Space Forum / Space Policy / July 2003

Despite a recent article in New Scientist, a solar sail does not break
the laws of physics.
In an article in New Scientist recently, maverick astronomer Thomas
Gold cast doubt about solar sails:

Brits with altitude prepare to float into space in a giant balloon
A bag of helium the size of the Empire State building to challange
Nasa record
Tim Radford, science editor

"Paul F. Dietz" <dietz@dls.net> wrote:

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/rocketscience-03zg.html
Interesting...

Another SBX factoid for the record, on the exceedingly unlikely
assumption that the record will ever matter.
 Aerospace Daily
 June 25, 2003

Are we getting our money's worth?  I advocate taking explosives to Mars and
using them to gain rover access to the subsurface.

It's looking increasingly likely that the space shuttle will not fly
again until next year.  And therefore both the Chinese and Rutan (and/or
some other X-Prize teams) will fly before NASA does.  
I'm curious as to how you think this will play out.  I'm sure NASA will

In a decade or so, we may be able to detect Earth-like planets using
spacecraft currently being developed. We may even be able to detect evidence
for life on such planets (detection of methane through spectroscopy) and
even chlorophyll (?).

Unlike me, Andrew Case is probably too modest to toot his own horn,
but he has a nice piece over at The Space Review about the coming age
of suborbital barnstorming.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/30/2

Buddha is sitting on prayer mat. He is wearing a seat belt. In a
buttoned upper left hand pocket, he has a pack on Camels and a Bic
lighter. He is sitting in the middle of 20' diameter chunk of plate
steel- about 1/4" thick. This disc is attached to a pipe which is 20'

It occurs to me that because we live in a society where the main
institutions are necessarily controlled by the rich, who constitute an
elite minority, and furthermore that the main scientific ventures are
undertaken under their orders, there has been an unfortunate tendency to

Clearly, by scaling up a launch vehicle to carry more passengers, you
should be able to reduce per-passenger costs.
But my question is, what types of vehicles are easiest to scale up?  I'm
thinking, especially, of HTHL (Rutan) vs. VTVL (Carmack).  My gut

I recently stumbled across this page showing illustrations pretending
to be of the japanese IGS spy-sats.
http://www.spaceserver.org/image/igs/igs.html
I guess, these are simply based on the phantasy of the author, or did