I know nothing about the backgrounds of those that wrote this US General Accounting Office Report but isn’t it blazingly obvious that when you build something that has never existed before you are going to have knowledge gaps?While the chairman of the US House of Representatives’ committee, on science and technology, that ordered the report, Bart Gordon had a somewhat flat matter of fact response
Somewhat less important, but still interesting IMHO, is the fact that it turns out that a question via youtube for a Republican candidate debate on CNN came from someone who works on NASA’s Orion crew exploration vehicle and is probably a Lockheed Martin employee
Marsblog blogger T. (for Thomas?) L. James revealed that he knows the CNN/Youtube questioner Steve Neilson
My personal view is that whomever wins the US presidency Orion is safe, what it flies on could change and Ares V and the lunar elements of Constellation will probably never get past the CAD/CAE screen. So I guess that means I’ve got bad news for Aerojet, which has announced its made progress with a prototype reaction control system engine that would be used for a lunar lander
Interestingly NASA is asking for proposals for its small explorer programme that would see science payloads delivered to the International Space Station by Japan’s HTV cargo vehicle after 2010; assuming that spacecraft ever gets off the launch pad
One spacecraft that is definitley past the CAD/CAE screen stage is NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, which has completed two of its three environmental tests
From questions of the cosmos to questions of the health of our home world there is a big jamboree going on in South Africa regarding the internatonal Global Earth Observation Satellite System (GEOSS) project, which aims to become a comprehensive, global monitoring system, to provide vast quantities of near-real-time information on changes in the Earth’s land, oceans, atmosphere and biosphere
Beyond cynical comments about diplomats living it up at our expense the GEOSS summit is perhaps one side of the use of space that everyone can agree on
