More water has been found on the moon. At the north pole this time.
Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it’s estimated there could be at least 1.3 million pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.
You could make a lot of margaritas with that.
[Monday evening update]
Here’s a lot more from Paul Spudis (who more than almost anyone should know).
There’s a new book
Actually, if the Chinese were really racing an Ares I, they’d have nothing to worry about. They should be a little more concerned now, though, assuming they’re racing at all (which they aren’t).
Roger Handberg has a useful history of NASA and its budgets for those who still fantasize that we can (or should) resurrect Apollo.
Dwayne Day has an amusing review of what seems to have been a particularly stupid episode of CSI: Miami. I’ve never actually sat through an entire show (the only reason I’ve ever been able to see for watching it is Emily Procter, and that’s not enough, particularly since she doesn’t have anywhere near the southern accent that much of the hype about her would lead you to believe). Are they all this dumb?
…has died.
For me his most impressive work remains the mural at the Air and Space Museum. But it was just a scratch at the surface of his work. He was a leading chronicler of the first space age. May the new one bring forth new artists as great as it will be, as he was to it.
I admire Walt Cunningham as a hero of Apollo, but it’s hard to do so as a policy analyst. The very title of his opinion piece is nonsense:
We must not discard greatest innovator in history
Presumably he’s talking about NASA, and specifically the human spaceflight program. But in fact, due to risk aversion, it is probably the least innovative technology program going, with “Apollo on Steroids” the most prominent and recent example. I’d wager that we get more innovation out of Silicon Valley in a month than we have from the entire history of the human spaceflight program. He expands in the first paragraph:
Clark Lindsey has some realistic perspective:
After the noise dies away from the hearings on the NASA budget, the harsh reality of NASA’s limited budget is going to sink in with Congress just as it did for the Augustine panel when they started to look at the numbers. Constellation just won’t fit. You can’t fly the ISS, keep all those Shuttle workers employed and proceed with Ares/Orion. Shelby et al will try to save Constellation but the vast majority of the appropriators have much, much higher priorities than NASA and they are not going to boost the agency’s budget just to preserve a $100B+ billion dollar program that the NASA administrator, a blue-ribbon panel, the President and common sense all say is not viable.
He also points to a useful recent precedent:
Despite all that noise and anger and legislative maneuvers, by the end of July the plan was accepted: The F-22: Senate Votes to End Production – TIME – July.22.09. Congress as a whole decided that the negatives were not nearly as bad as claimed and the positives were too good to reject.
If Bolden and the administration push in a similar vigorous and sustained manner for their NASA plan, they will also win. As I’ve noted before, President Obama would no doubt love to battle Congressional members who want to force him to spend tens of billions of dollars on a failed Moon program, especially when most of that opposition consists of supposedly small-government, pro-business, anti-deficit Republicans. (Could just see him in a public forum saying that continuing the Moon program would be “an inexcusable waste of money”.)
I hope that the days of NASA as pork, as opposed to progress, are at least coming to a middle, if not an end. And the ironies continue to abound.
I have some thoughts over at Popular Mechanics, that arose from last week’s suborbital researchers’ conference in Boulder.
[Update a few minutes later]
Wayne Hale (who I was privileged to finally meet in person last week in Boulder) has some thoughts on “human rating.” I like his last quote. It reminds me of another one: “Every time they performed an investigation of the accident, all of the paperwork was found to be in order.”
Not. Some very useful thoughts from Miles O’Brien.
It is a shame how atrociously this has been reported, with all of the nonsensical talk about “ending human spaceflight.” Of course, it’s partly the administration’s fault, by springing it at the last minute. As Miles notes, anyone with their head in the sunlight could see that Constellation (or at least Ares — killing Orion as well was a legitimate surprise) couldn’t survive in the current (or really, any) environment, but it still came as a shock, with an inadequate description of what is to replace it. I hope that this will be rectified in the coming weeks and months.
One wonders if Representative Olson, or his staff, even know what the word “suborbital” means.
These are the people running your space program. And your country.