Unlike the Chinese versus NASA, this is a space race worth taking seriously:

I do wonder if Virgin Galactic/Spaceship Company will accelerate their vehicle development in response to this project if it looks probable that the Explorer vehicles will start flying next year. I think suborbital space tourism business will grow robustly beyond just those who want to claim that they were the “pioneers” in public space travel. In fact, more people will want to go once there have been lots of flights since this will help to demonstrate safe and reliable operation.

Unlike the Chinese versus NASA, this is a space race worth taking seriously:

I do wonder if Virgin Galactic/Spaceship Company will accelerate their vehicle development in response to this project if it looks probable that the Explorer vehicles will start flying next year. I think suborbital space tourism business will grow robustly beyond just those who want to claim that they were the “pioneers” in public space travel. In fact, more people will want to go once there have been lots of flights since this will help to demonstrate safe and reliable operation.

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