Thoughts from Newt. I would note that Boeing would never do SLS on a fixed-price basis.
[Monday-morning update]
Bob Zubrin’s thoughts (tl;dr: Can SLS and the Gateway). (And yes, the URL is misleading.)
[Monday-afternoon update]
The NASA administrator is openly considering going to the moon with a Falcon Heavy and ICPS.
Dick Shelby was unavailable for comment, though I’m sure he will. I’m also sure he’s regretting confirming Bridenstine.
[Bumped]
Thoughts from pilots on “flying” it. Scare quotes because they make it sound like they don’t fly it; they just issue commands to it.
I suppose it’s possible that this is an April Fools post, but I don’t think Leonard would do that.
What is the plausible worst case?
This is great science writing. And if this happened today, unlike an excess of plant food in the atmosphere, it probably really would wipe out humanity, or at least a great portion of it.
We could be looking a lot harder for these things, and learning how to deflect them, but Congress would rather build a big monster rocket.
I’m glad to see the rocket starting to take shape, despite penny pinching from the parents, but that sure looks labor intensive.
A long article on the reasons we’re not burning it in reactors, including a lot of comments from Kirk Sorensen.
…has been working on previously undisclosed Space Act Agreements with NASA on a lunar lander. That would seem to be part of the puzzle of what’s been happening over the past several days.
Bob Zimmerman isn’t optimistic that NASA can break out of the status quo.
When we went to San Diego County last week, we explored some parts of California where we’d never been, even though I’ve lived here for four decades, and it’s not that far. We took a road through the desert from Highway 78 east of Julian south to I-8 at Ocatillo, and we passed by an historical monument for the stage route that ran from St. Louis to San Francisco from 1858 to 1861. It was a 25-day trip, stopping only to change horses and drivers. The monument pointed out that some Mormons had hacked their way through rock to get through the mountains west of Yuma, and then the route had headed north from there to Chino Hills and Los Angeles, then up to San Francisco taking the route of what is now I-5. When we cut across from Perris to I-15 to see the flowers in Riverside County, we ran across more signs for the stage route. Interesting bit of history.