…just made a dinner speech at #DC-X little of which I disagreed with.
Category Archives: Space
Mike Griffin
He’s supposedly speaking at dinner tonight here in Alamagordo, so if you hear about an explosion in southern New Mexico bigger than Trinity, it was probably a total mass/energy conversion with me.
Off To The Land Of Enchantment
As you can see from the sidebar on the left, this weekend is the twentieth anniversary of the first DC-X flight. I was there at the time, so it will be like old home week. I’ll be on the road most of the day (flying to Tucson, and then driving to Truth or Consequences) so blogging will be light if at all (via phone), until this afternoon or evening.
Flights Of Fancy
Bob Zimmerman blasts the SLS and the porkers on the Hill, over at the WSJ.
The Latest Grasshopper Test
A little sideways action.
[Via Universe Today]
Hyperloop, Tesla and Musk Bashing
I have some thoughts on the latest nonsense over at PJMedia.
Lunar Helium-3 Extraction
Is it ethical?
I haven’t read the paper yet, but I’ll be interested in comments from people who do.
The Eloi
Are we raising a generation of them?
Hyperloop–Tech Trick?
…or political manifesto?
Musk has a long history of political entanglement — usually with people trying to scuttle his various big-think projects. SpaceX has been a target of regulatory concerns from the get-go, most recently from Texas legislators who opposed letting Musk build an airport for spaceships at a site near Brownsville. Tesla has also clashed with lawmakers in New York and other states who have tried to stop the company from selling electric vehicles directly to consumers. These are the kinds of obstacles no tech CEO wants to face — and yet, because of the scope and scale of Musk’s ambitions, he has to climb over them.
For years, government has been a nuisance to Elon Musk. It’s slowed him down. It’s required him to spend his valuable time lobbying his Twitter followers for support in the New York legislature instead of building rockets. It’s required him to explain his mind-bending technical innovations to grayhairs in Congress as if he were speaking to schoolchildren. Over and over, the public sector has convinced Musk that it is hopelessly lost when it comes to matters of innovation, and that anything truly revolutionary must spring from the ambitions of the private sector.
Yup. NASA is an excellent example of that problem.
Matt Damon Movies
The five most destructive ideas in them. I liked this review of Elysium in comments:
Spoiler alert:
The liberals win and create a future society that makes the entire Earth into Detroit. Obamacare is in full effect and as a result — shock — there is a shortage of doctors, medicine and advanced medical equipment.
The conservatives leave the Earth (kinda aka Atlas Shrugged) and build this magnificent Space Station with all the trappings of a productive and prosperous people — replete with advanced medical technology.
Since they cannot build and create a similarly advanced and prosperous society, the liberals decide that they will take what they did not earn and ultimately (through violence and magic of course) heal everyone in the world — especially the babies.
I’ll wait until it’s on free television. I don’t really like to put any money in the hypocritical moron’s pocket.