Aleta Jackson emailed me this news last night. This is a big breakthrough for XCOR, and should make it easier to get capital for some of their more ambitious projects.

Keith Cowing has a quick take on Mike Griffin’s confirmation testimony before the Senate this morning. I’ll be interested to see the full transcript, but there’s some interesting stuff here for now.

I’ve rarely heard such bi-partisan praise for any nominee, for any position. This will be one NASA administrator that at least begins the job with powerful support from both the White House and the Hill, and that can’t hurt. Senator Stevens said that he sees it as vital, almost an emergency, to get him into place as soon as possible. We’ll see how long this era of good feeling lasts, because he’s got some tough decisions ahead, that are certain to alienate at least some constituencies.

He’s clearly a man in a hurry. He wants to get CEV up before 2014, to avoid (or at least minimize) the gap in (government) human spaceflight beginning with the end of the Shuttle. He also sounds like he’s inclined to reverse O’Keefe, and do the Hubble servicing mission. He’s had to backpedal on his previous criticism of the ISS, showing that he’s no fool politically. Who knows what he’ll do about aeronautics?–it doesn’t sound like he’s given it much, if any, thought.

I’d say overall that he has a very ambitious agenda (and this testimony confirms my take a couple weeks ago). He definitely wants to do it faster and better, and since he’s not likely to get much more budget, he’s going to have to figure out how to square the circle and do it cheaper as well. I’m sure he believes that he can do it. We’ll have at least three and a half years to find out if he’s right.

[Update at 2:30 PM EDT]

His prepared statement is up now.

I’m always a little leery of using the Columbus analogy, because I think it’s flawed in many ways, but I suspect that it will go over well, regardless. This bit is worth repeating, because we tend to think of the 1960s only in terms of Apollo:

NASA in the Apollo Era was hardly the “single mission agency” in the simplified view that is often heard today. In addition to the manned spaceflight development programs of the time, NASA executed dozens of Explorer-class missions, a dozen Pioneer missions (including Pioneer 10 and 11 to Jupiter and Saturn), Ranger 1-9, Surveyor 1-7, Mariner 1-10, the Orbiting Solar Observatory, Orbiting Geophysical Observatory, and Orbiting Astronomical Observatory series, and paid for most of the Viking missions to Mars, which were launched in 1975. Communications satellite development was initiated with Telstar and Early Bird, while the TIROS, NIMBUS, and ESSA series did the same for weather satellites. In addition to these robotic science and technology development missions, NASA also executed 199 X-15 flights (which still hold the speed record for piloted flight within the atmosphere), and accomplished an otherwise vigorous program of aeronautics development, including the liftingbody research which enabled the development of the Space Shuttle.

Before he died, former administrator Tom Paine once told me that during Apollo, NASA did a lot of things that they didn’t even realize that they were doing, there was so much going on. But there was a sense of urgency then, and I’m not sure that stories about the far-sightedness of Isabella can restore it.

It’s been forty-four years since the first man went into space, and orbit. On April 12th, 1961, the Russian Yuri Gagarin was the first human to go into extended weightlessness, a major event in the development of the race to the moon in the 1960s. For those who are into raves and partying, it has provided an excuse for young people to commemorate the event, so go see if there’s one in your area.

In addition, it is almost a quarter of a century since the first flight of the Shuttle (next year will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first flight of Columbia). That the two anniversaries are the same was not deliberate, but due to a computer glitch on the pad. It was originally supposed to launch on April 10th, 1981, but a timing anomaly between the flight computers caused them to scrub for two days. I was down at the launch, and took advantage of the delay to go over to Tampa for the day, and check out the beach and Cuban restaurants. Columbia’s last flight, of course, ended tragically a little over two years ago, when it disintegrated on entry, on February 1st, 2003.

At this point, I think it’s safe to say that the Shuttle program has a much longer past than it does a future, and while it’s done some interesting things, it was also a policy mistake in many ways, so this isn’t a bad thing.

[Update at 10:40 AM EDT]

I didn’t mention it yesterday, but it was the thirty-fifth anniversary of the launch of Apollo XIII. Tomorrow will be the anniversary of the oxidizer tank explosion that ended the mission, and almost the lives of the astronauts.

Instapundit points to a WaPo article about asteroid hunters.

It’s a good article, and even points out that the popular notion of blowing them up with nukes doesn’t make much sense, but it doesn’t talk about it in the context of present space policy. In order to be able to control our fate with respect to extraterrestrial objects, we need to be a true spacefaring nation, with affordable reach not just beyond LEO to the moon, but to (in the president’s words over a year ago) “Mars and beyond,” with emphasis on the “beyond.”

That unfortunately implies a level of activity that isn’t allowed by the planned budgets for the VSE, at least if it’s done business-as-usual, using existing launchers, or derivatives of them. Conventional cost models indicate that there is budget for another Apollo-like program, sending a few astronauts to the moon once or twice a year, into the third decade of this century (and millenium). That might be enough for some (though I think that it’s not worth the money), but it surely isn’t a path to get us in a position to deal with these kinds of threats, which I think should be one of the major justifications for the program.

Not to sound like a broken record (you young whippersnappers can run to ask your folks what that phrase means), but we simply aren’t going to get the levels of activities necessary to drive down the costs to make things like this routine until we open up space to the market, whether the actual one, or an artificial one spurred by a recognition from NASA that they need to be getting a lot more for their money. If they go with the conventional aerospace wisdom, we’re very likely to end up with an expensive lunar base with insufficient activity to justify it for the next twenty years, instead of a space station like that. We’re also more likely to get clobbered, and be able to do nothing about it.

The paper that Sam is presenting at ISU is now available on line.