Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
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 [...]
Posted in NASA, Snark, Space Policy, Space Transportation on Jul 15th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in NASA, Space Development, Space Policy on May 18th, 2010
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 [...]
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 rebuttal.
First [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Posted in NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Development, Space Policy, Space Transportation on Jun 4th, 2009
[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 [...]
Posted in COTS, Commercial Space, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, NASA, Space Development, Space Policy, Space Transportation on May 26th, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in ESAS, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Space Policy on Apr 11th, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, COTS, Commercial Space, NASA, Space Development, Space Policy, SpaceX on Feb 25th, 2009
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 [...]