Category Archives: Law

Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Low-Cost Launch

The military could have it in the next half decade, but it’s going to have to work at it:

Miller argued that taking advantage of the current opportunities is going to require leadership from an organization that doesn’t exist yet in the Pentagon.

“We need an organization that’s not totally there,” he said. “We need an organization that has the right culture to understand private industry and partner with them. It needs to have the right authorities…It needs to have the right leadership and vision to go exercise this plan. We did not find any existing organization that has all the right qualities now, so we recommended creating a purpose-built organization to go execute this strategy.”

Schilling said the study was “not an indictment in any way shape or form” of the work of the Air Force’s Operationally Responsive Space Office in New Mexico.

He has to say that, but in fact it is. ORS has been pretty blinkered in its thinking. Of course, it’s not like it’s ever had a huge budget to work with.

[Update a few minutes later]

Funding to defend space systems will be in the next budget:

“Our fundamental challenge is we have to deal with space as an increasingly challenged domain,” he said at a Washington Space Business Roundtable panel discussion in Arlington, Virginia, on national security space priorities in the Trump administration. The problem is that the current systems were not built to withstand attacks, he added.

“What you will see in the budget is measured steps across the enterprise on how we address mission assurance,” he said, without going into details on how much will be proposed.

They will be “measured steps” and the work will take many several budget cycles, beyond the current future year defense program, which projects funding out for five years.

“It took us a long time to build the existing system. It is going to take a significant amount of time to transform it into the mission-assured system that is required in the future,” he said.

Yes. And the sooner they start the better. This is long overdue.

Business, Economics, Health, History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

ObamaCare

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“My husband would have died if he’d relied on it.”

All of the mendacious hysteria over this bill has been incandescent, especially compared to the very real disaster that the ACA has been (and which many of us warned about).

Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Yesterday’s Senate Space Hearing

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Bob Zimmerman has a roundup of links, and some thoughts:

Cruz’s effort here appears incredibly bi-partisan. The only other Senate attendees to the hearing were Democrats, with the former and new ranking leaders of the subcommittee from the Democratic Party, Bill Nelson (R-Florida) and Ed Markey (R-Massachusetts), participating eagerly and without rancor. They were both there for the entire hearing, and were clearly being influenced not only by Cruz’s remarks but by the testimony of the witnesses. That no other Republican attended this hearing was I think not because they were boycotting Cruz (several fellow committee members, such as Mike Lee (R-Utah), are strong conservative allies) but because Cruz does not need to convince them to support his position. He was working here to bring the Democrats to his side, and it appeared that he was having some success.

Most important of all, however, were the repeated references to the Outer Space Treaty by Cruz and others. That Cruz noted that maybe it is outdated and needs revision did not surprise me. What was significant, and not captured by the stories above, was his reference to the idea of incorporating the American concept of homesteading in that revision. Even more significant was Bill Nelson’s hearty endorsement of the idea, noting that his own family had obtained land through homesteading in the early 20th century, a piece of land that just happened to be located near one end of the space shuttle runway at the Kennedy Space Center.

While these senators might have been influenced by my op-ed in The Federalist last week, I think it much more likely that they have been, like me, considering this issue themselves, and that I more likely sensed the wave coming from many different places, and caught it with my op-ed at just the right time.

If there’s any administration that could take action on the OST, it’s this one.