They’re frustrated that they have to actually be competitive in the launch market. And they keep using this word “subsidy.” I don’t think it means what they think it means. If anyone gets a subsidy, it’s ULA, not SpaceX, and sure as hell not Blue Origin. Plus, an open admission that their rocket is a jobs program.
Tom Wolfe
Thoughts from Tim Fernholz on his space legacy.
The Mueller Investigation
Michael Mukasey: “It’s time to end it.”
Yes, but we also need to properly investigate what happened with the Obama administration, and see that justice is done. Though perhaps Horowitz’s report will have the whole story.
[Update a few minutes later]
(Democrat pollster for Bill Clinton during his impeachment) Mark Penn agrees. He’s been on Fox News saying this for a while.
[Update late morning]
The hunter becomes the hunted:
The current conflict in Washington, though dismaying, is at least much more comforting than the condition where everyone sings each other’s praises. The whole purpose of oversight, checks, and balances is to avoid the formation of an absorbing Markov transition — a kind of political Hotel California — which you can enter but never leave.
Avoiding a crisis depends on not crossing certain lines and concealing that fact if it has occurred. That has now gone by the board. When a system is undeniably confronted with deceitful lawlessness it is like finding the dealer was cheating at cards. Trump, by officially demanding an answer into whether the previous administration engaged in political spying, is effectively accusing them of cheating at cards. As everybody knows, once you ask this question at a table, the surface game stops and a deeper game begins. Suddenly the little cardboard rectangles don’t matter anymore.
Stay tuned.
[Afternoon update]
I suppose I shouldn’t be, but I’m kind of gobsmacked at the number of people on Twitter, many of whom purport to be journalists, claiming that the Justice Department is “independent of the executive branch.”
GenCon
No, Tor.com, GenCon isn’t racist: A fisking (from Larry Correia).
Click. You know you want to.
The Latest Safety Insanity
OK, so I read this, and the steam that shot out of my ears took the fresh paint off the wall of the kitchen on both sides of the room:
His committee recommended that NASA and the other ISS partners should plan for ways to operate the station with a reduced crew if commercial crew vehicles aren’t ready to enter service by the fall of 2019.
“Given these schedule risks, we recommend the partnership pursue plans to protect for a minimum crew capability to ensure ISS viability during the flight development phase,” he said. “NASA’s biggest priority is maintaining the U.S. presence on the ISS in case the commercial crew launch dates slip.”
One option he mentioned at the meeting is “providing training to Russian crewmembers on the USOS critical systems.” That training, he said, would be provided to cosmonauts scheduled to fly to the station on Soyuz missions in September 2019 and March 2020.
So, let me get this straight: In order to avoid any risk of loss of crew (and there is no way to do that), we are going to not only make ourselves more dependent on the Russians, but further reduce, if not eliminate any actual utility we’re going to get out of a facility in which we’ve invested over a hundred billion dollars and, as a bonus, put that facility at risk.
All because “safety is the highest priority.”
This is insane.
Back To Florida
Unfortunately, flight from Charlotte is delayed. More posting tomorrow, if I get to West Palm beach tonight. Consider this an open thread in comments.
LOP-G
Gerald Black writes that it’s a waste of time and money.
You don’t say. Its only purpose is to give SLS/Orion something to do.
BFR Point To Point
Sam Dinkin looks at the business case.
There’s not currently a ferry terminal in the South Bay, so they’d have to build one somewhere, maybe by the Marina or King Harbor to make it more convenient to LAX.
Iran
Yes. Best outcome will be a revolution replaced by a more western democracy, but unsure what the likelihood of that is.
Block 5
Loren Grush on the significance of today’s launch.
At this point, SpaceX rules the world on expertise in developing and operating space transports. BFR is largely simply scaling up current systems. And rockets scale up quite nicely, within facilities limits.
[Update a few minutes later]
More from Doug Messier.
[Update a while later]
And more, from Chris Gebhart.
This will be an historic day if the flight is successful. Or even if it’s unsuccessful. Only way it won’t be historic is if they scrub.
[Update Friday morning]
OK, they scrubbed yesterday, and have another opportunity today. I haven’t heard yet if they found the problem, but here’s a transcript of a very interesting telecon with Elon yesterday.
[Bumped]
[Afternoon update]
I did a little tweetstorm.
Point many don't understand yet: SpaceX has shown not just the way to reusability, and low-cost launch, but low-cost DDT&E. It's revolutionary in the launcher business to be able to affordably do so many flight tests of a vehicle.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) May 11, 2018
As I note over there, in terms of opening space to humanity, historians will record that today was a more significant day than July 20th, and the most significant event in spaceflight since Sputnik and Gagarin. We’re finally making spaceflight routine and affordable to others than governments, over half a century after we first started.
[Monday-afternoon update]
More from Jeff Foust over at The Space Review today.
[Bumped]