Obama’s Competency Deficit

Some thoughts:

This administration has grand ambitions to grow government but little interest in running it. The result, according to polling, is the highest mistrust in government in years. And rightfully so. We’ve willy-nilly added bureaucracy, deepened the debt, perpetuated cronyism, slowed economic entrepreneurialism and gotten few, if any, of the promised benefits.

It’s not exactly a new problem, but more people are starting to notice it. Too bad they didn’t do so a year ago.

Life Support

Here’s an interesting schematic that describes how they plan to keep crew alive to Mars and back. Doesn’t look like they’re trying to recover water from feces, but that makes sense if they’re going to use them for radiation protection. And they’re venting methane. I’d think that it would be interesting to consider it as fuel for RCS, but perhaps that’s too high a technology risk for a mission that has to leave in less than five years. I don’t see any power input to the system, but I guess that’s a separate issue.

Here’s the full briefing to FISO.

[Via NewSpace Watch]

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, looking over the briefing, the current baseline seems to be two launches, one for propellant and one for crew, within a couple weeks of each other.

Losing The Gun Debate

It’s pretty simple really. One side actually wants to make schools safer, and the other side wants to take away our guns, despite all their lies about their intentions, and push measures that by their own admission wouldn’t have prevented the event that precipitated the push for the legislation. So it’s pretty hilarious when they deliberately mischaracterize their position as “reasonable,” and “common sense,” particularly when they don’t even understand how guns work.

Colorado Representative Diana DeGette

…is a gun-grabbing moron:

“What’s the efficacy of banning these magazine clips? I will tell you, these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now, they’re going to shoot them” says Rep DeGette. According to her, “the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will be shot and there won’t be any more available.”

These people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, let alone be elected to office.

Obama Incompetence

It’s not a new theme, but it is a new source: Joe Klein:

Yes, the President has faced a terrible economic crisis—and he has done well to limit the damage. He has also succeeded in avoiding disasters overseas. But, as a Democrat—as someone who believes in activist government—he has a vested interest in seeing that federal programs actually work efficiently. I don’t see much evidence that this is anywhere near the top of his priorities.

He only just figured that out? A little slow on the uptake, I guess.

SLS Delenda Est

Kill it to save human spaceflight:

Simply put, the SLS program should be canceled now to free up approximately $10 billion programmed for this decade. This money could then be redirected to continue the planned flight tests of the Orion spacecraft with the much lower-cost Falcon Heavy booster while making a robust investment in a first-generation space station in the vicinity of the Moon. An investment in such a cislunar station would provide—by the early 2020s—a multifunctional platform to act as a fuel depot, a workstation for robotic operations on the Moon and a habitat to protect against the more intense radiation environment outside of the Earth’s magnetic field. This station could even be used as a habitat during longer-duration human missions to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

Expect to see a lot more editorials like this as time goes on, new systems appear, and budgets get tighter.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!