I talked about it with John Batchelor and David Livingston last week.
[Update a few minutes later]
Space mining may be only a decade away. That’s basically what I said on Hotel Mars.
Category Archives: Business
Demons Under Every Rock
The ever-expanding definition of “climate denial.”
These sorts of attacks, supported by multiple layers of links that never actually materially support the claims that are being made, used to be the domain of a small set of marginal activists and blogs. Atkin herself cut her teeth at Climate Progress, where her colleague Joe Romm has spent over a decade turning ad hominem into a form of toxic performance art.2
But today, these misrepresentations are served up in glossy, big-budget magazines. Climate denial has morphed, in the eyes of the climate movement, and their handmaidens in the media, into denial of green policy preferences, not climate science.
…More broadly, the expansion of the use of denier by both activists and journalists in the climate debate, a word once reserved only for Holocaust denial, mirrors a contemporary political moment in which all opposing viewpoints, whether in the eyes of the alt-right or the climate left, are increasingly viewed as illegitimate. The norms that once assured that our free press would also be a fair press have deeply eroded. Balanced reporting and fair attribution have become road kill in a world where all the incentives for both reporters and their editors are to serve up red meat for their highly segmented and polarized readerships, a dynamic that both reflects and feeds the broader polarization in our polity. It is a development that does not bode well for pluralism or democracy.
Yup.
[Update Wednesday afternoon]
Related thoughts on the Brett Stephens brouhaha: How to lose friends and alienate people.
[Bumped]
Red Dragon
2018 isn’t happening, but they may send two Dragons to Mars in 2020.
[Update a while later]
Meanwhile, in Michoud…
SLS LOX Dome Dropped And Damaged Beyond Repair https://t.co/TkOkVUAEr7 @NASA_SLS #NASA pic.twitter.com/6daG95g7TX
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) May 10, 2017
It’s almost metaphorical.
[Update a few minutes later]
@WeHaveMECO so it was a suborbital drop?
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) May 10, 2017
@WeHaveMECO @SciGuySpace Every drop is suborbital.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) May 10, 2017
Commercial Spaceflight Standards
ASTM is launching a working group today to develop them.
The Idiotic California Launch Tax
Doug Messier has more details. If I were SpaceX, my public comment would be, “See ya later, we’re going to Alaska.”
[Update a while later]
OK, according to this article, the launch companies requested this rule, apparently to clarify their tax situation.
The Engine Competition
The race between Aerojet Rocketdyne and Blue Origin heats up. But as noted in comments over there, there’s a big word missing in the story: Reusability. And the issue isn’t so much reusability of the engines themselves (though I’ve heard nothing to indicate that the AR1 will be reusable), but in the vehicle design. ULA does not want to continue Atlas with a new engine; they know they need at least a recoverable propulsion/avionics unit of Vulcan to even hope to be competitive with SpaceX (and Blue Origin).
ObamaCare
“My husband would have died if he’d relied on it.”
All of the mendacious hysteria over this bill has been incandescent, especially compared to the very real disaster that the ACA has been (and which many of us warned about).
Who would've guessed the same folks who said Mitt gave a lady cancer & plans to kill Big Bird would exaggerate about GOP legislation.
— Razor (@hale_razor) May 6, 2017
Who would've guessed the same folks who said Mitt gave a lady cancer & plans to kill Big Bird would exaggerate about GOP legislation.
— Razor (@hale_razor) May 6, 2017
Dems telling even more lies to prevent this bill than they did to pass Obamacare. Impressive, in a way. Wouldn't have thought it possible. https://t.co/qkzzPcYw8c
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) May 6, 2017
California
Young people overwhelmingly prefer single-family houses, which represent 80 percent of home purchases nationwide for people under 35. If millennials continue their current rate of savings, notes one study, they would need 28 years to qualify for a median-priced house in San Francisco—but only five years in Charlotte and just three in Atlanta. This may be one reason, notes a recent ULI report, why 74 percent of Bay Area millennials are considering moving out in the next five years.
Regional planners and commercial chambers should indeed look to California as a model—of exactly what not to do. The state’s large metro areas are no longer hot growth spots for millennials, who are flocking to suburbs and exurbs elsewhere. Since 2010, the biggest gains in millennial residents have been in low-density, comparatively affordable cities such as Orlando, Austin, and Nashville. Ultimately, the battle for California’s future—and much of Blue America’s—will turn on how these regions meet the challenge of providing housing and opportunities to a new generation of workers and young families. A California that works only for the wealthy and well-established is not sustainable.
Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.
Made In Space
New details on their plans for optical fiber production on orbit.
California Rocket Taxes
If this is true, it’s good news for Kodiak. Dave Masten seems to think it’s overblown, though.