Administrative, Popular Culture

Heading Back To LA

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Had a nice visit with former roommates from Ann Arbor and their wives in Stinson Beach. It was like The Big Chill, except without the Michigan football game, the sixties music, the funeral, and the introspection.

Also, no adultery. As far as I know.

5 thoughts on “Heading Back To LA”

  4. I cross-posted this comment down on the NASA and LEO thread from last week:

    Interesting Ars Technica report coming out of the NAC meeting as well:

    …The free ride in low Earth orbit for private industry may stop as soon as a decade from now. “We’re going to get out of ISS as quickly as we can,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight, last week. “Whether it gets filled in by the private sector or not, NASA’s vision is we’re trying to move out.”

    Gerstenmaier made those comments during a meeting of NASA’s advisory council in early December at Johnson Space Center, which Ars attended. The comments are striking because, while the remarks reflect NASA’s desire to see US commercial industries thrive in the space around Earth, it is not the agency’s top priority to ensure that happens. Gerstenmaier said NASA is committed to moving humans deeper into space to the vicinity of the Moon, an area known as cislunar space.

    This seems in not-quite-direct contradiction to the document that Rand quoted above. I wonder if they’re just launching a few trial balloons to stir the pot (and maybe mix a few metaphors). There’s not enough money to do everything, and everybody seems to have gotten the memo that Thou Shalt Not Dis’ SLS In Public.

    (BTW, it looks like there may be a style sheet oddity coming out of blockquote. Normal text winds up horizontally centered and even narrower than the blockquote on Mac Firefox 42.0.)

    1. This would repeat the gap in domestic human launch but without a Russia to pick up the slack. I assume, maybe wrongly, that NASA would have a presence on an ISS replacement. What are their plans for cislunar that will be realized in ten years? I am curious if they have intentions to build another station or to just do the SLS missions that have been day dreamed about. Doesn’t seem like the SLS missions are a good trade off for abandoning the ISS.

      This is all very interesting. The relationship between civilian leaders and NASA doesn’t look strong.

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