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I had planned on visiting the Masten Aerospace hanger as well, but as we ran into Dave at XCOR I got business out of the way and did not really have an excuse to sandwich that much desired visit into our schedule. Time had slipped by far too rapidly and Rand was due at the Mariah Hotel to get his Press credentials.

Since I was also doing articles and had not yet had any guarantee of getting into the event as I was still just wait listed, I chanced showing up at the press desk, egged on by some Press friends. It did not work and in fact a woman named Jackie looked like she was about to turf me out of the building on my ear and thereafter seemed to glare at me every time she saw me.

My main chance at getting in was more official and as it turned out, it was successful. After Rand left on the press bus I tried the VIP desk. They were much more helpful and after showing a key email and talking with a few people in Virgin Galactic I was presented with one of the last of the stainless steel VIP badges and told to hurry on board the last bus.

The VIP registration desk.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The busses were the only way onto the field and even they were held up waiting for obeisance to red tape. All the buses, whether from LA or the hotel, were held in a queue and all were released to the taxiway at once.

The party site was at the end of the runway, hard up against the exhaust deflector and far from the hanger area. There were large signs which I correctly took to be part of the night time light show and a grouping of tents, one very large clear plastic covered structure and

The main tent.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

two smaller inflated balloon structures. It was all very 21st Century.

Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Inside of the tents was the sort of environment you would expect from a party held by Richard Branson for a few hundred friends. The first tent held the coat and bag check and was the point at which we were given our very nice Puma ‘VirginGalactic’ jackets and ski caps.

OCST Director George Nield deep in a conversation inside the first balloon tent.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The interiors of the two balloon tents were quite nice looking

Interior of second balloon tent.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The second balloon tent exits at the jet exhaust deflector.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Outside the second tent I found a sculptress still at work carving a space-suited figure out of a block of ice. As it turned out one of the sponsors was Absolut and carved ice played a big part in the night’s festivities. I do suspect at the planning stage they did not think it would be so cold that there would be no melting to worry about.

It was in no danger of melting.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

There was another bar inside the main tent and then the main auditorium area. People were collecting there as the speeches were due to start soon. There were little knots of conversation as people made contacts of opportunity or met with old friends.

Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The fellow in orange is Dick Rutan, the man who along with Jeanna
Yeager flew the first non-stop flight around the world.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The global media were out in force. Note Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize Foundation in the lower right. He is the man responsible for this explosion in commercial manned space flight.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Brett Silcox from NSS was busy chatting with targets of opportunity..
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I walked around the tent to get a feel for the territory.

This is the tarmac area where I expected we would see SpaceShipTwo
after dark.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The media were everywhere and interviewing everyone.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

There was a full scale replica of SpaceShipOne, the craft whose first flight I live blogged from here some five years ago.

The X-Prize Foundation arranged for the creation of replicas of SpaceShipOne.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The main stage was ready for occupation and speechifying.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Tomorrow I will cover the speeches.

This is the third in a series of articles. The previous one is here

A few of my photos also appear in Rand Simberg’s Popular Mechanics article.

Rand Simberg and I left his house in LA at a time he predicted would be optimal from a traffic standpoint, and as he used to commute to work at Rotary Rocket several times a week in the Nineties, he ought to know. We were in rain and overcast until one set of hills before Mojave when the Native American gods blessed the undertaking with a full rainbow bridge. Since photo ops of this sort are not easily scheduled with higher authorities, Rand pulled over.

Rand Simberg peers intently into the distance in hopes of spotting the pot of gold we need for our Wyoming Aerospace venture
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I have not been up to Mojave for a few years and some things have changed. The gate guardian Phantom is now at the airport entry, and it has been joined by a rather rare 1960’s vintage Convair airliner. Most striking to me was Roton standing proud not far from the main building. The first time I saw it was inside the Rotary Rocket High Bay back in 1999 and at that time I was only allowed to record it in my memory.

Roton is the first commercial space Gate Guardian that I am aware of
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Those who have been around the space scene for awhile will remember the Space Studies Institute. It was once a major player but seemed to fade out over the last 15 years and some thought it had died completely. Not so! Lee Valentine and Robin Snelson have moved it from Princeton to an office inside the terminal just behind Rand.

