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Yes, we all know about Google’s “rules and regulations.” I wonder if they’re trying to play off all the buzz about the IPO?
Here’s more from the New York Times. It’s very confusing–they seem to be conflating the Ansari X-Prize with the X-Prize Cup, which will be a separate annual competitive event, much like the Americas Cup of sailing.
[One more]
Leonard David has fleshed out the story more, with a better explanation of what the X-Prize Cup (which is what this story is about) is about.
Geoff Landis has a paper out on novel approaches to space solar power systems.
One of the reasons I’m skeptical of lunar He3 for fusion as a viable space based business is the competition from SPS. If you can put enough infrastructure on the moon to process the enormous quantities of regolith needed to extract He3, you can just as easily churn out huge numbers of SPS satellites. Unless there is some unforseen showstopper with SPS (and the only one I can think of is possible long term environmental effects due to the microwave beam, but that seems unlikely), then SPS construction will win over He3 fusion. We can do SPS with current technology. We’re not even close to being able to do fusion with He3, and we won’t be for probably two decades. That’s just fusing the He3, not doing it cheaply enough to compete with other power sources.
I’m slowly churning through a detailed piece on fusion which will hopefully clarify a lot of these issues, but I’m a having trouble making the piece not suck, so don’t hold your breath. Hopefully I’ll get unstuck soon.
President Bush is planning a speech in the next month or two addressing the new space policy (probably after the Aldridge Commission reports in early June).
Sources said Bush has been briefed on the hearings held by the commission and is awaiting its report to help frame his forthcoming remarks. Despite the approaching presidential election, the speech, which will reiterate Bush’s call for advanced human exploration of space, will not necessarily be made “in a political context.”
But you can bet it will be interpreted that way by people who don’t know any better.
Sources said although there has not been widespread support for the space plan since its debut, the president has felt no need to rush to make additional public comments. Bush has remained “highly enthusiastic” about his space proposal and his lack of additional mentions of the idea should not be taken as a cooling of interest, they said.
Dan DeLong has a suggestion for the NASA Centennial Prize:
1. first edible tomato over .1 kg grown at 5 kPa total atmospheric pressure
2. first edible potato over .1 kg ” ” ” “
3. first kg of edible corn kernels ” ” ” “
4. first kg of edible peas ” ” ” ” “
5. first kg of edible beans
etc.
Where 5 kPa is Martian atmospheric pressure and also a reasonable-to-build lunar greenhouse. If you make the winner of each ineligible for the others there will be a large number of contestants.
Each contestant gets to choose atmospheric constituents from oxygen, nitrogen, and CO2 in any combination.
Then, another series of prizes would be for food crops grown with 2 weeks daylight and not more than X% duty cycle and Y illumination intensity for 2 weeks, repeat cycle as necessary. Then, X and Y decrease to lower and lower values for higher dollar prizes.
I hesitate to extend the idea to animals because I wouldn’t want the issue to get confused by animal rights activists.
Unfortunately, things that are literally edible (they won’t kill you, and might even prove nutritious) don’t necessarily taste all that great. As I pointed out to Dan in email, there are a lot of items in the produce department of my local grocery (including tomatoes) that I consider inedible, at least relative to the home-grown variety. Maybe you could come up with a panel of judges to make a determination as to whether it was sufficiently edible to be useful to space colonists.
If you’re interested in returning to the moon, you might want to think about attending the Return to the Moon Conference, sponsored by the Space Frontier Foundation, in Las Vegas this July (around the time of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the first manned moon landing on July 20th). Film director James Cameron (Terminator, Titanic) is scheduled as one of the speakers. Considering that the president has made this part of the new space policy, it should be a very interesting meeting.
Andrew, Pete Knight certainly deserves to be recognized as a pilot and a space pioneer, but he was also a very controversial political figure in California. He was the driving force behind the legislation to keep gay marriage illegal (the law that the San Francisco mayor was flouting earlier this year), and he was regularly denounced by the left as a rabid right-wing homophobe (I don’t know to what degree that’s true, but considering the sources of much of the criticism, I’m inclined to think that he wasn’t as much of a neanderthal as his political enemies made him out to be).