Category Archives: Space

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Next Commercial Crew Battle

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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.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The NRC Report On Human Spaceflight

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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.

Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Peter Glaser, RIP

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I don’t see any details, but apparently he died late last week. I hadn’t seen him in a couple decades, but I know that he’d been ill for quite some time. I imagine many younger people in the space movement haven’t heard of him, but he was one of the luminaries back in the seventies, creating the potential economic driver for O’Neill colonies. Anyway, John Mankins seems to have taken up the baton from him for space solar power.