My Fox column is up, which has a longer discussion of today’s Senate hearings.

There’s a problem with one of the paragraphs toward the end, which will hopefully be fixed tomorrow. It should read:

They were next asked what they thought were the implications of the recent Chinese manned space launch. The responses were predictable. Dr. Huntress, ever the science bureaucrat, saw it as an opportunity for international cooperation, Dr. Zubrin as an opportunity for international competition, and Mr. Tumlinson had a response similar to mine–that the proper response to the Chinese’ socialist space program was not our own socialist space program, but rather, unlike the last time we had a space race, a free-enterprise one.

Well, it’s not a flying car, but at least we get liquid-nitrogen ice cream.

Transterrestrial web designer Bill Simon has some interesting information on why the firefighters were “short of resources.”

[update at 10 PM PST]

Here’s a running thread on the subject at Reason’s website, Hit and Run.

Steven Moore has an article about how government policy has been holding back the spread of broadband and television through overregulation. In the process, though he has a blooper with some interesting implications.

New multichannel TV and high-speed Internet providers now have the technologies to bolt a wireless local transmitter to a tower at a fraction of the cost of what it costs to design and pay NASA (or the Chinese) to launch your $300 million telecommunications satellites into orbit.

I’m a little surprised that someone as otherwise knowledgeable as Mr. Moore doesn’t know that communications satellites are launched by commercial providers–not NASA. NASA hasn’t launched a commercial communications satellite since before the destruction of the Challenger.

But setting that aside, if he’s correct, and ground-based systems start to replace satellites for telecommunications, it will put even more pressure on the commercial launch industry. This may explain why Boeing is no longer pursuing commercial contracts for the Delta. It also means that, for people who are looking for markets for new launch systems, there’s probably only one viable one right now–people who will pay to go.

Howard Lovy has a scary little email exchange about progress in molecular manufacturing.

I’m listening to the Senate hearings on the future of the space program. O’Keefe and Gehman testified earlier, at which the administrator continued to talk about how hard it is to build launch systems, and how OSP is the best we can do right now. Unfortunately, some of the senators were sympathetic to this, and there was a threat of a battle with the House over the issue.

As I type, Bob Zubrin is laying out his usual rapid-fire description of how to go to the obvious (to him) destination of Mars. He doesn’t like, or think that we need, nuclear propulsion. Nothing new.

[a few minutes later]

Now a risk management guy is talking about how to set up a safety organization at NASA.

[a few more minutes later]

Rick Tumlinson is calling for a cancellation of the Orbital Space Plane, and end to the Shuttle program, and encouraging the entrepreneurs via prizes and service contracts. He’s talking about the bounty of orbit, and the opportunity for freedom.

Now McCain is asking Huntress if we should fund the OSP. He says no. He asks Tumlinson as well, who of course says no. Now he’s asking about the implications of the China launch. Huntress says they’ll be a partner. Zubrin sees them as a competitor and wants to make it a race, calling them the tortoise to our hare.

Tumlinson is asking if we should answer their socialist space program with one of our own, or with one of free enterprise.

I’ve been getting a few spams in the comments sections–not a lot, but enough to be annoying. I’ve installed MT-Blacklist on the site. It shouldn’t bother any of the regular commenters, but I hope it will keep me from advertising vi@gra and genital enhancement techniques..

Public opinion polls can be infuriatingly misleading (or the coverage of them can) in several different ways, but here’s one that you see quite often. The Chron is reporting that four in ten Americans have had their confidence in the president reduced by his handling of Iraq.

Who cares? Does anyone think that a significant number of those were people who had high confidence in the President to start with? All it means is that low confidence got lower–it has zero electoral implications, because few of them would have voted for him regardless.

There’s some weather on the way (it’s not a permalink, but it does have as the top story right now this morning’s mass ejection from the corona, and it’s a good general link for space weather). Someone asked me in email if this will endanger the astronauts aboard Space Station Albatross.

No, not really–they’re protected for the most part by the geomagnetic field. If they were going to or from the moon, or somewhere else beyond earth, they’d be in trouble though, if they didn’t have adequate shielding.

In any event, those folks in the northern (and southern) latitudes should be seeing some spectacular aurora borealis and australis over the next night or two.

[3 PM update]

Here’s another story, and it answers the above question:

Such solar storms have the potential for knocking out communications and power grids on Earth, and can be harmful to orbiting satellites and astronauts.

The International Space Station’s current resident crew — commander Michael Foale and flight engineer Alexander Kaleri — will protect themselves by moving to a portion of the outpost that provides the most shielding from radiation.