The Pentagon wants to buy some.
These can be done pretty quickly and cheaply, both because the cost of access has dropped, and because the customer actually wants them, not a jobs program. ISS has warped our notions of what space stations have to cost and how long they should take to build as much as Apollo has about how much going to the moon has to cost.
Thoughts from Bob Zimmerman.
They’ve been courting a lot of American companies with money, but as with Luxembourg, there are strings attached. The investment requires that the companies locate there. Pretty sure I’d rather live in Luxembourg than the Emirates, though.
OK, not new footage, but a new version of it, enhanced by AI.
BTW, I’ll be on The Space Show at 1900 PDT tonight, to talk about the 51st anniversary of Apollo 11, and Evoloterra.
Bob Zubrin has a proposal for a lunar flyby within a year. It’s a political non-starter, of course, because it doesn’t use SLS or Orion.
There are large lacunae in the Outer Space Treaty, and as the article points out, it would be absurd to send someone to Mars to arrest someone per Article VI.
[Update later afternoon[
Sorry, link is fixed.
This looks promising. The American taxpayer has been subsidizing this crap for too long.
I hadn’t realized that after fifteen years, NASA has spent almost seventeen billion on Orion. Lockmart has been making out like a bandit.
[Update a few minutes later]
Bob Zimmerman is appropriately outraged.
Both of these programs are nothing but corrupt corporate welfare for Boeing and Lockmart, with kickbacks to congressional campaigns.
…it still really, really sucks.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Sorry, link is fixed.
I’m starting to wonder if Boeing will ever fly crew on Starliner. It’s clearly not going to happen this year, and Starship work continues apace.
This is an excellent overview.