A private space passenger conference in, of all places, France.
Looking at the description provided by Jack Kennedy, it doesn’t look much different than many similar ones that have been held here over the past few years. The difference, of course, is the location. I think that if this doesn’t show that the “giggle factor” is gone, nothing does.
Looks like NASA has given up on landing at the Cape. I wish we could get some of the rain that was keeping them from landing there today, but it’s pretty dry down here. And hot. Definitely summer time.
Why not blog at Kos? Maybe because of stuff like this.
Highlarious. Hey, Ferris, plenty of subdomains available at Typepad.
Why not blog at Kos? Maybe because of stuff like this.
Highlarious. Hey, Ferris, plenty of subdomains available at Typepad.
Why not blog at Kos? Maybe because of stuff like this.
Highlarious. Hey, Ferris, plenty of subdomains available at Typepad.
I hate to link to Kos, and wish that Ferris Valyn would find some other place to blog (like just getting his own domain), but he’s got a lot of links and commentary that are worth perusing.
My Lunar vendor CSI just got a Space Act Agreement with NASA for their LEO Express system.
CSI studied concepts for recoverable canisters for NASA under in Phase 1A of our Alternate Access to Station contract in 2003-04. We have also looked at placing our canister inside RLVs, such as the Kistler K-1, for return to Earth. We received high marks from NASA’s AAS program for our ability to adapt our system to include a recoverable cargo capability.
Glenn (and Popular Mechanics) confuse the terms. As is pointed out in the article, rocket packs aren’t “jet” packs.
Remember the rules? If you want to cruise in the atmosphere, use an air breather. A rocket belt sounds cool, but it really makes no sense for this application. Rockets are for accelerating, and getting out of the atmosphere as soon as possible (or for traveling in space, if you’ve already done that). They’re not for tooling around near the ground, or for atmospheric transportation (rocket races being an exception, because it helps push the technology, and sounds cool). A true jet pack, though, would be actually cool, as opposed to merely sounding (and looking, when you see a pro do it at a show, for a minute or so) cool.
A quote from The English Patient
Charlie Stross isn’t very sanguine about the prospects for space settlement. My main criticism of his argument is that it seems to assume that all materials will come from earth, and that there are no resources available in space. When he writes, for instance:
Optimistic projects suggest that it should be possible, with the low cost rockets currently under development, to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost of roughly $15,000 per kilogram. Some extreme projections suggest that if the cost can be cut to roughly triple the cost of fuel and oxidizer (meaning, the spacecraft concerned will be both largely reusable and very cheap) then we might even get as low as $165/kilogram to the lunar surface. At that price, sending a 100Kg astronaut to Moon Base One looks as if it ought to cost not much more than a first-class return air fare from the UK to New Zealand … except that such a price estimate is hogwash. We primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen. While the amount of oxygen, water, and food a human consumes per day doesn’t sound all that serious