Charle Pooley and Ed LeBoutillier have a new book
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Reusable Falcons
Jeff Foust mined Gwynne Shotwell’s Space Show interview for some interesting nuggets. Here’s what I found interesting:
Despite concerns about US access to the ISS given current tensions with Russia and NASA’s current reliance on Soyuz, Shotwell said she didn’t think it was feasible to greatly accelerate the development of a crewed Dragon. “We proposed a pretty forward-leaning program” for commercial crew, she said. “I don’t want to say that we couldn’t speed things up: we probably could, but it would have to be in lockstep with NASA.” She added that SpaceX current believes it can have a crewed Dragon ready “a little bit faster” than current NASA plans for flights in late 2016 or early 2017. [Emphasis added]
I’m pretty sure that if NASA went to her and Elon and said, “we want to fly this year, and we’re willing to do it without the abort system,” they’d be able to do it.
The Climate Debate
…is about to change to one of resilience and mitigation.
It badly needs to. We can afford a lot of resilience and mitigation if we stop impeding economic growth with insane anti-carbon policies.
A New Japanese Launcher
A “flagship” LOX/Hydrogen system with solids (sounds like cross between an Atlas V and Delta IV), to be operational in 2020. This seems more like a national pride thing than a practical launcher, unless they can resolve their site and calendar restrictions out of Tanegashima.
A Win-Win Sanction
Josh Galernter agrees with me that it’s time to end our dependency on the Russians for space. He doesn’t point out, though that we could probably start flying on Dragon any time we want. We just have to decide that it’s important.
Reusability And Other Launch-Industry Issues
Jeff Foust has a report at today’s issue of The Space Review.
The Future Of Commercial Space
An interview with Michael Lopez-Alegria.
As I note in comments there, NASA is not the only orbital customer. Bigelow has long expressed an interest in purchasing flights when they’re available at an affordable price.
The “Selling Space” Debate
Jeff Foust has six takeaways.
Falcon Heavy
SpaceX has it on their flight schedule for this year.
Faster, please.
British Accents
…of yore.
I’ve always wondered how anyone can think they know what an accent from before Edison would have sounded like. How do we know that Romans would have spoken the Latin of the modern Church?
[Update a few minutes later]
That second video on the how Shakespeare would have been performed in the day is quite interesting.