Well, here’s one mainstream media type (albeit from Down Under) who thinks that bloggers are significant. He claims that we are partially responsible for the upcoming demise of Salon.

Adding to the difficulties of companies such as Salon Media is the popularity of web loggers, known as “bloggers”. They produce highly individual and opinionated websites, that are constantly updated.

My Fox column is up, and it has a dumb error in it. Columbia is flying a Spacelab mission, not an ISS mission–Columbia is too heavy to get to ISS (another problem with the location…).

Thanks to Paul Henney for pointing out the error.

[Evening update]

Doh!^2

My ass has been fact checked twice more.

Columbia can get to ISS–I just meant that its payload is much reduced, relative to the other Orbiters, but I should have made that more clear.

And Ross Nordeen points out, correctly, that it’s a SpaceHab mission, not a SpaceLab mission. The latter, is, I believe, in retirement, but I don’t want to make any categorical statements, given my track record so far today…

The most powerful ex-Klansman in the country, who seems determined to move the entire federal government to West Virginia before he departs this earth, led the Senate in saying the pledge today. Unfortunately, according to reports, Senator Byrd forgot the words…

The Supremes say that vouchers for religious schools are A-OK. An interesting decision, coming on the heels of yesterday’s 9th Circuit ruling on having to omit “under God,” from the pledge. It may presage how they’ll rule the appeal in that case.

Had they gone the other way, then someone should have brought suit to end Pell Grants, since they can be used to attend, say, the University of Notre Dame.

Another milestone in rocketry was achieved on Monday. For the first time in history, a pure rocket-powered aircraft performed a touch-and-go landing. This maneuver, which involves landing on a runway, and then taking off again before speed is slowed too much, is one that every student pilot practices, multiple times, because it builds skill in both takeoff and landing. But until this week, it had always been performed with an airbreathing engine.

XCOR Aerospace has now demonstrated that it’s possible to do it with rocket power, which required the ability to routinely and reliably cut power for the landing, and then restart the engines for the takeoff.

This implies that if they are not available now, engines will be available very soon that will allow affordable rocket races, trips to suborbit, and (eventually) rides into orbit itself on a routine basis, that could provide the foundation for a whole new transportation industry.

Our manned space infrastructure is extremely fragile–even brittle.

NASA just found a problem with the Space Shuttle Orbiters Atlantis and Discovery. They have hairline cracks in some jackets in the main propellant lines.

These aren’t cracks in the lines themselves, so there’s no danger of a leak of oxygen or hydrogen, but they could result in a small piece of metal getting ingested into the engines, which could potentially cause anything from a premature engine shutdown to a turbopump explosion. Considering that, for the brief few minutes that it operates during each flight, each of the three fuel turbopumps generates about 70,000 horsepower (or about fifty megawatts–equivalent to a small power plant or dam), that could be a pretty spectacular show.

If it happened during flight it would be comparable to the Challenger disaster. If it happened on liftoff, it could take out the whole pad, along with the Shuttle and crew. Even in the event of a simple engine shutdown early in the flight, a Return To Launch Site (RTLS) abort would be exciting, and dangerous, and it’s never been attempted. No matter what, it would make for a very bad day for all aboard.

NASA doesn’t yet understand how the cracks got there (my own “recovering engineer” guess is fatigue from thermal cycling as they’re repeatedly soaked in very-cold liquified gases over several years), how long they’ve been there, and whether or not the other two vehicles have them. As a result, they have prudently grounded the entire Shuttle fleet indefinitely. Indefinitely, in this case, means not that it will be necessarily a long time, but that they can’t say how long it will be, which means that Columbia’s mission to the space station next month will almost certainly be delayed until they do have some answers.

I’ve written before about the high costs of space due to lack of economies of scale, but our minimal activity level causes other problems as well. It makes it difficult to afford a robust and resilient space transportation infrastructure.

In 1979, when a DC-10 literally lost an engine and crashed in Chicago, the whole McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 fleet was grounded, but it didn’t shut down the airline industry, because there were hundreds of aircraft of many other makes and models that weren’t affected.

