Free Republic

About 40 members of the grassroots space advocacy group ProSpace are descending on Capitol Hill to promote a legislative agenda big on prize competitions and other government-backed efforts intended to foster commercial space transportation services. ProSpace has been lobbying Congress every March for the past decade, pushing initiatives meant in one way or another to open space to the average citizen. Prize competitions were featured prominently in ProSpace’s 2005 "March Storm" agenda with the group urging lawmakers to give NASA authority to put up cash prizes in excess of $250,000 as a way to foster creative solutions to some of...

The recent mission of the Space Shuttle Discovery dramatically points up the need for us to resolve how best to rapidly promote space exploration and innovation. One inescapable response: Abolish the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) or drastically scale back its mission. Since the moon landings over three decades ago, NASA has become an obstacle to advancing space exploration and travel. If NASA had been in charge of developing the automobile, we'd still be riding horses. Free-enterprise competition spurs innovation and brings down the prices of products and services, the plunging cost of computing power being one dramatic example....

When President George W. Bush announced that the United States would begin a new effort to eventually return Americans to the surface of the Moon no later than 2020, the people tasked with that job immediately began addressing how they would accomplish it. They naturally started to consider the most obvious hardware that they would require—a launch vehicle (or vehicles) to lift the spacecraft into orbit, a spacecraft for carrying the humans to the Moon, and eventually a spacecraft for landing them on the Moon. Some of those involved also started to turn to less obvious hardware questions, however. What...

The successful flight of Space Shuttle Discovery has rekindled the dream of commercial ventures into outer space. That's good news for local companies that could benefit as the industry shifts from a government program to private ventures. The International Space Business Council last week released the "2005 State of the Space Industry" report, which calculates that spending from commercial services and government programs soared to $103 billion in 2004 and could reach the astronomical level of $158 billion by 2010. "With the diversity of the sector ranging from Wal-Mart's IT network to NASA Mars missions to the military's hunt for...

PASADENA -- With the Ansari X Prize claimed, ever better and cheaper technologies available and anxious scientists hungry for enhanced space exploration, some local space enthusiasts are convinced the time has come for commercial space missions to take off. It's been more than a year since Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne became the first commercial rocket to carry a man into space above the Mojave Desert. Last month, The Planetary Society attempted to launch an entirely privately funded solar sail mission to prove that a spacecraft could be propelled by the momentum of the sun's rays. Over the course of five decades...

TGV stands for “Two guys and a van” and got their start trying to figure out how to reduce the cost of spaceflight operations. They have discovered a very interesting market: suborbital imagery. The Bush Administration announced plans last week to restart plutonium 238 production. For $1.5 billion over 30 years, they get about 5 kilograms a year of plutonium whose main use is for thermoelectric generation to power classified military applications. $1.5 billion is a lot of money. If you add in the $9.5 billion here and the $25 billion there we are talking a pretty good chunk of...

Paul G. Allen's first foray into rocketry, as he recalls it, was inauspicious. "My cousin and I tried to build a rocket out of an aluminum armchair leg," he said. At just 12 years old, the future billionaire raided his chemistry set for zinc and sulfur, and packed the fuel mixture into the tube. He got the formula right, but had not looked up the melting point of aluminum.

ARLINGTON, Virginia – The long-awaited and long-delayed debut of the privately-built Falcon 1 rocket has a launch date in sight. "August would be a good bet," said Elon Musk, chairman and chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) of El Segundo, California. The rocketeer and his team are anxiously awaiting liftoff of a Titan 4 carrying a classified payload from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California – now slated to take to the air around mid-July, he said.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado – Entrepreneurs offer great promise in transforming the business of space, be it for spurring innovative space applications to hauling the public into space. That was the consensus from the panelists on "The Entrepreneurial Spirit" session held Wednesday here at the 21st National Space Symposium. Panel moderator, Courtney Stadd, President of Capitol Solutions, noted that Mike Griffin, newly nominated to take the helm of NASA, brings to the space agency "entrepreneurial sensibilities" – something unique in its history.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Mar. 17, 2005) Entrepreneurial businesses on the cutting edge of space developments will be featured in a focus panel at the 21st National Space Symposium, scheduled for April 4-7 at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. Veteran space consultant and former NASA Chief of Staff Mr. Courtney Stadd will lead a discussion of “Entrepreneurial Spirit” at 9:15 am on April 5. Joining Stadd on the panel will be Mr. James W. Benson, founder, chairman and chief executive officer, SpaceDev; Dr. Peter Diamandis, chairman and chief executive officer, Zero-Gravity Corporation; Mr. David Gump, president, Transformational Space Corporation LLC; Dr....

Recent news brings us the story of “space pioneers” launching privately funded craft into the heavens. A special prize is offered to the first private aerospace corporation who can successfully take a pilot and a “space tourist” into orbit.