For those of you who aren’t reading our ASM Blog, I participated in a panel at the SSI Conference last week in San Jose. Dallas Bienhoff presented the paper we are working on coauthoring, Gary Hudson talked about earth-to-orbit transportation, and Joe Carroll talked about several other interesting technologies including: mid-air capture (which I’ve talked [...]
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Posted in NASA, Space Policy on Aug 25th, 2010
I know I shouldn’t feed the troll, but Mark Whittington is sometimes amusing. On his blog, he quoted a commenter to NASAWatch: A commenter named Robert B. has a great answer: Congress doesn’t trust NASA’s administrators to follow the will of Congress. The admins have proven that they will use the letter of the law [...]
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They misnamed the bill though. Should’ve been called “Found a Pork Program (un)Worthy of its Host Nation”. I find it amusing that so many of the opponents of Obama’s proposed space plan are so happy with this, when it doesn’t actually resolve most of the things they said were wrong with his policy. To whit: [...]
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I had to keep this under wraps until this morning, but it’s now formal: May 25th, 2010, Mojave, CA, USA: XCOR Aerospace and Masten Space Systems, two of the leaders in the New Space sector, have announced a strategic business and technology relationship to pursue jointly the anticipated NASA sponsored unmanned lander projects. These automated [...]
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I was going to write another article about the administration’s new NASA plan, but while catching up on email and articles from while I was in Oregon, I see that “Rusty” Schweickart already said what I wanted to. And he put it better than I would’ve (emphasis mine): Our current situation is akin to being [...]
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Posted in NASA, Politics, Snark, Space Policy on Apr 16th, 2010
I know I shouldn’t take anything Mark Whittington writes seriously, but I want to write about a stupid meme that smarter people than Mark have also been bandying about–that somehow Obama’s budget proposal would surrender our leadership in space to the Russians and Chinese. I’m going to dignify this silliness with an attempt at a [...]
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Posted in Launch Vehicles, NASA on Mar 31st, 2010
…Like it needs a hole in the head. I was going to write a blog post on this earlier, but Jeff Greason beat me to the punch in comments over on SpacePolitics.com (emphasis mine): Both the Phase I and Phase 2 versions can support 7.5m fairings; I’ve discussed the fairing size argument elsewhere and won’t [...]
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I’ve had a few more ideas on the Lunar One-Way-To-Stay concept that I figured it would be worth posting now before I forget them. I still think this is pretty much the only way that there will be a human foot on the Moon this decade. More importantly, this is the only cost-effective way short [...]
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One of the reasons I haven’t blogged much about my reactions to the President’s NASA budget proposal is because I’ve been doing a lot of commenting over at NASASpaceflight.com. I just realized that my latest post could actually serve pretty well as a blog post too, so I’m copying it over here for discussion. One [...]
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Posted in NASA on Feb 1st, 2010
Holy Crap! Obama’s NASA Budget Proposal is Amazing! For once in my life, I think I’m actually speechless for now.
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