If, like me, you couldn’t make it to Colorado Springs last week, Calla Cofield has highlights.
[Noon update]
Valerie Insinna has the story on Tory’s choice in engines. Aerojet Rocketdyne has to have fingers crossed in the hope that BE-4 testing doesn’t go well.
Dick Eagleson has some interesting speculation.
Meanwhile, is the small-sat launch industry going to be Amazoned?
It’s like an apartheid state.
This looks like an interesting new book
The Electronic Freedom Foundation has a guide, now that the rules have been changed to allow your ISP to track you and sell the data.
They’re working on a lunar lander:
Blue Origin would be willing to invest in development of the Blue Moon system as part of a partnership with NASA, Meyerson said, envisioning regular delivery of resources and supplies to a potential lunar colony to augment NASA missions launched by the agency’s own Space Launch System.
“The more NASA flies SLS, the more they will need commercial logistics delivery services,” he said. “New Glenn and Blue Origin and Blue Moon compliment SLS and Orion, enabling NASA’s return to the moon, and this time to stay.”
NASA’s current human spaceflight plans do not include human missions to the lunar surface. Instead, NASA has outlined an an architecture that calls for the development of a human-tended facility in cislunar space, called the Deep Space Gateway, by the mid-2020s intended to support testing of technologies needed for human missions to Mars in the 2030s.
Congress doesn’t really want NASA to do anything except build a giant rocket that hardly ever flies, but Meyerson is being politically correct.
[Update a while later]
ULA has a nice video of their vision for the future.
[Update Friday morning]
Eric Berger talked to Rob Meyerson about Blue Origin’s plans. They’ll be flying again this summer. Passengers next year.
Time to throw in the towel on the theory. Like climate, genetics remains a lot more complicated than we’d like to think.
…sees a golden age of space entrepreneurship. Thanks to people like him, so do I. We’d previously heard he’d invested half a billion or so, but now he’s saying a billion a year. That’s serious.
This should be easy, they said. Just glue three Falcon 9s together, they said:
Musk said the rocket cores for Falcon Heavy’s first flight are two to three months away from completion. He emphasized that the first launch will carry a lot of risk, and as such, SpaceX doesn’t plan to carry a valuable payload or payloads with it.
“We will probably fly something really silly on Falcon Heavy because it is quite a high risk mission,” he said.
I’m glad to see that they’re finally coming close. It’s an important development, both technically and politically. Also, the claimed LEO payload is now up to 64 tonnes, so it’s almost the capability of SLS Block 1B.
[Update early afternoon]
If we want bigger telescopes or to go to Mars, we need heavy lift, “experts” say.
Nonsense.
Can they teach us to be better humans? I’m skeptical, but it’s an interesting development.