Leonard David has a roundup of prognostications. I hope that Virgin has commercial flights this year, but I don’t expect it, based on history.
Category Archives: Space History
The Diane Rehm Space Discussion
Marcia Smith has a good summary. This amused me:
Rehm exclaimed that she didn’t understand what Gold meant because the “language you’re using” sounds “proprietary” and one cannot own the Moon. Gold began answering, but apparently the show ran out of time for that segment (music began playing) and he was not able to fully respond. Rehm said it “sounds confusing to me,” and cut him off.
Diane Rehm always strikes me as someone who is easily confused. I’ve never understood her popularity, except that a lot of Beltway denizens share her propensity for confusion.
[Update a while later]
Monumental willful ignorance from Mark Whittington:
The cancellation of the SLS, unlikely in the current political climate, would mean the end of any hope of sending American astronauts beyond low Earth orbit for the foreseeable future.
If you can’t see beyond the next five years, perhaps. It’s the lack of propellant storage and transfer technologies, and landers, that is keeping bound to LEO, not lack of heavy life. Money wasted on SLS is trapping us there.
Expect him to show up shortly with his standard, foolish, “But you provide no alternative,” despite the fact that he’s been shown alternatives many times. We can explain it to you, Mark, but we can’t understand it for you.
Michael Belfiore’s Review
He’s got (rave) a review of the book, over at his web site.
Earthrise
Is Safety Stifling Space Development?
In which I’m interviewed by Popular Mechanics about the book. Which can be purchased on the button over to the leftright.
[Update a few minutes later]
I’d forgotten that it was on the right in the new template.
Book Sales
The book is currently listed at 132 thousand or so at Amazon, but it’s number five on this specialty list
(number three, really, since the books ahead of it are only two, in different formats).
Safe Is Not An Option
I didn’t expect the book to be available for purchase at Amazon for another couple weeks. This is the first thing in this project that happened ahead of schedule.
Working on e-versions now.
Dear NASA
JFK just wasn’t that into you.
My space-related thoughts on the anniversary of the assassination, over at USA Today.
Scott Carpenter
I’m seeing on my Twitter timeline that he has died. If so, John Glenn is the only Mercury 7 astronaut left.
Gravity’s “Science” Problems
Jeff Foust discusses the issue over at The Space Review (spoiler warning for those who haven’t seen it). Also spoiler warning for people who read the rest of the post.