Mark Whittington discusses the prospects for energy production via He3 mining on the moon. He also discusses the reluctance of the administration to talk about it as a justification for the VSE. I find the latter understandable–I suspect that they fear ridicule if they do so.

And I have trouble buying this statement:

For every ton of Helium 3 extracted from lunar soil, researchers say, nine tons of oxygen, water and other life-sustaining substances, as well as six tons of hydrogen useful for powering fuel cells, would be yielded.

While He3 is much more abundant on the moon than on earth, I have a hard time believing that it’s that abundant. There has to be much more than nine times it for those other substances. Oxygen alone is a major constituent of lunar regolith, whereas He3 is a trace element. I’d like to see the basis for those numbers.

Henry Vanderbilt, of the Space Access Society (who has been following this closely), just left a post at sci.space.policy indicating that the launch legislation just passed the Senate (miracle of miracles), at the last possible minute.

While I think that this legislation is flawed, it’s better to have it than nothing, in terms of investment, and the flaws can perhaps be fixed in the future.

More when I get more.

[Update a few minutes later]

It’s not new info, but I just got an email from Henry to the same effect.

I should note that I claim victory because this is now almost as good as law. It only requires the president’s signature, and the White House has never expressed any opposition to this legislation. And if he were to veto it, it would be the first bill that he vetoed since taking office.

It’s a done deal.

[Another update at 10:43 PM EST]

Keith Cowing, of NASA Watch, confirms.

[Update on Thursday morning]

Alan Boyle (as usual) has the details. Apparently it rode on some other legislation at the last minute. Kudos to whatever Senate staff tactician managed to pull it off.

Clark Lindsey and Jeff Foust have thoughts and links as well.

2004 continues to be a great, perhaps watershed year for those opening up the high frontier.

Holman Jenkins has a column in today’s WSJ about the launch legislation being held up in the Senate (link may be subscription only–I’m not sure). With the title, “The ‘Final Frontier’ May Be a Senate Waste Basket,” he’s clearly not impressed with that body. He makes an analogy with what happened to the general aviation industry in the eighties (in which it almost went under from fear of lawsuits and costs of insurance), that was only revived in the nineties by farsighted legislation limiting liability for aircraft makers. He also asks an interesting question, that I’ve been wondering about as well:

For a pair who say they want to spend $100 million making space tourism a reality, Messrs. Rutan and Branson have displayed an odd indifference to the legislative battle. Either Sir Richard is peddling vaporware and doesn’t really intend to fly — or he’s making an improbable bet on the FAA’s willingness to let paying clients fly in an “experimental” spacecraft in violation of every rule in the book.

My guess is that Branson is taking his cue from Burt, who wishes that AST would dry up and blow away. He wants to be regulated by AVR. He should be careful what he wishes for.

I don’t think this is necessarily a bad idea, but I do think that it’s extremely premature–a couple of European scientists have come up with a plan for conservation parks on Mars.

I think that their concern here is vastly overblown:

“It is the right of every person to stand and stare across the beautiful barrenness and desolation of the Martian surface without having to endure the eyesore of pieces of crashed spacecraft scattered across the landscape,” they write in the latest edition of Space Policy.

Mars is big. Mind bogglingly big. It has about as much surface area as the land of the earth. The likelihood that you’ll see any traces of humanity over most of it for the next century or two is vanishingly small. They seem to be dramatically overestimating the amount of potential activity there, and by the time we get around to sending enough spacecraft for it to even start to be a potential problem, we won’t be “crashing” them there. The notion of destroying a sufficient number of probes for them to become an eyesore anywhere one goes on Mars is ludicrous, logically and economically.

But he’s not a total moonbat (or in this case, Marsbat):

But Cockell argues that if a planetary parks system were in place, it would free up the rest of the planet for exploitation and claim-staking, which might encourage these nations to sign up to the system.

This is probably the last shot we have at saving the new suborbital launch legislation this year, which was passed by the House last month, but still needs to get through the Senate. If it doesn’t pass, we’ll have to start from scratch next year. Jeff Foust has some useful links.

