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.
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.
John Hare has some interesting speculations on how a Masten/XCOR team might reduce costs to orbit.
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.
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.
This is way cool. It looks like it tosses itself up, and then catches itself with the thrust.
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.