Glenn has a piece at TCS about it today. He links also to the one I wrote for National Review back in the fall of ought three. In addition, he links to another one that Mark Whittington wrote at The Space Review in the summer of that year. There, Mark wrote:
One interesting point against the idea of a Chinese space threat was made recently by Rand Simberg in his Transterrestrial Musings weblog. He stated,
That’s what Keith Cowing says that historian John Logsdon is doing.
Jeff Roche emails that CNBC’s program, The Closing Bell, will have a segment on the new commercial space race (show is on at 4 PM Eastern).
Ed Driscoll has an interesting review of what looks to be an interesting new DVD series detailing the history of Apollo.
On a day that we have for the first time landed a probe on another planet’s moon, it is also the first anniversary of the day that President Bush announced a new direction for our nation’s space activities. I don’t use the phrase “space program,” because I hope that it will be much more than that. To paraphrase the Space Frontier Foundation’s motto, it’s a vision, not a program.
How are we doing?
Well, while the president (probably wisely) didn’t emphasize it in any way after the announcement, NASA has moved forward in implementing it, with a new Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, with a new and apparently able man in charge (Admiral Steidle, of Joint-Strike Fighter fame). After the recent election, he (along with Tom Delay) ensured that it received full funding for the current fiscal year (in the face of budget cuts for almost all other domestic programs). Exploration architecture studies were let, technology studies have been selected, and an RFP is about to be released for the first phase of development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle. I’ve been spending this week in Houston at a fairly intense workshop to work out many of the implementation issues, in support of one of those architecture studies.
This could all be contrasted with the response of his father’s announcement in 1989, in which the project was immediately ridiculed in the media and the Congress, the NASA administrator worked behind the scenes to sabotage it on the Hill, NASA came out with an unaffordable price tag for it, and it died within a couple years.
I have many issues with the implementation of it (that I won’t go into now), but it has many promising aspects, and if we’re going to be spending government funds on manned space, they’re probably being spent more effectively now that they have been since the end of Apollo (and perhaps in the history of NASA). If you’re interested in what I had to say about it at the time, I actually had quite a bit. Just go here and scroll down to mid month, then scroll back up.
My real hope for our expansion into the cosmos continues to lie with the private sector, but it’s nice to, for the first time in decades, not feel utterly hopeless about prospects for the government civil space sector.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Glenn Wilson has succombed to diabetes at the age of eighty two. He had a long and distinguished career in space and space policy, but I don’t think that he ever realized the potential for the new space age, and remained too firmly mired in the old one for the space activist organization that he led to be effective in achieving its stated goals.
During his tenure (and mostly since) at the National Space Society, the group always tended to be too much of a NASA cheerleader, unable to conceive of any other way to get us into space, or offering a realistic roadmap of how supporting NASA’s goals du jour would have any hope of getting us there. Nonetheless, he was a good man, as far as I know, with good motives, and I offer my condolences to his family and friends.
Taylor Dinerman says that space technology is making a positive impact in the aftermath of the tsunamis, but that it could be leveraged much more.
Articles like this don’t hurt at all.
But I’m beat. Got up about 4:30 this morning to catch a flight out of Palm Beach to Reagan, and worked all day, and just got in to the room a few minutes ago. My brain hurts.
Nothing much to say, except that as others have noted, the administration belatedly released the space transportation policy that was supposed to have been released a couple years ago, before the loss of Columbia put everything on hold. I have some heartburn with it, as does Clark Lindsey (which I share), but won’t get around to commenting on it specifically until the weekend.
I’ve done interviews in the past with Gary Hudson and Jeff Greason, but Mitchell Burnside Clapp, of Rocketplane Ltd. Inc., has eluded me up until now (primarily because my pursuit has been inexplicably less than hot).
Mitchell Burnside Clapp is the CEO and founder of Pioneer Rocketplane and the Director of Flight Systems at Rocketplane Limited. He graduated from MIT in 1984 with two degrees in Aerospace Engineering, one in Physics, and another in Russian, establishing an apparent trend of being constitutionally unable to limit himself to just one field of endeavor. During 1988 he attended the USAF Test Pilot School, whence he graduated in that year to work on the YA-7F program, serve as an instructor on the school’s staff, and later as the Air Force’s flight test person on the DC-X program. It was this experience that led to his initial involvement with the alt.space community, and indirectly to his development of aerial propellant transfer technology to enable horizontal takeoff, horizontal landing spaceplanes.
When I first met Mitchell, he was a major assigned to the USAF Phillips Laboratory, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Shortly after that (but hopefully not as a result of our meeting), he left active-duty military service in 1996 to found Pioneer Rocketplane, which won a series of contracts from NASA, the DoD, and the state of California as well as significant private investment and contracted efforts. He is also the CEO of another technology startup called Short Order Video.
He claims (with some reason, I might add) to have a wife, several patents, three children (two beautiful daughters, and a son, of whom Mitchell is apparently too charitable to provide a physical description, though I’m sure he’s probably a strapping handsome lad as well), two houses, a dog, a cat, many songwriting credits, a growing expertise in wine, and (as he apparently attempted to demonstrate here) pitiably little skill at writing biographical information about himself. I should add that in addition to Russian, and almost-passable English, as a result of misspending much of his youth in one of the most lord-forsaken corners of the Outback, he speaks the most difficult language of all, so well that it’s totally incomprehensible when the listener is not under the influence of heavy drink.
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve belatedly engaged Mitchell in an email give and take, and hope that you find the results interesting and worth the wait.