“A Space Program for the Rest of Us”, a brief history of the American space program to date and an interesting case for why the next step should be the development of an open and robust space refueling infrastructure, instead of recycling the technologies and methodologies of the Apollo program.
-
recent posts
- our decrepit infrastructures
- reading the infrastructural city: chapter eleven index
- props
- roosevelt pneumatic
- “tim burton’s inception is not a film that needs to be made”
- “what to do when there is nothing to do”
- kotkin contra khanna
- spillway on jacobs
- “global hubs and mega-cities”
- “cheap land, abundant power, and accessible fiber optic lines”
- reading the infrastructural city, chapter ten index
- public landscapes of distribution
- robert overweg
- on “dubai-bashing”
- “a tax credit or a zoning change”
-
recent comments
- Kotzendes Einhorn: 1969 stoppten Ingenieure der US Army Corps einen der Niagarafälle um das Gestein unter den Fällen...
- building nothing out of something: conclusion. (FASLANYC has already done so.) In the meantime, you should be sure...
- rholmes: That reminds me of this map Strange Maps dug up, of California as the world. It doesn’t answer the...
- BrianR: As a geologist, what struck me in Inception was the complete lack of discussion about who/what designs the...
- faslanyc: interesting interview. I was confused by the end, where they claim to want work when there is nothing to...
- rholmes: I assume it’s just because they speak a lot of English.
- Wear Patterns: drawings of David Marsh capture the plays of World Cup Soccer to make visible the complex mechanics of...
- namhenderson: Why so many Canadians? Old graduate school ties?
- building nothing out of something -- Topsy.com: This post was mentioned on Twitter by nicolatwilley, Qb Gazette Feed...
- building nothing out of something: the project — and produce sounds. And the second was a research project from...
-
monthly archives
-
category archives
-
tags
antarctica architectural-criticism architecture blogging china competitions ecological-urbanism-at-gsd economics energy finance flood-control geology glacier-island-storm hacking-infrastructure high-speed-rail hot damn hydrology incremental-urbanism informality infrastructure iphone kazys-varnelis landscape landscape-architecture landscape-infrastructures Links los angeles netherlands networked-urbanism new-urbanism parks photography post-industrial re-industrial reading-the-infrastructural-city readings richard-florida soccer speculative suburbia technology transportation urbanism waste world-cup
I found the article rather heartbreaking. A lot of it is thought-provoking, though I’m not sure that I agree with the corporatist sentiment that keeps peeking through his attempts at third-way posturing.
While I think it’s an interesting idea, I’m not sure how it would help to reduce costs for reaching low-Earth orbit. Once you’re in orbit, you don’t need fuel unless you’re attempting to go further, and we’re having difficulties advancing even that far. Perhaps a space elevator is in order…?
I thought the author engaged in a bit of “the market will do it” hand-waving occasionally, too.
But his argument is that we ought to become a space-faring civilization, and for that, developing an extraterrestrial refueling infrastructure (whether in low orbit or on the moon or further) does seem essential. Whether that’s a good goal or not is an entirely different matter (and one that I don’t really have any way to evaluate, as I know very little about how realistic a goal it is).
[...] Today M.ammoth pointed me toward an article in the New Atlantis by Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer and blogger. Simberg lays out the fallacies as he and many in the aerospace community in NASA’s re-tread of the Apollo program. In short, he calls the space agency and government to task for its monolithic bloated-ness, declaring NASA a stagnant protector of jobs in crucial congressional districts that needlessly monopolizes human spaceflight. As an alternative, he suggests aggregating an orbiting and deep space fueling infrastructure, supplied and maintained by the private sector. Thus the burden of lifting all of a mission’s fuel (read: weight) at the time of launch is eliminated, and the marginal cost of getting into orbit is drastically reduced. [...]