If they’re artificially intelligent, they may be stranger than we think.
Category Archives: Space
A Blast From The Past
Someone asked me to sanitize some ancient comments on the blog today, and in the process of doing so, I perused some other posts from that era, and ran across this.
It wasn’t obvious at the time, but it was an historic post in this blog, because it led to all of my essays at The New Atlantis. I don’t know (or at least don’t remember) how Adam found out about it, but he contacted me to argue about/discuss the topic, and he ended up asking me for an essay, which resulted in this (not sure why it’s 404ing and I had to go the Wayback Machine, but I’ll tell the current editor about it).
When Will Starship Launch?
Speculation, over at Bob Zimmerman’s place. I make no predictions, but I obviously hope it’s sooner than later.
I’ve been at ASCEND in Vegas for the past three days, and tonight I have a red eye to DC to do final prep for the trial on Monday, so blogging will continue to be light.
Priorities
SpaceX says that progress is being held up by an understaffed FAA-AST.
It will be interesting to see what comes out of the hearing tomorrow. I’d head over to the Capitol to listen, but unfortunately, I have to focus on preparing for the upcoming trial.
NASA’s SLS Transition To Commercial Service Contract
“NASA’s aspirational goal to achieve a cost savings of 50 percent is highly unrealistic.”
You don’t say.
I haven’t read the full report, but there will be nothing surprising in it, and SLS supporters will remain in denial about it.
Europe’s SLS
They’re going to subsidize Ariane 6 to launch Jeff Bezos’s satellites.
Potemkin Village
Thoughts on Russia’s space program.
Elon’s Talk At IAC
Starliner
Chris Davenport writes about Boeing’s woes. I think they’ll throw in the towel eventually, but it’s really hurting their reputation with NASA. When Starship makes Falcon/Dragon obsolete, Starliner will be even more so.
Another CLD Drop Out?
Like Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman appears to be having second thoughts about building a commercial space facility.
[Afternoon update]
Well, if this is true, it confirms that Blue Origin has abandoned Orbital Reef. That was Brent Sherwood’s baby (he’d been thinking about commercial space facilities for decades, since he was at Boeing), so his departure tells the tale.