Space News Roundup January 10, 2011

• The Las Cruces Sun-News things Virigin Galatic, Spaceport America, and private space in New Mexico in general is a good thing for everyone.
• Three travel agencies in Florida have been authorized to sell seats on Virigin Galatic. WSFL has the story with cool shots of VSS Enterprise.
• NASA Administrator Charles Bolden is a moron. He says that in order to survive political wrangling, they must be affordable, sustainable and realistic. In other words they must be things we have done. To survive politics space travel must be new and exciting and commercial.
• Rick Homans, former director of Spaceport America, says that the new Governor, Susana Martinez, must declare her support or the project may slow or stop in its tracks.
  
• It only took 40 years, but NASA proved the Moon has a core using data from Apollo.
• NASA is currently stuck in bureaucratic hell, waiting on the congress and the president to figure out the budget. They have found $40 million more for the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program since the beginning of the fiscal year (October).
• It is an odd felling, but I am proud that commercial space tourism has become mainstream enough to be actively attacked my environmentalists.

Space News Roundup January 5, 2011

• NASA researchers have found that they can cut the weight of some components by 20% and still achieve safety goals.
• New Mexico's new governor, Rep Susana Martinez, is auditing Spaceport America to make sure tax dollars are spent the right way.
• Long term space flight may impact your ability to have children.
• India is building their own GPS type system, the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS).
• The James Webb Telescope may be pushed back 8 years due to cost over runs. The current launch date is now 2022.

ULA to Government: Don't Force Compeition

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) that is the product of the Boeing and Lockheed Martin merger is laying off 19% of its workforce to reduce overlap in the Atlas and Delta rockets. That isn't what caught my attention, though.

[ULA Chief Operating Officer Dan Collins] urged the government not to force a competitive environment on an industry that may be ill suited to it.

"I'm not saying no to competition, I'm just urging us to be judicious in its use," Collins said. "Our success will be judged not on how widely we used the tool of competition, but ... on how wisely we used the tool of competition."

For some odd reason I thought competition was the natural state of the market until the government starting screwing with it. They acknowledged that SpaceX is really there only current competition due to ITAR.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, after talking about switching from a cost-plus to fix-price contracts, said:

"The Air Force has erected enormous barriers to entry at least in the launch market, and made it really very difficult to get in," Musk said. "It's sort of strange that we have over 30 missions on contract for Falcon 9 — which is a vehicle that has more capability than the Delta 4 Medium — but not one of those is with the Air Force. Why is that?"

So Mr Collins, no need to worry. The government isn't going to let, um I mean force any competition on you.

Update: Original story

Space News Roundup January 4, 2011

• NASA announced they had purchased data packages for $500,000 from three (3) Google Lunar X-Prize contestants: Astrobotic Technology Inc (Pittsburgh, Pa., USA), Moon Express Inc. (Mountain View, Calif., USA) and the Rocket City Space Pioneers (Huntsville, Ala., USA).
• The Universe lets us know once again, we really have no clue what is going on: Vast Solar Eruption Shocks NASA and Raises Doubts on Sun Theory

Also if you didn't realize it, The Space Review came out yesterday:

Space challenges for 2011

Peace

What’s in a number?

Reviews: Envisioning the universe

Space News Roundup January 3, 2011

• Canada is looking to build and launch their own rocket. To be honest, I understand their desire to reach an important space milestone, but I think they would be better served by building the infrastructure for launches and buying launches from private companies, such as Boeing and SpaceX. Of course ITAR is always an issue...
• NASA's Mars rover Spirit is still not talking.
• Some band I've never heard of wants to play in space aboard Virgin Galactic.
• NPR has a roundup of NASA's plans for manned space.