Jon Goff has some thoughts.
I’d note, though, that Bigelow prefers the adjective “expandable,” rather than “inflatable.”
Category Archives: Space
Low-Cost Propellant
IKEA
A trailer for what looks to be a very frightening movie.
No, Veronique
The moon is not Antarctica.
Many of the “rocks have rights” crowd would like it to be, though. One of the problems with the Outer Space Treaty was that it was modeled on the Antarctic Treaty.
[Update a few minutes later]
Oh, Paul, please:
With launch costs of thousands of dollars per pound (and unlikely to come down significantly for the foreseeable future)
They are likely to come down to hundreds, or tens of dollars per pound within a decade, now that we have some actual competition and innovation happening in the industry.
Captain Video
The latest installment. Lileks watches so you don’t have to. Also brings the funny.
My Book Interview
It’s available on Youtube now.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here’s one of the brilliant comments over there:
he just sounds like a typical neo con who would prefer to send cheap chinese labor into space rather than waste money on returning white men to their families.
same type who wants more young americans to die for israel.
This is a sign of a broken brain.
BTW, fun fact. That picture of the book? It’s virtual, created by PJTV. It doesn’t yet exist in physical form, but it should next week, and it should look exactly like that.
My Interview With Glenn Reynolds
In which I talk about the book, which should be for sale in the next week or so (I’ve been having a nightmare experience with the printer, which I hope is almost behind me).
Hazardous Asteroids
…may be more common than we thought:
The scientific orthodoxy said that a Chelyabinsk-size event ought to happen every 140 years or so, but Brown saw several such events in the historical record.
Famously, a large object exploded over the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908. But there have been less-heralded impacts, including one on Aug. 3, 1963, when an asteroid created a powerful airburst off the coast of South Africa.
“Any one of these taken separately I think you can dismiss as a one-off. But now when we look at it as a whole, over a hundred years, we see these large impactors more frequently than we would expect,” said Brown, whose paper appeared in Nature.
But our response, and actions to become a space-faring civilization, remains pathetic.
How Safe Should A Frontier Be?
I have a piece up on that subject over at Reason. It’s a reprise of some of the arguments I make in the book, which I now expect to be available next week (my printer screwed up). I’d hoped to have them available for SpaceUp LA this weekend, but that’s not going to happen.
The Inner Solar System
Rick Boozer (who has a book out
Meanwhile, Bob Crippen is spinning fairy tales about SLS:
The combination of SLS and Orion will effectively establish a highway to the entire solar system.
It will be obsolete before it flies.
The Dream Chaser Test
A report from Joel Achenbach, who’s doing a space project for the WaPo.
As I note on Twitter, Sirangelo’s comments aren’t spinning a failure. The vehicle met its test objectives, other than the ability to get it back, sans a lot of bondo. But as with SpaceX’s loss of their first stage in the ocean, they got the data they needed to move forward. And at least they’re flying and testing, something that NASA has been too risk averse to do of late.