Yeah, I’m shocked too. And I still think the estimate is low.
[Update a while later]
Here’s a new post by Phil Klein on the revised CBO estimates. Of course, as we said a that time, CBO estimates are always garbage in garbage out, and a lot of garbage went into it while it was being debated.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More on the lies from Guy Benson, with a bonus mention of the growing deficits, which means that there will be another debt-ceiling fight in the fall, before the election, if not sooner. Hilarious, considering all of the lies and charades the White House went through last summer to avoid that.
Elon is one of those rare people who started with a small fortune in space and turned it into a larger one. Historically, it’s been the opposite for most attempts. I guess they’ll have to update this list now.
A very good overview of the current state of affairs by Stewart Money over at The Space Review. It’s a mess, and it’s not going to change until we start to take more COTS-like approaches throughout, not just for NASA but DoD as well.
When American cities embraced the high cost, high regulation statist model two generations or so ago, they were often the richest and most dynamic places in the country. Increasingly “progressive” policies, with higher wages for unionized teachers, bigger bureaucracies enforcing tighter regulations, more “planning” by qualified technocrats and more government services and benefits to improve the quality of residents’ lives were supposed to take the American city into a new golden age.
It’s hard to think of many social experiments that have more disastrously failed. Now many of these once flourishing cities are hollowed out shells, while around them suburbs and increasingly exurbs flourish away from the deadening influence of urbanist politics. None of this affects the hold of progressive and urbanist ideology on true believers; if anything, they believe even more passionately in the cause. Obviously the problem is that we haven’t spent enough on enough tenured teachers, haven’t written enough new regulations and established enough new bureaus to enforce them, haven’t published enough white papers by enough credentialed planners, haven’t extracted enough taxes and provided enough services. If we could just tax the suburbs and exurbs more heavily and spend more of the money in the cities, all would be well.
It’s a classic case of the definition of insanity.
Clearing up some misconceptions among the enthusiasts. Spaceflight isn’t “safe.” It’s also not “unsafe.” That any activity is either of those things in any absolute sense is a myth. It is all relative.
I’m assuming that Ed Wright wrote this, but it’s not clear.
on the subject. It’s a little out of my price range, but it looks interesting.