Bill “Ballast” Nelson is going to be head of NASA. This is almost the worst possible pick. Is there any level on which this administration is not a disaster, with less than two months in?
[Friday-morning update]
Five questions that Nelson should be asked (but probably won’t be).
The last is the most important. He’s never given any inkling of having anything resembling a vision for humanity’s future in space.
This new “study” may be the beginning of the end for the program. This graf stuck out, though: “McConnaughey is leading the study for Kathy Lueders, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight. Even before the study’s initiation, McConnaughey had been pushing for the SLS program to become more cost-effective. One goal of this analysis is to find ways for the large NASA rocket to compete effectively with privately developed rockets as part of the agency’s Artemis Moon program.”
No one seems to ask the question: Why should NASA even be attempting to compete with private industry? This is not a proper role of a government agency, but we’ve been stuck in this mode since Shuttle.
This looks like an interesting symposium this week. Hard to believe that it’s been eight years since my book was published.
As always, I’ll note that I don’t want to be immortal; I just want to live as long as I want to live.
What happens when they don’t negotiate requirements:
Read the thread for other examples.
Congratulations to Anita and Michelle, among others. I worked with Anita at Rockwell for years, and Michelle is my corporate counsel (when I need one).
This story on SLS is pretty lazy. They don’t question Singer’s statement, or point out that, with her talking about how many people SLS employs in how many states, she is simply reinforcing Garver’s point. And the cost of an SLS flight will never be as low as $800M.
I had a long telecon and exchange of emails with Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky a few weeks ago, to bring them up to speed on what is going on in space for National Review. This article would seem to be one of the first products of that discussion.
An enormous space telescope. I was writing about this sort of thing four decades ago, and it’s finally on the verge of fruition.