Matt Wronkiewicz's Weblog

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The Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee has drawn up several alternate architectures for NASA to pursue its mission of sending astronauts beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). For a more complete summary, see "Future of NASA: Program of Record". The third architecture in the list is ISS focused, with an increased budget of about $3 billion per year.

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Previous: Program of Record
Next: ISS Focused (Increased Budget)

The Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee has drawn up several alternate architectures for NASA to pursue its mission of sending astronauts beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). For a more complete summary, see "Future of NASA: Program of Record". The second architecture in the list is ISS focused, constrained to fit the projected budget. This architecture is not recommended by the committee because it… Read More

Next: ISS Focused (Constrained Budget)

The Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee has drawn up several alternate architectures for NASA to pursue its mission of sending astronauts beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). At the final public meeting, the members presented and then discussed all of the architectures that would be presented in their final report. This presents an opportunity for the space community to digest and decide on a course of action before the President and Congress even have a chance to read it. I have… Read More

Thanks to the committee's Twitter feed and some folks over at NASASpaceFlight.com, I was able to piece together the final options that will appear in the committee's initial report, to be presented to the White House on Friday. In its final report, the committee will not recommend one particular option, but will simply present the facts. Each of these options represents the combination of several architectural choices, adjusted for budget and schedule. Some architectural choices were discarded entirely. Several options will be presented as "for reference… Read More

The final public meeting of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee was today, and it looks like they did their job extraordinarily well. They really kept their focus on the goal of extending human civilization beyond Earth, and this was reflected in all of the options they are considering. To summarize, their recommended options are: maintain ISS and give up on NASA exploration, spend a little more to explore free space, and spend a little more to explore the moon. All of these options included some common recommendations. First, they called Ares I unaffordable and redundant, and recommended dumping it. Given their findings,… Read More

I'm really looking forward to hearing the final public meeting of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee tomorrow. My hope is that the committee will come up with a set of options that lead us along the way to becoming a truly spacefaring society rather than distracting us away from it. Reading the summary of Dr. John Marburger's testimony last week here really sharpened my view of what we are doing and space and where we need to go from here. What are we doing in space? Not enough.

The greatest achievement of the 20th century, in… Read More

The Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee is currently assessing options for sending astronauts beyond low Earth orbit, given budget realities. As they requested input from the public, I sent them my thoughts on the options they have presented. Here is my letter:

My name is Matt Wronkiewicz. I am a computer programmer with little involvement in the space industry, but I am excited about both the possibility of visiting outer space some day and the potential benefits from its economic… Read More

Thanks to the generous offer by Mallory and Joan Green to let me stay with them in Washington DC, I was able to go to March Storm this year. March Storm is an event organized by ProSpace to bring together space enthusiasts for three days of lobbying congress. The specifics of what we talk about are different from year to year, but the overall goal is to encourage more private commercial activity in space, and to reorient the national space program toward solving real problems instead of exploring for the sake of exploration.… Read More

I've finished my first Google Gadget. It's an up-to date map of the Earth using satellite imagery from the Aqua and Terra observation satellites. The satellite data gets downloaded from NASA GSFC and turned into tiles which work with the Google Maps API. No images older than 36 hours are used. There are other satellite maps available online which are more up to date or more complete, but not both.

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