In his valadictory address on his retirement from AIAA, Bob Dickman is proposing a $2B prize for one.
I think for that amount of money, if it were done privately, you could send a guy (or gal) to go get it.
[Update after lunch]
Clark Lindsey took notes of all of Bob Dickman’s space heresies.
Clark Lindsey is across the room from me, live blogging it.
…versus ACME.
I’m heading off to the Personal Spaceflight Symposium in a few minutes, so probably no blogging until tonight or tomorrow.
…for space tourism. Though he leaves out XCOR, which may beat Virgin Galactic to revenue service.
Felix’s giant leap was a life-long dream.
Not just odd, but rare:
Since Barack Obama took office in 2008, U.S. space policy has shifted in a surprisingly free-market direction. Despite the Obama crowd’s general enthusiasm for big government, where space policy is concerned they’ve taken a decidedly different approach: Instead of building its own rockets as a replacement for the now-retired space shuttle, the federal government is now buying launch services from private companies that are largely free to build their own rockets and choose their own approaches.
There’s nothing new about this idea. The federal government did the same kind of thing in the 1920s with air mail contracts, and that program — along with wind tunnels and other R&D assistance provided by NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics — did a lot to establish U.S. dominance in civil and military aviation in the 20th Century. I wrote articles and position papers advocating such an approach more than two decades ago.
But now that it’s happening under the Obama administration, some conservatives are criticizing them. This led space expert (and former congressional staffer) Jim Muncy to comment “Democrats don’t think that capitalism works within the atmosphere, and Republicans apparently don’t think it works above it.”
But, in fact, capitalism works everywhere.
Indeed. And one of the reasons that we need to get into space as soon as possible is not (as I naively thought over thirty years ago, when I first got interested in this) because we are running out of earthly resources, but because we need a new frontier into which to expand human freedom, lest that, the most vital resource, be lost on humanity’s birth world.
Does anyone know what regulatory hoops Red Bull Stratos had to jump through to do the flight, other than getting the air space from the FSDO?
…is about to jump. He’s almost to altitude. Here’s a live link. He just beat Kittinger’s altitude record on his way to his ultimate altitude.
[Update a while after the successful dive and landing]
Here’s the Gray Lady’s take:
“It was harder than I expected,” Mr. Baumgarter said after returning by helicopter to mission control in Roswell. “Trust me, when you stand up there on top of the world, you become so humble. It’s not about breaking records anymore. It’s not about getting scientific data. It’s all about coming home.”
I’m going to have to add this to my space safety paper. No one in the government was responsible for regulating his safety to jump from a balloon. Why would they do it for him to jump from a rocket?
[Update a few minutes later]
An interesting coincidence (it has to be that, because he wanted to do it earlier this week). The first supersonic flight of a human in a suit took place on the 65th anniversary of the first controlled supersonic flight of an aircraft. And he’s going to do it again with an F-15 to commemorate it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Talk about one giant leap for a man.