Jeff Foust has a preliminary damage assessment of the hurricane and its aftermath on the space agency’s near- and far-term future.

Clark Lindsey was usefully busy over the weekend. He has moved and renamed RLV News. It’s also now a full-blown blog, with permalinks. Last, but not least, he has several interesting new items up on it.

Professor Reynolds has some questions about the legal status of space elevators.

Here are some more. The problems associated with anchoring such a beast in an unstable and/or corrupt equatorial country has caused many of those planning such things to put them instead on floating ocean platforms, in international waters. This raises some new issues, because now, instead of (as Glenn notes) the structure simply being a very high tower, it would be a tall ship that would put to shame all of the previous false claimants to that designation, with their puny little sticks for masts. This thing would have a crows nest above geosynchronous altitude. It would also imbue an entirely new meaning to the old phrase, the “high seas.”

Presumably, maritime law would apply to it, absent any codicils to the Outer Space Treaty. Thus gambling would be legal, the person in charge of the facility would be captain of the ship with all implied powers (including wedding officiation), etc. He would also keep the keys to the gun locker.

As to whether such an object would be “launched” or not, that depends on the construction technique. Most plans for these things would in fact involve launching them, in the conventional usage of the term. It would be only after the initial mass had been deployed at geostationary orbit that it would be slowly lowered and attached to the planet. After that, more mass would be added via the elevator route, so it would really be a hybrid creature, partially launched and partially constructed from the surface.

It would get even more interesting if the orbital anchor were a captured carbonaceous asteroid, and the diamondoid materials needed for the tether manufactured from it. In that case, it would be more akin to a grappling of the earth from another planetary body. I’m not sure what the legal implications of that would be. Would its status somehow change once it was actually attached to the planet? And what does “attached” mean, if the bottom of it is simply floating on the ocean or, even more tenuously, in the atmosphere?

This is one that will indeed keep the lawyers happily busy for years.

[Update at 8:30 AM PDT]

This strikes me as a loophole in the sovereignty restrictions of the OST. If an asteroid were the orbital anchor for the beanstalk, and it were designated a ship (flagged, perhaps, in Panama or Liberia), then the property rights to mining (and owning) it would presumably be settled. Or at least much more so than they would be for it as a freely orbiting body. And one could protect additional objects in like manner by simply attaching them.

Keith Cowing says that NASA continues to dig itself deeper into its hole of irrelevancy to our future in space.

[Update at 9:15 AM PDT]

As Keith correctly notes in comments, those are my words, not his. I should have written that he provides evidence of that (in my opinion), not that he says it.

Thomas James has a lot more discussion of the ET manufacturing facilities that were in the path of Katrina. There was also a story at Space Daily about it.

Michael Huang tries to smooth over ruffled feathers in the Human vs. Robot space exploration debate by playing the colonization card. I vote humans. Nevertheless, there can be self-replicating nanobots or, before those develop, self replicating macrobots. If we are too busy or craven to leave the planet, then maybe we can settle the universe with ‘Cylons’ (the future human-created silicon cum wetware nemesis race from TV show Battlestar Galactica).

Come to think of it, DNA makes us digital life. An argument for Intelligent Design is that if you were trying to colonize a new world like Earth, you would probably arrive at something very much like life as we know it. Genetic algorithms work pretty well at solving ecological problems. Are we some other race’s expendable robot explorers?

Thomas James asks a question in comments that I’ve been wondering about as well. If the manufacturing facilities for the external tanks in Michoud, Mississippi are destroyed, maybe Shuttle will be retired sooner than we think. It may also put paid to Mike Griffin’s ambitions about Shuttle derivatives. It wouldn’t be as devastating as a hit on the Cape, though. They could probably rebuild tank manufacturing facilities, but if the orbiters were wiped out, the program would truly be dead.

[Update late on Sunday night]

Thomas James points out correctly in comments that Michoud is in Lousiana. That’s what I had thought, but I made the mistake of checking it on line. That’s what I get for relying on NASA web sites for information.

Let it be noted and time stamped that Dwayne Day and Clark Lindsey have proposed an interesting wager. Though Dr. Day may still back down, given Clark’s definition.

It’s not a surprise, really, but Virgin Galactic has publicly announced that the next goal after a successful SpaceShipTwo commercial suborbital service is an orbital system. I wonder what the projected schedule is for first service, and if it will end up beating the CEV into space?

Clark Lindsey has a powerful rejoinder to a recent pessimistic article about our future in space in the Wall Street Journal, which they printed.