RIP. He will be missed.
Little-known fact: He was a big fan of space. He was on the board of The Space Foundation. He never used email, but I sent some stuff to him once via his wife, and he wrote a nice letter thanking me.
[Update late afternoon]
John Podhoretz remembers him.
[Update Wednesday morning]
This kind of thing is why he was a national treasure.
[Monday update]
Matt Labash remembers him, as does Jonathan Last.
[Bumped]
By the time Europe could develop its own crew launcher, it would be past obsolete (just as Ariane 6 is). They should be focusing on getting around in space with their own vehicles, not getting there.
[Monday-morning update]
Problem solved! Russia is offering to provide them with rocket independence.
[Bumped]
…from recycling electronics and coal fly ash.
Whenever I see a breakthrough in processing like this, I always wonder how applicable it will be to space resources.
When I was at Rockwell thirty years ago, one of the projects I managed, with Ed McCullough (who died a couple years ago–NSS needs to update the page) and the late Bob Waldron was in adapting processes they’d been working on for beneficiation of lunar regolith to recover high-quality silicon and other things from fly ash. I guess it ended up not going anywhere after I left in 1993.
I’m supposedly quoted in this piece (or at least I gave Jim some suggestions), but unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall.
…to cure Earthly poverty. A long research paper, that I haven’t read yet, but she appears (unsurprisingly) to take a Lockean approach.
Brian Wang has run the numbers.
Reusable rockets have significant economic advantages at scale against aircraft for long haul. It’s partly because they don’t have to fight drag through the atmosphere for the whole trip.
It turns out that it’s probably Chinese.
But people wanted to believe it because SpaceX.
What Eric Berger is hoping to learn.
[Thursday update]
It’s at 2100 EST, on Youtube.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
Bob Zimmerman will be live streaming it as well.
[Friday-morning update]
Here is Eric Berger’s report.
What I heard last night that was new to me (maybe he’s said this before) was that it was less than a million per flight on the margin, and it could deliver 150 tons to LEO (I had thought the number was a hundred tons). That’s a fifty percent increase, and a one-third reduction in cost per pound.
[Late-afternoon update]
A report from NASA Spaceflight.
[Bumped]
[Saturday-morning update]
More on Musk at Politico, in which Yours Truly is quoted and cited.
I’m glad that Webb is working, but I continue to believe it was a mistake.
[Update a while later]
To clarify, I think it was a mistake to do it in the way it was done, but now that it’s operational, obviously it would be a mistake to abandon it now.