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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Some reasons to be cheerful

Here is an interesting article over at the Wall Street Journal about how Microsoft’s Paul Allen is faring with his own space venture. Rand Simberg weighs in.

All this private sector space stuff reminds me of this marvellously entertaining book by Victor Koman, although I agreed with an old American friend of mine that the book jacket design was a bit poor.

I hope Dale Amon doesn’t mind my writing about his chosen specialist subject!

6 comments to Some reasons to be cheerful

  • Paul Marks

    I wish Mr Paul Allen, and his friends, success.

  • It seems at last that we are on the verge of the real space age that we’ve waited for so long. Just had to clear the dead weight of national space administrations and get to the heart of the business – oportunity.

    That is where the money is to be made, sub-orbital hops between continents, sub-orbital zero-g flights, orbital space hotels and finally on to Moon Base Alpha.

    Shame Pan Am went bust – I always fancied a trip from an orbiting space station to the moon like in 2001 – A Space Oddessy.

    The thing that really annoys me is that because of the restriction of space to national governments, we’re somewhere around 30-40 years behind the curve.

    However, with folks like Burt Rutan and Paul Allen coming up with real working solutions to the problem of increasing access to space, we’ve got a real chance of getting off this rock and really spreading forth. It will be like the days of the Wild West writ large.

    I’m probably too old already to take even a sub-orbital flight, but I hope my children and grand-children will have this opertunity.

    Per ardua ad astra!

  • Dale Amon

    Too busy to say much now. Concept is a bigger version of SS1 and SS2; we are indeed in the early days of the real space age, just like the decade or so after the Wright Brothers.

    And note… the real problem has been the pork based space flight model, not entirely a NASA issue. Lori Garver has been fighting to support the commercial space folk, and to my surprise, Mike Griffen, former NASA head and the one responsible for the previous generation of giant pork rocket, is one of the Stratolaunch team members.

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