I got here late yesterday, and there was a shortage of space at the bloggers row, so I didn’t bother to live blog anything. But Jeff Foust has a report on perhaps the most interesting talk, by Steve Cook, on something that has little relationship to cheap access to space (and represents in fact the opposite)–Ares 1 and Ares 5. As Jeff notes, there was disputation over costs, and he was (understandably) evasive, though it’s almost certainly true that even NASA doesn’t know (they never really do, the way they keep books). And it’s difficult, and even arbitrary to attempt to allocate fixed and development costs of a program like this that has common elements, so people tend to jigger the numbers to make the case they want to make. Steve deserves kudos for walking into the lion’s den and doing what is, after all, only his job, as best it can be done.

The morning session begins in half an hour or so.