I’ve done interviews in the past with Gary Hudson and Jeff Greason, but Mitchell Burnside Clapp, of Rocketplane Ltd. Inc., has eluded me up until now (primarily because my pursuit has been inexplicably less than hot).

Mitchell Burnside Clapp is the CEO and founder of Pioneer Rocketplane and the Director of Flight Systems at Rocketplane Limited. He graduated from MIT in 1984 with two degrees in Aerospace Engineering, one in Physics, and another in Russian, establishing an apparent trend of being constitutionally unable to limit himself to just one field of endeavor. During 1988 he attended the USAF Test Pilot School, whence he graduated in that year to work on the YA-7F program, serve as an instructor on the school’s staff, and later as the Air Force’s flight test person on the DC-X program. It was this experience that led to his initial involvement with the alt.space community, and indirectly to his development of aerial propellant transfer technology to enable horizontal takeoff, horizontal landing spaceplanes.

When I first met Mitchell, he was a major assigned to the USAF Phillips Laboratory, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Shortly after that (but hopefully not as a result of our meeting), he left active-duty military service in 1996 to found Pioneer Rocketplane, which won a series of contracts from NASA, the DoD, and the state of California as well as significant private investment and contracted efforts. He is also the CEO of another technology startup called Short Order Video.

He claims (with some reason, I might add) to have a wife, several patents, three children (two beautiful daughters, and a son, of whom Mitchell is apparently too charitable to provide a physical description, though I’m sure he’s probably a strapping handsome lad as well), two houses, a dog, a cat, many songwriting credits, a growing expertise in wine, and (as he apparently attempted to demonstrate here) pitiably little skill at writing biographical information about himself. I should add that in addition to Russian, and almost-passable English, as a result of misspending much of his youth in one of the most lord-forsaken corners of the Outback, he speaks the most difficult language of all, so well that it’s totally incomprehensible when the listener is not under the influence of heavy drink.

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve belatedly engaged Mitchell in an email give and take, and hope that you find the results interesting and worth the wait.

Continue reading Rocketplane Man →

Jim Muncy says that the biggest breakthroughs last year, in a spectacular year for space activities both public and private, were not technological, but political.

A few years ago, under commission from the Sophron Foundation, headed by Tom Rogers, who was (and I hope still is, given his time on this earth) a noted proponent of space tourism, I wrote a long essay on the near-term prospects for space tourism. It was printed, but just a few copies only for the use of the foundation as a printout of a Microsoft Word file. To the degree it was published at all, it was on the web, at one of my own websites, and at Space Future.

Subsequently, somehow, Amazon has decided that it’s actually a book, out of print.

I’ve already received notification from an emailer that they’ve backordered a copy, whenever Amazon gets some in st0ck.

How did this happen? Does anyone have enough insight into the workings of Amazon to know?

Clark Lindsey has helpfully put one together for the significant events in space actitivities over the past very eventful (and probably historic) year.

I know that many of you are tapped out from the successful disaster relief fundraising, but we have to think about the future as well. The X-Prize Foundation has some matching grants up that expire at midnight, if you want to make a contribution to keeping the effort going for space prizes. I think that this is one of the most effective ways that a private citizen can contribute to opening up the frontier for all of us.

Here’s a study that says people derive more happiness from life experiences than from material possessions. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s not obviously wrong, and it buttresses my long-held belief that public space travel is the largest near-term market for space products.

Clark Lindsey has an interesting roundup of links, and some plausible speculation about the potential development path for orbital passenger vehicles.

Jay Manifold has some personal memories of a Christmas thirty six years ago.

JPL has started maintaining a status page on potential earth impactors.

I still think that we need to get the Corp of Engineers working on this.

[via emailer Paul Breed]

I missed the Delta 4 Heavy Launch yesterday–couldn’t justify driving up to the Cape on a weekday. But I’m bemused by the reporting. To read this story, it was spectacular success, but SpaceFlightNow says that it underperfomed significantly, something you’d never know from the space.com piece, which reads like a Boeing press release.