Sorry for the short notice–I should have said something sooner, but if you can get out of town, and the sky is clear, the best meteor shower of the year is tonight.

Jay Manifold has more, and actually had it over a week ago.

Again, sorry.

That’s the rumor. Jeff Foust has the story here and here, as does NASA Watch.

I find this a little surprising, given that he’s just gotten the budget go ahead for the new exploration initiative. I would have thought that he’d at least want to see the program off to a good start (though perhaps he thinks it already is).

What’s most surprising is where he’s going–to academia. There were rumors throughout his tenure at NASA that he was being groomed to replace Rumsfeld in a second term. Either those rumors weren’t true, or the fact that Rumsfeld is staying for now has thrown a wrench into them, or the administration is unhappy with him for some aspect of his job performance (Columbia? The Hubble fiasco?).

In that case, it’s sort of like the old “up or out” philosophy for military brass. Get passed over for your next scheduled promotion, and you might as well take your retirement.

Fortunately, with the new initiative and the budgets, it’s a more appealing job to many competent people than it’s been in the past. In previous vacancies, the running joke was that the administrator had to be someone smart enough to do the job, and dumb enough to take it. That may not be the case any more.

[Monday morning update]

A commenter wants to draft Pete Worden. Now Keith Cowing is reporting that this is, indeed, one of the names being discussed. I wonder who the “well-known millionaire” is. Dennis Tito? Paul Allen?

It would certainly be an interesting appointment, and reasonable payback for the shabby treatment (in my opinion) that he got from Don Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. If it were to happen (it seems unlikely to me), NASA would for the first time have as administrator a member of the alt.space movement.

That’s the rumor. Jeff Foust has the story here and here, as does NASA Watch.

I find this a little surprising, given that he’s just gotten the budget go ahead for the new exploration initiative. I would have thought that he’d at least want to see the program off to a good start (though perhaps he thinks it already is).

What’s most surprising is where he’s going–to academia. There were rumors throughout his tenure at NASA that he was being groomed to replace Rumsfeld in a second term. Either those rumors weren’t true, or the fact that Rumsfeld is staying for now has thrown a wrench into them, or the administration is unhappy with him for some aspect of his job performance (Columbia? The Hubble fiasco?).

In that case, it’s sort of like the old “up or out” philosophy for military brass. Get passed over for your next scheduled promotion, and you might as well take your retirement.

Fortunately, with the new initiative and the budgets, it’s a more appealing job to many competent people than it’s been in the past. In previous vacancies, the running joke was that the administrator had to be someone smart enough to do the job, and dumb enough to take it. That may not be the case any more.

[Monday morning update]

A commenter wants to draft Pete Worden. Now Keith Cowing is reporting that this is, indeed, one of the names being discussed. I wonder who the “well-known millionaire” is. Dennis Tito? Paul Allen?

It would certainly be an interesting appointment, and reasonable payback for the shabby treatment (in my opinion) that he got from Don Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. If it were to happen (it seems unlikely to me), NASA would for the first time have as administrator a member of the alt.space movement.

That’s the rumor. Jeff Foust has the story here and here, as does NASA Watch.

I find this a little surprising, given that he’s just gotten the budget go ahead for the new exploration initiative. I would have thought that he’d at least want to see the program off to a good start (though perhaps he thinks it already is).

What’s most surprising is where he’s going–to academia. There were rumors throughout his tenure at NASA that he was being groomed to replace Rumsfeld in a second term. Either those rumors weren’t true, or the fact that Rumsfeld is staying for now has thrown a wrench into them, or the administration is unhappy with him for some aspect of his job performance (Columbia? The Hubble fiasco?).

In that case, it’s sort of like the old “up or out” philosophy for military brass. Get passed over for your next scheduled promotion, and you might as well take your retirement.

Fortunately, with the new initiative and the budgets, it’s a more appealing job to many competent people than it’s been in the past. In previous vacancies, the running joke was that the administrator had to be someone smart enough to do the job, and dumb enough to take it. That may not be the case any more.

[Monday morning update]

A commenter wants to draft Pete Worden. Now Keith Cowing is reporting that this is, indeed, one of the names being discussed. I wonder who the “well-known millionaire” is. Dennis Tito? Paul Allen?

It would certainly be an interesting appointment, and reasonable payback for the shabby treatment (in my opinion) that he got from Don Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. If it were to happen (it seems unlikely to me), NASA would for the first time have as administrator a member of the alt.space movement.

There aren’t very many things that I find appealing about living in Florida, but being able to see launches is one of them. The inaugural flight of the Delta IV Heavy is scheduled this afternoon. For those not living as close to Cape Canaveral as I do, Boeing will have a webcast, starting about 2 PM EST.

