I find it hard to take seriously pronouncements of government plans to do something almost two decades from now. That’s a long time, and a lot of things can happen, both technologically and politically, to either accelerate it or put it off even further. I continue to think that the first mission back to the moon will be private, because unlike the government, there are people in that sector who actually want to do it, and they have the resources.
Category Archives: Space
Extraterrestrial Real Estate
How will Newt’s prospects affect its value?
Space Missions That Never Flew
I probably worked on many of these in my career. They’re the only kind I worked on. And that’s perhaps good, because many of them never should have flown. Not to imply that it was my fault, of course.
The Apollo 11 Landing Site
Jeez, another fake photo. I see they’re just trying to maintain the fiction that humans walked on the moon. I mean, c’mon! You can’t even see stars in that picture. You’d think they’d at least try to photoshop them in.
[Update in the afternoon]
Wow, are my commenters gullible. They really believe this. Come on, people, just look at the lighting and the shadows! Obviously fake, just like the landing itself. And that story about the astronaut punching out that truth teller.
High-Speed Train
All the way to orbit. Now that’s the kind of high-speed train I could get behind. I wonder how they came up with the sixty-billion number? It would be a lot better deal than SLS.
A New Space Billionaire
Elon is one of those rare people who started with a small fortune in space and turned it into a larger one. Historically, it’s been the opposite for most attempts. I guess they’ll have to update this list now.
Space Law And Space Mining
A new book is coming out
The Lunar Seas
Why do they face the earth?
EELV And The Launch-Cost Problem
A very good overview of the current state of affairs by Stewart Money over at The Space Review. It’s a mess, and it’s not going to change until we start to take more COTS-like approaches throughout, not just for NASA but DoD as well.
“Ishtar Lands On Mars”
This is a cruel headline at the Gray Lady.
I haven’t seen the movie (we were actually thinking about seeing it this weekend, but a combination of Patricia being under the weather and sticker shock at the prices for the 3D/Imax kept us away for now. But nowhere in the article does it really say, or at least support the notion, that it’s a bad movie (a Ishtar undeniably was, in addition to being a box-office flop) — it’s a business failure in that they spent too much in making it. The criticism that it “…was a bewildering mash-up, starting during the Civil War and moving to the Old West before leaping to a planet called Barsoom (Mars), home to tusked, four-armed creatures called Tharks,” sounds just like the book to me, which is an SF classic and the inspiration for much of the great SF in the twentieth century (including Star Wars, to the degree that it’s more than space opera). It seems as though perhaps the critics aren’t capable of handling complex story lines. Certainly, John Miller thinks differently.
Anyway, I hope that it does make its money back — I’d like to see it have sequels.
Oh, and speaking of SF, Sarah Hoyt has a review of (occasional commenter) Rick Locke’s new book
[Late Sunday evening update]
Bruce Webster has a more extensive, mixed review.