I haven’t had much to say about Monday’s “big” announcement, but Joel Achenbach has the straight scoop. In light of renewed concerns about planetary protection, from Emily Lakdawalla and others, I’m thinking about writing an op-ed on why we’re going to Mars, or sending humans into space at all.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I don’t know if I have the time or energy to properly fisk this right now, but Alana Massey says that sending humans to Mars is a terrible idea.
The company announces that it’s completed a hundred successful tests of its staged-combustion turbomachinery. It’s a little misleading to show a full-engine test, with shock diamonds, though. Also, they don’t say if there have been any failures. Particularly of the rapid-unscheduled-disassembly type.
Meanwhile, Aerojet Rockedyne continues to beg for money.
[Update a few minutes later]
George Sowers just tweeted to me that these were subscale tests, not full scale. Hopefully, that’s next.
From seed XCOR investor and blog reader Stephen Fleming, with connections to GA Tech.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Casey Stedman weighs in.
My biggest concern with going to the movie: When I read the book, I didn’t actually have to listen to the Disco.
[Bumped]
It was due to expire tomorrow. Congress just extended it for six months (assuming the president signs the bill, which he likely will).
Reportedly, this was to buy time to resolve differences between the House (who wants a ten-year extension) and the Senate (which wants five years) in conferencing the space bills in the coming weeks.
As Keith Cowing points out, the Planetary Society is in no hurry to put anyone on the surface of the Red Planet. They want to do Apollo to Mars, but take almost three and a half decades before the first boots on Mars, and almost four decades before long-term habitation. Though Firouz Naderi claims that keeping it under the cost limit makes it more likely, I’d say that it is doomed to failure. Something that takes that long, accomplishes so little, for so much money, is unsustainable in a democratic Republic. This is why Apollo to Mars is doomed in general. I’m discussing this in the Kickstarter project. We need to have a different approach, starting with an end to the phrase “space exploration” as the reason we send humans into space.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here’s the link to the report. I’m reading it now, hoping it will have some useful cost data from Aerospace.
[Update a while later]
Even Chris Carberry recognizes that we won’t ever get another “Kennedy moment.” I’m not sure, though, how one “stays the course” to Mars, when there is no course.
[Late-morning update]
Over at Sarah Hoyt’s place NASA employee Les Johnson proposes (wait for it) Apollo to Mars.
It is not going to happen, and it should not happen.
Unfortunately, looks like it’s only partial on the Left Coast.
Their domain has become available.
It could be that they simply forgot to renew, but this doesn’t seem like a good sign.
Michael Listner (at his new space-law blog) has a good description of the difficulty of reconciling the House and Senate bills.
However, even if the learning period expires next week, George Nield knows that both houses want to extend it, and he’s not going to waste any resources trying to suddenly start rule making.
Would Mark Watney have been able to stay sane?
I think it’s realistic to think he’d have been fine, as long as he had some level of hope, and tasks with which to occupy himself.
This is the sort of thing we’re going to have to figure out. But at least we’re building an unaffordable monster rocket.