…versus political philosophies.
I have some problems:
I very much doubt that anyone in the space community rejects Obama’s position purely out of hate for the man or his other policies or even his political party. Indeed, it often seems as though on the one issue of space Republican and Democrat positions are switched around completely.
This might [...]

Jeff Foust, on the upcoming test of the five-segment SRB.
What a waste of money. If they insist on using these monsters for a heavy lifter, it will be so heavy that it means a new crawler and crawlerway at KSC. But they’ll get lots of jobs out of it, I guess.

…to the moon. Thoughts from Dennis Wingo (who I’ll probably see in Anaheim this week — maybe even today).
This reminds me of Mike Griffin’s ridiculous comparison of Constellation to the Interstate Highway System (not to imply that Dennis’ analogy is in any way ridiculous).

It seems to have become my full-time job to correct this kind of thing. As for the notion that the new space policy “ends human spaceflight,” I feel like I’ve been playing whack-a-mole with that nonsense since February.

Were the dinosaurs wiped out by a dual strike?

…aren’t done yet. I wonder if transonic combustion could improve the performance of rocket engines as well?

So, I was reading comments at this post from yesterday, and Ed Wright mentioned some of von Braun’s death-bed regrets. Curious, I did a little searching, but all I came up with (so far) was this bit of lunacy from Carol Rosin.

…of popular support for Apollo — a blog post by Roger Launius from a few days ago.
I would point out, per Gene DiGennaro’s comment, that the popularity of space-related toys tells us nothing about the degree of public support. If only ten percent of the kids like space toys, that’s still a huge market.

In my talk at Space Access in April on the “Impedance Matching” panel, I raised the issue of how to completely decouple atmospheric vehicles from pure in-space ones. That is, right now, all paths to LEO seem to go through a launch pad, even coming back from some place else (e.g., the moon or [...]

Trent Waddington has a post about the potential for early asteroid missions.

Clark Lindsey has compiled a list of links to reviews of the book, and interviews with the author.

Some thoughts from Alan K. Henderson.
My general experience is that most conservatives who admire NASA don’t really know much about it.

Last week, I did a survey of the potential heavy lifters over at Popular Mechanics. This week, I describe the options for crew modules.

…and the Boomers. Thoughts on space advocacy.

I got this email a few days ago, and haven’t had the time to respond to it, but I thought I’d at least let my readers pick up the slack:
My name is XXXX and I have read your blog for a while now after being introduced to it through Instapundit. I’m sure you get [...]

A perspective, over at National Review. Two things struck me about the piece, one of which has nothing to do with Bradbury per se:
While he is a great advocate for NASA and space travel, his greatest fictional works address the recurrent theme of much of the modern age’s more significant literature: the separation of [...]

The Democrat strategist has a stupid and ignorant blog post about Elon Musk, SpaceX and NASA over at The Hill. He’s appropriately eviscerated in comments there.

Henry Vanderbilt has the latest on the space-policy battle in DC:
NASA Exploration Funding: The Battle Continues
“No man’s life and property are safe while the legislature is in session.”
– widely attributed to Mark Twain
This is a follow up to our last two Updates, both of them urgent political alerts in the continuing [...]

Lori says that the battle between the White House and the Congress over space policy is over.
I’m not sure what this means. Does it mean that NASA is going to stand aside and hope that the Senate and House stalemate? Probably.
I found this bit interesting:
Marshall Director Robert Lightfoot accompanied Garver to the editorial [...]

…meet dentistry. What would we do without Youtube?

“…was perhaps the greatest thing to come out of my trip to the moon,” said Buzz Aldrin at the memorial today. I had a drink with him afterwards. It was old home week for friends of Bill, and there were many, going back decades.
It was a beautiful service. I said something like:
As [...]

Assuming there is one, of course, which I hope there won’t be, because it’s a waste of money. My thoughts over at Popular Mechanics.

I’m getting word that it has been moved up from Saturday to tomorrow at 4 PM. I don’t know location yet, but will update when I find out. Fortunately, I get into LAX about 12:30.
[Update a few minutes later]
St. Paul’s Lutheran Church | 31290 Palos Verdes Drive W. | Rancho Palos
Verdes | CA [...]

Ray Bradbury:
“He should be announcing that we should go back to the moon,” says the iconic author, whose 90th birthday on Aug. 22 will be marked in Los Angeles with more than week’s worth of Bradbury film and TV screenings, tributes and other events. “We should never have left there. We should go to [...]

He flew for the military from the post-WW-II era to Vietnam, was a jet test pilot, was an F-100 squadron commander, risked his life many times for many years, and continued to enjoy commanding high-performance machines all of his life, when ironically, it suddenly and unexpectedly ended with him losing a battle of momentum between [...]

Most of my readers don’t know him, or even who he is, but I just learned that he was killed in an auto accident yesterday, on his way to church. Ironically, as Bill Simon (Bill’s webmaster and our mutual friend) tells me, the picture of him at his blog is one that he took [...]

Is that what the Merlin is? A little early to say, I’d say, but I think one could come up with some creative new vehicles using it in the lower stages and the R-10 up above. If I were in control of NASA R&T budgets, something I’d have done a long time ago [...]

I know it’s more exciting than the prosaic reality, but someone needs to tell the copy editor at MSNBC that there is nothing in this article to indicate that SpaceShipTwo is going into space this fall. All it says is that they may start drop tests.
Which raises the question again — do they have [...]

…in this article about which asteroids are good prospects for human visits. It should just jump right out to regular readers. I’ll reveal over the fold:

I talked to Elon for half an hour or so last night, to make sure that I was getting the story straight on an article I’m writing for Popular Mechanics, but he didn’t really tell me anything that changed the relevant aspects of my story. It does, however, change the spin on the story [...]