James Sensenbrenner didn’t get the ranking member position he wanted on the House Science Committee. He lost out to Texan Ralph Hall. Hall will be much more devoted to JSC, while Sensenbrenner, with no NASA centers in his state of Wisconsin, would have been better for commercial space.

Russia says they’ll help us build a moon base, if we provide them with funding.

Sorry, I think we tried the foreign aid bit back in the nineties on ISS. As I recall, the result was late deliveries of hardware, and a proliferation of dachas, Mercedes, and Cayman accounts.

Russia says they’ll help us build a moon base, if we provide them with funding.

Sorry, I think we tried the foreign aid bit back in the nineties on ISS. As I recall, the result was late deliveries of hardware, and a proliferation of dachas, Mercedes, and Cayman accounts.

Russia says they’ll help us build a moon base, if we provide them with funding.

Sorry, I think we tried the foreign aid bit back in the nineties on ISS. As I recall, the result was late deliveries of hardware, and a proliferation of dachas, Mercedes, and Cayman accounts.

Now these are what I call hot rockets. Question is, which are the rocket geeks going to pay more attention to, the rockets, or Sheri?

It reminds me of the old engineer joke. An engineering student sees one of his buddies, a fellow engineering student, riding a bike toward him.

“Hey,” he says. “When did you get the bike?”

“It’s a weird story,” he replies. “I was just walking on the quad, and this girl rides up to me, gets off, drops the bike, takes off all her clothes and lies there, saying ‘take what you want.'”

“Good choice,” says his friend. “The clothes probably wouldn’t have fit.”

Now these are what I call hot rockets. Question is, which are the rocket geeks going to pay more attention to, the rockets, or Sheri?

It reminds me of the old engineer joke. An engineering student sees one of his buddies, a fellow engineering student, riding a bike toward him.

“Hey,” he says. “When did you get the bike?”

“It’s a weird story,” he replies. “I was just walking on the quad, and this girl rides up to me, gets off, drops the bike, takes off all her clothes and lies there, saying ‘take what you want.'”

“Good choice,” says his friend. “The clothes probably wouldn’t have fit.”

Now these are what I call hot rockets. Question is, which are the rocket geeks going to pay more attention to, the rockets, or Sheri?

It reminds me of the old engineer joke. An engineering student sees one of his buddies, a fellow engineering student, riding a bike toward him.

“Hey,” he says. “When did you get the bike?”

“It’s a weird story,” he replies. “I was just walking on the quad, and this girl rides up to me, gets off, drops the bike, takes off all her clothes and lies there, saying ‘take what you want.'”

“Good choice,” says his friend. “The clothes probably wouldn’t have fit.”

Keith Cowing continues to live blog the Exploration conference today:

Cooke is going through a standard recitation of why we explore, why go back to the Moon, etc. It is fine for NASA folks do this once or twice at a meeting of the faithful (such as this), but I have to wonder why NASA folks feel compelled to spend so much time on this with an audience that is already convinced – except, perhaps, to serve as cheerleaders, I suppose. This is the fourth time the VSE story has been told here.

…Tony Lavoie is speaking now. He opened by making sure everyone knew that these architectural depictions in the fancy graphics were “notional” (NASA’s favorite word to make sure they can wiggle out of something later), “points of departure”, “Point in the sand” a “Point at which to engage” etc. This is one of NASA’s odd habits – on one hand they wave this new architecture around so as to demonstrate to the external world that they have done something and that they can make decisions – and then they turn around and warn people that what they see on the screen (to illustrate the very same architecture) is not what they may get. Hardly what you do to inspire confidence among external observers.

Jonah Goldberg has been discussing the probability of a catastrophic asteroid impact with the earth, based on this post by Ron Bailey. He has an email from one of his very confused readers:

You probably have a lot of others e-mailing as well to point this out, but while that 0.3% seems like a small probability it is wholly implausible. Just as a point of comparison given what I

I didn’t make it to Houston for the Exploration Conference, but Keith Cowing did, and is live blogging it.