I expect stupidity from Congress, but I wish that we had an administrator who was a brighter bulb. Bolden also said earth was “the most important planet in the world.”
Category Archives: Space History
Prizes, Technology, And Safety
Doug Messier has a history of early aviation, and Virgin Galactic.
Space Resource Distribution
This article at The Space Review seems profoundly ignorant of economics and history, including the history of the Moon Treaty, because that basically seems to be what he’s proposing.
Ending Apollo To Mars
I couldn’t give a heads up, because they only want people on the approved list to call in, but I was the speaker for today’s FISO talk. The audio and PDF are up now.
Sad Space Anniversaries
The end of January is a time of remembrance for NASA human spaceflight, starting with the Apollo 1 anniversary on Wednesday, the Challenger anniversary (30th) on Thursday, and Columbia a week from tomorrow. Here’s one of the first pieces at Florida Today, by James Dean, on the Challenger anniversary, with some quotes from Yours Truly.
The Future Of Space
There was an interesting discussion this afternoon at Council of Foreign Affairs with Lori Garver, John Logsdon, and Charles Miller. The Youtube is now available. Note that they touch on many of the themes in my upcoming paper, on how we have to stop trying to do Apollo again, that SLS is a jobs program, that propellant transfer is a game changer, the need for a competitive private sector, etc. Lori was quite harshly critical of NASA (and Congress).
Lyndon Johnson’s Daily Brief
I’ve been looking forward to this. Some formerly classified documents from the Apollo era have emerged.
Shuttle/Centaur
A history, over at Ars Technica. In addition to the balloon tanks, there were concerns with the common bulkhead between the LOX and LH2 tanks (though AFAIK this has never caused a Centaur failure).
As I’ve written before, there was an alternative approach, that NASA never considered.
ISPCS
I got up early this morning, flew to El Paso, and then drove up to Alamagordo to the space history museum. In Las Cruces now. I’ll check in from the event tomorrow.
Hollywood And Mars
[Monday-afternoon update]
Even the film-makers had doubts:
“If you had told me two years ago when we were walking into Fox to pitch the approach and what this movie would be, if you told me I’d be on the phone talking about how this is a big spectacle movie, I would have been delighted,” he tells Esquire. “At the time, we knew it was going to be expensive, but we thought it would be more niche than Ridley made it.” Nope.
What made The Martian unique also made it a difficult sell. It was not an action movie. The film’s star would spend his time farming potatoes harvested from his co-astronaut’s feces. The Rock would not show up to blow away aliens halfway through the second act. Mind would prevail over muscle. And that’s not easy to write for the masses.
I hope it will break some of the stereotypes, and make it easier to make these kinds of films.
[Bumped]