Trump clears the way for a commercial space revolution

Recently, President Trump issued an executive order entitled “Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry.” Its text suggests that the real title should be “Making commercial space great again.”

William Shatner doesn’t much like space travel

About a year ago Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and CEO of Blue Origin, had what seemed to be the brilliant idea of sending Shatner on a suborbital hop on the New Shepard rocket. Indeed, Shatner gushed in awe and wonder about the experience at the time.

That was then. Now, Shatner has just published his latest memoir, “Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder.” He says that his experience of flying into space was depressing.

Four private astronauts are headed to the International Space Station

We’ve now entered a new era of spaceflight with Ax-1 — the first private mission to the International Space Station (ISS) that launched Friday and arrives today. Ax-1 is being conducted by Axiom Space and sending four private astronauts for an eight-day stay on board the ISS.

Non-fungible tokens are going to space

Bill Nelson is a born-again supporter of commercial space at NASA

During the Bill Nelson nomination hearings for NASA administrator, the nominee, a former senator, broke with some of his previous positions on space policy.

The one thing that raised a lot of eyebrows was Nelson’s enthusiastic support for commercial space at NASA. He expressed approval of the commercial crew program that is sending astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). He claimed in his opening statement to have always supported commercial space. He even supported the recent selection of SpaceX’s Lunar Starship as the first crewed moon lander in 50 years.

The latest communique from the Space Access Society contains an interesting passage that illustrates one of the many things that is wrong with what is laughingly called "space activism."

We've been of mixed mind how actively we should oppose SLS for a while now. On the one hand, it is indisputably a huge piece of earmarked pork. Further, there's a strong likelihood that SLS will never fly at all for the proposed funding under the implicit political requirement of being managed by as much of the current NASA HSF booster establishment as can possibly be kept on the payroll. Finally, SLS's Congressional sponsors remain prone to trimming back actual useful NASA projects like Commercial Crew (fingers crossed CCP gets over their HSF-inspired micromanagement compulsion) and Space Technology Program to pay for minor plus-ups of the SLS porkfest.

Plus, attacking SLS all-out would be really, really satisfying. We'd certainly enjoy it, and we have reason to believe we'd mobilize considerable additional grass-roots support, because face it, a lot of you would enjoy it as well.

There are two boringly unsatisfying reasons why we've mostly limited ourselves to pointing out SLS's absurdities without actively trying to defund it.

Of course considering the current budget climate, the lack of leadership coming from the White House and NASA and the chaos in the Congress, it is uncertain that anything is going to fly anytime soon. Congress is getting ready to not only underfund SLS but also commercial crew. Coupled with that NASA moving to manage commercial crew the old fashioned way, and one sees shaping up another "lost decade" of American space flight, as Mike Griffin so adroitly put it.

With all of that, these people contemplating going after SLS because it would be "really, really satisfying" seems to these tired, old eyes to be the height of absurdity. Letting emotions interfere violates one of the first rules of political intrigue. Sadly too many people violate that rule.

A Congressman and an Astronaut Propose a New Plan to Explore Space

Addendum: There is a wild discussion over at Space Politics with the usual ranting, blathering, and clueless behavior. Here is an especially delicious gem coming from our favorite "recovered aerospace engineer," referring to Gene Cernan.

I can infer it from the clueless things he says. If someone tells me 2+2=5, I will call them out on it, and I don’t care if he was the first man to step on Mars.

Sheila Jackson Lee could not have said it better. It illustrates the arrogance and cluelessness exhibited over the years by the Internet Rocketeer club, a group of angry, little men who are about to get a cold dose of reality as adults like Olson move to reclaim the American space program.

For the record, by the way, Gene Cernan, whom Rand choose to slime, was the last man to walk on the Moon.

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