On the way home from the Space Access 2012 conference yesterday, we drove by Meteor Crater, Arizona. I’m not much of a photographer, but I take pictures anyway. Here’s a few of my favorites: While I was standing there looking at this pretty darned impressive hole in the ground, I started thinking about Larry Niven’s [...]
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[Note: I just wanted to share a quick semi-baked opinion, and it was long enough that if I broke it up into a series of tweets, Ben Brockert and Will Pomerantz would probably remind me of this blog thing I supposedly run...It's probably not that new, profound, or even correct, but as I said, think [...]
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Posted in Space Policy on Feb 9th, 2012
[Note: Here's a letter to the editor that I sent in to a local Colorado paper a few days ago, which didn't get published. Not that most of this should be too surprising to regular readers, but I figured it was worth putting something new on the blog. Also, some apologies on the terseness, I [...]
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Posted in Business, Commercial Space, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, NEOs, Space Development, Space Exploration, Space Law, Space Policy on Jun 10th, 2011
I finally got around to watching Jeff Greason’s ISDC talk last night (youtube link here), and it has got me thinking. In an effort to actually get some blog posts going again, I’m going to break this up into chunks to try and keep things short. Jeff made the point that you can look at [...]
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Keith Cowing posted an interesting notice over on SpaceRef today. Basically NASA is using authority in one bill to remove a restriction in their acquisition regulations on doing “anchor tenant” type contracts. Anchor tenancy agreements have been talked about in the past as a way of making it easier to close the business case on [...]
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Posted in Launch Vehicles, NASA, Space Policy on Feb 18th, 2011
From NASAWatch/Spaceref: “While it is true that prudent investments in science and technology will almost certainly yield future economic gains and will allow our knowledge economy to grow, it is also true that these gains can be thwarted by poor decision-making,” Chairman Hall said. “Americans expect and deserve better. With our unemployment hovering at over [...]
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Posted in ITAR, Politics, Space Policy on Feb 16th, 2011
I know I’ve written about this topic before, but I think it’s worth bringing it up again. When you combine the stupidity of ITAR as it exists with the difficulty of getting even a green-card for your typical foreign engineering student studying in the US, you get a particularly pathetic situation. While they’re in school, [...]
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Posted in NASA, Politics, Snark, Space Policy, SpaceX on Feb 1st, 2011
So, a group of rocket engineers starts making claims about how they’re going to revolutionize the industry and deliver a vehicle for far less than has been the traditional norm. When asked how they are going to do this, they talk about stuff like “vertical integration”, “keeping stuff simple”, using a “clean-sheet approach”, and “borrowing [...]
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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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