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Goodbye, Space Program. Hello, Space Industry!

I was planning to write a blog post about the Obama administration's cancellation of NASA's Constellation program, but I found that Michael Mealling has already written it for me! Read it here.

Michael doesn't blog very often, but when he does, he nails it. [Read more...]

Back to the Moon?

Forty years after Apollo, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wanted to run a brief pro/con on "Should we go back to the Moon?" They called Georgia Tech. I volunteered to do "No," and Dr. Loewy from our School of Aerospace Engineering volunteered for "Yes." The catch: a tight limit of 150 words. That's hard. [Read more...]

My Letter to the Editor for “New Scientist” magazine

They probably won't publish this, so I'll put it here:

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To the Editors:

The premise of your special on growth in the 15 October 2008 issue is just plain wrong, and the wrongness starts in your lead editorial. http://tinyurl.com/4evh5e

You state that "we live on a planet with finite resources." But we also live in a solar system with eight planets, fifty moons, a million asteroids, [Read more...]

Aerospace Venture Forum

Most venture forums concentrate on a particular geography (Atlanta, the Southeast, the Mid-Atlantic, whatever).

This one is a little different... it's focusing on a particular industry sector. In our case, aerospace. [Read more...]

XCOR announces Lynx spaceplane

Today has just been insanely busy (which is why I'm not in L.A. for the announcement), and this is my first spare moment at my desk, but a lot of people have noticed that XCOR made the Drudge Report today! I've also been told via Twitter that we were on CNBC.

So, finally, we're able to talk about the Air Force contract and the Lynx spaceplane. [Read more...]

Digression

I'm testing Skribit, and I just noticed that there's a request to talk about my header image. It's taken from a shot of XCOR's LOX/methane engine, which was just named one of TIME Magazine's "Inventions of the Year" for 2007. It's a prototype built under subcontract for NASA; descendents of it will one day land on the Moon and on Mars. Yes, it looks like a death ray! [Read more...]

DragonCon

Okay, I seem to have survived Dragon*Con.

Yes, I go every year. No, I don't wear costumes. [Read more...]

Accident in Mojave

I guess it's not unexpected that, if I put that picture at the top of my blog, I'm going to get a lot of email and phone calls about what happened in Mojave last Thursday. [Read more...]

Second Life

Watching Gen. Pete Worden give a presentation via SecondLife. Okay, it's geeky (and it just crashed) but... wow. Who would have imagined this a few years ago?

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Please excuse brevity. Sent from handheld.

I can’t resist a challenge…

On his blog a couple of weeks ago, Jeff Haynie wrote: [Read more...]