Space News says kill this bill.
It’s a very foolish (and probably unconstitutional) piece of legislation, whose only purpose is to protect high-cost pork projects that hold us back from space accomplishment.
Category Archives: Space
The Next SpaceX Launch
…is scheduled for about an hour from now. Watch it here.
[Update about 1:29 PST]
The webcast has started.
The Key To Reusable Launch
To me, the biggest advantage to this approach (as with Stratolaunch) is single-orbit rendezvous.
A Space-Exploration Program
As I point out in the book, one of the reasons space policy is such a mess is because we don’t have a national consensus on that question.
Commercial Crew
It needs maximum support, and should be a priority over SLS (which shouldn’t exist at all).
Space Mining
A good overview of the companies going after lunar and asteroidal resources. Expect to hear a lot more nonsense like this as the industry evolves, though:
Space exploration researcher Alice Gorman is based at Flinders University, Australia, and is an internationally recognised leader in the emerging field of space archaeology. Passionate about space, she believes both industry and academia underestimate the emotional investment people have in the night sky.
‘There is the view that it’s just unethical to destroy another celestial body… but then [people] also question if it is right for a profit-making company to make massive profits from this,’ she says. ‘Nobody doubts the investment will be monumental and some argue that those willing to take these risks deserve all the rewards as this isn’t for the faint-hearted.’
But, as Gorman also highlights, the world already has unequal distributions of wealth and some wonder if space-based industries could drive these disparities further apart. As she asks, could Earth one day comprise a terrestrial-based underclass looking up at the off-world wealthy.
We wasted six bucks Saturday night to watch Elysium on pay per view. It’s based on the same stupid socialistic fantasy premise.
Books
My radio silence today was due to the fact that I spent most of it getting books in the mail. Almost everyone who gets a signed book, who has given me shipping information, should be getting one soon. Still have to get out unsigned ones, but that will be easier, and will probably happen Monday, as will the furriners (including Canucks). Any stragglers are local people (e.g., Mojave) who will be getting theirs in person next week some time.
The Diane Rehm Space Discussion
Marcia Smith has a good summary. This amused me:
Rehm exclaimed that she didn’t understand what Gold meant because the “language you’re using” sounds “proprietary” and one cannot own the Moon. Gold began answering, but apparently the show ran out of time for that segment (music began playing) and he was not able to fully respond. Rehm said it “sounds confusing to me,” and cut him off.
Diane Rehm always strikes me as someone who is easily confused. I’ve never understood her popularity, except that a lot of Beltway denizens share her propensity for confusion.
[Update a while later]
Monumental willful ignorance from Mark Whittington:
The cancellation of the SLS, unlikely in the current political climate, would mean the end of any hope of sending American astronauts beyond low Earth orbit for the foreseeable future.
If you can’t see beyond the next five years, perhaps. It’s the lack of propellant storage and transfer technologies, and landers, that is keeping bound to LEO, not lack of heavy life. Money wasted on SLS is trapping us there.
Expect him to show up shortly with his standard, foolish, “But you provide no alternative,” despite the fact that he’s been shown alternatives many times. We can explain it to you, Mark, but we can’t understand it for you.
Michael Belfiore’s Review
He’s got (rave) a review of the book, over at his web site.
Parachutes
Why commercial jetliners don’t have them.
I discuss this in the book. Many safety measures proposed for new space vehicles may be similarly pointless. Certainly the Shuttle “rescue pole” was. It was just for PR.