Jeff Foust has the highlights of what Gwynne said at the conference yesterday (I flew back last night, got in about midnight).
Not covered: I asked her the status on crossfeeding Falcon Heavy. She said definitely not first flight — they want to get the thing flying first (which makes perfect sense), but want to get there, maybe in the next two years. She also said that they had no current customer for a “sixty-ton(ne) payload.” Parenthesis because I don’t know if she meant English or metric, but either way, that’s the first time I’ve heard that number. The original stated payload (with crossfeed) was fifty-three tonnes (I think, have to double check, might have been tons), but that was also in expendable mode. I can imagine with the improved performance of the new larger densified Falcon cores, it would go up, but it’s not clear what the flyback penalty is. I may follow up with her in email.
This article at The Space Review seems profoundly ignorant of economics and history, including the history of the Moon Treaty, because that basically seems to be what he’s proposing.
I got up at 3 AM to catch a 5 AM flight from LAX to DCA via ORD. Heading there for the FAA-AST Space Transportation Conference tomorrow. Earliest flight I’ve ever taken from there, I think. I had TSA pre-check, but the line wasn’t open yet, so I had to do the whole drill. The American terminal is pretty dead at 4 AM. Anyway, I’m in a flying chair somewhere over the plains with Internet. It almost feels like the 21st century.
Warning to denizens of the Beltway: I am on my way. Hide the women and liquor.
This is the thirty first year my birthday has been marred by the event. Leroy Chiao thinks that we shouldn’t have retired the Shuttle, but he assumes we did it for safety reasons. As I note in the book, Shuttle was retired because it cost too much, and the fleet had gotten too small to sustain it properly.
[Update a while later]
My thoughts on the anniversary, and lessons not learned, over at USA Today.
[Update a few minutes later]
Clark Lindsey has a link roundup on the anniversaries.
[Update a while later\
Doug Messier has some thoughts, and a warning to the space upstarts.
I couldn’t give a heads up, because they only want people on the approved list to call in, but I was the speaker for today’s FISO talk. The audio and PDF are up now.