Leonard David has the story of yesterday’s roll out in North Las Vegas.
In my view, there were three events in human spaceflight this week. The SRB firing, BEAM, and the announcement by Lockheed Martin of a long-needed space tug. Only the latter two have any relevance to the future.
There’s one year left, if we don’t get a wet winter.
A sane electorate would start fracking the hell out of the Monterey Shale, opening up wells of shore, and use the energy to run desalinization plants, instead of wrecking the state economy with carbon mitigation that will have zero effect on the climate, and building high-speed rail.
So we won’t be doing that. Not yet, anyway.
Some thoughts on the evolving “consensus” on climate science:
…there never has been a “crunch point” forcing journalists to re-examine the issue. Instead they have just kept the same ridiculous views for over a decade even though no sane journalist coming to the subject of “global warming” after 18 years of pause, complete failure of climate models, global ice back at normal levels, no increase in climate extremes, a decrease in hurricanes and children still knowing what snow is … no journalist would swallow this non-science about doomsday warming in the face of NO EVIDENCE to support it. (Rookies might be more sceptical, but they probably quickly get indoctrinated into the journalists alarmists views)
They don’t ever look at global warming afresh. They just keep believing the same non-science they have for over a decade despite the overwhelming evidence against their insane views.
The fever (to borrow a metaphor from the alarmist-in-chief) will have to break at some point.
[Update a while later]
Naomi Klein showcases everything that is wrong with climate alarmism.
It looks to Dan Rasky as though it’s literally about to erupt.
I do think it’s probably figuratively, though.
This is what the past decades have wrought. The federal student loan program has been an unmitigated disaster for almost everyone, except (so far) the university administrators.
To me, ethanol epitomizes the dysfunction of our national politics. It’s an awful policy, raising the price of both fuel and food, which hits the poor hardest, while damaging engines and stealing from the taxpayer. Everyone knows it but, because, by historical circumstance, Iowa is so politically prominent in presidential politics, too few are willing to say it (I’ll grant that Huckabee and Santorum may actually be economically ignorant enough to think it’s a good idea). So good for Cruz.
I wonder if there’s any possibility of a class-action suit against it, from both fuel consumers and food consumers? If not, there should be. It could fix a lot of awful welth-transfer laws.
It might be real, but the Left’s “solutions” to it are a fantasy.
Joe Pappalardo has the story. I wonder how much of it is due to environmental impact assessment, and if so, if it would be as hard if they were doing an airport instead? Back in 2004, we tried to extend the categorical exception that the aviation industry gets from the National Environmental Protection Act to space transportation, but the result was weak tea, leaving waivers up the discretion of the head of the EPA. Something I’d like to see in an amended version of the Commercial Space Launch Act would be to make it a clean extension, with no discretion from Gina (or any future administrator). It would be interesting to see if that made it veto bait for Obama, though.
Roger Launius has a brief history of the Shuttle, but this number is outdated:
The best expendable launch vehicles (ELV) still cost about $10,000 per pound from Earth to orbit.
As I commented over there (it’s awaiting moderation), Falcon 9 delivers ~30,000 lbs to LEO for ~$60M. That’s $2000/lb. Price, not cost. Falcon Heavy will roughly halve that. If they can reuse cores, they’ll drop the price further.