Updating the Integrated Space Plan 65
garyebickford writes 'Space Finance Group (in which I'm a partner) has launched a Kickstarter to fund updating the "famous Integrated Space Plan", created by Ron Jones at Rockwell International in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and can be found on walls in the industry even today. The new Plan will be a poster, but also will provide the initial core data for a new website. The permanent link will be thespaceplan.com. As additional resources become available the website will be able to contain much more information, with (eventually) advanced data management (possibly including sources like Linked Data) and visualization tools to become a resource for education, research, entertainment, and business analytics. The group also hopes to support curated crowdsourcing of some data, and is talking to Space Development companies about providing data about themselves. They hope to be able to construct new timelines and show the relations between events and entities — companies, agencies, people, etc.'
Re: Nope (Score:3, Informative)
Back in the day there were several thousand printed and distributed, and that was just within the industry. Rockwell International used it as a pr tool, and a copy once hung behind the desk of the NASA administrator. We've been told by some in the space development community that seeing the original is what got them into it. BBC did a documentary on it in 2007. So it continues to be a big deal in the community.
The original was not just "blue sky" fantasies but a compilation of what the engineers of the time considered a reasonable stepwise progression from what they were building - the Shuttle, and the rest of the space technology that has been flying for a while - to what analysis showed would probably be necessary, and possible. If there had been a Congressional hearing on how to go forth, this Plan would have been one of the source materials. Of course the later time frames were increasingly speculative, of necessity. But it was not just a dreamer's fantasy.
But our goal is even less fantastic. A poster is just a snapshot in time and is limited in how much information can be included. But a website does not have those limitations. It will start slowly, but over time we intend the website to be a useful analytics tool where you can see how things are connected as well as information about the companies and agencies. For instance, who owns SeaLaunch? What is their financial status? Their launch schedule? Their success rate? We want to be the resource for all of that.
If the Kickstarter only just barely succeeds the website project will go slowly. (We are encouraging folks who want to help with any of this, from data collection & curation to building the back end, to pledge at the $1 level at least, to get on our contact list.) but if it's wildly successful we'll be able to build the team to make it rock.