Clark Lindsey has a summary.
[Late afternoon update]
Apparently, the range has finally signed off on the Flight Termination System, so they’re good to go tomorrow.
Category Archives: Space
The Moon Needs Women
..and men. Paul Breed says there’s a lesson about robotics to be learned from the oil leak (no, it’s not a “spill”).
The Range Goes Green
…for SpaceX. And they’ve rolled it out to the pad, and erected it.
It’s now less than forty-eight hours until their first opportunity, at 8 AM Pacific. On later flights, when they have to go to ISS, they’ll have a tight launch window (ten minutes more or less, depending on how much performance margin they have), but for the first couple flights at least, there’s no target they’re aiming at in space, so they can go any time within the window provide by the range (four hours, I think, on each day). As Clark notes, while I won’t be surprised if they’re successful (nor will I be surprised if they’re not, on this first launch), I will be surprised if they actually launch at 8 AM on Friday. I suspect that they’ll be operating on a hair trigger when it comes to anomalies that can delay them. There is a lot riding on success (and for those defending the old regime, a lot riding on their failure).
Bureaucratic Sabotage
…or how Dilbert won the war. Though actually, credit has to go to the pointy-haired boss.
I think this also explains a lot about why we haven’t made much progress in space.
I Got My Wish
Parker Griffith lost his primary. Unfortunately, he’ll just be replaced by another maroon:
Brooks said in that interview that he was opposed to the White House’s plan for NASA even though it may result in additional business for the United Launch Alliance factory in the district, citing concerns about having the private sector being in charge of unspecified “national security information”.
It’s unspecified because it’s complete bull hockey. Why won’t the press call these idiots out on things like this?
Florida Jobs Transition
The Florida Today is reporting that Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will be in Florida tomorrow to make an announcement with Lori Garver. I have it on pretty good authority that it’s to announce a twenty-million-dollar National Emergency Grant. This is over and above the forty million that Florida is supposed to get, and I think that it’s 2010 money, rather than 2011.
[Wednesday morning update]
I guess it turned out to be fifteen million, instead of twenty.
The Space Review Today
A lot of good stuff today. Editor/publisher Jeff Foust has a report on this past week and weekend’s ISDC in Chicago, with a focus on space entrepreneurs and the new NASA direction. A young Belgian engineering student says that NASA needs to take a lesson from LEGO in developing space architectures (I agree). Alan Stern says that any SpaceX setbacks this week should not, and likely will not be permanent. Finally, James McLane says that we should do Apollo to Mars. I demur in comments.
Cooperation
John Hare has some interesting speculations on how a Masten/XCOR team might reduce costs to orbit.
Space Junk
While a cascade in LEO is something to be very concerned about, this Pop Sci article gets this quite wrong:
If a chain reaction got out of control up there, it could very quickly sever our communications, our GPS system (upon which the U.S. military heavily relies)…
Most communications satellites are in GEO, thousands of miles above LEO, and GPS are in twelve-hour orbits, also very high, but not as high as GEO. Most of our communications would remain intact, as would GPS.
XCOR Update
I’m seeing tweets from the ISDC that Jeff Greason is saying Lynx rollout and flight tests are about a year from now.
This is interesting:
XCOR has plans to develop an orbital vehicle.
Jeff has been saying that he has some ideas along those lines. I wonder how much he’s revealing publicly?
[Update a while later]
A lot more XCOR tweets over at Space Transport News.