Glenn at Instapundit points to a UPI story that says JPL thinks the odds of a 4,000 km flyby for 2007 W(M)D5 or less is 99.7%. If it’s not going to hit Mars, that increases the chances that it will slingshot around Mars toward Earth. Odds are likely in the 1 in a million range or less, but what if it did? I wouldn’t say “probably“, but let’s have some transplanetary musings!

Jesse Londin has a roundup. I’d like to go to the one in Arcachon, France.

She also has a year-end space linkfest that I’d missed.

I hadn’t said anything about this long but useful post by Jon Goff, primarily because I hadn’t had the time to read it. I just glanced through it, and it’s definitely worth a read for those interested in rocket theology.

One point that I didn’t really see addressed is (to me) one of the biggest disadvantages of single stage–off-design performance. Because a single-stage vehicle will have a much larger dry mass/payload ratio on orbit, if one wants to take it to higher altitudes or inclinations, the payload penalty will be much more severe than that for an upper stage of a multiple-stage system. Altitudes can be dealt with by staging in space (i.e., a tug that meets the vehicle at low altitude and transfers the payload to a higher-altitude facility), but inclination hits can’t be accommodated in this way.

But I remain a launch-vehicle agnostic. I’d like to see a lot of different concepts developed, and let the market sort out which is the best, rather than engineers arguing over napkin sketches, or with Powerpoint charts.

[Update a few minutes later]

I should note that the comments are worth reading too, including contributions from Antonio Elias, Gary Hudson, and Dan DeLong.

Clark Lindsey reports that Patti Grace Smith is leaving FAA-AST. With a tenure of thirteen years, she has led the office longer than all her predecessors combined. If it happens soon, it seems to me that it’s going to be tough for the Bush administration to find a replacement, since whoever takes the job may perceive that they’ll be replaced again with a new administration. Perhaps someone (e.g., George Nield?) will simply act for her for the next year.

In any event, as Clark notes, she has done good things overall for the space entrepreneurs, and good luck to her in future endeavors. Let’s hope that her successor has the same attitude.

A new space and SF blog, from Wired refugees.

[Via Alan Boyle]

Holman Jenkins endorses space tourism, Bigelow and COTS in his Wall Street Journal Opinion column today as means to speed the time when humanity can survive a big rock hitting us on one of the planets where we live. (I write this from the Yucatan Peninsula which owes its formation to a big rock).

Unless you can avoid a newspaper in 2008, expect to be reading a lot about human extinction. In June arrives the hundredth anniversary of the Tunguska impact, which leveled 800 square miles of Siberia. By happenstance, a rock of similar size may smash into Mars on Jan. 30, affording scientists a close-up view of a planetary disaster….

At times like these, thoughts naturally turn to escape.

Kudos to “consultant Charles Lurio” who is cited and has been beating the drum for rationalizing space policy for years.

Or…Honey, I shrunk the economy!

China’s GDP is forty percent smaller than previously assumed. Walter Russell Meade considers the implications.

One that he doesn’t point out is the hysteria by some (including the NASA administrator, except that in his case I suspect that it’s just a cynical attempt to scare Congress into giving him more money for “Apollo on steroids”) that they will beat us back to the moon is even less justified than it was at the higher number.

China not only has a much smaller economy than ours after the PPP recalculation, but it has a much smaller economy per capita, since their population is over four times ours (resulting in average per capita income of about an eighth of ours), with a much smaller middle class. That means that the Chinese peasants, the vast majority of whom are still in poverty by US standards, are likely to be even less happy about boondoggles to the moon than we are.

And as Meade points out, the government is not sufficiently stable to risk the popular uproar that might be engendered by large numbers of people who are unhappy to see their national wealth spent to send a few taikonauts off to Luna, while they continue to have no running water. I expect the Chinese program to continue at its current snail’s pace, but to think that they will beat us back to the moon any time soon, or at all, remains a fantasy.

[Via Instapundit]

Business Week reports on a nuclear electric battery (more like a reactor) that has 27 MW for 5 years worth of juice and it’s “the size of a hot tub”. It’s patent pending (20040062340; search for “uranium hydride over at USPTO.gov). That’s about 64 cubic feet. That’s 1.2 terrawatt hours or 1.2 billion kwh. They say it’s 70% cheaper than natural gas–maybe $30 million? If it’s 54 cubic feet and pure uranium hydride (a high overestimate), it would weigh about 15 tons. Compare that with 15 tons of LOX and hydrogen with 66,000 kwh at 39 kwh per kg of hydrogen. Pretty good ISP. Thrust to weight not so good. Combine it with a reaction mass fill up on Mars?

Speaking of The New Atlantis, in addition to the Zubrin excerpt, the fall 2007 issue has a lot of space essays to commemorate the half century since Sputnik. It has a classic essay from the early space age by Hannah Arendt on man’s limitations (which I may get around to commenting on later), with several current-day responses, some retrospection from Jim Oberg and (at long last) my review of Michael Belfiore’s Rocketeers.

Are we nearing the end of COTS? Happy New Year.

It’s probably not too late to do anything about it:

If you’re even half as angry about this as I am, then it’s time to let Congress know that you’re mad as hell and not going to take it any longer. Even if it doesn’t do any good, won’t it just feel grand to let your Representative and Senator know how you feel!? And while you’re at it, write a letter to your local newspaper editor.

If you want to communicate with the Member of Congress who is sponsoring this destructive anti-COTS language, I recommend calling or writing to Senator Barbara Mikulski, who can be reached at:

Senator Barbara Mikulski
Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
PHONE: (202) 224-4654

Here’s the Space News story from Brian Berger.

I guess I’d be more disappointed if I had had higher hopes for the program. But it was conceptually flawed to begin with, in many ways, and while the people executing it are good people, they had to battle a bureaucracy whose primary focus was on maintaining jobs and Constellation, many of whose cohorts (along with the porkmeisters on the Hill, such Senator Mikulski) no doubt viewed it as both a threat and a distraction.

I don’t know whether or not this effort will save the program or not, but I’m not sure that it really matters. SpaceX always had a plan that didn’t involve COTS, and will continue to move forward without it. Bigelow is continuing to offer his market incentives. The suborbital business will go on in the absence of COTS. As for how ISS is supported, that will continue to be a slow-motion train wreck into the next decade. I think that in the end, it will go off the tracks, as more and more people realize in Washington that the federal human space program is FUBAR, and likely to be replaced by a private one.