Obligatory tourist style photo of Rand. As if he has not been here a few thousand times before…
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

First stop was the Voyager restaurant, an amenity that is fairly recent. Lunch used to require a trip into town. The first thing I noticed coming in the door was that I knew a large fraction of the people there; the second thing I noticed was the private jet parked just outside with a G-number and a Virgin logo. I wonder who that might belong to?

Familiar faces in the lunch crowd at the Voyager.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Care to hazard a guess at the owner?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

After chatting awhile in the lounge we found that someone was over in the SSI office and we could connect to the net or work from there if we wished. As it turned out, we mostly just talked and looked over the large collection of commercial and space industrialization books lining the walls.

Just hangin at the SSI office.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

In the next installment I will cover the visit with our old friends and colleagues at XCOR.

You can find an intro article here.

I attended Alan Boyle’s book release signing tonight amongst a group of familiar faces. As such things go, this one was a great deal of fun as attendees were actually rather familiar with the material and the debate to which Alan has taken the ‘Pluto is a Planet’ side. If you are interested in the history of the whole debate over what is a planet according to astronomers, this is a worthwhile addition to your shelf.

Alan Boyle reading from his newly released book, “The Case For Pluto” at Barnes and Nobles in The Grove in LA.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Alan’s book release also presents me with the excuse I have been waiting for to throw in my tuppence in this ‘debate’.

For astronomical purposes, the reclassification of Pluto to officially be a scare quoted ‘Dwarf Planet’ is useful. I can also admit their classification of every element other than Hydrogen and Helium as a metal might also be useful… to them. On the other hand, neither classification is of much use to anyone else. Oxygen might be an astronomer’s metal, but to one like myself whose undergraduate degree was in Electrical Engineering, this method of sorting elements is rather silly. astronomer’s definition of planet is likewise rather worthless outside their discipline.

For those of us who look upon space as a place for settlement, commerce, and a source of resources to feed a solar system wide industrial economy, knowing whether a body clears its orbit of other matter is a “So what?” issue. Settlement and industry have different concerns and will most likely require a more complex system of classification. A planet with a thousand kilometer deep atmosphere that gradually turns to a liquid and then a solid phase is not useful for the same things as a body with a rocky surface. There may be temperate bodies out there covered with hundred mile deep oceans of water; there may be ones with molten rock surfaces. Each presents unique characteristics to the future explorer or industrialist.

From my point of view a planet has sufficient gravity to make it round-ish. Ceres and many of the new bodies outside of Pluto’s orbit are therefore planets in my book. I propose that just as Electrical Engineers ignore the astronomer’s definition of metal, the rest of us should ignore their definition of planet as well.

It is not everyday you find an email in your email box telling you someone you know is a real, honest to goodness spy, but that is what happened to me this morning. According to The Huffington Post:

Nozette allegedly informed the agent that he had, in the past, held top security clearances and had access to U.S. satellite information, the affidavit said.

The scientist also allegedly said that he would be willing to answer questions about this information in exchange for money. The agent explained that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, would arrange for a communication system so Nozette could pass on information in a post office box.

Nozette agreed to provide regular, continuing information and asked for an Israeli passport, the affidavit alleged.

Personally I find it difficult to become exercised over someone passing information to an ally who may well use that information to do horrible things to people who really, really deserve it. It would be rather different had he sold information to China, North Korea, Iran or one of the other current or potential future enemies.

Oh, and the personal connection? I have crossed paths with Stu off and on over the last thirty years as he was once active with the L5 Society and was a leading figure in the Clementine lunar mapping project for which we (the National Space Society) awarded him one of our highest honours.

Stewartt Nozette receives the National Space Society’s Space Pioneer Award at the 1994 International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Toronto for his work on Clementine.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I still hold Stewart in the highest esteem and if I have anything to do with it, we will still reserve that space for his name on the Luna City wall of “Heroes of the Frontier” .

The following was sent to us by our occasional Samizdata correspondent and secret agent within the heart of the MSM, Taylor Dinerman.

