NASA appears to be close to making a decision as to whether or not SpaceX will be able to take Dragon all the way to the ISS on its next flight, now tentatively scheduled for November 30th. That would be almost a year since the last flight. From the article, it’s not clear what the long pole in the tent is, but it looks like it could be problems on the NASA side, and not just development and teething issues for SpaceX. Allowing them to combine test objectives would save SpaceX on the order of a hundred million bucks, but more importantly, it will accelerate the schedule to make us less dependent on the Russians, and potentially expand ISS crew size. Once they’ve demonstrated rendezvous and docking capability, combined with the landing demonstration, all they would need to use the system as a seven-person lifeboat would be a rudimentary life support system.
Category Archives: Business
Moore’s Law
The Great Irish Hunger
Lessons learned. Hint: it wasn’t a failure of the free market.
Houston, We Have An Earmark Problem
Over at Tea in Space web site, the Senate Launch System earmark is explained:
Do the senators who authored this language have more knowledge about systems engineering than NASA employees and contractors? Do the senators who authored this language have more knowledge about acoustical flight dynamics of SRBs than NASA employees and contractors? Do the senators who authored this language have more knowledge about the inherent risks and safety of SRBs than NASA employees and contractors?
They’re no rocket scientists.
How Far Is Egypt…
…from starving?
This isn’t going to end well. Revolutions in countries with large masses of illiterates rarely do, and the naive coverage of the situation, with hopeful talk of an “Arab spring,” has been appalling.
[Early afternoon update]
Things are falling apart in Egypt pretty rapidly. As Michael Totten says, the good guys are vastly outnumbered. And this administration has no plan.
Europeanizing American Space Policy
…by stealth. I have a column over at Pajamas Media this morning on the space “code of conduct.”
A Surreal Depression
Thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson. I think we’re about the same age, and I have similar memories of being told about the Depression by my parents and grandparents who lived through it. I don’t know what we’re in, but it isn’t (at least yet) a depression, though it seems as though the government is doing everything possible to get us there.
There Goes Another Hundred Million
The next (and penultimate) Shuttle flight is now no earlier than May 16th.
John Shannon said last year that it costs about two hundred million a month to extend the program, so this two-week delay cost another hundred million dollars (note that four months of that burn rate would provide enough resources for another entire SpaceX). That assumes, of course, that this delay will also push out the the schedule of the final flight. I don’t know enough about KSC flows to know if that’s the case, or if they can be parallel processing Atlantis, currently scheduled for the end of June.
What Does He Know?
Jeff Bezos is investing in a fusion company (though as commenters there note, the technical explanation is pretty confusing). Maybe he wants to use it to power his spaceships.
I Did Not Know That
Whenever I hear an unemployment number, and particularly the statistic of how many people are in the labor force or looking for jobs, I wonder where they get the data. Well, here it is, explained.