Eric Hedman has a column in today’s issue of The Space Review on whether or not ESAS is a good approach, or at least a good enough one. His bottom line:

After reading over the ESAS, I

Eric Hedman has a column in today’s issue of The Space Review on whether or not ESAS is a good approach, or at least a good enough one. His bottom line:

After reading over the ESAS, I

Eric Hedman has a column in today’s issue of The Space Review on whether or not ESAS is a good approach, or at least a good enough one. His bottom line:

After reading over the ESAS, I

In “Human orbital spaceflight: the ultralight approach,”, Richard Speck looks at a cheap, light, low tech escape system and fleshes out the new rocket adage, “Be the escape system”.

In “The challenges of Mars Exploration,” Donald Rapp assesses the not-too-bright prospects of various technologies on the necessary timelines for Mars exploration.

There’s one I disagree with him on: in-situ lunar oxygen. In-situ oxygen extraction on the Moon need not be a major industrial process. The basic needs are a heat source and vapor recovery. Suppose you have an Earth imported high efficiency pump. Add a lunar glass bell jar and an Earth imported parabolic mirror (later, lunar made). If you make the bell jar big enough, the mirror can sit inside the bell jar. Set the whole thing on a flat piece of lunar glass to make a low efficiency seal.

Operation would be as follows:

1. Dump some ore on a flat piece of lunar glass.
2. Point your parabolic mirror at the ore.
3. Put the bell jar on top.
4. Turn on the pump.
5. Dump it out before the slag sticks to the glass bottom.
6. Repeat.

Some kind of airlock conveyor belt thing where the top layer of the ore is fried might be a more advanced version. It’s ore efficiency would be quite low, but there’s plenty of ore up there.

This weekend Jews celebrate Passover and Christians celebrate Easter. The latter holiday has its roots in the former as the Last Supper was a Passover feast. Christians celebrate Jesus being seen alive following his crucifiction and subsequently ascending to heaven, the Jews celebrate Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt to the promised land.

The ultimate Earthly oppressor is not Pharoah or Rome, but gravity. This month, my web site, Space-Shot.com took steps to throw off the yoke of gravity. For $3.50 the myriads can compete in a tournament to win a trip to space. If they don’t win, they help someone else do so.

It does not take divine intervention, a miracle or ten plagues to get people into space, just a creative web site. (Albeit praying for a change in the weather can’t hurt.) Now people of all means can ascend to space and soon can reach the planets and the stars.

Let my people go to space!

I guess it’s time to give Mark Whittington the secret decoder ring, and initiate him into the Secret Brotherhood of Internet Rocketeers:

Clearly recent experience teaches us that simply telling the current NASA to go forth and build a lunar base is the last thing anyone would want to do. For NASA the construction of a lunar base would be the work of decades and at least tens of billions of dollars. If you like how NASA has managed the International Space Station, you

Chris Bergin has retracted the story about problems with ESAS. That’s why I hedged my piece yesterday with the word “apparently.” This doesn’t, of course, mean that there aren’t problems with ESAS–we just don’t know what they are, yet.

At the risk of violating a trademark, I can only say, heh:

NASA’s various attempts to develop new space transports, particularly fully reusable launch vehicles, in the past decade or so have not been successful. However, rather than revealing poor planning and management, NASA said those failures proved that RLVs were not feasible with current technology. So if the CEV program collapses due to overruns colliding with a no-growth budget, I guess that will prove that capsules on expendables are not feasible with current technology.

Today is the forty-fifth anniversary of the first man in space, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first flight of the Space Shuttle. If you want to celebrate, it’s also the fifth anniversary of Yuri’s Night. Go find a party near you.

[Update a few minutes later]

I have some thoughts on this anniversary over at National Review (note, it’s been edited somewhat from what I submitted).

[Update in the afternoon]

Mark is whining again:

First, Rand has presented a breath taking lack of specifics in his suggestions on how to improve the space program.

I only had nine hundred words. I’ve offered many specifics, many times, in many places. It was an anniversary commemoration, not a policy white paper.

Amidst the big anniversary tomorrow, it’s easy to forget that it’s been exactly thirty-six years since Apollo XIII headed off on its ill-fated voyage around the moon. It occurred at an inauspicious time, for those who are triskaidekaphobic.

[Update a few minutes later]

It’s also been five years since the X-33 died. That didn’t happen soon enough.

I disagree with this, though:

NASA was willing to take the risks inherent in the winged potato for one reason: LockMart was willing to put its money where its mouth was, to a degree that Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas, or Boeing weren’t. LockMart had even touted its orbital “VentureStar” as a replacement for the shuttle and Titan IV, ready for flight between 2004 and 2006.

This isn’t true, for two reasons. First, NASA picked it because they were enamored with the technology. Second, there’s no evidence that Lockheed was “willing to put its money where its mouth was,” and quite a bit to the contrary. Their business plan was a joke, and not a good one, but NASA was unable to distinguish between a good and a bad business plan. If Lockheed had really been willing to put its money where its mouth was, it would have made the investment to complete the program. I don’t believe for a minute that Lockheed-Martin management ever intended to develop Vstar with their own money. They just told NASA what it wanted to hear.