…has woken up:
SIGNAL RECEIVED #AOS European Space Agency has reestablished contact with @ESA_Rosetta 807 million km from Earth #Rosetta
— ESA Operations (@esaoperations) January 20, 2014
Congratulations to ESA. I think people were getting nervous in mission control.
A good survey at The Economist on the coming tsunami on unskilled labor, for which no government is prepared. They’re right that the most important thing is to reform K through post-grad education, root and branch, but there are a lot of entrenched interests that will continue to fight that.
Looks like they’re in big trouble. It was a business model set up to compete with the Space Shuttle, not a truly reusable vehicle with modern technology. They may continue to get some business for Ariane 5 for political reasons, but I’d say their only chance is back to the drawing board with Ariane 6.
Congratulations to Geoff Landis.
I don’t always agree with Geoff, but it’s great to see him getting recognition for all that he’s done over the years.
Printing aircraft structural parts.
I have some thoughts on the tenth anniversary of the Bush VSE speech, over at USA Today.
Some new pictures, never seen before.
An interesting interview about spaceflight regulation with COO Andrew Nelson.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I should note that much of this is ground that I cover and justify in the book.
Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Bush’s speech, and no one seems to have noticed. Down the memory hole, I guess.
Anyway, I’ll have a piece up sometime today about it at USA Today.
[Mid-morning update]
Heh. Google has picked up this post, and it’s the only one in the top ten that is actually discussing it. I can sort of see why NASA didn’t make a big deal of it, given that most people consider it to have been canceled in 2010. I disagree, though, as you’ll see.