Over at The Space Review today, Jeff Foust writes that space enthusiasts have to avoid the Segway problem of overhype. On a related note, Bob Clarebrough says that space entrepreneurs need to be both visionary and customer focused.
Bigelow Aerospace seems to be making good progress in developing private orbital facilities (a key component of a spacefaring infrastructure). Alan Boyle has more.
A NASA center director has started a blog. It’s too bad there aren’t more Pete Wordens to replace existing NASA center directors. And speaking of Ames, it looks like they just lost a promising program, as a result of politics as usual.
Punish success, reward failure. Does this look like an agency that needs an emergency appropriation? If so, it’s only due to Congressional meddling and pork barreling.
This is why NASA will not get us back to the moon, or open up space.
Heinlein’s work is characterized by ordinary people cobbling together ordinary resources to do extraordinary things–like go to the moon. In Rocket Ship Galileo, three high school students and a nuclear physicist build a moon ship just because they can. It must have seemed possible in 1947, when that book came out. Then in the 1960s, NASA convinced everyone that only massive government programs could send people into space, and stories about people building spaceships in their back yards went by the wayside.
Now, finally, in the 21st century, science fact has caught up with the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s. Private citizens are now building space ships for real, in large part because the winning of the Ansari X PRIZE proved it was possible.
The sad thing is that it could have been done much earlier, at least from a technological standpoint. It has been our own attitudes and policies holding us back.