Clark Lindsey has updated his Commercial Space Timeline for 2007.

Just to the north of me. Apparently several people were killed by tornadoes early this morning up in central Florida, and now there are tornado warnings for Titusville and the Cape. While it’s unlikely, if a twister were to hit the VAB, it could be a disaster for NASA. Of course, a hurricane is a much larger threat, due to the more comprehensive nature of it, but it’s certainly possible (and would be extremely bad luck) to get hit by a tornado.

Happy Groundhog Day!

I neglected to note yesterday that it was the fourth anniversary since the loss of Columbia (hard to believe, just as it’s hard to believe that last Sunday was the twenty-first since the Challenger loss, and last Saturday was the fortieth of the Apollo fire).

Here are my immediate thoughts upon hearing of the event.

What does it mean for the program?

Like Challenger, it was not just a crew that “looked like America” (two women, one african american) but it also had the Israeli astronaut on board, which will have some resonance with the war.

Instead of happening just before the State of the Union, it occurred three days after. It also occurred two days before NASA’s budget plans were to be announced, including a replacement, or at least backup, for the Shuttle.

The fleet will certainly be grounded until they determine what happened, just as occurred in the Challenger situation. Hopefully it won’t be for almost three years. [Note: It turned out to be.] If it is, the ISS is in big trouble, and it means more money off to Russia to keep the station alive with Protons and Soyuz. The current crew can get back in the Soyuz that’s up there now. They will either do that, or stay up longer, and be resupplied by the Russians.

The entire NASA budget is now in a cocked hat, because we don’t know what the implications are until we know what happened. But it could mean an acceleration of the Orbital Space Plane program (I sincerely hope not, because I believe that this is entirely the wrong direction for the nation, and in fact a step backwards). What I hope that it means is an opportunity for some new and innovative ideas–not techically, but programmatically.

Once again, it demonstrates the fragility of our space transportation infrastructure, and the continuing folly of relying on a single means of getting people into space, and doing it so seldom. Until we increase our activity levels by orders of magnitude, we will continue to operate every flight as an experiment, and we will continue to spend hundreds of millions per flight, and we will continue to find it difficult to justify what we’re doing. We need to open up our thinking to radically new ways, both technically and institutionally, of approaching this new frontier.

Anyway, it’s a good opportunity to sit back and take stock of why the hell we have a manned space program, what we’re trying to accomplish, and what’s the best way to accomplish it, something that we haven’t done in forty years. For that reason, while the loss of the crew and their scientific results is indeed a tragedy, some good may ultimately come out of it.

They seem (at least to me) to have held up pretty well, and as usual, NASA learned the wrong lessons from the disaster. And while some good did come out of it, the program is still on the wrong track, in terms of prospects for making space affordable.

You can also read many other posts on the subject in the following days. Scroll to the bottom and work your way up.

While I agree with Virginia Postrel that we shouldn’t discount the value of Roger Launius’ list of book recommendations over it, I’m not sure what it is she thinks is “unfair” about my previous criticism of him (or at least of what he said–perhaps calling him “clueless” was a little harsh). His comment really was ill informed .

While I agree with Virginia Postrel that we shouldn’t discount the value of Roger Launius’ list of book recommendations over it, I’m not sure what it is she thinks is “unfair” about my previous criticism of him (or at least of what he said–perhaps calling him “clueless” was a little harsh). His comment really was ill informed .

While I agree with Virginia Postrel that we shouldn’t discount the value of Roger Launius’ list of book recommendations over it, I’m not sure what it is she thinks is “unfair” about my previous criticism of him (or at least of what he said–perhaps calling him “clueless” was a little harsh). His comment really was ill informed .

Leonard David has an article describing prospects for NewSpace in 2007.

Sea Launch lost a rocket and comsat today. Two losses out of twenty-four flights is only a 92% success rate. That kind of sucks for something that costs tens of millions, particularly when the payload also costs tens of millions. That’s not good news for the launch insurance business. It’s also not good news for Sea Launch’s schedule, even if they can figure out what happened quickly, if they have to do major repairs on the floating launch platform (of which they have only one–more fragility in the system).

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s more info. Exploded on the pad. Fortunately, no one was injured, but it’s hard to imagine how they won’t have to do some major repairs back in Long Beach.

We aren’t going to get reliable launch systems until we stop throwing the vehicles away, and fly a lot more.

[Wednesday morning update]

That didn’t take long. Here’s video.

[Update a few minutes later]

Hard to imagine that the platform is even salvageable. And it’s the only one they have. This is a huge disaster for Sea Launch–they could be out of business for a long time. And it’s bad for their customers as well, who will have to look for other rides if they want to hit their own service delivery schedules. This could be a setback for DirectTV HD, among others.

…until Space Access ’07. It should be an interesting meeting, with lots going on in both the orbital and suborbital world.

If you think you might want to attend, it would behoove you to make a hotel reservation today. You can always cancel.

On this week of anniversaries of space disasters, space historian Dwayne Day writes that we should display, rather than hide, the results of past tragedies, and allow not only NASA to learn from them, but the public as well. I agree.