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From our vantage all we can confirm is that it went up, lit and came back. But unofficially its being confirmed that they did get beyond 62 miles. Its still difficult finding the time to post articles since there are press conferences still to go to. I'll be posting more pictures in the wiki page.

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I'm off to Mojave. I'm not sure what kind of connectivity I'll have there so entries may be lite until Tuesday morning. See you there!

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Mojave Airport received its launch site license today. I haven't found any press releases to link to yet.

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Check out these comments. I'm not sure if I'll be able to sleep tonight after reading that. This one in particular sent shivers up my spine:

bq.

Well, I work at a NASA Center, too, and I don't particularly care who pays me, though the rosy picture painted as to employee benefits is contrary to the experience at the FFRDC National Optical Astronomical Observatories, where scientists and engineers routinely make less than their peers in government, industry — or universities.

What concerns me far more is the ignorance of the people on the panel (and apparently among some of your correspondents) as to what actually goes on at NASA Centers. There are people above and beyond contracting officers and their bosses who monitor flight programs: engineers, technicians, and scientists. Was even one of the members of the Commission ever involved with a flight project, at NASA or JPL? Can they even spell the words, “fiduciary responsibility?”

Honestly, this raises the question for me of the competence of the Commission to make these suggestions. I get the sick feeling that there was an agenda at work before the Commission ever met, and that it included the more efficient transfer of the taxpayers' dollars to industry and universities — be damned with any expert oversight from within the government. Are the activities of Payload Engineers, Systems Engineers, Project Managers, and Project Scientists “inherently governmental?” Of course not. Would you trust the industrial and university partners of NASA that gave us the stirring successes of Lewis, WIRE, Mars Polar Lander, and Mars Climate Orbiter to go and try again with no adult supervision? I hope not. Should you trust an FFRDC technical expert to have the taxpayers' interests at heart? Good question.

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(Thanks to Jeff Foust at Space Politics for finding this!)

Final Report on the PresidentÂ’s Commission on Implementation of U.S. Space Exploration Policy

Science, Technology, and Space Hearing

Thursday, June 17 2004 - 2:30 PM - SR - 253

Click here for the webcast

If you are at all interested in how this report is going to play in Congress you should be watching this. Interesting questions about FFRDCs and how they can manage what is normally thought of as a 'federal' resource

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I watched this afternoon's Senate Commerce Committee hearing but I didn't hear about Brownback's NASA authorization legislation for FY 2005 (thanks to Jeff Foust for keeping track of all this for us!) But if the following is actually in there then I really don't care what they do with NASA's budget:

• The bill would call on NASA to implement a “private sector managed robotic mission to the Moon in three years”;
• The bill also asks the administration “to clarify US positions on private property rights for those seeking to develop space resources and infrastructure”;
• It includes provisions to enable NASA to offer prizes (presumably to allow NASA specifically to award prizes bigger than the current $250,000 limit it currently has). Brownback also said he would suggest that NASA’s first “big” prize would be a manned orbital flight; he has previously suggested a “Glenn Prize” like that with a purse of $100 million.

I thought I'd be old and grey before someone in the government finally took space property rights seriously. This and all of the other Aldridge Commission related legislation is going to go through a hell of a time in Congress but if it comes out even remotely resembling what went in then the world will be a better place.

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bq. The Commission finds that sustaining the long-term exploration of the solar system requires a robust space industry that will contribute to national economic growth, produce new products through the creation of new knowledge, and lead the world in invention and innovation. This space industry will become a national treasure.

bq. Given the complexity and challenges of the new vision, the Commission suggests that a more substantial prize might be appropriate to accelerate the development of enabling technologies. As an example of a particularly challenging prize concept, $100 million to $1 billion could be offered to the first organization to place humans on the Moon and sustain them for a fixed period before they return to Earth. The Commission suggests that more substantial prize programs be considered and, if found appropriate, NASA should work with the Congress to develop how the funding for such a prize would be provided.

Yes. That's Bob Walker talking there. He's probably going to advocate for an incremental ($500 million a year) prize for sustained lunar base.

bq. The Commission recommends that Congress increase the potential for commercial opportunities related to the national space exploration vision by providing incentives for entrepreneurial investment in space, by creating significant monetary prizes for the accomplishment of space missions and/or technology developments and by assuring appropriate property rights for those who seek to develop space resources and infrastructure.

Hmm…. that's really it. The rest of it gets into the Science and Education agendas. I was really hoping for specific recommendations on FAR contracting changes and some detail on exactly what they mean by “partnership” between public and private. I think they only mentioned once that the point was that NASA should have nothing to do with the missions at all other than buying slots for rides.

I had to search through the document to look for it but I finally found the “We all wanted to go!” quote. Here's the context (page 15): bq. Public ownership of this agenda must be broad, deep, and nonpartisan. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts did not really belong to NASA, but to the public. That was just one manifestation of public ownership of NASA during that era. We heard from many in the public and the aerospace industry how President Kennedy s challenge to land a man on the Moon affected an entire generation. One witness from the government said simply, We all wanted to go.

