Linda Billings hates the thought of it.
Category Archives: Space
Mojave
Alan Boyle has a longish piece on what the place is all about.
Cis-Lunar Space
I think that to the degree people think of that phrase at all, they assume it’s in the vicinity of the earth-moon system, but technically, of the Lagrange points, only L-1 is part of it. L-2 is in trans-lunar space, and I’m not sure how you’d characterize Ls 3, 4 and 5. The thought was prompted by this post on transgendered and cisgendered people.
Is NASA Going Extinct?
The biggest problem with this piece (by a professor of journalism) is its fundamental false premise — that the purpose of human spaceflight is science.
Cost Versus Safety
@Jeff_Foust has a roundup of the current discussion, including last week’s panel at the conference.
We’re Number 53,000!
[Sunday morning update]
We’re up within 35,000 today, and there are three new (all five-star) reviews.
I think this is the highest ranking the book has ever had on Amazon. Sales must have picked up this week (I hawked it quite a bit while in DC, both at the conference and with a couple think tanks — I’ll probably be doing a ReasonTV interview in the next couple weeks).
Also, it’s once again number one in the category “Aviation and Space Law.” Plus, it’s selling for full retail, which I’d assume means that Amazon thinks there’s sufficient demand for it that they don’t have to discount (not that I’ve given them a lot of room to do so, but they have had it down a buck or so in the past).
[Update a while later]
OK, based on numbers at the printer, it looks like I sold 27 books last week. Compare that to 18 for the entire month of January. Hopefully those will continue to build with more publicity, and good reviews at Amazon (six right now, all five star).
[Bumped]
Gwynne Shotwell
Am interesting interview over at Forbes.
The Space Transportation Conference
Marcia Smith has a good description of the highlights, including the discussion on space safety on Tuesday afternoon, at which I felt like the elephant in the room that no one talked about. It was an excellent conference.
Grounding Private Space
Three ways it could happen through red tape.
Congress Versus Commercial Space
Bob Zimmerman says that the former “hovers over [the latter] like a vulture.”
While there are no doubt many in Congress with that attitude, I was actually encouraged by Chairman Palazzo’s remarks this morning at the Space Transportation Conference, in which he expressed support for an extension of the “moratorium” because it will “stifle innovation” to overregulate at this point. (Note: At the hearing yesterday, he used the phrase “learning period,” as industry does. It’s possible he used the “m” word because he was reading from notes put together by staffer that hadn’t gotten the memo.)