Folks in southern California will have an opportunity to see the last Titan IV launch out of Vandenberg in about an hour, at 11:04 AM Pacific time. If the sky is clear, go outside and look to the west. Spaceflightnow is blogging the countdown.

[Update a couple minutes later]

To clarify, it’s the last Titan IV (or Titan anything) launch, period. It just happens to be launching out of Vandenberg. And with its retirement, Delta IV can take over as reigning pad queen.

[Update at 11 AM PDT]

I don’t know if it was the Transterrestrialanche, or what, but SpaceFlightNow is now down.

[Update at 11:30 PDT]

Well, it apparently launched, but I didn’t see it. There was a slight marine layer, and it may have obscured the view.

DoD space programs are a management mess.

[Via Kevin Parkin]

Alan Boyle has an interesting report from New Mexico:

The “giggle factor” that often dogged the space tourism industry in the pre-SpaceShipOne era is gone forever. “Now the idea of personal spaceflight can come out of the closet,” Michael Kelly, vice president of the X Prize Foundation, told an audience of more than 200 at New Mexico State University here.

Jeff Greason explains the importance of these kinds of events, and the suborbital industry, despite the foolish naysayers who think it has nothing to do with orbit:

“We don’t know how to make spaceships that can fly a couple of times a day, every day for years,” he said. “We don’t know how to fly so safely and so reliably that we can fly people as a business. We don’t know how to make money yet. … If we’re ever going to free ourselves from the kinds of fits and starts, one spurt of energy per generation, little incremental bits of progress that characterize government funding in space, we’ve got to start making a profit. And we don’t know how to do that yet. We don’t know any of those things. But we think we have pretty good ideas about how to solve them, and we aren’t the only ones.”

He also had some good news:

“We are off the back burner [with the Xerus project], but we don’t have enough money that I can confidently say we can finish working on the vehicle,” Greason told MSNBC.com.

Other interesting news:

Tai told the audience of rocket entrepreneurs and enthusiasts at Thursday’s symposium that Virgin Galactic wasn’t necessarily locked into using SpaceShipOne design exclusively, just as the Virgin Atlantic airline isn’t locked into using a specific kind of airplane.

“We want to partner with all of the people in this industry. … If you have a better spaceship than Burt Rutan, then Virgin Galactic wants to operate that spaceship,” Tai said.

In other words, they want to be a spaceline.

I’m going to be attending this conference in LA in a couple weeks. Those who are interested in the other space program may want to do so as well.

You know, if Tom Hanks could stop being so enthralled with NASA, and use his money and influence to help out some of the private players in space, he might actually be able to get to the moon before 2018. And they’d even be willing to build a vehicle that can handle his 6’1″ frame.

[via Fred Kiesche]

Clark Lindsey just got back from the Air and Space Museum. He’s got pictures.

That’s the title (except theirs is declarative, not interrogative) of an op-ed piece in the business section of today’s Journal (sorry, subscription required) by Holman Jenkins, in which he quotes yours truly, Henry Vanderbilt and Charles Lurio:

We put these views in the paper as a public service. NASA can be expected to dismiss them. Most of the media, bound up in its notion of legitimate “sources,” reports only the views of NASA, the lobbying sector and the congressional delegations whose main interest is keeping the pork flowing.

Political reality is that government does not admit mistakes, briskly decide not to throw good money after bad, junk failing organizations and start over with a clean sheet. That’s what business does.

To his credit, and at the risk of ridicule, NASA’s Mr. Griffin has at least given the best explanation of why space colonization is important: survival of the species over the long term. Yet already visible is the unworkable budget logic that’s destined remorselessly to deflate NASA’s conceit that only a government-led program, at a cost of billions of dollars per astronaut, can get personnel and equipment the first 100 miles of whatever journeys we take to elsewhere in the solar system.

NASA’s core competence, which Mr. Griffin is fighting to retain, consists of treating space as fit terrain for occasional budgetary blowouts, with the inevitable intervening hangovers.

This may be a way to keep its massive civil service and contractor armies together. But it’s the enemy of routine access to earth orbit, which would allow space finally to become a thriving part of our human economy and make it affordable to contemplate a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars.

