The very latest from the Space Access Society, including the new ITAR problems.
A Star Trek Movie Review
By someone who is both a Star Trek fan and a brilliant writer. Yes, at least one exists.
A Smoking Gun
What was a campaign official doing in White House meetings with the IRS?
Congressman Issa should call in Ms. Cutter and recall Mr. Shulman to testify under oath about these meetings. I, for one, would like to watch them squirm as they commit perjury.
Yes. Particularly since, no matter how much they attempt to synchronize their lies beforehand, they won’t know just how much independent information Issa has.
Susan Rice?
Is this the most politically tone-deaf administration in history?
And do they really think that throwing Donilon under the bus is going to make Benghazi go away?
I feel much more secure now that we have a security advisor who doesn’t know the difference between a terrorist attack and a rambunctious movie review.
[Afternoon update]
“Not one, not two, but three flips of the Obama bird:
Susan Rice is no more qualified to opine on matters of national security than a character from The Wizard of Oz. Like Obama himself, she is a highly politicized, over-credentialed Scarecrow, with certificates from Stanford, Oxford, and the Brookings Institution in place of a brain.
He’s being kind, I think.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, per comments here and elsewhere, how can the administration prevent her from testifying on executive privilege when the thing that she will be testifying about occurred when she was working for the State Department?
OK, let me amend that. How can they credibly do so?
Not that that ever slows them down, either, of course. It didn’t with Holder in Fast and Furious.
And then there’s this. Maybe Bob-1 is right in comments (hey, you know, blind squirrels and all) and it’s not Donilon that’s becoming a bus speed bump:
As for birds two and three, I’ll leave it to my PJ colleagues to unpack the implicit antisemitic and anti-Israel nature of the Power appointment; the Irish-born Ms. Power is married to Harvard egghead Cass Sunstein, proving once again that leftists, like rock stars and supermodels, tend to travel in packs and marry each other because they never meet anybody else. But surely Hillary Clinton, who’s clearly now being fitted for the fall guy jacket regarding Benghazi, must be seething.
Keep the corn popper on standby.
The Fish Police
This is another area of government overreach that I’d like to see rolled way back.
The Space Transport Conundrum
Clark Lindsey has a useful essay on the two approaches to reusability, and prospects for the near future.
ITAR Emergency
Yesterday at the #NSRC2013 meeting, Andrew Nelson, COO of XCOR, announced both in his talk and at a noon press conference that there was good news and bad news on the ITAR front. The good news is that communications satellites were moved back from the munitions list to the commercial list, for the first time in about a decade and a half. That’s good news for the US comsat industry, which has lost almost all of its business to other countries since the late nineties when they had been declared munitions.
The bad new is that suborbital vehicles, such as XCOR’s Lynx, have been put on the munitions list, which will make it much harder for the companies making them to export them. Imagine the impact on US exports if Boeing commercial transports were moved to the munitions list…
But the good news is that neither of these decisions are final — there is a public review period of this rule making for the next few weeks. It’s a good opportunity for anyone, not just affected industry, to weigh in, and try to get the latter decision reversed. Jon Goff (who I saw at the conference today) explains the stakes (and the danger):
My concern is that while this NPRM does go a long way towards solve some of the key ITAR problems (particularly related to GEO communications satellites), it creates dangerous precedents in other areas–like forcing manned suborbital and orbital vehicles and satellite servicing robotics explicitly onto the munitions list. My worry is that by relieving the pain of the most vocal, and financially well-established part of the space community (GEO commsats) while leaving the rest of us in the lurch, I worry that this will completely kill any impetus for further repair of ITAR for many years. Basically, this may be the community’s only chance to fix some of this damage, because if we don’t, those of us in the satellite servicing and manned spaceflight industries will be battling ITAR without the help and clout of the commercial communications industry on our side like we have this time. And it would be a travesty if something like Lynx or Dragon (or Sticky Boom™) were continued to be treated as dangerously as say a ballistic missile, a supersonic fighter jet, or a main battle tank. While all of these may be “dual-use” in some fashion, that’s what the EAR was meant to deal with–not ITAR, which was meant to deal specifically for systems whose primary use is military.
Make your own voice heard while there’s still time.
The Religious Zealots
…who are running our public schools:
What’s up with this? It’s not based on any concern with safety. Lego guns, cap guns, bubble guns, nibbled Pop Tarts, and fingers are no threat to safety. And the wild overreaction in these cases says there’s more going on here than simple school discipline. As I said, who treats a 5-year-old this way? It smacks of fanaticism.
In fact, it seems like a kind of quasi-religious fanaticism. I think it’s about the administrative class — which runs the schools with as little input from parents as possible — doing its best to exterminate the very idea of guns. It’s some sort of wacky moral-purity crusade. If a few toddlers have to suffer along the way, that’s tough. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
But that raises two questions. First, what business do public schools have in trying to extirpate “impure” thoughts? Aren’t we supposed to celebrate diversity? And, second, why should public schools decide that a longtime staple of American childhood, the toy gun, is suddenly evil?
Suppose you wanted to raise a generation that was both frightened of guns and thought them evil, except in the hands of government employees, and wanted to make thaat generation supine, disarmed sheep, and deferential to those same people. This is exactly what you would do.
These people are stupid, or evil, or both.
The IRS Intimidation
No, it wasn’t a few “rogue agents,” and anyone who believed that was a fool:
The claim that “rogue agents” came up with the Be On the Lookout (BOLO) list never made any sense. The claim that “rogue agents” came up with the many detailed questions that conservative groups were subjected to never made any sense. The claim that “rogue agents” would come up with so much extra work for themselves, outside their normal responsibilities and outside their union contract, never made any sense. Getting unionized workers to do extra work requires the union’s buy-in. Getting bureaucrats to do extra work requires orders from their superiors. That’s how government works.
The IRS itself has blown Lerner’s story apart, saying that as many 88 employees are being looked at. The agency is still evidently trying to contain the scandal to its lower ranks, but the deposed IRS agents say they were following orders from those above them.
Of course they were. The only question is from how far above. And when one considers what happened to True The Vote, Gibson Guitar, et al, it’s clearly above the IRS. It’s either the White House, the campaign, or both since there probably wasn’t much in the way of a wall between them, despite the pretence of running the latter out of Chicago).
As someone once said, there is a cancer on the presidency, and it’s going to continue to metastasise.
Obama’s Asteroid
Ruminations on the state of the space program, from P. J. O’Rourke.
One point that he misses, I think, is the degree to which human spaceflight (and non-human as well, but to a lesser degree) is driven by pork.