I missed the Delta 4 Heavy Launch yesterday–couldn’t justify driving up to the Cape on a weekday. But I’m bemused by the reporting. To read this story, it was spectacular success, but SpaceFlightNow says that it underperfomed significantly, something you’d never know from the space.com piece, which reads like a Boeing press release.

CrushKerry.com says has spotted a potential dark horse candidate for 2008–Sam Brownback. Regardless of your views on his other views, this would be potentially the best possible president to continue to carry out the president’s Vision for Space Exploration, with emphasis on entrepreneurs.

[Update at 11 PM EST]

Nick Kristof is fascinated as well despite his “right-wing” views.

On Friday, I threatened to write a review of the year in space. Jeff Foust has preempted me this morning, over at The Space Review, and it’s unlikely I’ll do any better.

Lots of other good stuff over there as well, with items on Bigelow, and a well-deserved slapdown of Alex “Eeyore” Roland by Dwayne Day.

The GAO has released a report on Hubble servicing costs:

At our request, NASA prepared an estimate of the funding needed for a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble. NASA estimates the cost at between $1.7 billion to $2.4 billion. However, documentary support for portions of the estimate is insufficient.

What a surprise.

NASA, an agency that has already internally decided that it isn’t going to use Shuttle to save the Hubble, comes up with an outrageously high cost number to do so in order to help justify its decision, but doesn’t substantiate it.

This number is simply incredible. I’ll bet they’re using a cost per flight of between half a billion and a billion dollars (which is the average cost, but isn’t the appropriate number to use when estimating the mission cost, which should be the marginal cost–between one hundred and two hundred million). I’ll also bet that they’re including the cost of Hubble replacement hardware that has already been built and paid for. I’ll also bet that getting the basis for this “estimate” from NASA will be like pulling teeth from an unanaesthetized elephant on crank.

The only costs that need to be compared are the cost of developing the robotics necessary to do this mission without Shuttle (already estimated to be hundreds of millions, if not over a billion), the cost of any modifications necessary to allow the equipment originally designed to be serviced by astronauts to be instead replaced by the aforesaid “robot” (which is really not a robot, but a teloperator, and which will up costs even more), to the cost of launching another Shuttle mission, training the crew, and using the equipment already designed and built to do so. I would truly be shocked if any honest analysis would indicate that the Shuttle mission isn’t the cheapest way to go.

[Via NASA Watch]

That’s what Roger Launius says that launch technology is.

Anthropomorphising technologies? Is solar power a “cheerful” technology”?

And as Clark Lindsey points out, his comparing what’s happening with today’s emerging suborbital industry with Pan Am’s selling of reservations back in the sixties is equally bizarre.

Between him and Alex Roland, one wonders if there are any NASA or space historians (other than Dwayne Day) who aren’t clueless.

That’s what Roger Launius says that launch technology is.

Anthropomorphising technologies? Is solar power a “cheerful” technology”?

And as Clark Lindsey points out, his comparing what’s happening with today’s emerging suborbital industry with Pan Am’s selling of reservations back in the sixties is equally bizarre.

Between him and Alex Roland, one wonders if there are any NASA or space historians (other than Dwayne Day) who aren’t clueless.

That’s what Roger Launius says that launch technology is.

Anthropomorphising technologies? Is solar power a “cheerful” technology”?

And as Clark Lindsey points out, his comparing what’s happening with today’s emerging suborbital industry with Pan Am’s selling of reservations back in the sixties is equally bizarre.

Between him and Alex Roland, one wonders if there are any NASA or space historians (other than Dwayne Day) who aren’t clueless.

Jeff Foust says that the Pete Worden bandwagon is gaining momentum, with open support from Senator Brownback.

I’d love to see it happen, but I just can’t believe that he’ll be named by the White House, and if he is, he may have tough sledding getting confirmed, even with the Senator’s support. Based on his history of pretty blunt comments about NASA and the mainstream aerospace industry, he threatens too many rice bowls, particularly in Houston and Florida.

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Mark Whittington has a pretty good summary of Sean O’Keefe’s tenure as head of the national civil space agency.

[Update at 1:30 PM EST]

He says he has no regrets, and wouldn’t change any of his decisions.

Well, perhaps the incoming administrator can fix his dumb Hubble one.

Keith Cowing disagrees with (retiring) John Young’s comments (valid, in my opinion) that it’s time to accept the risk of the Shuttle and start flying again:

…to just throw up your hands, as Young has done, and say nothing has changed – and that its not worth the effort to try and get better – is defeatism of the first order. It is curious that he feels this way when you recall that a contemporary of his, Gene Kranz, coined the phrase “failure is not an option”.

It’s not defeatism–it’s realism. Shuttle’s safety flaws are intrinsic, and really unfixable for the most part, without spending much more money on it than a new, much better launch system would cost. I’ve always believed that the CAIB recommendations about what was needed to return to flight were unrealistic, and at some point NASA (and the administration) will have to admit to that as well, or stop flying. We know we’re going to retire it (so we don’t have to husband the resource of orbiters as hard as we have in the past), and we’ve got plenty of astronauts willing to fly it, so we should either start flying it again and getting some use out of it, or shut the whole thing down and apply the savings toward something with a future. As it is now, we’ve the worst of both worlds–spending billions on it every year, with no activity at all other than trying to put lipstick on a pig.

As for the quote about failure not being an option, it all sounds very inspiring, but like the Kennedy quote of “because it’s hard,” it doesn’t really make much sense when one actually parses it. As someone once said, when failure isn’t an option, success gets pretty damned expensive. If we can’t take risks, there’s no point in even attempting to venture into the cosmos.