Note the new media flavor. Also, go check out Henry’s latest thoughts (probably not a permalink):

This plan is crippled from the start, in that it doesn’t contemplate more than minor trims and reshuffles of the current Shuttle/Station standing army, and it calls for development of not one but two major new NASA-proprietary launch vehicles rather than working with existing US and world commercial launch assets. The combination ensures costs will be far too high for the program to have any chance of doing sustainable deep-space exploration over the long term – possibly too high to allow NASA to even make it past the first major hurdle, simultaneous winddown of Shuttle/Station and development of the oversized new “CEV” Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay and the large new CLV launcher to lift it.

[Update at mid morning]

This part bears a little comment:

It may not be important in the grand scheme of things, a $16 billion a year agency. But one thing has changed: There’s now a popular constituency for space policy that does more than just tune in for the blast-off extravaganzas. Blame the Web: We told you last year how seething space fans had kept Congress’s feet to the fire and ended up saving a bill designed to speed development of private space tourism.

The same folks are also a source of critique of NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study, issued last month, mostly in consultation with the usual suspects — the giant aerospace contractors, who’ve been NASA’s primary iron triangle sounding board since Gemini. Now there’s an effective peanut gallery, their voices magnified by the Web, which has sprouted numerous sites devoted to criticizing and kibitzing about NASA.

This plan actually wasn’t in consultation with the usual suspects, or at least not all of them (other than probably ATK-Thiokol for the SRB, and Lockmart for ET mods). At least in Boeing’s case, this architecture is not at all what they recommended in their architecture studies. The sixty-day study was strictly a NASA-internal activity, initiated and led by Mike Griffin and Doug Stanley, and as far as I can tell, they paid little attention to industry input, except what they needed from the contractors named above to flesh out their Shuttle-derived designs.

[4 PM EDT update]

Instapundit has more excerpts, including the quotes.

That’s the title (except theirs is declarative, not interrogative) of an op-ed piece in the business section of today’s Journal (sorry, subscription required) by Holman Jenkins, in which he quotes yours truly, Henry Vanderbilt and Charles Lurio:

We put these views in the paper as a public service. NASA can be expected to dismiss them. Most of the media, bound up in its notion of legitimate “sources,” reports only the views of NASA, the lobbying sector and the congressional delegations whose main interest is keeping the pork flowing.

Political reality is that government does not admit mistakes, briskly decide not to throw good money after bad, junk failing organizations and start over with a clean sheet. That’s what business does.

To his credit, and at the risk of ridicule, NASA’s Mr. Griffin has at least given the best explanation of why space colonization is important: survival of the species over the long term. Yet already visible is the unworkable budget logic that’s destined remorselessly to deflate NASA’s conceit that only a government-led program, at a cost of billions of dollars per astronaut, can get personnel and equipment the first 100 miles of whatever journeys we take to elsewhere in the solar system.

NASA’s core competence, which Mr. Griffin is fighting to retain, consists of treating space as fit terrain for occasional budgetary blowouts, with the inevitable intervening hangovers.

This may be a way to keep its massive civil service and contractor armies together. But it’s the enemy of routine access to earth orbit, which would allow space finally to become a thriving part of our human economy and make it affordable to contemplate a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars.

Note the new media flavor. Also, go check out Henry’s latest thoughts (probably not a permalink):

This plan is crippled from the start, in that it doesn’t contemplate more than minor trims and reshuffles of the current Shuttle/Station standing army, and it calls for development of not one but two major new NASA-proprietary launch vehicles rather than working with existing US and world commercial launch assets. The combination ensures costs will be far too high for the program to have any chance of doing sustainable deep-space exploration over the long term – possibly too high to allow NASA to even make it past the first major hurdle, simultaneous winddown of Shuttle/Station and development of the oversized new “CEV” Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay and the large new CLV launcher to lift it.

[Update at mid morning]

This part bears a little comment:

It may not be important in the grand scheme of things, a $16 billion a year agency. But one thing has changed: There’s now a popular constituency for space policy that does more than just tune in for the blast-off extravaganzas. Blame the Web: We told you last year how seething space fans had kept Congress’s feet to the fire and ended up saving a bill designed to speed development of private space tourism.

The same folks are also a source of critique of NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study, issued last month, mostly in consultation with the usual suspects — the giant aerospace contractors, who’ve been NASA’s primary iron triangle sounding board since Gemini. Now there’s an effective peanut gallery, their voices magnified by the Web, which has sprouted numerous sites devoted to criticizing and kibitzing about NASA.

