SpaceRef has a summary of the hearing on prizes for space achievements, held on the Hill this morning.

Molly Macauley made an excellent point:

“Even if an offered prize is never awarded because competitors fail all attempts to win, the outcome can shed light on the state of the technology maturation. In particular, an unawarded prize can signal that even the best technological efforts aren’t quite ripe at the proffered level of monetary reward. Such a result is important information for government when pursuing new technology subject to a limited budget,” she said.

The DARPA Challenge is a good example of that, in my opinion.

Of course, we have the usual caviling:

“While establishment of a NASA prize program is certainly worth considering, we should not be lulled into thinking that it is any substitute for providing adequate funding for NASA’s R&D programs,” cautioned Subcommittee Ranking Minority Member Nick Lampson (D-TX).

Rep. Lampson is one of the representatives from JSC.

Overall, while there were some appropriate cautionary notes, there seemed to be a consensus that this was a good idea. Let’s hope that they can get the funding now.

Andrew, that piece really is worse than you say.

The trouble is that the space program’s purposes are inseparable from its Cold War-era context.

No, the trouble is not that they are inseparable–it’s that we’ve never made a serious policy attempt to achieve such a separation.

He gets the NASA budget wrong (it’s closer to twenty billion than fifteen). That doesn’t change his point (in fact it strengthens it, to the degree that it’s valid), but it’s sloppy. It’s also not clear that the plan will require a significant increase. That was one of the selling points of it–that by putting down the Shuttle program, we can shift funds to the new activities.

Along the way, the space commission he appointed has offered up a smorgasbord of absurd side benefits, such as possible improvements in our (so far non-existent) ability to deflect threatening incoming asteroids, of the sort that may have severely disrupted life on Earth as recently as 35 million years ago.

I guess his point is that it doesn’t happen very often, so it’s not a benefit. He’s probably unaware that if the Tonguska event had occurred on the eastern seaboard of the US, instead of in Siberia, we could have lost millions of lives only a century ago.

It really is a typical “why pour all that money into space when we have so many problems on earth?” rant. Nothing new here.

[Update in the afternoon]

Jeez, I’m almost starting to feel sorry for the schmuck. Dwayne Day really goes after a gnat with a howitzer in the comments section.

I’d say that he’s been pretty thoroughly discredited. Unfortunately, most of the PI’s readers probably don’t read this blog.

Can someone explain to me why Aura is a NASA mission, and not a NOAA mission? It seems to me that if one wants to focus NASA better, this is the kind of thing that would be better done by a different agency.

Over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Alex Roth has an op-ed piece that is simulteneously insightful and inane. It’s no mean trick to pull that off, but he manages to do so. He correctly identifies some of the problems with NASA:
The trouble is that the space program’s purposes are inseparable from its Cold War-era context.
…but immediately follows with this pointless slur:
The very concept of a “space station,” for example, is a 1952 brainchild of Nazi rocket scientist-turned-American-Cold Warrior Wernher von Braun, who was later caricatured as “Dr. Strangelove” in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War satire film.

I enjoy a good rant as much as anyone (OK, probably more than most), and Roth has certainly written a stem-winder. Unfortunately getting a few small points right is not enough. The editorial is well written from a polemical standpoint, but it utterly destroys a strawman that nobody in either the alt.space or NASA communities believes.

It’s worth a few minutes just to familiarize yourself with his arguments, since they will be coming up again, and it’s good to know what the other side is saying.

Leonard David has a report from Las Vegas on what Bob Bigelow is up to with inflatable space structures. I probably haven’t emphasized this activity enough. If SpaceX is successful, we will soon have a private space habitat testbed launched on a private launch vehicle.

So what

Michael Mealing reminds us about this weekend’s Return to the Moon conference, in Vegas. So I do too…

On next week’s thirty-fifth anniversary of the first manned lunar landing?

[Via Rob Wilson]

[Update a few minutes later]

Boeing has established an anniversary web site.

Via RLV News, the presentations from the most recent COMSTAC meeting are available. I haven’t read any of them yet, but I figured I’d post a pointer. I’m a little snowed under trying to make sure I’ve read everything I ought to read in order to do a decent job for the SOI, but I think the paper by Terry Hardy on Ec[*] calculations is a good place to start. I’m beginning to think that the single best paradigm change for moving towards a sustainable and vigorous spaceflight industry is a public safety regime that doesn’t use Ec as a figure of merit. Ec is a little bit like man rating in that it implicitly assumes that the norm for space vehicles is that they blow up with some regularity.

[*] for those not already familiar with it, Ec is the expected number of casualties from operations of a given launch vehicle. You need less than 30 casualties per million flights in order to get a launch license.

Reader John Breen points out this “Foxtrot” comic strip, about a little kid making an X-Prize attempt.

As Rand has already blogged, I’m the new interim Washington Director of the SubOrbital Institute, since Pat Bahn is too busy actually running a company to take care of the nitty-gritty of running the Institute. This goes for many of the other Institute members, which is very good news. Unfortunately I’m paid exactly the same as I am for blogging here, but that’s not zero except in dollars. Let me clarify that statement a little: I realized a few years ago that I was thinking about the problem of space access all wrong. The problem is complex and has many conceivable solutions, but only a small set of practically implementable solutions. Which solutions are practical is not obvious except in retrospect, and since we don’t already have low cost space access, retrospection is not an option.

Continue reading Interim Washington Director, SOI →