It’s dead, Jim.
Or if not, it’s mostly dead. I hope we can bring it back.
[Update Monday morning]
More from David Bernstein.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
The Nutrition Scam
If you have forty minutes or so, watch Nina Teicholz.
Space Force
That was then, this is now:
Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson asserted on Wednesday that the service is not pushing back on President Trump’s idea to create a Space Force. She offered no new details on how the process of forming a new service might unfold but insisted that this “has to be done the right way.”
I’m old enough to remember when she opposed Space Corps, let alone Space Force.
And are people really talking (again) about a Department of Space? Please, no.
Sextortion
I got two of these types of emails last night. While I have occasionally viewed a raunchy video, it was pretty clearly hinky, for numerous reasons (misspellings, fact that the password is not associated with either my email of Facebook, and I don’t even have a Messenger account, I rarely allow a webcam to see me, etc.). If it was a serious threat, they’d send a sample video.
This is a federal felony, but I find it kind of amazing that if you want to report it to the FBI, you do it by phone, instead of forwarding to an email address. The country’s in the very best of hands.
Airworthiness For Spacecraft
I missed this earlier in the week, but Mike Snead has a long essay on passenger safety over at The Space Review. It’s a useful history, that touches on many of the themes of my book, but I believe that it’s technologically premature to apply the principles to human spaceflight. Spaceflight participants (not passengers) must be aware of the risks of the varied methods of building spaceships, and accept them accordingly. No one should, at this point in history, get aboard one with the same expection of getting safely off that one does with an airliner, particularly because different people have different risk tolerances and goals. There will come a time when trips to space will be considered common carrier, on certified vehicles, but we are years from that time.
Russian Rocket Development
So much for them being competitive on the world market. One wonders what it is about Rogozin that results in Putin continuing to keep him in charge.
Planting The American Flag On The Moon
Bob Zimmerman isn’t impressed with the Armstrong movie.
[Update late evening, before I drive up to West Palm Beach to pick up Patricia]
Some (sadly) hilarious thoughts and links from Jim Treacher.
[Sunday update]
OK, I see that Bob Zimmerman has had second thoughts.
I’m going to reserve judgment until I see the film. I think that the proximate cause of the uproar wasn’t the decision to leave out the flag planting, but the Canadian actor’s idiotic explanation of it. As I note in comments, the movie is a biopick of Neil Armstrong, not a history of Apollo, and his great achievement was not in planting a flag on the moon, but in simply being present on its surface.
Iran In Iraq
I could never understand why the Bush administration let Iran get away with so much. They were waging war on us (and have been since 1979), and the administration did essentially nothing. And then Obama came along and bent us over for them and didn’t even ask for lube. Thanks, Valerie!
Jobs “Americans Won’t Do”
Huh. Turns out there aren’t any. I suspect that immigrant gardeners are taking away a lot of jobs that young people used to do.
Crew Dragon
Almost ready to fly.
The Crew Dragon capsule for the SpaceX DM-1 mission will be launch ready by the end of September. pic.twitter.com/xsGw9fWkUG
— Michael Baylor (@nextspaceflight) August 27, 2018
And NASA is now saying that the first crewed flight, scheduled for spring of next year, may be operational. And no more Soyuz flights after that. Should have happened long ago, though.