Brian Swiderski hasn’t been posting much to his new blog, but when he does, it’s fairly meaty and lengthy.

Clark Lindsey, on more clueless commentating from the MSM:

In science it is not considered a valid technique to generalize from a single data point. The same is true for judging RLVs. The Space Shuttle, which is not really reused but rather is rebuilt between flights, has innumerable design flaws and shortcomings far too extensive and numerous to go into here. Predicted to become the DC-3 of launchers, to call it even the Ford Tri-Motor of launchers would be an insult to that historic plane. (Ball also mentions the X-15 but it was a experimental development program, not an operational system. It should be compared to the SS1 not the SS2.)

Commercial spaceflight vehicles are being designed and built with the goal of low cost operations rather than highest possible performance. Low cost operations can only arise when high reliability and robustness are designed into the systems from the ground up. Those features in turn will produce safe rides for the crews and passengers. (I’ll note that it will be easier to achieve safe and routine operations for suborbital spaceflight but eventually the lessons learned there will be applied to orbital systems.)

One runs into this illogic often in space discussions, as though the Shuttle proves anything at all about reusable vehicles in general.

Though it’s not as bad as that Alex Tabarrok piece a while back.

Charles Krauthammer goes to bat for them. I do think that this story is overblown, but he overstates the “spam in a can” argument. Like airline pilots, Shuttle pilots need to have a clear head at launch, in the event of an abort. As for the rest of the crew, it probably wouldn’t hurt much if they were mildly intoxicated, but the notion that one has to have a couple stiff ones to climb into the Shuttle (or the Soyuz) seems a little silly to me, regardless of how many times the joke is repeated, and he seems to be serious about it. Maybe some of the pilots in the Battle of Britain wouldn’t have been able to pass a breathalyzer test, but if so, their chances of killing the enemy, or getting home, would have been sharply reduced compared to their sober colleagues.

And he has entirely much too much faith in NASA to execute the vision, even if it gets support from the politicians.

…is being hosted over at Universe Today.

Well, actually a pre-dawn launch, but it should still be a nice sight if/when the Delta II takes off with the Mars Phoenix lander tomorrow morning, from the Cape. I don’t know if I can work up the gumption to drive up there for it, though. Particularly if we plan to see Endeavour launch on Tuesday, which seems to be back on track with the valve replacement in the crew cabin.

Jeff Foust has found the most egregiously awful reporting of the Scaled Composites explosion yet.

Amidst huge entitlement programs, paying farmers not to grow food, pork and boondoggles, the nation’s transportation infrastructure has been badly neglected, and is quite brittle. It also makes one wonder how many other ticking time bombs there are out there.

This applies to space transportation as well. A category three hurricane could wipe out NASA’s manned space program. On some days, I’m not sure that would be a bad thing. It would force them to do something different, and break us out of the rut we’ve been in since Apollo.

Of course, there’s a big difference. The highway infrastructure was a huge improvement over the past, offering affordable mobility to hundreds of millions of Americans, with a great deal of redundancy and resiliency. The space transportation infrastructure has never been affordable to anyone but the government, or able to support more than a few dozen people in orbit per year, and it’s always been quite fragile, with no backups. Until we address this issue, we’ll never be a spacefaring nation, or accomplish the things there that many of use want. But all that NASA offers is more of the same.

Seriously. I’m sure that he’s a fine engineer, and manager, but why does that mean that we should give his opinion more weight than anyone else’s on the subject of space goals? Just because someone is an expert at implementing a space program doesn’t make them one at justifying it, or determining what it should be.

As is always the case with stories like this, there are implicit underlying assumptions that are never stated. In order to argue where we should be going, one first has to decide why are going into space at all, and that’s not a subject that ever really gets discussed. I assume that Mr. Gavin is into space “exploration,” and assumes that everyone else shares that justification. He thinks that when it comes to the moon, we’ve “been there, done that,” and it’s time to go “explore” somewhere else, and that Mars is much more interesting. But what if the goal is instead, space development, or space defense, or geoengineering, or energy production? In that case, Mars makes no sense at all, and the people who want to send humans there should pay for it themselves.

Of course, I continue to wish that we could get a consensus from all the people with disparate space goals that the best approach is to make space access affordable, which will enable them all. Unfortunately, NASA is only making things worse in that regard (unless COTS, despite the paltry sums being spent on it, succeeds).

[Late afternoon update]

Rampant sarcasm has broken out in comments on this subject at Space Politics.

In the wake of last week’s tragedy, Leonard David has a report on space marsupial progress. He also has a roundup of reactions to the Mojave deaths.

Thomas James righteously rails against it. If humans settle space, we will take human institutions with us, and the ones that have proven successful here will do so there as well.