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Category Archives: Space
Why Space?
With yet another national commission on the subject being formed, Dennis Wingo has some thoughts.
Commercial Friendly?
Taylor Dinerman says that NASA is finally moving in the right direction. We’ll see. Particularly after the Augustine review.
The Mission Continues To Shrink
Doug Messier has a scoop on the latest cost cutting efforts at NASA. One small step for a dummy, one giant leap for dummykind.
Reading The Tea Leaves
There’s a lot of interesting and disputatious discussion of the NASA budget and its implications for Ares I over at Space Politics this morning.
Virgin Vision
Will Whitehorn talks a good game:
He foresees uses of the spaceship for science experiments, for example as an alternative to visiting the International Space Station or using unmanned flights for pharmaceuticals companies seeking to use microgravity to change particles.
Later, the aircraft could be used to launch small satellites or take other payloads into space, Whitehorn says. “We could put all of our server farms in space quite easily…”
…Eventually, he sees the possibility of transporting passengers to terrestrial destinations in spacecraft outside the atmosphere instead of by plane. He says a journey from Britain to Australia could be done in about 2-1/2 hours.
“That’s a 20-year horizon,” he said.
I’d take that a lot more seriously if he had liquid engines…
And of course, he never misses an opportunity to bad-mouth the competition:
Virgin is not the only non-governmental party trying to develop space travel in the private sphere, but Whitehorn is confident it will be the first to take passengers into space.
SpaceX, led by veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elon Musk, is developing space-launch vehicles but they are not designed to carry passengers.
Well, yes, if you ignore the Dragon…
And of course, XCOR might beat them, though if they don’t get to a hundred klicks, the claim will be that they’re not in space, despite the stars, curvature of the earth, and minutes of weightlessness.
The Case For A Lunar Base
From Darnell Clayton.
The Documents Have Been Released
The full ESAS study, apparently including appendices (other than 12) seems to be available over at Wikileaks.
Ah, where to find the time to read it…? I hope that Norm Augustine does, at least.
Gaia Versus Medea
Two alternate metaphors for the planet. I disagree with Lovelock that there are too many people, or that there is some magical “right” number of them. It’s all a function of technology level. And I disagree with Ward, too:
In his view, the costs and distances involved in moving outward from the solar system – or even terraforming the moon or Mars – just don’t seem worth the effort.
Obviously they don’t now. Technology advances will change that.
Futility
Henry Spencer says that it’s time to give up on Ares I:
NASA, predictably, is not happy about being forced to change. NASA’s ex-administrator, Mike Griffin, has been a particularly vocal opponent of the idea, claiming that outsiders shouldn’t try to second-guess NASA on technical decisions, and that it’s cheaper to stay on course after four years of effort than to start over from scratch. Sorry, but that’s not the way it looks to me.
I’d agree that it would be cheaper, if I thought NASA had made four years of progress. But Ares I is the International Space Station of rockets: redesigned again and again, justified using assumptions that no longer apply, and already escalating mightily in cost (and already well behind schedule). There comes a time when it really is cheaper to start over in some more sensible way, because banging your head against the wall harder and harder isn’t getting you through it.
Mike Griffin is employing the sunk-cost fallacy — that the fact that we’ve already invested a lot in something justifies further expenditure. In this case, though, the investment isn’t just taxpayer dollars, but his personal pride and reputation.
Let’s hope that Norm Augustine comes to a sensible conclusion.