Some advice from Scott Hubbard. But here is the problem:
…the new administrator must provide NASA and the rest of the world much more clarity on the brief statement issued by Vice President Pence and the newly revived Space Council that the United States will “lead the return of humans to the Moon.” Studies of the future of human space exploration have for decades emphasized that Mars is the target of greatest interest for reasons of science and exploration.1–4 The last initiative that attempted to include both human landings on the Moon and eventually Mars, the so-called Constellation program, collapsed from its own budgetary (over) weight.
Two points: First, the assumption that human spaceflight is about “science and exploration.” I’ve written about this error at length. Second is the notion that Constellation collapsed because it was attempting to do both the Mars and moon. It wasn’t seriously trying to do either. NASA wasn’t seriously trying to do either.
Yes, it was down for a while, due to an update on server software, including updating PHP to the latest version, which broke some of the plugins. I think everything should be working now. And I’m swamped on the NASA proposal.
The political ads on television in California have been quite bizarre. Here’s why. I don’t know what the voters were thinking when they came up with this crazy primary system.
If anyone has been having problems commenting, I’ve had a database issue that I finally resolved, so things should be going faster now. I’ll also be posting more, instead of waiting for WordPress to time out.
I agree that it’s probably the best we can do under current political circumstances, but if that’s the case, we should stop wasting taxpayer money on human spaceflight.
I’ve never been enough of a Star Wars fan to care whether it lives or dies. I would note, though, that $40M went a lot farther four decades ago than it would today.
And sorry for light posting, but last week (and weekend) was wall-to-wall space conferences, between Space Tech Expo in Pasadena, and ISDC by LAX. And now I have three weeks to write a proposal for the LEO Commercialization NASA Research Announcement that came out the week before.