…at SpaceX. Alan Boyle talks to Elon Musk.
I think I’m going to be on Which Way LA this afternoon with Elon, talking about the moribund manned space industry in southern California. SpaceX is the only player standing.
[Update early afternoon]
I’ll definitely be on the air, in a little over half an hour. KCRW streams, so you can listen on the Intertubes, if you’re not near an FM radio in southern California.
[Bumped]
A risk worth taking. Five-dollar gasoline will cause people to come to their senses, I suspect.
[Update a couple minutes later]
From an environmental perspective, off-shore oil drilling is far safer than Mother Nature. As the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, oil that seeps naturally from the ocean floor puts 47 million gallons of crude into U.S. waters annually. Thus far, Deepwater Horizon has leaked about three million gallons. That sounds like a lot of oil, and it is. But the Exxon Valdez leaked 11 million gallons into Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. Even those figures are dwarfed, according to the Economist, by the amount of oil spilled in man-made disasters elsewhere around the world. Saddam Hussein’s destruction of Kuwaiti oil facilities during the Gulf War dumped more than 500 million barrels of crude into the Arabian Gulf. The 1979 blowout of Mexico’s Ixtoc 1 well resulted in 3.3 million barrels being dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. In short, Deepwater Horizon is an environmental crisis, but not the apocalypse that alarmists claim.
Unfortunately, perspective, and logic, aren’t politicians’ strong suits.
…have to do with finance regulation?
One of the Dems I’d love to see get booted out this November is Henry Waxman. Unfortunately, some of the most destructive politicians (e.g., Waxman, Frank) are in the safest seats. That’s not a coincidence, of course. The safer your seat (or at least the perception of safety), the more outrageous the behavior.
Thoughts on the Wall Street Democrats:
…every time the president accuses Republicans of trying to “block progress” or of defying “common sense,” as he did that night, he is executing a dangerous tightrope walk. His party’s electoral fortunes depend on his making forceful calls for reform of our banking laws. His party’s fundraising fortunes depend on his ensuring that no serious reform—of the kind that endangers the big banks’ size and power—ever happens. That may be why the Democrats’ strategy of painting the Republicans as obstructionists on finance reform has gained little traction. By the same token, if Republicans ever did get serious about reforming the banks—and even about breaking up an industry that has turned into a Democratic war chest—they would put Democrats in mortal peril. There seems no chance of this. Obama’s taunts show a confidence, verging on certitude, that Republicans’ hypocrisy is as deep as his own.
Sounds like the Republicans suffer from false consciousness. I still think that low marginal rates are a good idea, though.
California is the worst state in the country in which to do business. I can believe it.
It’s a tragedy what the vandals in Sacramento have done to such a beautiful and naturally wealthy place.
An interesting discussion (at least to me) on the power and limitations of government regulation.
Our noble leaders in Washington were shorting America while they wrecked the economy.
…come up with ridiculous skill/experience mismatches with positions? I used to get calls when I was working advanced space programs in Downey from headhunters looking for me to do things like avionics spec development for Navy fighters at Point Mugu. There was nothing on my resume to indicate either experience or interest in such a thing. My theory, then and now, is that corporate headhunters are both desperate for fresh meat (though that’s less of a problem in this economy) and clueless about technical jobs.
A comsat is loose in GEO. This was one of the things that Orbital Recovery was supposed to address. I’m not sure what the status is on the company, but perhaps Dennis can comment.
About three months ago, I had a couple phone conversations with Charles Homans, an editor at the Washington Monthly, who had contacted me as a result of reading The New Atlantis piece. Apparently, he’s been doing a lot of other research in the interim. This long article is the apparent result of it.