That is the question. Sam Dinkin discusses the pros and cons of pilots in space vehicles. He ignores the most critical issues, though–the willingness of passengers to fly, and the FAA to license, an unpiloted space transport. I’ve discussed this issue in the past.

I doubt it. I suspect that Bob Zubrin is fooling himself, and that these supposed Kerry space staffers are just telling him what he wants to hear. After the election, if Kerry manages somehow to win, he’ll just tell Bob that he was for Mars exploration before he was against it.

The Beagle 2 mission team has released its own report on what went wrong – they place a lot of blame on ESA management, but the upshot is that the atmosphere wasn’t as dense as they thought. Story via Nature

Nature also has a story on the Shuttle return to flight. One paragraph stands out to me:

The CAIB report said that safety checks were often poorly managed. “The shuttle programme had become comfortable with an operational mindset that treated a developmental vehicle as an operational vehicle, accepting debris strikes as normal, and so on,” says Hubbard. This culture is being challenged through increased communication between different areas of NASA, says Hubbard.

The problem of treating a vehicle in development as operational is serious, but the solution is not more communication. Reading between the lines, that looks to me a lot like more forms, more reports, more meetings, more teleconferences. In other words, more noise. The solution I prefer is a single office tasked with both operations and upgrades, and with the authority to take the vehicle off line. The bipod ramp foam shedding was a known issue and it could have been addressed with a number of different fixes had work started when the problem was first identified. Of course this presumes management with an attitude oriented to fixing things before they become problems, which may be asking too much. Certainly expecting NASA to behave in ways which fly in the face of the political incentives imposed by congress is asking too much, but hey, a man can dream, can’t he?

On space, this time. Thomas James points out a dumb article about the DaVinci Project, including an obligatory bonus quote from John Pike.

To be fair, of course, the folks up in Saskatchewan probably don’t get many opportunities to do first-hand space reporting.

Via WorldChanging, an item about a NASA sponsored simulation of Mars colonization that’s being sat on instead of released. I don’t see why there is a need to do much of anything active to release it other than just slap it on a web server, but then again, I’m not a NASA official. Who the hell knows what calculus leads to this sort of thing. From the article linked in the WorldChanging post it sounds like most likely somebody had an overly ambitious plan to release it on CD, and once the money dried up they didn’t come up with an alternative. If anyone reading this has free server space and is willing to host the game, I’d suggest contacting Professor Henry directly and offering to distribute the game. Double bonus if you distribute source as well. My bet is that if source is released the very first hack will be to add hostile aliens and weapons.

Thomas James mildly fisks a clueless space policy op ed.

By the way, I just got a complaint in the previous post that I’m doing too much politics, and not enough space stuff.

Maybe. I just don’t see that much going on in space right now worth commenting on, and if you browse through some of the space related blogs to the left, you’ll see that there’s not much activity there either (other than at the always-prolific Clark Lindsey’s site).

Maybe it’s just the dog days of August (and my continuing travails in getting the California house rented and finally getting to Florida), but I’m also getting a little burned out on space commentary. After almost three years of this, and a couple years of Fox News columns, I start to feel like I’m repeating myself. In addition, I just finished up a several-thousand word essay for The New Atlantis (in the mail to current subscribers, probably on line about the beginning of September, at which point I’ll put up a link to it), and I’m expanding it into a book, so I don’t have a lot of space energy remaining to blog about it unless something really topical pops up.

And I find the story of how the press is AWOL on Mr. Kerry’s tall tales, and clearly desperate to prop up his candidacy, the most fascinating thing going on right now.

Maybe Andrew can pick up the slack, but I suspect he’s busy as well.

[Evening Update, with thanks to Glenn for the link]

Per Bill Maron’s comment, I don’t think that space is an unimportant issue for this election. I think that, at least for those interested in space, it’s a very important one and an important election, and that Kerry would be a return to the stagnation of the nineties. But there are still over two months to the election, and most people aren’t really paying attention yet. To the degree that I’m going to invest much energy, mental or otherwise, in the subject, I think that it would be a better investment to do so in October rather than August.

Welcome Masten Space Systems to the new-vehicle fray. It’s another VTOL concept.

It’s Monday, which means a new issue of The Space Review. Sam Dinkin points out the logical economic fallacy of “space versus butter” (one in which Senator Kerry indulges himself). Thomas Olson examines the prospects for a commercial heavy lifter, and specifically a Shuttle-derived one. Unsurprisingly, they’re not good. Also, editor Jeff Foust has a review of Dennis Wingo’s new book, Moonrush.

Leonard David has a good survey of the state of space tourism, with a discussion on the risks of failure and their potential effects.

Alan Boyle has an email interview (something that I should have done long before now, if I hadn’t been buried in other issues recently) with John Carmack, in the wake of this past weekend’s vehicle loss (though not necessarily test failure). What was most interesting, though, was a little aside at the end of his column:

…Sunday’s explosive rocket mishap put Space Transport Corp. in the national limelight as an X Prize underdog with a can-do spirit.

The result: A slew of investors have e-mailed the cash-strapped company, saying they are interested in making an investment in the partners’ dream of developing space tourism.

“The national attention has been great. We’ve gotten a flood of e-mail, a lot from potential investors,” Space Transport vice president Eric Meier said Monday after he, company president Phillip Storm and volunteers cleaned up the wreckage and debris of Rubicon 1 on the beach near Queets.

“I’m trying to raise some money, and am responding to people who have expressed interest.”

Of course, it remains to be seen whether these were serious investors. We’ll find out in the next few weeks and months.