Jeff Foust writes about the unheralded 25th anniversary of the DC-X flights, and what has happened in the past half decade to see the promise that it offered a quarter of a century ago finally coming to fruition. I attended the 20th anniversary, but the only thing happening this year is a dinner in LA later this month.
I would note, per the criticism of the “purists,” that SSTO is highly overrated. Two-stage systems are much more flexible and efficient, particularly for off-nominal missions (e.g., high inclination or high altitude). SSTO would make sense only for a large traffic model to a single destination, probably equatorial.
I’m going to reserve judgment until I see the film. I think that the proximate cause of the uproar wasn’t the decision to leave out the flag planting, but the Canadian actor’s idiotic explanation of it. As I note in comments, the movie is a biopick of Neil Armstrong, not a history of Apollo, and his great achievement was not in planting a flag on the moon, but in simply being present on its surface.
@SciGuySpace Part of that history was the idiotic policy in the early 90s of telling USAF to use expendables, and assigning reusables to NASA, which resulted in the disastrous X-33 and X-34 programs, which "proved" that reusables couldn't be done.
It’s not just the 49th Apollo anniversary; it’s also the anniversary of the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. Plus, it’s the 25th anniversary of the (likely) murder of Vince Foster.
I scored a ticket to the VIP gala at KSC Saturday night, to celebrate the 49th anniversary of the first moon landing. I just found out I’ll be seated at a front table with commercial-spaceflight basher Walt Cunningham.
Georg von Tiesenhausen died on Sunday, at the age of 104. He was the last of von Braun’s rocket team. Amazing that he lived so long after what he went through in his youth.