The Telegraph is reporting that Iran attempted to launch a monkey into space, and failed.
Why? Frankly I haven’t taken their space program seriously, other than as front for missile development, so I wonder what they have in mind?
[Via Marcia Smith]
Category Archives: Space
The End Of The Future
I missed this earlier, but last week Peter Thiel had a long and pessimistic essay on the stalling of American innovation.
Putting the SLS On Hold
…is not “putting human spaceflight on hold.”
The SLS is in fact the antipathy, the nemesis of human spaceflight for NASA.
Frankly, I would cancel both Webb and SLS, and rethink how to do Webb with a bigger launcher, such as Falcon Heavy.
It’s The Space Settlement, Stupid
I have some Columbus Day thoughts this morning over at Pajamas Media.
NASA’s Insane Risk Aversion
My latest rant on the ISS situation, over at Open Market.
A Tale Of Two Rockets
Stewart Money has some thoughts on SpaceX’s recent announcement:
The initial success of the Falcon 9 and the introduction of the Falcon Heavy are revolutionary enough. If over the coming years, however, SpaceX is able to successfully transition the Falcon to a fully reusable launch vehicle, then the stage on which the entire arena of space exploration is cast would be radically redrawn. Simply put, with the advent of a fully reusable Falcon series of rockets, a heretofore unforeseen level of space exploration becomes not simply more affordable, but in all likelihood, unavoidable. Once a permanent human presence on Mars is within practical reach, failure to pursue it, many will argue, becomes a moral transgression against humanity itself. To be sure, Musk’s vision of thousands of émigrés to a new world will have to wait on new, even larger rockets, but his company has a plan for that as well, beginning with a large staged combustion engine it wants to begin building next year.
While “within reach” does not mean “within grasp”, it certainly bears serious consideration from a space establishment about to consume the better part of a decade and plow, at an absolute minimum, the equivalent cost of 144 Falcon Heavy flights at 53 tons each into a single 70-ton launch by 2017. With a projected launch rate of no more than once per year, and the 130-ton super-heavy version of the SLS expected no earlier than 2032 and sporting a price tag almost certain to exceed $40 billion, it is not a stretch to believe that SpaceX has a better chance of achieving reusability with the Falcon than the Senate has of achieving orbit with the heavy version of its “monster” rocket.
Of course, they could both fail (it’s likely in the Senate’s case), but as he points out, even without reusability, SpaceX will be commercially dominant.
She Knew The Job Was Dangerous When She Took It
Sorry, but I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this woman:
…the situation has pitted Ms. Douceur and her family against Raytheon Polar Services, which manages the station through a contract with the National Science Foundation. Both Raytheon and the science foundation say that it would be too dangerous to send a rescue plane to the South Pole now and that Ms. Douceur’s condition is not life-threatening.
“During the winter period, extremely cold temperatures and high winds make an extraction dangerous for all involved, passengers as well as crew,” said Jon Kasle, a Raytheon spokesman, “and such an extraction is considered only in life-threatening conditions.”
So, here’s my question. NASA was recently considering abandoning the International Space Station because they didn’t have a reliable lifeboat to extract astronauts in an emergency. But Amundsen-Scott is inaccessible for half of the year, every year, and yet people winter over there. Why isn’t the NSF spending billions to develop an Emergency Crew Extraction Vehicle for the south pole? Or, why are astronauts’ lives worth so much more than those of Antarctic researchers? Or is the research they’re doing on ISS worth so little that they’re unwilling to risk lives on it?
This to me is a perfect example of the irrationality of our space policy.
Virgin Galactic’s Space Pilot
…has a fear of heights.
Hey, I can sympathize.
You Know What This Country Doesn’t Need?
An escalation of the War on (Some) Drugs.
Between this and the NASA IG thing, Lamar Smith is looking more and more like a moron.
That Bienhoff Paper
I’ve got the presentation that Dallas Bienhoff gave in Long Beach last week that implicitly demonstrated the lack of need for a heavy lifter.
Note the element weights on page 6. The heaviest item is the depot at twenty tons, but that could go up in three flights. After that is the lander, at twelve tons. That sets the minimum throw weight for the launcher. It’s about ten percent of the eventual capability of the SLS.
[Update a few minutes later]
What’s funny is that the paper doesn’t just bury the lede — it leaves it out entirely. Note that nowhere in it, including the final chart describing the benefits quantitatively, does the phrase “heavy lift” appear. Because Boeing is not allowed to actually say that heavy-lift isn’t needed, even if that’s what their own analysis shows.