Andrew, my very first Fox News column, a couple of years ago, was on this very subject.
All posts by Rand Simberg
ISDC Time
If you don’t already have plans for the upcoming Memorial Day weekend (I’ll be unpacking boxes in Boca Raton…), and can get to Oklahoma City, think about attending this year’s International Space Development Conference. Info on the linked press release.
Temperature In Hell Dropping Rapidly
James Lovelock has endorsed nuclear power.
It will be interesting to see if this creates a major schism in the watermelon community. This was always the rational position for environmentalists to take, if they really believed that carbon release was harmful, but environmentalists have rarely been rational. Either that, or they had some…other…agenda.
Revenooers
I’m still fuming.
I dropped Patricia off at LAX this morning on my way to work, to fly to Florida. She had a 7:40 flight.
She usually carries on, but today she had a couple pieces of luggage to check, so we decided that I’d park the car and help her check in. Now, to park at LAX is a minimum of three bucks for the first hour, but downstairs, at the arrival level, there are metered lots that take quarters, and I figured fifty cents would do me. Of course, this means that one has to enter the airport on the arrival level, which at 6 AM is almost empty since there are few arrivals that early. I cruised past an airport motorcycle cop, at the speed limit, or at least no faster than traffic. But he decided to pull out after me and turned on his flashers.
We pulled over, and he walked up to the car and informed me that we’d been pulled over because we didn’t have a front license plate. Now, I’ve been meaning to put it on, but the last time I tried, the screws that I bought at Pep Boys didn’t fit the holes on the front bumper. He took the license and registration (I’m a Wyoming resident, with a Wyoming drivers’ license), and took about ten minutes, presumably to run a check on this blatant and dangerous criminal. He finally came back with a ticket. It wasn’t a moving violation, and it could be dismissed, with a service fee, if I corrected the problem and drove to the DMV to get it signed off. Of course, because we’d pulled over into a side road heading away from our terminal, we had to backtrack to reenter the airport, costing even more time.
So to save a couple bucks, I now have to deal with the hassle of correcting a problem on a car that’s about to move to Florida, and we almost missed her flight. If I’d taken the upper level and parked up there, that cop wouldn’t have seen us at all, and there would have been much more traffic, resulting in many better things to do for whatever law enforcement was up there.
The coupe de grace, of course, was that, after all this, the metered lot ended up being closed.
Asteroid Eaters
Now this is a much more creative (and probably effective) way to herd errant asteroids than crude nukes.
Defining Prizes
Just a reminder, for those interested, that the Centennial Challenges Workshop is coming up the middle of next month in Washington, for anyone who wants to attend and influence the direction of NASA’s new prize program.
Picky, Picky, Picky
The Great Wall of China, a river, whatever…it’s all good.
ESA doesn’t seem to know the difference.
Extrapolation
Andrew Sullivan points out that Susan Sontag is vying for one of his Susan Sontag awards:
…the cover story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is a Susan Sontag essay. Yes, she’s going to write about Abu Ghraib. And – yes! – the headline is: “The Photographs Are Us.”
Fine, Susan. I’ll consider the possibility that “the photographs are us” when you and other people in the intelligentsia and media will admit that people like this are you.
Audentes Fortuna Juvat
“Fortune Favors The Bold”
That’s apparently the motto of the new Exploration Office, complete with logo.
Hmmm…tell it to the Islamonutballs who attack our forces in Iraq and other places, and get generally slaughtered. Methinks that it’s one of those things that’s a necessary, but not sufficient condition. Smartness is required as well as boldness.
[Hat tip to emailer Ken Talton]
Missing The Point
Don Peterson has a long disquisition at SpaceRef about why we shouldn’t go to Mars via the moon.
The problem with this, of course, is that it presumes that the only goal is to go to Mars. He seems to recognize no intrinsic value in returning to the moon, or in establishing a base there. He’s welcome to his opinion, of course, but that’s not in concert with the president’s goals, and in my opinion, he’s wrong. There are many reasons to go back to the moon, as were laid out by several witnesses to the Aldridge commission a few weeks ago, regardless of its eventual utility in supporting a Mars flight.