NASA will be announcing the winner of the CEV Phase II competition at 4 PM Eastern. And since I’m supporting one of the teams, good news for me will be bad news for Thomas James, and vice versa.
As Thomas notes, NASA has been astonishingly good at keeping it a secret. It’s all the more astonishing when one considers that they had to tell Congress who the winner was a month ago.
Alan Boyle reports that Blue Origin has gotten their environmental assessment approved, which was one of the last hurdles to getting their FAA license as a spaceport. It will be the first private spaceport, but it will also be the first spaceport to be licensed for vertical takeoff and landing (Mojave and Burns Flat are only licensed for horizontal operations). I wonder if Jeff Bezos will be open to allowing others to operate from it? I’ll bet that Armadillo and Masten would like to use it.
Ted Stevens says that he was only (anonymously) holding up the bill until a cost/benefit analysis could be performed on it.
[Excuse me a minute]
[Sorry, give me another minute or so]
[Almost ready now…no, wait, another minute or two]
OK, sorry. Phew. Oh, gosh…man, my sides hurt.
I may have even moistened my pants.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, right. So he wants a cost/benefit analysis? Here’s a cost/benefit analysis.
[Evening update]
Mark Tapscott has additional thoughts.
Ted Stevens says that he was only (anonymously) holding up the bill until a cost/benefit analysis could be performed on it.
[Excuse me a minute]
[Sorry, give me another minute or so]
[Almost ready now…no, wait, another minute or two]
OK, sorry. Phew. Oh, gosh…man, my sides hurt.
I may have even moistened my pants.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, right. So he wants a cost/benefit analysis? Here’s a cost/benefit analysis.
[Evening update]
Mark Tapscott has additional thoughts.
Ted Stevens says that he was only (anonymously) holding up the bill until a cost/benefit analysis could be performed on it.
[Excuse me a minute]
[Sorry, give me another minute or so]
[Almost ready now…no, wait, another minute or two]
OK, sorry. Phew. Oh, gosh…man, my sides hurt.
I may have even moistened my pants.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, right. So he wants a cost/benefit analysis? Here’s a cost/benefit analysis.
[Evening update]
Mark Tapscott has additional thoughts.
Melanie Phillips writes about the media war against Israel:
The level of anti-Israel, anti-American madness has reached such a pitch in Britain that any similar expression of alarm at the manifestly blatant mendacity in the reporting of the Middle East has simply become unthinkable. Yet thanks to the efforts of the blogosphere
Rick Tumlinson, co-founder of the Space Frontier Society, will be on CNBC at 1:40 Eastern
I hadn’t noticed earlier, but Rocco Petrone died last Friday. I worked for him in the eighties, when he was president of Rockwell’s Space Transportation Systems Division in Downey. He was a key member of the Apollo management team. On the morning of the Challenger disaster, he questioned the decision to launch when he saw icicles hanging from the gantry, but he wasn’t part of the MMT.
With the Tigers in a slump, their nearest rivals, the Twins and the White Sox are playing the worst teams in the respective divisions, while Detroit plays the Yankees.
It turned out, like Alberto, to be dramatically overhyped (but I guess it’s better to be safe than sorry, and it may still do a lot of damage in the Carolinas and Mid Atlantic). The real hurricane season has begun:
The computer models are very bullish in developing waves coming off the coast of Africa in the next two weeks, and I expect we’ll have at least two new named storms by the time the peak of hurricane season arrives, September 10.