I won’t be getting to the conference until tomorrow, but Clark Lindsey has several posts up already with what’s been going on, here, here, here, and here.

And Jeff Foust has interviewed Bob Bigelow, who will be keynoting tomorrow morning.

One thought on Clark’s report:

Tumlinson: The whole Exploration architecture is going to fail because it is financially and politically unsustainable.

He’s right.

Those are the number of years ago, respectively, that Viking 1 landed on Mars, and Apollo XI landed on the moon. I’ll have more thoughts up later, either here or elsewhere. But if you haven’t made plans for dinner tonight to commemorate it, there’s still time.

[Update on holy night]

Alan Boyle, who I expect to see in Las Vegas tomorrow, has a lot of related thoughts and links.

Howard Dratch has some thoughts on the value of failure for the commercial launch industry. This was resonant with me:

The photographer who shoots and sees that the story he/she wanted to tell was lost, the moment missed, the avenue of seeing not taken, and uses the failure to become Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, or Robert Frank has used failure as a step toward the stars. The question is if there is creativity to see the possibilities of the failure and the guts to put it behind. The new space entrepreneurs may have it, probably have it. The government agencies are a question. Will NASA learn from its mistakes and tragedies as quickly and as well?

It’s apparent to me that NASA has taken lessons from its failures (and from its successes as well, such as Apollo), but strategically, it’s learned the wrong ones.

I’ve had an essay on this subject bubbling around in my brain for a while now that I’ll have to unburden myself of soon.

Ben Chertoff has an podcast interview with astronaut Thomas Jones on the implications of the most recent successful Shuttle mission.

Discovery has performed its deorbit burn (about half an hour ago). One way or another, it will be back on earth in another thirty-five minutes.

[Update at 9:15 AM EDT]

Picture perfect landing. Looks like the mission at the end of next month is definitely a go.

Alan Boyle has scored a long and interesting interview with Bob Bigelow (yeah, I know it’s old news–I’ve been busy for the last few days), in which, among many other things, he discusses the prospects for American commercial launch providers for his needs:

Looking ahead, Bigelow plans two launches per year, moving up from the third-scale Genesis to a roughly half-scale prototype, and finally launching the full-scale, 330-cubic-meter Nautilus spacecraft by 2012. The time line targets 2015 for an honest-to-goodness space station, capable of hosting tourists or researchers, performers or athletes.

Bigelow hopes that the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be ready to go in time for the Nautilus launches. If SpaceX founder Elon Musk is successful, “we are probably a multiple-flight customer for him,” Bigelow said.

But read the whole thing.

And I hope that I’ll get some of Mr. Bigelow’s thoughts myself, next week, in Vegas.

You still have time to register at next week’s Space Frontier Conference in Vegas, where it was just announced that aspiring orbital hotelier Bob Bigelow will be making the keynote address. The lower price applies until Monday night. I’ll be there, but you should come anyway.

The Bigelow test article has reportedly inflated and deployed its solar panels.

[Update before bed]

Here’s the story.

And Clark Lindsey has a brief roundup of the state of the alt-space industry.

Leonard David says that the Bigelow mission is in orbit. I haven’t been paying enough attention to this to have any profound thoughts [When did that ever stop you before? — ed Quiet, you], but it’s clearly good news, and big news.

[Update in the afternoon]

I’m in the middle of meetings, but Clark Lindsey is continuing to follow this and provide links here and here.

Not that this suprises me (well, actually it does a little–even I didn’t think that it would be this high), but if this is true, it’s hard to imagine that there will be much enthusiasm for lunar missions. There certainly won’t be from me, considering the alternate uses for the money:

…individual lunar missions using a CEV, CLV. CaLV, LSAM, LSAS, etc. are now estimated to cost $5 Billion each. By comparison, Space Shuttle missions cost $0.5 billion.

As always, that Shuttle figure has to be heavily caveated. Shuttle missions at current budgets would only be half a billion if we were launching eight to ten flights a year. The last Shuttle flight cost about five billion.

Like real estate, there are three rules of per-flight costs: flight rate, flight rate, flight rate.

And ESAS doesn’t allow a high flight rate…

[Wednesday morning update]

As is almost always the case, I am frustrated by the ambiguous terminology in discussing costs. What does “individual lunar mission” mean? I took it to mean average cost based on annual operating expenses. That would imply ten billion a year for two flights a year. Is that right? If it were four flights a year, then this interpretation would imply a twenty billion annual budget. Some could interpret it to mean marginal cost, but that would be even more insane.

If the number is correct, I suspect that it was derived by taking the total life cycle costs of the program, including development, and dividing by the total number of planned missions. If that’s the case, it looks like a reasonable number. A lot more than I’m willing to pay for it as a taxpayer, but it makes sense, given typical NASA program costs.