Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Challenger Day

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On the 28th anniversary of the event (and my birthday), Mollie Hemingway (to whom I gave a copy of the book at the Ricochet podcast Sunday night) has already read and reviewed it over at The Federalist. I would clarify this, though:

He suggests that NASA consider returning to an R&D function consistent with its original charter, otherwise getting out of the human spaceflight business entirely.

I don’t necessarily want them out of the human spaceflight business entirely, but I do want to get them out of now-mundane things like getting people (or anything) into orbit, and focus on the systems they need to go beyond. We have a commercial launch industry, and they should avail themselves of it instead of trying to compete with it.

[Afternoon update]

Molly has a post up at Ricochet, with a lot of discussion in comments.

[Bumped]

[Update a while later]

I was particularly gratified by this:

In any case, the book is just wonderful. I’m not someone who’s particularly interested in space exploration (though I have gone to many Space Shuttle launches and landings, so maybe I’m selling myself short). I’m definitely not someone with much knowledge of the space industry. And I wasn’t sure if this book would be so technical or wonkish as to be inaccessible. It’s not. It’s just a really engaging read with a compelling story about human nature, risk and reward.

That was what I was aiming for.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Space History

Another Book Review

4 Comments

Mark Lardas had a review a couple weeks ago in the Galveston Daily News, but it was behind a paywall. But I just learned that he reposted it at Ricochet. It’s an appropriate time to note it, given that today is the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, and tomorrow is the 28th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.

[Update late afternoon]

Here’s another brief (partial) review, in comments at the same web site. It’s the first one to discuss the quality, as opposed to the content of the book.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

The Pennsylvania Bomber

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Well, what to make of this?

Altoon Mayor Matthew Pacifico said Miftakjov is a student at Penn Stat University Altoona.

He is charged with possessing a weapon of mass destruction, risking a catastrophe, possessing instruments of crime, prohibited offensive weapons, incendiary devices, recklessly endangering another person, and several drug-related charges.

Officers had been investigating an alleged marijuana growing operation when they discovered the alleged bomb, according to a statement posted on the police department’s Facebook page.

They said the bomb was found inside a suitcase along with “assorted bomb making materials.”

“The bomb was safely deconstructed by experts from the Pennsylvania State Police Bomb Squad,” the statement read.

Unless it’s a nuke or chemical weapons, it is not a “weapon of mass destruction.”

It’s too early to tell, but there’s no mention of his religion, just his Russian nationality. He’s a college student in Altoona now, but it looks like a couple years ago, he was a HS sophomore in Belmont, California:

Sophomores are required to take the ELA (English language arts) portion that is a multiple-choice test along with an essay prompt. The following day sophomores took the mathematics portion with a total of 92 questions.

”I thought the English [section] was easier, but overall the CAHSEE was really boring,” Vladislav Miftakhov said.

He doesn’t seem to update his Facebook page much, which might explain why it says San Carlos (might be where he lived while attending the school in Belmont), rather than western Pennsylvania. But he did have an interesting answer to a question about that time, two and a half years ago:

“Do you believe Bind Laden is dead?”

“No”

It’ll be interesting to see how they caught him. I’m guessing it wasn’t NSA data mining, though.