…that geeks would do with $700B.
I can tell you that if I had that much money to play with, I can guarantee that, within two decades, asteroids wouldn’t be a worry any more. And there would be a tourist resort on the moon.
[Via (where else?) Geek Press]
I have some fiftieth birthday thoughts over at Pajamas Media.
[Early afternoon update]
Well, this is annoying. A screwed-up history from Time magazine:
NASA was actually founded in 1915 and at the time was known as the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics — or NACA. Its job was to keep the nation abreast of the latest developments in the then-nascent technology of powered flight. NACA was established with good intentions but operated mostly as a bureaucratic backwater, a government body that couldn’t hope to keep up with a rapidly evolving private industry. In 1957, however, all that changed. That was the year the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik, the first Earth satellite — and in the process, scared the daylights out of the U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower acted quickly, dusting off NACA and renaming it NASA — for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. On October 1, 1958, the new agency officially went into business.
No, NASA was not NACA, or “founded in 1915.” NACA was a completely different kind of animal. It had nothing to do with space, and it was not an operational organization. It was a basic research outfit, and viewed the aviation industry as its customer, providing data and resources that allowed them to build better airplanes.
Sadly, once it was absorbed into the borg of the new space and aeronautics agency fifty years ago, it lost that focus, and the new entity largely saw itself as the customer, and the space industry as its contractors. Many argue that we need to return to a NACA philosophy for space, but it’s extremely misleading and confusing to state that NASA is NACA, and that its history goes back over ninety years. In fact, it is false.
He also doesn’t really explain why JSC is in Houston. Yes, Johnson was happy to have the mission control center in Texas, but Texas is a big state, and there are no particular geographical requirements for mission control (unlike, e.g., a launch site). It could as easily have been in Dallas or elsewhere. It was established in Houston because Rice University donated a lot of land for it.
Plans to set up international efforts to deal with the asteroid threat continue.
The October issue is up.
I just got an email indicating that the Hubble mission has been delayed until February. So they’ve got two orbiters sitting on the pad, neither of which is configured for an ISS mission. Will they be able to accelerate the next planned one, or does this mean more delays for ISS completion (and Shuttle retirement, assuming that they go ahead with it)?
Many continue to disbelieve (with no obvious basis) that there really is a market for people who want to go into space; that it is “just a fad,” and that after a while, folks will get bored and the demand will disappear. I of course think that’s nonsense, and that word of mouth of the experience will only increase interest in it as more and more people hear about it, and want to try it themselves. Any astronaut will tell you that it was a, if not the peak experience of their lives.
Well, Space Adventures has announced today that Charles Simonyi, who flew with them previously, is going to spend millions do it again.
Man, that first time must have really sucked.
[Update mid morning]
Clark Lindsey has the press release.
Shubber Ali noticed an omission, that surprises neither of us.
As I continue to point out, space isn’t important. Unless it somehow gets kids to study their math and science.
Shubber Ali noticed an omission, that surprises neither of us.
As I continue to point out, space isn’t important. Unless it somehow gets kids to study their math and science.
Jeff Foust has a piece on yesterday’s successful launch of the Falcon 1, and contrasts it with the successful landing of the first Chinese EVA mission:
SpaceX is moving on to launching real satellites, starting with RazakSAT, a Malaysian remote sensing satellite scheduled for launch on a Falcon 1 early next year; the first Falcon 9 launch is now planned for the second quarter of 2009. “We look forward to doing a lot of Falcon 1 launches and a lot of Falcon 9 launches and continuously improving until the point where we’re the world’s leading provider of space launch,” Musk said.
Sunday’s launch was not the only space milestone in the last week. On Thursday China launched its third manned mission, Shenzhou 7, on a 68-hour mission that featured the first Chinese spacewalk. The launch, EVA, and landing all captured headlines around the world, and has generated far more attention than the SpaceX launch likely will.
In the long run, though, it may be the SpaceX launch that is more influential. China is following the same path forged nearly five decades ago by the United States and the former Soviet Union: a government-run human spaceflight program that is as much for national prestige as for anything else. Several other countries, including India, Europe, and Japan, may follow in the next decade and beyond. It’s a tried-and-true paradigm, but one that has done little to date to open space for new applications and new audiences.
SpaceX, and other NewSpace ventures like it, carry the promise of dramatically changing the space industry with low-cost orbital and suborbital launch options that open up new and potentially lucrative new markets. That promise, though, has remained just that–a promise, not a reality–since SpaceShipOne won the Ansari X Prize four years ago. Sunday’s launch was perhaps the biggest milestone since then in demonstrating what NewSpace can offer.
Apparently, the fourth time was the charm. More thoughts later.