There’s a very friendly article toward NewSpace in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required, sorry) based on the reporter’s interview with Clark Lindsey. It notes the disconnect between the science-fiction reality in which we live in many respects, and the woefully slower pace of space development, relative to what we thought we’d have:

…the Pluto debate was another unhappy reminder that except for a few astronauts, we’re stuck down here on Earth long after sci-fi paperbacks predicted we would have been occupying moon bases or exploring Mars or mining asteroids. It’s not as if we haven’t seen an enormous amount of technological progress in recent decades. In some ways, we live in a science-fiction world: We carry massive music collections in our pockets, conduct real-time conversations with people across the globe for fractions of a cent and can spend hours playing (and even making money) in hypnotically detailed virtual worlds. Pure cyberpunk, down to the jihadis exchanging deadly tips on hidden message boards.

But at the same time, the science fiction of “out there” seems stillborn — 25 years after the first space shuttle took off, it’s news if it returns with all aboard safe and sound. Space elevators and moon bases? C’mon, kid: Your square-jawed rocket engineers of future histories past are now tattooed, pierced software engineers coding social-networking sites. Pluto’s a faraway place in more ways than one.

Or is that too pessimistic? Is there another way into space, one that isn’t dependent on the fitful attention of big government and the iffy performance of big bureaucracies?

Clark S. Lindsey, for one, is optimistic. Mr. Lindsey is a Java programmer and space enthusiast who runs the blog www.spacetransportnews.com. Last summer, a Real Time column being decidedly mopey about the future prompted a letter from him, contending that we’re at the start of a private-industry-led era in space development, one that would develop more quickly than many disappointed sci-fi fans like me thought. (His letter, and other reflections on space exploration, are available here.)

…As sketched out by Mr. Lindsey, it sounds convincing — aided, perhaps, by the fact that I desperately want to believe it. Once thing that does seem certain is this: If we’re to shed our disappointment, we have to let go of space exploration as it was, and accept how it will be. Don’t think of the race to the moon as a first step to Mars and beyond — that’s a perspective best left to history books that will be written centuries from now, if we’re lucky. Instead, consider the space race of the 1960s a mutation of cold-war competition, a peaceful contest that caught the imagination of a more-uniform society that united behind it. Put that big-government model from your mind, and the relatively small scale of private-sector efforts to get into orbit may catch your imagination, instead of just arousing cynicism and disappointment.

Jon Goff’s musings on essential spacefaring technologies was very useful, inasmuch as it seems to have kicked off a substantial discussion in the blogosphere. One wonders how many at NASA are reading.

[Friday morning update]

Jon has some further thoughts. I would add one technology to his list: routine EVA equipment and orbital assembly techniques.

Anousheh Ansari may want to reconsider her upcoming trip:

Zvezda has manufactured seats, suits and other personal equipment for every single of Soviet cosmonauts, including Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova who was the first woman to fly to space. Ansari as any other female member of a Soyuz-TMA crew requires a different bowl for disembowelment, Pozdnyakov. “This equipment is fit for answering both kinds of calls of the nature,” Pozdnyakov told Space.com in an interview on Thursday.

[Emphasis mine–Via emailer Adrian Reilly]

[Update at noon]

This part was cute, too:

A woman’s organism is different, that’s why we need to modify some of the life systems in the capsule…

It sure is. Vive la difference!

Jon Goff writes about technologies necessary to a spacefaring civilization that NASA is avoiding developing, instead pouring most of its resources into new and expensive (and probably ultimately unaffordable) launch systems.

[Afternoon update]

Clark Lindsey notes an omission. I agree, tugs are important as well. And NASA’s not working on one of those, either.

Travis Johnson writes about SpaceDev’s prospects, with the loss of its COTS bid. I’m not sure he understands Rocketplane Kistler, though:

Rocketplane Kistler arguably has the design that’s most like SpaceDev’s DreamChaser, in that it’s based on a spaceplane design somewhat like a smaller version of the current shuttle, so if there was a spot for SpaceDev on this contract I expect we have Rocketplane to blame for them not getting it. SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft is essentially a capsule that rides on the Falcon launch vehicle.

I have no idea what he’s talking about here (perhaps because he has no idea what he’s talking about, either). There is no resemblance whatsoever between the Shuttle, Dreamchaser or the Kistler orbital vehicle.

Well, all right, there’s a superficial resemblance between Dreamchaser and the Shuttle, in that they’re both vertical takeoff/horizontal landing vehicles. But neither of them look anything like the Kistler vehicle, which returns a capsule with no wings at all (via parachute, I believe). Perhaps he is confused by the Rocketplane XP (a Learjet derivative), but that has nothing to do with COTS–it’s a suborbital vehicle only.

Ed Kyle has a new lunar architecture proposal (or rather, a variant on an old NASA lunar architecture proposal). It’s an improvement on ESAS (a low bar, of course), but it would still be horrendously expensive, and in the long run, neither affordable or sustainable.

[Update]

Sorry, link is fixed now.

I shouldn’t have to tell regular readers this, but not all who come here are regular readers. Clark Lindsey has a blow-by-blow of the COTS announcement, an RpK press release, and other info.

He does this stuff, so I don’t have to.

[Update on Saturday morning]

Clark has another set of links, and an idiotic quote (are there any other kind?) from John Pike.

COTS finalists are supposed to be announced in a couple hours.

Clark Lindsey has an overview of the program, and links (including one to the webcast of the announcement, which will occur at 4 PM Eastern).

[Update shortly after begin of announcement]

Just said that two have been selected. So we know they’re not going to be spreading money thin.

Well, that didn’t take long. SpaceX and RpK.

That means two (partially) reusable vehicle companies.

[Update a minutes later]

Well, I see via comments that I didn’t have to liveblog it. An army of reporters!

…and probably even get well paid for it, in an influential publication, if I didn’t want to lose my job. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t pay that well…

Proposition (with which I don’t necessarily agree):

NASA’s approach, a return to Apollo (both in terms of the “we need to set a goal and get there,” and the actual hardware concepts) represents the mindset of a cargo cult.

As Rusty Barton noted over at sci.space.policy, in response to this story, “When Boeing started designing the 787, did its engineers go to the Udvar-Hazy Museum and start pulling parts off the Dash-80?”

Discuss.

OK, my question to Dr. Stanley is, if it’s a good idea for Mars, why isn’t it a good idea for the moon?

“If you refilled the EDS in orbit [using commercial LEO fuel depots] it could act as the MTV,” says Georgia Institute of Technology aerospace professor Douglas Stanley, manager of the November 2005 NASA exploration systems architecture study (ESAS).