Whoever wrote that didn't get the point of the comment that was made at the hearing. Its like the difference between automobiles and race cars. Watching a NASCAR race makes you want to be able to drive in a race. But that's not the same “I want to do that to” as wanting to be able to drive a car to the corner grocery store. If NASA had been in charge of the automobile industry the above interpretation of the statement would be “Well, we have NASCAR races and people want to be able to do that to so that's sufficient, right”? No. The point is that we want the entire point to be that we're the ones in space doing the work, living our lives, raising our children. If that isn't your goal then all your doing is setting up another car race while I'm still stuck riding a horse to the track.

Oh.. BTW, just found a free facebook proxy service.

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Ok, I've skimmed and read most of it and here's my take. I think that the report is good for the most part. There are a lot of details left unsaid that could really be used to completely derail what the commission is trying to get at. There's just to much wiggle room in the wording on what the private/public partnership should be. And that suggests to me that much of this report can really get mutilated in the political process unless the President understands what the Commission was getting at.

So am I behind this? Yes. But I could change my mind if things look like their going south. Especially if it looks as though the “space industry” verbage is used to simply transfer money to existing contractors. I was hoping for something that could be used as a bat, instead I got an inflatable toy bat. But still a bat.

So, you should go read the entire thing. I'll be commenting more on it as the week progresses and we get reaction to it.

Public reaction:

Transterrestrial Musings thread on the report

Reuters

Information free O'Keefe statement

Space Foundation release

CNN: White House receives space vision report

Wired: Commission: NASA Needs to Change (this one has some commentary so it appears they had a reporter at the press conference)

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Congressman Rohrabacher's Statement on the Aldridge Commission Report has these 5 points:

• Incentivize non-traditional businesses, including both entrepreneurs and non-aerospace major companies to invest their ideas and capitalin making space exploration more affordable and profitable.
• NASA should turn over Earth-to-orbit space transportation to private firms, especially resupplying the International Space Station, but also include the private sector every step of the way to the Moon and beyond.
• The Federal Government needs to streamline regulatory burdens so that Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, and Dennis Tito can develop new passenger-carrying spaceships. The House of Representatives passed HR 3752 to do just this three months ago, but the bill is still awaiting action in the Senate.
• Congress can also spur investment through the use of tax incentives, such as those proposed in my Zero-Gravity, Zero-Tax Act of 2003 (H.R. 914.)
• While other nations can play a supportive role in space exploration, the real benefits may come not from government-to-government partnerships but rather from U.S. companies working with foreign firms, such as the Russians, to create the best value for taxpayers everywhere.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

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Reports are trickling in from the Centennial Challenges Workshop (which I couldn't get to because of day job responsibilities). So far we have these observations (hat tip to Warren Thompson):

• There is a rumor that Elon Musk will call for the Kistler contract to become a prize tomorrow morning during his guest speaker appearance. I guess this means his efforts to buy Kistler outright haven’t been going well (see the last paragraph in this Economist article).
• Peter Diamondis was very interested in the Lunar Lander challenge, so much so that I came to the conclusion that he may have something other than the X Prize cup in mind for the near future. He did make three specific suggestions:
  • Soft land a rover on the Moon, rove to a historic Apollo landing site, take video and snap shots. (Think Radio Shack’s logo in the foreground of the Apollo 11 landing site.)
  • Soft land a rover on the Moon at the South Pole, rove to ice.
  • Create a truly international “Space Race” to the Moon with ESA and other agencies kicking in prize money.

• Diamondis also stated that he though that commercial space could get a rover to the Moon within 3-5 years… and then someone suggested the goal of the prize be to film NASA's return to the Moon. ;)

Another report from Paul Blase of TransOrbital:

bq.

I attended the Centennial Challenge workshop Tue and Wed, very interesting. NASA has authority from Congress to offer prizes like the X-prize and the DARPA Grand Challenge (for off-road navigation by autonomous vehicles); the purpose of the workshop was to help them generate additional ideas for prizes and to develop rules for running the contests by.

A large number of possible challenges were discussed, in both space and aeronautics, with subjects ranging from very-high-temperature computing (for use on Venus), to landing on the moon, to high-performance aircraft engines.

We boiled things down to 3 kinds of challenges:

• 1st to achieve prizes (similar to X-Prize)
• all-at-once races (like the Grand Challenge, generally used where the infrastructure cost for running the competition is high)
• and bounties. The latter was discussed in the context of asteroid sample retrieval, where NASA wants lots of samples from many different asteroids.

This next year (FY 2004) NASA will start to offer prizes of up to $250k (the limits are set by Congress) for relatively simple and short-term challenges. Next year (FY2005) they'll start with prizes of up to $30M.

One of the more interesting problems was convincing the NASA types not to try and overspecify the competitions and turn them into competitive procurements. They'd usually try to say “we'd like a challenge to do X, using technologies Y and Z. For instance, it took some argueing to make them see that ultra-high-temperature computers will not necessarily use semiconducting electronics (e.g. silicon carbide), or even electronics at all! I think that they got the idea at the end, however.

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