…explained.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
A Solution Looking For A Problem
Lou Friedman, like most sensible people, wonders why the Congress is insisting that NASA waste billions on a heavy lifter with no payloads. Of course, the real problem being solved here is job losses, nothing else.
Missing The California Of My Youth
This guy is probably just a racist.
Talk about a human-caused disaster.
A Scientific Theory
…is judged by its predictive powers. Unless it’s climate change, of course. Because there, the issue isn’t the issue. It’s about power, and forced wealth redistribution.
The Business Case For Iridium Servicing
Jon Goff has a very interesting post about the potential for justifying the private development of a LEO tug.
This is a key element of a LEO (and cis-lunar) infrastructure that NASA has ignored ever since the ignominious end of the disastrous Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle (OMV) program in the early nineties (another wonder of management from Marshall). We should have had one decades ago, but it looks like the private sector is going to have to make it happen. Once in existence, it has a number of other useful (and money making) applications, if NASA can start to be a good customer.
The Perils Of Constitutional Ignorance
Thanks to congressional incompetence, the food-safety bill is dead. Sometimes, perhaps more than not, given how evil most of what they want to do is, I’m glad that Congress is incompetent.
Space Cheese
…and other breakthroughs. Katherine Mangu-Ward reports on last week’s SpaceX success. Yours truly is cited. FWIW.
[Update a while later]
A California Bankruptcy
Some legal thoughts. I don’t know if it would be constitutional, but I would condition a federal bailout on reversion of the state to territory status, with an opportunity to reenter the union after it gets its fiscal act together, possibly as multiple states. For instance, if some of the eastern and/or northern counties wanted to band together to form a new government independent of Sacramento (or even including Sacramento, but independent of the coastal megalopolises) they could do so and apply for readmission. Alternatively, they might want to apply to be annexed to (say) Nevada, or Oregon.
Same thing for Illinois and New York, though the impetus to break them up would be much less in those cases.
More Commie/Nazi Thoughts
Over at Instapundit.
Earlier thread here.
On The Anniversary Of The First Tea Party
The Tea Partiers have won a great victory:
Speaking now on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) says he is “sorry and disappointed” to announce that he does not have the votes for the omnibus spending package. Instead, he will work with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) to draft a temporary continuing resolution to fund the government into early next year.
Reid says nine Republican senators approached him today to tell him that while they would like to see the bill passed, they could not vote for it. He did not reveal the names of the nine. A top Senate source tells National Review Online that “it looks like Harry Reid buckled under the threat of Republicans reading [the bill] aloud.”
Mr. Smith has come to Washington, again.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More links from Instapundit. “Brave Sir Harry Ran Away.”
Heh.
[Update a minute or two later]
I should note that I haven’t had much to say about the horrible NASA appropriations in this bill (three billion dollars for SLS and MPCV — how in the world would they have sensibly spent $1.8B on a heavy lifter in 2011, with only nine months left in the fiscal year?), because I wanted to wait and see if it was actually going to pass.
I think that we will be on continuing resolutions as far as the eye can see, at this point, or at least until 2013, and the big battles over the NASA budget will be what goes into rescission bills, starting early next year. The job of people who really want to see progress in space is to make sure that the SLS is on the top of the chopping block, at least restricting it to studies in the next couple years instead of pouring hundreds of millions into obsolete technologies.
You heard it here first.