Category Archives: Space

Happy Anniversary

It’s been a year since Henry Cate kicked off the Carnival of Space. He’s asking for entries for the anniversary edition:

Fraser Cain, the current organizer of the Carnival of Space, has graciously asked me to host the anniversary edition of the Carnival
of Space.

Could you:

1) Consider sending in an entry to the carnival? Send the link to a post about space to:
carnivalofspace@gmail.com. It is helpful if you include a brief summary of your post.

2) Encourage your readers to also send in an entry?

You could direct them here.

Dog Bites Man

Mark Whittington has a completely pointless post:

…not much remarked, is the implicit endorsement of NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration by one of the leading new commercial space companies

Is this supposed to be news? Is Mark aware of any commercial space company that is opposed to the VSE, or sending humans to the moon and Mars? I’m not. So what’s the big deal?

Or is he confusing ESAS with VSE again?

What Goes Up Must Come Down

Well, not all of it, but quite a bit. Rob Coppinger has some thoughts on the issue of ISS downmass requirements, which is something that doesn’t get as much attention as the launch payload. Once Shuttle goes away, we lose an awful lot of downmass capability, at least in theory, though I don’t think we’ve been returning all that much in it lately.

Whither VSE And ESAS?

Or should it be “wither VSE and ESAS”?

My analysis on what the presidential election could mean for NASA’s current plans for human spaceflight, over at Popular Mechanics.

Bottom line: don’t expect “steady as you go…”

[Update late evening]

Mark Whittington has his usual (i.e., idiotic) response:

The problem here is that without a lot of those billions being spent not only on technology development, but operational experience, it will be a long time before private business gets us to the Moon, if at all. And we they do get there, they may have to have visas signed by the Chinese who will have beaten everyone there.

Yes, [rolling eyes] having to have visas signed by the Chinese to land on the moon should be our biggest concern. Not the fact that NASA has chosen an architecture that is fundamentally incapable of establishing a fully-fledged lunar presence and is unlikely to survive politically (and ignoring the fact that the Chinese are on a track to get a human on the moon sometime in the next century, at their current rate…).