Even NASA seems to realize that the end is near for Ares I.
For more than a week now, engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., including some working on Ares I, have been pulled from their current duties to study creation of a smaller version of the Ares V that could carry both crew and heavy equipment.
NASA confirms that it is looking at different versions of the Ares V, though a spokeswoman played down the significance of the review.
“This is nothing new, and as a part of these ongoing … studies the program continues to look at a wide variety of options on Ares V as is standard practice in formulation,” said NASA spokeswoman Ashley Edwards in a statement.
But NASA insiders and contractors familiar with the work say that the work is far from “standard practice” and could herald the demise of the Ares I.
“They are looking at a whole new launch architecture,” said one NASA contractor familiar with the study. “Although it’s still too early to pronounce Ares I dead, it is safe to assume that members of the committees have doubts about it.”
Gee, you think?
Iowahawk for car czar.
A surtax on small business to pay for nationalizing health care:
Here’s the ugly income-tax math. First, Mr. Obama has promised to let the lower Bush tax rates expire after 2010. This would raise the top personal income tax rate to 39.6% from 35%, and the next rate to 36% from 33%. The Bush expiration would also phase out various tax deductions and exemptions, bringing the top marginal rate to as high as 41%.
Then add the Rangel Surtax of one percentage point, starting at $280,000 ($350,000 for couples), plus another percentage point at $400,000 ($500,000 for couples), rising to three points on more than $800,000 ($1 million) in 2011. But wait, there’s more. The surcharge could rise by two more percentage points in 2013 if health-care costs are larger than advertised — which is a near-certainty. Add all of this up and the top marginal tax rate would climb to 46%, which hasn’t been seen in the U.S. since the Reagan tax reform of 1986 cut the top rate to 28% from 50%.
Combined with the upcoming rise in the minimum wage, remember things like this when Democrats lie about how they’re interested in creating jobs.
In everything but thought:
A professor who confronted me declared that he was “personally offended” by my column. He railed that his political viewpoints never affected his teaching and suggested that if I wanted a faculty with Republicans I should have attended a university in the South. “If you like conservatism you can certainly attend the University of Texas and you can walk past the statue of Jefferson Davis everyday on your way to class,” he wrote in an e-mail.
I was shocked by such a comment, which seemed an attempt to link Republicans with racist orthodoxy. When I wrote back expressing my offense, he neither apologized nor clarified his remarks.
Instead, he reiterated them on the record. Was such a brazen expression of partisanship representative of the faculty as a whole? I decided to speak with him in person in the hope of finding common ground.
He was eager to chat, and after five minutes our dialogue bloomed into a lively discussion. As we hammered away at the issue, one of his colleagues with whom he shared an office grew visibly agitated. Then, while I was in mid-sentence, she exploded.
“You think you’re so [expletive] cute with your little column,” she told me. “I read your piece and all you want is attention. You’re just like Bill O’Reilly. You just want to get up on your [expletive] soapbox and have people look at you.”
From the disgust with which she attacked me, you would have thought I had advocated Nazism. She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed.
This is one of the reasons that the education bubble will eventually pop. Parents aren’t going to remain willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to send their kids to Indoctrinate U.
Some thoughts from Jerry Pournelle, in response to the Derbyshire piece a few weeks ago:
Years after Apollo I had a conversation with John R. Pierce, Chief Technologist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. John said that we’d made a mistake. In Heinlein’s future history, we go to the moon in stages first developing sub-orbital capabilities, then satellites, and finally went to the Moon; and we should have done it that way this time.
At the time I get somewhat angry in my disagreement with him, but it’s pretty clear John was right. He really meant that we should have learned to build space ships, real reusable ships that could fly suborbital, then orbital, then be refueled in orbit — rather than developing a bit disintegrating totem pole that could only be used once. I think he was right, and we may have to do it all over again before we can become a space-faring nation.
This will be one of the themes of my upcoming piece at The New Atlantis.
[Monday afternoon update]
Paul Dietz notes in comments that the Pournelle response was actually to a different Derbyshire post, that I hadn’t seen. He says that Apollo wasn’t a mere folly, but a magnificent one.
