I’ll be on The Space Show tomorrow morning (Thursday, January 26th) from 9:30 to 11 AM Pacific, if anyone is possessed of sufficient masochism and fortitude to listen to my latest blather.

Rick Tumlinson has some space policy advice for the White House. As one of the people in attendance at the meeting last fall that Rick mentioned (and who has signed off on the consensus document that resulted), I encourage you to read the whole thing.

I doubt if they’ll pay any attention, though. I think that this administration’s space policy is pretty firmly fixed now, absent some new unexpected event (e.g., another Shuttle loss, assuming that it ever flies again), and there are many more critical issues to them at this point, both from the standpoint of the national interest and electorally. I suspect that they think that space policy is currently one of those things that ain’t broke, so there’s no need to fix it, relative to more pressing concerns. I think that the best we can hope for, at this point, is that the policy is sufficiently non-hostile to private enterprise that current NASA activities and expenditures won’t hold things back too much. This is not to say that NASA isn’t doing useful things for the private sector, but the amount of resources being expended in that direction, relative to those being spent on centralized (and ultimately unaffordable and unsustainable) fifteen-year plans, remain tragic.

As Clark Lindsey (and Keith Cowing) notes, NASA hasn’t formally dropped methane propulsion from Constellation, or CEV. The final CFI doesn’t, after all, forbid methane, or specify hypergolics. They simply appear to have dropped it in the final version because the earlier draft version of the CFI so emphatically required it.

However, given the risk aversion of industry, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that neither bidder on CEV will propose methane propulsion, absent a strong sense of a desire to have it on NASA’s part. The driving requirement at this point seems to be cost and schedule (including schedule risk), which means avoiding any unnecessary technology development programs on the critical path. So despite the fact that methane propulsion isn’t intrinsically risky, the fact that it’s currently non-existent in terms of the technology-readiness level that NASA will want at the Preliminary Design Review probably assures that it won’t be incorporated into the CEV, at least for the initial version. It could, however, be an upgrade later, assuming that the program gets to the point at which upgrades will occur.

One of Alan Boyles’ readers repeats a common myth about the emerging space industry:

“OK, rocket-powered planes have been around since the early

I’m busy writing a proposal or two, but here’s an innovative way to get to the Moon. Much lower marginal cost, and exactly the kind of things that NASA should be considering.

[via Mark Whittington]

There’s an interesting interview with the authors of The Rocket Company over at The Space Review today.

TSR: With all the information you’ve presented, shy of seven relatively sympathetic and understanding billionaires and an engineering group from heaven, what other missing pieces are needed for someone to develop The Rocket Company?

Dave: That

There’s an interesting interview with the authors of The Rocket Company over at The Space Review today.

TSR: With all the information you’ve presented, shy of seven relatively sympathetic and understanding billionaires and an engineering group from heaven, what other missing pieces are needed for someone to develop The Rocket Company?

Dave: That

There’s an interesting interview with the authors of The Rocket Company over at The Space Review today.

TSR: With all the information you’ve presented, shy of seven relatively sympathetic and understanding billionaires and an engineering group from heaven, what other missing pieces are needed for someone to develop The Rocket Company?

Dave: That

But, hey, if it was, no one would bother to shell out a couple hundred thousand for the real thing, right?

Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane emails that they have a streaming video of a computer-generated movie of one of their suborbital flights over at Pure Galactic (apparently a new spaceline on the block). I was surprised to see that the modified Learjet has a “V” tail.

He’s interested in comments on the soundtrack. It’s a little too new agey and native Americany for my taste, and the musical transitions don’t evoke the visual ones to me. But what do I know?

Thomas James beats the eternally clueless Bruce Gagnon with a heavy cluebat. One could say that he beats him senseless, but it’s so short a journey that it would be pointless.

It does bring to mind an interesting issue. If we do ever achieve the desideratum of low-cost, high-volume launch, will it become a significant contributor to atmospheric pollution? As Thomas points out, Jet A and oxygen overwhelm rocket exhaust by orders of magnitude, so it’s hard to imagine lox/RP, lox-hydrogen or even lox-methane as being a problem, but I can see a point at which solids might be banned (though I suspect that they’d have long before that point been eliminated as unsafe and uneconomical).