Eileen Collins explains why it will be successful.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Our Space Dependence On The Russians
I say it’s time to end it, over at PJMedia.
National Security Launchers
A live blog of the Senate hearing, with Elon Musk and Michael Gass. ULA is running scared, and Shelby is running interference for them, spouting economic lunacy.
Elysium
A brief review of the stupid movie by Lileks:
I made two attempts this weekend to watch “Elysium,” but was hampered by the fact that it was stupid.
There’s actually a little more, but that’s the bottom line.
The Fall Of The Software Commons
…is a myth. Eric Raymond on the history of open source, and the ahistorical knowledge of young programmers.
If Russia Refuses To Fly US Astronauts
My response:
If we really wouldn't fly crew on Dragon as is today, it just shows how unimportant we think that ISS is. @PopMech
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) March 3, 2014
Climate Activists Behaving Badly
Roger Pielke on the warm-mongers Internet antics. I look forward to his book.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related: The president’s (anti)Science Advisor.
The Holdren appointment was just one among an appalling many.
The Venus/Mars Flyby
The magical thinking behind it:
This mission requires more magical thinking than a leprechaun trying to predict the track of a flock of flying unicorns on their annual migration.
MPCV employs a heat shield designed for lunar return and its CM is ~20% (thousands of pounds) overweight for its parachutes. But we’re going to equip MPCV with an even heavier heat shield for Mars return and magically it will be capable of a safe Earth landing?
There’s practically no element of the ISS ECLSS that lasts more than a year. But magically every component will remain operating for 17 months in a new vehicle when applied to a Mars flyby mission?
ASAP is warning about the lack of an ECLSS shakedown on MPCV before sending astronauts around the Moon for a few days. But magically we’re going to decide that the ASAP membership are all wimps of the highest order and decide to risk astronaut lives for 17 months on the first shakedown of the MPCV ECLSS?
At best, SLS is scheduled to have an upper stage capable of launching this mission a half decade after the mission’s 2021 window closes. And magically that half decade of development is going to be accelerated by more than a decade?
Congress can’t find funding to perform testing like AA-2 or to finish development like MPCV ECLSS in a timely fashion, and the White House is wrapped around the axle of ARM. But magically billions of dollars of federal funding are going to appear in a timely manner to develop a new ECLSS, a new hab module, a new heat shield, and a new upper stage for this mission?
If Tito really wants to see this happen, he has to give up on getting NASA to pay for it, and for it to happen with NASA hardware. He needs to sit down with SpaceX and Bigelow.
Hindsight, Twenty Twenty
I ran across this old piece I wrote a few months after the loss of Columbia. It has some of the underlying themes of what later became the book, and holds up pretty well, I think.
The Mammoth
We’re starting to resurrect extinct animals.
What could go wrong?