• Planetary Resources is announced, with a four-stage approach to prospecting and mining near-Earth asteroids:
1. Leo, a small space telescope placed in (appropriately enough) low Earth orbit.
2. Interceptor spacecraft (Leo telescopes with additional propulsion and science equipment) to scout for near-Earth asteroids
3. Rendezvous Prospector spacecraft to approach and gather data on specific asteroids
4. Asteroid mining (umm…yeah, this is where it gets a little Underpants-Gnome-ish)
• The Blue Origin capsule shape is revealed:

Instead of using a more traditional symmetrical capsule design, the Blue Origin Space Vehicle uses a biconic shape with one side of the capsule flattened and a split flap (most likely two) that can be used for directional control. The flap can be seen in the multicolored image above from the computational fluid design program used to develop the spacecraft. Similar designs have been developed in the past, most notably McDonnell-Douglas’ legendary Advanced Maneuvering Reentry Vehicle (AMaRV) developed in the 1970s. This vehicle also used split flaps for directional control, though it was designed to deliver weapons launched from a Minuteman missile.

• SpaceX is currently planning to launch its first flight (Dragon 2/3) to the ISS on May 7, but will have a test firing of the launch vehicle on Monday, April 30.

Ahh, landing airbags. I remember when Orion had those. Those were the days…

When I first heard mention of this last week, I scoffed because it struck me as just another bandwagon-jumping scheme akin to “green energy”. But as the video points out, there are good reasons to consider a spaceport in Colorado beyond the “us too” factor. The most important being the fact that there are a lot of commercial aerospace companies in Colorado, including Dreamchaser-builder Sierra Nevada, who might profit from providing and/or using services at the spaceport, and the airport’s proximity to a major hub airport, which can feed passengers and high-value cargo into potential future point-to-point suborbital transportation services.

I’m against “public-private partnerships” and subsidies and the like on principle, but it’s an idea worth looking into – perhaps there is a way that a spaceport could be created at Front Range without requiring such things. Unfortunately, I doubt our current legislature will do it, and if they do, I fear the bloated, corrupt, ineffectual result that would come of any such effort.

[video h/t Clark Lindsey]

He doesn’t seem very confident in commercial space:

Do you have any hope for commercial space efforts, like Space X?

It has been the commercial space industry, under NASA’s leadership and guidance, that has allowed us to get to the moon and build a shuttle and everything that has happened in the last 50 years. To entirely turn it over without any oversight to the commercial sector, which is a word I question anyway, is going to take a long time. Some of these guys are highly qualified, but some are young entrepreneurs with a lot of money, and for them it’s kind of like a hobby. Not all of them. But some of them are making claims to get into space in five years for $10 billion, and even the Russians say it’s going to take twice as long if we put our eggs into that basket. I don’t have a lot of confidence in that end of the commercial space spectrum getting us back into orbit any time soon. I’d like to hear all these folks who call themselves commercial space tell me who their investors are. Tell me where their marketplace is. A commercial venture is supposed to use private money. And who are their users? Suppose we, NASA, have no need for their services. There’s no other marketplace for them. So is it really a commercial venture, or is it not? Is it a group of guys who have stars in their eyes and want to be a big space developer? I don’t know.

I don’t think they’ll come anywhere near accomplishing what they’ve said they can do. I said before Congress, and it’s still true today, they don’t yet know what they don’t know. We, if you’ll allow me to include myself with NASA, have been doing this for half a century. We have made mistakes. We’ve lost colleagues. Don’t you think we’ve learned from some of those mistakes? You bet your life we have. They have yet to learn from those mistakes. And I’m not willing as a taxpayer to sit here and pay them to make those mistakes before they can ever get where they think they can go. Now the good news side of this is there are some of the larger aerospace companies looking into getting into it, the Boeings, the Lockheed Martins, the ATKs, are now looking to compete in the commercial side of the business. That’s a little more encouraging. Those are the folks who have been working on everything we’ve done for the last 50 years. They know how it can be done.

