It’s essentially illegal. My latest column, about NASA in the movies and in real life, at USA Today.
Category Archives: Space
Virgin Galactic
Almost a year after the loss of SpaceShipTwo, Doug Messier has some questions about their switch back to a rubber engine. The answers are unsatisfactory. And there’s this perennial bit:
Despite Richard Branson’s increasingly dire pronouncements (The Time for Climate Action is Now) about how rising global temperatures and sea levels threaten the planet (and his private island home), it looks as if Virgin Galactic will go back to using a carbon spewing rubber hybrid rocket engine to power SpaceShipTwo.
That’s the word from Virgin Galactic officials in Mojave, who say that the rubber/nitrous oxide engine they previously abandoned is now performing better than the supposedly superior nylon/nitrous oxide engine they abandoned it for in May 2014. It’s not entirely certain, but it looks that way.
Branson won’t lose any sleep over this further expansion of his carbon footprint. He never has. Anyone who can passionately advocate for the climate while flying around the world in a private jet, expanding his fuel-gulping airlines, launching three new massive cruise ships, and burning rubber in the upper atmosphere is clearly untroubled by irony or contradictions. Here’s a guy who urges billions in new public spending on climate change while living as a tax exile in the British Virgin Islands.
As Emerson said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
A New Desalinization Method
If this works out, it would be huge. It might be useful for Martian water, too.
“Space Exploration”
I hate op-eds like this. They’re meaningless.
I oppose "space exploration." It's a meaningless phrase. I favor space development.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) October 20, 2015
New NASA Human Spaceflight Rules
I have trouble caring about this, given the programmatic unlikelihood of SLS/Orion.
That Mysterious “Stalking” Russian Satellite
Reusable Mars Landers
Yes, throwing them away makes no sense. That’s Apollo-to-Mars thinking.
Creating fully reusable transportation infrastructure will be a key element of my Kickstarter report.
Back To The Moon
…by Europe and Russia?
Five years until the first probe hardly seems like a breakneck pace, but I take this more seriously than I do China. I suspect that the next president, whoever it is, will have to make some serious choices about US plans.
[Update a few minutes later]
SpaceX Return To Flight
Orbcomm is going to go first:
SpaceX on Oct. 16 said it had changed its return-to-flight plans and would first launch 11 small Orbcomm messaging satellites into low Earth orbit, and then test reignition of the redesigned second-stage engine during the same flight before launching SES’s heavier telecommunications satellite into higher orbit, a mission that will need the reignition capability.
Luxembourg-based SES said the company was comfortable with ceding its slot to Rochelle Park, New Jersey-based Orbcomm, especially since SpaceX has said it can launch the SES-9 telecommunications satellite into geostationary orbit in late December.
So December may be an interesting month, with two landing attempts.
Planetary Protection
This whole debate assumes that the only purpose of space exploration is science. But if we want to settle space, we have to accept the fact that we are going to “contaminate” it with earthly life.