I missed this earlier in the week, but Mike Snead has a long essay on passenger safety over at The Space Review. It’s a useful history, that touches on many of the themes of my book, but I believe that it’s technologically premature to apply the principles to human spaceflight. Spaceflight participants (not passengers) must be aware of the risks of the varied methods of building spaceships, and accept them accordingly. No one should, at this point in history, get aboard one with the same expection of getting safely off that one does with an airliner, particularly because different people have different risk tolerances and goals. There will come a time when trips to space will be considered common carrier, on certified vehicles, but we are years from that time.
Category Archives: Economics
Russian Rocket Development
So much for them being competitive on the world market. One wonders what it is about Rogozin that results in Putin continuing to keep him in charge.
Jobs “Americans Won’t Do”
Huh. Turns out there aren’t any. I suspect that immigrant gardeners are taking away a lot of jobs that young people used to do.
Paul Spudis
This is terrible, and a huge loss to the lunar development community. I just saw him in January at the lunar landing science workshop at Ames. He had finally come around to oppose SLS. Condolences to his family and other friends, RIP, and ad astra.
[Update a few minutes later]
More from Leonard David, who was as shocked by the news as I am. I hadn’t been aware that he had lung cancer.
[Update on June 8, 2021]
Paul’s widow, Anne, asked me to update this post to note that, contra a comment here, Paul had quit smoking in 1988, and was informed by his doctors that it was not the cause of his cancer.
Terraforming Mars
John Strickland analyzes the terrible media coverage of that recent report, and points out (as I did at the time) that Mars isn’t a closed system.
The War On Climate Change
How it’s really a war on the world’s poor.
Property Rights On Mars
I don’t know if it will be webcast, but I’m going to be giving a talk tomorrow morning in Pasadena, as part of the final plenary of the Mars Society meeting.
[Update Sunday afternoon]
I think the talk went OK. The crowd was smaller than I expected; I think that the Mars conference in DC has pulled a lot of the audience that Bob used to get for his Mars Society meetings. I called people in the audience “mutant weirdos,” and made a lawyer joke.
[Bumped]
Rocket Report
Eric Berger has this week’s round up.
I will say that I’ve never been very concerned about competition from China, but now that they’ve allowed commercial companies to engage, we may start to see a lot of innovation there.
Lunar Water Ice
An interview with Phil Metzger, including the most recent findings, on how to utilize it.
Pence’s Space Speech At JSC
Bob Zimmerman says that the swamp is winning, big league.