Posted in COTS, Commercial Space, ESAS, International Space Collaboration, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, NEOs, Politics, Space Development, Space Policy on Dec 14th, 2009
Amid all the recent discussion of the Augustine Committee’s results, Mark Whittington asks a question that a lot of people in Congress seem to be asking: “Why not just pay for the current program since any new program is going to cost more money anyway?” To elaborate, the line of reasoning goes that if [...]
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Posted in NASA on Dec 11th, 2009
Dave pointed out to me earlier today that it looks like Centennial Challenges is finally going to get more funding this year (see http://docs.house.gov/rules/omni2010/hr3288cr_divb_jes.pdf on page 182 about 3/4 of the way to the bottom). The new amount is the full $4M that the Obama Administration asked for earlier this year.
While this [...]
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I didn’t have a chance to watch either of the House subcommittee hearings today, so I’m grateful that Clark linked to the testimonies of the various witnesses. I really enjoyed reading Brett’s testimony, and thought one of his points in particular is worth repeating.
To me one of the more interesting points is found at the [...]
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Posted in ESAS, Fun, NASA on Oct 20th, 2009
This is poor taste, but too funny not to pass along (I apologize in advance to CxP workers reading this). Upon hearing about another CxP element that’s been supposedly defunded, a NASASpaceFlight.com member (Lawntonlookirs) expressed his frustration by creating the following, slightly modified mission patch for Constellation:
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Posted in ESAS, NASA on Oct 9th, 2009
I listened in a bit on yesterday’s Augustine Committee discussion. The debate at the end between Bo and the others reminded me of a point I’ve made a bunch of times on this blog–that when you’re talking about exploration missions, ascent reliability is only a small component of the overall risk.
Since I’ve been doing a [...]
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Posted in NASA on Sep 25th, 2009
Continuing my trend of outsourcing most of my blogging to others with more time on their hands, here’s a great question [from a guy named SpaceXULA] on NASASpaceflight.com:
You must ask yourself this question. “Given that NASA is national prestige program purely funded by deficit spending, do you feel a 30% increase in NASA’s budget, that [...]
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Posted in COTS, Commercial Space, ESAS, International Space Collaboration, International Space Competition, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Policy, Space Transportation, Technology on Jul 30th, 2009
Or at least that’s how Stephen Flemming put it on Twitter regarding Jeff Greason’s presentation at the Augustine Committee meeting today in Florida. To be fair, the rest of the subgroup also did an amazing job, especially Chris Chyba’s wrapup near the the end, where he made the case forcefully that becoming a spacefaring [...]
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Just reading some of the comments from the Constellation used-car sale pitch going on in Huntsville today. One of the topics discussed was how Ares-V enables manned missions to Mars. The Marshall guys put up a chart showing that depending on whether we go with NTRs or chemical propulsion, Ares-V could place the needed mass [...]
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Last week, right after I finished sending my propellant depot white paper in to the Augustine Committee, I got contacted by David Shiga of New Scientist with some questions for an article he was writing. The article is now available online, and while it probably doesn’t say much that is new for most readers here, [...]
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Posted in NASA on Jul 28th, 2009
I know this may sound mean-spirited, but I’m genuinely curious: does anyone know of any big projects that MSFC has played a major role in over the last 30 years that were actually successful? I’ve only been paying attention since the mid-nineties, and almost everything that I’ve seen has been the megaprojects that they’ve run [...]
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