A bill has been introduced to have NASA establish a new institute to study them.
Category Archives: Space
Raptor Update
They did a full-thrust test last night in Texas.
"Metric tons of force"? Don't you mean maganewtons?
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) February 7, 2019
This program is moving along at a crazy pace. I wonder how close they are to installing them in the hopper?
Armageddon
No, they’re not going to “knock the asteroid out of orbit.” They’re going to knock it into a different orbit.
SLS
Eric Berger has the latest on the ongoing wasteful programmatic disaster.
[Update a while later]
Meanwhile, a French auditor says that Ariane 6 is “too conventional” to compete with SpaceX. I’ve been saying for years that it will be obsolete before it flies.
Location For A Mars Colony?
Bob Zimmerman (who is doing his annual fundraising drive) has found a fascinating cave.
Space Settlement Straw Man
I don’t know whether this guy’s ideas for carbon capture make economic sense or not, but this I see a lot of this sort of nonsense:
You quote the Jesuit philosopher Thomas Berry, who writes about our being inseparable from the Earth. That’s not trending in Silicon Valley the way, say, terraforming Mars is.
What the hell do we do when we’ve trashed the hell out of Earth? We escape to another planet! That appears to be the attitude from the tech-os. Well, I find that hugely irresponsible. Why waste billions on going to Mars when we should be putting that into nourishing Earth? It’s your classic mechanical mind gone to the extreme, and I find it abhorrent from people that are meant to be intelligent. We are an integral part of Earth and until we start nurturing her, we are going to go down the gurgler. Maybe a few of those tech-os will end up on a spaceship, but the rest of us won’t.
I don’t know anyone who wants to escape to another planet because we’ve trashed the earth.
Interior Design
…of long-duration space ships. I’d like to attend that event, but it looks like it coincides with the Space Transportation Conference in DC.
These issues are why I’ve never taken any Mars plans by NASA seriously. Until we dramatically reduce the cost of access to space, so we can afford an armada of spacious vehicles, sending humans to Mars will be a pipe dream, but at least Elon is taking that problem seriously, even if he’s doing nothing about the partial-gravity issue.
[Update a few minutes later]
Oops, there is no conflict, but I still can’t go; it starts tomorrow. I wonder if Lurio will attend?
A Luxury Space Hotel
No, the numbers never really added up.
The Space Access Conference
It’s baaaack. And better than ever, despite the fact that Yours Truly will be there. It will be in the Bay Area, instead of Phoenix, though (the latter is a slightly shorter drive from LA). On the other hand, that’s where it started, with the Making Orbit conferences in San Mateo, almost three decades ago.
Raptor
SpaceX is simplifying development to a single version to get to the moon as fast as possible. That makes sense. When it comes to the moon, the real space race is between SpaceX and Blue Origin.