Category Archives: Space

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Atlas Empire Strikes Back

4 Comments

With FUD:

Unlike Vulcan, which is still a paper rocket, and Falcon 9, which has yet to fly defense missions, Atlas V has 53 successful missions under its belt. This long history of reliability will be an attractive selling point for the government customer, which is intolerant of launch risk, especially when lofting payloads sometimes costing as much as $1 billion.

Furthermore, Atlas V has earned a reputation of being on time, a key requirement for some missions with very tight launch windows. Some government officials are concerned SpaceX has not consistently performed in optimal launch windows.

“Compared to starting with a clean-sheet launch system, upgraded launch pad and clean sheet engine, we believe that re-engining the Atlas V is the lowest cost, risk and schedule solution to getting the U.S. off of dependence on Russian engines,” King tells Aviation Week in an email. He notes that the company has been under contract to NASA for the past two and a half years developing and demonstrating kerosene-powered booster stages and engines. This work will provide lessons on the Atlas V re-engining project.

Here’s their problem, though:

Aerojet Rocketdyne officials have been openly frustrated by slow progress by the Air Force in crafting a strategy for a propulsion program. A traditional Pentagon contractor with less access to private funding, Aerojet Rocketdyne has been lobbying hard for government money to augment its work on the engine while propulsion for Falcon variants and the Vulcan are privately funded.

This means the Aerojet/Dynetics/Schafer team will likely rely on a more traditional government funding model to bring their design to fruition while ULA and SpaceX tap private cash at a time when defense spending is under pressure.

Led by the old guard of Griffin and King, it’s a thrashing dinosaur.

Here’s more at Reuters.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The First Woman To Be Raped In Space

16 Comments

…has already been born.

As Glenn notes, this seems to be gender feminism’s major contribution to spaceflight.

I ruffled some feathers this weekend at Space Access by having the temerity to point out that there will be some people who will oppose our expansion into space, because they don’t trust us to do it “right,” and with “social justice.” So much will they oppose it that they may even get violent about it. They do, after all, call themselves “warriors,” and they use a lot of eliminationist rhetoric, like “Smash patriarchy.” I got an email or two about it.

My quick take: Saying that I am “picking a fight” with these people is like saying that the New York Times was picking a fight with the Japanese by reporting that they had bombed Pearl Harbor. As I noted in my talk, they went after the gamers, and the SF community. They’re already on their way to go after the space settlers, as the above linked piece indicates.

I’ll have a longer take at Ricochet or PJMedia.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sort of related: Why Joss Whedon left Twitter.

[Update a while later]

Here’s one hot off the press (Monday) from D. N. Lee (the Scientific American blogger whose tweet I highlighted in my talk). This is much more mild than the tweet, but it gives you an idea of what we’re up against.

Space, Technology and Society

Regenerative Life Support

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Listening to an interesting presentation on challenges of closing the cycle on ISS, particularly water. Not seeing any real surprises, but I think that this will be a very useful result of having the station for improving systems. They’re learning about life of various system elements, and getting some surprises, with some failure years before expected, and some lasting much longer.