Heading back down to LA today. More posting tonight or tomorrow.

In response to the subject of my previous post on John Carter McKnight’s rant about space advocates and property rights, over at Curmudgeon’s Corner, Mark Whittington has followed up by publishing a response from Alan Wasser, the author of the Space Settlement Initiative.

In another report on the Space Access conference a couple weeks ago, Jeff Faust says that the enterpreneurial space transport industry is almost through the grieving process over the loss of the perceived orbital markets of the nineties, and in a state of renewed and optimistic health, seeking more realistic suborbital goals.

Andrew Sullivan has a devastating critique not only of Sid Blumenthal’s new book about the Clinton presidency, but of what it reveals about the author himself.

…There?s no one like Sid. Not even in Washington. I?m still immensely fond of him, although it?s quite clear by now that, in some respects, he is completely out of his mind…

…Which reminds me what The Clinton Wars evoked for me. It has the tone and manner and piety of one of those “Lives of the Saints” books most Catholic school kids were once forced to read at some point or other. It?s not a memoir, or a history. It?s a Gospel. Its facts are assembled, as the facts in the Gospels were assembled, for one purpose only: to affirm the faith, to rally the flock, to spread the further glory of the Church. It?s an allegory of eternal good and evil?a passion narrative with a scriptural past and a resurrection at the end, the first-person narrative of one saint who prevailed.

That saint is Bill Clinton. Of all the characters who have graced the office of the Presidency, Sidney picks William Jefferson Clinton as the moral exemplar. There is not a scintilla of a clue anywhere in this book that Mr. Blumenthal sees even a trace of irony in this selection….

And the end:

That?s why, in the end, this book is worth reading. It?s brutally revealing about the stupidity, bigotry, malevolence and extremism of the right-wing forces that became obsessed with President Clinton. I?m glad they ultimately lost. But it?s just as revealing about the hollow moral center of Bill Clinton and Clintonism. The fact that the President and, more worryingly, his wife sought out this slightly nutty man as their confidant?a man whom they knew would never question them, never challenge them, never leave them?reveals the brittleness of their characters and the ruthlessness behind their sanctimony. They used him for his propagandistic skills and his fawning loyalty. They used him to drape their own modest but defensible record with the patina of world-historical significance. And they used him to lie to one another. Some people would find that demeaning. It tells you a lot about Sidney Blumenthal that he regards it as an achievement worth recording for the ages.

Thirty years and one day ago, on May 14, 1973, a Saturn vehicle thundered into orbit.

Its payload was not an Apollo mission to the Moon, for which it was originally designed, but rather, in historian Henry Cooper’s words, a “house in space” called Skylab.

The Apollo program had essentially ended exactly five months before, with the Apollo XVII mission, the last one and the only one that actually carried a working scientist to the lunar surface.

NASA had long-term plans for building space stations in low earth orbit, as part of Wehrner von Braun’s grand scheme to settle the Moon and send men to Mars. But the Nixon administration, after soon-to-be-disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew’s announcement of plans to do exactly that by the 1980s was denounced by war-weary pundits and politicians, backed off from any ideas it might have had of resurrecting a vigorous space program–one that had already essentially been pre-empted due to decisions made by the previous administration, under fire for the costs of the Great Society and Vietnam.

Nevertheless, NASA knew that it had to gain some experience with space stations, and the use of existing Apollo hardware might allow an affordable prototype that would provide valuable lessons for future designs. Fortunately, they did receive approval to build such an Apollo-derived station.

It was essentially a reoutfitted upper stage of a Saturn booster, for which propellants were unneeded because it didn’t have to deliver hardware all the way to the Moon. It contained all the systems necessary to support a crew of three and their science experiments for several missions.

The program got off to an inauspicious start. The shroud protecting the systems on the outside of the fledgling space station came off during ascent, tearing off a meteoroid protection system, and one of its two solar panels that were to provide power for life and science.

