Space Business:
http://www.space.com/news/060403_space_usc_forum.html

From the webpage above--a response to Burt Rutan's CEV bashing

ME-163 KOMET on steroids, meet Corona on steroids.

There is nothing new under the sun.

From another post:

It all comes down to money, again. To steal a quote from James Fallows, author of FREE FLIGHT (From pages 154-156):

"All entrepreneurs have a class grudge against all financiers...I once thought Klapmeier (from Cirrus) was going to kill me...when I told him about a friend of mine who received tens of millions in venture capital for an Internet-based company with no obvious 'revenue model.' ...The niche occupied by Dell Computers--a huge-volume, commodity producer--is not immediately available to Cirrus...Venture Capitalists keep offering them deals, but in return they want a large equity share in the company...The Klapmeiers faced the classic dilemma of entrepreneurs. Their stiffness, self-reliance, and refusal to listen to conventional opinions had allowed them to survive...(but)..there is a point when original virtues become liabilities..."

And that was for a small but otherwise conventional type of light aircraft.
The only thing for it would be to pass laws and "assign" worthy products to venture capitalists. For every hundred dollars of EXXON stock, an investor must place 10 dollars (per share) into some aviation/technology start up.

The carrot won't work. I think its time for some nice union-wielded baseball-bat style negotiations with the venture vultures--and make them fork it over.

It worked for Korolev. And it is working for Kliper. Oil money from Yukos/Gazprom is helping fund their space program. Now howabout we renew the call a windfall tax--to go to ours?

Who's with me?


OT (To the COTS folks and science-only VSE haters)
Sadly, Griffin has had to adopt the old Goldin era tactic of "hand them a sucker and the brats will shut up for awhile."

Give them just enough to keep them busy, and out of our hair.

That kind of nickel and diming (where everybody got a little piece of the pie, but no one program really got what it needed) was what caused the Goldin era stagnation we are still recovering from.

I miss the old Griffin. (VSE first and damn everything else). He is reduced to bribes now. I wonder if the t/Space frauds will continue to bash NASA even with their mouths full.

Probably--they and the rest are ingrates no different than that old fossil Mikulski in D.C. Griffin rescued her Hubble, and now she undermines him with her and Boehlert's bashing.

Any news on Bigelow?

Earlier in the month, they said the launch of the first prototype should take place from Russia by July 14, which means we could be days away from a big moment in private spaceflight.

http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/multiverse/news.php

More here:
www.xprizenews.org

Nothing at all, which means there's nothing negative to report, so it must still be doing fine. Day after day of positive news gets boring with all the tragedy in the world to report, so you'll never hear about Genesis again until something pops it prematurely.

__________________
I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

Actually, they just put online interesting items about some of the payloads that will be aboard Genesis II going up within the next couple of months... A good read..

http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/life...e_in_a_box.php

http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/gala...o_in_space.php

Blue Origin
http://www.spacefellowship.com/Forum...ht=blue+origin

Some of Carmack's people balked at the large size of the craft--but small landers can get away from you real fast--and at large scale--the weight of one weld being a tad thicker than the other doesn't matter quite as much. With a massive craft--you can have more time for your reaction control system to...well...react.


Size has many advantages. Big payload shrouds mean simpler craft. Not as many unfolding--moving parts perhaps.

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Ferengi!

Here is the trade federation:
http://www.astronautix.com/craftfam/newurism.htm

The overall gist of the comments here seems - so far - that profit will drive the expansion into space. Right now, nothing can be made cheaply enough in space to make it profitable - though economies of scale might help.

Odds are (in my opinion) that - just like any other major expansion in recorded history - treasure is going to drive any exodus. The current question is: what treasure? There's darn little on the moon that we don't have in abundance on earth (given that we were once part of the same body, that's not surprising)... Mars is.. pretty - but finding anything there other than a convenient place to put an outpost seems unlikely.

My money is on the asteroids, in the long run. Unfortunately, it's a sucker bet - we know jack about them, when you get right down to it. What would be outstanding would be confirmation of the hypothesis that there are hydrocarbon deposits. More likely, though, would be huge hunks of nickel-iron (from my limited reading). Nice, usable, but not as handy as hydrocarbons.

I dispute those who insist that government has a role - unless they are alluding to a "space government" - one that is separate from and independent of those on earth. Else you are begging the question: "which government". There isn't a government on this planet I'd want overseeing my efforts in space.

what you really want/need is simply an impartial investigative service that examines accidents and determines the causes. And publishes them. Widely. Any organization with a significant history of failure due to stupidity will not last long in that environment. Heck, look how long the Corvair lasted after Nader attacked it - when it was not significantly any more dangerous than a dozen other cars on the road then.

