No, Barack Obama is not the first president to terminate America’s ability to put people into space. I would also note that while Nixon generally gets the blame, the decision to end Apollo was actually made in the Johnson administration.
Category Archives: Space
“We Need NASA To Change Commercial Crew Contracts”
Joe Pappalardo got some comments from Elon yesterday, after the hearing.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s Frank Morring’s report on yesterday’s hearing.
Commercial Crew Hearing
Joe Pappalardo from Pop Mechanics is live tweeting it. So is Marcia Smith.
[Noon EDT update]
Clark Lindsey has compiled a lot of the tweets.
Tomorrow’s Commercial Crew Hearings
What’s So Great About Earth?
Some thoughts on what might motivate ET to attack us.
More Propellant Depot Commentary
Doug Mohney weighs in (though he misspells Keith Cowing’s name — a common error). The SLS is fiscally insane.
For Aspiring Space Engineers
…some advice.
A Hypernova?
Eta Carinae could kill us all next year. I hate when that happens:
Mario Livio, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland warns that Eta Carinae could be “seen to explode at any time.” [BBC News]
Esteemed NASA scientist Stefan Immler at the Goddard Space Flight Center thinks Eta Carinae could very well explode in our lifetime, or even in the next few years.
Well, maybe Earth has a little more time, right? Well, maybe not.
Some astrophysicists at the European Space Agency have suggested it’s quite possible, based on observational analysis, that the killer star has already gone hypernova thousands of years ago and the speeding death rays could inundate Earth in as little as a year.
How exciting. Of course, that something is “possible” is not to say that it is likely. The problem with this kind of event is that getting off the planet is no protection, per se, though if we were spacefaring, we could at least have shelters ready, and put out pickets in the outer solar system to give us some warning, since there’s some evidence that gamma rays are subluminal.
Propellant Depots Going Mainstream
Ken Chang has an article about them in the New York Times. And over at The Space Review today, Andrew Gasser of Tea Party in Space defends them from the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt being sown by the defenders of the status quo.
Pay The Americans Now, Or Pay The Russians Later
I have a post up at Open Market about the penny-wise-pound-foolishness of Congress with Commercial Crew.