Not encouraging at all. Would I still vote for Romney over Obama, knowing this? In a heartbeat. Putting out of office the corrupt and dangerously incompetent disaster currently in the White House would be worth the (manageable) risk of strangling the Obama space policy in the crib. Would we need to keep a sharp eye on a President Romney’s space policy to make sure Mike Griffin and others with Griffinian proclivities couldn’t pull the stake out of the heart of Constellation and resurrect his dream rocket at the expense of a non-NASA-dependent space industry? Absolutely. But when has there not been a need for space advocates to stand watch on space policy?

UPDATE: Interesting that Robert Crippen, another Romney space advisor, served as president of Thiokol Propulsion. 

Scott Pace [PDF] was head of program evaluations at NASA during the Griffin years, and at least as of last August Pace was promoting a return to the Ares I/Ares V architecture (as a better alternative to the SLS, believe it or not):

“Ironically, the budget pressures being put on the program right now would in my mind argue for returning to the previous plan,” Pace said, “which was launch and build Ares I first and build Ares V later.”

Ares I was the first and smaller of tworockets in the now-canceled Constellation program, which also included a Multipurpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) that is being constructed. Ares I, which could have taken astronauts back to the moon, was being developed in Huntsville by many of the aerospace workers now facing layoffs.

For Pace, Ares has several positives. First, a lot of money and time have already been spent on it, and that work would feed into the larger rocket later.

“You build on the work that was already done,” Pace said of Ares I. “You can fly the MPCV. You have five-segment solid (rocket motors) that are already done. You have a use then on the upper stage for the J-2X engine, which is also in development.”

To encourage commercial cargo runs, NASA has hired SpaceX and a second company, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. to fly cargo to the space station, a $100 billion project of 16 countries, which orbits about 240 miles above Earth.

A successful test flight by SpaceX — as well as a similar run by Orbital scheduled for next year — would begin restoring U.S. access to the station, which is expected to remain operational until at least 2020.

As others have pointed out, space policy is the one area where the Obama administration seems to be getting things more or less right – and that’s all the more amazing for it involving commercial endeavors. (It’s early, of course – if and when these commercial startups hit their stride, that will be when the federal government starts taxing and regulating them out of business like every other successful industry.)

Three months ago, we successfully flew our second test vehicle in a short hop mission, and then last week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet. A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle. Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job. We’re already working on our next development vehicle.

Nobody wants to lose a test vehicle, of course, but this can actually be a useful development — as anyone who has read Henry Petroski’s books understands, you learn more from your failures than from your successes. It has always struck me as the wrong approach that Orion didn’t budget and schedule a bunch of simple test vehicles, with potential failures and learning from them in mind. Yes there are test vehicles, but they’re each quite complex and expensive, and the failure of any one of them will be seen as a major black eye to the whole program (regardless of what might be learned).

Fortunately, given Bezos’ ability to fund the project, NASA getting cold feet over COTS or CCDEV after a failure probably isn’t much of a threat to the ongoing efforts he mentions in the post.

A Russian company which plans to build the world’s first space hotel has released further details on its ambitious project.

The plan, which would see a hotel placed into orbit some 350 kilometers above the earth, was first unveiled last year by Russian firm Orbital Technologies as a commercial alternative to the International Space Station.

This week, it revealed further details of the design at an aviation industry event in Moscow, suggesting that it will be able to accommodate seven people at a time – with the most incredible views you’re likely to get out of a window…

Orbital Technologies says that the design and development of the space station is underway, and it is expected to launch in 2016.

Just add money!

I’d like to see them succeed, but given the frequency with which ambitious space projects involving the Russians emerge and then disappear, I’m a little skeptical.

If all goes to plan, engineers will launch the Falcon HTV-2 to the edge of space, before detaching the plane and guiding it on a hypersonic flight that will reach speeds of 13,000mph (about 20 times the speed of sound) on its return to Earth.

