Wayne Hale says he can’t be specific, due to NDAs, but it’s going to be amazing.
Yes, notwithstanding dead-end programs like SLS/Orion, we’re about to enter the most exciting era in space since Apollo, and it will vastly surpass it.
5 thoughts on “Our Spaceflight Future”
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Once the three legs of the stool are in place, commercial cargo, crew, destintation it will be the take off point.
SpaceX seems positioned to do this. But for it to actually become a market more companies must enter the segment. Otherwise there is a good chance SpaceX itself will just metastasize and bloat.
The profit picture will determine that. Capital automatically flows to extra normal profits. If SpaceX can make insane profit margins we will not have to worry about competition. I tend to view SpaceX more as the Conestoga Wagaon or the Stourbridge Lion steam engine for the railroad.
I like this passage:
Nowadays, I’m retired from the government and work as a consultant, mostly to private industry. I find that the industry guys don’t have a lot of insight into how the government works, surprising to me. I always thought we had been fully open and transparent. Now I know better; the government and its decision making processes are pretty impenetrable from the outside. In fact, a lot of the leaders and workers out in the aerospace industry have established theories about how the government works internally, about what the government leadership wants, etc. I find most of these theories incredibly funny, terribly inaccurate, and I am astounded that otherwise knowledgeable people have some very odd ideas about what goes on behind the walls of government offices.
Bob Clark 🙂
When I worked as a contractor for the FAA I was amazed how budgeting worked. The skill of the engineers was asking for enough more than they wanted so that what made it through the cut was what they actually wanted.