My Popular Mechanics piece on Friday’s flight is up.
Category Archives: Space
Commercial, One For One
Government, Oh For Two:
A half-Russian, half-Korean rocket likely exploded a few minutes after liftoff Thursday, dealing a second blow the South Korea’s $400 million program to develop its own satellite launcher.
They spent almost as much on this as SpaceX has in their entire company history, to develop two rockets and a capsule, not to mention manufacturing and test facilities, and launch infrastructure.
There’s an idiot commenter (well, there are a lot, actually) over at Space Politics who keeps repeating the mantra, “There is no cheap.” Well, maybe not, but there does seem to be inexpensive and affordable, as long as a government isn’t intimately involved.
Legal Games
There’s been a lot of whining from the Ares huggers about how NASA is “violating the law,” by shutting down Constellation in the face of the appropriations language. Now, I think that continuing Constellation is horrible policy, both from the standpoint of taxpayers and space enthusiasts, but I haven’t had any strong sense of or opinions on the legality of continuing it or not, and was sort of resigned to it continuing to zombie into next year until we finally get some sort of actual appropriations bill (as opposed to a continuing resolution. But now, it turns out that actually, Mike Griffin was violating the Anti-Deficiency Act, a much older (over a century, I think) law that requires that funds be available for contract termination. Jim Muncy explains in comments over at NASA Watch. I’m pulling it up to the front page here.
[Update a few minutes later[
Jeff Foust has more at Space Politics (including another Muncy comment). But follow over the fold for Jim’s thoughts:
Carnival Of Space
I often don’t link to these, because I often find them to be carnivals of space science and astronomy, but Ken Murphy has a very linky special edition from the recent ISDC, including a budding young talent.
You First, Pete
Lileks, on Peter Singer and other misanthropes.
I don’t believe that there’s any inherent good in having people on earth. We’re fond of ourselves, but that’s about it.
Uh huh. Well, here’s a question I find more interesting than Singer’s threnodies: if there was no sentient life on Earth, would Nature still be beautiful? Everyone loves the beauty of Nature, after all. Everyone agrees it’s a Good and Wonderful Thing, although some think some spiritual experience can be distilled from its contemplation. I don’t – I sense the inconceivable depths of time, the wonders of natural systems, and find aesthetic pleasures if they mesh with my own preferences, i.e., I like the colors of a sunset, but do not like the face of a spider. There is no moral component to beauty, no ethics in a great forest. I like them, but they are not my Brother or Mother anymore than the bear considers me a distant relative. I prefer a certain amount of distance from Nature, as in the form of walls and roofs and clothing and medicine and so on, and if this makes our lives “disconnected” from Nature, then talk to the beaver, who gnaws down trees and dams streams. But we cannot disconnect with Nature; we’re part of it. We’re just the clever part that figured out how to arm ourselves against its indifference.
We pay Nature the compliment of being Beautiful, but that’s a hard-fought luxury. Nature requires the application of judgment to be beautiful. It requires people.
That’s just as true off planet as on.
The New Frontier
Orphans Of Apollo had its official LA premier down in San Pedro Friday night, and Rick Tumlinson gave an impromptu talk.
Stupid Commentary On Bigelow
Was this supposed to make any sense?
Robert T. Bigelow, of Bigelow Aerospace and the Budget motel chain, believes he can build the space stations, and others will be able to fly paying customers, including NASA astronauts, into orbit—all for less money than NASA and other government space agencies currently pay to transport and host spacemen and spacewomen.
Truthdig is not entirely convinced this is such a good idea. In a year of oil spills, runaway Toyotas and toxic happy meals, we’re not so sure about turning over exploration of the final frontier—and transportation of our astronauts—to private profiteers.
Apparently the word “profit” remains a dirty word to some. Which is why it continues to amaze that this new policy came out of the Obama administration.
And of course, we know how scrupulous that “non-profit,” NASA is about flight safety. Why, it’s only killed fourteen astronauts in the past quarter century.
[Update a few minutes later]
The other dumb thing about this is the notion that any space activity is “exploration.” This is one of the ignorant straw-man shibboleths of the bashers of the new plan (notably, by the moronic commenter “DCSCA” over at Space Politics) — that “exploration” is being turned over to private enterprise, which they claim won’t work, because it’s not profitable. But all that the plan actually calls for is to get NASA out of the business of transportation to LEO, so that they can finally focus on real exploration.
A Side Helping Of Crow
My opinion piece on the recent SpaceX success is up at AOL News.
More SpaceX News
Clark Lindsey has a lot of links.
[Update a few minutes later]
I said yesterday that they had a chute failure. But what I’m hearing now is that the stage broke up on entry, rather than when it hit the ocean, so the failure to open chutes was an effect of the vehicle breakup, and not the cause. That’s too bad, because a failure of chutes to deploy would be a lot easier thing to fix. I wonder how much of a setback this is to the goal of first-stage reusability?
Elon’s Telecon
Clark has a great roundup of the tweets.