Almost ready to fly.
The Crew Dragon capsule for the SpaceX DM-1 mission will be launch ready by the end of September. pic.twitter.com/xsGw9fWkUG
— Michael Baylor (@nextspaceflight) August 27, 2018
And NASA is now saying that the first crewed flight, scheduled for spring of next year, may be operational. And no more Soyuz flights after that. Should have happened long ago, though.
John Strickland analyzes the terrible media coverage of that recent report, and points out (as I did at the time) that Mars isn’t a closed system.
I know her pretty well, but I learned a lot about her from this talk she gave last year.
I don’t know if it will be webcast, but I’m going to be giving a talk tomorrow morning in Pasadena, as part of the final plenary of the Mars Society meeting.
[Update Sunday afternoon]
I think the talk went OK. The crowd was smaller than I expected; I think that the Mars conference in DC has pulled a lot of the audience that Bob used to get for his Mars Society meetings. I called people in the audience “mutant weirdos,” and made a lawyer joke.
[Bumped]
Time to let go of the reins?
He has Gwynne to run SpaceX for him, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone like that at Tesla. And his behavior has been quite erratic of late.
Eric Berger has this week’s round up.
I will say that I’ve never been very concerned about competition from China, but now that they’ve allowed commercial companies to engage, we may start to see a lot of innovation there.
An interview with Phil Metzger, including the most recent findings, on how to utilize it.
This is just nuts. I hope he’ll come back to Twitter.
[Update a few minutes later]
More PC stupidity: The sins of the father shall be visited on the child.
Marina Koren has a nice history of religious allusions in space speeches.
Bob Zimmerman says that the swamp is winning, big league.