Grant Bonin is having a debate on the appropriate launch vehicle size for exploration. My attitude is either use what you have, or if you’re going to spend billions of dollars developing new vehicles, focus it on something that actually reduces cost and improves reliability.

Wayne Eleazer has an interesting brief history of the US military space program at today’s issue of The Space Review. I was working at the Aerospace Corporation when some of the changes described were occurring in the early eighties. Clearly what they’re doing now isn’t working well, but I’m not sure that just going back to the SPOs is going to help. The problem is, as described, that space hardware (at least as historically developed and procured by the Air Force) is not like airplanes. Until they get some fresh thinking there, and try to make it so, I suspect that their woes will continue.

Thomas James has another Carnival of the Space Moonbats.

[Update in the afternoon]

Oh, this is too weird. One of the people that Thomas links to is Elaine Supkis, but in a posting at his blog she calls herself Elaine Meinel (her maiden name, apparently). As an old L-5er, this made my antenna go up.

A little googling reveals something that I didn’t know (assuming it’s true). She’s Carolyn Meinel‘s sister. I didn’t know Carolyn had a sister. I also didn’t know that Aden worked with the CIA.

My policy of sponsoring realistic space art to spawn realistic space economics may be bearing some fruit. I sponsored this picture from David Robinson first published in September. In January, Aerospace America had this to say:

“Picture a buggy pulled behind a rover that is outfitted with a set of magnetrons,” [Larry Taylor, distinguished professor of planetary sciences at the University of Tennessee] suggests. (A magnetron is the heating element in a microwave oven.) “With the right power and microwave frequency, an astronaut could drive along, sintering the soil as he goes, making continuous brick…”