Can be seen at the Langley website.

You can follow the progress of today’s Hyper-X test here, starting at noon Pacific time.

[Update at 12:23 PST]

Fox News says they’re going to cover it, if you want to see it on television instead of your computer.

[Update about 1 PM]

As Hefty notes in comments, the B-52 is in the air. Listening to Fox is a little irritating. First they have the PR guy from the program on, and he’s talking about how this will enable a five-hour trip to Japan. That’s nonsense. First of all, you don’t need scramjets to do that–supersonic flight will. A scramjet flying at this speed would do the job in an hour and a half. But there’s nothing about this technology that deals with the real issues of supersonic/hypersonic flight–the drag and the sonic boom. This is a military technology, first and foremost, and its first application, if there is one, will almost certainly be in hypersonic cruise missiles. It’s also unlikely that it will be used in launch vehicles for a very long time, for reasons that I explained here, with responses to criticism of that article here.

I’m also irritated that they reflexively go to John Pike as their “expert.”

[Update at 4:45 PM PST]

The test appears to have been successful. Leonard David has the story.

Steven Weinberg has a 5500-word essay in the New York Review of books on the president’s space initiative. It repeats the same tired nonsense and myths, about how space is for science, that there’s no reason for people to go, that it will cost a trillion dollars.

The President gave no cost estimates, but John McCain, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, has cited reports that the new initiative would cost between $170 billion and $600 billion. According to NASA briefing documents, the figure of $170 billion is intended to take NASA only up to 2020, and does not include the cost of the Mars mission itself. After the former President Bush announced a similar initiative in 1989, NASA estimated that the cost of sending astronauts to the moon and Mars would be either $471 billion or $541 billion in 1991 dollars, depending on the method of calculation. This is roughly $900 billion in today’s dollars. Whatever cost may be estimated by NASA for the new initiative, we can expect cost overruns like those that have often accompanied big NASA programs. (In 1984 NASA estimated that it would cost $8 billion to put the International Space Station in place, not counting the cost of using it. I have seen figures for its cost so far ranging from $25 billion to $60 billion, and the station is far from finished.) Let’s not haggle over a hundred billion dollars more or less

Laughing Wolf attended yesterday’s Aldridge hearing in Atlanta, and blogged it live. So did Michael Mealing.

It sounds like it was an interesting discussion, particularly Steve Fleming’s presentation. I’ll be looking for the transcripts.

Now there’s a new blog dedicated to covering it.

I’ve just been notified that Jeff Greason’s full (not spoken) testimony at today’s public Aldridge Commission hearing is now available. There is little here with which I disagree, except for the beginning:

I am here today because I have seen signs of hope

I’ve just been notified that Jeff Greason’s full (not spoken) testimony at today’s public Aldridge Commission hearing is now available. There is little here with which I disagree, except for the beginning:

I am here today because I have seen signs of hope

I’ve just been notified that Jeff Greason’s full (not spoken) testimony at today’s public Aldridge Commission hearing is now available. There is little here with which I disagree, except for the beginning:

I am here today because I have seen signs of hope

I’ll be very interested to hear the testimony from tomorrow afternoon’s local hearings in Atlanta.

1:15

Dwayne Day has a long, but worthwhile description of how bad the reporting has been on the president’s space initiative, and the source of the mythical trillion dollar program.

Jeff Foust has a related piece on how badly the administration and particularly NASA has handled the media, with the danger that this president’s space initiative may share the fate of his father’s.

I remain very concerned about this program, because I think that the approach is fundamentally technically flawed. If Dennis Wingo is right, they’ve narrowed down the trade space far too much too early, by looking at a binary decision between building at ISS with EELVs (a bad idea for two reasons–ISS and EELV) or building a heavy lifter and replicating Apollo. Either approach will result in a program that’s ultimately unsustainable, if it succeeds at all.

There are other options, but it requires new thinking that NASA is clearly not yet ready for. I think that the president’s initiative would have a much better chance if he had set up a clean new agency, rather than giving it to the existing NASA, just as we did when NASA was established forty six years ago. It’s not clear that Code T as such will be able to break out of NASA think as long as it’s a code within the agency, rather than one that’s independent.