Space Forum / Space Policy / May 2005

The first flight-ready Falcon I is on its pad at
Vandenberg.  SpaceX is set to test fire the vehicle
next week.
Tom Cuddihy provided this link in another sci.space.policy

Goodmorning, monday 10:30 am
bought 2200 of twtr at 3.04

research suggestions for GPS/Galileo engineering/policy article
Hi!
I've embarked on a magazine feature article on the European 'Galileo' navsat
program and am seeking suggestions on existing survey and commentary

JimO asks -- what can this report mean? What technical capability
is being referred to, and in how garbled a form? As of now, I have no reason
to believe this CBS/AFP story has any credibility. Can anybody enlighten me?
US satellite recorded checkpoint shooting, shows speed of ...

If we ever decide to resume lunar exploration (even if it is robotic at
first) is there any chance that propulsion or fuel systems have improved
enough where we could get there in 1 day instead of 3?
JoeL

I was wondering: would it be feasible to make an ultra-cheap Mars mission by
using a small satellite with an ion engine which would increase it's Earth
orbit until it got captured by Mars' gravity either by natural forces or by
firing a small solid rocket?

Sunday night, I was sailing from St. Pete, FL to the Northern Gulf of
mexico.  looked up and saw a satellite going west to east.  Suddenly,
it flared in brightness for a couple of seconds then back to normal.
No more flashes while I watched it.

Scott Horowitz, former shuttle pilot and astronaut, came to the Naval
Postgraduate school today to teach a lecture to my class of Space
Systems Engineers & gave a very convincing argument for the SRB to
orbit option. (He works for ATK, but keep reading.) There were quite a

The mad cap Helen Caldicott has written a polemic against space based
weapons which, while it does not mention "missile envy" or "boys
playing with toys", is still pregnant with the fallacies of arms
control cultists that one would have thought were disproven by how

How Dare Could America Industrial Property Office Be In Conspiracy With
Jungang International Patent Office To Make An Extravagant
International Crime ?
Currently a Korean party now holds the American patent 4919933, the

It looks like they are bending metal, boys!
http://www.novosti-kosmonavtiki.ru/content/photogallery/gallery_032/index.html
Jeffrey

This article was already posted on sci.space.policy,
but it is so good that it deserves a repost. URL:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-03zzx.html

Henry Spencer wrote:
"A *small* amount of curiosity about the situation over the next hill
has survival value."
And what about those of us with *massive* curiosity? What about those

<http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7403>
Sounds like a pretty good idea -- the physics and chemistry of getting
oxygen from regolith has been long known, but I don't think anyone's
ever built it into a practical, working unit.  It's certainly not

According to a 5/16/05 Aviation Week article, NASA
Administrator Griffin's "Exploration Systems Architecture
Study" team, headed by Dr. Douglas Stanley, that was
instructed to reassess the CEV program, will be