Well this certainly inspires confidence in the ability of the federal government to protect me:
How much do you think Osama bin Laden would pay to know exactly when and where the President was traveling, and who was with him? Turns out, he wouldn’t have had to pay a dime. All he had to do was go through the trash early Tuesday morning.
It appears to be a White House staff schedule for the President’s trip to Florida Tuesday. And a sanitation worker was alarmed to find in the trash long hours before Mr. Bush left for his trip.
Well, it seems to be at least as effective as TSA at the airports.
at the Texas Space Authority organizational meeting tomorrow in Austin. I am too. Email me at dinkin@space-shot.com or comment if you think we can do something for you from a business angle or want to see my slides.
— Update —
Buzz continues to promote Starcraft Boosters and his plan for many space adventurer orbiters on the same launcher. He asserts that orbital is “so hard that only 3 governments have done it”. That was also true of people to 100 km before Rutan won the Ansari X Prize. Number of governments that can go to 100 km without losing money=0. Number of governments that have a reusable craft that can fly again in less than a week to 100 km=0. He views suborbital as a dead end. He is still promoting lotteries to fund spaceflight. I asked him to join forces once skill games can finance orbital flights and he agreed.
I bet Buzz $20 that orbital craft would emerge without government funding.
Alan Boyle reports at MSNBC.com that “several” vendors are in negotiations for $500 million in commercial orbital transport service (with the same acronym as commercial off the shelf):
Oklahoma-based Rocketplane Kistler and California-based Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, acknowledged that they were finalists. Other sources, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the official NASA reticence, indicated that the Virginia-based t/Space consortium, California-based SpaceDev, Texas-based Spacehab and Andrews Space in Seattle were also on the list.
Before being bought by George French, owner of Rocketplane (whose flights I am offering as a prize at Space-Shot.com), Kistler had an agreement with NASA which was unawarded after an objection from SpaceX. In this competition, there are many strong companies and the winner may have a march on orbital adventure travel competition. I hope the winner chooses a fixed price agreement so it will maintain the discipline to compete in the private markets too.
Via Clark Lindsey, here’s one of those periodic stories that someone is working on a Concorde successor. As usual, it makes little technical or economic sense (at least the story, if not the reality).
It is full of contradictory statements, to anyone who understands basic aeronautics. Example:
Japan is trying to leapfrog ahead in the aerospace field with a plan to build a next-generation airliner that can fly between Tokyo and Los Angeles in about three hours. But a string of glitches, including a nose cone problem during the latest test flight in March, has led the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to look for an international partner.
This is a good example of how it’s easier to make your investments grow with small companies than big ones (albeit riskier). Just a few days ago at the ISDC, Jeff Greason was saying that XCOR’s sales had increased dramatically, to about three million per year in the coming year. I noticed that Jeff disappeared for a day after that announcement on Thursday, arriving back at LAX late Friday night. I suspect that this may have been the subject of that excursion. They just doubled their sales for this year again:
XCOR Aerospace announced today that it had won a $3.3 million contract with ATK as part of ATK