I put up a level 9 entry on eBay for my Space-Shot.com tournament to win a trip to space on Rocketplane. This was Joe Latrell’s entry for winning the SpaceShot, Inc. beta 1 tournament and he will get the proceeds of the sale. He is ineligible to use it himself because he is on the advisory board. Face value $750 for an entry to compete against 511 other players for a trip to space, starting price $499. The price needs to rise 15% to be 1/512 of the retail value of the prize ($192,500 ticket plus $100,000 cash).

SpaceShot also received Rocketplane congratulations on a successful launch.

Poor Mark Whittington. He continues to grasp at any straw that offers him hope of the Great Race with the yellow hordes, despite their obvious slow pace and uncertain plans for their human spaceflight program.

Sadly for him, Dwayne Day sets the record straight, in comments:

I’m increasingly surprised by the shallowness of the coverage that the Chinese space program is receiving from spacedaily.com’s Australian commentator. See, for instance, here.

The commentator, Morris Jones, speculates based upon limited knowledge and data. For starters, he was not even _at_ the talk by Mr. Luo Ge (I was), and is making his judgments based upon a Reuters news article. That article was essentially accurate, but did not discuss Luo’s comments in detail or really in context. Thus any conclusions that one draws from the article are going to be a distorted assessment of what Luo actually said.

Read all, if you’re interested in this subject.

Remember Safe, Simple, Soon? Well, I guess they never explicitly said it would be cheap, but they sure implied the hell out of it:

NASA’s initial internal estimate of what it would cost to modify the current SRB used for Shuttle missions to serve as the first stage of the new Crew Launch Vehicle had been around $1 billion. That estimate has been revised up to around $3 billion.

Nice bait and switch–you have to admire ATK for their marketing, if nothing else.

And tell me again, what was the estimate to “human rate” an EELV? And more to the point, how many very juicy first, second and third prizes for low-cost crew access to LEO could three billion dollars fund?

Also, for any enterprising muckraising space journalists out there, this has been a juicy scandal waiting to happen, what with Scott Horowitz’ recent job change, and all. Moreover, it could potentially be one that kills the Satay (or as Henry Spencer calls it, Porklauncher I).

I’m just sayin’…

Remember Safe, Simple, Soon? Well, I guess they never explicitly said it would be cheap, but they sure implied the hell out of it:

NASA’s initial internal estimate of what it would cost to modify the current SRB used for Shuttle missions to serve as the first stage of the new Crew Launch Vehicle had been around $1 billion. That estimate has been revised up to around $3 billion.

Nice bait and switch–you have to admire ATK for their marketing, if nothing else.

And tell me again, what was the estimate to “human rate” an EELV? And more to the point, how many very juicy first, second and third prizes for low-cost crew access to LEO could three billion dollars fund?

Also, for any enterprising muckraising space journalists out there, this has been a juicy scandal waiting to happen, what with Scott Horowitz’ recent job change, and all. Moreover, it could potentially be one that kills the Satay (or as Henry Spencer calls it, Porklauncher I).

I’m just sayin’…

Remember Safe, Simple, Soon? Well, I guess they never explicitly said it would be cheap, but they sure implied the hell out of it:

NASA’s initial internal estimate of what it would cost to modify the current SRB used for Shuttle missions to serve as the first stage of the new Crew Launch Vehicle had been around $1 billion. That estimate has been revised up to around $3 billion.

Nice bait and switch–you have to admire ATK for their marketing, if nothing else.

And tell me again, what was the estimate to “human rate” an EELV? And more to the point, how many very juicy first, second and third prizes for low-cost crew access to LEO could three billion dollars fund?

Also, for any enterprising muckraising space journalists out there, this has been a juicy scandal waiting to happen, what with Scott Horowitz’ recent job change, and all. Moreover, it could potentially be one that kills the Satay (or as Henry Spencer calls it, Porklauncher I).

I’m just sayin’…

Paul Spudis reviews Harrison Schmitt’s book on returning to the moon.

The vehicle presumably still had a lot of propellant in it when the engine cut off and it fell back on the reef, presumably in flames from the fire that caused the problem, and wouldn’t be shut down by the cutoff valve. Why wasn’t there an earth-shattering kaboom?

…of ants and islands. I doubt if it will persuade anyone, though, even if they get the point.

We start with the richest among us only able to afford a few minute or a few days in space. As we get richer and space gets cheaper, we can have space studios, then space apartments, space mansions, space palaces and space shopping malls. People live where they are. The spectrum from tourism to settlement is just a measure of time. Where does space tourism leave off and space settlement begin? Two-week time shares are probably tourism. One-way tickets, definitely settlement. What’s the down payment on a one-year lease?

This isn’t really news for anyone paying attention, but I found this article about the potential for an asteroid hit in 2036 interesting, because it describes a new method of diversion that I hadn’t considered or heard of previously (though it’s obvious, once you think about it).

It’s called a “gravity tow,” in which you hover a large mass near the asteroid, and maneuver it, pulling it from its trajectory simply using the gravitational attraction between them. It seems like the safest, most controlled way to go, and doesn’t require physically grappling, which could make problems worse if you end up breaking it. I’m glad to see that there’s a lot more thought going into this than the traditional “nuke it” approach.