[FPSPACE] Happy New Year! 21st Century! 3rd Millenium!

[Keith Gottschalk]

Dear FPSPACE-ers,

     The reward for the numerate is alibis for a three-in-one celebration. I think all of us owe especially Jennifer Green,  & also fellow spaceflight fans, & astronomers, a happy, healthy & wealthy new year, new century & new millennium. All three epoch's start with humankind's PERMANENT, uninterrupted residence in space. 

     There could be no better start than Dan Goldin backing down from his "cease work" order on the Pluto-Charon flyby to issue his RFP.  Three cheers for The Planetary Society's petition with its ten thousand signatures. My only worry is that since it is a flyby, not an orbiter, & Pluto & Charon take 6 days to rotate on their axes, we will still only get images of not much over 50-60% of their surfaces, as with Mercury.

    Whatever procrastinations & budget over-runs the X-33, X-33A & X-34 face, they at least, at last bite the bullet that Congress ducked on the shuttle a quarter century ago. Higher R&D costs are the trade-off you must make to get  RLV operational costs down to lower than ELVs.  By the close of this coming decade in 2010, one of Lockmart, Boeing, Orbital Sciences, or just-surviving Kistler, will surely succeed where Roton & MirCorp did not.

wishing all of you an out-of-this-world celebration,

Keith Gottschalk