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).

I’m struggling through my Internet issues to do a little posting tonight. Mike Griffin was interviewed by the BBC, and had some interesting comments. Think of this less as a fisking, than an analysis of what’s really going on in the agency.

…having spent about

…but head over to Space Transport News, and keep scrolling. Lots of good stuff.

…but head over to Space Transport News, and keep scrolling. Lots of good stuff.