General Shelton versus Senator McCain.
They’re both wrong. We don’t need an RD-180 replacement; we need an Atlas replacement. And ULA wants to build one. They know that a re-engined Atlas isn’t going to be competitive with SpaceX. But there’s not enough graft in that for some on the Hill.
…as with settlements anywhere else, you start small, and grow them.
…has a piece at Time about SpaceX and commercial space.
Oklahoma is going to court over it.
I think this case will have a better chance than the one that wasn’t ripe in the DC Circuit.
Meanwhile, why does the EPA hate blacks and other minorities so much?
What is happening in Greece was completely predictable, and predicted. What will happen to us is likewise if we remain on the current path.
“A bunch of politicos got in on the ground floor of Obamacare’s $2 billion co-ops in 2011. Today, they are filthy rich cauz nobody’s been watching. Except Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation. Tomorrow’s second part will make you even madder. I know, I’m his editor!”
It’s crony socialism all the way down.
The absurdity of this program knows no bounds. I feel terrible for the NASA and industry managers who have to go through the kabuki of pretending any of this makes any sense.
For those not backers, but interested in what’s happening, I did a project update this morning:
I’m starting to spool up on the project (I expect to actually be funded this week — there’s a two-week delay after the close). Leonard David has a report today that the “Affordable Mars Strategy” report has been published and is available for free download [note: I haven’t actually been able to find the download — all I could find at Leonard’s link was Scott Hubbard’s op-ed — but I think I have the report]. I’ve also been in communication with the authors (specifically, John Baker and Nathan Strange at JPL), and received a lot of material from them last week (some of which may be redundant with the report). I’m planning a trip to Denver next week to (among other things) talk to folks at ULA about integrated vehicle fluids and propellant depots.
The JPL work will provide a foundation for my own analysis, and I’ll probably be discussing it with them. While I think they have a good solution for what they perceive to be their problem, I have fundamentally different top-level requirements.
I would characterize their approach as “Apollo to Mars”: A destination, a date, civil-servant boots on the ground, with a giant government-owned-and-operated rocket, except (unlike Apollo) it is budget constrained. I don’t think that will be any more economically and politically sustainable than Apollo was. I also think, bluntly, as a taxpayer and space enthusiast, that it would not be worth the money.
My approach is to get NASA completely out of the earth-to-orbit business, and to take the savings to develop the technology needed to build a scalable in-space reusable, resilient, affordable transportation architecture, that will enable not simply NASA, but anyone else who wants to, to go to the Red Planet.
And not just to Mars.
…”captures the self-defeating arrogance and tone deafness that has characterized the American environmental community for decades.”
Oops. Maybe there is a “consensus” after all:
According to the newly published survey of geoscientists and engineers, merely 36 percent of respondents fit the “Comply with Kyoto” model. The scientists in this group “express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”
The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.
The survey finds that 24 percent of the scientist respondents fit the “Nature Is Overwhelming” model. “In their diagnostic framing, they believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth.” Moreover, “they strongly disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal lives.”
Another group of scientists fit the “Fatalists” model. These scientists, comprising 17 percent of the respondents, “diagnose climate change as both human- and naturally caused. ‘Fatalists’ consider climate change to be a smaller public risk with little impact on their personal life. They are skeptical that the scientific debate is settled regarding the IPCC modeling.” These scientists are likely to ask, “How can anyone take action if research is biased?”
The next largest group of scientists, comprising 10 percent of respondents, fit the “Economic Responsibility” model. These scientists “diagnose climate change as being natural or human caused. More than any other group, they underscore that the ‘real’ cause of climate change is unknown as nature is forever changing and uncontrollable. Similar to the ‘nature is overwhelming’ adherents, they disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal life. They are also less likely to believe that the scientific debate is settled and that the IPCC modeling is accurate. In their prognostic framing, they point to the harm the Kyoto Protocol and all regulation will do to the economy.”
The final group of scientists, comprising 5 percent of the respondents, fit the “Regulation Activists” model. These scientists “diagnose climate change as being both human- and naturally caused, posing a moderate public risk, with only slight impact on their personal life.” Moreover, “They are also skeptical with regard to the scientific debate being settled and are the most indecisive whether IPCC modeling is accurate.”
Taken together, these four skeptical groups numerically blow away the 36 percent of scientists who believe global warming is human caused and a serious concern.
One interesting aspect of this new survey is the unmistakably alarmist bent of the survey takers. They frequently use terms such as “denier” to describe scientists who are skeptical of an asserted global warming crisis, and they refer to skeptical scientists as “speaking against climate science” rather than “speaking against asserted climate projections.” Accordingly, alarmists will have a hard time arguing the survey is biased or somehow connected to the ‘vast right-wing climate denial machine.’
Note, whether I agree or not, science isn’t done by polling, or by “consensus.” But I’d place myself in the third of those four groups.
[Late-afternoon update]
Scientists speaking with one voice: Panacea, or pathology?