He’s talking about the DHS, but Cliff May may have an explanation for NASA:

When bureaucracies become sclerotic, they don

If this story is true, it looks like Prometheus is dead. No nuclear propulsion for the foreseeable future.

This part, though, is a little puzzling:

NASA had hoped to develop the nuclear propulsion system to carry spacecraft beyond the solar system, according to a June 19 story in the Times Union.

That’s news to me. I thought the program’s purpose was to enable easier exploration of the solar system, not to go beyond it.

Jon Goff has some interesting speculation about the recent changes in SpaceX payloads. There are some even more interesting comments to the post, including one from the horse’s…errrr…Falcon’s mouth.

In the wake of the damage to Michoud by Katrina, and the threat to the Cape from Ophelia, one of Alan Boyle’s readers has an idea to avoid further impacts to the space program from tropical weather:

NASA will have to weigh the benefits of the possibility of keeping space shuttle faculties in the Gulf Coast or relocating elsewhere in the United States to avoid the specter of frequent hurricanes. In the beginning of the space shuttle program, Vandenberg Air Force Base (Lompoc, Calif.) was to be a West Coast launch site. Thanks to budget cuts, Vandenberg AFB never was expanded for shuttle launches. While NASA might have gotten off easy this time, NASA might not be so lucky after the next hurricane. NASA and its contractors might consider moving back out to the West Coast and move its displaced workers at the same time. The facilities are still here at Plant 42, Edwards Air Force Base and Phillips Laboratory as well as throughout Southern California.

“Having grown up in the Antelope Valley (in Lancaster), in the shadow of Edwards AFB (where the shuttle landed last time) and Palmdale

If you only read the head on this story, you’d think that Neil Armstrong is claiming that a Mars mission is easier than a lunar one. But he’s not comparing a future lunar mission to a future Mars mission–he’s comparing a future Mars mission to Apollo. Based on the headline, though, it’s not at all clear that the reporter understands that.

[Update at 2:50 PM PDT]

It occurs to me that I’m too hasty to blame the reporter. Headlines are usually the copy editor’s responsibility.

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.