Roger Launius has a brief history of the Shuttle, but this number is outdated:
The best expendable launch vehicles (ELV) still cost about $10,000 per pound from Earth to orbit.
As I commented over there (it’s awaiting moderation), Falcon 9 delivers ~30,000 lbs to LEO for ~$60M. That’s $2000/lb. Price, not cost. Falcon Heavy will roughly halve that. If they can reuse cores, they’ll drop the price further.
No, Newsweek, that’s not what Silicon Valley billionaires are seeking. They’re seeking indefinite lifespan. Immortality, if achievable, could/would be a curse. People just want to live as long as they want to live.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, read it all the way through. The last graf shows a huge failure of imagination:
Perhaps the most worrying question that arises with the prospect of having millions (and even billions) of multi-centenarians running around on Earth is whether the planet can support this kind of growth. Current projections suggest that the world’s population will rise from 7 billion today to about 9 billion in 2050—at which point it will more or less level out. And abundant concerns have already been raised about what all these billions of people will do for work, not to mention where they will get safe drinking water and the food necessary to live healthily. But those forecasts don’t consider the possibility that we’ll stop dying. If we do, the next generation of innovative health-tech entrepreneurs will face perhaps an even greater challenge: redesigning the planet to accommodate its massive population of Humans 2.0.
Planet? Where we’re going, we don’t need “planets.”
SpaceX was basically told that they’d lost this patent battle, but would win the war.
[Friday-morning update]
[Bumped]
For those curious about the differences between the out-of-the-box TwentyFourteen theme, and my child theme, I’ve done the following:
Most of these involved style sheet changes, which will be preserved if I have to do a theme update, but a couple (adding time stamp and moving metadata) necessitated changes to the template and tag files in the parent theme. But they’re minor, and can be redone if needed.
One thing I’d still like to do, but have been unable to so far, is to change the color of the blog title from white to the same green as the search box. Not sure why a color change in the CSS won’t do it. I can change font size, but not color.
Marcia Smith has the story on yesterday’s NASA appropriation hearing, in which Chairman Culberson and General Bolden beclowned each other. More thoughts anon.
[Update a while later]
Here’s Culberson’s statement. I haven’t read it yet in detail.
More thoughts on the climate witch hunt:
How would the mainstream media react if a Republican congressman lobbed threatening inquiries hounding seven university presidents regarding the funding of professors’ research? Or if Republican congressmen sent threatening letters to the heads of left-wing think tanks? They would summon the ghost of Joe McCarthy. The Times would lead the pack and we’d still be hearing about it.
Yeah, but those Republicans are evil.
They don’t have that much.
This is the result of decades of terrible public schooling, thanks to the teachers’ unions.
After a one-year hiatus, the conference is happening again (though a few weeks later than usual, early May instead of early April). I think it’s the best value for the money to find out what’s going on in space transportation and reducing the cost of getting to orbit.