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 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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[Ed: I'm pretty sure I've used this argument before, but didn't see it on the blog, so I figured I'd put it down in writing even if it ends up being repetitive.]
One of the most common criticisms I hear of propellant depots is that we can’t “put unproven technology on the critical path to our [...]
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I’ve been busy a lot lately (between this, this, this, and having friends in from out of town for the holiday), so I hadn’t had a chance until now to reply to Mark Whittington’s correspondence with me (found here). A majority of his reply was arguing against stuff that I had never said, or making [...]
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Several recent news items paint an interesting budgetary picture for the future of NASA’s preferred approach for spending tens of billions of dollars to send a few government employees to visit the Moon sometime supposedly starting in 2020.
The three big pieces of new information (in addition to NASA not getting the large budget increases the [...]
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I think most in the commercial space industry would agree that COTS is one of the best things the government has done to help promote commercial space in a long time. While I think that overall this program has been run pretty well by government standards, some recent discussions on a few threads at NASASpaceflight.com [...]
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Posted in Commercial Space, NASA, Space Policy on Jan 13th, 2009
I’m busy on a writing project, but Ferris Valyn and I submitted two papers to the Obama transition team over the past week, and Ferris just posted the first one on his DailyKos site. The change.gov site seems to be fairly backed up at the moment, so I don’t know how soon it will show [...]
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Posted in NASA, Politics, Space Policy on Jan 3rd, 2009
There was an interesting piece about foreign policy linked to by one of the blogs I read on a regular basis (can’t remember who now). The piece was talking about the delay between when changes to the global order happen, and when elites finally start recognizing that something has changed:
Now… it seems to me [...]
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Posted in NASA, Space Policy, Technology on Nov 28th, 2008
When I was a teenager, my dad had me read a small book called “The Richest Man in Babylon”. It was a good and simple read about personal financial management, set in a fictional background of ancient Babylon. I think the concepts in the book are just as timely today as when it was first [...]
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Space Journalist/Blogger Rob Coppinger wrote an article tonight attempting to debunk “The Fantasy of Propellant Depots“, which he makes out to be some sort of religious mantra in the New Space community. I will admit that depots are finally starting to get a tiny bit of the attention they deserve, but that has only been [...]
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