This plan actually wasn’t in consultation with the usual suspects, or at least not all of them (other than probably ATK-Thiokol for the SRB, and Lockmart for ET mods). At least in Boeing’s case, this architecture is not at all what they recommended in their architecture studies. The sixty-day study was strictly a NASA-internal activity, initiated and led by Mike Griffin and Doug Stanley, and as far as I can tell, they paid little attention to industry input, except what they needed from the contractors named above to flesh out their Shuttle-derived designs.

[4 PM EDT update]

Instapundit has more excerpts, including the quotes.

That’s the title (except theirs is declarative, not interrogative) of an op-ed piece in the business section of today’s Journal (sorry, subscription required) by Holman Jenkins, in which he quotes yours truly, Henry Vanderbilt and Charles Lurio:

We put these views in the paper as a public service. NASA can be expected to dismiss them. Most of the media, bound up in its notion of legitimate “sources,” reports only the views of NASA, the lobbying sector and the congressional delegations whose main interest is keeping the pork flowing.

Political reality is that government does not admit mistakes, briskly decide not to throw good money after bad, junk failing organizations and start over with a clean sheet. That’s what business does.

To his credit, and at the risk of ridicule, NASA’s Mr. Griffin has at least given the best explanation of why space colonization is important: survival of the species over the long term. Yet already visible is the unworkable budget logic that’s destined remorselessly to deflate NASA’s conceit that only a government-led program, at a cost of billions of dollars per astronaut, can get personnel and equipment the first 100 miles of whatever journeys we take to elsewhere in the solar system.

NASA’s core competence, which Mr. Griffin is fighting to retain, consists of treating space as fit terrain for occasional budgetary blowouts, with the inevitable intervening hangovers.

This may be a way to keep its massive civil service and contractor armies together. But it’s the enemy of routine access to earth orbit, which would allow space finally to become a thriving part of our human economy and make it affordable to contemplate a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars.

Note the new media flavor. Also, go check out Henry’s latest thoughts (probably not a permalink):

This plan is crippled from the start, in that it doesn’t contemplate more than minor trims and reshuffles of the current Shuttle/Station standing army, and it calls for development of not one but two major new NASA-proprietary launch vehicles rather than working with existing US and world commercial launch assets. The combination ensures costs will be far too high for the program to have any chance of doing sustainable deep-space exploration over the long term – possibly too high to allow NASA to even make it past the first major hurdle, simultaneous winddown of Shuttle/Station and development of the oversized new “CEV” Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay and the large new CLV launcher to lift it.

[Update at mid morning]

This part bears a little comment:

It may not be important in the grand scheme of things, a $16 billion a year agency. But one thing has changed: There’s now a popular constituency for space policy that does more than just tune in for the blast-off extravaganzas. Blame the Web: We told you last year how seething space fans had kept Congress’s feet to the fire and ended up saving a bill designed to speed development of private space tourism.

The same folks are also a source of critique of NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study, issued last month, mostly in consultation with the usual suspects — the giant aerospace contractors, who’ve been NASA’s primary iron triangle sounding board since Gemini. Now there’s an effective peanut gallery, their voices magnified by the Web, which has sprouted numerous sites devoted to criticizing and kibitzing about NASA.

This plan actually wasn’t in consultation with the usual suspects, or at least not all of them (other than probably ATK-Thiokol for the SRB, and Lockmart for ET mods). At least in Boeing’s case, this architecture is not at all what they recommended in their architecture studies. The sixty-day study was strictly a NASA-internal activity, initiated and led by Mike Griffin and Doug Stanley, and as far as I can tell, they paid little attention to industry input, except what they needed from the contractors named above to flesh out their Shuttle-derived designs.

[4 PM EDT update]

Instapundit has more excerpts, including the quotes.

Keith Cowing says that this is more bad news for NASA, but I disagree. If the cause was worker carelessness, at least we now know what it is, and it’s easily fixable, by retraining workers, or hiring new ones. Ideally, of course, you’d like to have a system that’s not so sensitive to the individuals who have to implement it, but at some point, the people are part of it, and you have to look for quality there as well.