[Bumped]
From several legal experts, and Senator Cornyn.
[Update early afternoon]
The Seinfeld hearings:
Today we live in a legal world in which many progressives and conservatives share the legal realists’ preoccupation with results. So justices must be chosen who will reach the politically correct results or opposed because they will reach the wrong results. Judicial confirmation hearings are thereby turned into a game of gotcha, with questioners trying to trip up the other side’s nominees, and nominees quite properly refusing to reveal the only thing their inquisitors truly care about: how they would rule in particular cases that are likely to come before the Court.
But postures must be assumed and questions must be asked. So senators and nominees opine about two empty concepts. The first is “stare decisis” or precedent: Will the nominee follow the hallowed case of U.S. v. Whatchamacallit or not?
Of course, the legal realists detested precedent, which in their time stood in the way of their progressive agenda. Nothing has really changed. Both sides only want to respect the precedents that lead to the results they like. No one thinks justices should follow every precedent, so the crucial issue is picking and choosing which to follow and which to ignore. But how? Well, by the results, of course.
I’ve posted on this often in the past. One of the hardest concepts for many people to understand is that the Constitution is not designed to suit their preferences, and it is not the job of a judge to construe or misconstrue it to the preferences of themselves or others. Roe was a judicial atrocity not because it legalized abortion, per se, but because it found a non-existent right in the Constitution, and extended it to all fifty states, part of the obliteration of federalism that occurred in the twentieth century. One can think that abortion should be legal and still think Roe deeply flawed (the position of Judge Ginsburg, if I am not mistaken).
Accordingly, one shouldn’t choose a judge because one thinks that they will agree on the desired outcome, but for their willingness to follow the law (including the fundamental law expressed in the Constitution). This should be an argument not about results, but about process. But it never is.
He has a recommendation as to how to do it right, which, unfortunately, most Senators would be incapable of doing, even if they wanted to:Don’t ask how the meaning of these clauses should be applied in particular circumstances. Just ask about the meaning itself and how it should be ascertained. Do nominees think they are bound by the original public meaning of the text? Even those who deny this still typically claim that original meaning is a “factor” or starting point. If so, what other factors do they think a justice should rely on to “interpret” the meaning of the text? Even asking whether “We the People” in the U.S. Constitution originally included blacks and slaves — as abolitionists like Lysander Spooner and Frederick Douglass contended, or not as Chief Justice Roger Taney claimed in Dred Scott v. Sandford — will tell us much about a nominee’s approach to constitutional interpretation. Given that this is hardly a case that will come before them, on what grounds could nominees refuse to answer such questions?
Of course, inquiring into clauses not cases would require senators to know something about the original meaning of the Constitution. Do they? It would be interesting to hear what Sen. Al Franken thinks about such matters, but no more so than any other member of the Judiciary Committee. Such a hearing would not only be entertaining, it would be informative and educational. After all, it would be about the meaning of the Constitution, which is to say it would be about something.
Couldn’t have that.
[Bumped]
…that Obama can’t ideologically deliver:
Liberals are clearly getting nervous. Their Keynesian religious-like faith rests on the notion that government spending “creates” economic activity and wealth. So the answer must be: more stimulus!
Meanwhile, there is chaos on the Hill:
Commerce committee Chairman Henry Waxman has delayed the health care markup he had planned for this week, giving the administration and House leaders a chance to win over balky Blue Dog Democrats. Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel is also stymied, and says all he knows about agreements that the White House has struck with various health groups (pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, health maintenance organizations) is what he reads in the papers.
All this sounds like muddling by incompetents, but in fact these Democratic legislators are (mostly) highly competent and they are trying to do very hard things: restructure government regulation of — or establish government control over — one-sixth (health care) and one-tenth (energy) of the economy. And they’re dealing with a president who has shown a striking lack of interest in details and whose single legislative achievement so far — the $787 billion stimulus package passed in February — has visibly failed in its asserted goal of holding unemployment down to 8 percent.
This is all good news, of course, since most or all of what they want to do would be ruinous for the nation.
A potential overanalysis of song lyrics.