Clark Lindsey is disappointed that Dennis Tito hasn’t followed through on his pledge to invest in space tourism, and cites his congressional testimony:

He declared that the “only big problem that stands before myself and others who want to do this is the regulatory risk.

The Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed, with all aboard. Here’s a vivid remembrance of the event, from someone who was there.

Here are my recollections of that fateful day.

[Via Jim Oberg]

Today is the first of three grim anniversaries in late January and early February (within a week of each other) of the deaths of American astronauts. On this day in 1967, Ed White, Roger Chafee and Gus Grissom were incinerated on the launch pad in a ground test of the Apollo capsule.

Jim Oberg has more on these closely-timed anniversaries, in which he makes a compelling case that none of them were “accidents” but that all were avoidable, and that we’ve been lucky that we aren’t commemorating even more astronaut deaths. Here’s what I wrote a year ago (in which I criticized NASA’s reluctance to send a Shuttle to Hubble, a subject on which nothing has happened in the interim to change my mind).

[Update a little after noon]

OK, my dear friend Tim Kyger is whining at me in email that they didn’t die from their burns–they died from asphyxiation. True enough.

I didn’t explicitly say that the burns killed them, but I did imply it, and probably “incineration” is too strong a word for the degree of the burn damage to their bodies. The point remains that they died from a fire (and their deaths, like those of their later colleagues in the Shuttle) were avoidable.