Jeff Foust has a podcast up of Mike Griffin’s speech and Q&A from last week’s Mar Society Meeting.

James Van Allen, discoverer of the magnetic belts surrounding the earth that bear his name, has died. He was one of the most (perhaps the most) notable long-time opponents of the manned space program. He never understood that civil space is about much more than science.

Condolences to his family. It is a loss to science, if not informed space policy debate.

Dwayne Day has a review of a new documentary on the Mars movement starring (for better or worse), Bob Zubrin:

One of Zubrin

Grant Bonin discusses the papers put out by the Space Frontier Foundation and the GAO on problems with NASA’s exploration plans in todays issue of The Space Review.

It’s worth the read, but being busy working on same plans, I would comment only on this bit:

Human-rating either the Atlas 5 or Delta 4 is likely to be an expensive proposition regardless of the fact that both boosters have already been developed (especially since no one really knows what it means to

Clark Lindsey notes (probably correctly):

Certainly one way to help insure that the exploration program continues past this administration would be to tie it closely with international partners as was done with the ISS in the early 1990s.

Based on history, it would also be a good way to insure that the program is delayed, over cost, and doesn’t achieve its objectives. Back in 1993 NASA made a Faustian bargain. It would accept the need to make the station more “international” in exchange for keeping Congressional (and in that case, more importantly, administration) support. It won its appropriation by a single vote.

We went to the moon alone, and it was vastly successful, at least in terms of getting to the moon. There’s no reason to think that bringing in other nations increases the probability of success, or reduce costs, even if it increases the probability of keeping the program alive politically. This is not a dig at other nations–it’s simply a recognition of the degree to which bringing in other entities, with their own inscrutable politics (that, like ours, largely have nothing to do with space), can complicate and confound our own efforts. For recent (in the last four years) readers of this blog, I discoursed on this subject back in 2002.

Clark Lindsey has some thoughts on John Kavanagh’s thoughts about NASA’s potential conflict of interest in COTS/Constellation (at least as currently formulated). I might have some thoughts, too, but not today. Perhaps this weekend or next week, after I get home to Florida (where it now looks unlikely that we’ll get any severe weather soon).

Here’s a link to the show at Utube.

Clark Lindsey has dropped in on the Mars Society conference, which is in DC this year, and has some first-hand reports, on Mike Griffin’s speech and the latest from Elon Musk and SpaceX.

I haven’t spent much time reading them myself, being too busy, but when I do later, I may have some thoughts.

One question I do have, though. Just how big does Mike think is big enough for a heavy lifter for a Mars mission? How many decades does he plan to put off developing the critical technologies of orbital storage and handling of propellants, and vehicle assembly?

Popular Mechanics has a new podcast up with interviews with Bob Bigelow (presumably on space hotels) and Tom Jones about spacewalking (among other non-space topics).

The latest roundup of links at New Space News is up.