My current partner in crime here, Sam Dinkin, has some interesting ideas about how to encourage space activity and drive down costs over at The Space Review today. I don’t agree with all of them, and I’m sure that in some cases there may be some bad unintended consequences, though I haven’t given them enough thought to identify any yet.
I like the idea of subsidizing EELV at the margin. Government policy in general doesn’t seem to understand the concept of marginal cost (one of the reasons that both Shuttle and ISS are programmatic disasters), and a more explicit recognition of its importance could have some good policy outcomes.
I’m not sure what he means by “privatizing ISS and Shuttle,” I think that the infrastructure to maintain both of them is too expensive for anyone to operate at a profit, even if they were given away.
This is very interesting, for two reasons. Most plans for lunar bases assume a need for a nuclear power plant, because of the two-week-long night there. Discovering regions where the sun always shines means that we can get by with solar power. From a design standpoint, it will also be a lot easier to design equipment for a single temperature (-50 C) than for an environment with huge temperature swings, which is the case between lunar day and night.
The real question now is whether or not there’s ice in the craters, where the sun never shines, as seems to be the case at the south pole.
Mike Griffin (who only Tuesday testified before the relevant Senate committee) has already been confirmed by the full Senate, and may be the NASA administrator before the weekend.
Today is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the day that Apollo XIII developed the “problem” that they told Houston about, when a liquid oxygen tank overpressurized and exploded en route to the Moon. Via email, Jim Oberg points out an interesting article in IEEE Spectrum with the real story, for those familiar only with the movie.