I caught Simonyi’s liftoff this morning.
If someone had told me back in the eighties that in 2009, I’d be watching a Soyuz launch from Kazakhstan on the local news, carrying an American millionaire to a (mostly) NASA space station, I’d have thought they were nuts.
Jeff Foust attended a speech that Elon Musk gave in DC, and took notes. It would be nice to see a Falcon 9 launch this summer.
Astrium has officially shelved its nutty suborbital project:
“The world economic situation has created a difficult near term environment in which to finalise ongoing discussions with investors. Astrium is to temporarily slow down the technical activities focusing on core risk mitigation for the project. The [space jet] team achieved impressive results in the pre-development phase particularly in the field of propulsion technology. Astrium sees suborbital flight as a promising area because of the emerging space tourism market.”
They had no sensible business case even in a booming economy. There was never any way that a vehicle with a billion-dollar development cost was going to compete with the other players.
Unless, of course, they were hoping to pull a Concorde, and have the taxpayers pick up the tab.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Doug Messier, with a roundup of the competition.
Why we haven’t been back to the moon:
The former head of the US lunar program, Wernher von Braun, said in one of his interviews several years later that certain extraterrestrial forces were even more powerful that humans could ever imagine. The scientist said that someone or something was watching every US-led flight to the Moon.
According to one of the versions, which seems to be rather unreal, all lunar programs were shut down 30 years ago because of the fear to encounter extraterrestrial beings and their immense power. Both the USSR and the USA realized that their presence on the Moon was not desirable at all.
The Earth’s natural satellite is a perfect platform for aliens and their spaceships. The Moon is not far from the Earth and it faces the planet with only one part, which means that aliens can rest safely on the other side of the Moon and they do not have to worry about telescopes. Ufologists say that there is quite a number of alien bases on the dark side of the Moon.
Well, if Ufologists say so, it must be true.
Actually if it were the deliberate policy to not have returned to the moon for the past thirty-seven years, but not explain why, I’m not sure what the government would have done or be doing differently.
[Via email from ]
Orbital Hub has the latest Carnival of Space.
Why don’t I host one, you ask? I’ve noticed that most of them are mostly focused on space science, and (assuming that’s what the audience wants), I’m just not that into that to do a good job with it.
Fresh from his brutal but well deserved fisking by Lileks, old Amitai is at it again. This time, he wants NASA to forget about this space stuff and explore the oceans.
Leaving aside his historical ignorance (it was Copernicus, not Kepler who posited that the earth went around the sun), really, what part of National Aeronautics and Space Administration do these morons who want to repurpose the agency not understand?
We have an agency that studies the oceans — it’s called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We also have an agency that deals with energy issues. It’s called the Department of Energy. Can you say “Department of Energy,” boys and girls?
If we don’t want to have a federal space program, then disband the agency, and shift its funds to the things we do want to do. If there are NASA employees who know how to and want to study the ocean and energy, they can transfer to the places where those things are done. But enough with these stupid attempts to make NASA something that it is not.
Clark Lindsey has an extensive discussion going in comments. One point that came up is something I’ve been wondering about. Virgin has been talking about passengers in the White Knight 2, doing parabolas or other experiences. As Paul Breed points out, they won’t be able to do this unless they certify it as a commercial aircraft (I would assume under Part 127). I wonder if they’ve budgeted in time and funds for that certification, which could increase the cost of the program an order of magnitude or more.
I just ran across this (five-year-old) post of mine that seems relevant to the recent discussion (which has a fascinating discussion by Carl Pham in comments on the nature of law, dictatorships and the state):
As a comment outside the context of the debate, Dr. Kurtz’ position is one shared by many, but the point is not that space is by its nature a libertarian utopia, any more than (and yes, I know he dislikes the analogy, but that doesn’t make it invalid) were the Americas two and a half centuries ago. Yet somehow we created a form of government here previously unseen in the history of the world, that was quite libertarian in philosophy (certainly much more so than either major party today).
From the standpoint of forming new societies, the point of settling space is that it’s a tabula rasa, and that many different groups and ideologies will find room there to do social experimentation. This is a factor that is independent of technology. Yes, cooperation will be required, and perhaps even laws, but there’s nothing intrinsically unlibertarian about that. Ignoring teleological arguments about our duty to be the vessels that bring consciousness to the universe, this is to me the greatest value of space–an ongoing large petri dish in which groups of like-minded people can continue to seek improvements on society, unconstrained by existing governmental strictures that are now dominant on this planet.
There’s some good discussion in comments there as well.
An interesting interview by Alan Boyle. I too find it annoying that people not only believe that a human body will explode in vacuum because they saw Outland or Total Recall, but will ignorantly argue the point with those of us who know better.
Doug Messier wonders if Scaled and Virgin bit off more than they can chew with SpaceShipTwo.
I agree with him that it was a mistake to not fly SpaceShipOne more (and perhaps even commercialize it). I think that they made two misjudgements (well, actually, three). Their determination to stick with a hybrid, the initial decision to develop it within Scaled instead of subcontracting, and an overabundance of faith in Burt (which wasn’t helped by his health problems a couple years ago, though he’s reportedly much better now). The explosion cost them at least a year, and probably more, now that they’ve let a new subcontract to SpaceDev for the propulsion. They would have been a lot better off to just go with a liquid from the beginning (as some of us suggested to them). It might have been too risky to rely on XCOR for SpaceShipOne, because they didn’t yet have the track record, but they should have considered them (or someone else, such as Armadillo) for the new vehicle.
I wonder if they’ve been schedule constrained by budget? If not, a 2011 service date (six years after program start) puts into question the ability of private industry (at least this particular team) to do things much faster than the government.