If more people were aware of things like this, there would be a massive revolt against the education establishment.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Hide The Decline
For some reason the WaPo failed to publish its own poll showing a new low in Obama popularity.
Year Of The Dragon Permalink
It’s been republished over at Space Daily.
A CCW Joke
From an email list:
A guy cruises through a stop sign and gets pulled over by a local policeman.
He hands the cop his driver’s license, insurance verification, plus his concealed carry permit.
“Okay, Mr. Smith,” the cop says, “I see your CHL permit. Are you carrying today?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Well then, better tell me what you got.”
Smith says, “Well, I got a .357 revolver in my inside coat pocket. There’s a 9mm semi-auto in the glove box.
And, I’ve got a .22 magnum derringer in my right boot.
“Okay,” the cop says. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, back in the trunk, there’s an AR15 and a shotgun.
That’s about it.”
“Mr. Smith, are you on your way to or from a gun range…?”
“Nope.”
“Well then, what are you afraid of…?”
“Not a damn thing…”
Notes On “Plymouth Rock”
Jon Goff attended an interesting meeting at SwRI last week.
While a dual-Orion mission may be doable for a two-person crew, I still think that it’s more of a stunt than a serious mission, and I actually question the value of sending people to a NEO early, other than to demonstrate and practice deep-space capability. I’d also send an “armada” of two. I’m not sure you get sufficient redundancy from a single dual-Orion mission, due to potential common cause for the two docked vehicles. With two separate “ships” flying in a loose formation, you’d have a lot more depth in safety.
Of course, Orions won’t be cheap. Maybe Dragons instead. Then you’d get the bonus of having an asteroid map with the words, “Here be Dragons…” 🙂
But as Bigelow said, what you really want is an expandable habitat, and just take the capsule along for the entry, as (I suggested to Keith Reiley at Boeing yesterday on the phone) a motor home drags a car along for short excursions. Also, I can’t speak to what Boeing plans, but if I were them, I’d be scarring CST for deep space.
[Update a while later]
Now that I think about it, if you really want to eliminate common cause (other than a major solar flare), your armada would consist of a CST-based craft, an Orion-based craft (if you could afford it) and a Dragon-based craft.
More Dragon Commentary
…from Henry Spencer. With some Mercury history, for the NASA worshipers.
Year Of The Dragon
I have an editorial up at Launch Space today. Unfortunately, there is no permalink. It’s at the top right now, but in the future, you’ll have to scroll down to the December 12th entry.
The Race Heats Up
…and Sir Richard moves on:
Dulles, Va.-based Orbital is teaming with Virgin Galactic of New Mexico on the Commercial Crew Development 2 (CCDev 2) project. Virgin Galactic will market commercial rides on the spacecraft, conduct drop tests of the orbital space vehicle using its WhiteKnightTwo aircraft and offer transport services for the space vehicle, industry sources said. Although Orbital expects to launch and land the spacecraft at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., in the event of an abort, WhiteKnightTwo would be used to ferry the spaceship between its landing location and the Cape.
Virgin is also expected to announce this week a separate CCDev 2 bid led by Sierra Nevada Corp., the big winner in NASA’s first round of Commercial Crew Development awards earlier this year. The Sparks, Nev.-based firm garnered $20 million in CCDev 1 funds to mature its Dream Chaser orbital spacecraft, a six-passenger lifting-body vehicle based on NASA’s HL-20 concept from the early 1990s that the company has been working on for several years.
I can’t reveal the source, but I am reliably informed that at Burt Rutan’s retirement dinner last week, Sir Richard phoned it in from Necker Island, with a video lamenting Burt’s abandoning the field (though Burt had always been on record as not knowing how to do orbit — at heart he was always an airplane guy, and one of the best ever). With the hybrid engine problems, I take this as a sign that, while he still hopes to make his mark in the suborbital world, his focus has shifted to a higher velocity game. It can’t be a result of SpaceX’s success last week, because both deals have to have been in work for months, but I suspect that the week of the Dragon had some influence as to when to make announcements.
The Congress will do what it does when it reassembles in January, but with Bigelow’s habitats beckoning, I doubt that anything they do will have much influence over our future in space, at this point. At worst, they will only be able to continue to waste the taxpayers’ money.
Asking The Real Question At The Airports
It’s not as simple as it seems, and then again, it is. The right way to profile.
ObamaCare Is On The Ropes
Richard Epstein explains:
The government finds itself here in a real pickle. Virginia has drawn a clear line that accounts for all the existing cases, so that no precedent has to be overruled to strike down this legislation. On the other hand, to uphold it invites the government to force me to buy everything from exercise machines to bicycles, because there is always some good that the coercive use of state authority can advance. The ironic point is that this is not a commerce-clause argument as such, for in my view any state statute would be subject to the same objection even though the state has plenary police powers.
Read the whole thing.
I think that this also demonstrates the constitutional ignorance of the Democratic leadership and its counsel, and legal incompetence of the Holder Justice Department (not that it was really a winnable case).
I would also add that, as he points out, that this is a demonstration of why state requirements for the purchase of auto insurance don’t lie with the fact that the are states, but with the fact that driving on public highways is a privilege, not a right, and that auto insurance mandates are to protect others from the externalities of your driving, not to protect you from yourself (as health insurance is).