Writing in the Washington Post Adam Nagorski the former Moscow corespondent (Reagan’s Missile Defense Triumph) wants us to believe that Obama’s September 17th decision to cancel the deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic of a missile defense system based on the one now deployed in Alaska and California, is somehow a triumph for Reagan’s SDI (Star Wars) concept.   Like they said to the tomcat when they brought out the snippers, “Its for your own good”.  

He writes, “The debate is no longer focused on whether to build such a system, but on what kind of system will do the job better against what sorts of threats. ” That debate was over long ago. The Democrats, in the 1990s under Clinton, came to the decision that publicly at least, they could no long promote the idea that the US population should   be totally defenseless against nuclear attack.  

Either Nagoski is ignorant or he is being disingenuous. In 1993 after canceling the first Bush administration’s space based Brilliant Pebbles with the words “I’m taking the stars out of Star Wars”., the Clinton administration could not simply abandon missile defense completely, instead, like the Obama administration they sought to proceed with the smallest and least offensive possible program.  They ordered the Defense Department to concentrate its efforts on defending against tactical and medium ranged missiles.   

After the GOP gained control of Congress in 1994 Clinton’s team faced unrelenting political pressure from Congress to build up America’s anti ballistic   missile defenses. They chose to support a few programs including the Navy one that Obama is now touting as if it were something new, and the Airborne Laser (ABL)   program that the administration has eviscerated.     

Most significantly Clinton and his team promoted something called National Missile Defense, a mid course interceptor system designed to handle ICBMs. It was this program that Bush, on taking office decided to proceed with especially after he withdrew from the much violated ABM treaty. This has long been the most controversial part of the US Missile Defense program since provides a direct, though weak protection to the US civilian population. For the Democrats and their allies who still believe in Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) this is intolerable.  

Bush and the GOP pushed ahead and now there are about 30 Ground Based Interceptors (GBIs) deployed in Alaska and California, along with a network of sensors. The Obama administration is choosing to cut the number of deployed GBIs to from the 44 ones planned by their predecessors to the ones now in the ground. The Bush plan was in itself inadequate, so this cut means that the US population is almost as completely vulnerable as it was under Clinton.  

Like Clinton, Obama knows little about missile defense or about nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. At least Bush had flown air defense missions in a nuclear capable aircraft, the F-102. To imagine the plan to deploy sea based SM-3 missiles as a substitute for the GBIs that were to be based in Poland is laughable, as is the idea that sometime around 2020 there will be a version of the SM-3 that can do the job the GBIs are now doing.  

The SM-3 is an excellent missile and Vice Admiral J.D.Williams (ret.), the father of sea based missile defense, is to be congratulated. It is however,   not a system that can defend the US population against an ICBM attack. That is the main question that Nagorski tries to avoid. The Democrats are still doing everything they can to prevent a real space based missile defense. The other question as to why Bush failed to revive his father’s Brilliant Pebbles program is a tough one for him and for the GOP. The little they did is now being cut to ribbons by President Pantywaist (as he was referred to in the London Telegraph.) Trying to put a Reaganesque happy face on this fact is typical of the way the MSM is willing to make a fool of itself for its man.

Taylor Dinerman

There is a rumour floating about that a lot of water has been found on the moon:

Reliable sources report that there will be a press conference at NASA HQ at 2:00 pm this Thursday featuring lunar scientist Carle Pieters from Brown University.

The topic of the press briefing will be a paper that will appear in this week’s issue of Science magazine wherein results from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) aboard Chandrayaan-1 will be revealed.

There is both good and bad to this discovery from our viewpoint. Much will depend on whether the deposits are limited to polar cold traps as has long been suspected or are to be find over a broader polar area. The presence of ice cuts down the required consumables budget for any lunar settlement. The fewer bulk imports required, the nearer the time at which settlement is feasible. The downside is an International Regime led by the United Nations no doubt will be created to ration this valuable resource.

My presumption is they have finally found large deposits of real ice inside some of the polar region craters. The theory for the last thirty years has been that when comets strike the moon, most of the volatiles escape into space, but some linger long enough to find their way into the shadowed polar craters where the temperature is so low that water cannot remain a gas even in vacuum. About 25 years ago I helped a friend of mine, Dr. Francis Graham, to gain funding from the Space Studies Institute to do some telescope work on this problem. His results were negative but I believe Francis may have been one of the first to attempt the search.