The Times of London offers another tiresome screed against human space flight. The logic seems to go like this: The shuttle did not performed as advertised and in fact killed two crews. Therefore all human space flight should be cancelled.

I seem to recall that the first attempt at building a jet airliner, done by a British firm by the way, turned out even more disasterously than the shuttle. Several of these early airliners crashed because of metal fatigue. Following the Times' logic, we should have abandoned all thought of jet air travel.

Of course, instead, Boeing came out with the 707 and the rest is history.

Rheos: A "Pacemaker" to Lower High Blood Pressure.

Mark Trulson has a chat with Gary Lantz of Rocketplane Limited. Lantz dares to speak a little heresy:

One interesting group of people that are very excited, are those that work for NASA. I had my own preconceived notions about NASA that were obviously founded on misinformation. NASA has unfairly received a lot of negative publicity and attacks lately, so I was surprised at their enthusiasm to support an alt.space company. Our leaders have worked very hard to develop a close positive relationship with NASA, and the results have been great. It’s nice being able to tap into the expertise of the NASA employees and see the enthusiasm in their responses. We’ve worked with them on such things as trajectory training, wind tunnel testing, space act agreements, rocket testing - the list is tremendous! In addition, we’ve had several agencies come by our offices to find out who we are; all of them left very impressed and eager to work with us!

Read the whole thing.

Looks like Serenity got snubbed at the Oscar nominations. While not unexpected, it is still a travesty.

Addendum: Of course, if normal people were making the nominations, Best Picture might be something like this:

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Serenity, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, King Kong, and Walk the Line.

Two weeks to Neptune? Paul Czysc discusses.

Is it just me, or is it just a little bit suspicious when an academic study conducted by a pair of partisan Democrats concludes that Republicans tend to be more racist than other people?

A second season of Firefly? The business model this guy is proposing seems interesting, at least.

"We're looking at actually doing a direct pay-per- ... view model for this series, where the consumer could choose, if they wanted to, [to] view it on their computer, on their iPod, on direct-to-DVD sent to their house or on demand through their cable or satellite operator," Underhill said in a telephone interview. "That would be the first run of the series. And then the second run, obviously, you would go to the off-net cable channels. ... We're looking at giving choices to the audience.

Could NASA get people back to the Moon a year sooner?

Andy Turner discusses ways to deliver bulk cargos into low earth orbit cheaply and reliably.

It's a principle that is all but written in stone that some small, entrepeneurial company can do space far better that big, bureaucratic, unimaginative NASA or its usual big contractors. Eric Hedman, in an article that is sure to make a lot of people angry, suggests that some tough questions need to be asked of these companies to prove that what they propose to do can in fact be done.

Some of the ideas I’ve read about are from Transformational Space, SpaceDev, Kistler Aerospace, SpaceX, and Masten Space Systems. According to their web sites, they have projects in the works to launch small to large satellites, people on suborbital to orbital missions, or even on to the Moon using a variety of innovative technologies. Most of the more ambitious parts of the plans seem to be just in the early phase of design. If I was a NASA official considering using their services, or a venture capitalist considering investing in one of these companies, there are a series of tough questions I would want answered before investing or spending a penny.

One of the things that have really irked me about the alt.space crowd is the ratio of boasting to actual accomplishment. I'm a big booster of commercial space. But I also think that Hedman has performed a valuable service by proving a reality check. I hope he is not vilified too much for the presumption.

Addendum: Clark Lindsey and Jon Goff respond.

Speaking of complaints, Michael Mealing weighs in with one of his and stumbles about very badly.

Back in the mid-90s when the Internet was 'growing up' the online world consisted services like Prodigy, Compuserve and AOL. It was around this time when Al Gore came out with his 'information superhighway' proposal. The 'information superhighway' was a completely new creation that had more in common with interactive TV than anything. But those of us involved with the Internet at the time simply chuckled a little and went right on doing what we loved simply because we liked doing it. In the end it ended up routing completely around OSI, interactive TV, Compuserve, Prodigy, and Al Gore's information superhighway.

Micheal of course forgets that the Internet started in the late sixties as a government project as a means of communication for DOD and NASA scientists. For Michael's analogy to be correct, we would have had to have rejected the idea of starting up a big government computer network and just allowed plucky entrepeneurs to grow it.

Also, Al Gore is a silly individual given to flights of fancy. What he was trying to do was to try to take credit for something that was already an accomplished fact by the time he started bloviating about the "information super highway."

The current administration is comprised of serious adults. They are very serious about what they propose.

And the same thing is about to happen with space. You don't stear the elephant, you just drive around him in your new car.

Actually, an elephant is absurdly easy to steer if you know how. Just read about how Scipio Africanus did it at the Battle of Zama. It's also not advisable to approach an elephant in a car; one might get stepped on.

Michael is right about one thing. ESAS may well evolve into something else the way the Arpanet did into the Internet. He just doesn't know it yet.

Rand Simberg offers one of his periodic complaints about the space program while on the way missing the point and failing the offer any positive alternative.

It's twenty years today since Challenger was lost with all aboard. It was the first real blow to NASA's confidence in its ability to advance us in space, or that our space policy was sound. It finally shattered illusions about twenty-four flights a year, to which the agency had been clinging up until that event, but it wasn't severe enough to really make a major change in direction. That took the loss of Columbia, three years ago this coming Tuesday.

