Anthonares

Good morning! This happens to be the first Monday that I’ve been at my blogging post for quite some time, and I was pleased to tune my RSS reader to The Space Review this morning and discover another great set of articles. Here are the highlights:

Jeff Foust writes a piece about his involvement with the predecessor to the New Horizons Pluto spacecraft. In it he also provides a thorough review of the history of the program that serves as a nice compliment to the review I wrote last week.

Mark Trulson interviews Patrick J. G. Stiennon and David M. Hoerr who co-authored The Rocket Company (Bruce did a brief review of Rocket company last December), a fictionalized account of the development of a fully reusable launch vehicle system at a small space startup. The book provides a great wealth of engineering background on the challenges and design issues of launching a fully-reusable rocket program, yet is still cast on a fictional backdrop. In the interview the authors explain this decision because of the fact that so much more than engineering plans are needed to get us into space (as I argued in my response to Jeffrey Bell last November). I have not yet read the book, but it would be interesting to see the reaction to it by a high-school age student, so if there are any out there, please comment on what you think of it!

Also, Chris Gainor defends the legacy of Apollo lunar science by highlighting the importance of our understanding the Moon’s origins. Prior to Apollo, the impact hypothesis for lunar origins was just one among many. But, following the return of lunar rock samples and their subsequent age dating and compositional analysis, the impact hypothesis emerged victorious. There are many more benefits of Apollo lunar science that Gainor does not mention that together add up to a revolutionized understanding of our solar system and its history.

The Space Review is uniquely positioned as the premier forum for discussion of space policy. Fortunately for its founder, Jeff Foust, we also seem to be at an age where space may finally be becoming accessible to the masses. The Space Race 2, headed by the likes of Elon Musk and Burt Rutan has increased the enthusiasm of the space advocacy community (alt.spacers as sometimes they are referred to, though I’ve never used the newsgroups I’d still consider myself part of that cohort) greatly. Interestingly, we’ve seen a waning of enthusiasm in the Mars exploration community as timelines and programs are being trimmed down at NASA. I certainly hope that as the community and its voice (typified by media outlets such as The Space Review, though a community blog site is still sorely needed) grow, that there will be room for those who continue to advocate Mars exploration even though the focus now is so firmly on the Earth/Moon system.

Update: Over at Space Politics, Jeff Foust has been scouring the nation’s editorial pages for the last few weeks and has found a fair amount of anti-human exploration sentiment. Of course, everyone likes NASA’s robotic science. The apparent discord between science and space exploration is uncomfortable to many scientists and budget hawks alike. As I mentioned back in November, maybe its time that NASA is divided into two separate agencies.