Jeff Foust reports on the NRC report, and reactions to it.
As I tweeted last week, as both a space enthusiast and a taxpayer, I don’t want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to send a few civil servants to Mars decades from now. Call me completely uninspired.
Why it’s self defeating.
At best, it’s a delaying tactic.
[Update a while later, about an hour before my appearance on The Space Show]
Sam’s thesis is a matter of some dispute. I suspect it will be addressed in comments over there.
I’ll be on this afternoon from 2-3:30 PM PDT, to discuss the book in the context of current events with Russia, commercial crew and congress.
Eric Berger has the latest on the attempt to cripple commercial crew.
[Update a few minuts later]
Florida Today has the story as well.
Ed Driscoll interviewed me the other day. The podcast and a transcript are up now.
OK, we lost the fight in committee, but now the bill goes to the full Senate. As noted here, individual senators actually can throw a wrench in the works, because there is a preference for unanimous consent. So now you don’t have to have a senator on the committee to fight the good fight — anyone with a senator or two (that is, any USian voter) can call one or both of them and try to fix this before the floor vote.
Is this the future?
Who knows?
Go read this action alert, and call your senator if they’re on the appropriations committee.
Well, it’s out, and depressingly familiar. There seems to have been very little imagination, and its authors seems stuck in the sixties. It’s basically Apollo to Mars.
Joel Achenbach has the story. I’m glad that at least they’re pointing out the safety issues with flying SLS so rarely, but a bolder report would have discussed what a disaster the program will be cost wise. I’ll have to read the report to see if they addressed the real issue, which is launch costs, but since they seemed to get all their input from NASA, I suspect that it will be completely ignored.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here‘s Eric Berger’s take.
She’s discussing the future of American launch right now, live.