RIP.
I haven’t read all his books, but The Rocket Team
Category Archives: Space
The Huntsville Reality-Distortion Zone
This isn’t new, but I don’t think I linked it at the time. Eric Berger reports on the people working SLS:
May turns the cost issue around.
“My question would be, how could we afford not to do this?” May asked. “Great nations explore. Great nations push their boundaries. And this country has continued to the limits of what we know and learn for a generation, and I think we’ve got to continue to explore.”
And in the larger perspective, he argues, SLS does not cost that much. NASA spends about $1.6 billion a year building it, less than 9 percent of the space agency’s total budget, he said, which is itself less than one half of one percent of the federal budget.
“I think it’s a relatively small amount of money to set the leadership for the world in space exploration,” he says.
Count the number of logical fallacies in just those four grafs.
Commercial Spaceflight Federation
It’s undergoing a leadership transition.
Wonder who will replace Alex and Michael LA?
The SpaceX Webcast
Gwynne Shotwell explains.
Bob Farquhar
Monte Morin has a great piece on him and the ISEE-3 reboot.
SpaceX And Orbcomm
The launch delays are costing money. Note this, though:
Commercial satellite fleet operators have said that with a price differential so large — more than 50 percent in this case — they can absorb the cost of even lengthy SpaceX delays without much trouble.
They’re changing the rules.
NASA Mission Planning
If you want to see how ludicrous SLS is, look at this chart.
That is not a spacefaring civilization.
Lunar Gravity
A beautiful map of the field, courtesy of the late GRAIL satellites.
The VA Scandal
It’s the face of government as it actually exists.
Between ObamaCare, the IRS, the VA, and now the EPA, it’s been a bad year for cheerleaders of big government. Which means a good year for liberty. We’ll see what it means in November.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Note Glenn’s quoting of Pournelle’s law of bureaucracies:
…the strongest priority of most bureaucracies is the welfare of the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats it employs, not whatever the bureaucracy is actually supposed to be doing.
I often say that there are a lot of good people at NASA, and there are. But they are trapped in a similar system.
Here Be Dragons
Stewart Money has a book out on the history of SpaceX.