Greg Abbott wants it in Houston.
Of course he does. Let’s put the HQ of one of the services in a place that gets slammed by hurricanes and floods on a semi-regular basis.
Vandenberg would be a good location, other than earthquakes, but Colorado Springs, the current home of Space Command, is probably best, both in terms of centrality and low risk of natural disasters (other than fire). It could even share the service academy with the Air Force.
They may have been caused by “safety” “features.”
Gee, someone should write a book about that sort of thing.
Oh, wait
[Update a while later]
That is to say, the learning period currently set to expire in 2023 (I think) for the FAA (or whoever) to not regulate mission assurance should be extended indefinitely. Guess I should op-ed that.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) March 12, 2019
[Mid-morning update]
And it's equally unclear at this point (at least to me) whether it's a bad design or a crew-training issue (did they RTFM?), though the fact that there have been no such incidents in the US suggests the latter.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) March 12, 2019
[Afternoon update]
An interesting perspective.
[Update a while later]
State owned @FijiAirways cannot afford to ground their #737MAX – they taken a billion dollars out of compulsory superannuation fund for their wish list. Grounding would bankrupt airline … even the state itself…. pic.twitter.com/SumhqSDRuM
— Michael Field (@MichaelFieldNZ) March 12, 2019
In New Zealand. Entirely by women. Hey, more power to them.
It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the last time Chrysler proposed a spaceship to NASA. I’d forgotten about that.
For Dragon, it will be early tomorrow morning, when it enters and is recovered.
If Crew Dragon lands (waters?) successfully tomorrow, the U.S. will clearly have human spaceflight capability again. If NASA chooses not to use it immediately, that's a choice, but the notion that we can't get Americans into space from American soil will no longer be true.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) March 7, 2019
[Friday-morning update]
Congratulations, @SpaceX, for what appears to be a flawless test flight. Time to fly now, and flip Putin (and Rogozin) the bird.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) March 8, 2019
[Noon update]
What SpaceX’s success means for America.
It’s not really acting. They have been left behind.
But, while I like Sandy, this kind of thing continues to drive me crazy.
Oh, Sandy. Is there anyone out there who thinks it's at all important to end our dependence on Putin to get our astronauts into space? https://t.co/dv1IhziJQc
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) March 7, 2019
Compare and contrast. This is why NASA human spaceflight is a mess.
Amy Shira Teitel has a review of the new IMAX documentary. Looks like the closest one to us is in Century City.
An interview about our future in space with Jeff Bezos.
He doesn’t really say anything that I haven’t been preaching for literally decades, but it’s nice to see that (finally) someone with money gets it.
It looks like they had a successful suborbital test of SARGE today at Spaceport America (after the earlier successful launch of Crew Dragon early this morning).
[Tuesday noon update]
Russ Blink just posted an explanation of the wobble at Arocket:
The wind picked up as we approached launch and the torque due to the fins at liftoff was getting pretty high, that caused the initial pitch angle and the control PID is pretty close to critically damped, which of course needs to be addressed, however it settled down nicely until we hit a high wind shear which it damped out slowly again after passing through. Still she was heavily influenced by the wind which we are addressing.
The fins on this flight were actually hurting us because of weather-cocking. We intend to remove or reduce them in the future when we have good aero data or modeling to tune the control part of our gnc for that condition.
For those curious in comments…
[Bumped]