These people want to set up at the pole. “Looking for alien life” doesn’t seem compatible with settlement, though, unless you don’t care if you contaminate or wipe it out.
Category Archives: Space
Russia’s Space Problems
They think they understand the cause of the Proton failure, but not that of the Progress.
Migrating To Mars
Shouldn’t we solve poverty first?
No.
Corruption In The Russian Space Industry
Bob Zimmerman says that it seems to be returning to the Soviet era. The Russians never learned how markets and competition actually work. As he notes, it’s not clear that this will help with their endemic quality issues.
[Update a few minutes later]
“Mind boggling financial irregularities at Roscosmos.”
Space Tech Expo
I’m heading down to Long Beach. I’ll have my laptop, but blogging may be light.
The House SPACE Act
Some interesting proposed amendments. Dana wants to extend the learning period indefinitely. So do I. Hope this one passes, but it would still have to be reconciled with the Senate’s five years.
SpaceX’s “Aggressive” Schedule
The story at Spaceflightnow.
@MichaelBelfiore A truly "aggressive schedule" would be putting people up next month.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) May 18, 2015
Clearing The Road To Mars
I think that will be the theme of my proposed Kickstarter project.
BTW, if someone wants to volunteer to make a prettier version of this, I won’t complain.
[Update Saturday morning]
Per suggestions in comments, I’ve come up with a new version.
[Sunday-afternoon update]
Thanks to Ed Minchau, this probably conveys it better:
[Bumped]
Another Russian Failure
There is clearly a serious QC problem in the Russian program. A Proton just suffered another Briz-M upper-stage failure, and delivered a Mexican comm sat into Sibero-stationary orbit, which isn’t particularly useful.
Way to tell that "safety is the highest priority" is that Congress trusts Russian rockets which repeatedly fail to American ones that don't.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) May 16, 2015
It's time to get our crews on American rockets. Not in 2017. Now.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) May 16, 2015
I would ride a Dragon tomorrow, even without the Max-Q abort test. Or at least, I'd do that before I'd ride a Soyuz.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) May 16, 2015
And yet, the House appropriators cut the commercial crew budget. Again.
If I were Congress, I’d go to Phil McAlister on Monday and ask him to ask SpaceX what the probability of LOC for Dragon2 is this summer.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) May 16, 2015
The Russian space industry clearly has systemic QC issues. The policy implications for this are profound, but Congress continues to ignore.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) May 16, 2015
[Update a while later]
The Russians have been averaging two-and-a-third launch failures per year for the past six years. Also worth noting that the trend is getting worse. That’s two launch failures in the past three weeks.
[Update a few minutes later]
Whoa! Two failures in one day. Apparently the reboost engines on the Progress currently at ISS failed to fire as well.
[Late-afternoon update]
Here’s a fairly comprehensive story on today’s launch failure from Stephen Clark at Spaceflightnow.
Soyuz
They still don’t know what happened on the Progress failure.
I noted at the time that this could result in a delay of the planned crew rotation on the 26th, and it has. I had a discussion with Jim Oberg on Facebook, and he didn’t think there was sufficient commonality, but he seems more concerned now:
Whatever the conclusions of that report may be, lessons can already be drawn from the accident, Oberg said.
“This and recent similar failures highlight the foolishness of judging mission success reliability based on historical statistics. It’s not just that each launch is a new roll of the dice — it’s a first roll of NEW dice,” he said. “The quality of fabrication and mission preparations reflect the CURRENT human and industrial context, and Russian space industry leaders have been so alarmed by those levels that they’ve repeatedly replaced the Russian Space Agency head with outsiders with nothing to show for it.”
This is a serious issue, and Congress’s response? To cut the funding for a Soyuz replacement.