I’d almost forgotten that today is the anniversary of Sputnik.
Here’s a post from the fiftieth anniversary, with links galore, and here’s what I wrote last year.
Note that today is also the eighth anniversary of the winning of the X-Prize. If Virgin Galactic hadn’t made so many bad decisions in the aftermath of that event, they’d probably be flying passengers by now.
…with no gate. As usual, NASA is constrained by politics from making sensible technical decisions.
From Popular Mechanics. He’s not the only one.
I had an invitation to the award dinner, but unfortunately, a trip to the Big Apple isn’t in my budget right now.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sorry, link is fixed.
I’ll be talking to David Livingston this afternoon at 2 PM PDT about my space safety project, which seems to be turning into a small book, that I hope to publish this month.
[Update mid-afternoon]
I’ll be on in ten minutes or so.
[Bumped]
[Early evening update]
Well, that was in interesting discussion. It went on for a couple hours. The most important thing to me was that David brought up one of the very best case studies for my thesis — the Hubble decision. I’m going to incorporate it into the book (yes, I’ve decided to just call it a book). This is partly just a reminder for me to do so…
[Evening update]
It’s probably worth repeating this video from the space teddy bears. Or dogs. Or whatever.
What does Battlestar Galactica get right?
[Update a couple minutes later]
I liked this:
FP: And the worst shows for realistic space warfare?
CW: There are so many that are so bad. Star Wars is probably the worst.
I know that’s heresy for a certain generation.
…and her space fantasy.
Paul Spudis has a new blog.
This isn’t exactly a new question. The Space Studies Institute has been thinking about it for a third of a century. And of course, one always finds the inevitable “it’s obvious that the first colony should be on Mars” comment.
…to lighting up the moon.
One quibble. If you really bought that many one-watt green lasers, I’m sure that you’d get the price well below $300.
Will it be bad for SpaceX?
The problem with his analysis is that (as Clark Lindsey notes in comments) he assumes no elasticity of demand with the lower prices. I think he’s wrong.