Forty years ago today, President Richard Nixon announced that the nation would build a reusable vehicle, that would be used to fly all of the nation’s payloads into space. It first flew a little less than a decade later, and flew its last flight last summer, after a little over thirty years of operations. We are only starting to recover from the policy disaster.
[Update late morning]
The Space Shuttle, in happier days (flyback booster, no SRBs, no ET).
Clark Lindsey has an overview of the past year.
Short answer: with the exception of Newt, they don’t. On the day of the Iowa cauci, a survey from (Iowa native) Jeff Foust.
…from Leonard David.
I have a preview up over at Popular Mechanics.
…is bright, with the end of the Shuttle.
…is under new management. They want to reenergize it, and start to push the technologies we need to actually develop space. If you still want to contribute and get the deduction for 2011, you have two more days to do it. It’s a worthier cause than ever.
Jeff Foust has to explain this to The New Scientist.
…at The Economist.
This is the first time that I’ve seen the aircraft called a “Stratolaunch.” I wonder if the correspondent knows something we don’t, or is just making a false inference? Also, I’m a little surprised that the editors don’t know the difference between a hanger and a hangar. Unless it’s a British spelling.
A piece of the Meridian satellite hit a street named after cosmonauts. But this is the troubling part:
The loss of the Meridian satellite caps a disastrous 12 months for Russia that has already seen it lose three navigation satellites, an advanced military satellite, a telecommunications satellite, a probe for Mars as well as the Progress.
“This again shows that the (Russian space) industry is in crisis,” admitted Vladimir Popovkin, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, in comments broadcast on state television. “It is deeply unpleasant.”
Acknowledging that the jobs of the Roscosmos leadership were at risk, he added: “I think it is possible that the organisational conclusions will be quite severe, right up to including myself.”
I don’t think that this is a problem that will be solved by changing out personnel. It’s just rearranging deck chairs.