Space Forum / Space Policy / April 2004

Hello there. Students for the Exploration and Development of Space
(SEDS-USA) is conducting a survey to see what students think of recent
developments in US space policy.  If you could assist us by taking a
few minutes to complete the poll, we would appreciate the help.  We've

Odd that Space.com has an article about life around M type stars
because over the past week I have been pondering the same thing.  Even
more coincidental is that my 7 yr old daughter suddenly asked me while
I was thinking about this "Daddy, if you found a new planet, what

Guys, I wish discuss and hopefully learn somethin more abt gamma
radiations so thats one reason of starting this topic.
Gamma burst which were detected in enormous amts by radio telescopes
backin 1991 were discovered to be belonging to Star nursuries at the

Based on the Drake Equation, scientists say our galaxy holds as many
as 30 billion other earth-like planets.  NASA has laid on several
multi-million dollar missions to look for them.  Why?  Could the
answer be physics?  Could the law of entorpy be the reason?

XCOR announced today that it's received a RLV mission license from the
FAA.
Details: <http://www.xcor.com/launch-license-grant.html>
Congratulations, XCOR!

I was at the Oberg's discussion about Chinese manned spacelight, in bldg.
3 auditorium at GSFC on Monday, April 26, 2004, 3:30pm EDT.
He was interesting, well informed about the subject matter and candid
overall making for an wonderful presentation, IMHO. Politics aside, I

Has it been discussed before the possibility of multiple nations
jointly funding a manned mission to Mars? Each nation could send one
astronaut. Do you think the governments would be interested?

With all this talk about terraforming Mars, I started
wandering how could mankind terraform earth.
Take the Sahara desert, for instance, and the
dangerous level of CO2 that humans have injected

Mars is a frozen and very dead, boring piece of rock IMO.
But Mercury is a much warmer place and there could be life on this
planet, because aliens rather live on a warm planet than on a frozen
world.Many chemicals don´t do anything when frozen, but are rather

Despite all its human flaws, the "NASA culture" has a strong can-do,
will-do attitude that makes it possible for them to achieve what
organizations ten times their size cannot.  This sets a very bad
standard for industry, giving the shareholders and investors a high

I've been hearing a fair bit about these in recent weeks. Popular
Mechanics has an article out in this months edition. At first glace
they seem to have a lot of ideal properties for space applications.
Lightweight, controllable, stable, high energy storage density, etc.

Has anyone else here checked out Energia's most recent Mars plans? It
would involve a very large baseblock and solar-electric thrust, and
would place a semi-permanent space station in orbit around Mars.
According to their website, it would have two landers initially, and

Consider cosmic view of Earth Day
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-04-21-oberg_x.htm
USA Today, April 22, 2004
Alcestis "Cooky" Oberg and James Oberg

This reminds me of something that has become a bit puzzling:
what relationship does SBR bear to the radar component of
NRO's Future Imagery Architecture? In the days of Discovery II,
SRB was just going to be an MTI radar, which is technologically

I used to run PArt Time Models, which made resin model kits of aircraft
and spacecraft. I'm getting back into it.
I've finally slapped together my Big Fat List Of Models, Maybe. It's in
the form of an Excel file... with about 200 suggested models.