Bob Zubrin’s take on the stagnation in NASA human spaceflight.
As I’ve often said, if we don’t know why we’re doing something, it’s not possible to come up with a sensible way to do it.
Category Archives: Space History
Seventeen Years
Ian Kluft remembers seeing Columbia breaking up, from California.
[Sunday-morning update]
Here are my thoughts from that day. If you click on “Next Post” you’ll read a lot more from the hours and days that came after.
My IAC Paper
So, I just found out that I have until January 31st to submit it for the IISL (International Institute of Space Law) Proceedings. There is apparently a word limit of 5000 words. I just checked, and it’s exactly 4997…
Must be living right.
Leonov
A giant of human spaceflight history has left us. Bob Zimmerman remembers him.
So does Gwynne Shotwell.
[Sunday-morning update]
More thoughts from Bob Zubrin.
Oops
Wayne Hale remembers a flawed safety design from the early Shuttle days.
Evoloterra On The Space Show
Our discussion from Sunday afternoon is now on line.
Chris Kraft
We continue to lose the giants of that generation.
[Update Tuesday morning]
Heh. “Perhaps the New York Times’ obit for Kraft was already written, as it curiously fails to explore the seething hotbed of sexism and white supremacy that was the early NASA, according to the latest reporting by the New York Times.“
[Update a few minutes later]
Eric Berger remembers an inspirational friend.
Per a commenter there, I’ve also been wondering if he had been hanging on to see the 50th anniversary, and then let go.
The Next Fifty Years On The Moon
An interesting essay, but it has a few problems. First…
And they repeatedly use the phrase “lunar soil.” In fact we just update Evoloterra this weekend to fix this ourselves.
Finally, we have this comment, which seems gratuitous and almost a non sequitur in the context of this article:
The Complete Descent
Mike Collins
It was a weird situation, but it wasn’t lonely.
“You put some Samoan on his little canoe out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night and he doesn’t really know where he’s going, he doesn’t know how to get there. He can see the stars, they’re his only friend out there, and he’s not talking to anybody. That guy is lonely.”
“I didn’t experience that kind of loneliness,” he said. “So I did not have Mission Control yakking at me for a full two-hour orbit — for 40 minutes or so I was over there behind the moon — but I was in my comfortable little home. Columbia was a nice, secure, safe, commodious place. I had hot coffee, I had music if I wanted it, I had nice views out the window.”
“To depict me as in despair or something and so lonely as in, ‘Oh my gosh, I could hardly wait to get back to the human voice coming directly up from Earth,’ yeah, that’s baloney.”
I always thought it was baloney.