The National Space Society’s annual conference starts today in Chicago. I’m unable to attend this year — finances don’t allow, but you can find Twitter feeds here and here. It’s nice to see that Space Adventures is actually funding Armadillo to build a tourist vehicle.
[Update a few minutes later]
John Carmack is reportedly saying that he’ll be delivering payloads above a hundred thousand feet in a year, and above a hundred kilometers in two years.
Alan Boyle has the story on yesterday’s space-policy farce on the Hill. Jeff Foust also has a couple posts, with meeting notes, and a description of the “ruckus” caused by Jeff Hanley’s abrupt reassignment from the Constellation program.
I wish that someone (like a staffer, or former staffer) would suggest to Dana Rohrabacher that the next time Tom Young is brought forth to testify at one of these joke sessions, he ask him what experience he has with human spaceflight. Because the answer is pretty much zip.
[Update a few minutes later]
As usual (and this isn’t Alan’s fault, obviously) but ignorance abounds in his comments section, with one commenter saying we should just “…finish the Aries-1 [sic] capsules for LEO…”
Citizens Against Government Waste has come out with a white paper opposing continuing Constellation, and to buttress their case, they cite the piece I wrote at National Review a few weeks ago:
An April 21, 2010 editorial in the National Review referred to Constellation as “a programmatic disaster,” while the Washington Post has referred to it as “ill-conceived” and “under-funded.” For the National Review and the Washington Post to agree, something must be seriously off-track.
This implies that it was an editorial position of the magazine, which it was not, though the WaPo’s was. National Review has taken no editorial stance on the issue, as far as I know (though it would be interesting to see what it would be if they did). It was just part of a give and take between me and Bob Costa.
[Update a few minutes later]
I should also note that the WaPo and I don’t really agree, other than that Constellation should end. They want to end human spaceflight entirely, at least if it’s funded by NASA. Of course, the hysterical opponents of the new plan, who apparently can’t read a budget document or the myriad RFIs that have been coming out recently, think that the two are synonymous.
Apparently, I’m seeing in comments and tweets that Masten just demonstrated an in-air shutdown and restart of the engine (I assume it was deliberate?). XCOR does this routinely, but they have wings. If Masten’s engine doesn’t restart, they have a very hard landing.
[Update a few minutes later]
According to Clark, this is the vehicle that did the maneuver.
I assume there will be film at eleven.
[Update mid afternoon]
Here’s the first video.
Jeff Foust tweets the latest idiotic comment from Alan Grayson:
Rep. Grayson: if Apollo 13 had been comm’l, all those 100s of engineers would have been replaced by a 20yr-old in Grateful Dead tshirt. (?!)
Was this supposed to be clever?
Can this guy possible win reelection? I wonder what the current polls say?
[Update]
Oh, barf:
Rep. Griffith calls Ares 5 “the soul of America” to the rest of the world.
I hope he loses his primary.
[Update a few minutes later]
Geez, it gets stupider by the minute:
Griffith: if we put space out to competitive bid, might as well walk off the court and hand it over to Russia and China.
That’s right, because allowing American free enterprise to deliver NASA astronauts to orbit is exactly like “handing it over to Russia and China.” You know, just like having Fedex and airliners deliver logistics and troops to the theater is just like handing it off to the commies.
You’d think that these people would pull their heads out at least once in a while, just so they could breathe.
…from space. It amazes me that some people really think that there’s no market for visits to LEO.
It’s about the space economy, stupid.
I agree that developing lunar resources should be part of the mix, though we have a lot of work to do to prove out the techniques to do so in a way that makes economic sense. But as I’ve said before, I’m not that concerned about abandoning that goal for now — it was many years off in any event, and if it’s the momentary price we have to pay to kill off the misbegotten Ares program, it’s one well worth it. We can decide to go to the moon any time, and it will be a lot easier with a low-cost infrastructure than with a high-cost one.
Masten and XCOR have announced a strategic partnership:
Masten’s award winning automated vertical take off, vertical landing (VTVL) flight vehicles combined with XCOR’s strong experience in liquid oxygen (LOX) / methane powered propulsion systems and nonflammable cryogenically compatible composite tanks, brings to NASA a powerful and competitive combination of innovative talent with a proven record of producing exceptional results quickly and affordably.
So does this mean that Masten is going to focus on the vehicles, and let XCOR provide propulsion systems? And is this just for the NASA lunar lander work? Guess I’ll have to talk to Dave and Jeff to find out.
Jeff Foust has a good roundup of the current state of play in industry/congressional skepticism about the ability of the new players to do the job.
And Tom Frieling describes an appallingly bad book on space history. This kind of thing is really inexcusable, and may feed ignorance for years. When I do my pieces for The New Atlantis, I circulate drafts among a lot of knowledgeable people, to make sure that I get it right. If I write a book, I’ll do the same thing. But I guess that kind of thing isn’t very important to some authors and publishers.
If you want to know why more people don’t invest their own money in manned space hardware, look no further than this article:
After announcing in February that Orion and the rest of the Constellation program would be canceled in favor of outsourcing routine crew transportation to commercial operators, the White House decided in April to have NASA fund completion of a stripped-down Orion capsule that would launch to the international space station unmanned to serve as an escape craft.
Lockheed Martin, which beat Boeing and its teammate Northrop Grumman in 2006 for an Orion prime contract worth an initial $3.9 billion, welcomed the news as a partial reprieve for the project. But to Boeing, continued NASA funding of an Orion capsule that would need only a launch abort system to start launching crews would add substantial risk to a business case Schnaars said will be a struggle to close.
And why was Orion kept alive? Not because NASA really needed a lifeboat. It was to try to maintain political support for the administration in the purple state of Colorado. But this political decision could have bad consequences for the stated desire to have competition in commercial crew. And the general problem is that one of the many ways that NASA is such a bad customer is in its unpredictability. And it will always be thus with a government space program.