My buddy Michelle Hanlon was on NPR yesterday, and the LA Times has an approving editorial.
Category Archives: Space
Anti-American Forces At NASA?
Bob Zimmerman is concerned.
If it’s not the intent of this to aid Russia, that’s certainly the effect.
And yes, this is concerning:
But the sources familiar with the matter said the companies must address “most” of those concerns before flying astronauts and, eventually, tourists to space. [emphasis mine]
NASA has no business dictating what standards will be met for private spaceflight participants. Someone needs to stomp on this right now.
[Update a few minutes later]
And just by coincidence, as NASA continues to want to purchase more rides from the Russians, another Fregat upper stage failed today.
The Soyuz 2-1b has apparently FAILED according to Russian media: ?https://t.co/l09jEEtPTG
— Chris B – NSF (@NASASpaceflight) February 21, 2019
[Late-morning update]
Looks like while there may have been an anomaly, the mission was ultimately a success.
I now have independent confirmation that #EgyptSat-A was released from Fregat into a planned orbit in today's #Soyuz launch!!! Stay tuned for updates: https://t.co/O5RqZRE7ed
— Anatoly Zak (@RussianSpaceWeb) February 21, 2019
[Friday afternoon update]
Well, that piece by Reuters didn’t age well. Seems kind of dumb to have run it when the flight readiness review was scheduled for the very next day.
[Bumped]
Throwing Shade At Branson From Bezos
I wonder how much the additional twenty kilometers will be worth in the market? Jonathan McDowell makes a pretty good case that the line actually should be eighty kilometers. Von Karman never declared it to be a hundred.
SpaceShipTwo
Their launch window opened this morning at 7 AM. I’d thought about driving up, but it’s going to be pretty cold up there, and I didn’t think the weather would cooperate. It did turn out that they scrubbed. I think Friday’s the most likely day now, because another storm is coming through tonight and tomorrow.
NASA’s “Space” Program
It will be a decade and a half, and $50B, with little spaceflight to show for it.
Europe And Its Space Race
Will SpaceX shut it out?
Probably. Not that he could really do anything about it, but I warned Clay Mowry years ago that Ariane 6 would be obsolete before it flew. Which is probably why he went to Blue Origin.
Protecting Human Heritage On The Moon
An interesting piece by Michelle Hanlon. This is a corollary with space property right. If some places are off limits, it implies that most others are not.
Space Solar Power
I wonder how serious this Chinese plan is? It looks like a traditional GEO concept. They have an advantage over us for this, in that they won’t have envirowackos to stop them.
NASA’s Return-To-The-Moon Plans
Eric Berger has the details. It’s clearly an effort to continue to justify the Gateway, which in turn has become required to justify the Shelby Launch System. If/when Starship lands on the moon, or even orbits it, all of this will be moot.
Careful With Your Drafts
This story reminds me of about thirty years ago, when I was pulling an all-nighter at Rockwell to finish a major deliverable to the Air Force on a study contract on launch systems. PCs were a relatively new thing in the workplace then (at least that one–I’d been one of the forcing functions to get them), and I accidentally munged a file on a floppy, apparently the only copy of it. Fortunately, I had a printout of the pages that I could insert into the document, but it had one section in it that contained the phrase “[Go ask [name of one of my colleagues]].” There was no way I was going to retype the whole thing — I had too much else to do to finish it, and I ended up just inserting the page as is (in a document of several hundred pages). I figured it would be an interesting test to see if anyone actually read these things. I never heard a word from the Air Force about it.