Several journalists seem to have gotten a personal tour from Jeff Bezos yesterday. Here’s Jeff Foust’s story. Things seem (finally) to be ramping up. I’d say they’re now solidly in the lead in the suborbital race, but they’re also going to orbit.
[Update a couple minutes later]
And here’s Ken Chang’s story. I’m sure that Alan Boyle and Eric Berger will have their own takes. Wish I’d known about it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Chang’s take is more detailed. I found this amusing:
Currently, most rocket companies launch, at most, about a dozen times a year. “You never get really great at something you do 10, 12 times a year,” Mr. Bezos said. With a small fleet of reusable New Shepard rockets, Blue Origin could be launching dozens of times a year.
NASA proposes to launch SLS once every couple of years. Insane.
[Update a while later]
Here’s Eric Berger’s take. He has more detail about the BE-4 and its implications for the RD-180 issue.
Keith Cowing has some thoughts, with which I largely agree. This was clearly a compromise, in which the SLS/Orion supporters and Commercial Crew supporters agreed to come together to support each others’ programs, and present a united front. Unfortunately for the former, one program makes sense, and the other doesn’t. At some point, it will die, but not before billions more are wasted on it.
…when I look at the data, it’s clear to me that if I entered the race, I could not win. I believe I could win a number of diverse states — but not enough to win the 270 Electoral College votes necessary to win the presidency.
In a three-way race, it’s unlikely any candidate would win a majority of electoral votes, and then the power to choose the president would be taken out of the hands of the American people and thrown to Congress. The fact is, even if I were to receive the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, victory would be highly unlikely, because most members of Congress would vote for their party’s nominee. Party loyalists in Congress — not the American people or the Electoral College — would determine the next president.
I’m always amused at the horror of some that a president might be selected exactly the way the Founders intended it.
Note the theme that safety is the highest priority, and no discussion of how much this is all costing, or how much it’s delaying ending our dependence on Russia (which is part of the cost) in addition to delaying an increase in ISS crew size (which is also part of the cost).
I hate cell phones, but once in a while I need a smart-phone feature. But I generally only use it when I’m traveling. As I’ve noted in the past, young people have no conception of what good phone service is like.
Remember, he wasn’t even allowed to work for the State Department by the White House. She basically ignored them. Anyone not named “Clinton” (or, rather, not a high-level Democrat) would have been indicted over all this long ago.
CosmoCourse CEO Pavel Pushkin told Sputnik New Agency, he came up with the idea of suborbital tourism back in 2013 when he was working at Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center.
“We were reviewing various concepts of commercial space rockets and came up with the idea of launching people into space via suborbital trajectory.”