It’s starting in the House. Looks like a good line up of witnesses, including Laura Montgomery.
Category Archives: Business
“We Don’t Need Space Colonies”
I don’t know where to start with this ignorant burning of a field of strawmen.
A Quiet Air Conditioner
I’m going to look into this, despite the fact that it’s “smart.” I hate things that are smart. My A/C does not need to talk to the cloud. It would be nice if they’d make a dumb one that was cheaper, but probably smarts don’t cost much.
Lunar Ice
There may be a lot more of it than we thought. And we were already thinking there’s quite a bit.
Easing Drone Restrictions
I’d been wondering about this. We just bought one (small one, for a hundred bucks at Fry’s), and we certainly have no plans for it to go out of line of sight, or the neighborhood, but I need to look up whether it needs to be registered, legally.
Puerto Rico
It strikes me that the fact that the asshat governor in San Juan is pro statehood is probably a big strike against the movement. I’ve long thought, since we lost the bases, that we should just give PR independence.
The Next Fifty Years On The Moon
An interesting essay, but it has a few problems. First…
And they repeatedly use the phrase “lunar soil.” In fact we just update Evoloterra this weekend to fix this ourselves.
Finally, we have this comment, which seems gratuitous and almost a non sequitur in the context of this article:
The NASA Moon Base
What might it look like?
Still not clear to me that NASA will be the one to do it.
Apollo And The Treasure Fleets
Gary Oleson has a good op-ed over at Space News. A lot of space enthusiasts misinterpret the lesson of the Ming Dynasty. I wrote a similar piece seventeen years ago. As with most of my old space commentary, I’m always surprised at how well it holds up.
Speaking of old space commentary, I just read this for the first time, written by my former editor at The New Atlantis, in 2003. This was about the time that we first met, probably as a result of a comment I had at my blog about a post of his at National Review. I wrote my first essay for him about a year later.
[Update a few minutes later]
In searching for that blog post, I discovered something funny; it was based on that piece, so it wasn’t the first time I’d read it — I’d just forgotten, it was so long ago. I think what happened is that someone at The Corner commented about my blog post, which caused Adam to engage, and later call me to talk. The rest is history.
The original post, with comments, is here.
Back To Basics
The military is being trained (for the first time in decades) how to manage without computers.
This is good, not just as a defense against cyber attacks, but because it will give them a lot more insight. Even when I started my career in aerospace, I worried that young people were being too confident in computer output, without understanding the fundamentals sufficiently to know whether or not it made sense.