A new paper by Jim Vedda from the Aerospace Corporation.
[Via Doug Messier]
Category Archives: Law
Office Of Commercial Space Transportation
Norm Bowles has built a web site with its history. I haven’t looked through it yet.
The Space Frontier Act
It’s nice to see bipartisan action on this useful bill, but I don’t see it as doing much about the frontier. And I’m glad that they’re finally taking OCST out of the FAA, something I’ve been advocating for a quarter of a century, ever since Gore buried it there.
Terraforming Mars
There’s not enough CO2 there. Doesn’t seem like a problem to me; just import carbon and oxygen (and hydrogen) from carbonaceous asteroids in the belt. And of course, they have to throw this in:
If you believe it’s possible to terraform Mars, you also must believe in human-caused climate change, because it’s the same process. Even if it’s impossible to terraform Mars, it’s clearly possible to areoform the mid-latitudes of Earth. Because people are doing it.
Ummmmm…no. We’re not.
Meanwhile, Tim Fernholz says we’re going to have to be careful to not contaminate the water there.
Hillary
Five reasons that she was the worst presidential candidate the Democrats could have run.
The Unmasking Probe
Sharyl Atkisson wonders whatever happened to it?
I think there are still a lot of shoes to drop with regard to the corruption of the Obama administration, but expect the media to continue to ignore and suppress it. Her story is also a reminder of what terrible picks George W. Bush made:
To understand, it helps to begin with the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when U.S. intel agencies sought to expand their surveillance authority — for what seemed like all the right reasons. (For context, a week before 9/11, Robert Mueller had become FBI director; a month earlier, James Clapper had been named head of the agency that supplies image intel to the CIA, and John Brennan recently had become CIA deputy executive director).
I’m glad that Gore (and Kerry) didn’t win, but Bush was a disaster in many ways.
[Update mid morning]
Nunes says that the American people will be shocked by what’s been redacted in the documents. I wonder if Trump is waiting for an opportune time to declassify that? Maybe just before the election?
Regulating Space Activity
I oppose the Senate version of this bill.
I think that Commerce should be in charge, and I’ve said in the recent past, keep the FAA’s head in the clouds.
Congress Tells USAF To Consider Reusables
Eric Berger has the latest.
@SciGuySpace Part of that history was the idiotic policy in the early 90s of telling USAF to use expendables, and assigning reusables to NASA, which resulted in the disastrous X-33 and X-34 programs, which "proved" that reusables couldn't be done.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) July 27, 2018
The Open-Minded Democrats
Commentary from Mitch McConnell on their insanity about Brett Kavanaugh.
Higher Education
…is in decline. It has been for many years, but only now are more people finally noticing:
The president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has summed up the consensus among faculty: “The sad truth is that US higher education is in decline.” A poll in 2012 showed that 89 percent of American adults and 96 percent of senior academic administrators agree that American higher education is “in crisis.” When a recent dean of Harvard College writes a book subtitled How a Great University Forgot Education and laments “the loss of purpose in America’s great colleges”—meaning Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the other elite universities that follow their lead—the presumption must be that something has gone very wrong. These are the opinions of academics, most of whom are by no means conservative.
Some authorities still insist that colleges, even if they teach no specific knowledge, at least improve “critical thinking.” But this contention is not borne out by a test designed to measure such thinking, the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Since the 1980s the improvement in students’ CLA scores during their four years of college has dropped by about 50 percent, and such improvement now averages just 7 percent over the first three semesters.
Along with government-recommended nutrition, this is one of the biggest public-policy disasters of our time. And it doesn’t even mention the degree to which the student-loan debt for these worthless degrees blights the lives of young people, while lining the pockets of banks and colleges at no risk to them.
[Update late morning]
I think it says something about the state of higher education, and particularly BU, that economics major Alexandria O-C is so fundamentally ignorant about not just the federal budget, but basic arithmetic.