(From a surprising source) let’s stop pretending that it works.
They can’t do that. It cuts the legs from under one of the primary weapons they use against critics of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Senator Cruz’s climate hearing with Judith Curry, John Christie, Mark Steyn et all is today at noon PST. Get out the popcorn.
…are narcissistic, and mostly female.
But wait! I thought feminists told us that it’s women who are oppressed!
…but at what cost? My thoughts on the latest battle in Islam’s war with us.
Thoughts on Judith Curry, from Matthias Shapiro.
[Friday-morning update]
The post seems to have disappeared. I’ll ask him what the deal is.
NASA Watch has a draft of the NAC statement on LEO operations and ISS transition. It’s as though it’s posted from an alternate reality:
Even after a shift of focus to cis-lunar space and beyond has occurred, NASA may need to maintain some capability to get astronauts into low Earth orbit. If the Agency concludes that such a capability is necessary, it would be unwise to assume the existence of commercial demand for human access to LEO that may or may not materialize. Taking steps to encourage commercial activity in LEO may not be adequate to guarantee a successful transition.
So WTF is this supposed to mean? By NASA “maintaining some capability,” do they mean on a NASA owned/operated rocket? When Commercial Crew is operational (and there is zero reason to believe that won’t happen, regardless of how much Congress attempts to delay it with budget cuts), that will be how NASA gets its astronauts into LEO. Even in the very unlikely event that no commercial demand emerges, that capability will remain in place for as long as NASA wants to use it, at a much lower cost than NASA has ever gotten anyone into space. So can someone on the NAC explain to me what this word salad means? What are they proposing? Because if they’re proposing SLS/Orion, that’s economically insane.
This looks like an interesting (and likely very entertaining) Senate hearing:
Witnesses:
Dr. John Christy
Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama in HuntsvilleDr. Judith Curry
Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of TechnologyDr. William Happer
Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics, Princeton UniversityMr. Mark Steyn
International Bestselling Author*Additional witnesses may be announced
Stock up on popcorn.
Comparing and contrasting NASA and private industry. I prefer the term “space transports” to RLVs, though.
“Oops, I joined a cult.”
The NASA Advisory Council is pretty remarkable to listen to today, particularly Bill Ballhaus. They’re essentially telling NASA it doesn’t have the technology or a plan. Which has always been the case. As I tweeted, the NAC needs to speak truth to Congress about SLS.
Jeff Foust has the story on what Jeff Greason and Dan DeLong are up to (Aleta is going to join up, too, according to an email exchange I had with Jeff G. this weekend). I’ll probably have one of my own up this week.
[Afternoon update]
Alan Boyle (who it was pleasant to visit with in Seattle a couple weeks ago) has a story up now as well.
[Tuesday-afternoon update]
Here is my interview with Jeff over the weekend:
RS: How are you doing?
JG: My health is great, I’m enjoying a lot of long walks through my neighborhood in Midland, Texas, and I am excited about the next phase of my career.
RS: How long has this been in the works?
JG: It is all quite new. I made the decision to leave XCOR at the beginning of November. XCOR reorganized back in June and that took both me and Dan off of any management role on the Lynx. Due to the focus of resources on completing the Lynx, my efforts to work on next-generation R&D projects didn’t gain the traction inside XCOR that I hoped, so I didn’t feel I was in a situation where I was contributing the best that I could to the industry. Once I decided to leave XCOR, I recognized that I have a lot of experience with a problem that many companies have been frustrated by – how to shorten the vehicle prototyping cycle so that time to market is faster and the fly-learn-build cycle is faster. So I decided to set up a company to solve that problem. It’s called Agile Aero and we’re just getting started.
RS: Will you be staying in Midland?
JG: Dan, Aleta, and I all like Midland, so we’ll stay here if we can.
RS: Is anyone else involved in the new company?
JG: Dan DeLong had left XCOR for his own reasons, but since he found out what Agile Aero is working towards, he’s decided to join. Aleta Jackson was laid off just after I left, and she’s also decided to join.
Do you have any financial backers? Do you have any prospective customers?
JG: I have had some initial offers of investment and we’re certainly interested in talking to others; I expect we will need additional resources to hire more people. Realize that right now what we have is a clear understanding of the problem we want to solve – vehicle development speed. We haven’t solved it yet! But I’m confident we have the experience to do it, starting from a clean sheet of paper with our collective experience in the industry. As for customers, I’m definitely interested in talking to them because it will help us know which capabilities to demonstrate first, and I have already had some interesting “can you do something like this?” questions. I also expect we will be available to offer some expertise to other companies while we work on our core technology.
RS: Does XCOR retain rights to any IP on the orbital vehicle? Or do you still plan to do it with another entity? If so, is the new company that entity, or will that be a separate venture?
JG: Before we start working on any vehicle concept for any market, we first need to demonstrate rapid prototyping of vehicles – the faster vehicle ideas can turn into reality, the faster the time to market. Solving this problem will inform how a future vehicle system should be designed and built, and once we’ve done it, an orbital system might look quite a bit different from what I imagine today. I don’t want to make specific vehicle plans until we get the prototyping capability in place. As to whether we would do an orbital system for ourselves or for another customer, time will tell. I would love for XCOR to be one of our customers. Agile Aero intends to make a rapid prototyping capability available for many clients once we have the basic technology in hand. It is a bit like the niche that Scaled Composites used to fill – enabling other companies’ creative aerospace projects, although Agile Aero will be focused on higher performance aircraft and space vehicles. I’m extremely interested in fully reusable launch architectures, and once we have the tools in our toolbox I’d welcome such an opportunity.
[Bumped]