Thus, the first mission to the facility was radically altered, from one of simply starting up systems and settling in for work, to an emergency and heroic one of repair, in the hopes that the station could be used at all. A week and a half later, the first crew, Charles “Pete” Conrad, Paul Weitz, and Joe Kerwin, set off to the station and performed several such repairs, including putting out a parasol to cool the station, replacing one of the functions of the lost meteoroid shield. The lost solar panel was not replaced, but the station had three successful crewed missions, performing most of its objectives without it.

Because of the Saturn’s size, ironically, Skylab had a greater diameter (twenty-two feet) and more spaciousness in many ways than the current multi-decabillion-dollar International Space Station, which had to be extruded through a fifteen-foot hole represented by the diameter of the shuttle payload bay. It remains a jarring comparison to walk through the huge, almost cathedral-like backup Skylab module in the National Air and Space museum in Washington, and then view the relatively cramped module for the “modern” ISS.

In fact, of course, we could have had an even more spacious follow-on to that program with this one. It would only have involved developing a shuttle-derived heavy-lift vehicle, which could have occurred in less than half a decade, for a small fraction of the total program cost of the current station program. It could have been constructed from barrel sections of the shuttle external tank, which would have yielded a diameter five feet greater than Skylab, and almost twice the diameter of any current station module, with over three times the cross-sectional area. And we could have had a fully functional station in a single launch, with a huge and very capable one in two or three more.

And with several other such modules, we could even, had we chosen, have had a huge, spinning space station like that envisioned in Clarke’s movie, 2001, A Space Odyssey, and several years prior to 2001.

But of course, that would have required a national space policy that actually required, or even desired, a functional space station on orbit, as opposed to one that simply required that major NASA centers be given something to keep themselves busy, and sufficient funds with which to do so, and to justify the space shuttle itself, after its development had been completed.

Of course, defenders of our current, much-more-expensive, much-more-behind-schedule encore would point out (and in fact do) that it contains as much volume as a Boeing 747 in orbit. So some might think it churlish of me, even on the three-decade anniversary of the magnificent achievement of our first, spectacularly successful space station, to point out any deficiencies in our present one.

Those same people might think it even more so if I additionally point out that regardless of how large, or how many people the ISS might support in theory, now or in the future, it remains constrained not just by hardware on orbit, but by our fragile, expensive and inflexible space transportation infrastructure, and our corresponding utterly inadequate ability to spontaneously return more than three people from orbit at once.

The purpose of the Orbital Space Plane program is ostensibly to solve this problem, but it has some severe flaws, some of which Congress is starting to recognize, thankfully. Unfortunately, while they are properly critiquing NASA’s current plans, they don’t seem to offer much useful as an alternative.

Sadly, because of the limited and myopic viewpoint of those running our space policy, in which only NASA’s perceived needs are considered when formulating plans for space transportation, and the potential capabilities of private industry and the desire of the American people for a space program for themselves, rather than a few civil servants, continue to be ignored, there’s little prospect for fixing this real problem any time soon.

So thirty years after the launch of our first space station, and two years after 2001, Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of Pan Am spaceliners and rotating orbital hotels, while certainly technically feasible, remains frustratingly far beyond our national and institutional reach or, apparently, desire.

I haven’t had time to write much this week but, at least when it comes to space policy, Mark Whittington has some interesting posts up, including a commentary on recent (useful) Congressional resistance to the Orbital Space Plane, and a righteous fisking of usually sensible John Carter McKnight’s misconceived rant against space property rights (or to be more precise, some space advocates’ advocacy of them), plus some other odds and ends.

Being a blogspotter, his permalinks are FUBAR, so just scroll down two or three days from today’s date.

Go check them out while I recombobulate here and finish my Skylab eulogy.

Sorry, but I was on the road until late last night, and had a lot to do to catch up with up here.

I was going to post some useful info about tomorrow night’s lunar eclipse, but Jay Manifold has already done it.

No posts before this evening. We’re driving up to San Bruno today.

John Weidner has some nice pics of Burt Rutan’s Spaceship 1 in flight.

You’ll have to find it in the archives–it’s a May 11 post, at 8:53 AM. Thanks, blogspot…

Wednesday is the thirtieth anniversary of the launch of our first space station, arguably superior to the existing one in many practical ways.

I’ll have more thoughts later this week.