All posts by Rand Simberg

General

Get Well Wishes

I’m certainly no fan of Governor Corzine, but I also certainly hope that he recovers fully and soon from his auto accident. And if he really wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, that was dumb, and should be a lesson taken from the incident for all. I’m always amazed at people who don’t wear one. My grandmother hated to–she claimed that it was more dangerous to do so because she might get trapped in the car in it, completely misjudging the relative odds of this happening versus getting her face plastered into a dash or through a windshield.

[Update on Friday evening]

I just heard the Lieutenant Governor say that “business in New Jersey would continue to take place as usual.” If I were a Garden State resident, I’d take small comfort in those words. One would like an improvement, I think…

Space

Will Microgravity Research Finally Pan Out?

Clark Lindsey has an interesting post on the prospects, now that people more responsive than NASA are going to offer research opportunities. I’ve always been a skeptic on it, and thought it vastly overhyped, particularly with regard to how it was used to sell the space station, but at least now, it will get a fair shot. And I agree with how he opens the piece:

One of the unfortunate tendencies of NASA is for the agency to implement a good idea in a bad way and thereby discredit that idea. Prime examples include RLVs and space tethers.

Yes, when people ask what harm it is to have NASA doing its own thing, and to just ignore it while we do ours, this is the answer. Few people really understand how much damage NASA has done over the decades in this manner. X-33 by itself probably set back the cause of low-cost spaceflight by over a decade, and we’re only just starting to recover from that debacle, with the Air Force finally starting to take space transports seriously again, even if NASA continues to refuse to do so.