I don’t know if it will be webcast, but I’m going to be giving a talk tomorrow morning in Pasadena, as part of the final plenary of the Mars Society meeting.
[Update Sunday afternoon]
I think the talk went OK. The crowd was smaller than I expected; I think that the Mars conference in DC has pulled a lot of the audience that Bob used to get for his Mars Society meetings. I called people in the audience “mutant weirdos,” and made a lawyer joke.
[Bumped]
…that could change your life.
Good list.
Time to let go of the reins?
He has Gwynne to run SpaceX for him, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone like that at Tesla. And his behavior has been quite erratic of late.
Eric Berger has this week’s round up.
I will say that I’ve never been very concerned about competition from China, but now that they’ve allowed commercial companies to engage, we may start to see a lot of innovation there.
An interview with Phil Metzger, including the most recent findings, on how to utilize it.
Thoughts from Matthew Continetti on Trump’s media skills, and his vulnerability to others who share them.
As I noted on twitter, it’s stupid to think that the hush money was a campaign contribution, because for many Trump supporters, the notion that he was shtooping porn stars and playmates was part of the appeal.
Bob Zimmerman says that the swamp is winning, big league.
Want power to the people? Then you want capitalism.
Was it normal, or abnormal?
One off the polling practices I find annoying is the “right track, wrong track” question, because it can be very misleading in its implications. It doesn’t provide any information as to what the respondent thinks what “track” we should be on. I have never in my adult life felt that the country was on the “right track,” and if polled I would always say it was wrong. And of course, if I said that whenn Republicans were in power, Democrats would infer that it meant that I wanted them to win, which would be stupid, because what I wanted continually was a more libertarian, constitutional government.
Anyway, I have to confess that, despite my dislike of Trump, I do feel, for the first time, that with all the regulatory rollback, and constitutionalist judicial appointees, we’re at least, finally, on the right track. But we still have along way to go down the rails. My fear is that if the Democrats get back in power, we’ll be off the rails entirely.
A history, as it approaches first air under the gear. As I noted in an email to the person who sent me the link:
“Stratolaunch has never made any sense to me as a business. Gary [Hudson]’s theory is that it’s the Glomar Explorer of space: a civilian cover for a black operation (in this case, perhaps as an X-37 launcher capable of single-orbit rendezvous). But it seems nutty to me to make your business dependent on a single carrier aircraft. Orbital got away with it with the Tri-Star but at least there they could have gone to the boneyard for another one if they’d lost it. Look how much time it’s taken to even do taxi tests with a single vehicle. And they only this week announced (again) their plans for the orbital launcher, now not to fly until 2022, over a decade after that press conference.”
I also think that Allen placed entirely too much faith in Burt, who is an aviation genius, but not necessarily a space guy.