Jeff Foust notes that there’s surprisingly little opposition to the RTGs in the upcoming New Horizons Mission (with some interesting discussion in his comments section).

I think that his take is right–back in 1997, when Cassini launched, loony leftists didn’t have a lot of better things to do, but now they’re so consumed with the war and George Bush that they don’t have the time or energy to focus on non-issues like this. As I pointed out in comments over there, when even perennial loony tune Bruce Gagnon doesn’t have time to organize anything against it, no one else will, either.

[Update a few minutes later]

Thomas James (Bruce’s occasional nemesis) has more New Horizons info.

Leonard David writes about space sports, an activity that many have thought about for years, but now seems much closer to coming true.

Clark Lindsey (whose domain forwarding is still on the fritz) has a roundup on them, including that well-known one in Sheboygan, WI.

Ed Kyle ponders the current state of the US launch industry. Well, they are making awfully expensive buggy whips…

In yesterday’s issue of The Space Review, Ryan Zelnio offered a model for international cooperation in lunar development (begging the question of why this is necessary).

Thomas James critiques it.

Speaking of Thomas, I wonder what he’ll think of this scienctifically ignorant hysteria?

That’s what Michael Mealing says.

while I agree with Rick and Jon that NASA and Congress could do a lot better, the odds of being able to convince the existing organizations to change is so slim that its hard to justify spending your time attempting to change it. The political reality is that the various Shuttle derived systems exist because no other plan pays the political bribe that gives NASA the budgets it needs to do other things. Any suggestion that causes the standing army to stand down is dead on arrival. It sucks but its just the nature of our system of politics. Its the nature of any large organization.

Does that mean you give up and start cheerleading for the Architecture as the only show in town? No. Did Jobs and Wozniak become cheerleaders for mainframe computing? No. They simply ignored the current way of doing things. While their products did eventually disrupt the computing industry rather radically, they didn’t set out with that goal. They did it by finding new markets and routing around adoption barriers.

I’ve thought this for a long time, which is one reason that I don’t devote much (unpaid) time or energy in trying to change the agency or its plans, or even in critiquing them. And Michael’s suggestion is exactly the path by which space will be opened up.

Clark Lindsey has some links to stories and pics about their record-setting rocket flight. Here’s hoping that it’s broken soon, and repeatedly.

That’s what Jon Goff says that ATK should do with its “Safe, Simple, Soon” vehicle.

I agree. But we can bet it won’t happen, now that they have their own man running the exploration activities.

NASA has two new Centennial Challenges:

The space agency is challenging innovators to build an autonomous aerial vehicle to navigate a tricky flight path or robots capable of building complex structures with only limited guidance from their human handlers, NASA officials said.

I hope that a few of these start to pay off soon, to provide incentive to start spending a lot more money on them. Right now, by my count, they’re spending about a hundredth of a percent of the agency’s budget on them.

Leonard David also has a report on a recent space tourism roundtable in California. The giggle factor continues to dissipate.

More foam cracks on the PAL ramp.

At the current flight rate, if they get it off next fall, the cost per flight will be many billions. Either fly it, or retire it, but stop wasting all this time and money on trying (in futility) to make it safe.