Work is beginning on a launch pad in Florida.
This is looking serious.
[Thursday-morning update]
It’s an end of an era: Gerstenmeier and Hill are out at NASA. Thoughts from Bob Zimmerman.
Category Archives: Space History
The First Moon Landing
What most people don’t know about it.
As I’ve noted for years, the reason that we haven’t been able to do Apollo again is that we just barely did it the first time, and it’s extremely unlikely that the stars will align to allow it to happen again. And that is as it should be, for America. There was a very powerful sense in which Apollo was not the right thing for a country based on entrepreneurialism and free enterprise to be doing.
I’m reading Roger Launius’s new book, in which he talks about four perspectives of Apollo. I noted to him privately that there was a fifth, that he didn’t address:
I felt a little left out. I think I represent a fifth perspective, in that I believe that Apollo was both necessary and not a waste of money for what it accomplished (a major non-military victory in the Cold War), but that it set us back in human spaceflight for decades (and continues to do so, as witness the current ongong Artemis fiasco).
He didn’t disagree.
The Current Space Race
Why it’s better than Apollo.
For one thing, it’s more sustainable. And it will accomplish much more. Whenever kids (i.e., people less than 50) tell me they envy me that I saw men walk on the moon, I tell them that I envy them for all the much more exciting things in space they’ll see (assuming that we don’t get life extension).
Blood And Money
While I think that we could do a lunar return for far less than NASA estimates, if allowed to do so without having to use SLS/Orion, or the Gateway, I certainly agree with the second point that Wayne Hale (new head of the NASA Advisory Council) makes, as he takes more than one page from my book.
Moon Books
There are a bunch of new ones out as part of the fiftieth anniversary. Here’s a list (including some old classics as well).
Lunar Heritage Sites
A bill has been introduced in the Senate, by Ted Cruz and Gary Peters, to preserve them. For All Moonkind has been working on this for a while. It would only protect the sites from Americans, but we need to make this into a multilateral agreement.
[And yes, link is fixed now]
Back To The Moon, This Time To Stay
My op-ed on one-way trips to the Moon is up at Space News.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Can Trump put people on the moon by 2024? It seems unlikely under current political circumstances.
The Gateway
Bob Zimmerman says it’s time for it to die.
Yes, the bureaucrats are pretending that it’s a required part of returning to the moon when, as Bob Zubrin has pointed out it’s a toll booth at best, and a likely roadblock, and there has been no public debate about its necessity.
Bezos’s O’Neillian Vision
There’s an article at Popular Mechanics, but the picture it has of Gerard O’Neill isn’t. Not positive, but I’m pretty sure it’s Brian O’Leary.
The Space Technology Curve
I don’t usually post from Facebook, but Jeff Greason has an interesting/depressing thought:
In the Star Trek episode “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, Kirk is told “I’m going to lock you up for two hundred years”. He looks at the camera (very nearly breaking the fourth wall), and says “that ought to be just about right” — in other words, telling the viewer that Star Trek is set about 200 years in the future.
That episode was filmed in 1968.
That was 50 years ago.
Somehow, I don’t feel we’ve made 1/4 of the progress from Apollo to Star Trek
As Mike Heney points out over there, we haven’t even made a quarter of the progress from Apollo back to Apollo.