Rest in peace, and ad astra.
He was about my age. Trying to remember the last time I saw him. I’m sure it was at a conference in 2019, before the end of conferences. I’m sure he’ll be showing Saint Peter the latest Rocketplane business plan.
Category Archives: Space
Spaceship 3
I wonder what the improvements are? They really should have gone with a liquid engine years ago (after the accident in Mojave). They can’t fix the problem with the shuttlecock, but they could fix that.
Continuing To Learn
I’ll look forward to learning what happened to the latest flight attempt.
Is there an SN12? Or will the next test be of SN15?
UFOs
Some thoughts from Bryan Preston.
Europe’s Response To The SpaceX Challenge
…is about as pathetic as one would expect.
I told Clay Mowry back in (I think) 2014 that Ariane 6 would be obsolete before it first flew. He didn’t buy it then, but now he’s with Blue Origin.
Lori Pulls No Punches
She is clearly less than thrilled with the pick of Bill Nelson.
Note the implicit assumption that having an administrator that can get more funding for NASA is intrinsically a good thing.
Glynn Lunney
RIP.
I think he got short shrift in the Apollo 13 movie (as did Milt Windler). Very smart guy, and he was arguably more responsible for getting them back than Kranz.
Read It And Weep
Bill “Ballast” Nelson is going to be head of NASA. This is almost the worst possible pick. Is there any level on which this administration is not a disaster, with less than two months in?
[Friday-morning update]
Five questions that Nelson should be asked (but probably won’t be).
The last is the most important. He’s never given any inkling of having anything resembling a vision for humanity’s future in space.
SLS “Affordability”
This new “study” may be the beginning of the end for the program. This graf stuck out, though: “McConnaughey is leading the study for Kathy Lueders, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight. Even before the study’s initiation, McConnaughey had been pushing for the SLS program to become more cost-effective. One goal of this analysis is to find ways for the large NASA rocket to compete effectively with privately developed rockets as part of the agency’s Artemis Moon program.”
No one seems to ask the question: Why should NASA even be attempting to compete with private industry? This is not a proper role of a government agency, but we’ve been stuck in this mode since Shuttle.
NASA And The Rise Of Commercial space
This looks like an interesting symposium this week. Hard to believe that it’s been eight years since my book was published.