Are we going to run out of helium due to an economically ignorant law? This could affect the cost of spaceflight operations. It would be ironic if we end up going to the moon not for He3, but He4.
It seems to me that if they really wanted to privatize the federal reserve, they should have sold it off to a private bidder, rather than selling the helium at an arbitrary rate.
I got this email a few days ago, and haven’t had the time to respond to it, but I thought I’d at least let my readers pick up the slack:
My name is XXXX and I have read your blog for a while now after being introduced to it through Instapundit. I’m sure you get plenty of e-mails like this where people ask for your advice or opinions on something so if you don’t have time to respond it’s more than understandable.
Some background on me; I recently graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a B.A. in Political Science and just finished my first semester in the University of North Dakota’s M.S. in Space Studies program. Also, I am in the Army National Guard and just transitioned into the public affairs career field, completing a basic course at the Defense Information School.
I had originally planned to go to law school and hope for a career in space law, but after moving to public affairs I’ve fallen in love with the PR-field and now hope to find a PR-related career-path in the aerospace industry. My biggest question to you is, where do I start? I’ve tried researching which PR firms have major aerospace companies as their clients but have found nothing. Also, I don’t see aerospace-PR jobs advertised a whole lot. I’m not sure where exactly to begin looking or who to attempt to contact.
Also, do you have any advice on how I could present my qualifications once I do find someone/place to contact? My issue is that I have a liberals arts bachelors that doesn’t directly apply to the career I want (anymore) and my actual PR-training might not be understood/taken seriously since it comes from the military.
One last question, am I foolish in pursuing the North Dakota program? I talked to a few alumni before I applied and they all had great things to say, however I sometimes wonder if I’m making the wrong decision pursuing an interdisciplinary degree that an employer might not “get” when they review my resume.
Sorry if this e-mail was a bit rambling. I greatly appreciate any help or advice you could give me.
As I said, I hope that some of my readers, who understand the PR world better than I, can help.
[Update later afternoon]
Some advice from a (smart, who knows this stuff) reader who prefers to remain anonymous, but may be useful to more than the emailer:
[He should] save up enough money in his bank account to work as an unpaid intern someplace when he’s done w/ classes in North Dakota. That will give him real-world experience, and could actually turn into a job at the firm he’s interning for. Also, it’ll help him confirm that P.R., which can be a field that chews up young people and spits them out, is what he really wants to do. And if he chooses a city that has lots of outfits working in industries he likes, he can make other useful contacts.
Sounds good to me.
The Democrat strategist has a stupid and ignorant blog post about Elon Musk, SpaceX and NASA over at The Hill. He’s appropriately eviscerated in comments there.
The government report instantly made headlines for the astonishing conclusion that approximately 75 percent of the oil had been collected, burned, skimmed or simply disappeared. Given the magnitude of the spill — the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history — some scientists concluded it was premature to draw such conclusions.
Another independent study released this week estimated as much as 79 percent of the oil remains in the Gulf, beneath the water’s surface.
Lehr’s admission that the peer review wasn’t completed in advance of the report’s release undermines the administration’s claim that it was.
And then, there’s this:
Interior Department officials knew beforehand that President Obama’s six-month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico would cost more than 23,000 jobs and inflict devastating economic damage throughout the region.
Even so, the administration was not deferred from defying a federal judge and doing it anyway.
You’d almost think that they want to destroy the economy. I’m not sure what they’d be doing differently if they did.
And I don’t want to hear any more partisan noise about a “Republican war on science.”
…in this company when it IPOs:
GM…acknowledges that meeting customer and CAFE requirements is going to add to the cost of vehicles in the future and could put downward pressure on sales. The more advanced technologies, like fuel cells and batteries, face even bigger hurdles as neither one has yet proven commercially feasible and there is no guarantee that GM and its suppliers will be able to bring down the costs as hoped. Nonetheless, alternative propulsion systems will be GM’s top research priority going forward.
A non-Government Motors wouldn’t be doing such a nutty thing.
Why the bad economic news shouldn’t always (or ever, lately) be “unexpected“:
While our economy is enormously complicated, it seems reasonably clear that the current slump has turned into the “worst downturn since the Great Depression” precisely because of the ill-advised policies of the Obama administration. Those policies contradict the lessons of history, and there is no reason why their failure should be unexpected.
But “as any intelligent and informed person would have expected” doesn’t quite fit the media narrative.
Is that what the Merlin is? A little early to say, I’d say, but I think one could come up with some creative new vehicles using it in the lower stages and the R-10 up above. If I were in control of NASA R&T budgets, something I’d have done a long time ago was to pay Pratt to test them to destruction to determine how many restarts they could do and how many hours they could fire without refurbishment. If I were SpaceX, I’d be doing the same with Merlin. Perhaps they already are.
Speaking of rocket design, I see that the rocket scientists on the Hill have been sharpening their pencils. I guess that Bill Nelson not only flew into space once, but he must have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, too.
I’m on a trip into the heart of darkness (yeah, I know, that’s racist). Just arrived.
Why is it that the more expensive the hotel, the more they charge for Internet?
I know it’s more exciting than the prosaic reality, but someone needs to tell the copy editor at MSNBC that there is nothing in this article to indicate that SpaceShipTwo is going into space this fall. All it says is that they may start drop tests.
Which raises the question again — do they have an engine yet?
…that the president doesn’t read much. I’d be willing to bet that one of the things he hasn’t read is Hayek. Or Friedman. Or Sowell. If he had, he wouldn’t be such an economic ignoramus.
Speaking of which, IBD:
Only minutes after her department reported that payrolls had shed another 131,000 positions in July, there was Secretary Hilda Solis speaking brazenly of the “strong and immediate action” the White House had taken to save or create “more than 2.5 million American jobs.”
But as the market action showed, investors could see she didn’t know what she was talking about.
But then, Solis is no different from any number of administration officials who by their comments or actions demonstrate almost daily that they know nothing about creating jobs or anything else to improve the economy.
And why should they? There’s never been an administration led by so few people with any experience in the private sector — including the president, the vice president and even the treasury secretary, who last week wrongly called it a “myth” that raising taxes on high-income Americans would hurt small business.
The country’s in the very best of hands.