[Update in the evening]

Yes, the launch was scrubbed, for weather. Apparently winds aloft.

We don’t have time to drive up there and back every day until they get it off, so I guess we’ll miss it. But we did have a nice day. We saw some birds up in the Merritt Island Refuge, and took a leisurely drive back down the coast along A1A. The hurricane damage from Frances and Jeanne along the coast in southern Brevard and St. Lucie counties (which were basically ground zero, in terms of being on the northern eyewall for both storms) remains impressive. Many houses along the shore were gutted, and we saw lots of tarps on roofs.

The post title is an acronym for “Yet Another Space Society,” a running joke back in my space activist days in the eighties.

Here it is: Americans For Space.

There’s no explanation of who they are, what they propose to do (other than “educate legislators”), of whether or not they’re aware that there are other groups, many of which have been around for decades, purporting to do the same thing, or what unmet need they think they’re filling with this new organization (if it indeed is that, and not just a website).

Sigh…

Mark Whittington discusses the prospects for energy production via He3 mining on the moon. He also discusses the reluctance of the administration to talk about it as a justification for the VSE. I find the latter understandable–I suspect that they fear ridicule if they do so.

And I have trouble buying this statement:

For every ton of Helium 3 extracted from lunar soil, researchers say, nine tons of oxygen, water and other life-sustaining substances, as well as six tons of hydrogen useful for powering fuel cells, would be yielded.

While He3 is much more abundant on the moon than on earth, I have a hard time believing that it’s that abundant. There has to be much more than nine times it for those other substances. Oxygen alone is a major constituent of lunar regolith, whereas He3 is a trace element. I’d like to see the basis for those numbers.

Henry Vanderbilt, of the Space Access Society (who has been following this closely), just left a post at sci.space.policy indicating that the launch legislation just passed the Senate (miracle of miracles), at the last possible minute.

While I think that this legislation is flawed, it’s better to have it than nothing, in terms of investment, and the flaws can perhaps be fixed in the future.

More when I get more.

[Update a few minutes later]

It’s not new info, but I just got an email from Henry to the same effect.

I should note that I claim victory because this is now almost as good as law. It only requires the president’s signature, and the White House has never expressed any opposition to this legislation. And if he were to veto it, it would be the first bill that he vetoed since taking office.

It’s a done deal.

[Another update at 10:43 PM EST]

Keith Cowing, of NASA Watch, confirms.

[Update on Thursday morning]

Alan Boyle (as usual) has the details. Apparently it rode on some other legislation at the last minute. Kudos to whatever Senate staff tactician managed to pull it off.

Clark Lindsey and Jeff Foust have thoughts and links as well.

2004 continues to be a great, perhaps watershed year for those opening up the high frontier.

Holman Jenkins has a column in today’s WSJ about the launch legislation being held up in the Senate (link may be subscription only–I’m not sure). With the title, “The ‘Final Frontier’ May Be a Senate Waste Basket,” he’s clearly not impressed with that body. He makes an analogy with what happened to the general aviation industry in the eighties (in which it almost went under from fear of lawsuits and costs of insurance), that was only revived in the nineties by farsighted legislation limiting liability for aircraft makers. He also asks an interesting question, that I’ve been wondering about as well:

For a pair who say they want to spend $100 million making space tourism a reality, Messrs. Rutan and Branson have displayed an odd indifference to the legislative battle. Either Sir Richard is peddling vaporware and doesn’t really intend to fly — or he’s making an improbable bet on the FAA’s willingness to let paying clients fly in an “experimental” spacecraft in violation of every rule in the book.

My guess is that Branson is taking his cue from Burt, who wishes that AST would dry up and blow away. He wants to be regulated by AVR. He should be careful what he wishes for.

I don’t think this is necessarily a bad idea, but I do think that it’s extremely premature–a couple of European scientists have come up with a plan for conservation parks on Mars.

I think that their concern here is vastly overblown:

“It is the right of every person to stand and stare across the beautiful barrenness and desolation of the Martian surface without having to endure the eyesore of pieces of crashed spacecraft scattered across the landscape,” they write in the latest edition of Space Policy.

Mars is big. Mind bogglingly big. It has about as much surface area as the land of the earth. The likelihood that you’ll see any traces of humanity over most of it for the next century or two is vanishingly small. They seem to be dramatically overestimating the amount of potential activity there, and by the time we get around to sending enough spacecraft for it to even start to be a potential problem, we won’t be “crashing” them there. The notion of destroying a sufficient number of probes for them to become an eyesore anywhere one goes on Mars is ludicrous, logically and economically.

But he’s not a total moonbat (or in this case, Marsbat):

But Cockell argues that if a planetary parks system were in place, it would free up the rest of the planet for exploitation and claim-staking, which might encourage these nations to sign up to the system.