In contrast, we learned in the Challenger breakup the danger of relying on a single launch system, with a small number of vehicles, when grounding it means putting all activity on hiatus. A loss of an Orbiter would constitute the loss of a quarter of our fleet. The loss of another one after that would be another third of the remainder. And grounding the fleet to avoid this may result in more delays to the beleaguered space station program.

NASA has studies underway to look at solutions to this problem, such as the Space Launch Initiative, or the Alternate Access to Space program. But these programs seem to be stuck in the same mode of thinking that gave us Shuttle. People talk about “the” Shuttle replacement, or “the” next-generation launch system, as though there will be only one, because no one can imagine market or funding for more. And all the focus remains on technology and vehicle concepts, which are beside the point.

No one in the government seems to recognize our real problem, which is the currently infinitesimal market size for space transportation. NASA continues to pay the traditional aerospace contractors for traditional solutions, and ignores the fact that we need a diversity of approaches and providers. Such a diversity can only be supported by a large, vibrant and growing commercial demand for space transportation services.

There is an old tale, about “for lack of a nail…a kingdom was lost.”

As long as we, as a nation, refuse to acknowledge the problem with our space markets and approaches, we will remain in our current state of fragility, in which the fate of a multi-billion-dollar space station, that, for all of its cost, can only support three people, is held hostage to the whims of microscopic slivers of metal in frigid propellant ducts.

[Update on Thursday morning]

I screwed up–Columbia is flying a Spacelab mission next month, not an ISS mission. Columbia is too heavy to get to ISS.

Magaw seems determined to destroy what’s left of the airline industry. It’s going to cost billions to implement these security measures, and the machines for detecting explosives have a false positive rate of thirty percent.

Well, as the air continues to rush out of the bubble, with Enron, Global Crossing, Worldcom, and Arthur Andersen collapsing on themselves like the WTC, just which decade was it that was the real “Decade of Greed”?

Was it the one presided over by Reagan, as Bill and Hillary told us in 1992?

Or was it the one presided over by Bill Clinton?

Just wondering.

Pop up some corn, and settle back in the comfy chair. It’s going to be a fun campaign for governor in California.

“I’m going to knock Gray Davis’ and (Davis adviser) Garry South’s teeth out with their own record,” Rollins said. “This is going to be a donnybrook.”

The strategy, he said, will be to skewer Davis on his own record and “make the story of (the governor’s) failure so severe that people will walk in, in those closing days, and say, ‘yes’ to Bill Simon.”

It was inevitable, and it didn’t take long. The EUnuchs are unhappy because they weren’t consulted about Bush’s speech. And the fact that he’s not sucking up to their buddy, Arafat.

Some of the quotes are delicious.

…the European official said Bush’s broad signal to the Palestinians that Arafat needed to be replaced as a prerequisite to the establishment of a Palestinian state, “is rather alien to European thinking.”

Yes, that’s why there’s still no peace to the Middle East. We’ve been going along with European “thinking,” for far too long.

And here’s a shocker:

European heads of state reserved as much criticism for Israel as for the Palestinians.

And the usual idiotarian party line:

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer welcomed Bush’s “clear commitment” to peace in the Middle East, but added, “The Palestinian people alone will decide who is their legitimate leader.”

That’s right, Herr Fischer. And the Palestinian people alone will choose their fate, and live with the consequences of their actions. It’s all up to them, now.

Europe has rendered itself utterly irrelevant.

[Update at 5 PM PDT]

Comment “Matt” astutely points out this bit of hypocrisy, in response to the comment that “…Bush’s broad signal to the Palestinians that Arafat needed to be replaced as a prerequisite to the establishment of a Palestinian state, “is rather alien to European thinking.”

If we don’t like your leaders then you can’t have what you want? Yeah, the EU never said that to anyone…

*coughHaidercough*

*coughLePencough*

Well, to be fair, maybe they were just talking about replacing Arafat as being alien to their thinking. I’m sure they didn’t intend to have a double standard…