Compare and contrast. This is why NASA human spaceflight is a mess.
Category Archives: Business
Schools Of Education
They remain a disaster, that should have been abolished long ago.
As a report on education said almost four decades ago, if a foreign power had imposed on the U.S. the educational system we've imposed on ourselves, we would rightly consider it an act of war. https://t.co/rpg0ym3yEh
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) March 6, 2019
BTW, I highly recommend Quillette as a web site in general. Claire and others have a lot of smart, heterodox stuff there.
“We’re At The Barnstorming Phase”
An interview about our future in space with Jeff Bezos.
He doesn’t really say anything that I haven’t been preaching for literally decades, but it’s nice to see that (finally) someone with money gets it.
EXOS Aerospace
It looks like they had a successful suborbital test of SARGE today at Spaceport America (after the earlier successful launch of Crew Dragon early this morning).
[Tuesday noon update]
Russ Blink just posted an explanation of the wobble at Arocket:
The wind picked up as we approached launch and the torque due to the fins at liftoff was getting pretty high, that caused the initial pitch angle and the control PID is pretty close to critically damped, which of course needs to be addressed, however it settled down nicely until we hit a high wind shear which it damped out slowly again after passing through. Still she was heavily influenced by the wind which we are addressing.
The fins on this flight were actually hurting us because of weather-cocking. We intend to remove or reduce them in the future when we have good aero data or modeling to tune the control part of our gnc for that condition.
For those curious in comments…
[Bumped]
Freeman Dyson
“We don’t understand climate.”
He’s not wrong.
[Update late morning]
Is climate change like an asteroid, or diabetes? I’d say neither, but to the limited degree that it’s an understood problem, diabetes is a much better analogy.
The Security-Clearance Process
…is about to get a long-overdue overhaul for the 21st century. It takes too long, and costs too much. I haven’t had a clearance in over a quarter of a century, and lack of one has probably limited my income opportunities.
Renewables
Why they can’t save the planet.
[Update a while later]
Requirements for a scalable approach to decarbonization.
Trump’s CPAC Speech
I listened to some of it, but I really, viscerally hate listening to Trump for long. But Nick Gillespie (!) was impressed:
All in all, it was, in the words of Daniel Dale, the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, “one of the least-hinged speeches Trump has given in a long time.” It was indeed all over the place but like the weirdly wide-ranging and digressive speech in which he declared a national emergency, it was also an absolute tour de force, laying out every major point of disagreement between Republicans and Democrats (abortion, the Second Amendment, and taxes, among other things) while tagging the latter aggressively as socialists who will not only end the private provision of health care but take over the energy sector too. Those charges take on new life in the wake of the announcement of the GND and comments, however short-lived, by Democrats such as Kamala Harris, who at one point recently called for an end to private health care. And over 100 House Democrats have signed on to a plan that would end private health insurance in two years. For all the biting criticism and dark humor in today’s speech, Trump has mostly ditched the “American Carnage” rhetoric that marked his first Inaugural Address, pushing onto liberals and Democrats all the negativity and anger that used to surround him like the dust cloud surrounds Pigpen in the old Peanuts cartoons. “We have people in Congress right now who hate our country,” he said. “We can name every one of them. Sad, very, very sad.”
At moments, he seemed to be workshopping his themes and slogans for 2020. “We believe in the American Dream, not the socialist nightmare,” he averred at one point. “Now you have a president who finally standing up for America.” The future, he said “does not belong to those who believe in socialism. The future belongs to those who believe in freedom. I’ve said it before and will say it again: America will never be a socialist country.” That’s a line that may not work forever, but it will almost certainly get the job done in 2020.
As previously noted, the media is going to re-elect Trump. Because they still don’t understand how they got Trump.
Flight Of Crew Dragon
The mission seems to have gone flawlessly so far.
But even if it’s a complete success with the recovery on Friday, some will still want to slow walk the first crew flight this year.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here you go. pic.twitter.com/6X1ODdIRna
— Raumfahrer.net (@Raumfahrer_net) March 3, 2019
[Update a few minutes later]
Lot of links and pics at NASA Spaceflight.
Trump’s Style
I agree with this, but the piece seems to have fizzled out at the end.