Here is a compilation of what some people would like to see in the Great Prevaricator’s book, when it’s released next week. I have lots of these myself, but here’s one that no one else mentioned:
Will he deny the rape charge? Will he call Juanita Broderick a liar?
He’s never had a comment on this–whenever asked, he has simply said to talk to his lawyer. His lawyer denies it, of course, but that’s meaningless since he has no knowledge.
Brian Berger has apparently gotten an early look at the Aldridge Commission report, now scheduled to be publicly released Wednesday.
It has some encouraging things, but there are also some areas of concern.
It says that NASA should rely on the private sector for transportation to LEO, which is good, but it also excludes human transportation from that, which is an implicit go-ahead for the Crew Exploration Vehicle on an expensive expendable. I find this program almost as economically senseless as the Orbital Space Plane was, if envisioned as a Shuttle replacement (a role that many are urging for it), but apparently there’s too much political pressure to build such a thing to kill it off completely.
I think that NASA is setting itself up for embarrassment a decade from now when their vaunted “Crew Exploration Vehicle” ends up costing hundreds of millions of dollars per flight while there are regular space tourism flights to orbit costing a couple of orders of magnitude less. By giving NASA permission to ignore the private sector for passenger services, the commission is simply putting off further the day that it will become a reality.
The other concern is this:
The commission also identified 17 enabling technologies needed to accomplish the exploration goals. These include an affordable heavy lift capability, advanced power and propulsion, automated spacecraft rendezvous and docking capability, high bandwidth communications, closed loop life supports systems, better spacesuits for astronauts and others.
“Affordable heavy lift capability” is not a technology, and its certainly not an enabling one. At best, to the degree that it’s a technology at all, it’s an enhancing one. “Enabling” implies that we can’t do without it. I absolutely reject the notion that it is essential, and if we believe that it is, it will simply hold us back in schedule while we wait for it to appear, and we will miss a lot of opportunities for innovation.
This heavy-lift fetish is going to be (or at least should be) one of the major space policy debate issues, because it is a hingepoint for the direction of our near-term future.
The New York Times has an article on SpaceShipOne today. It’s a good piece, though it doesn’t talk much about the potential for the suborbital flight industry. My biggest issue with it is a subtle one–it appears in the Science section. There’s nothing in the article about science, but it just shows how inextricable the perceived relationship is between space and science in the public mind (including New York Times reporters). Now that we’re starting to get accurate stories about this, the next step is to get them where they belong–in the Business sections.
Really. Check out the last comment in this post. It’s one of two, so far.
Should I complain to them? Who would be doing this for them, and why?
Really. Check out the last comment in this post. It’s one of two, so far.
Should I complain to them? Who would be doing this for them, and why?
Really. Check out the last comment in this post. It’s one of two, so far.
Should I complain to them? Who would be doing this for them, and why?
Archaelogists have discovered evidence that some people in the borderlands of England may be descended from Moors from northern Africa, Roman soldiers brought over to guard Hadrian’s wall. One more interesting ingredient to the mix of Picts, Saxons et al.
Also a little ironic, considering that many of these people are the so-called Scots-Irish who settled much of Appalachia and the American south, with its slavery and anti-miscegany laws.
…dated today. But it looks frighteningly like the 1930s again in Europe.
I’ve run a half-staff flag at the site for the past week. I’m removing it now, it being a week since the (physical) passing of President Reagan.
If one mourns too long, the mourning loses significance. It’s time to just remember, move on, and continue to build the city on the hill that he envisioned.
There are still a few people attempting to fight against the now-prevailing wisdom that Reagan ended the Cold War through his policies, claiming that he just had the good luck to be president when it happened. Now, of course one can never know for sure what the causes were, but I find it interesting that some people are determined to continue to attempt to prove that it wasn’t Reagan’s doing. I wonder why they have such a powerful emotional investment in that?
They should consider something–if there were a good case to be made for their position, then it should have persuaded many of those on the fence, and perhaps even some who originally thought that it was Reagan’s doing, to change their opinion, but I don’t see that happening.
From James Lileks, to Bill Whittle, Matt Welch, Roger Simon and others, many people this past week have confessed that they thought Reagan was a dunce at the time, but they’ve seen the light now. This kind of commentary has abounded in comments sections as well. But I haven’t seen a single post or comment anywhere to the effect that someone thought Reagan was great at the time, but now they realize he was an idiot who had nothing to do with defeating the Soviet Union.
I wonder why that is?
[Update a few minutes later]
And yes, I do realize that I’ve just motivated them to start leaving me spurious comments with unverifiable claims about how brilliant they thought that Reagan was at the time, but that now they’re older and wiser.
I point this out preemptively to make their claims all the more ridiculous, since none have appeared spontaneously heretofore.