Some reflections, from Joel Achenbach.
Category Archives: Space
Space Solar Power
whatever you think of its prospects, low-cost launch will certainly improve them.
[Afternoon update]
Space solar power, visualized.
News On The Asteroid Bombardment
The B612 Foundation is going to have a press conference at the Seattle Museum of Flight at 2:30 EDT. It will be live streamed.
Earth II?
My thoughts on the latest discovery from the Kepler data, over at PJMedia.
Earth-Like Planets
by a researcher who says that planets that can accommodate LAWKI aren’t as common as some are saying.Base Camps
Derek Webber writes that in order to advance into the solar system NASA needs to take some lessons from Everest climbers.
Not to mention be willing to lose folks occasionally.
[Update a few minutes later]
Jeff Foust notes that there seems to be an emerging consensus that Mars is the goal, though none on how to do it.
Meanwhile, John Strickland says we need an integrated approach, with robots and humans. to get to Mars. He seems to be focusing on Mars surface water, though. I think we need to trade that with manufacturing propellants at Phobos or Deimos.
My take, as always, is that destinations are less important than capabilities. Put an off-planet space-transportation infrastructure in place, and the entire solar system (including Europa and Enceladus) is opened up to us. But Congress would rather build big rockets.
Big Asteroids Hit Us
…a lot more often than we’ve previously believed. I’m not sure, but I think that one of the reasons Ed Lu wrote the foreword to my book is that he shares my concern that our risk aversion will prevent us from mitigating the real risks.
Happy Berth Day To Dragon
It was launched on Good Friday, and now the Dragon has berthed with the ISS early in the morning on Easter Sunday, over the region of the world in which Christ was reportedly born, died, and resurrected. That wasn’t planned, though. They’d have preferred to have it up weeks earlier.
Meanwhile, no word from SpaceX about recovering the first stage. I’m going to interpret that as bad news, for now.
SpaceX Flight
Looks like another perfect flight of the Falcon 9 and Dragon. Press conference is scheduled at 1700 EDT, when they’ll presumably tell us how the recovery attempt went. They did report a successful entry burn.
[Update about 5 PM PDT]
Elon has some news:
Data upload from tracking plane shows landing in Atlantic was good! Several boats enroute through heavy seas.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2014
[Another update about twenty minutes later]
Flight computers continued transmitting for 8 seconds after reaching the water. Stopped when booster went horizontal.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2014
[Update an hour or so later]
I should add that while this is great news, it will still be disappointing if the rough seas prevent recovery, or break up the vehicle, because they’ll lose data they’d like to have to see how the stage handled the flight. That’s critical to understanding turnaround. The good news is that they’ll be able to do this every flight (that doesn’t need a lot of performance, like their earlier GEO missions) to get it right, and finally start to understand that.
Mojave Experimental Fly-In
This looks like it might be interesting. We may go up for it tomorrow, and hopefully check in with XCOR for a progress report. They got their cockpit a few days ago, and I think that was the long pole in starting to assemble the Lynx.