I’m listening to the NASA announcement on COTS, but I missed the first few minutes. I’m inferring that both SpaceX and OSC won follow-on contracts. First mission is two years from now for SpaceX and a little later for Orbital.
[5 PM Update]
Clark Lindsey has a report.
[Evening update]
Clark has more links.
Mike Thomas has a misguided rant over at the Orlando Sentinel, bashing NASA and its supposed desire to go to Mars (something that is hard for me to discern, based on what it’s actually doing).
There are, broadly, two classes of NASA critics: those who think that it’s doing the wrong thing, and those who think that it’s doing the thing wrong. I fall into the latter camp, but Mr. Thomas is clearly one of the former. But his position seems to be incoherent. He thinks that NASA is supposed to be doing science (as indicated by his final words), and if so, he’s correct that manned spaceflight, as currently performed, contributes very little to it. But he doesn’t seem to think that it should be engaged in space science. He (like too many) thinks that NASA’s job is to heal the planet. My biggest fear of an Obama administration (at least in terms of space policy) is that they will agree, and divert it from its original role as an agency that looks outward, to one that looks instead inward.
Whether one believes that we should be doing more about climate change or not, Mike Griffin is correct that it is not within NASA’s charter to do the heavy (or even any) lifting in that regard. It was a heartburn that I always had with things like the Ride Report, and “Mission To Planet Earth.” If these are important things to do, then set up an agency to do them, but don’t defocus and distract NASA with them. In fact, it is much more a job for NOAA. The problem is that NOAA has no history of developing satellites, and has traditionally relied on NASA to do it for them. Perhaps that ought to change.
If NASA improperly gets assigned the task of healing the planet, it is inevitable that it will make it even harder for it to properly explore and develop space, which is what it was established to do. Now frankly, given how wrongly NASA has been doing the right thing, I’m not sure that it would be all that much of a tragedy if we were to end its manned spaceflight program. But unlike Mr. Thomas, I’d rather see it starting to do it right.
Does anyone out there know what the maximum speed is for aluminum skin as a function of altitude?
…and meditations on experts.
This is why I have no problem challenging the conventional wisdom in space policy and technology. Sometimes the experts can be completely wrong, in a groupthink sort of way.
Iowahawk says that when it comes to incriminating photos from the seventies, Obama is a piker.
Alan Boyle has a look back at 2008, and forward to 2009.
Apparently, not only are politicians born, not made, but it’s genetic. I find it ironic that the party that is supposedly the defender of the common man is so enamored of its own aristocracy. But I think that Democrats (and their enablers in the press) apparently lack a sense of irony.
[Update late evening]
Her Highness refuses to make a financial disclosure. Can you imagine that?
OK, her excuse is that she hasn’t actually been annointedselected by the governor to be the next Senator from New York, and she shouldn’t have to do so until she is. But doesn’t this just feed into the theory that she doesn’t have to actually “run” for the office, and that she should be “selected” just because of her DNA? I would think that the public would like to know this kind of 411 prior to their governor “selecting” her for the office. I mean, I’m all for being a Republic, where our elected officials make decisions, but this seems a little ridiculous.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
Victor Davis Hanson has further (relevant) thoughts.
Elon Musk says that there will be a Falcon 9 vertical at the Cape by year end. By my count, that’s less than two weeks from now.
Rich Karlgaard says that capital is on strike. He has some good policy recommendations that the Obama administration is unlikely to follow.
Through nanotech. J. Storrs Hall (aka JoSH) has some ideas. I have a problem with this one, though:
So you have this balloon and it floats up there twenty miles. They all have a little GPS and receiver so they can turn themselves. That’s all there is to it. What can you do with a machine like this? The machine is essentially a programmable greenhouse gas. If you set the mirrors facing the sun, it reflects all the sunlight back. If you set them sideways, it allows the sunlight to come through, and similarly for the longwave radiation coming from the back side of the earth at night.
He seems to be implying that GPS can be used to determine attitude. It can’t. It only provides velocity and position. Now it may want to know that information for other purposes, but there will have to be some other means of attitude knowledge. It seems to me the simplest way would be to just measure the sunlight hitting the mirror (which would actually be a solar cell). As you adjust your attitude, the power available will grow or shrink, and it can use the rate to control the angle. As for how to physically control the attitude, I would guess that little reaction wheels would do the job.
Of course, many of the warm mongers hate technical solutions like this, because they don’t require us to piously tighten up our hair shirts, and they don’t allow for sufficient control of the global economy.