Category Archives: Space

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space

This Won’t Be Good For The Rocket Racing League

31 Comments

Many people have been killed and injured at the Reno Air Races. It was a vintage plane (reportedly a Mustang) and things can go wrong. The rocket racers will be more modern, and presumably safer, but there will be a lot of emotional arguments against allowing a crowd anywhere near them after this.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s some video. Looks to me like it could have been a lot worse — the pilot seems to have tried to minimize the damage. I’d hope do the same in similar circumstances — I suspect it’s a natural reaction. You don’t want to die, but you don’t want to fly into a crowd, either.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

SLS Thoughts

9 Comments

…from the Space Access Society:

NASA HQ just gave in to prolonged Congressional pressure and announced a vehicle configuration for the SLS “Senate Launch System” heavy-lift launch vehicle project. The project will be run under traditional NASA practices; the cost multiplier over doing the job commercially will thus presumably start out on the rough order of fifteen times as expensive.

Note we said, start out. We see indications that the NASA organizational dysfunction that causes that huge cost multiplier is not a constant, but rather has been growing in recent years. We thoroughly expect that SLS project cost will grow and schedule stretch, just as Constellation program costs and schedule did.

We predict that at some point, it will be as obvious that SLS will never fly usefully as it was obvious that Constellation was going nowhere, and SLS too will be expensively cancelled. We hope that SLS will go away before it’s wasted even more scarce dollars (and impacted even more actual useful NASA projects) than Constellation – but we wouldn’t bet on it at this point.

The only hope is that people in Congress who don’t normally pay attention to space will start to notice, given the fiscal issues that the nation faces.

And on CCDev:

Human spaceflight will remain a risky business for a long time no matter who is in charge, the industry and FAA, or NASA. The only way it will become completely safe in our lifetimes is if it is made so expensive that we no longer do it at all. NASA getting their way on changing how CCDev is run may ultimately produce exactly that result.

Indeed.

Political Commentary, Space

Norm Augustine

13 Comments

…weighs in on the monster rocket:

“I would emphasize that I don’t know the background of what has happened. With that caveat, I would observe that even as powerful as the United States Congress is, it can’t legislate engineering. Engineering deals with Mother Nature. And Mother Nature is a very fair, but unforgiving judge. You just cannot legislate engineering.”

Congress doesn’t care. It can legislate jobs, and the engineering is a distant second. I wish that he had been willing to tell it more like it is in the report, but I guess he could not do that, and still get a consensus.