Just a few hours after the end of it, Alan Boyle (who was too burned out to have dinner with me, Jeff Foust, and Clark Lindsey this evening) has a good wrap up of the event.
Off to Holloman in the morning for a pre-Cup press activity.
[Update a little after 10 Mountain time]
Alan also has a report on the hurdles ahead for the Spaceport America.
Bob Bigelow (who is not in attendance at this Personal Spaceflight Symposium) is apparently offering three quarters of a billion dollars for a launch contract:
The contract or purchase agreement would be worth $760 million in total for eight launches. To show that Bigelow Aerospace is serious, it will deposit $100 million in an escrow bank account up front if the plan goes forward.
The potential offer tops the $500 million NASA has budgeted for its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) programme, which is part of the agency’s own effort to spur development of commercial orbital crew launch capabilities.
Sounds like he’s finally starting to get serious about solving the launch problem.
[Update a few minutes later]
I find the timing of this announcement interesting. I doubt that it’s a coincidence that he decided to do it the same week that NASA issued an announcement for a COTS recompetition.
If one believes that one of the reasons that RpK had trouble closing their financing was because people didn’t believe that the NASA market could be counted upon, this provides a useful secondary (or even primary) market to help make the business case. Perhaps it was his intention to help the COTS competitors get their financing lined up.
From Jeff Foust.
Leonard David reports that, like last year, Armadillo will be the only competitor this year for the Lunar Lander Challenge.
While it would certainly have been more interesting, and I’m sure that the X-Prize Cup folks are disappointed, the important thing about prizes is that they’re won, not how many competitors there are. Good luck to John and the team. But of course, as they saw last year, there are no guarantees, except that they won’t have to break any ties. As Yoda would say, they will either do, or do not.
I’m not in the room, but sitting out on the patio checking email, listening to the speakers on the…speakers. Listening to an astronaut (not sure which one) describing his flight experiences, and the awe and wonder of seeing an 800-mile-long aurora borealis from orbit. Listening to the whole panel (including Anousheh Ansari), I’m once again boggled at people who think that the spaceflight experience will be a “fad,” or that once a few people have done it the interest will drop off, or that no one will want a repeat trip.
[Update late afternoon]
Clark Lindsey has much more extensive coverage of the space tourism sessions.
The wireless seems to be working all right, though it’s a tad slow.
No big news this morning. There was a press conference with Elon Musk, Alex Tai, Clay Mowry (of Arianespace) and Peter Diamandis.
The most notable thing about the conference was the fact that there was someone there from Arianespace. The giggle factor continues to diminish.
In response to the first question, from me, Alex said that they are not in a position to make any announcements as to what happened in Mojave–that is for Scaled and Northrop-Grumman to announce when they have made a determination. He said that how they will respond will be at least partly a function of what caused the accident, but that they are in a reevaluation period with regard to propulsion, so that it’s possible, but not definite that there will be changes (this is a paraphrase, not a quote). In response to a related question, he noted that propulsion has never been on the vehicle critical path, so the accident didn’t necessarily set them back. It remains to be seen whether or not it will be a factor, and going to a new propulsion system could potentially slip the schedule, which remains internal (off-the-cuff comments from Richard Branson aside).
Perhaps more thoughts later.
[Update a few minutes later]
Clark Lindsey is live blogging, and has some results of the morning sessions here and here.
Michael Belfiore has his Sputnik thoughts up at Financial Times.
The supposed derived engine from Apollo isn’t going to be very derived after all:
“This one has to generate more than 290,000 pounds of thrust,” said Mike Kynard, J-2X program manager. “Not only is the J-2X going to be more powerful, it’s going to be different. Time has seen to that. This engine has its roots in Apollo, but we aren’t just lifting their work. It’s almost a new engine.”
This notion that we were going to save money with all these new vehicles by “deriving” them from existing hardware and designs was always kind of a scam (and it’s gotten more so as the designs have departed further from the original ESAS concepts). A five-segment SRB is also essentially a new motor relative to a four-segment one, in terms of understanding the structure and stresses, particularly when all of the loads (at least for The Stick) will be compressive, rather than some from the side as they are in the current Shuttle stack. The only thing really being preserved is the very costly, but politically essential “heritage workforce.” It may be necessary for political preservation of the program in Congress, but it does nothing to reduce costs of access to space, or truly open up the frontier.
[Update a few minutes later]
Thomas James is similarly unsurprised.
[Update a few minutes later yet]
Thomas also has further thoughts on whether or not space is the new Australia (with some comments on the history of northern Michigan).
I don’t know how likely it is, but I thought that there was an interesting comment at this post about Giuliani’s candidacy.
I find it interesting because, rightly or wrongly, the vice president has been traditionally in charge of space policy. And while there are a lot of things that I wouldn’t want Sam Brownback in charge of, considering that his adviser on space was Pete Worden, we might be in for some very interesting space policy under him.