…could be imminent.
Category Archives: Space
Europe’s Rocket Woes
They’re self inflicted.
European rocket politics are complicated by the “geographic return rule,” which states that each member nation must receive a proportional amount of contracts to the amount of funding it contributes to the space agency. “With the dawn of New Space and the delays in Ariane 6 launcher development, an ongoing debate has emerged about whether geo-return is consistent with the competition and competitiveness that is needed in Europe’s space industry,” Aschbacher wrote in March.
#ProTip: It never was.
Starship
It’s almost showtime.
Aliens
If they’re artificially intelligent, they may be stranger than we think.
A Blast From The Past
Someone asked me to sanitize some ancient comments on the blog today, and in the process of doing so, I perused some other posts from that era, and ran across this.
It wasn’t obvious at the time, but it was an historic post in this blog, because it led to all of my essays at The New Atlantis. I don’t know (or at least don’t remember) how Adam found out about it, but he contacted me to argue about/discuss the topic, and he ended up asking me for an essay, which resulted in this (not sure why it’s 404ing and I had to go the Wayback Machine, but I’ll tell the current editor about it).
When Will Starship Launch?
Speculation, over at Bob Zimmerman’s place. I make no predictions, but I obviously hope it’s sooner than later.
I’ve been at ASCEND in Vegas for the past three days, and tonight I have a red eye to DC to do final prep for the trial on Monday, so blogging will continue to be light.
Priorities
SpaceX says that progress is being held up by an understaffed FAA-AST.
It will be interesting to see what comes out of the hearing tomorrow. I’d head over to the Capitol to listen, but unfortunately, I have to focus on preparing for the upcoming trial.
NASA’s SLS Transition To Commercial Service Contract
“NASA’s aspirational goal to achieve a cost savings of 50 percent is highly unrealistic.”
You don’t say.
I haven’t read the full report, but there will be nothing surprising in it, and SLS supporters will remain in denial about it.
Europe’s SLS
They’re going to subsidize Ariane 6 to launch Jeff Bezos’s satellites.
Potemkin Village
Thoughts on Russia’s space program.