They had to evacuate the OPF due to a hydrazine leak yesterday. But they plan to continue to use hypergolics in Orion.

Just one more sign of business as usual at NASA.

Here’s an amazing demonstration of the cluelessness and credulity of reporters, particularly when it comes to NASA and space:

With the cost of gas hovering between $2 and $3 a gallon and the oil supply declining, scientists at NASA have discovered a potential new energy source — helium-3.

When combined with water, the element creates energy.

Just add water? What a breakthrough! Guess we don’t have to figure out how to do that complicated fusion thing.

Grigsby said he also plans to discuss NASA’s other creations, including the ion motor. It’s an engine that accelerates so quickly in space, picking up speed as it moves, that it creates artificial gravity.

A high-acceleration ion drive? Another breakthrough!

And of course, we get the usual spinoff argument.

Grigsby said most Americans don’t understand the importance of NASA. It’s more than space travel, he said.

“The problems we solve in space have a direct spinoff on people,” he said.

Well, actually, maybe not that usual:

Even tennis shoes, with their rubber soles, are partly a NASA creation. Before the 1960s, shoes were all leather and, often, not comfortable.

Wow. Tang, teflon and tennis shoes! Who knew?

Guess those old Converses I wore before we got to the moon were a figment of my imagination. Or maybe I just forgot about the leather soles–it’s been so long, after all.

Dan Schmelzer checked out the Blue Origin site on his way back from New Mexico, and provided a photo tour.

Over at NASASpaceflight.com. The Italian proposal is quite intriguing (I’m guessing that some of the people involved were the same ones teamed with Boeing on CE&R), and the Lockmart proposal seems better as well. Of course, from an affordability and sustainability standpoint, it’s hard to do worse than ESAS.

Commercial space, that is. I got a call a couple weeks ago from the author of this piece for the Jewish Journal. He was looking for Jews involved in NewSpace (and he guessed I was from my last name, though I’m not). I gave him a couple other names (notably Goldin’s, which he misspelled, though he’s not exactly NewSpace). But I see that he found some others. For instance, I wasn’t previously aware that Paul Allen was Jewish.

Jeff Foust has found a story of some people who are clueless on multiple levels:

According to Net#work BBDO

Model rocketeers need some pro bono help against an out-of-control government agency.

Will India beat NASA back to the moon?

At a forthcoming meeting of the country’s top scientists on November 7, ISRO will, for the first time, unveil two of its ambitious plans – to send an Indian into space around 2014 and then to have one walk on the moon about six years later. Both missions will be accomplished without any foreign assistance. ISRO will even find a Sanskrit word equivalent for the US’s ‘astronaut’ and Russia’s ‘cosmonaut’ to describe the Indian in space.

They seem to be taking the same high-cost approach, though, so I’m not sure where this will lead, or how affordable it will ultimately be. Of course, they also have to avoid a nuclear war with Pakistan.

Some have asked my opinion of the Direct Launcher concept. Frankly, I haven’t taken a close enough look at it to have one, other than it suffers from the same fundamental flaw as ESAS–that NASA will once again be developing its own vehicles, for its own unique purposes, and they will be very expensive to operate for very little in the way of results, and won’t move the ball down the field much in terms of opening up space for The Rest Of Us. But for those into arguing the technical issues, here’s a discussion page on the concept. Jon Goff has some related thoughts:

NASA may be lousy at doing commercially effective R&D, but they are far worse when they try acting like an airline. If NASA deserves to exist at all, they should be spending most of their money on trying to help “encouraging and facilitating a growing and entrepreneurial U.S. commercial space sector,” not trying to fund and run their next Amtrak in the Sky. People like to point at how much X-33, SLI, NASP, and other such programs have wasted, but what they seem to be missing is that while these were “R&D” programs, they were “R&D” programs trying to lead to another NASA operated space transportation system. Which is basically what the money for CEV, Ares I, and Ares V are. Sure, Ares I and Ares V aren’t trying to break new technological ground, but they are trying once again to establish the national space exploration transportation system. The fundamental flaw in all of those failed research programs wasn’t so much that they were trying new technology, and new technology is bad. It’s that they were trying to make yet another NASA owned and operated transportation system. Ares I and Ares V aren’t so much a bold break with past mistakes as they are an unimaginative repeat of the same.

[Update at 1 PM EST]

No, Mark, I don’t “hate” it (once again, one must wonder at his feeble powers of reading comprehension). I’m indifferent to it.

[Late afternoon update]

OK, I will say that Direct Launcher has one thing to commend it. It is indeed preferable to develop one new launcher than two. Of course, my point is that it would be even better to develop none, and let the private sector provide crew and cargo deliveries to LEO, so that NASA can concentrate on getting to the moon affordably.

Arnold Kling has an interesting alternative to the preferred solution of many European bureaucrats (deindustrialization) to global warming, and it’s one that would warm the hearts of space enthusiasts.

I think it would be a mistake to get the NSF involved, though. This is a job for engineers, not scientists. I’d work with the engineering societies (e.g., AIAA) instead. And I wouldn’t let NASA anywhere near it.