During the anniversary week of the first human moon landing, Eric Hedman reminds is that we know practically nothing about the effects of partial gravity on human (or any animal) health. This is a sign of how unserious we remain about human spaceflight.
Category Archives: Space
Forty-Seven Years Ago
The first launch on the way to the surface of the moon. 
It’s also the 71st anniversary of the first nuclear explosion at Trinity test site.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The anniversary of the landing is Wednesday. Bill Simon and I will be on The Space Show at 7 PM PDT to talk about the ceremony we came up with to commemorate it.
Molly’s Service
It’s going to be a week from today, in Baltimore. Wish I could attend — I’m planning to be in DC the Monday after, but I’ll be in Florida that weekend.
A New Space Company
This was announced in Seattle in June, but in San Diego this week, Michael Suffredini repeated his plan to attach a module to ISS that could be later detached as a free flyer. I wonder where he is in terms of finding customers?
The Commercial Spaceflight Federation
They have a nicely redesigned website. Here’s the story behind it.
Try, Try Again
After losing the new docking adaptor on the launch failure a year ago, SpaceX is going to try again this month.
This is important for using Dragon or “Starliner” as a lifeboat for ISS.
Jimmy Carter And The Space Shuttle
Did he save it? And if so, why? An interesting bit of history of which I’d been unaware. Mondale wanted to kill it, and did manage to reduce the fleet size from seven to five (including Enterprise, which never flew). Which was economically stupid, because it saved very little money. If we’d had six vehicles, we’d have still had four after the losses of Challenger and Columbia (assuming that we hadn’t built Endeavour from spares after Challenger, and those two events would have occurred in that alternate universe). A four- or five-ship fleet would have made for a slightly different calculus after the loss of the latter, because part of the reason the program was ended was that three was too small a fleet to continue to operate for long.
The “Lunar Gift Shop”
Some Europeans say that’s the only place that Apollo visited.
@Lee_Ars It's hard for people to appreciate the degree to which Apollo copulated things up, in terms of space.
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) July 14, 2016
XCOR
I don’t know what to make of this announcement. Chuck Lauer has been promoting Prestwick for the last couple years, but does this mean that they’ve found the money to restart Lynx development? If so, will they do it in Midland? Or Scotland? How will they reassemble the team?
The Economic Development Of LEO
Yesterday, Deputy NASA Administrator Dava Newman announced with a blog post a new publication by NASA. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but given that one of the authors is Alex McDonald, I expect that it will be very good.
Speaking of which, I’m heading down to San Diego in a few minutes to attend at least the first day of the annual ISS R&D conference. So blogging may be light.
[Update Thursday morning]
I’m back from the conference. Meanwhile, I still haven’t looked at the publication, but Leonard David has.