Bob Zimmmerman has a piece at The National Interest: So, what should President Trump do? Does he continue to fund Ares/SLS/Orion, which is taking almost TWO DECADES and more than forty billion dollars to design, build, and fly a SINGLE manned capsule, or does he instead shut it down and have NASA buy the products … Continue reading The Harsh Reality Of The Senate Launch System→
One of the many problems with SLS has been that there were no missions defined for it. One of its contractors, Boeing, has accordingly decided to define some lunar exploration architectures that utilize it. Of course, they don’t have any comparisons with the much cheaper alternatives that don’t. If I were SpaceX (or ULA, though … Continue reading Selling The Senate Launch System→
I’ve added a new page to the “Issues” section of the Competitive Space Task Force web site. [Update a while later] The Space Frontier Foundation has just issued a press release calling for people to hit the Hill: Please remind your Representative & Senators they are not rocket scientists! Let NASA compete all the best … Continue reading The Senate Launch System→
A nice piece on modern technological philanthropy at The Economist: History is full of examples of rich men with big ideas. The merchant princes who founded enterprises such as the London Company in the 17th century wanted to build bustling empires across the seas. Howard Hughes spent the 1930s testing innovative aircraft and setting aeronautical … Continue reading Billionaires And Grandiose Dreams→
The Senate Launch System is four years old (if you count from when NASA actually rolled out the design — it’s more like five years when it was first stipulated in the NASA authorization bill). Some thoughts at the time from Jerry Pournelle. And Stephen Smith has a history of Orion (the capsule, not the … Continue reading SLS And Orion→
“…and the lobbyists he road in on.” An epic rant (IMHO) over at my underfunded Kickstarter project. [Friday-morning update] I’ll re-run the rant here: I’ve been writing all week, in various venues, about the mess that we’ve gotten ourselves into with Russia, whose space systems seem to be having reliability issues, despite the successful landing … Continue reading Screw Dick Shelby→
Some thoughts from Dennis Wingo. I haven’t crunched any numbers (and am unlikely to absent a paying client), but it struck me at the time that it was very unlikely that this mission is technically feasible in a single launch, unless the launcher is SLS. Which would, of course, put it outside the range of … Continue reading Inspiration Mars→