Rocketeers on Bloomberg radio, in Air & Space mag

There's a transcript and a nice write-up of an interview I gave Bloomberg Radio recently at bloomberg.com. I talked with Robin Schatz about the viability of commercial spaceflight as a business and a bit about Bigelow Aerospace and other space ventures. There's a mugshot of me there too, taken on the Bloomberg roof.

The Bloomberg headquarters in New York City is every bit as astounding as the Bigelow plant. I wish I had gotten some pictures. The lobby features soaring, multistory windows, a vast snack bar full of free food and drinks. The side areas somehow manage to convey the same open-to-the-sky feeling, stuffed as they are with TV studios, radio booths, acres of flat screen TVs streaming news feeds, and hundreds of reporters pounding away at keyboards. Doing my interview there, I had the same science-fiction-come-true feeling I had talking with Robert Bigelow as we looked out of his conference room windows at space station modules being built.

Also check out the current issue of Air & Space Smithsonian and the magazine's website for an excerpt of chapter 6 of Rocketeers, about Rocketplane.

PopSci cover story on Astrium spaceplane

The October issue of Popular Science is out, with my cover story on EADS Astrium's new tourist spaceship design.

The ship, the size of a business jet, with twin jet engines for takeoffs and landings, and a single rocket engine for the boost to space, bears more than a passing resemblance to Rocketplane Global's spaceship design.

That's no accident, as Astrium's chief technical officer Robert Lainé confirmed for my article. After looking at all the major designs being floated, including air-launch like SpaceShipOne, vertical-takeoff-and-landing like Armadillo Aerospace and Blue Origin's designs, the Astrium team settled on Rocketplane's jet-and-rocket hybrid concept because they felt it would be the most cost-effective to operate from multiple airports.

Astrium is a wholly owned subsidiary of the company that owns Airbus, and it is also a major contractor for the European Space Agency. The company plans to build the as-yet-unnamed spaceplane for separate owner-operators whose orders for the ship would help finance its construction.

C-SPAN's Book TV, NPR's Marketplace, and Amazon.com

For those of you who missed my talk about my book Rocketeers on C-SPAN's Book TV last weekend, you'll have another chance to catch it on Saturday, August 25 at 10:45 a.m. Eastern Time. You can also watch it online right now at www.booktv.org.

Coming up, I'll be on Marketplace, broadcast nationally on National Public Radio. I taped the segment yesterday, but the producers didn't know whether it would air Monday or Tuesday. Check your local listings for show times, and check the show's archives after it airs.

Have you read Rocketeers? Think it's good enough to recommend? Head over to Amazon.com and be the first to post a review!

Bamboozled by Google

And now a word from our (former) sponsor....

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed the appearance of ads served by Google to the right of this post late last year, and then their disappearance a couple of weeks ago.

I ran those ads through the Google Adsense program and saw a (very) modest return from them--until Google abruptly terminated my Adsense account with no other explanation than that my site had generated some type of activity that was against my terms of service.

Oh, and Google took back all the money that was in my account.

No explanation for exactly what the offending activity was. The email told me I couldn't reply to the automated email, that I could only appeal the decision to cancel my account through a contact form on the Google Adsense website. The form in question had a required field disabled, again making contact impossible.

Did I mention that Google took all my money?

A somewhat testy note sent to Google's press office resulted in another automated email a couple of days later reaffirming that I'd been canned by Google and I wouldn't be allowed back. No mention of giving me my money back, either. In other words: "You just spent the last few months serving our ads for free. So long sucka! Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck!"

I'm not the only one who's had this experience. See here and here for a couple of good blog posts. This article by Benjamin Cohen on the Times of London website gives an excellent account of this and other questionable practices by Google's Adsense program. Anyone else have a tale of woe? Post it here.

Seems to me Google's looking at a class action lawsuit when the number of us stiffed Web publishers reaches a critical mass. In the meantime, Cohen notes that Yahoo!'s ad-serving program comes with the "right to speak to a real human being, 24/7."

Bigelow Aerospace jumping straight to manned habitats

I've just had word from Bigelow Aerospace, now at work on the first commercial space station in Las Vegas, that the company will leapfrog its next planned test module and skip right to its first habitable space station.

That's exciting news for anyone who's been following the company's recent successes--two uncrewed test modules now in orbit and performing flawlessly. These guys are making commercial spaceflight look easy.

The previous schedule called for the first commercial space station up by 2012. No word yet on when the habitable Sundancer module will launch under the new plan, except this statement from company head Robert Bigelow via press release:

"With this decision made, the future of entrepreneurial, private sector-driven space habitats and complexes could be arriving much earlier than any of us had previously anticipated."

DEKA's prosthetic arm

I've been here in Anaheim, California for the every-18-month DARPA Technology Symposium put on by the Pentagon's mad scientist department. There's Chuck Hildreth modeling a DARPA-funded prosthetic arm built by DEKA Research, the company run by Segway inventor Dean Kamen
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This is the arm's first public appearance, and it, along with prosthetics being developed for the same program by Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab (APL), stole the show.

Using a couple of joysticks, one operated by Hildreth's stump, the other in his right shoe, Hildreth demonstrated how he can operate a drill, pick up and eat M&M's one at a time, and shake hands.

Those little hoses on his belt feed air to a set of bladders in Hildreth's harness, continuously adjusting the arm's fit and the way its 9-pound weight is distributed across Hildreth's back and shoulders in response to the arm's movements.

Hildreth told me the system is extremely comfortable, and relatively easy to use. He'd been working with it for a total of 30 hours, and he already seemed quite proficient at using it.

DARPA Urban Challenge semi-finalists, location announced

DARPA director Tony Tether has just released the list of 36 teams that made it into the semi-finals for the Urban Challenge for autonomous vehicles capable navigating through city streets with other moving traffic. List here:

http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/teamlist.asp

The event will be held at the military urban training facility at Victorville, CA on November 3.

Makes sense that it wouldn't be held in a populated city.

More updates soon as I finish up the last day here at the DARPA Technology Symposium in Anaheim, California.