A few articles in this week’s issue of The Space Review have some policy relevance:
Taylor Dinerman examines the future of the shuttle program, which currently has 19 missions (18 ISS flights and a Hubble repair mission) on its notional manifest through 2010. There are a number of tradeoffs that could reduce that number, although those changes would not necessarily save much money and could upset international partners on the space station project. Some advice from Dinerman: “Mike Griffin and his team will have to explain their plans to the public at every opportunity. They will have to make their case over and over, and to do so in a way that the public can easily grasp.”
Dwayne Day examines an interesting meeting at the White House in April 1961, just two days after Yuri Gagarin’s flight, where journalist Hugh Sidey (who passed away last month) sat in among a group that included President Kennedy and NASA administer James Webb. It’s clear from Sidey’s later account of the meeting that the administration was still grappling with how to respond to the USSR’s advances in space, and had yet to decide on Apollo.
Ryan Zelnio offers a model for international cooperation on the exploration and development of the Moon, using an approach patterned on both ESA and Intelsat. Zelnio admits that this idea is “not necessarily the most realistic model to implement.” However, given Griffin’s interest in international cooperation, models other than the ISS approach are worth some degree of consideration.
Anybody who is interested in a pdf of the relevant chapters of the Sidey book and the Journey to Tranquility book should e-mail me. Because these are copyrighted, we didn’t put them on the web, but I will provide them (with the warning that the Journey to Tranquility file is almost 3 megs).
I’d love to have both please!