Category Archives: Space History

History, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Evoloterra

6 Comments

Get together with friends and celebrate the 48th anniversary tonight. Bill Simon and I will be on The Space Show at 7 PM Pacific to discuss it.

[Update a while later]

Here’s what I wrote on the 40th anniversary. It still holds up pretty well, I think.

[Update early afternoon]

There’s a new version of the ceremony on line now.

[Late-afternoon update]

Seeing comments out there on the Interwebs that Nixon canceled Apollo. No, it happened in 1967, by Congress. Before he was elected. For those of you unfamiliar with the post-Apollo history under Nixon, John Logsdon’s latest book is a good read. Funded by Bill Anders, it’s probably the definitive history at this point. He’s currently working on the space history of the Reagan administration, which I wrote about at the time of Reagan’s passing.

[Friday-morning update]

The Space Show we did last night has been archived.

Business, Economics, History, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Space History, Space Science, Technology and Society

Private Space Exploration

4 Comments

There was an interesting conference in New York last week (that I would have liked to attend if it had been in my budget). It’s still hard to raise money for it, because modern philanthropists don’t know the history, and can’t conceive of anyone but NASA doing such things, but I think that this is the future.

[Update a while later]

Sorry, added missing link.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

The National Space Council

2 Comments

A brief history.

I don’t know whether or not it will help with the current policy mess. It probably partly depends on who heads it up (that is, the real day-to-day work, not Pence).

This is strange:

According to historians, in 1992, council staff convinced Bush to fire the NASA chief because they thought he would resist their ideas. As is the case in many bureaucratic environments, the dysfunction of the council had little do with national interest or policy, but with office politics.

Truly wasn’t fired because the council staff “thought he would resist their ideas.” He was fired because he was actively sabotaging Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative, and actually having his AA for legislative affairs lobby against it on the Hill.

[Update a while later]

Stephen Smith has a blog post on the (meaningless) NASA authorization ceremony last week. Trump seems remarkably uninformed, but that’s true of most subjects, I think.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Jeff Kluger says that magical thinking won’t get you to Mars. But a) this isn’t an appropriation and b) he seems to think that we can do Apollo again.