Over at Open Market, I’ve roundly fisked the latest display of ignorance from a supposed conservative on the new space policy. It’s sad that one of Breitbart’s sites would publish such nonsense. The real “Solyndra in Space” is SLS.
[Update a few minutes later]
I see that Thomas James has shredded it as well.
My thoughts on Neil Armstrong, over at PJMedia.
That’s a shame — he was only 82, which isn’t that old these days. No word of the cause of death. I’d heard that he’d been doing well since his recent heart surgery, so either there were later complications, or he just happened to succumb to something else.
The irony, of course, as it notes in the bio, is that he never wanted to be an icon, and generally shunned the publicity. In any event, ad astra, and resquiescat in pace.
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, my Facebook wall is all Neil, all the time.
This is worry-making stuff, and the kind of thing that Bill Joy was worried about. We’re going to have to come up with personal defenses for it. It will be an arms race. It’s also a reason to get space opened up ASAP.
…for deep-space propulsion.
We need to be shifting funds from new unneeded NASA rockets to things like this, if we really want to get beyond earth orbit.
…by looking to the opening of the American West. A very good piece, by a British astrophysicist. I met Professor Elvis at GLEX a couple months ago.
No, the bill was not “weakened.” It was eviscerated to the point of uselessness, by the Consumer Attorneys of California. The word should go out to the industry that in its current form, if passed, it’s basically a fraud, in that it does nothing significant to reduce liability for launch services providers. As Doug says, we can try again next year, and this time be ready to push back harder against the CAC.
Isn’t it amusingly stupid how he is unable to write the phrase “commercial crew” without using the word “subsidy”?
What’s funniest of all, of course, is that he seems to actually believe that space policy will be a significant, or even debated issue in this election.
[Afternoon update]
Awwwww, isn’t that cute? Mark still fantasizes both that I have a “chain,” and that I ever “leap the length” of it. It seems to be one of his favorite expressions. That’s the autism, rather than the Tourette’s.
[Update on Tuesday morning]
I know what metaphors are, Mark. I was simply pointing out that your attempt at it was insane, and bore no resemblance to reality.
Check out the comments over at my National Review piece. It’s almost as though some of the commenters are going out of their way to prove my thesis, by engaging in exactly the ignorant, straw-man behavior that opponents of the new policy have been for going on three years now. I love the notion that because I correct misstatements of fact, I am “attacking” the commenter. I especially love the latest insane redefinition of “subsidy” — that because SpaceX didn’t reinvent every single wheel in its vehicles, instead building on technology developed over the past decades, that it has been “subsidized” by NASA for decades.
Over at Wired, Adam Mann has a history of them, from von Braun to present. None of them are going to come to fruition until we get costs down, and stop wasting money on big rockets.