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" On the technical side, Apollo 8 was mainly a test flight for the Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft. The main spacecraft system that needed testing on a real lunar flight was the onboard navigation system. "

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" Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don't get the rocket back for inspection. "

Henry Spencer

Always

Going

Painful

" SpaceX does seem to have had a run of bad luck, with its first three launches all failing. "

" An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept: that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket carrying the relatively heavy Orion spacecraft. "

" The Orion capsule uses an escape system quite like that of the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s and 70s: an 'escape tower' containing a solid-fuel rocket that will pull it up and away from Ares I in a pinch. "

Henry Spencer

Rocket

Space

" Rocket engines generally are simpler than jet engines, not more complicated. "

" Liquid oxygen is one of the cheapest manufactured substances on Earth. In large quantities, it costs pennies per kilogram - cheaper than milk or beer. "

" As plans for the first lunar landing started to be made, nobody had really thought about who would be out first. "

" Sometimes a malfunctioning test setup actually gives the tested system a chance to show what it can do in an unrehearsed emergency. During a test of an Apollo escape system in the 1960s, the escape system successfully got the capsule clear of a malfunctioning test rocket. "

" Past experience, on the shuttle and the Titan rockets, suggests that large multi-segment solid rockets have a probability of failure of 0.5 to 1 per cent. "

" Sometimes people wonder why aeroplanes are so cheap and rockets are so expensive. Even the most superficial comparison shows one obvious difference: aeroplane engines use outside air to burn their fuel, while rockets have to carry their own oxidisers along. "

" Technically and financially, it might still make sense to give up on Ares I and simply write off the money spent on it, but politically, that's probably impossible. "

" My one concern is that when money gets tight, it's easy to cut R&D funding that isn't tied to a specific project - look at what's happened to NASA's aviation research. "

" Reusable rockets promise much easier testing because you should usually get them back, and you can debug as you go rather than having to get everything perfect the first time. "

" Not until the space shuttle started flying did NASA concede that some astronauts didn't have to be fast-jet pilots. And at that point, sure enough, women started becoming astronauts. "

" In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did. "

" Supplying fuel for a Mars expedition from the lunar surface is often suggested, but it's hard to make it pay off - Moon bases are expensive, and just buying more rockets to launch fuel from Earth is relatively cheap. "

" Progress requires setbacks; the only sure way to avoid failure is not to try. "

" The communications delays between Earth and Mars can be half an hour or more, so the people on the ground can't participate minute by minute in Mars surface activities. "

Henry Spencer

People

Earth

" Trying to build a spaceship by making an aeroplane fly faster and higher is like trying to build an aeroplane by making locomotives faster and lighter - with a lot of effort, perhaps you could get something that more or less works, but it really isn't the right way to proceed. "

" If your goal is to change the world, you can't start by doing things the same old way because it sells better. "

" Foul-ups in testing are not uncommon, especially when the test setup is being tried for the first time. "

" Claiming that solid rockets are necessary for a heavy-lift launcher is obvious nonsense. "

" Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular. "

" In the first few years, it was at least plausible to come in in the morning and read all the Usenet traffic that had come in, and 15 minutes later be off doing something useful. "

" Since SpaceX's very beginnings, they have talked about recovering and reusing at least the first stages of their rockets. "

" Historically, the U.S.'s big launchers fly seldom enough that their costs are dominated by annual upkeep of facilities and staff, not by the actual cost of each launch. The expensive part is maintaining the launch capability, not actually conducting launches. "

" The key virtue of orbital assembly is that it eliminates the tight connection between the size of the expedition and the size of the rockets used to launch it. "

" Testing a parachute drop of a heavy object is not simple. "

" Speaking of photography, while the Apollo 8 crew shot hundreds of photos, there was one that got everybody's attention: a blue-and-white Earth rising over a gray moonscape. "

" Is manned space exploration important? Yes - not least because it simply works much better than sending robots. "