Space exploration and development – more than numbers
(With acknowledgments to David Brin, blogging at Contrary Brin, and a thank you for his feedback as I wrote this.) Across my many years witnessing and participating in space marvels, too often my awe of the moment got rudely shoved aside by wondering what comes next. Some just can’t resist that temptation to look ahead, … Continue reading Revisiting the near future of human spaceflight
And what does any of this have to do with space exploration? 2004, a large, musty conference room at Kennedy Space Center, today holding only the six or so of us to mull over a question trickled down from on high. What is the *probable* year the Shuttle will complete another 22 launches? I'd been … Continue reading Monty Hall, goats, the odds, and new rockets
Inflation is a hot topic in the news of late. This is to be expected when daily experience brings a far-off abstraction home for a visit. Also unsurprisingly, this phenom happens more so when the news is terrible. A price dropping is fodder for a moment of amazement, good company with a happy grin about … Continue reading Inflation, NASA’s budget, and ambition
Soon, NASA will load propellants onto its new Space Launch System – the “SLS.” This test will span a few days, a whole shakedown and practice run, much like the launch countdown starting at T-72 hours for a Space Shuttle. This is an exciting moment, the end-to-end system seeing liquid hydrogen and oxygen for the … Continue reading Make good choices!
Predictably, reports by committees read like a meeting with a few people speaking all at once. Why say something simply when saying it five ways keeps every contributor happy their suggested sentence remained intact? Yet even with this expectation going in, this year's NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) report is a refreshing read, saying … Continue reading A review of the ASAP review of NASA
The idea: How each step we explore beyond Earth can only happen if the previous step gets cheaper. I must back-track and unbury the lede from my previous post. Especially as we start the new year and NASA's budget continues at 2021 levels for 2022 (in beltway-talk, congress passed a "continuing resolution.") This idea, in the … Continue reading Unburying the lede
To talk about NASA space exploration as policy, intersecting budgets as resources, is to witness a repeating crash between what and how. A step removed as the children of policy, plans are in one car and rarely strapped in. Projects, over inside the budget, are distracted checking texts. This might sound like an acutely pessimistic … Continue reading How space policy can successfully meet up with space projects
"The gift shop is down that way, toward the lobby, past the spacesuit." These are not the directions anyone can give a visitor lost among a run of offices and cubicles. You get away with this in the Kennedy Space Center Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout building, home today to the Orion spacecraft, home once … Continue reading The call, spacesuits, and everything else
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,In proving foresight may be vain:The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley,An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! Robert Burns, On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785. This was not my first rodeo. Word had spread that … Continue reading The best laid schemes of NASA
If everything we want is cheap, but everything we need is expensive, which is NASA? It was the late 90s, and everyone was so happy to hear the budget would remain flat because, after all, flat was the new up. A lot has happened since. Glancing at NASA’s recent budgets seems to show good times … Continue reading NASA’s (really) declining budget
Zapata Talks NASA 