I listened in by phone. Here‘s the white paper.
As one would expect, a consensus from thirteen space organizations is going to be mostly motherhood, and implicitly self contradictory. More after I’ve taken the time to go through it. Elliot Pulham said that the campaigns have received it with “gratitude and interest,” but as he said, the main goal is not so much to inject space into the campaigns as to prevent people from saying stupid things about it. Good luck with that.
“a consensus from thirteen space organizations is going to be mostly motherhood, and implicitly self contradictory.”
Well, based on experience with eco/climate organizations, that summary regarding “consensus” would seem to be the default, null, hypothesis requiring very strong evidence to reject.
Off topic: based on news about a mini-“Death Star” orbital laser to deflect incoming asteroids, and InstaPundit’s mention of laser-booster light-pressure-sail propelled interstellar craft, are there any economies to putting up a laser system that would do sail propulsion as “base load” but redirect power to “meteor defense” ad hoc, on call, and in terms of “peak need” ? Or are we talking totally different kinds of laser?
Don’t know if it’s a different type of laser, but it operates in a different mode. A sail wants a steady beam, while asteroid deflection would probably demand high-power pulses.
So the bottom line seems to be that we can do our COTS/CRS/CCP stuff in LEO sandbox but anything beyond that stays with the traditional Apollo cultists/pork slobberers forever.
Wow, what a great deal for the CSF.
Especially when the LEO stuff will get deadended when ISS is terminated, and exploration is being set up as the entire future of the human spaceflight program.