Forty-nine years after its founding, Chair Force Engineer asks if NASA should get out of the manned spaceflight business. I think that’s inevitable, at least for earth to orbit segment (probably beyond as well, once access gets cheap enough for the Planetary or Mars Societies to sponsor their own expeditions, as the National Geographic Society does on earth), but there’s too much political inertia for it to happen before it becomes clear to everyone how absurd its proposed architecture is. That won’t happen, as he notes, until the private sector is launching people into space.

Dan Schrimpsher has a comment on Scaled’s test flight schedule for SS2:

…the test flights are going to have to start soon, perhaps later this year. At 1 flight/week, it would take two years to make 100 test flights.

I see no reason that they shouldn’t have a much higher flight rate than that. I’d think that they could probably fly every day, as long as they make the hybrid motor easy to refuel. I suspect that the only constraint on their test flight rate would be data analysis, and modifications resulting from test flight results. And I also suspect that the high number of “test” flights won’t really be test flights, but rather demonstration flights, to establish reliability confidence. Those could go every day, as long as nothing goes wrong. I doubt if flight test (or at least intrinsic flight rate ability) will be the long pole in the schedule tent–I think that just delivering the initial hardware to be tested will be have much more schedule uncertainty.

[Update in the late afternoon]

Dan follows up:

I assume that in the beginning the flights will be less often as problems will show themselves up front. I see more of an exponential cure of flights starting with one every few weeks to get the kinks out. And closer to once per day when they are close to starting service.

I think we’re now in violent a agreement.

Also, based on history, SS1 was flown months apart except for the X-Prize run, so I am trying to be conservative.

Well, I’m not sure how good a guide history is here. In the one case, they were trying to win a prize, and didn’t need a high-rate vehicle to do it (twice in two weeks, and that was it). I suspect that they’re spending more money this time, in order to hit a market, and get it to market as soon as they can within safety constraints to maximize payback. I’ll be surprised if it’s weeks before the first and second flights.

But I’ve been surprised before. After all, I didn’t think that the stand down after Columbia would be nearly as long as that after Challenger (and neither of them should have been as long as they were), so what do I know?

[Another update a few minutes later]

One other point (see, Anonymous Moron in comments isn’t completely useless–but mostly)…

The other difference (which I didn’t mention, though I also didn’t assume otherwise, contra Anonymous Moron) was that there will be a fleet of vehicles for SS2, though the initial test flights will be only for one, because they’ll want to learn a lot of lessons early to incorporate into the other vehicle builds. So the initial test flight series will be with a single version of each vehicle (White Knight and SS2), and only later, when they’re doing reliability demo flights and building flight experience, will there be multiple vehicles. And the transition from one to a fleet will be part of the exponential increase that Dan described in his follow-up post.

And in the way of disclosure, I should also add that, despite the fact that I occasionally talk to the Virgin consultant responsible for overseeing the vehicle development (who is an old friend of mine), and Alex Tai himself, this is all speculation on my part.

NORAD didn’t see the Iranians launch anything.

It’s possible that they managed to launch something without our detecting it (though if so, as Allen Thompson notes over at sci.space.policy, I want a tax refund), but I think it’s more likely that they just said they launched, but didn’t, for propaganda purposes. Did they actually provide any time-stamped evidence of an actual launch?

NORAD didn’t see the Iranians launch anything.

It’s possible that they managed to launch something without our detecting it (though if so, as Allen Thompson notes over at sci.space.policy, I want a tax refund), but I think it’s more likely that they just said they launched, but didn’t, for propaganda purposes. Did they actually provide any time-stamped evidence of an actual launch?

NORAD didn’t see the Iranians launch anything.

It’s possible that they managed to launch something without our detecting it (though if so, as Allen Thompson notes over at sci.space.policy, I want a tax refund), but I think it’s more likely that they just said they launched, but didn’t, for propaganda purposes. Did they actually provide any time-stamped evidence of an actual launch?

Anyone who watched the video of the Zenit explosion will be surprised to see how little damage was actually done to the SeaLaunch platform.

Not me this time, but it looks like an interesting lineup this week:

1.Monday, Feb. 26, 2007, 7-8:30 PM Pacific: Dr. Lee Valentine returns to discuss the upcoming Planetary Space Conference, commercial space investments and much more.

2. Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2007, 7-8:30 PM Pacific. Stephen Metschan, President & CEO of TeamVision Corporation comes on board to discuss the comprehensive TeamVision plan for returning to the Moon and going to Mars.

3. Wednesday, Feb. 28, 9:30-11AM Pacific: Dallas Bienhoff, an engineer with Boeing, joins us to discuss on orbit fuel depots and much more.

I worked with Dallas on the CE&R studies a couple years ago, in which we fleshed out a lot of the features and advantages of propellant depots, in LEO and elsewhere. NASA continues to prefer a return to Apollo.

Gregory Anderson repeats a long-time theme of this web site–that we have to broaden our discussion of space far beyond science, which is actually one of the poorest justifications for it. Jeff Foust reviews the Astronaut Farmer, and Taylor Dinerman rightfully mocks the recent call by some well meaning but naive former astronauts to make the UN responsible for asteroid protection. I was going to do one of these myself, because it just begs for ridicule, but I’ve been busy.

While the Dem takeover of Congress will have many bad effects, Jeff Foust points out that there’s at least one silver lining for space enthusiasts:

…there appears to be a chance to make a serious attempt at some form of export control reform. The change in control of Congress after the 2006 elections has put new people into leadership positions of key committees, including some representatives who may be more amenable to reform. However, getting that reform passed through Congress is no easy task, and is fraught with political peril for those who do support it. The odds of getting meaningful reform passed during this Congress may be higher now than they have been for years, but that doesn

Cathy Booth Thomas has a fairly comprehensive overview of the space tourism industry at Time Magazine. I didn’t see any mistakes in it, except I’m not sure what she means about Dreamchaser being Russian derived. I thought that it was based on the HL-20. That vehicle was inspired by a Russian design, but she probably should have mentioned the Langley heritage.