Survival Arts

The future is not NASA's

To cheer myself up, I've been perusing the X Prize website. As Dale Amon points out:

NASA will go to Boeing or Lockmart for a replacement. They are not going to talk to XCOR [spelling corrected by me - ed.] or Armadillo or any of the other companies who will develop the true space ships.

What is my guess? I will suggest we'll see a half hearted program for a shuttle replacement initiated. It will run over budget or be stillborn like every other such program in the last 15 years. The ISS schedule will stretch out to a completion date of 2010, almost 30 years after Ronald Reagan called for a space station to be completed in 10 years. An X-Prize space ship will fly suborbital this year or next year and there will be private tourists on private suborbital flights by 2006 and orbital by 2010. NASA will then buy one for crew turnaround. The Russians will get a big capital infusion to turn out more Soyez and Protons.

On a related note, just yesterday I received by mail, from a former co-worker who had borrowed it, my sole copy of Victor Koman's Kings of the High Frontier, which I'm astounded to see is $75 new on Amazon, and about half that used. My copy is not leaving my house again anytime soon!