after it introduced its miniature PLEN walking robot at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Roborior by Tmsuk — a watermelon-shape house sitter on wheels that rolls around a home and uses infrared sensors to detect suspicious movement and a video camera to transmit images to absent residents — has struggled to find new users. A rental program was scrapped in April because of lack of interest.

Though the company won’t release sale figures, it has sold less than a third of the goal, 3,000 units, it set when Roborior hit the market in 2005, analysts say. There are no plans to manufacture more.

That is a shame, Mariko Ishikawa, a Tmsuk spokesman, says, because busy Japanese in the city could use the Roborior to keep an eye on aging parents in the countryside.

“Roborior is just the kind of robot Japanese society needs in the future,” Ms. Ishikawa said.

Japan’s aging population had given the development of home robots an added imperative. With nearly 25 percent of citizens 65 or older, the country was banking on robots to replenish the work force and to help nurse the elderly.

But sales of a Secom product, My Spoon, a robot with a swiveling, spoon-fitted arm that helps older or disabled people eat, have similarly stalled as caregivers balk at its $4,000 price.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries failed to sell even one of its toddler-size home-helper robots, the Wakamaru, introduced in 2003.

Of course, less practical, novelty robots have fallen on even harder times in the downturn. And that goes for robot makers outside Japan, too.

Ugobe, based in Idaho, is the maker of the cute green Pleo dinosaur robot with a wiggly tail; it filed for bankruptcy protection in April.

Despite selling 100,000 Pleos and earning more than $20 million, the company racked up millions of dollars in debt and was unable to raise further financing.

Sony pulled the plug on its robot dog, Aibo, in 2006, seven years after its introduction. Though initially popular, Aibo, costing more than $2,000, never managed to break into the mass market.

The $300 i-Sobot from Takara Tomy, a small toy robot that can recognize spoken words, was meant to break the price barrier. The company, based in Tokyo, has sold 47,000 since the i-Sobot went on sale in late 2007, a spokeswoman, Chie Yamada, said, making it a blockbuster hit in the robot world.

But with sales faltering in the last year, the company has no plans to release further versions after it clears out its inventory of about 3,000.

Kenji Hara, an analyst at the research and marketing firm Seed Planning, says many of Japan’s robotics projects tend to be too far-fetched, concentrating on humanoids and other leaps of the imagination that cannot be readily brought to market.

“Japanese scientists grew up watching robot cartoons, so they all want to make two-legged companions,” Mr. Hara said. “But are they realistic? Do consumers really want home-helper robots?”

Robot Factory, once a mecca for robot fans in the western city of Osaka, closed in April after a plunge in sales. “In the end,” said Yoshitomo Mukai, whose store, Jungle, took over some of Robot Factory’s old stock, “robots are still expensive, and don’t really do much.”

Of course, that is not true for industrial robots — at least not when the economy is booming.

Fuji Heavy Industries argues its robots are practical and make economic sense. The company sells a giant automated cleaning robot that can use elevators to travel between floors on its own. The wheeled robot, which resembles a small street-cleaning car, already works at several skyscrapers in Tokyo.

Companies can recoup the 6 million yen investment in the cleaner robot in as quickly as three years, a Fuji spokesman, Kenta Matsumoto, said. The manufacturer has rented out about 50 so far.

“A robot will work every day and night without complaining,” Mr. Matsumoto said. “You can even save on lights and heating, because robots don’t need any of that.”

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo.