For those wondering, we’re on an actual vacation, and not just on a pleasure trip combined with business, for the first time in a long time. We flew to Cancun yesterday, and are ensconced in a resort between there and Playa del Carmen. Keeping an eye on the hurricane, but the current projected tracks show it heading north, not west, after it beats the hell out of Jamaica and Cuba. We’re here all week, and I may find some time to keep up with events and blog, but we plan to see some Mayan temples and do some diving. Next Friday we head to Orlando, and then I’ll be at space conferences next week at the University of Central Florida.
Anyway disport yourself gently in comments on topics general.
One of the reasons that we have made so little progress in space for the past half century is that Congress decided that NASA had to have its own space transportation, regardless of how terrible it is at it.
Delete unnecessary parts and processes ==> If Starship can land 100 T of stuff on the Moon, or fly >10 T to and from the Moon from LEO without refueling, all other parts of the NASA so-called "architecture" are unnecessary, regardless of how many tens of billions of dollars have… https://t.co/Gna5xuX9GO
There have been many dud NASA administrators, some of which looked good on paper (e.g., Dick Truly). Webb was a lawyer, but even he had experience in the aviation industry. What are Duffy's qualifications? You need to at least know which end the fire comes out of.
Lockmart is starting to look to reusability and other launch vehicles than SLS for Orion.
NASA may want to have it for its precious astronauts, but at some point it will be embarrassing when Starship is putting up dozens of people at a fraction of the cost.
I spent years tiling this ship. Drilling composites and making every detail perfect. Management was a disaster and even tried to convince us they were on par with SpaceX. Now that I work on starship comments like that sound even more childish than before. Rip chaser. Never to be. https://t.co/4Lk7ta8L8f
Here's an argument why data centers will be built in space instead of on the ground. Projected by 2040, $700B/year of costs due to environmental, regulatory, and delay costs for building data centers on Earth. Compare this to decreasing launch costs (not shown here) to predict…
Eric Berger has the latest. Killing EUS would also eliminate the need for ML-2. It could be that we’ll have to continue wasting money on the SLS core and Orion for a while, but it would free up some funds to actually get back to the Moon soon.