A month ago, at the XCOR press conference, Mike Kelly told me about this possibility, but asked me to keep it confidential. But now Charles Lurio says that it’s official. Mike is taking the position of Chief Engineer for FAA-AST, reporting directly to George Nield. I can’t think of a better man for the spot, given his long history as chairman of the COMSTAC RLV working group, and long-standing support of reusable vehicles.
Congratulations. It’s good news for Mike, and good news for the space industry. And since it’s not (at least that I’m aware of) a political position, there’s a good chance that he would survive a change of administration, even if George doesn’t.
Alan Boyle has a roundup of links on the latest Soyuz entry mishap. I think that this is going to have an effect on policy, but it’s unclear what it will be, so far.
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?
People have been speculating about this sort of thing for years, but one of the nice things about having a decent-sized orbital facility is that we can actually prototype them, and figure out if any are interesting enough to think about building inflatable stadia for them.
…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?
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.
Why, who could ever imagine such a thing? Particularly after it got off to such a completely non-corrupt start, with no conflicts of interest at all, via Scott “Revolving Door” Horowitz.
Why, who could ever imagine such a thing? Particularly after it got off to such a completely non-corrupt start, with no conflicts of interest at all, via Scott “Revolving Door” Horowitz.