No, the flight of Orion is not going to inspire us in space:
Just how an empty Orion capsule designed to make work for displaced Shuttle employees doing two orbits before it splashes down into the Pacific Ocean is going to inspire taxpayers to spend hundreds of billions on Mars escapes me.
Stop. Just stop. Don’t be an Apollo cargo cultist.
Taking a red eye to West Palm Beach tonight, for a week and a half of misery. I’ll have a laptop, but not sure when I’ll check in again. There’s a possibility we’ll drive up to the Cape for the SpaceX launch on Tuesday, but it’s at a gruesome hour: 1:15 AM.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Blogging will be light this week. We’re prepping a house to get it on the market.
Glad I didn’t attempt to watch the successful launch. It would have been an all nighter, with the delay.
Another new smallsat launch venture, based in Auckland.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here‘s Jeff Foust’s take on it.
A brief history of SLS, up to this week.
This looks too good to be true, and it probably is, but it’s worth pursuing.
And since when is thrust rated in “grams”?
Eric Stallmer has been hired to replace Michael Lopez-Alegria. Seems like a good pick.
No, it’s probably not caused by sexism.
This seems sort of useful for space settlement.