Category Archives: Space History

History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

We’ve Lost Another Great One

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Bill Anders has died, apparently piloting his own plane.

He was the astronaut who took the iconic photo of the whole Earth from the Moon on his trip around it on Apollo 8, which was the actual moment when we won the space race. And it became the icon for the environmental movement, for good or ill.

I consider myself privileged to consider him a friend, and I’ll explain why anon, but for now, farewell, yet another hero of that era, who (unlike many of his Apollo cohorts) understood how important commercial space was.

[Saturday-afternoon update]

I was at AIAA SciTech Forum in San Diego in 2016. Bill was speaking, discussing the history of Apollo, while standing under a huge Lockheed Martin banner (they were the primary sponsor of the event). He was talking about risk aversion and how it was holding us back in space, and how today’s NASA could not do Apollo in terms of the accepted (at that time) risk. In other words, echoing themes from my book.

But he also started to bash SLS and Orion, wondering out loud why we were building them (this was after SpaceX had started landing boosters, which happened in 2015). After his talk, I walked down to meet him, and gave him a copy of my book and a business card, and talked to him for a few minutes. As we were talking, Ann Sulkosky (who had replaced Jeff Bingham as chief staffer on the Senate Space subcommittee, and then gone on to become a flack at Lockmart) came running down with her hair on fire, saying “Bill, Bill! What are you doing?” It was hilarious, because obviously Bill had no copulations to give.

Anyway, a couple weeks later, he called me, and said “I got around to reading your book, and I couldn’t put it down.” We talked for half an hour or so.

Later, Alex McDonald at NASA got some money to do a study on safety and risk acceptance, much of which was based on my book, and gave a contract to Resources for the Future, a think tank in DC where Molly MacCauley worked, and she was put in charge of the study. There was a workshop at their place in Dupont Circle to which I was invited, along with fairly high-level people, including the chairman of the ASAP, Scott Pace, Jim Bennett, and some historians. She also invited Bill, who attended by phone (it was hard to get him to leave his home in the San Juan islands). We had a bad connection, and ultimately decided to give it up, but before he hung up, he said “I think that everyone should read Rand’s book.”

Tragically, Molly was murdered near her home in Baltimore a few months later, stabbed in the neck. Her dogs stayed with her, but she’d exsanguinated before she was found. No motive or murderer was ever found. When her co-workers tried to finish the report, they couldn’t find her files, so it was never published (a very frustrating thing, not just for the shocking loss of Molly, but the failure to spread the word on the problem of risk aversion beyond my book).

General Anders was one of the most accomplished of the former Apollo astronauts, and remained sharp (as far as I know) right up until the plane crash. I was honored to know him.

[Monday-morning update]

Bob Zimmerman remembers the astronaut who like to go fast.

[Bumped]

Business, History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Starliner

25 Comments

With the upcoming launch today, Eric Berger writes that the surprise is not that it took so long, but that it happened at all.

Has Boeing done anything right, or well recently?

[Update a few minutes later]

Reading in the article about the “incident” at White Sands, I recall that I was sitting next to Chris Ferguson at an Apollo 49th-anniversary dinner at KSC a month or so afterward, and I said something like “I heard you had a little oopsie at WSMR.” He said, “You’re not supposed to know about that.” I’m sure that he wished that I (and others) didn’t know about that.

Business, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

ULA

35 Comments

Can it get its mojo back?

I think that partially, even largely depends on whether it can get a better owner than the current ones.

[Update a while later]

I have more thoughts over at X.

[This is a good history from @SciGuySpace, but there’s a word missing in it: Starship. Tory’s problem is that he thinks that he’s competing against Falcon, but Elon is going to obsolesce Falcon ASAP. How will Vulcan or New Glenn compete against a fully reusable heavy lifter?

The thing about Elon is that he never faces the Innovator’s Dilemma. His first instinct is to obsolesce his own product line before a competitor can. Anyone who wants to seriously compete against SpaceX has to compete against his future plans, not his current business.

If space launch was just a business for Elon, he’d be as complacent as any other businessman in his position, but it’s not a business; it’s a passion, and he wants to get thousands of people to Mars. So he’s going to continue to out-innovate the competition.

Imagine a world in which SH/SS is flying daily (or more often) on regularly scheduled trips to ELEO at a cost of tens of dollars a pound. Propellant would be cheap enough to deliver a payload to anywhere in cislunar space for much less than the cost of a traditional launch. That is what ULA and BO are going to have to compete with if they want to stay in the launch business.

I know, “But there’s not enough demand for that level of launch activity!” Believe me, at those prices, we will finally see the kind of price-demand elasticity that will drive it through the roof. People will be doing things dreamt of for decades, held back only by launch costs.

So good luck to ULA (and BO) on their upcoming maiden flights this year, but I don’t predict a long future for them. Not to mention SLS… 

I feel like I should write a book about this.

[Monday-morning update]

ULA had a successful maiden flight, but there’s an anomaly with Peregrine.

[Bumped]