Jeff Manber writes that we should be inviting China to participate in the ISS program, and space in general.
I have a hard time getting worked up about it, either way. I don’t consider either NASA or China relevant to the future of space at this point, though if they actually start flying this thing, I may start to take them more seriously.
I interviewed Steven Weinberg who has replaced James Van Allen as the most prestigious and eloquent direct critic of human spaceflight (unlike Barack Obama who may be the most effective passive-aggressive de-funder of space activities since Nixon).
I faced a fundamental media ethics issue. Weinberg’s opinion on the likelihood of nuclear war with Russia in the next twenty years (“more likely than not”) puts him in a tiny minority. By publicizing his view on this, it delegitimizes him as a spokesman against human spaceflight without discrediting directly his arguments against human spaceflight on the merits. I chose to carefully transcribe his words on this point, confirm that he stood by them, then released them.
What would you have done?
Four years ago, President Bush announced a new direction for the nation in space, perhaps the biggest space policy change since the end of Apollo, in that it forthrightly declared that there was now a national goal to send people beyond low earth orbit, where they had been stuck since 1972, a situation that was cemented with the onset of the Shuttle era, because it was our only crewed space vehicle, and it could go nowhere else.
Unfortunately, four years later, the program is bogged down with an unnecessary new launch system that will do little to improve safety and nothing to reduce costs, and for this and other reasons, it seems unlikely to survive the next administration, almost regardless of who wins. My primary hope is that at least the goal remain in place, and perhaps some fresh thought will be given to how it will be best achieved, with a lot more emphasis on the commercial sector and tying it in to national security, as the Aldridge Report advised, and NASA has completely ignored. And no, COTS doesn’t count, both because it’s inadequately funded, and because it has nothing to do with VSE–it’s simply a way to replace Shuttle logistics for ISS.
Jeff Foust has some thoughts over at The Space Review today. Here’s what I wrote as I live blogged the speech at the time, from a motel in Lauderdale-By-The-Sea.
Glenn at Instapundit points to a UPI story that says JPL thinks the odds of a 4,000 km flyby for 2007 W(M)D5 or less is 99.7%. If it’s not going to hit Mars, that increases the chances that it will slingshot around Mars toward Earth. Odds are likely in the 1 in a million range or less, but what if it did? I wouldn’t say “probably“, but let’s have some transplanetary musings!
I hadn’t said anything about this long but useful post by Jon Goff, primarily because I hadn’t had the time to read it. I just glanced through it, and it’s definitely worth a read for those interested in rocket theology.
One point that I didn’t really see addressed is (to me) one of the biggest disadvantages of single stage–off-design performance. Because a single-stage vehicle will have a much larger dry mass/payload ratio on orbit, if one wants to take it to higher altitudes or inclinations, the payload penalty will be much more severe than that for an upper stage of a multiple-stage system. Altitudes can be dealt with by staging in space (i.e., a tug that meets the vehicle at low altitude and transfers the payload to a higher-altitude facility), but inclination hits can’t be accommodated in this way.
But I remain a launch-vehicle agnostic. I’d like to see a lot of different concepts developed, and let the market sort out which is the best, rather than engineers arguing over napkin sketches, or with Powerpoint charts.
[Update a few minutes later]
I should note that the comments are worth reading too, including contributions from Antonio Elias, Gary Hudson, and Dan DeLong.
Clark Lindsey reports that Patti Grace Smith is leaving FAA-AST. With a tenure of thirteen years, she has led the office longer than all her predecessors combined. If it happens soon, it seems to me that it’s going to be tough for the Bush administration to find a replacement, since whoever takes the job may perceive that they’ll be replaced again with a new administration. Perhaps someone (e.g., George Nield?) will simply act for her for the next year.
In any event, as Clark notes, she has done good things overall for the space entrepreneurs, and good luck to her in future endeavors. Let’s hope that her successor has the same attitude.
A new space and SF blog, from Wired refugees.
[Via Alan Boyle]
Holman Jenkins endorses space tourism, Bigelow and COTS in his Wall Street Journal Opinion column today as means to speed the time when humanity can survive a big rock hitting us on one of the planets where we live. (I write this from the Yucatan Peninsula which owes its formation to a big rock).
Unless you can avoid a newspaper in 2008, expect to be reading a lot about human extinction. In June arrives the hundredth anniversary of the Tunguska impact, which leveled 800 square miles of Siberia. By happenstance, a rock of similar size may smash into Mars on Jan. 30, affording scientists a close-up view of a planetary disaster….
At times like these, thoughts naturally turn to escape.
Kudos to “consultant Charles Lurio” who is cited and has been beating the drum for rationalizing space policy for years.