An apparently before-coffee tweet from Wayne Hale this morning kicked off a minor exchange that reminded me of this back and forth I had with Homer Hickam at the LA Times on the fiftieth anniversary, six years ago. I think it holds up pretty well.
Category Archives: Space
Rebooting Star Trek For The Small Screen
A Deadly Accident In Space
There will be one:
You might depart the theater after Gravity with mixed emotions about going to space yourself. Cuaron’s tracking shots and sweeping vistas of the blue marble below evoke a sort of spiritual response, especially in the spaces between suspense when the movie gets quiet. Of course, the Bullock and Clooney spend much of the film spinning and flailing in mortal danger, dodging hunks of metal that become ballistic missiles at orbital speed. Jones sees Gravity as appearing amid a rising wave of interest in space brought on by the emerging private space industry, and that’s a hopeful trend. But humanity has to be realistic about risk assessment, and ready for the high drama of trying to rescue space travelers after a disaster in orbit. Perhaps when space travel becomes common, and not simply the domain of professional astronauts, we’ll treat space disasters like plane crashes—tragedies that can be made extremely uncommon, but never eliminated. And that will be a good thing.
Yes. That’s the fundamental premise of my book.
Houston, We Have A Market
Greg Autry writes about the success of COTS:
When it comes to the International Space Station resupply business, these firms are competing with governmental operations from Russia and Japan. Congressional defenders of the old-school government-operated space service are curiously disdainful of American entrepreneurship and eagerly point out how these foreign solutions can fill our needs while we compel NASA to build a Space Shuttle replacement. What these critics miss, however, is that every dollar going to one of our domestic firms stays in the U.S., creates serious jobs, and makes the most of America’s entrepreneurial advantages. Funding this investment in America’s future follows in the steps of successful Federal investment in jumpstarting industries that have included the transcontinental railroad, the Internet, and GPS. Such visionary investments have produced big economic returns that increased government revenues for decades.
They don’t care. It’s all about the pork.
Gravity
Peter Suderman raves about it:
Director Alfonso Cuaron’s ultra-realistic tale of disaster and survival in near-Earth orbit is easily the best movie about space exploration since “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It’s also the most spectacular and awe-inspiring cinematic experience in recent memory.
That’s pretty high praise.
Also, an interview with Sandra Bullock by Rob Pearlman.
UP Aerospace
…has had their upcoming launch delayed as a result of the government shut down.
Freeing Our Minds For Space Missions
Bob Clark has some politically incorrect thoughts on how to get back to the moon.
Tom Clancy, RIP
He was an early New Space investor, in Rotary Rocket. Stephen Green has some thoughts.
The SpaceX “Second-Stage Explosion”
The company says it didn’t happen.
Super Sunday For Commercial Spaceflight
My piece on Orbital’s, SpaceX’s and ILS’s trifecta is up now at PJMedia.