And one of those links, this story from Alan Boyle irks me:

The word from some quarters on Capitol Hill is that the House bill was caught up in a cross-chamber dispute with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is pressing the House to move forward with boxing-reform legislation.

It’s always frustrating when needed legislation gets held hostage for reasons having nothing to do with it. On the other hand, this probably prevents a lot more bad legislation from passing than good (since most legislation is bad), so perhaps I shouldn’t complain.

Via Clark Lindsey, here’s an interesting first-hand description of what it’s like to pilot SpaceShipOne.

I was amused at this part:

We talked about G forces on Tuesday. He
says that he gets hit with about 3Gs kicking him backwards as soon as
he lights the rocket motor. He’s supersonic within about 9 seconds
later. But he immediately starts to pull up into an almost vertical
climb. So he also gets over 4.3Gs pushing him down into his seat just
from that maneuver. The combined force is “very stressful” and Mike
says it’s “important not to black out” at that point.

Emphasis mine.

I’ve written on this subject before, but I agree with this editorial. Why in the world is the administration supporting the Law of the Sea Treaty? Is it Powell’s State Department, and no one else is paying attention?

Charles Rousseaux describes the story, little discussed in the press, of the president’s and Congress’ visionary support for the new space age, both NASA’s and the private sector’s. And Ken Silber talks about the outer solar system.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Speaking of the outer solar system, here’s a beautiful shot of Saturn’s rings and its moon Mimas from Cassini, courtesy of NASA Watch.

I think that for honeymoon destinations, the rings will be the late twenty-first century equivalent of Niagara Falls.

Jeff Foust has an interesting column at The Space Review today about use of the word “tourist” to apply to private citizens traveling into space.

Unlike Rick Tumlinson, I’ve never minded the term all that much–it captures a lot of what we’re trying to accomplish in a single word, and clearly differentiates it from the NASA astronaut paradigm. And as Jeff points out, it’s easier to criticize it than to come up with an alternative that people will readily use. In the nineties, when Dan Goldin’s NASA could be cajoled or pressured into paying any attention to the subject at all, they resisted using the word, preferring the phrase “public space travel.”

But Jeff makes a point that I’d never previously considered. If the resistance to the new launch legislation allowing space passenger travel without heavy FAA regulation for passenger safety arose from the use of the word, perhaps we do need to come up with substitute, at least in a formal sense. Clearly, the early flights for the next few years are not going to be for the masses, expecting airline-like safety, but if Reps DeFazio and Oberstar had the mistaken impression that they were, due to the t-word, it may be time to give it more thought.

How about “space adventurer”?

Costs of the robotic Hubble repair mission have been skyrocketing.

The estimated price tag of a robotic rescue mission — between $1 billion and $2 billion — is raising eyebrows and questions about whether Hubble is worth the investment amid tight budgets and periodic reports of technical woes that could cripple the spacecraft before the robot gets there.

I’ve never taken this mission seriously. I don’t think that NASA ever really intended to do it. The initial studies were just a fig leaf to distract attention from the fact that they weren’t willing to send a Shuttle to it, and assuage Hubble fans. The problem that they have now is that just safely deorbiting the thing is going to be impossible to do for a reasonable amount of money. I still think they should do the Shuttle servicing mission, because the marginal cost of that is the absolute cheapest thing they can do, and the risk is overblown (though even if it’s as dangerous as some think, it’s still one of the few things that Shuttle could do that would actually be useful).

By the way, they (like almost everyone) gets this part wrong:

If the cost hits $2 billion, that’s three to four times what it would cost to send astronauts to do the job as they have four times before and as NASA planned before the Columbia disaster.

That’s not what it would cost to send the Shuttle. The marginal cost of a Shuttle flight is somewhere between a hundred and hundred fifty million dollars. They’re basing this assessment on the average cost, which is more than half a billion, but that’s not the number one would properly use to make that decision.