Orbital Sciences Corp. is warning subcontractors supporting development of a launch abort system for NASA’s Orion crew capsule that funding for the effort will cease April 30, according to industry sources and documents.
No more money down that rat hole. This is good, not just because it doesn’t waste any more money on it, but because it makes it harder for Orion to compete with Dragon or Orion Lite for crew delivery if Lockheed Martin tried to use their subsidized system to get into that market. Boeing couldn’t have been happy to have heard that Orion had been resurrected, when they were making a decision about whether not to put their own money into a crew capsule (with the help of their CCDev contract). I don’t know if this will be enough to assuage their fears, though.
Yesterday, I took a tour of the new (well, new to me — I hadn’t seen it because they moved while I was in Florida) SpaceX facilities in Hawthorne. They are quite impressive, as are all the rocket parts being manufactured there. No cameras were allowed, unfortunately. It’s even more impressive considering how little (relative to other similar projects) money has been spent. I would say that this is the current state of the art in expendable launch systems, with plenty of room for future cost reduction (including at least partial reusability). It makes me curious to visit Decatur now, to compare it to the Delta/Atlas production process.
I’ve been trying to understand the Tea Party Movement. Sounds like a lot of angry people who want to get the government out of their lives and cut both taxes and the deficit. Nothing wrong with that — although one does wonder where they were in the Bush years.
They were there all along, and few of them were very happy about the spending, but they weren’t idiotic enough to think that the Democrats would be better. And sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.
Anyway, I think that what Beijing Tom really wants is a watermelon tea party.
Stu Witt and Peter Navarro make a (probably futile) plea to Sacramento. Don’t hold your breath, guys. As you noted, the state’s politicians don’t give a damn.
Some thoughts on the health-care debacle, in Massachusetts and the nation:
Insurance companies in Massachusetts are thus required to offer numerous benefits as determined by politicians and lobbyists, but they may only charge what government bureaucrats permit. It would be akin to the government requiring restaurants to sell $50 steak dinners, but only allowing them to charge $25.
When similar price controls and “guaranteed coverage” laws were imposed in South Dakota and Kentucky, many insurers left these states rather than be slowly bled to death. As similar laws are phased in nationally under ObamaCare, the government could drive private insurers out of business altogether, enabling it to herd unwilling Americans into a “public option.”
ObamaCare thus places a noose around insurers’ necks. Insurance companies will be allowed to survive only at the arbitrary pleasure of the government.
…The trend is becoming clear. First, insurers must seek government permission to survive. Then, patients must seek permission to receive some forms of medical care. Will we soon need government permission simply to live?
That’s what seems to generally happen at the end of the road we’re on. A quarter of a billion people were, after all, murdered by their governments in the last century.