When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Category Archives: Space
Spaceport Vegas?
In theory, Vegas should be an ideal hub for space tourism, but what operators are they talking to? VG doesn’t have enough business to support Spaceport America as it is, and it would be a real punch in the gut to the poor citizens in New Mexico who paid taxes to build it if they pulled up stakes for Vegas. Maybe New Shepard could fly out of there, but it’s not a vehicle with enough tempo to justify it. Is there someone else (finally) working on a practical suborbital vehicle?
Mars Sample Return
A practical but politically incorrect approach from Bob Zubrin.
On The Starship Delays
Articles by a human, and an AI, at Reason. That picture is wild, and bears no resemblance to SLS/Orion.
Polaris Dawn
Eric Berger has the story on the upcoming flight.
[update a while later]
As per usual, many of the comments are idiotic hating on billionaires.
Starliner
With the upcoming launch today, Eric Berger writes that the surprise is not that it took so long, but that it happened at all.
Has Boeing done anything right, or well recently?
[Update a few minutes later]
Reading in the article about the “incident” at White Sands, I recall that I was sitting next to Chris Ferguson at an Apollo 49th-anniversary dinner at KSC a month or so afterward, and I said something like “I heard you had a little oopsie at WSMR.” He said, “You’re not supposed to know about that.” I’m sure that he wished that I (and others) didn’t know about that.
Dick Rutan
RIP.
He was the test pilot for XCOR’s rocket planes. It’s sad that he (nor anyone else) ever got to fly the Lynx.
Starship Update
What’s new on ship 30 (and possibly 29 as well).
[Thursday-morning update]
Meanwhile, over at NASA, the agency seems peeved at its Inspector General, as Artemis delays continue to seem inevitable.
There was never any prospect of a serious human lunar program from NASA until it is allowed to end its dependence on SLS/Orion.
The Orion Heat Shield
NASA still doesn’t understand the root cause.
Once SpaceX works out the heat shield problems on Starship, it won’t really matter.
Dealing With China In Space
Greg Autry discusses his new book (with Peter Navarro).