Will it revolutionize spaceflight? A report at Technology Review from Michael Belfiore.
Category Archives: Business
Nancy Pelosi
I hope she remains this delusional right through the first Tuesday of November.
“I think the Republicans are wasting their time using that as their electoral issue, and they will find that out,” she said.
Pressed by a reporter whether Democrats should shy away from the issue on the campaign trail, Pelosi didn’t hesitate.
“No, absolutely not,” she said.
Pelosi has long argued that the healthcare law will become increasingly popular as more people recognize the benefits.
She’ll probably argue it to her grave, hopefully at least her political one.
Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Historical Knowledge
No, not about Bruno, but about the history of exploration:
There is no nice, clean line between private “buck making” and high-minded government exploration just for the sake of it. From the Wright Brothers making the key advances in aviation to IBM funded Nobel Prize winning basic research, innumerable breakthroughs in science and technology have been led by private non-governmental ventures.
Yes. It’s the post-war government funding that’s been an anomaly, historically. Fortunately, when it comes to spaceflight, that era is ending.
SpaceX Mission Reliability
General Shelton says they’re not ready for prime time:
Launches of NASA cargo to the International Space Station, including one planned early Sunday, don’t guarantee SpaceX is ready to launch military satellites, the head of Air Force Space Command said Tuesday in Cape Canaveral.
If a rocket failed, the loss of a national security satellite potentially worth more than $1.5 billion would be a bigger setback than losing food, clothing and other station supplies, Gen. William Shelton told the National Space Club Florida Committee.
“So there’s a big difference,” he said.
This is one reason that talk about “human rating” an Atlas (or Delta) is silly. If it’s reliable enough for a $1.5B satellite, it’s reliable enough to carry crew. All it ever needed was failure onset detection. And when SpaceX starts flying crew, the general’s argument will be much less strong.
OK, looks like someone broke it.
The Malaysian Air Flight
How can an airplane just disappear?
Some people think that with satellites we have an “every sparrow that falls” omniscience, but we’re not there yet.
Elon’s Mars Plans
A detailed technical breakdown. Pretty ambitious.
Unless I missed it, there was one important aspect not discussed in trading kerosene versus methane. The latter would be much easier to manufacture on Phobos/Deimos or the Martian surface.
SpaceX Versus ULA
This isn’t a full transcript, but it’s a good selection of key points made during last week’s Senate Appropriations hearing.
New Pressure To Accelerate Commercial Crew?
Someone needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that “as soon as possible” could be within a year, if they accelerate the docking system, and they could fly someone in ten days, if someone decided it was important.
SpaceX Versus “Boeing”
The headline of this good National Journal article on yesterday’s Senate Appropriations hearing is very misleading. One would think from it that’s it’s about the commercial crew competition between Dragon and CST, when in fact it’s about the competition between SpaceX and ULA for milsat launches. I assume that the copy editor screwed up, not the author. Anyway, note the typical socialist argument against competition that Dick Shelby uses.