Jeff Foust asks a question (scroll down about thirty comments):

…should settlement be an explicit goal of the space agency, with programs specifically tailored to that, or should settlement be instead a commercial initiative that is either an outgrowth of, or even completely independent from, government space efforts?

I’ve some thoughts on that, but no time to put them down right now. The comments section is open, however.

The FAA Oklahoma Spaceport Draft Environmental Assessment (EA) is available for download (6 MB). I haven’t read it yet, but I can already say it is very similar to the Mojave Spaceport one. That’s because there is an XCOR Xerus on the front cover. They are soliciting comments and will have a public meeting in Oklahoma on March 9.

Liftport has had a successful test.

From Henry Spencer, over at sci.space.policy:

As various people have pointed out in the past, to judge by the fuss that gets made when a few of them die, astronauts clearly are priceless national assets — exactly the sort of people you should not be risking in an experimental-class vehicle.

I tracked down the cite to the following quote in The Economic Impact of Commercial Space Transportation on the US Economy: 2004.

Recent market studies have shown public space travel has the potential to become a billion dollar industry within 20 years.

It’s the famous 2002 Futron study made public in October 2004. On the bullish side, still no accounting for games. No accounting for $200,000 starting prices (It assumes $100,000) which is bullish for price, bearish for quantity. On the bearish side, still none of the demand flown off. Why am I analyzing 4 year old data when I could be testing the market personally for a little more than the cost of a new study?

I am doing that, too.

A lot of people disparage newcomers to the space field as having “paper rockets.”

Well, at little cost, you can now make your own paper Saturn V. And here’s another company that’s going to be offering a paper MLP and crawler. The pictures are pretty amazing, considering the construction materials.

Tom Cuddihy (to whom congratulations on his upcoming marriage are owed), inspired by some musings on the subject by Jon Goff, runs some numbers on reusing lunar landers, and finds that (unsurprisingly), it doesn’t make sense. At least with the assumptions that he uses.

The utility of reusable space transportation elements is heavily dependent on the cost of propellants in all of the transportation nodes through which they operate. If we are going to deliver all propellants from earth, to the surface of the moon, using chemical propulsion, then it’s not possible to justify reuse of the lander (and in fact it would be impossible to justify reuse of the crew module itself, except for the fact that we have to return crew, anyway). If we are to have a cost-effective cis-lunar transportation infrastructure, it’s not sufficient to get the cost of LEO delivery down (though it is certainly necessary). We also either need to manufacture propellants on the moon, or deliver them to L1 via low-thrust high-Isp tugs from LEO, or both.

This was discussed (I believe–at least I wrote a lengthy input to it) in the final Boeing report on the CE&R contract (a document that NASA apparently never even bothered to look at once Steidle was fired and they came up with ESAS).

OK, enough space blogging for a while. I’ve got to get back to work.

At The Space Review today, in the context of NASA’s new budget, Jeff Foust reprises one of my recurring themes–that we can’t make sensible policy decisions until we decide what we’re trying to accomplish and what the purpose of a space program is.

These editorials all seem to follow the old argument that robots are better, cheaper, and safer means of exploring the solar system than humans. However, buried in that debate is a deeper issue that is almost never brought up in superficial newspaper editorials and other commentary: what is NASA

I’d like to add my name to the list of luminaries at the bottom of this letter. Jim Muncy has been an unsung (or at least not sufficiently sung) hero of commercial space for decades.

Well, that depends on what you mean. NASA has always been politicized–it is a government agency, after all. Anyone who thinks that the agency has ever made decisions, from what part of the country in which to award a contract, to whether or not to ship money off to Russia, that weren’t driven strongly by politics has no understanding of how government agencies work. The question here is, has the science that NASA purports to do and report become more politicized?

Troublingly, the answer may indeed by yes, but again, it’s still nothing new. On the other hand, the Sentinel damages its credibility when it writes:

Former Administrator Sean O’Keefe made an unprecedented decision that fall to campaign on behalf of Republicans. In the final days before the election, he visited Huntsville, Ala., home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, to endorse U.S. Rep. Bob Riley, R-Ala., for governor. A similar visit to Cocoa Beach to stump for U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Oviedo, was canceled only after O’Keefe’s flight was delayed.

There’s nothing unprecedented about this. Where were they when Dan Goldin was doing the same thing with Barbara Mikulski in the nineties?

Setting that aside, though, certainly hiring an unqualified political hack and college dropout for a powerful position at the Public Affairs Office (PAO) was shameful, but just as much of that thing went on in general during the Clinton years (anyone remember Craig Livingstone, the former bar bouncer made head of White House security?). And it’s not like PAO has ever been a bastion of competence, either. Certainly, though, it’s troubling when you have people with very little understanding of science (at least based on the quotes) telling scientists how they have to present their data (the young idiot insisted on prefixing the phrase “Big Bang” with the word “theory,” as though this was somehow pejorative–ah, well, just one more blow to the reputation of journalism degrees).

But there is also this myth that science is science, and that scientists never let their own personal political viewpoints color their interpretation of the data, and that scientists can be, and are above the fray of political debates. Unfortunately, particularly when it comes to environmental issues, many scientists have allowed themselves to become political pawns in issues for which many of them have sympathy, and they often attribute too much certainty to their conclusions than is justified by the data, because they find them personally appealing from a policy perspective.

In fact, it seems to me that claims of scientific objectivity are similar (though perhaps slightly better founded, given the nature of the scientific method and peer review) to those of journalistic objectivity–the notion that somehow, despite one’s personal prejudices, it’s still possible to play it straight down the center. We know that in journalism, that’s a nonsensical conceit, and we should be wary of the same argument made by people with science degrees.

The lesson here, I think, is that rather than have an unrealistic expectation of pure scientific objectivity coming from a government agency, we should instead expect politics to intrude, both from without and within, and always maintain a realistic and skeptical view of the process with as much transparency as possible, and keep the debate flowing freely with no assumptions of nobility on either side. Blogs can help with this.

[Update at 9 AM EST]

Thomas James has a Carnival of Space Moonbattery. It really is related, honest.