Obama follows its lead. If California is bailed out, it’s the end of federalism. Unfortunately, it already started, with the “stimulus.”
[Update a few minutes later]
“California can either have all the regulation, or all the business, but it can’t have both.”
Get a degree in something societally useful.
Some thoughts from Michael Listner.
[Update a while later]
The asteroid miners need to get their legal act together.
Just who and what is he?
Astrobotic has landed a NASA contract for a prospector.
November can’t come soon enough.
[Update a while later]
The official “apologizes” for the comment. That’s OK — we know what he really thinks now. It was a Kinsleyan gaffe aka a Freudian slip.
Does it violate the law?
No, but Tanja Masson-Zwaan has been tweeting that it’s now time to start setting up the “regime” under the Moon Treaty to redistribute the wealth:
Possibly parties to Moon agrmt 79 must start talks about regime governing exploitation, as it seems ‘about to become feasible’ 2/2 #spacelaw
Personally, I think it means that it’s now time to have the Senate actively repudiate it by vote, to indicate that we will have no part of that nonsense.
Here’s a WSJ piece on it. If they do actually move an asteroid, under current precedent, they’d own it.
I won’t be covering it in real time, because I’ll be at a workshop at JPL giving a talk on propellant depots. Interestingly, Dennis Wingo gives a talk following mine on extraterrestrial resource utilization. It seems like a lot of things are coming together at the same time.
[Evening update]
Sorry, workshop link was wrong. Fixed now, I hope.
The Dragon flight has been pushed off again, apparently to do some final validation on code. There’s entirely too much political pressure on the successful outcome of this flight.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the official release from SpaceX: “After reviewing our recent progress, it was clear that we needed more time to finish hardware-in-the-loop testing and properly review and follow up on all data. While it is still possible that we could launch on May 3rd, it would be wise to add a few more days of margin in case things take longer than expected. As a result, our launch is likely to be pushed back by one week, pending coordination with NASA.”
A better question is, should they be, at least in anything resembling their current form. It won’t change until parents realize what a massive fraud the whole thing is.