Interesting piece at Space.com about the Oklahoma space activities. That’s right, Oklahoma.

I’ve actually been following this for a few years, but never paid much attention to it because they looked like just another state that had been taken in by Lockheed Martin’s lies about commercial Venture Star, and hopes of getting lucrative federal incentives and funding. But now that X-33/Venturestar is dead, they actually seem to be the first state to take the entrepreneurial space community seriously, and are using state funds and incentives to actually encourage innovation. It’s an interesting article, with a different take on the future of space than you’ll get from the usual suspects.

[Update]

Spoke too soon. Another Space.com article by my friend Leonard David indicates that the Air Force may want to keep their X-33 options open by storing the parts up at Edwards. I’m not sure this means anything as far as future plans–it doesn’t cost that much to store it, and there may be some minimal value in keeping the parts around, even if (or expecially if) the program doesn’t actually get resurrected.

My preference–rather than cutting it up for scrap, it should be preserved in its current configuration as a billion-dollar monument to lousy management, technological hubris, gullibility, and flawed vision of government bureaucrats.