Does Mark Whittington want to name names, or provide credible examples from serious people?

This may annoy some people who, on the one hand, preach libertarian cant and, on the other hand, demand government pay money up front, before the promised hardware is even built, not to mention delivered.

Most “libertarians” that I know have been demanding that the government only pay for progress, when achieved. Mark’s straw man notion has in fact been the standard government approach with the big contractors for years, with dismal results.

Rick Tumlinson eloquently states many of my concerns with NASA’s (and specifically Mike Griffin’s) approach to getting back to the moon:

…it is tempting to harken back to the

It must be true, it’s on the Internet.

No, I don’t know whether or not they’re serious either.

[Via Jeff Foust]

[Update a few minutes later]

Thomas James has further commentary.

It looks like the private solar sail mission may have gone in the drink.

This just points up how ridiculous our space transportation situation is. There is no other field in which we would accept the horrifically low reliability of vehicles, and the only reason for it is that we’ve historically simply come to accept it, and won’t demand better.

[Update on Wednesday morning]

Good news. Or at least better news. They seem to have found it. It’s not in the right orbit, but it’s in an orbit. Let’s hope it’s in an orbit that will last long enough to get it on its sunshiny way.

[Another update at 9:20 AM]

Emily Lakdawalla is blogging the progress.

[Update at 1:20 PM EDT]

Looks like the mission is history.

Last summer solstice, a year ago today, I was in Mojave, California, watching SpaceShipOne go into space for the first time. Tariq Malik describes all of the activity since then that bodes well for private space passenger travel.

OK, I decided to do a mild (because there’s actually much of it with which I agree) fisking of last week’s piece.

Continue reading My Take On Derb’s Rant →

OK, I decided to do a mild (because there’s actually much of it with which I agree) fisking of last week’s piece.

Continue reading My Take On Derb’s Rant →

OK, I decided to do a mild (because there’s actually much of it with which I agree) fisking of last week’s piece.

Continue reading My Take On Derb’s Rant →

John Derbyshire doesn’t think much of (what I’m guessing is) Keith Cowing’s emails:

I had some exchanges with one fellow who took strong exception to my Space Shuttle piece. “It must really suck being you,” he asserted. Now, this is pretty lame on a first occurrence; but in our subsequent exchanges he just couldn’t think of any way to improve on it. “Like I said, it must really suck being you,” he’d close. It dawned on me at last that the guy thinks this is the most crushing, most devastating put-down that has yet been devised from the English language. I weep for these people.

Which reminds me that I still plan to critique the piece myself.

I was going to comment on this strange and hyperbolic broadside at the Shuttle, and the manned space program in general from John Derbyshire, but Mark Whittington (who really should spell check his posts) and Clark Lindsey have preempted much of what I would have written.

Briefly, while I agree with his conclusions, he gets there by accident, because his premises are mostly wrong, and his numbers exaggerated beyond any semblance of reality.