Jeff Foust has found a story of some people who are clueless on multiple levels:

According to Net#work BBDO

Model rocketeers need some pro bono help against an out-of-control government agency.

Will India beat NASA back to the moon?

At a forthcoming meeting of the country’s top scientists on November 7, ISRO will, for the first time, unveil two of its ambitious plans – to send an Indian into space around 2014 and then to have one walk on the moon about six years later. Both missions will be accomplished without any foreign assistance. ISRO will even find a Sanskrit word equivalent for the US’s ‘astronaut’ and Russia’s ‘cosmonaut’ to describe the Indian in space.

They seem to be taking the same high-cost approach, though, so I’m not sure where this will lead, or how affordable it will ultimately be. Of course, they also have to avoid a nuclear war with Pakistan.

Some have asked my opinion of the Direct Launcher concept. Frankly, I haven’t taken a close enough look at it to have one, other than it suffers from the same fundamental flaw as ESAS–that NASA will once again be developing its own vehicles, for its own unique purposes, and they will be very expensive to operate for very little in the way of results, and won’t move the ball down the field much in terms of opening up space for The Rest Of Us. But for those into arguing the technical issues, here’s a discussion page on the concept. Jon Goff has some related thoughts:

NASA may be lousy at doing commercially effective R&D, but they are far worse when they try acting like an airline. If NASA deserves to exist at all, they should be spending most of their money on trying to help “encouraging and facilitating a growing and entrepreneurial U.S. commercial space sector,” not trying to fund and run their next Amtrak in the Sky. People like to point at how much X-33, SLI, NASP, and other such programs have wasted, but what they seem to be missing is that while these were “R&D” programs, they were “R&D” programs trying to lead to another NASA operated space transportation system. Which is basically what the money for CEV, Ares I, and Ares V are. Sure, Ares I and Ares V aren’t trying to break new technological ground, but they are trying once again to establish the national space exploration transportation system. The fundamental flaw in all of those failed research programs wasn’t so much that they were trying new technology, and new technology is bad. It’s that they were trying to make yet another NASA owned and operated transportation system. Ares I and Ares V aren’t so much a bold break with past mistakes as they are an unimaginative repeat of the same.

[Update at 1 PM EST]

No, Mark, I don’t “hate” it (once again, one must wonder at his feeble powers of reading comprehension). I’m indifferent to it.

[Late afternoon update]

OK, I will say that Direct Launcher has one thing to commend it. It is indeed preferable to develop one new launcher than two. Of course, my point is that it would be even better to develop none, and let the private sector provide crew and cargo deliveries to LEO, so that NASA can concentrate on getting to the moon affordably.

Arnold Kling has an interesting alternative to the preferred solution of many European bureaucrats (deindustrialization) to global warming, and it’s one that would warm the hearts of space enthusiasts.

I think it would be a mistake to get the NSF involved, though. This is a job for engineers, not scientists. I’d work with the engineering societies (e.g., AIAA) instead. And I wouldn’t let NASA anywhere near it.

Here’s a story on plans for a suborbital space port in Singapore.

But don’t try to smuggle any drugs through it…

If I were a member of the Mars Society, I’d be looking for a new leader, or looking to form a new organization. This seems like a very unprofessional press release to me (but hardly out of character for Bob Zubrin). Does he really imagine that this is going to win support for any cause associated with him?

I agree that O’Keefe’s decision was a mistake, and that the robotic mission was a waste of money. I also think that he should have left earlier, and let someone else make that decision, because he was obviously unable any longer to deal with risk after the trauma of Columbia. But that doesn’t justify this kind of vicious, personal attack on a good man.

Also, this is simply wrong:

Alone among space advocacy groups, the Mars Society responded the former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe’s stupid and cowardly decision to desert the Hubble with forthright opposition, exposing as fraudulent the technically illiterate oaf’s claims that a mission to Hubble was more dangerous than missions to the Space Station…

There was nothing fraudulent about it. It was true then, and remains true, that a Hubble mission is in fact riskier than an ISS mission. O’Keefe’s mistake wasn’t in believing that it was riskier, but rather in believing that it was too risky. He was wrong, but that doesn’t mean that we should pretend that the risk isn’t greater. I agree with Mike Griffin’s decision to go forward (and think that, if anything, it’s late–he could and should have made it much sooner), but only because we are continuing to fly Shuttle for ISS. It certainly wouldn’t have been worth keeping Shuttle alive just to fix Hubble.

In the meantime, Bob might want to invest in a Dale Carnegie course.

The Chair Force Engineer continues to be unimpressed with the Ares program:

Of course, the problem here is that we are sticking with “shuttle derived” instead of pushing technologies that have been developed since the early 70’s when the shuttle was finalized. The EELV programs have taught the industry how to reduce the marginal costs of added launches and how to streamline the processing of the Delta & Atlas rockets. And it’s also clear that the shuttle hardware was never capable of meeting ambitious flight rates, which are the only way to make spaceflight more cost-effective.

If Congress insists that NASA retain the shuttle workforce to the maximum extent in its moon launcher planning, the “Direct Launch” proposal is the smartest way of launching human missions to the moon.

Of course, it’s that congressional insistence that’s the real problem, and what will probably prevent the president’s vision from being implemented. And don’t tell me it’s not pork, Mark.

Jeff Foust describes the current situation with Centennial Challenges. It’s not quite as bleak as earlier reports, and the issue may be resolved in conference. But as Jeff points out, even it not, it doesn’t affect any prizes currently funded; it just prevents NASA from initiating any new ones. That’s still a bad thing, but not as bad as pulling money out of prizes that people are currently working toward.

…if Jack Kennedy had? That’s an intriguing question that Dwayne Day is asking in today’s issue of The Space Review. Unfortunately, the data isn’t yet available.

And I’m continually amused by Democrat space supporters who still buy into the Camelot myth, and think that we’d be on Mars long ago had only Oswald (or whoever they may think actually did the deed) missed, when he clearly wasn’t that big on space. In fact, based on the speech cited in Dr. Day’s article, he would have been solidly behind the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which basically declares space off limits, at least philosophically, to exploitation and settlement, through its ban on claims of sovereignty.