So long as the investigators remain impartial, the system should be self-maintaining.

For my money, that is the ONLY government you need out there. Individual rocks/stations may decide on their own, but the authority ends at the edge of the atmosphere. In the great wide open, virtually every other "job" of the government is superfluous. Who needs roads? Armies? *Welfare*?

Ditto for 'traffic control". That would be the responsibility of the various rocks. The space (pardon the pun) between any two rocks is.. is... *big*. If La and San Francisco were to each throw a basketball at the other, the balls would have a greater likelihood of colliding than any two craft with similar destinations in interplanetary space.

Some have pointed out the progression of trains-->planes-->space - in terms of safety. I think this is a bogus comparision - and actually one I'd rather avoid altogether. Train and air travel are NOT safe. They are as safe as we can make them - a BIG difference. Not a week goes by without a train derailment. Not a year goes by without a significant aviation accident. What sets space travel apart from them is that A) the accidents tend to be pretty spectacular and B) tend to be caught on tape from 38 different directions.

So.. back to the beginning.. we need to find something outside our atmosphere that we "need". Land and gold don't seem to be the magic magnet they used to be. Information - limited play list. Eggs in a basket - that's good enough for me, but not many others..

The bad thing is - as with virtually all previous expansions - we don't know what's there. The government tasked somebody with finding out what's over the horizon. In the past, sending a pair of eyes, a body, and a half-working brain was the only option.

These days, the government isn't willing to fund Lewis & Clark, Columbus, or even Dodge - they feel much more comfortable sending mechanical mice to nibble at the cheeze. The problem is, by the time they decide the cheeze is A) Cheddar, B) edible, and C) undefended, the floor under them will have collapsed, making the whole effort moot.

We need private enterprise to toss money at this - there's no other way it's going to happen. We need to build permanent establishments on the moon and mars (and anywhere else we can think of). Chicago and St Louis (and just about any other city you care to name) started out the same way- somebody taking a huge risk and plopping a house down. Some grew neighbors, others grew dead. It happens.

Eventually, this will too. The only question is, will it be us, our children, or the evolutionary decendants of dogs who make the first step?

Space X cleared for the cape.

Valid point, but consider;

The present space pre-colonization activites are just a stepping stone. Once space is actually economically opened up (to the point of generating more revenue than it absorbs-- a single asteroid's worth of resources could do it) then we may see a "gold rush" into space, and that means that yes, there'll be some tough times for a while, but they won't last. Probably by the time the first generation born in space matures, the wild-westlike "corporate days" will be history, and all anyone will remember is that we got out there and now live all over the solar system.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Dream Chaser is going for an X-15 design now--from the lifting body and the X-34 clones

Over on NASASPACEFLIGHT.COM, is a concept called Excalibur Almaz. This would use the Merkur capsule that was originally to be fitted atop Almaz/DOS/Salyut. This was a capsule with a hatch thru the heat-shield like MOL/Gemini.

I was thinking this small stump of a capsule--with both retros and escape tower atop a 'stem' might work best fitted atop the Genesis inflate...

A new craft
www.interorbital.com

http://www.space.com/spacetourism/

There's room enough in space for everybody. And I think Private Spaceflight is one of the most exciting facets of our New Century. What can I say, I'm a sucker for little guys who take on the big guys, and the big guys don't come any bigger than here.

__________________
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
Sally Ride for NASA Administrator!

Solar System Economy: Speculations

Keep in mind I'm taking a minimalist approach: Resource exploitation alone WITHOUT permanent planetary surface habitats

From the Moon: Aluminum, Helium, limited H2O for life support and H-O rocket fuel

From Mars: Possibly some heavier high value minerals (especially silver, gold, diamonds, etc)

From Venus: carbon (for nanotubes), Oxygen, Nitrogen (3X by kg mass than earth's atm), Sulfur (very useful material)

From Asteroid Belt: Various carbon and other minerals (lighter gravity well than the other bodies, but it's also further away).

From Earth: high-mass high value manufactured goods, foods

Later, the other bodies might be able to make low mass-per-unit high tech goods, but that'll be a while yet.

In time, the areas economies will develop. I especially see Venus as a kind of one-stop shop, possibly the Workhouse of the Solar System. Despite it's high gravity well, enviornmental restrictions on earth might make it cheaper and ecologically safer to get our materials from dead Venus.

I kind of think Mars might be a better place than Venus to harvest bulk quantities of carbon and oxygen. Like Venus, Mars's upper atmosphere is dominated by carbon dioxide. Unlike Venus, Mars has a couple moons which can be used to get "fr