I read about this on Arocket last week, but Masten now has it up on their blog. They lost their test vehicle last week.

This is not a setback. It’s a learning experience, and a demonstration of the virtues of cheap incremental testing.

[Afternoon update]

Dave Masten has a good point over at Arocket:

This morning I got a phone call from the landlords (Mojave Air and Space Port folks) asking about the “explosion, injuries, cats and dogs living together” and all other sorts of terrible calamities. OK, I exaggerate a bit, but I was specifically asked about an explosion. Seems Stu Witt is in D.C. visiting FAA/AST and he was asked about an explosion, so he called his staff here in Mojave and asked about it.

I would like to take this opportunity to point out that there is no physical law that says a launch vehicle must explode if something goes wrong. I know that if this were a Zenit, Delta, or STS there probably would be an explosion. But, we are not building that type of vehicle. In fact several of us on this list specifically design our vehicles and operations so that the risk of explosion is negligible. It is not difficult to do. Just starting with the assumption that safety margins are more important than payload margin takes one a very long way towards that goal. Add in a little thought about survivability of a vehicle takes one the rest of the way.

So, if I could beg a favor from those of you on this list who are with AST, please let your colleagues know that a crash of our vehicle does not imply an explosion or even a fireball.

Jeff Foust has a good roundup of current events over at The Space Review today.

When I was digging through my December 2003 archives to see what I was writing about the Wright brothers anniversary, I ran across this space policy essay that I wrote a few days later. As long as I’m doing reruns today, it still holds up pretty well, I think, so here’s an encore, from almost four years ago.

Continue reading A Vision, Not A Destination →

That’s how long it’s been since the Wrights first launched their first airplane from the dunes of Kitty Hawk. That also means, now, that it’s been four years since the X-Prize was won. We haven’t made as much progress since then as many of us hope, but I think that things are moving along reasonably well. I in fact expect to see an acceleration of suborbital activity, in the near future, with John Carmack hoping to fly into space in the next two years. I think it was Arthur Clarke who pointed out that we tend to be overoptimistic in the short run, and overpessimistic in the long run, partly because we tend to think linearly.

Anyway, I’m going to reprint my thoughts from four years ago, including links to two other pieces that I wrote at National Review and TCSDaily (then TechCentralStation).

Continue reading A Hundred And Four Years →

I’ve been meaning to comment about this piece at TAP, which is a few weeks old, but I haven’t had time to give it much thought. Among many other problems, though, one thing really jumps out at me; it has absolutely no mention of space, or who should handle it. That by itself makes it hard to take the rest seriously.

Over at Universe Today.

Elon Musk has a long update on progress on the new Merlin engine, the Falcon 9 and Dragon. Those are the first pictures I’ve seen of the Hawthorne facility. It sounds like they have a lot of room to grow.

I’m disappointed, but not surprised, that they’ve gone with hypergolics for reaction control. That’s going to complicate turnaround.

But overall, (in contrast to Orion/Ares) progress seems to be good. Note that they’re continuing to hire, and even offering bounties, if you know anyone to refer to them.

[Update a few minutes later]

SpaceX should look into this engine for RCS. Presumably, the hypergolics were chosen for reliability (no igniter required) and storability, but XCOR has pretty reliable engines, and they don’t use such nasty propellants, and they have been working on well-insulated LOX tanks.

Eric Hedman has some ideas. I agree with Clark Lindsey–he is far too optimistic about the prospects for scramjets providing a solution to the problem:

Scramjet propulsion theoretically has the advantage of increasing a vehicle

Dennis Wingo thinks so. So do I.

In over 30 years of reading space literature from NASA, congress, and the president, this is the first time that the presidential stamp has been placed on the development of extraterrestrial resources. This was not the only step in the development of this thought at the highest reaches of our government. In 2006 at the 44th Goddard Symposium the presidential theme was extended and amplified.

“As I see it, questions about the VSE boil down to whether we want to incorporate the Solar System in our economic sphere, or not. Our national policy, declared by President Bush and endorsed by Congress last December in the NASA authorization act, affirms that, “The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program.” So at least for now the question has been decided in the affirmative.”

These two speeches, one by President Bush, and another by his science advisor, the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy laid the foundation and provided the ground rules, and gave very explicit policy direction to NASA regarding what we are to do in the return to the Moon and conduct exploration to Mars and beyond.

The problem is that NASA has not embraced this expansive goal for our national space program. Why is this? It seems to be just the kind of red meat goal that NASA has dreamed of forever. Even in the SEI era there was never this kind of clear cut, practical direction for a policy, as Marburger states, from the President and Congress. It boggles the mind that this has not been incorporated as a core value for the lunar exploration program–it is exactly this type of effort that has the potential to connect to the American people.

Just as was the case with SEI, VSE is being done in by NASA, though in a different way this time. In SEI, they did it by deliberately sabotaging the program with outrageous cost estimates, and actually lobbying against it in Congress. With VSE, it’s more a case of negligent manslaughter, rather than premeditation. ESAS, and NASA’s lack of vision, is killing the Vision. And the administration is too preoccupied with other things, and long in the tooth, to do anything about it.

I just got my fall issue of The New Atlantis–its focus is space, in keeping with the Sputnik anniversary in October. I just glanced at it, but it’s got lots of good stuff in it, by Oberg, Mike Griffin, and others, including a long review of Rocketeers by me (well, that one may not be so good). Unfortunately, no links, because it won’t be on line for a couple weeks or so, but when it is, I’ll remind folks. So if you’re not a subscriber, this is just a teaser.