Those who think that the long-overdue termination of the Space Shuttle and NASA/Congress’ lack of clear vision on what should replace it indicate the U.S. no longer has what it takes to innovate in aerospace ought look at this (and the X-37b) before shedding additional tears or rending further garments. DARPA and USAF certainly seem to be cutting new edges — and that’s on top of the New Space companies who are recapitulating and improving upon prior efforts with new technology of their own.

Orion has a crewed version planned for…um…”eventually”. That’s got to count for something…right?

I did, however, catch a bit of commentary on the radio while running errands Friday afternoon. Not sure what show it was (didn’t recognize the host — name was something like “Joe Pax”), but I tuned in just in time to hear a rant about how the end of the Shuttle program without a replacement on hand was a national tragedy, and that it came about because Obama cancelled Bush’s space policy only because it was Bush’s space policy.

Let’s unpack that, shall we?

The “national tragedy” bit simply repeated the received (un)wisdom that the end of Shuttle = end of US manned space exploration. Not so — NASA civil servant astronauts will still be flying to the predominantly-US International Space Station for the foreseeable future, albeit via the Russian Soyuz. New domestically-built and -launched spacecraft are a couple years out, so yes, we won’t be able to send NASA astronauts up on American-made vehicles for a while, but that does not equate to the end of an American presence in space. This part, though, I can understand — if someone hasn’t been following post-Columbia space policy, it may seem as though we are simply shutting down the manned side of NASA and giving up on space.

The worse flaw in his argument is the assertion (very strongly and unambiguously made by the host) that Obama cancelled the policy because it was Bush’s. This is utter bullshit, which a few minutes of research would have revealed as such. The policy that Obama cancelled (in part) was Mike Griffin’s, not George W. Bush’s. (While it’s true that Griffin reported to Bush who was in turn ultimately responsible, Constellation was unquestionably Griffin’s ill-begotten baby.) Bush gave us the broad policy of the VSE, which was later hijacked at the implementation level by Mike Griffin for his own vanity projects — the crowning glory of which was his Ares I launcher.

Griffin’s Constellation architecture is what was largely cancelled in February 2010, and with good reason — it was ill-conceived, over-sold, over-budget, under-performing, and behind schedule (more on that last in a moment). Obama’s cancellation of Griffin’s program was arguably the only good thing the man has accomplished as President, and it was done not out of spite for his predecessor (which I admittedly wouldn’t put beyond him), but because of the aforementioned problems.

And this brings us to the “gap” in American manned access to space, which was the inspiration for the rant. Had it not been for Griffin’s Ares-based Constellation architecture and its follow-on effects on the design of Orion, Orion might well have been ready to fly by now, or at the least with a minimal “gap” between Shuttle flyout and Orion IOC. Constant redesigns of Ares I and trouble meeting its performance goals meant redesigns and ultimately the stripping down of Orion, which in turn led to schedule slips with the latter. Had Orion (whether in in the original lifting-body form or the Griffin-mandated capsule form) been directed to fly on an EELV — in-production rockets with known performance characteristics and much more benign flight environments — a good portion of its development schedule slip could have been avoided. Which means we would have had little if any “gap” to cause radio talk show hosts consternation, nor reason for said hosts to suspect partisan motivations behind a necessary shift in space policy.

To be fair, when I came back to the program about fifteen minutes later, the host was admitting (apparently at the prompting of a caller I had missed in the meantime) that the shift to a more commercial orientation for manned access to space was a welcome development. But rather than rethink his earlier foolishness, he stuck to his guns and (incredibly, for a supposedly right-wing, pro-business, free-markets type of host) expressed doubt that commercial providers could ever fill that role. Which is disappointing — if people who are supposed to favor private enterprise allow their “national greatness” emotional priorities take precedence over letting a new industry take root, who will defend the new industry against those who don’t favor private enterprise?