Here’s an article in the Jackson Hole Star Tribune about Frontier Astronautics, a company that has set up shop in an abandoned Atlas silo outside Chugwater, Wyoming.

This is an interesting concept, but I think that it would be a tough sell politically, partially because of the false lessons learned from ISS:

The notional mission design that Farquhar presented is based on what he calls the

Jon Goff explains why the ESAS windmill is worth a tilt:

How are we going to find investors willing risk the money to develop on-orbit propellant transfer when they’re being told that multi-launch architectures are too unreliable? That the best way to get back to the moon is building Ares I and Ares V, and that any EELV or light launcher based system would require too many launches to be practical?

Who’s going to fund a commercial lunar transportation system if we’ve abandoned the field to those who claim the only way you can do lunar transportation is using HLVs?

Ideas matter.

Honestly, as much as I would like to see NASA change to a more commercial aligned position, I don’t really think it is likely to happen. But if we can sway the conventional wisdom that these other, more commercial approaches really are not only technically feasible, but technically and economically superior, it doesn’t really matter. In the end, NASA will do what NASA will do, but if we can convince potential investors that there really are more cost effective ways of doing things, it will have been worth it.

But if we abandon the field of ideas, and stick to our knitting, we’re setting ourselves seriously up for failure.

It’s impossible to even begin to estimate the staggering amount of damage that has been done over the past decades to our prospects of opening space, by NASA-driven public perceptions about the difficulty of doing various things in space, in terms of decimating investment prospects. The false lessons from Apollo, the Shuttle and ISS continue to haunt us today, and this current irrational fear of orbital operations just continues that destructive legacy, in my opinion.

Ryan Zelnio has started a new space policy blog, that reviews space policy papers. He seems to be off to an interesting start.

The latest edition is up on the web.

I wonder what the center picture is on this web page? And what the “15” means? Years until it flies…?

[Update late morning]

As a commenter notes, it’s not Chinese, but Korean, which I should have known by the name of the publication.

I wonder what the center picture is on this web page? And what the “15” means? Years until it flies…?

[Update late morning]

As a commenter notes, it’s not Chinese, but Korean, which I should have known by the name of the publication.

I wonder what the center picture is on this web page? And what the “15” means? Years until it flies…?

[Update late morning]

As a commenter notes, it’s not Chinese, but Korean, which I should have known by the name of the publication.

Most of the alternatives put forth against ESAS are different launch vehicle concepts, with no major changes to the nature of the lunar mission hardware or operations itself. Following up from his previous posts, Jon Goff has been exploring a different corner of the trade space, and has some interesting results. As a commenter points out there, he’s grossly overoptimistic on his vehicle weights, but it remains an interesting avenue to explore, regardless.

Thomas James notes something that I didn’t get around to noting yesterday–how limited in his thinking Stephen Hawking is:

If you’re going to have to terraform even barren worlds with Earth-like parameters, how is that so much different from developing Mars-like planets as well? Why be so picky?

In fact, there just happens to be a Mars-like planet nearby, which wouldn’t require anti-matter rockets or tens of thousands of years to reach…

And for that matter, there are plenty of asteroids and moons in the universe, not to mention the infinite possible variations on O’Neillian space settlements. Settling Earth-like planets isn’t the only way to preserve the species.