The Space Frontier Society has put together a new feature at their site, called NewSpace News. It has a nice roundup of links to stories of interest to fans of the new (private) space program(s).

Also, Rick Tumlinson has an editorial with some advice for Mike Griffin. Like many of us, he’s underwhelmed by “Apollo on steroids”:

It’s dead Mike. That horse won’t run. That dog won’t hunt. The fat lady has sung. Or, to bring it closer to space, I’ll quote Bill Paxton in the film Aliens: “Game over man!”

The bloated, business as usual, cost-plus, pork-based, design-bureau use-it-and-throw-it-away approach to space is a failure. The excitement and momentum that might have existed when the president aimed us toward the Moon, Mars and beyond has been squandered. It has been worn down by the dumping of vision in favor of pork, and the jettisoning of the President and Aldridge Commission’s declarations that frontier infrastructure building based on commercial enterprise is a prime goal. Dumped in favor of getting a few folks on the Moon relatively quickly (for these timid times) and pretending that this will lead us on to Mars

…is to call for an end to controversial debate. I got more calls and letters on this article than I got in a year of previous writing. The responses were polarized. The most controversial item was my list of companies that could succeed if we stop space industry infighting. The list was a mistake–no list can be completely inclusive so better to describe broad categories. I did not intend to exclude companies. Many many companies can prosper in a boom. Not all will be around 25 years from now. IBM is not even in the PC business any more.

Setting aside the list, the correspondence was bi-modal. Half said it’s about time that someone said this. Some of these people had Washington return addresses. The other half said it is brutally repressive to cage the intellectual debate, and counterproductive.

I think there must be some kind of inverse square law that says if you have a political party that represents 50% of the people, it has one opinion, but a splinter interest group that represents 1% of the people has 2500 opinions.

There certainly can be a democratic process to arrive periodically at consensus. I favor a knockout auction where the proponents of a position pay those that disagree with it if they win.

Those who agreed with my article probably would think that just about any civility and unity in the space industry would be better than division and infighting regardless of the message disseminated.

Those who disagreed with my article challenged that there was any way to arrive at a consensus without free and open debate that wouldn’t fatally taint the ultimate message.

I guess I will have to go on being controversial and dividing people.