Congratulations to Charles Bolden, on his nomination to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and for demonstrating that the stereotype that all geeks are white just isn’t true:
In 2002, then-President George W. Bush unsuccessfully tried to appoint Bolden as the space agency’s deputy administrator. The Pentagon said it needed to keep Bolden, who was a Marine general at the time and a pilot who flew more than 100 sorties in Vietnam.
I can’t imagine how the Pentagon could have frustrated the will of a President who, in 2002, had approval ratings roughly equivalent to those of Zeus at the time of the Trojan War. Still, as a veteran of more than 100 combat sorties and a man who’s flown into space 4 times, Bolden qualifies a complete badass.
Obama may have stellar approval ratings. He may prove more that an American politician can be more powerful than General Motors when it declares bankruptcy next week, but we’re still going to die as a species if we don’t get off this rock.
Next Sunday, Garriott, who is 47, will become only the sixth person to travel privately to the International Space Station, and the first such ‘space flight participant’ to have been born in Britain. Like the five who preceded him, Garriott is a rich high-achiever – a celebrated video-game designer who made his first $100,000 in his first year in college, and whose current worth is reportedly in the hundreds of millions.
Unlike them, he will also be a second-generation space traveller, boldly going where his father has gone before, twice. He grew up in a neighbourhood full of astronauts, was the person whose early interest helped make private space travel a reality, and may well have a legitimate claim to ownership of the Moon.
Garriott’s personal site, covering his space tourism in detail, can be found here.
Sol 3, a planet inhabited by primitive, triangular organic lifeforms, whose religion involves ritually covering themselves in a paste of sodium chloride, preservatives, capsaicin, and dyeing chemicals, which color the natives orange in the common visual spectrum.
My co-blogger Ken occasionally has mean things to say about Robert A. Heinlein’s later libertarian, almost Randian phase of science fiction, and I have to admit that I find parts of it offputting myself, particularly the emphasis on group sex. But Heinlein in his later years was pretty adamant that private initiative was what would ultimately lead to the full exploration of space. Turns out he was ahead of his time on that, as with much else:
During the press event at the Google Lunar X PRIZE Team Summit held May 20-21 at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, a journalist commented on the prevalence of American teams and asked, “Where are the European teams?”…
Astrium’s [Europe's "space plane"] overhead costs are more like those of Boeing than SpaceX Corp. Astrium’s failure to secure broad support also isn’t surprising for a different reason; the lackluster interest of European politicians (and therefore society) in manned space exploration (and, by extension, human spaceflight). Beyond the issues raised above, the views expressed by European Commission Vice President Guenter Verheugen speak volumes about the attitudes of the European political establishment toward entrepreneurial space activity (NewSpace). Referring to public remarks by Guenter, Astrium Chief Executive Francois Auque said, “I was even told that this project was morally blameworthy because it targets an audience of the rich people.”
Although China is showing impressive drive to build its space program, it’s certain that when humans colonize Ceres, there’ll be no Eurocrats among them. For one thing, they won’t need a Commissoner of Purity for Zero-Gravity Cheese. Like Spanish viceroys, they’ll try to come later, when others have done the work. But with this sort of attitude, will the Europeans make it at all?
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May 23, 2009 
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Space