The manifesto of the committee to abolish it.
To be honest, I had never previously realized how terrible outer space is.
Category Archives: Space
Blue Origin
Several journalists seem to have gotten a personal tour from Jeff Bezos yesterday. Here’s Jeff Foust’s story. Things seem (finally) to be ramping up. I’d say they’re now solidly in the lead in the suborbital race, but they’re also going to orbit.
[Update a couple minutes later]
And here’s Ken Chang’s story. I’m sure that Alan Boyle and Eric Berger will have their own takes. Wish I’d known about it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Chang’s take is more detailed. I found this amusing:
Currently, most rocket companies launch, at most, about a dozen times a year. “You never get really great at something you do 10, 12 times a year,” Mr. Bezos said. With a small fleet of reusable New Shepard rockets, Blue Origin could be launching dozens of times a year.
NASA proposes to launch SLS once every couple of years. Insane.
[Update a while later]
Here’s Eric Berger’s take. He has more detail about the BE-4 and its implications for the RD-180 issue.
The Space-Policy White Paper
Keith Cowing has some thoughts, with which I largely agree. This was clearly a compromise, in which the SLS/Orion supporters and Commercial Crew supporters agreed to come together to support each others’ programs, and present a united front. Unfortunately for the former, one program makes sense, and the other doesn’t. At some point, it will die, but not before billions more are wasted on it.
On The Radio
I did a show this morning with Jim Muncy and Paul Sutter at the NPR affiliate in Columbus, OH. I thought it went pretty well.
Commercial Crew
“Building in safety from the ground up.”
Note the theme that safety is the highest priority, and no discussion of how much this is all costing, or how much it’s delaying ending our dependence on Russia (which is part of the cost) in addition to delaying an increase in ISS crew size (which is also part of the cost).
A New Suborbital Tourism Vehicle
This article is amusing:
CosmoCourse CEO Pavel Pushkin told Sputnik New Agency, he came up with the idea of suborbital tourism back in 2013 when he was working at Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center.
“We were reviewing various concepts of commercial space rockets and came up with the idea of launching people into space via suborbital trajectory.”
Wow, as far back as 2013! What a visionary.
Note that it’s short on details.
Fifth Time The Charm
Less than an hour to go for the next SES-9 launch attempt by SpaceX. Eric Berger has the story.
This Morning’s Space Press Conference
I listened in by phone. Here‘s the white paper.
As one would expect, a consensus from thirteen space organizations is going to be mostly motherhood, and implicitly self contradictory. More after I’ve taken the time to go through it. Elliot Pulham said that the campaigns have received it with “gratitude and interest,” but as he said, the main goal is not so much to inject space into the campaigns as to prevent people from saying stupid things about it. Good luck with that.
The Ignorant Idea That Won’t Go Away
No, we can’t “just” throw our trash into the sun.
But I hate when people use current launchers to demonstrate the cost of a massive space project. That’s not how it would be done. And I wish they’d simply say “the sun is the most expensive place to get in the solar system.” Because it is.
Reforming Space Policy
Space News has a story on Bridenstine’s proposed legislation.
I’ll have to take a look at the actual draft bill, but it has some good things, and some not so good. I don’t think that SSA should be simply handed over to the FAA. I don’t think that FAA should even be involved in launch licensing. If we’re going to be making radical changes in structure, it’s time to seriously consider a U.S. Space Guard.