Elon Musk says that the window opens on Saturday.

I’m guessing that this flight is one of their milestones for COTS.

Meanwhile, speaking of COTS, Jeffrey Bell wonders what’s really behind it.

He confuses VSE and ESAS (as many do). The Space Frontier Foundation is not opposed to VSE–it is opposed to ESAS.

I think that the answer to his question is much simpler than any of his speculations, and I don’t buy his theory of “COTS as management slush fund for Constellation.” COTS is funded because the White House wants COTS to be funded. What their motivation is, I don’t know, but this is not a NASA-driven program, for any reason of the reasons he states. And that’s bad news, since it may not have any defenders in a new administration. They’re going to have to make a lot of progress in the next two years to ensure program survival. And even then, it could be cancelled. We’ve certainly done dumber things.

Jon Goff has a nice picture of XCOR’s recent firing of their LOX/Methane engine at night.

My former co-blogger, Sam Dinkin, has challenged teevee weatherman Willard Scott to a wager.

As Jeff Foust notes, yesterday was the third anniversary of the announcement of the Vision for Space Exploration. Jeff thinks that the next two years are crucial. I agree.

When the president made the speech from NASA HQ, I was staying at a motel in Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, looking for a house somewhere in the area (we ended up getting a place in Boca Raton). I live blogged it using the wireless in the motel room on my laptop, and then had some further thoughts. I think they hold up pretty well.

In fact, there were several related posts over those few days. You can check them out by scrolling about halfway down here.

Clark Lindsey has a little roundup of links relating to the “Direct Launch” concept. Short answer, Doug Stanley believes that it can’t provide the necessary performance. Having read his argument, I have no reasons to disagree, or think him less than sincere.

Of course, it doesn’t matter to me, since I’ve never been a big fan of it anyway. The fundamental problems with NASA’s approach to achieving the president’s Vision for Space Exploration go far beyond critiques of specific vehicle designs.

I wonder if this guy is making any money on these domains? They seem overpriced to me.

Rob Wilson seems to be attempting to resurrect his space web site.

Actually, I think that “Death Star” would be a better analogy myself. At least when George Abbey was running the place.

Clark Lindsey has the current preliminary agenda:

1. Near Earth Objects (Asteroids and Comets)
2. Prizes for Space Achievements
3. ITAR Reform
4. NASA/Commercial Services

Fine as far as it goes, but I think there’s an item missing there. We need to send a message to incoming chairman Oberstar to keep his hands off our suborbital launch regs.

Thomas James has lots of new posts over at Marsblog this morning.

Check out in particular his thoughts on spacecraft diets. Also, I’m curious as to what he means by (JARGON WARNING!), “It’s worth noting that a good chunk of that excess weight is due to changes to the LM FPR configuration neccessitated by the merging of the NG/Boeing and Smart Buyer configurations and inputs from NASA ADPs.”

An acronym list would be useful, but what and when was the “merging of the NG/Boeing and Smart Buyer configurations”?