Bob Zubrin reviews Ron Howard’s National Geographic series, and Elon Musk.
Patricia and I had dinner with Leonard and Barbara David Saturday night in Austin. He’s on a book tour for NatGeo for his new book that accompanies the series.
Category Archives: Economics
Orion
The slow, inevitable death begins:
Entering into the transition period between presidents, NASA’s administrator, Charles Bolden, has encouraged the next White House administration to continue support for Orion and the Space Launch System rocket, which account for more than $3 billion annually. Congress, too, has expressed a strong interest in continuing work on these vehicles.
However one source told Ars that it may become necessary to choose either the Orion capsule or NASA rocket in the coming years as the space agency looks to pare back its budget, and this might necessitate going to a less expensive, more privately developed vehicle. “Look,” this source said, “if you have to cancel a program, this is a responsible way of lining up a replacement.”
It will be a bloody political battle, but ultimately, SLS won’t be far behind.
Trump, And Space
Jeff Foust’s take. I’ll be talking about this on The Space Show on Sunday.
Post-Election Thoughts
In no particular order:
1) Despite his “approval rating,” this was an utter repudiation of the last eight years (and to a lesser degree, the previous eight years under Bush). Trump is Obama’s “legacy.”
2) I hope, and even expect, that Giuliani will be the next AG. He will take the handcuffs off the FBI, and finally get to the bottom of all of the Obama lawlessness as well as hers. In the spirit of reconciliation, Trump should offer her a pardon, on condition they shut down the foundation, and she exit our lives.
3) There will obviously be no post-election confirmation of Garland. Ginsburg and Breyer will probably be rethinking their retirement plans.
4) I assume that House Republicans have a repeal and replace plan to give to Trump in January.
5) Expect a flurry of executive orders undoing much of Obama’s lawlessness in the first week.
More anon.
[Update a few minutes later]
Will “liberals” finally discover the appeal of limited government?
[Update a few minutes later]
Predictably, embittered Democrats engage in racist outbursts. Well, this is nothing new; they have historically been the party of racism.
[Update a couple minutes later]
What "uncertainty"? It's dead, Jim. https://t.co/1UwLXbRfln
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) November 9, 2016
[Update a couple more minutes later]
Would’t accepting a last-minute pardon from Obama be a tacit admission that someone did something wrong? That’s why Nixon didn’t necessarily want one.
[Update a while later]
It occurs to me that now that the crime family has no favors to offer, the donations to the Clinton Crime Foundation will start to, or immediately dry up.
Unlike Hillary, @KellyannePolls is clearly a woman of high historic actual accomplishment.
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) November 9, 2016
[Late-morning update]
Yes, a large part of Trump’s appeal is a backlash against the fascism of political correctness.
O’Neill Space Colonies
It’s seemed clear for a while, but Jeff Bezos has now said explicitly that that’s his vision for humanity’s future in space. While Elon remains a planetary chauvinist. Fortunately, there’s room for both visions.
SLS
Bob Zimmerman has some thoughts on potential upcoming (and unsurprising, since it doesn’t really matter whether or not it actually flies) schedule slips:
…it means that it will have literally taken NASA two decades to build and fly a single manned Orion capsule, beginning when George Bush ordered the construction of the Crew Exploration Vehicle in January 2004.
Plenty of time to take it behind the barn and put it out of its misery.
Molten-Salt Reactors
Yes, we could use them both here and on Mars.
The Rising Health Insurance Premiums
Loony leftist blames the party that didn’t vote for the legislative atrocity.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: David Harsanyi: “When Will Liberals Answer For Obamacare’s Failures? Is there any accountability in politics for being completely wrong? Not for defenders of Obamacare.”
#ProTip: They’re not “liberals.” There is nothing liberal about them.
A New Transistor
…that doesn’t need batteries. Seems like it would have applications for the outer solar system.
I have to say, after reading decades of science fiction, that it does feel like the future is arriving. For better or worse.
[Update a while later]
3-D printed magnets.
Climate McCarthyism
Wikileaks exposed it, from Podesta and Steyer:
Since the fivethirtyeight.com uproar, Pielke has quit publishing about climate change. He’s gone on to become a world-leading expert on sports and doping. He now heads the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado, which is housed within the university’s athletics department. He has more than 8,000 followers on Twitter and is an active, maybe rabid, tweeter. “I’m having a blast,” he told me. Working on climate change, he said, “you wake up, it’s the same people arguing about the same stuff. In sports, you have no idea what idea you will be writing about. . . . There’s so much going on. There’s so much upheaval.” What lessons did he learn from his stint in the climate-change discussion? He replied that the debate is “almost religious in its intensity.” Instead of having a rational discussion about the best ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the debate has become solely “about power, about who gets to speak and whose voices are deemed legitimate.” The smear campaign against him by Romm and ThinkProgress was designed “to make public speech costly.”
The lawsuit against me and others is mentioned as well. What fascists these people are.