Scott Lowther of up-ship.com (as conservative as they come) laments that private business actually has a poor record of preservation.

A few years back, he was on the verge of being homeless—he, a repository of aerospace knowledge.

That is proof that he an others need something like Marshall in that private industry doesn’t think twice about dumping history.

You would think the techbrahs would fund him—but they haven’t.

Yes Musk has gone after social media—but pest though he may be…Soros isn’t afraid to spend bank in terms of bailing out members of rent-a-mobs.

Lowther is a national asset…and should be treated like it.

A whole lot of stuff researched and created during Project Apollo. Congress abandoned far more than just Apollo.

Another reason for the commercialization of space. Commercial companies would be eager for much of what NASA has researched but was then abandoned by its funding agency, Congress.

If Gemini is to be believed:

“Southern California Logistics Airport: Exquadrum has a test site at this airport for liquid rocket engines and solid rocket motors, including hypergolics testing. Tulsa International Airport: Agile Space Industries is developing the Tulsa Space Test Center adjacent to this airport for advanced in-space rocket engine testing, according to Agile Space Industries.”

It wasn’t long ago that the USAF itself thought about bringing back the Martin Astrorocket concept:
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/martin-ar-14b.2928/#post-23541

“Note: sometime around 2002, I was contacted by someone at Lockheed-Denver about the Astrorocket. Seems that someone in the USAF had expressed interest in a modernized Astrorocket, so the LM folk decided to dig up all their references on the AR to make a proper response. As it turns out, even though their facility had done the studies… they had nothing left on it. Someone googled AR, found my website, and negotiated a copy of the original Martin report.”

When I hear things like that–it makes me seven different kinds of angry—fogbank…how much else has been lost to the dumpster?

O/T
I saw this on Hackaday that may be of interest–model rocket sim:
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/04/a-simple-simulator-for-model-rocket-performance/

From the article:

“They’re in final assembly,” she [Dana Weigel, ISS program manager] said of Sierra Space. “They’re doing a lot of tests, and they’re doing what I call final certification work. Some of the big key areas that they’re focused on is the software certification. You’ve got to test end-to-end all the different software functions. So that’s a big focus area for them. And then they’re still working on certification in the prop [propulsion/thruster] system.”

I’m not sure that this is a fundamental problem. It could be that Sierra Space had not been as prepared for all the different end-to-end software testing. Sierra Space is a fairly new company, so it should not be surprising that they were caught as unprepared as the stalwart Boeing was. NASA may have changed the requirements between the beginning of 2020 and now. It is possible that the software has only minor or no problems but that they have to write more test software than they had intended and now are spending more time than originally scheduled for running these tests. However, if they are finding and fixing software problems, then Starliner has shown us that finding them now is much better than finding them in flight.
______________
Jeff Wright wrote: “The United States lost practice with making small spacecraft–and that kind of knowhow only persists if you stay in practice with propulsion …”

The U.S. builds plenty of small spacecraft. Besides, Dream Chaser is not so small. It fits into the category of Extra Heavy satellite, over 15,000 pounds.

The problem is not being out of practice with propulsion but with straying from hypergolic propulsion systems to thrusters that are less familiar.

From the article:

“We wanted to have a fuel system that was green instead of using hypergolics, so we could land it on a runway and we could walk up to the vehicle without being in hazmat suits,” Tom Vice, then Sierra’s chief executive, told Ars in late 2023. “That was hard, I have to say.”

They had a reason for avoiding the hypergolics. This would allow them to approach the returning vehicle and get it off the runway fairly quickly, freeing up the runway for use by other aircraft. If they had hypergolics, then the runway could be tied up for hours, and that would greatly limit the airports that would welcome Dream Chaser for landings. The point of having Dream Chaser land horizontally is the ability to land at any airport in the world so that the returning payload comes back close to the customer rather than thousands of kilometers away.

I stand corrected on Dream Chaser’s propulsion. It has engines that can use hydrogen peroxide as both a monopropellant and a bipropellant via the afterburner-like injection of RP-1 into the monopropellant exhaust stream.

Buran used super-refined kerosene (Sintin) and LOX. I have read in secret projects that kerosene and nitric acid might be good for any shuttle replacement.

Most jets use kerosene (propellor planes still use leaded gasoline).

The idea was to keep everything as aircraft like as possible

I thought trouble might be coming from elsewhere–but Ars may very well be correct here.

The United States lost practice with making small spacecraft–and that kind of knowhow only persists if you stay in practice with propulsion–hard to do with economical and ecological zealots claiming pork this, poison that.

Who “should have went with the bloody hypergolics?” Can’t be Sierra Space as they did go with the bloody hypergolics for Dream Chaser. So who? The Brits? The Chinese? And “bloody hypergolics” for what? We’re not bloody mind readers. You have a tendency toward gnomic declarations that assume we all understand the context you have in mind. We don’t. A lot of your comments are mini-singularities – no information emerges from their mass.

All,

The linked info about the new ISRO Moon/Mars simulation hab doesn’t say exactly where in Ladakh it is located, but that entire province is a border region surrounded by hostile territory – Pakistan, Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and the PRC. There would seem to be a reasonable probability the simulation hab’s residents might face challenges other than those related to the site’s approximate resemblance to places off-planet.