Category: Space Race

Express Shuttle.

A month into his new gig, new NASA administrator Michael Griffin argues for speeding up the shuttle replacement by four years, with a new proposed launch date of 2010. “To execute the new strategy, sources said, Griffin intends to assemble a small, Apollo-style team of NASA experts and scrap the current plan to have two civilian contractors compete for several years for the right to direct development of the exploration vehicle.”

The Blackness of Space.

“It was a different time, 1957 or ’58. America’s love affair with racism was in full swing. NASA was no exception.” Ted at The Late Adopter sends along a sordid tale of cosmic achievement and racial injustice in this award-winning documentary on The Old Negro Space Program, a film not by Ken Burns.

Griffin in the door?

Finally, a Dubya nominee I can get behind. At his confirmation hearing, Michael Griffin — the administration’s pick for head of NASA — suggests the Hubble may still be worth saving. “Griffin, a physicist-engineer who holds six advanced degrees, is known as a devotee of human space travel and a firm advocate of Bush’s ‘Vision for Space Exploration’ aimed at the moon and Mars…He bluntly expressed his intention to lead a resurgence in American ‘spacefaring,’ noting that Russia and China had both put humans into space since the space shuttle last flew.”

Life on Mars, Death from Space.

“I’d give it a 50-50 shot that you could find it somewhere underground. But then that’s a guess.” The NYT surveys the current thinking about prospects of Martian life, and how astrobiologists plan to go about proving or disproving its existence. (To wit, the European Space Agency plans to send an tricked-up rover to the red planet after 2011…hopefully, it’ll get past the Dubya Pentagon’s rash of Moonraker weapons.) Update: In somewhat related news (to the second story), Slate‘s Fred Kaplan assesses the Pentagon’s overly enthusiastic vision for ground-based future tech.

When Good Things Happen From Bad People.

Hmmm…I don’t know quite how to feel about this one. “Without a separate vote or even a debate, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) has managed to deliver to a delighted NASA enough money to forge ahead on a plan that would reshape U.S. space policy for decades to come…DeLay, a self-described ‘space nut,’ told Johnson Space Center employees a few days after the vote that ‘NASA helps America fulfill the dreams of the human heart.’” It probably doesn’t hurt that the Johnson Space Center is now in his district, either…still, this may be one of the only times when I find myself applauding the Exterminator.

X2.

After SpaceShipOne’s historic win yesterday, the X Prize becomes the X Cup. “Teams will compete in five different categories to win the overall cup: Fastest turnaround time between the first launch and second landing, maximum number of passengers per launch, total number of passengers during the competition, maximum altitude and fastest flight time.“

The Mojave Run (in less than 12 Parsecs).

Despite an unplanned and disconcerting series of barrel rolls on the way up, FlightTwo and TripOne for SpaceShipOne was a rousing success. Now, if they can repeat the feat within the next ten days, the elusive X Prize is theirs, and the business of space tourism will have reached a watershed moment. (Indeed, Richard Branson has already announced he’ll be leasing SS1 tech to kick off Virgin Galactic.) But first, they might want to figure out what’s causing that roll.