The president stammers because he thinks too fast.
I don’t recall Buckley as a stammerer, just a deliberate speaker. It’s been a long time since I heard him, though. And I do find Obama’s long “aaaaaannnddds” annoying. Of course, I think that Sarah Palin needs a speech coach, too, not to get rid of her accent, but to lower the register of her voice a little and not sound quite so screechy.
Over at Space Politics in comments, in response the moonwalker editorial yesterday, “Major Tom” once again lays out the numbers:
Continue reading The Continuing Constellation Underfunding Myth
…stuck in the past. My thoughts on Wednesday’s USA Today piece by the Apollo astronauts, over at the Washington Examiner.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I see that the White House and NASA have responded as well, over at USA Today.
We may be about to finally find out, though I expect them to continue to stonewall: a judge has ordered the University of Virginia to release the climate research materials And Michael Mann is his usual smarmy, ad-hominem self:
“I think its very unfortunate that fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers … continue to harass U.Va., NASA, and other leading academic and scientific institutions with these frivolous attacks,” he said.
Hey, if I’m funded by the fossil-fuel industry, where the hell is my check?
Is Patrick Fitzgerald covering for Barack Obama?
Robert Zimmerman has a post, with which I mostly agree. But since I seem to be unable to comment there, I would add a couple corrections.
Gagarin’s launch vehicle had reached escape velocity and orbited the earth.
No, it reached orbital velocity. If it had reached escape velocity, it would never have come back. Escape velocity is about 1.4 (root of two, to be exact) times local circular velocity.
Another point (besides the fact that the two Bushes aren’t Junior and Senior).
In all these declarations, it was assumed that the space vehicles and rockets to get into space would be designed and operated by the federal government.
That actually was not the case for the Vision for Space Exploration. If you go back and read the Aldridge report, it recommends commercial (and international) participation, and doesn’t require or expect NASA to develop any launch systems. It only directs it to build a “Crew Exploration Vehicle” (what eventually became Orion). All of the contractors for the Concept Exploration & Refinement trade studies considered existing commercial launchers, or larger versions of them, for the lunar architecture. No one considered anything resembling what became Ares, because it was universally recognized that a Shuttle-derived system would be unaffordable (not to mention that it was always a nutty idea). It was only when Mike Griffin replaced Sean O’Keefe and fired Craig Steidle that a Marshall-developed rocket became the baseline. In fact, other than eliminating the goal of moon first, the new NASA plans (or, at least, the 2011 budget submission) resemble the original VSE much more than Mike Griffin’s Constellation did.
I have some thoughts on today’s space anniversary at Pajamas Media (and no, neither the headline or subhed are mine — such are the woes of writers subject to copy editors, which is why we have blogs…).
What the president of Yale should have said.
Note, as is often the case, that opposition to freedom of expression comes from the left.
…..with nothing to tell:
Wow, you can really see how that pushed Bailey over the brink, coming on top of Palin’s being filmed walking into a hotel. In reality, it is a testament to Governor Palin’s rectitude that a former aide who wants to get rich by writing an expose can’t come up with anything better than this.
Desperation is as desperation does.
…getting desperate.
I have a response to Loren Thompson’s latest load of bilge, over at the Washington Examiner.