Shenzhou 9 seems to have had a minor mishap on its return to terra firma.
Category Archives: Space
Perspective
Did the nation invest a hundred billion dollars in Colorado Springs? What will the effect be on foreign policy if it burns? Shouldn’t safety be the highest priority for our firefighters? Don’t their lives have infinite value? Why are we risking their lives in fighting this fire?
Finally, which would you rather do, and feel it more worth the fight in terms of your risk of life? Fight this fire, or ride a Dragon to the space station without a launch abort system?
Just asking.
Who Do You Call?
Asking the important questions about an extraterrestrial invasion, over at National Geographic.
A Commercial Space Powerhouse
MDA has purchased Space Systems Loral.
I think this means that the next generation of high-power comsats will be serviceable.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the press release from Loral.
[Update a while later]
Related thoughts from Clark Lindsey.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s more from Space News, who also thinks it’s about servicing satellites.
Ric Locke
Terrible news. Go hit his tip jar if you have anything to spare, and help him finish the book.
NASA’s Strategic Direction
Check out the group of people determining it at the National Academies.
There are two problems, and they’re old ones. First is the lack of commercial industry participation. They’ve added former astronaut Bob Crippen who’s now at ATK, but that hardly counts. But the more fundamental issue (and reason for the first problem) is the assumption that NASA’s strategic direction should be established by the National Academies, with its own inherent assumption that it is about science and technology development, and not opening a frontier. This in turn may be another remnant of the agency’s beginning in the depth of the Cold War and the Space Act. But somehow, we can never have a serious national discussion about why we spend billions of dollars on human spaceflight, which will be necessary to get a new direction. And part of that discussion should be NASA’s role in the twenty-first century, and what other entities may be required as well.
Boeing’s Human Spaceflight Experience
In an LA Times interview with Ed Mango, he repeats a common fallacy in the aerospace industry:
Boeing has their design, which is also a capsule-type design, and is trying to work out the same kind of issues that Dragon has. The only difference is that they haven’t flown their stuff yet. But Boeing has 50 years of human spaceflight already. They have all the people who did Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the space shuttle. They have all the trips and falls that have been made over those 50 years.
As I’ve said for years, companies don’t have experience — people do (this is a fallacy that government evaluators subscribe to, because every proposal we put in to NASA or the Air Force always included the past experience of the organization, regardless of whether or not the people who would be actually working it had such experience). Most of the people who actually worked on the development of those programs are retired or dead. At this point, I would say that when it comes to building reliable cost-effective space hardware, SpaceX has the best team in the country, with the most recent experience (though they got help from some key people at NASA, such as John Muratore). That is not to say that the people working CST at Boeing aren’t good, but it’s really meaningless to tout their historical experience as having any relevance to the current team.
Time To Get Serious About Space
I have more thoughts on the apparently infinite value of an astronaut’s life, over at PJMedia.
Space Shuttle And The New Pioneers
Another space Kickstarter project, with a week to go.
What Does A Moon Base Cost?
In reading this article about whether or not there’s money to be made on the moon, I came across this link, with an estimate from about three years ago of the cost of a lunar base.
The numbers seem way high to me, but of course, they’re based on Constellation. But I can never get over the cost estimate for Altair. Twelve billion dollars to develop a lander? How can that possibly be? The only way I can think that they came up with that is to look at the LEM costs in the sixties, and scale them up in both size and current-year dollars. Which is a completely useless way to do it.