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.
If I’d been one of those AvWeek reporters, I’d have asked her to expand on that.
An interesting new discovery by LRO:
“If this hypothesis is true, only the first few hundred meters of the moon’s surface possesses little iron and titanium oxides, according to NASA. ‘But below the surface, there’s a steady increase to a rich and unexpected bonanza,’ it said.”
At the Space Settlement Summit last fall in Pasadena, a Canadian mining engineer berated the assembled for lack of seriousness when it comes to lunar resources. “You have no idea what’s under that dust,” he said, “and you won’t until you get up there and start drilling.” I thanked him for the comment, noting that for people who claim to want to develop the solar system, we think really small, likely from hanging out with NASA too much.
Robin Hanson says we will colonize the sun first.
Rocketlab didn’t go to space today, or at least not to orbit.
[Sunday-morning update]
Here’s the story from Eric Berger.
Its solar panels are generating much more power than expected.
Well, that’s nice.
[Tuesday-morning update]
NASA is very happy with the Crew Dragon performance so far.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is moving from stage-production mode to fleet-management mode.
Only four cores doesn’t seem like enough to me. One of the reasons we retired Shuttle was that we had too small a fleet with only three. But SpaceX can build more.
[Bumped]
I posted this on Twitter, but not here. But Glenn picked it up.
[June 26th update]
Bob Zubrin has read the book, so we didn’t have to. His review is sort of…excoriating.
[Bumped]