Here‘s to stainless steel. Too bad they couldn’t have done a hop for the anniversary tomorrow.
Category Archives: Space
Mike Collins
It was a weird situation, but it wasn’t lonely.
“You put some Samoan on his little canoe out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night and he doesn’t really know where he’s going, he doesn’t know how to get there. He can see the stars, they’re his only friend out there, and he’s not talking to anybody. That guy is lonely.”
“I didn’t experience that kind of loneliness,” he said. “So I did not have Mission Control yakking at me for a full two-hour orbit — for 40 minutes or so I was over there behind the moon — but I was in my comfortable little home. Columbia was a nice, secure, safe, commodious place. I had hot coffee, I had music if I wanted it, I had nice views out the window.”
“To depict me as in despair or something and so lonely as in, ‘Oh my gosh, I could hardly wait to get back to the human voice coming directly up from Earth,’ yeah, that’s baloney.”
I always thought it was baloney.
China And NASA
Are they in a race?
Bryan doesn’t mention the (white) elephant in the room: SLS.
The Latest From Elon
Not a lot new here for people who read Vance’s book (or the more recent ones), except he thinks he could put Starship on the moon in two years. From now.
He also describes how he was inspired by Apollo, so that is one good thing that came of it (besides winning a battle in the Cold War).
The Landing
It wasn’t recorded, but NASA has reconstructed what Neil Armstrong saw using LRO.
NASA’s Next Fifty Years
Thoughts from Bob Zubrin:
If NASA wants to send humans to the Moon or Mars, it should not spend billions on random cost-plus infrastructure projects that supposedly might come in handy if some day there were a program to go. Instead it should just take competitive bids for delivery services. It should incentivize the development of additional systems, including rovers, habitats, life support, power units, space suits and so on, the same way.
It’s pretty clear that, whatever individuals might desire, institutionally, neither NASA or Congress care whether or not they send humans to the moon or Mars, and haven’t since 1972. I do think, though, that despite Bob’s skepticism, the entrepreneurs will get us there.
The Fiftieth Anniversary
Saturday is the landing anniversary, but today is the anniversary of the launch.
Loren Grush has an article today on how Apollo set NASA back for decades, a subject I’ve written quite a bit about.
Russia’s Federation Spacecraft
Moscow, we have a problem.
One of the issues that the Orbital Space Plane (and now Commercial Crew) had to deal with was avoiding an abort into the North Atlantic.
The Dragon Investigation
This is good news. Hans Koenigsmann just did a press conference with Kathy Lueders in which they announced the root cause of the explosion. Apparently it was a failed check valve prior to the test as they were pressurizing, that resulted in some NTO setting fire to titanium piping, causing an overpressure which then cascaded to mixing of the hypergolics. At least that’s my preliminary understanding. They’re going to go from check valves to burst disks, and the fix doesn’t seem to be on the critical path to getting to a November flight.
[Update a couple minutes later]
[Update a few minutes later]
Here is the full SpaceX statement. And “hyperbolic” typo fixed in initial post.
Anthropogenic Climate Change
Two new studies indicate that, for practical purposes, it doesn’t exist.