I’m not in the room, but sitting out on the patio checking email, listening to the speakers on the…speakers. Listening to an astronaut (not sure which one) describing his flight experiences, and the awe and wonder of seeing an 800-mile-long aurora borealis from orbit. Listening to the whole panel (including Anousheh Ansari), I’m once again boggled at people who think that the spaceflight experience will be a “fad,” or that once a few people have done it the interest will drop off, or that no one will want a repeat trip.

[Update late afternoon]

Clark Lindsey has much more extensive coverage of the space tourism sessions.

The wireless seems to be working all right, though it’s a tad slow.

No big news this morning. There was a press conference with Elon Musk, Alex Tai, Clay Mowry (of Arianespace) and Peter Diamandis.

The most notable thing about the conference was the fact that there was someone there from Arianespace. The giggle factor continues to diminish.

In response to the first question, from me, Alex said that they are not in a position to make any announcements as to what happened in Mojave–that is for Scaled and Northrop-Grumman to announce when they have made a determination. He said that how they will respond will be at least partly a function of what caused the accident, but that they are in a reevaluation period with regard to propulsion, so that it’s possible, but not definite that there will be changes (this is a paraphrase, not a quote). In response to a related question, he noted that propulsion has never been on the vehicle critical path, so the accident didn’t necessarily set them back. It remains to be seen whether or not it will be a factor, and going to a new propulsion system could potentially slip the schedule, which remains internal (off-the-cuff comments from Richard Branson aside).

Perhaps more thoughts later.

[Update a few minutes later]

Clark Lindsey is live blogging, and has some results of the morning sessions here and here.

Michael Belfiore has his Sputnik thoughts up at Financial Times.

The supposed derived engine from Apollo isn’t going to be very derived after all:

“This one has to generate more than 290,000 pounds of thrust,” said Mike Kynard, J-2X program manager. “Not only is the J-2X going to be more powerful, it’s going to be different. Time has seen to that. This engine has its roots in Apollo, but we aren’t just lifting their work. It’s almost a new engine.”

This notion that we were going to save money with all these new vehicles by “deriving” them from existing hardware and designs was always kind of a scam (and it’s gotten more so as the designs have departed further from the original ESAS concepts). A five-segment SRB is also essentially a new motor relative to a four-segment one, in terms of understanding the structure and stresses, particularly when all of the loads (at least for The Stick) will be compressive, rather than some from the side as they are in the current Shuttle stack. The only thing really being preserved is the very costly, but politically essential “heritage workforce.” It may be necessary for political preservation of the program in Congress, but it does nothing to reduce costs of access to space, or truly open up the frontier.

[Update a few minutes later]

Thomas James is similarly unsurprised.

[Update a few minutes later yet]

Thomas also has further thoughts on whether or not space is the new Australia (with some comments on the history of northern Michigan).

I don’t know how likely it is, but I thought that there was an interesting comment at this post about Giuliani’s candidacy.

I find it interesting because, rightly or wrongly, the vice president has been traditionally in charge of space policy. And while there are a lot of things that I wouldn’t want Sam Brownback in charge of, considering that his adviser on space was Pete Worden, we might be in for some very interesting space policy under him.

…the next Australia?

Clark Lindsey has some thoughts on the late Kistler concept, with which I largely agree:

I’ve never thought the K-1 design that they came up with was anywhere close to an ideal RLV. For example, it doesn’t allow for incremental testing to find problems without losing the vehicle as Rutan could do with the SS1. However, it was a proof of principle that even a group of conservative NASA/Apollo/Saturn engineers could sit down and design a two-stage-to-orbit (TSTO) fully reusable vehicle without breaking any laws of physics or requiring even an ounce of unobtainium. Other than the occasional anonymous commenter posting “the K-1 is crap” sort of criticism, I’ve never seen any credible person point to some particular part of the K-1 design and say this definitely is not going to work.

Kistler got 75% of the hardware built for the first K-1 when their target LEO comsat constellation market disappeared and funding dried up. Kistler had at that point spent about $800M but raised only $600M. The company itself had remained relatively small and had farmed out most of the hardware to various mainstream aerospace companies. (SpaceX decided that building many of its major components in house could save lots of money over this outsourcing approach.) People who were involved with other entrepreneurial launch vehicle companies during that period occasionally express annoyance, to say the least, that Kistler Aerospace soaked up most of the private investment available for such ventures yet still didn’t get anything into the air.

I always thought that it was a mistake to hire Apollo retreads for the job. George Mueller and company knew how to get the job done on an unlimited budget, but they didn’t have one (though they had a lot more money than anyone else). There was never any reason to think that they could do things cost effectively. My understanding is that the investors demanded that “space experts” be brought in. Unfortunately, the “space experts” they brought in simply farmed the job out to cost-plus contractors, because that’s all they knew how to do.

Whether they really “soaked up all the private money for such ventures” is hard to know, because the investors that were willing to put money into Kistler weren’t necessarily willing to put money into a company that didn’t have old Apollo hands running it. So perhaps that was their loss, not the industry’s.

At least for now. As expected, NASA has pulled the plug on their COTS contract, as a result of their inability to hit their funding milestones. Clark Lindsey has a link roundup.

I expect to find a lot more about what’s going on, and their prospects for getting back to focusing on the suborbital business, in New Mexico next week.

…is up, over at Space for Commerce.

In a Corner piece today, Jonah Goldberg discusses the humanitarian benefits that would have accrued had we forced a regime change in Moscow in 1946. But he states one of what he considers the down sides:

While the space program would have suffered without the Space Race, it seems a sure bet that the net gain of liberated human genius would more than have compensated for that.

While I agree with his post overall, I don’t agree that the “space program would have suffered.” Oh, we certainly wouldn’t have gotten to the moon as quickly, but as I argued at TCSDaily a week and a half ago, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

I also think that, even absent the superpower adversary of the USSR, we still would have found surveillance and communications satellites quite useful. And of course, had we removed the Stalin regime, it’s likely that we would have eventually picked up all of the German rocket team, and not just the ones that managed to escape with von Braun as the Soviets advanced. If you were a German who wanted to build rockets, given a choice between living in America, and Russia, even a free Russia, it’s seems most likely that most of them would have wanted to come here.