Category Archives: Space

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Space History

Hillary And The NASA Letter

22 Comments

Did she really get a letter saying “no girls allowed”?

There’s no evidence of it, other than her repetition of the story (which doesn’t hold much weight with me, considering the source). As Jim Oberg points out, she certainly could have been part of the first class in 1978 that admitted women, had she applied herself. But her degrees were in political science and law, which certainly weren’t indicative of someone who desired a career in spaceflight. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that she couldn’t handle technical subjects, or math.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Space Science

National Space Policy

17 Comments

A “Values-Based Approach“? The question is — what are the values? I think he’s got it wrong:

Discovery is why a nation should go to space. It is what inspires all of humanity. It has been NASA’s only use of human spaceflight in the post-Apollo era that has returned value that is highly regarded by nearly all people in developed countries with free access to information. The synergy that once existed between human-assisted and robotic space exploration in the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) program is a blueprint for sustained deep space human-assisted exploration that can stoke the nation’s competitiveness in science, technology, and math toward realization of long-term financial and physical security.

That’s an opinion, not a fact. I would expect a scientist to think that science is the reason for human spaceflight, but most people don’t agree with him (or have even given it much thought). If it’s not for the purpose of developing and settling space, the amount of money we’re spending on it is unjustifiable.

Business, Space

Stratolaunch And OSC

32 Comments

Stewart Money has some thoughts on the implications of the culmination of the courtship.

I’ve never really believed that the true goal of this program was a significant cost reduction. I think that the only requirement for which it makes sense is rapid-response single-orbit rendezvous.

But one other point that Stewart doesn’t mention. In the original rollout, they declared that the goal was (at least eventually) human missions. I don’t know how many people are going to be willing to go to orbit on a two-stage solid, particularly given OSC’s record. I know that I wouldn’t be, particularly given the more attractive alternatives (SpaceX/Dragon and perhaps whatever XCOR eventually comes up with). I wonder if this is the final nail in the coffin of the original cover story.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

ITAR Emergency

12 Comments

Yesterday at the #NSRC2013 meeting, Andrew Nelson, COO of XCOR, announced both in his talk and at a noon press conference that there was good news and bad news on the ITAR front. The good news is that communications satellites were moved back from the munitions list to the commercial list, for the first time in about a decade and a half. That’s good news for the US comsat industry, which has lost almost all of its business to other countries since the late nineties when they had been declared munitions.

The bad new is that suborbital vehicles, such as XCOR’s Lynx, have been put on the munitions list, which will make it much harder for the companies making them to export them. Imagine the impact on US exports if Boeing commercial transports were moved to the munitions list…

But the good news is that neither of these decisions are final — there is a public review period of this rule making for the next few weeks. It’s a good opportunity for anyone, not just affected industry, to weigh in, and try to get the latter decision reversed. Jon Goff (who I saw at the conference today) explains the stakes (and the danger):

My concern is that while this NPRM does go a long way towards solve some of the key ITAR problems (particularly related to GEO communications satellites), it creates dangerous precedents in other areas–like forcing manned suborbital and orbital vehicles and satellite servicing robotics explicitly onto the munitions list. My worry is that by relieving the pain of the most vocal, and financially well-established part of the space community (GEO commsats) while leaving the rest of us in the lurch, I worry that this will completely kill any impetus for further repair of ITAR for many years. Basically, this may be the community’s only chance to fix some of this damage, because if we don’t, those of us in the satellite servicing and manned spaceflight industries will be battling ITAR without the help and clout of the commercial communications industry on our side like we have this time. And it would be a travesty if something like Lynx or Dragon (or Sticky Boom™) were continued to be treated as dangerously as say a ballistic missile, a supersonic fighter jet, or a main battle tank. While all of these may be “dual-use” in some fashion, that’s what the EAR was meant to deal with–not ITAR, which was meant to deal specifically for systems whose primary use is military.

Make your own voice heard while there’s still time.