I won’t be getting to the conference until tomorrow, but Clark Lindsey has several posts up already with what’s been going on, here, here, here, and here.
And Jeff Foust has interviewed Bob Bigelow, who will be keynoting tomorrow morning.
One thought on Clark’s report:
Tumlinson: The whole Exploration architecture is going to fail because it is financially and politically unsustainable.
He’s right.
Those are the number of years ago, respectively, that Viking 1 landed on Mars, and Apollo XI landed on the moon. I’ll have more thoughts up later, either here or elsewhere. But if you haven’t made plans for dinner tonight to commemorate it, there’s still time.
[Update on holy night]
Alan Boyle, who I expect to see in Las Vegas tomorrow, has a lot of related thoughts and links.
Rear-wheel drive is once again in ascendance.
[Via Kaus]
Howard Dratch has some thoughts on the value of failure for the commercial launch industry. This was resonant with me:
The photographer who shoots and sees that the story he/she wanted to tell was lost, the moment missed, the avenue of seeing not taken, and uses the failure to become Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, or Robert Frank has used failure as a step toward the stars. The question is if there is creativity to see the possibilities of the failure and the guts to put it behind. The new space entrepreneurs may have it, probably have it. The government agencies are a question. Will NASA learn from its mistakes and tragedies as quickly and as well?
It’s apparent to me that NASA has taken lessons from its failures (and from its successes as well, such as Apollo), but strategically, it’s learned the wrong ones.
I’ve had an essay on this subject bubbling around in my brain for a while now that I’ll have to unburden myself of soon.
I just got in on an early morning flight.
I have to say that I really like Delta, at least that flight. Leaves Florida at 7 AM and gets me in to LA at 9 AM, non-stop (the American non-stop leaves at 9:15 and gets in at 11). Comfortable, not too packed (empty seat next to my window) with DirecTV on the seat back, which allowed me to follow the war on Fox and CNN.
Too bad I’m an elite flyer with American.
Probably not much blogging–I’ve got a lot of work to do over the next couple days, then I’m driving to Vegas tomorrow night or early Friday morning for the conference. Maybe some live blogging from there, though, wireless permitting.
Mark Steyn discusses the shocking truth–that George Bush didn’t invent war:
Lawrence Keeley calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. “Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century,” writes Wade, “its war deaths would have totaled two billion people.” Two billion! In other words, we’re the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we’re the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. “The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent.”
…One swallow doesn’t make a summer, of course, but I wonder sometimes if we’re not heading toward a long night of re-primitivization. In his shrewd book Civilization And Its Enemies, Lee Harris writes:
“Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary.”
For many, it still apparently is.
Ben Chertoff has an podcast interview with astronaut Thomas Jones on the implications of the most recent successful Shuttle mission.
If the Democrats were smart, they’d listen to Evan Baye (Birch’s son):
In his speech, Bayh said the party has focused most of its attention on the needs of lower-income Americans, but it also must address issues that matter to people on the next rung up the economic ladder.
“Without an agenda that speaks directly to the middle class and all who aspire to it, we will no longer be the party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Clinton. And we will not be a majority party,” Bayh said, invoking the names of former Democratic presidents.
But they aren’t, so they won’t.
My webmaster, Bill Simon, is coach of a Chinese dragon-boat team, based in Long Beach, CA. He sends link to a video of a close race in Vancouver last month:
Here is the 500M race for the medals in the Comp C division of the 2006 Vancouver (ALCAN) Dragon Boat festival that was held on June 18, 2006. Now you can actually see how close this race was.
LARD (Los Angeles Racing Dragons, our local rivals) came in first (in the lane 4th from the top). We, the Los Angeles Killer Guppies, (in the 3rd lane from the top) came in about 3/4 boat behind them–and that put us in 9th place! We were separated by less than 2.5 second! Our time was 2:09.
I know how intense this was for us on the boat. But now I know what the crowd experienced. This is the closest Dragon Boat race I’ve ever seen. Awesome! Congrats to LARD! But just wait till next year…
This is my kind of multiculturalism.