I’d gotten a heads up about this over the holidays, but now it’s official:
This new funded contract follows an unfunded agreement signed in 2011 under which Bigelow has worked on various “procedures and protocols for adding BEAM to the space station”.
As indicated above, the module would be delivered to the station by either a SpaceX Falcon 9 or Orbital Antares rocket.
BEAM would provide extra storage while also providing data and experience for both Bigelow and NASA on installing and using a module with a non-metal structure in a working space station environment.
It doesn’t sound like it will create more habitable volume, in terms of allowing bigger crews, but it will provide valuable experience, and allow more useful expansion later.
…but not quite as busy as it looks. In addition to the points made, there will doubtless be delays. But it’s still great progress considering that the company didn’t exist a decade ago.
BTW, as an aside, note that in comments over there, Tom Elifritz actually sounds sane. I hope he’s doing better than historically.
I’d suggest returning it to the taxpayers with a reduction in sales or property tax rates. Show the rest of the country what a virtuous, and opposed to vicious cycle looks like.
We’re betting that this news won’t dent greens’ self-confidence. They will still insist that unless they are put in charge of the entire world economy we face disaster. The sad truth is that the more power they get, the more damage they do.
They don’t care about poor people. They don’t care about people at all, except themselves.
…there always have been American Tories—people who chafe at restraints on central power and would prefer a British-style government. In recent years, as political “progressives” have gradually lost the scholarly battle over constitutional interpretation, some have stopped pretending the Constitution means whatever they want it to, and have begun to trash the document itself.
But the source of the claim is more shocking, because it comes from one who has taught constitutional law for 40 years. And who should know better.
Did the Constitution cause our present “fiscal chaos?” Quite the contrary. The crisis has arisen not because we followed the Constitution, but because we have allowed federal officials to ignore it. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court announced that it would stop enforcing the Constitution’s limits on federal spending programs. Without meaningful spending restraint, Congress became an auction house where lobbyists could acquire new money streams for almost anything—a redundant health care program; a subsidy for an uneconomic product; or a modern art museum in Indiana.
It is hard to believe there would be a fiscal crisis today if federal spending had remained within the Constitution’s generous but limited boundaries.
…Although it is true, as Professor Seidman states, that politicians have violated the Constitution, it is rarely true that we have been better off for it. The breaches have included incarceration of innocent citizens during World War II, ill-advised attempts to micro-manage the economy through monetary and regulatory policy, and unrestricted spending. We have lived to rue them all.
The thought of limited government is anathema to would-be tyrants. Read the whole thing, which demolishes the ad hominem arguments put forth by those who want to ignore our founding document.
It turns out that fracking is perfectly safe, and the New York state government tried to hide the evidence:
Greens are quick to defend their climate change position with scientific evidence and have positioned themselves as a movement wedded to science. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that evidence is a flag of convenience for a movement that is rooted in emotion and passion far more than it likes to admit.
Because it doesn’t like to admit it at all, even though it’s mostly that.
We knew (at least those of us not idiots) that it was criminally insane from an economic standpoint, but it also turns out that it was an environmental disaster.