This could revolutionize interplanetary flight.

I didn’t expect the president to mention space last night, and he met my expectations. Reflexive Bush-hating space enthusiasts (you know who you are…) will of course claim that this is indicative of his lack of enthusiasm and support for his own new initiative, but I think that’s nonsense. I think that it’s more reflective of confidence in his ability to continue to execute it without having to rally the public behind it (something that it’s not clear that it’s possible to do). If anything, parading it in a SOTU address might simply draw fire from critics in a time of massive budget deficits.

I will continue to judge the president’s support by his actions, rather than public speeches. He got the full NASA budget passed last fall, using a rare threat of a presidential veto. The program is moving forward as quickly as it’s possible for a bureaucracy like NASA to make it happen, with concept studies underway, an RFP about to be released for the CEV, and plans for a Lead System Integrator to be selected this year. Ultimately, it’s hardware, not speeches, that will get us into space.

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.