Looks like their space policy is as much of a politics-driven mess as ours is.
Category Archives: Space
The Legality Of Asteroid Mining
Some thoughts from Michael Listner.
[Update a while later]
The asteroid miners need to get their legal act together.
Improved Lunar Prospecting
Astrobotic has landed a NASA contract for a prospector.
The SLS Problem
Amy Shira Teitel is noticing it as well. It’s too bad that only the space media understand it. I’d sure like to get someone like Sixty Minutes on it.
Asteroid Mining
Does it violate the law?
No, but Tanja Masson-Zwaan has been tweeting that it’s now time to start setting up the “regime” under the Moon Treaty to redistribute the wealth:
Possibly parties to Moon agrmt 79 must start talks about regime governing exploitation, as it seems ‘about to become feasible’ 2/2 #spacelaw
Personally, I think it means that it’s now time to have the Senate actively repudiate it by vote, to indicate that we will have no part of that nonsense.
A Bad Week For Shuttlyndra Supporters
I have some thoughts on recent events over at Open Market.
Tomorrow’s Announcement
Here’s a WSJ piece on it. If they do actually move an asteroid, under current precedent, they’d own it.
I won’t be covering it in real time, because I’ll be at a workshop at JPL giving a talk on propellant depots. Interestingly, Dennis Wingo gives a talk following mine on extraterrestrial resource utilization. It seems like a lot of things are coming together at the same time.
[Evening update]
Sorry, workshop link was wrong. Fixed now, I hope.
Another One-Week Slip
The Dragon flight has been pushed off again, apparently to do some final validation on code. There’s entirely too much political pressure on the successful outcome of this flight.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the official release from SpaceX: “After reviewing our recent progress, it was clear that we needed more time to finish hardware-in-the-loop testing and properly review and follow up on all data. While it is still possible that we could launch on May 3rd, it would be wise to add a few more days of margin in case things take longer than expected. As a result, our launch is likely to be pushed back by one week, pending coordination with NASA.”
Another Unfortunate Document Leak
If you’re an SLS supporter, that is. Spaceref has a NASA document from November that concludes utilizing orbital assembly and fueling for exploration missions adds no significant mission risk. Opponents of this concept have been sowing FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about this ever since it became viewed as a threat to first Ares, and now SLS. It was always a monumentally ignorant argument, that could be made only by someone unfamiliar with basic statistics and space ops (and sadly, it was once even made by the administrator himself), but now NASA has an internal document that shows what nonsense it is (and really, always was). Of course, in defense of Bolden, he knew what his audience wanted to hear.