Apparently frustrated with the light sentence on the first conviction, the federal prosecutor has indicted Courtney Stadd on new charges.
Category Archives: Space
The P
Resurrection
Lee Valentine is reactivating the moribund Space Studies Institute, recently moved from its original home in Princeton to Mojave. I wonder where the conference will be this fall? All previous ones have been in Princeton (and have always been known as the “Princeton Conferences”).
Complexity And Danger
Bob Clarebrough has some useful thoughts on the risk of space flight, for NASA and private enterprise, over at The Space Review. This is a very important topic, and one that I want to write a long post on, when I get unburied from current activities.
Aviation Week Person Of The Year
…the space entrepreneur. Looks like Dave Masten made the cover.
It’s certainly more inspiring than anything that NASA is doing, at least in terms of manned spaceflight.
Stifling On-Line Space Discussion
…thanks to ITAR. Fixing this is something that the Congress and administration could do that would be really useful for space.
New Year’s Plans
For Masten. I’ll bet that Armadillo has a lot of exciting things happening this year as well. Stay tuned.
Commercial Spaceflight
Past and future. An overview by Leonard David.
Gravity Wells
A nice graphical presentation.
[Via reader Brock Cusick]
The Foolishness Of Reliance On Authority
Roger Simon runs into a Hollywood nitwit who believes in global warming because NASA says so.
Point 1: “NASA” doesn’t say so. One duplicitous ideologue masquerading as a climate scientist at one particular NASA center says so. That center had to confess error on his behalf (no doubt through clenched teeth).
Point 2: “NASA” has no opinion on anything. NASA is a government agency, with thousands of employees, of varying opinions. The previous NASA administrator, in fact, famously outraged the warm mongers with his own skepticism, but if any one person could have spoken for NASA at the time, it would have been Mike Griffin, not James Hansen.
Point 3: NASA has had many spectacular achievements in the past. It has also had many spectacular failures. To rely on it, as an agency, as a source of authority for something (particularly when there is no official agency position on it) is foolish. In fact, this false sense that people have in NASA as an authority has contributed greatly to the difficulty over the past decades to raise money for private ventures. This is because investors, when doing due diligence on an investment decisions, have often gone to someone at NASA who knows nothing about the venture, and relied on their foolish advice, for no other reason than they worked for NASA.
Anyway, this gets back to the foolishness of relying on people who claim to be scientists, instead of on science itself.
Made It To Vegas
…but a lot later than we wanted, due to hellacious traffic getting out of LA. Things didn’t really start to move until we got halfway up the Cajon Pass. So, later dinner at Mandalay Bay, and then on to Colorado in the morning. But Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night. I’ll leave you with a video from another Christmas eve, forty-one years ago.
I had a piece on this story last year, on the fortieth anniversary. Hard to believe it’s been a year since I wrote that.