Category Archives: Business

Business, History, Space, Technology and Society

115 Years Of Powered, Controlled Flight

10 Comments

Fifteen years ago, on the centennial anniversary of the Wright’s first flight, I wrote three separate essays on it. One was at National Review, a second was at Fox News (though I can’t find it; the original blog post can be found here), I think, and a third was at what was then TechCentralStation, but that one seems to have succumbed to link rot. If anyone can find it, I’d appreciate it (I think the title was “Airplane Scientists”).

It’s also the fifteenth anniversary of the first time that SpaceShipOne went supersonic. Burt liked to do things on anniversaries.

[Afternoon update]

John Breen found it.

[Update a while later]

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Weekly Standard

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It’s shutting down, after twenty-three years. Probably a victim of its anti-Trump behavior.

Here are the three pieces that I wrote for it, the most recent being my obituary of Jerry Pournelle. When I read my criticism of SLS from 2011, it seems prescient.

There’s a lot of talent there, from Steve Hayes to Adam Keiper and Jonathan Last, and Haley Byrd. Hopefully they’ll land on their feet.

[Late-morning update]

Thoughts from Rod Dreher.

Business, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Back To Space

8 Comments

Virgin Galactic just completed the first flight of SpaceShipTwo to space, if one considers the boundary to be 80 kilometers (it reportedly got to 82). At the Galloway Symposium last week, Jonathan McDowell made a good case that this, not the traditional Karman line of 100 km, is the right altitude. If one accepts that, it is the first flight of humans to space from American soil since the Shuttle retired over seven years ago. Here’s hoping that Blue Origin does the same thing next year (except they’re designed to get to 100 km).

[Update a few minutes later]

Here‘s Emilee Speck’s story.

[Update a while later]

Link to the McDowell paper should be working now, sorry.

[Update a while later]

Tim Fernholz has a story up now.

[Update a few minutes later]

And here’s a story from CNN‘s Jackie Wattles.

Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Climate Wars

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The first shots are being fired in western Europe:

Who pays for environmental virtue?

The gilets jaune revolt begs the issue: who pays to save the planet? The Paris accords absolved the very countries driving emission increases — China and India — from mandating emissions cuts until 2030, leaving the burden largely on the backs of the West’s own middle and working classes.

Yet many of these people need fossil fuels to get to work or operate their businesses. Tourists may gape at the high-speed trains and the Paris Metro, but the vast majority get to work in cars. More than 80 percent of the Paris metropolitan area population lives in the suburbs and exurbs, in an area nearly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.

Like the revolutionaries of 1789, people are enraged by the hypocrisy of their betters. In pre-revolutionary times, French aristocrats and top clerics preached Christian charity while indulging in gluttony, sexual adventurism and lavish spending. Today they see the well-off and well-connected buying their modern version of indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices. Meanwhile, as many as 30 percent of Germans and as many as half of Greeks are spending 10 percent or more of their income on energy, the definition of “energy poverty.” This is occurring while these policies prove sadly ineffective in reducing emissions while the much disdained US leads the large countries in cuts.

It’s not about saving the planet; it’s about the “elites” (who are elite in name only, not in talent or competence or intelligence) signaling their virtue to their peers, while defecating on the commoners and telling them it’s cotton candy.

[Update a while later]

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost exactly nine years since I wrote this piece about the Precautionary Principle. And nothing has changed.