My Fox column is up. It’s new, though it’s got some repetition of previous recent posts.

I kvetch a lot about the ISS, and I do think it a misbegotten and mistaken program, but that doesn’t mean that we never get anything of value from it. Like this picture.

I just got a virus email:

Klez.E is the most common world-wide spreading worm.It’s very dangerous by corrupting your files. Because of its very smart stealth and anti-anti-virus technic,most common AV software can’t detect or clean it. We developed this free immunity tool to defeat the malicious virus. You only need to run this tool once,and then Klez will never come into your PC. NOTE: Because this tool acts as a fake Klez to fool the real worm,some AV monitor maybe cry when you run it. If so,Ignore the warning,and select ‘continue’.

Yeah, I’ll be sure to do that. You’d think these virus writers would put a little more effort into at least making it look like English was their native language…

There’s an article at Space.com that says that the Columbia disaster hasn’t dampened enthusiasm for the X-Prize or public space travel. If anything, it’s enhanced it.

And here’s a good roundup of what’s going on in the current issue of Wired (via an anonymous commenter in this post). Some choice bits:

Thompson and Ressi are after more than profit, though. Having participated in and grown rich from the Internet revolution while still in their twenties, they have boundless faith in their own power and importance, not to mention the power of technology. They feel betrayed by NASA, which promised so much with those first ounces on the moon. It’s been 34 years since Armstrong took his small step, and they’re still waiting for the next leap, for colonies on Mars and the liftoff of the starship Enterprise.

“For the dotcom folks who got a lot of money in tech ventures,” says Thompson, “the evolution from mainframe machines to the PC is parallel to the shift from the traditional space industry to space tourism. Yes, the X Prize is suborbital. But that’s just a baby step, like the first PC. People said there’d never be a market for them and look what happened. Most techies are geeks who as kids read science fiction, and we all dream of something grander.”

Ressi nods with Buddha-like certainty as three more flasks of sake arrive. “I saw the potential of the Internet to change the world,” he says. “Now I believe the world will be meaningless without the changes that going to space will bring.

“Of course I won’t recoup the money I put into X Prize in the next 10 years,” he says, refilling cups all around. “If space tourism works, some folks will make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But that’s not my focus. History has proved that exploration is always worth the cost and risk. There’s just no way to guarantee human survival unless we move off this planet – and our days as a space-faring race start the moment someone wins the X Prize.”

And this one, from John Carmack:

Carmack is pragmatic about how space exploration is luring him away from gaming. “We’re always pushing hard for innovations in our gaming software, but if I disappeared tomorrow there’d be a lot of people doing similar things,” he says. “It’s appalling how in aerospace, we’ve been using the same stuff for decades. There’s a big difference between what’s been done and what’s been possible and that’s the definition of opportunity…”

…”I think there’s definitely a tourism market,” he says, “but I don’t know that it’s huge.” That’s why he’s looking at making a variety of spacecraft that could do everything from carry tourists to launch trinkets – or even go orbital. “You’ve got to build a lot of vehicles to learn. Space has been mythologized way out of proportion,” Carmack says. “We’ve just not had enough people doing it to be comfortable with the challenges. We’re blas

John Hawkins has dug up a quote by ever-more-senile Bobby “White Sheet” Byrd from October, 2003.

A man almost died from having a bluegill stuck in his throat.

The fish didn’t survive the encounter. Alcohol may have been involved…

Nice attempt for a Darwin Award, but no cigar.

A few months ago, I interviewed Gary Hudson, long-time space entrepreneur.

Clark Lindsey has done so as well, and it’s a very interesting one. While some of the discussion of Alternate Access may sound like “inside baseball” (as it were), this is a very important story, and sadly not atypical of NASA behavior, and one of the many reasons we make so little progress.

Clark makes a good point here:

There doesn’t seem to be much of a tradition of investigative journalism within the aerospace press. When you talk about your case and the X-37 situation, it reminds me of the X-34 cancellation, which I saw as an outrage if not a scandal. As I understand it, in the aftermath of the two Mars mission failures, all major projects got hit with system reviews to avoid any more embarassing public disasters. For the X-34, they added so many additional safety requirements that it crossed their cost limit and so was canceled. This happened even though, in traditional X project spirit, Orbital had built 3 vehicles just so it would have backups if one was lost. In addition, NASA had required that they use the Fastrac engine, which as far as I know, was a project that simply faded away without ever flying an engine or making any public accounting whatsoever.

You surely know more about what really happened in these cases than I do. However, the fact that I have to guess as to what happened [in these and your cases] rather than go to a NASA web page and read a clear and full summary of such projects [and how decisions regarding them were made] absolutely amazes me. And I’m even more amazed that the aerospace press lets them get away with it.

Yes. Unfortunately, being a good investigative reporter in this field requires both good journalistic skills, and knowledge of both the technical and programmatic aspects of the industry. That’s a combination that’s in scant supply, and there aren’t very many publications in whose interest it is, necessarily, to turn over the rocks. Even when the stories are told, it’s mostly in the trade press–it rarely makes it into the mainstream where the public becomes aware of it because, well, space just Isn’t Important.

And when the only scandal is perceived to be a waste of money (as opposed to the real tragedy, which is the time lost, and opportunity cost, and continued delay in making serious progress), that doesn’t stand out that much in the context of the general waste of government funds. People have become inured to the notion that Big Aerospace wastes money, and that almost fails to be news any more.

For anyone who’s been following my server saga over the weekend (too gruesome to go into in detail), I ended up having to blow off my new Moveable Type installation, because it screwed up the numbering on my permalinks. I’ve reverted to a backup from Friday morning, and rebuilt all posts since then by hand. In the process, all comments and trackbacks on posts since then have been lost, so if you said anything timeless in any of them, or want to get your link back in, have at it.

I’ve also not bothered to repost the progress reports on getting the blog back up, but briefly, I ran out of disk space on my server on Friday, and fubared my database as a result (MT really should check for the ability to write files before it attempts to write files…). The system was broken to the point that it wasn’t possible to post comments at all. All seems to be well, now, however.

Can anyone explain to me why the Rave Act isn’t in violation of the First Amendment? If it is, who will challenge it?

Mark Whittington (and former Congressman Walker) will disagree, but Jeff Foust has a good piece at the Space Policy Review that explains why it won’t happen, and more importantly, why that’s A Good Thing. I think he’s got it pretty close to right.

A desire for a race with a China that’s simply recapitulating Russian hardware is nostalgia for the sixties and Apollo, and that’s a mindset that we have to break ourselves out of, instead focusing on commerce and lower cost of access. If we ever actually develop an American, free-enterprise space industry, we’ll leave all of the command economies (including NASA) in the dust.

On a related note, Laughing Wolf has a good post on why many space entrepreneurs fail, and why we seem to have made so little commercial progress to date. It’s a lot more fun to draw pictures of rockets than it is to sit down and do the hard work of figuring out markets and drawing up realistic business plans that a non-insane investor will fund. This was a perennial kvetch of the late G. Harry Stine (who used to harangue the attendees of the Space Access Conference on this subject every year).

Fortunately, I think that’s changing. I’ve tried to pick up the lecture where he lamentably left off, and I think that it’s finally sinking in, because we did see some serious companies with serious proposals, starting to raise serious money this year.

I’m very optimistic about this industry right now. We’re not going to get to orbit overnight, but some interesting things are going to happen in the next couple years that I think will have dramatic effects on both the quality of business plans, and the receptiveness of investors toward them. And it will ultimately get us into orbit much faster than any number of NASA programs (from which the prospects of the latter are, in my opinion, null).