I mean, how silly is it to think that someone would pay money to see something like this?
Category Archives: Space
The Biggest Earmark
…plods on. My thoughts on last week’s SLS announcement, over at PJM. As usual, the comments are chock full of foolishness.
Looking For Snoopy
The search is on:
In a celestial version of finding a needle in a haystack, Howes and his team are about to embark on the seemingly impossible: finding Snoopy!
After consulting members of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Faulkes Telescope team, who are working with the Space Exploration Engineering Corp and astronomers from the Remanzacco Observatory in Italy as well as schools across the UK, the team are under no illusion of how difficult the task will be as Paul Roche, Director of the Faulkes Telescope Project states: “To paraphrase President Kennedy, we are trying these things ‘not because they are easy but because they are hard’ — this will be a real test for the hardware and the people involved.”
The challenges facing the team are enormous, a fact that isn’t lost on Howes. “The key problem which we are taking on is a lack of solid orbital data since 1969,” he told Discovery News. “We’ve enlisted the help of the Space Exploration Engineering Corp who have calculated orbits for Apollo 13 and working closely with people who were on the Apollo mission team in the era will help us identify search coordinates.”
Here’s an interesting project. Have Paul Allen or someone put up a prize to not just find it, but to retrieve it, and put it on the lunar surface as part of the lunar Apollo historical sites. It’s the kind of thing we’d do if we were really a space-faring nation. And we will never do it with anything like an SLS.
Rocketdyne
Denise Chow has an interview with Jim Maser. He says pretty much what one would expect, and what I would probably say if I had his job.
SLS Thoughts From Jeff Greason
I had a brief email exchange with Jeff Greason, CEO of XCOR Aerospace but also (and more importantly in the context of this post) member of the Augustine panel, to get his thoughts on last week’s SLS announcement.
This Won’t Be Good For The Rocket Racing League
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.
The Upcoming NASA House Hearing
Some thoughts from Tea Party in Space.
Some Commercial Crew Questions For NASA
I have a lengthy post up over at Open Market on today’s developments.
SLS Thoughts
…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.
Norm Augustine
…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.