Over at Universe Today.

I wonder what this prize will be for? Guess we’ll find out next week.

Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides thinks that the on-line community can help NASA come up with one.

<VOICE=”Alice“>Must…stop…fingers…of satire…</VOICE&gt>

Hey, there’s always the comments section.

And yes, I have emerged, blinking and confused, from SBIR proposal hell. Thanks for asking.

Live from Second Life, it’s the Frontier Spaceport. Robin Snelson reports that Colonel Smith is going to report to the Pentagon that SPS is viable.

We’ll see.

[Update about mid morning.]

Colonel Smith (aka “Coyote”) explains why the DoD is interested in power from space.

Almost half a century after the first orbital launch by the Soviets, and in the wake of another failure of a supposedly “reliable” Russian launcher, Clark Lindsey has a brief, but appropriate rant about our national failure to develop reliable and low-cost access to space, a goal that NASA is not only doing very little about, but, by building yet another horrifically expensive throwaway, actually spending billions to delay.

Almost half a century after the first orbital launch by the Soviets, and in the wake of another failure of a supposedly “reliable” Russian launcher, Clark Lindsey has a brief, but appropriate rant about our national failure to develop reliable and low-cost access to space, a goal that NASA is not only doing very little about, but, by building yet another horrifically expensive throwaway, actually spending billions to delay.

Almost half a century after the first orbital launch by the Soviets, and in the wake of another failure of a supposedly “reliable” Russian launcher, Clark Lindsey has a brief, but appropriate rant about our national failure to develop reliable and low-cost access to space, a goal that NASA is not only doing very little about, but, by building yet another horrifically expensive throwaway, actually spending billions to delay.

You’re going to see a lot of these kinds of pieces as we come up on the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik, now only one month away. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ll probably come up with a version of my own in the next few weeks.

This article on testing satellite shielding against space debris is a good reminder that even if NASA solves the foam problem, or someone comes up with a new reusable vehicle concept that isn’t subject to debris during ascent, that space vehicles will always be vulnerable to orbital debris:

An object less than 0.05 inch across blew a hole through a section near the payload door of the shuttle Atlantis during its mission last September, according to the July edition of NASA’s Orbital Debris Quarterly News journal.

The damaged section was replaced.

Had the object, which investigators think was a piece of a circuit board, hit the thinnest part of the wing edge, “There is a question whether the vehicle would have survived re-entry,” said Eric Christiansen, a NASA engineer specializing in debris shielding.

A spacefaring nation will have the capability to do repairs on orbit to mitigate the hazard of such events, but to do that requires the development of a orbital infrastructure, something that NASA’s current plans strenuously avoid.

Space logistics consultant Mike Snead has an interesting article at The Space Review on how to become a space-faring nation. I’ve glanced over it, but haven’t had time to absorb the whole thing. I don’t know how politically realistic it is, but what is most interesting to me is that the word “NASA” does not appear in it, anywhere.

I think that this was fundamental policy failure of the Vision for Space Exploration. While the vision was seen as important for the administration, just as was the case with Shuttle after Apollo, and space station after Shuttle, it was primarily treated as something for NASA to do after Shuttle and station, not an intrinsically important goal in itself. If it had truly been important, an entirely new entity would have been created to carry it out, without the baggage of the past, in much the same way that missile defense was viewed as too important to leave to the Air Force in the eighties, resulting in the formation of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO).