It’s rare to get the Obama Administration and the conservative editorial page of the Washington Times in agreement on something. Yet, both have spoken out in opposition to report language in the Senate’s Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) appropriations bill—due to be considered by the full Senate this week—regarding cost and pricing data for commercial crew and cargo providers.
Well, it’s not like he has any political principles other than what will get him reelected.
Dale Skran has a review, that mirrors a lot of my own concerns with it:
There is no discussion at all that the prospect for increased traffic to LEO for all purposes, including tourism, might lead to significantly lower costs; or that it may lead to reusable spacecraft with superior operational characteristics relative to existing vehicles or the SLS. This glaring absence seems remarkable given the stated goal of SpaceX to develop just such lower-cost, reusable craft, as well as their considerable progress in this direction. Of course, the efforts of SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, XCOR Aerospace, and others to greatly reduce launch costs may all fail. However, the NRC report is based on the unstated assumption that over the entire period considered, all the way out to 2054, there will be essentially no progress in rocketry other than that funded by NASA exploration programs, and that for the entire period the SLS as currently envisioned will remain the preferred method for Americans to reach space. It is difficult to imagine a more unlikely foundation for the planning of future space efforts than this.
It is extremely myopic, and therefore of little value, but it was probably doomed to be so by its charter.
Temporarily, anyway. Things had gotten sufficiently absurd recently on the space-policy front that a new video would have almost written itself, but sadly, Xtranormal went tits up last summer, with all user info. Fortunately, there wasn’t much money in my account to lose, and all my videos are preserved on Youtube, but I’m not sure how I’ll be making any new ones.
The ads tell you that fatherhood – indeed, any sort of domestic entanglement – turns you into a dullard, a dope, a neutered clueless dork who can be reduced down to oversized tools and stammering befuddlement at Important Things. Why would any man want to be that? What rewards does the culture offer in return?
In other words mitigation to slow or halt GHG emissions will be costly today with little payout over the next 100, if not 1000, years, making it unlikely that large mitigation projects have a positive net present value. And for these results to occur, the United States would have to be joined by the rest of the industrialized nations as well as the developing ones, something that is not going to happen.
Given that mitigation has gained little policy traction, many climate scientists seem to be paying more attention to adaptation. Indeed, the subtitle of the IPCC’s 2014 report is Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. In contract to earlier IPCC reports, the press release in April mentioned mitigation only once and adaptation 12 times. According to Chris Field, chairman of one of the IPCC working groups, “The really big breakthrough in this report is the new idea of thinking about managing climate change.”
What a concept.
[Noon update]
Math is math: “(100,000′s of Jobs + Billions of Taxpayer $’s) x 85 years = 0.018° C.”