I know, it's a cliche´, but it's most of what I'm holding on to right now. Life's been crazy for at least the last month, and one of the big factors was build-up to a TEMPO balloon flight. We chose not to do any real pre-advertising in case there were problems, which there were. We flew yesterday, but the payload detached from the balloon early. We recovered the hardware mostly intact, and there's talk of doing a re-flight, but I'm not ready to commit to it yet, especially on a short timeline because life is crazy...

Update: Stratofox, a group of amateur (in this case it's TRULY because they don't charge, not their skill level) recovery folks who were tracking our flight remotely. Here is their description of the events. They gave us our initial search coordinates for the payload, and we found it within an hour.

Interesting discussion going on at Rand's House (while he moves to CA). It started with a discussion about the need for heavy-lift, and sort of turned into one about the need for heavy-delivery to the moon. Unfortunately, I think one of the commenters is a little out there, but it got me thinking, and led to this post. I guess posting to someone else's web page is better than doing nothing on the web...

Here it is. I've glanced through it, and not seen anything huge changing since earlier discussions. I expect some sort of move for the 'flexible path' option which, if played right, could actually work quite well for the future of humankind in space regardless of a government program. Given what I've seen since 2004, however, the odds of it being played right are slim. I don't know much about the new NASA administrator, though.

As much as I think it would do more long-term harm than good, I hold slim hope that the current administration may be looking for something audacious and hopeful to change directions in the near future.