Michael Mealing reminds us about this weekend’s Return to the Moon conference, in Vegas. So I do too…

On next week’s thirty-fifth anniversary of the first manned lunar landing?

[Via Rob Wilson]

[Update a few minutes later]

Boeing has established an anniversary web site.

Via RLV News, the presentations from the most recent COMSTAC meeting are available. I haven’t read any of them yet, but I figured I’d post a pointer. I’m a little snowed under trying to make sure I’ve read everything I ought to read in order to do a decent job for the SOI, but I think the paper by Terry Hardy on Ec[*] calculations is a good place to start. I’m beginning to think that the single best paradigm change for moving towards a sustainable and vigorous spaceflight industry is a public safety regime that doesn’t use Ec as a figure of merit. Ec is a little bit like man rating in that it implicitly assumes that the norm for space vehicles is that they blow up with some regularity.

[*] for those not already familiar with it, Ec is the expected number of casualties from operations of a given launch vehicle. You need less than 30 casualties per million flights in order to get a launch license.

Reader John Breen points out this “Foxtrot” comic strip, about a little kid making an X-Prize attempt.

As Rand has already blogged, I’m the new interim Washington Director of the SubOrbital Institute, since Pat Bahn is too busy actually running a company to take care of the nitty-gritty of running the Institute. This goes for many of the other Institute members, which is very good news. Unfortunately I’m paid exactly the same as I am for blogging here, but that’s not zero except in dollars. Let me clarify that statement a little: I realized a few years ago that I was thinking about the problem of space access all wrong. The problem is complex and has many conceivable solutions, but only a small set of practically implementable solutions. Which solutions are practical is not obvious except in retrospect, and since we don’t already have low cost space access, retrospection is not an option.

Continue reading Interim Washington Director, SOI →

Michael Turner has a piece in today’s The Space Review arguing that Moore’s Law won’t apply to space development. His argument fails, at least to me, because it rests on a false premise (and a common myth)–that the reason access to space is expensive is because we don’t have the “right” technology.

While I don’t literally believe in a Moore’s Law for space (in the sense that we can see seemingly never-ending halving of costs on some constant time period), I do expect to see dramatic reductions in cost in the next couple decades, but not because there are vast ranges for improvement in the technologies, but because there are is vast potential for improvement in the real problem–the heretofore lack of market.

Costs will come down dramatically when we start flying a lot more. It’s that simple. Once we reach a plateau, in which the costs of propellant start to become significant in the overall costs of flight, then we should look to some new technological breakthroughs, but we’re sufficiently far from that that some form of Moore’s Law, at least in the short term, is actually quite likely to hold.

Michael Turner has a piece in today’s The Space Review arguing that Moore’s Law won’t apply to space development. His argument fails, at least to me, because it rests on a false premise (and a common myth)–that the reason access to space is expensive is because we don’t have the “right” technology.

While I don’t literally believe in a Moore’s Law for space (in the sense that we can see seemingly never-ending halving of costs on some constant time period), I do expect to see dramatic reductions in cost in the next couple decades, but not because there are vast ranges for improvement in the technologies, but because there are is vast potential for improvement in the real problem–the heretofore lack of market.

Costs will come down dramatically when we start flying a lot more. It’s that simple. Once we reach a plateau, in which the costs of propellant start to become significant in the overall costs of flight, then we should look to some new technological breakthroughs, but we’re sufficiently far from that that some form of Moore’s Law, at least in the short term, is actually quite likely to hold.

Michael Turner has a piece in today’s The Space Review arguing that Moore’s Law won’t apply to space development. His argument fails, at least to me, because it rests on a false premise (and a common myth)–that the reason access to space is expensive is because we don’t have the “right” technology.

While I don’t literally believe in a Moore’s Law for space (in the sense that we can see seemingly never-ending halving of costs on some constant time period), I do expect to see dramatic reductions in cost in the next couple decades, but not because there are vast ranges for improvement in the technologies, but because there are is vast potential for improvement in the real problem–the heretofore lack of market.

Costs will come down dramatically when we start flying a lot more. It’s that simple. Once we reach a plateau, in which the costs of propellant start to become significant in the overall costs of flight, then we should look to some new technological breakthroughs, but we’re sufficiently far from that that some form of Moore’s Law, at least in the short term, is actually quite likely to hold.

It’s Monday, and that means a new issue of The Space Review. Dwayne Day leads off the week with an interesting comparison between the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative, and the new Vision for Space Exploration.

Editor Jeff Foust also makes an interesting analogy between planetary exploration and sports.