Category Archives: Space

Inland Spaceports

Jon Goff has some interesting thoughts. I agree, for the most part. If Florida wants to continue to play in the game (at least for commercial vehicles), it has to realize that it no longer has the intrinsic geographical advantage that it’s thought it did for years. This is an issue that is going to take a lot of work with AST to sell, though, particularly for orbital flights.

Death Of A Space Scientist

James Van Allen, discoverer of the magnetic belts surrounding the earth that bear his name, has died. He was one of the most (perhaps the most) notable long-time opponents of the manned space program. He never understood that civil space is about much more than science.

Condolences to his family. It is a loss to science, if not informed space policy debate.

White Paper Review

Grant Bonin discusses the papers put out by the Space Frontier Foundation and the GAO on problems with NASA’s exploration plans in todays issue of The Space Review.

It’s worth the read, but being busy working on same plans, I would comment only on this bit:

Human-rating either the Atlas 5 or Delta 4 is likely to be an expensive proposition regardless of the fact that both boosters have already been developed (especially since no one really knows what it means to

Kiss Of Death

Clark Lindsey notes (probably correctly):

Certainly one way to help insure that the exploration program continues past this administration would be to tie it closely with international partners as was done with the ISS in the early 1990s.

Based on history, it would also be a good way to insure that the program is delayed, over cost, and doesn’t achieve its objectives. Back in 1993 NASA made a Faustian bargain. It would accept the need to make the station more “international” in exchange for keeping Congressional (and in that case, more importantly, administration) support. It won its appropriation by a single vote.

We went to the moon alone, and it was vastly successful, at least in terms of getting to the moon. There’s no reason to think that bringing in other nations increases the probability of success, or reduce costs, even if it increases the probability of keeping the program alive politically. This is not a dig at other nations–it’s simply a recognition of the degree to which bringing in other entities, with their own inscrutable politics (that, like ours, largely have nothing to do with space), can complicate and confound our own efforts. For recent (in the last four years) readers of this blog, I discoursed on this subject back in 2002.