Good so far. Nothing new or insightful. Most people both in alt.space and NASA would agree.

Unfortunately, while that resulted finally in a policy decision to retire the ill-fated Shuttle program, the agency seems to have learned the wrong lessons from it--they should have come to realize that we need more diversity in space transport, and it cannot be a purely government endeavor. Instead, harkening back to their glory days of the sixties, the conclusion seems to be that, somehow (and inexplicably) the way to affordability and sustainability is exactly the approach that was unaffordable and unsustainable the last time we did it.

Several wrong things here. First, to read this, one would think that Rand has never heard of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services initiative. It is a tiresome tendancy of some internet rocketeers to not only be incapable of taking yes for an answer, but to actually display rank ingraditude.

Much of this paragraph refers to NASA's Vision for Space Exploration, which was initiated by President Bush two years ago. Rand makes a number of questionable assumptions. First, that "harkening to their glory days of the sixties" is utterly a bad thing. A case can be made that the worse public policy decision ever made in civil space was ending Apollo and trying to remake NASA into a high tech, space taxi service. Returning NASA to cutting edge exploration, research, and development and leaving the routine tasks of transportation to the private sector should be seen as a brilliant and overdue decision.

He also suggests that the VSE is as "unaffordable" as Apollo. He doesn't mention that we will be spending less than one percent of the federal budget for the foreseeable future. During Apollo spending was about four times that much. Most polling data indicates that the public is just fine with that. If anyone seems to be stuck in the sixties, deathly afraid that what happen then must inevitably happen now, it is Rand.

But one has to grant that Apollo was safe, and probably the new system will be more so than the Shuttle was. But safety shouldn't be the highest goal of the program. Opening frontiers has always been dangerous, and it's childish to think that this new one should be any different. The tragedy of Challenger and Columbia wasn't that we lost astronauts. The tragedy was that we lost them at such high cost, and for missions of such trivial value.

This part is true, but Rand goes on to draw totally wrong conclusions.

This is the other false lesson learned from Challenger (and Columbia)--that the American people won't accept the loss of astronauts. But we've shown throughout our history that we're willing to accept the loss of brave men and women (even in recent history) as long as it is in a worthy cause. But NASA's goal seems to be to create yet another appallingly expensive infrastructure whose focus is on recapitulating the achievements of four decades (five decades, by the time they eventually manage it, assuming they keep to their stated schedule) ago.

That's not the conclusion I see NASA making. The conclusion I see is that if we must loose astronauts, it should be on grander missions than going around in circles--like explorering the Moon and the planets.

Will the American people be inspired by that? I can't say--I only know that I am not.

Polling data suggests that Americans are very much in favor of VSE. That Rand is not is an illrelevant fact to evaluating the merits of the program.

Would they be inspired by a more ambitious program, a riskier program that involved many more people going into space at more affordable costs, even if (or perhaps because) it is a greater hazard to the lives of the explorers? I surely would. But it seems unlikely that we're going to get that from the current plan, or planners.

So what are Rand's suggestions along those lines? He has never said. I have my own ideas about how VSE can be improved, which includes more private sector participation, not only in moving people and material between the Earth and destinations in the Solar Systems, but in sustaining people once there. Mike Griffin, the clever and visionary NASA Administrator has already touched on that subject in a speech last November. And we've noticed recently the commercializtion of a promising interplanetary propulsion technology, VASIMR. But oddly enough we've heard nothing from Rand but complaints. No positive suggestions.

If one wishes to change policy, that is not the way to go about it.

Twenty years ago this date, the Challenger space shuttle became a funeral pyre for her crew on live television. It was a sight that would be aired over and over again that day in a kind of awful instant replay.

Besides ending seven brave lives, the Challenger Disaster would quickly end the notion that the space shuttle fleet would be the instrument for opening the high frontier of space. Because of a number of factors, including design compromises and the very absurdity of the notion of a government space line, it could never have done that. One of the good outcomes of the accident was that the space shuttle fleet would no longer carry commercial payloads. It's a bitter irony that perhaps one of the things the Challenger Seven gave their lives for is that the promise of a private launch industry might have a chance of being fulfilled.

There's an old story about the farmer who whacks his mule over the head with a two by four, not to get it to move but to get its attention. For the space program it took two whacks by that two by four, as it took the Columbia Disaster (anniversary upcoming) to finally convince the nation that a government space line was an untenable thing to sustain and, if there is a purpose for NASA, it lays in the higher purpose of cutting edge exploration and research, not going around in circles. If people must die in space (and they must, for the Price of Admiralty is the same on the airless sea as it is on the Earthly one), then let it be for pushing back frontiers.

Alan Boyle's readers have come up with a myriad of names for the CEV family of vehicles, including the original idea of just calling it "Apollo."

Skiing on the Moon, with a nod to Fred Kiesche, who is mentioned at the end of the piece.

Happy 250th Birthday Mozart. Michelle Malkin has more.

This Yale Study suggesting metal shortages on Earth suggests a market for lunar and asteroid mining.

Algore thinks that the results of the Canadian election are the result of a neferious plot by Big Oil. Jason Verheyden is unimpressed. As are we all.

Jim Oberg offers Seven Myths about the Challenger disaster.

More evidence that Saddam's WMDs were carried off and hidden somewhere in Syria.