All posts by Rand Simberg

Nearing A Turning Point?

The fact that this is a news story is depressing. On the other hand, the story itself offers a glimmer of hope. One would like to think that the basic humanity of the people called “Palestinians” hasn’t been totally quenched by the oppressive conditions and brainwashing that they’ve endured for decades (and no, I’m not referring to the Israeli “occupation”).

Golda Meir once said that the war would end when the Palestinians decided that they loved their children more than they hated the Jews. This may be a sign that this is starting to happen.

An End To High-Power Model Rocketry?

I don’t know, but the news isn’t good. Tripoli just lost its suit against ATFE, and the agency will be allowed to classify ammonium perchlorate compound propellant as an explosive, which will be a significant damper on the hobby, since hobbyists will now have to get a federal Low Explosives Users Permit (LEUP).

This kind of bureaucratic stupidity is the reason that I’m not thrilled with the Bush administration, but there’s no reason to think that a Kerry administration would be any better.

The only way this can be fixed now is with legislation, but that’s unlikely to happen in an election year.

[Thanks to emailer Bruce Brazaitis for the heads up.]

Man Bites Dog

The Vatican has actually condemned Palestinian terror tactics.

The Vatican, often critical of Israel, harshly condemned Palestinian terrorists for trying to use a teenager as a suicide bomber.

I guess it would have been all right if it was an adult murdering those Jews (and other “Palestinians”).

The Wrong Author

Steven Weinberg has a 5500-word essay in the New York Review of books on the president’s space initiative. It repeats the same tired nonsense and myths, about how space is for science, that there’s no reason for people to go, that it will cost a trillion dollars.

The President gave no cost estimates, but John McCain, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, has cited reports that the new initiative would cost between $170 billion and $600 billion. According to NASA briefing documents, the figure of $170 billion is intended to take NASA only up to 2020, and does not include the cost of the Mars mission itself. After the former President Bush announced a similar initiative in 1989, NASA estimated that the cost of sending astronauts to the moon and Mars would be either $471 billion or $541 billion in 1991 dollars, depending on the method of calculation. This is roughly $900 billion in today’s dollars. Whatever cost may be estimated by NASA for the new initiative, we can expect cost overruns like those that have often accompanied big NASA programs. (In 1984 NASA estimated that it would cost $8 billion to put the International Space Station in place, not counting the cost of using it. I have seen figures for its cost so far ranging from $25 billion to $60 billion, and the station is far from finished.) Let’s not haggle over a hundred billion dollars more or less