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RLV Potpourri

Clark Lindsey has a lot of good stuff today over at RLV news, including SpaceShipOne’s first in-flight test of their rocket engine, the SpaceX extravaganza in Washington, and some promising developments by the Japanese (perhaps I was a little too hasty in dissing them–we’ll see if they allow this effort to flower).

I do want to clarify one point, though.

…I’m sure that Elon would agree with Rand Simberg and others who say that man-rating is an obsolete term. All vehicles should be built to the highest degree to not fail, regardless of whether the payload includes people or not.

To be precise, all reusable vehicles should be built to the highest degree not to fail. Optimal reliability for an expendable is an economic trade based on payload value and insurance rates, so it may still make sense to talk about man or (to use the current PC NASA term) human rating of the Delta IV and Atlas V for OSP. It’s pretty clear, at least to me, that for a number of reasons, neither of those vehicles are going to be usable off the shelf for that mission, despite public impressions to the contrary.

Space

Meteor Strikes Earth–Women, Minorities And Endangered Species Hardest Hit

That’s not exactly the headline of this dumb NYT editorial, but it almost could be.

Let’s leave aside that no meteor has ever struck the earth, or anything else, other than eyes (a meteor is the flash of light that an object makes when it hits the atmosphere–not the physical object itself). They talk about how life has been devastated in the past by bombardment from extraterrestrial objects, but instead of proposing that we do something about it, they use it as an opportunity to preach about how we’re extincting too many species. In fact, they not only don’t propose doing anything about it, they deny that anything can be done.

There’s no controlling the possibility of a meteor strike. But there’s every reason — ethical and practical — for preventing our own habitation of earth from having the same impact.

Well, in fact, there is “controlling the possibility of a meteor [sic] strike.” One starts looking for them, and as Clark Lindsey (from whom I got the link) points out, one develops the spacefaring capability to divert them, which is entirely feasible, and relative to the cost of being hit, quite affordable.

It’s particularly ironic that the Gray Lady publishes this silliness on perhaps the eve of a major change in space policy that might, in fact, ultimately lead to such a capability, but I guess that there’s some comfort in knowing that, even under new management, some things at the Times never change.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!