Two years ago, I (and much of the rest of the world) woke up to learn that Columbia had been destroyed on entry. Here were my immediate thoughts at the time (before we had much data to work with).

Clark Lindsey is disappointed that Dennis Tito hasn’t followed through on his pledge to invest in space tourism, and cites his congressional testimony:

He declared that the “only big problem that stands before myself and others who want to do this is the regulatory risk.

The Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed, with all aboard. Here’s a vivid remembrance of the event, from someone who was there.

Here are my recollections of that fateful day.

[Via Jim Oberg]

Today is the first of three grim anniversaries in late January and early February (within a week of each other) of the deaths of American astronauts. On this day in 1967, Ed White, Roger Chafee and Gus Grissom were incinerated on the launch pad in a ground test of the Apollo capsule.

Jim Oberg has more on these closely-timed anniversaries, in which he makes a compelling case that none of them were “accidents” but that all were avoidable, and that we’ve been lucky that we aren’t commemorating even more astronaut deaths. Here’s what I wrote a year ago (in which I criticized NASA’s reluctance to send a Shuttle to Hubble, a subject on which nothing has happened in the interim to change my mind).

[Update a little after noon]

OK, my dear friend Tim Kyger is whining at me in email that they didn’t die from their burns–they died from asphyxiation. True enough.

I didn’t explicitly say that the burns killed them, but I did imply it, and probably “incineration” is too strong a word for the degree of the burn damage to their bodies. The point remains that they died from a fire (and their deaths, like those of their later colleagues in the Shuttle) were avoidable.

Glenn has a piece at TCS about it today. He links also to the one I wrote for National Review back in the fall of ought three. In addition, he links to another one that Mark Whittington wrote at The Space Review in the summer of that year. There, Mark wrote:

One interesting point against the idea of a Chinese space threat was made recently by Rand Simberg in his Transterrestrial Musings weblog. He stated,

That’s what Keith Cowing says that historian John Logsdon is doing.

Jeff Roche emails that CNBC’s program, The Closing Bell, will have a segment on the new commercial space race (show is on at 4 PM Eastern).

Ed Driscoll has an interesting review of what looks to be an interesting new DVD series detailing the history of Apollo.

On a day that we have for the first time landed a probe on another planet’s moon, it is also the first anniversary of the day that President Bush announced a new direction for our nation’s space activities. I don’t use the phrase “space program,” because I hope that it will be much more than that. To paraphrase the Space Frontier Foundation’s motto, it’s a vision, not a program.

How are we doing?

Well, while the president (probably wisely) didn’t emphasize it in any way after the announcement, NASA has moved forward in implementing it, with a new Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, with a new and apparently able man in charge (Admiral Steidle, of Joint-Strike Fighter fame). After the recent election, he (along with Tom Delay) ensured that it received full funding for the current fiscal year (in the face of budget cuts for almost all other domestic programs). Exploration architecture studies were let, technology studies have been selected, and an RFP is about to be released for the first phase of development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle. I’ve been spending this week in Houston at a fairly intense workshop to work out many of the implementation issues, in support of one of those architecture studies.

This could all be contrasted with the response of his father’s announcement in 1989, in which the project was immediately ridiculed in the media and the Congress, the NASA administrator worked behind the scenes to sabotage it on the Hill, NASA came out with an unaffordable price tag for it, and it died within a couple years.

I have many issues with the implementation of it (that I won’t go into now), but it has many promising aspects, and if we’re going to be spending government funds on manned space, they’re probably being spent more effectively now that they have been since the end of Apollo (and perhaps in the history of NASA). If you’re interested in what I had to say about it at the time, I actually had quite a bit. Just go here and scroll down to mid month, then scroll back up.

My real hope for our expansion into the cosmos continues to lie with the private sector, but it’s nice to, for the first time in decades, not feel utterly hopeless about prospects for the government civil space sector.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Glenn Wilson has succombed to diabetes at the age of eighty two. He had a long and distinguished career in space and space policy, but I don’t think that he ever realized the potential for the new space age, and remained too firmly mired in the old one for the space activist organization that he led to be effective in achieving its stated goals.

During his tenure (and mostly since) at the National Space Society, the group always tended to be too much of a NASA cheerleader, unable to conceive of any other way to get us into space, or offering a realistic roadmap of how supporting NASA’s goals du jour would have any hope of getting us there. Nonetheless, he was a good man, as far as I know, with good motives, and I offer my condolences to his family and friends.