I oppose the Senate version of this bill.
I think that Commerce should be in charge, and I’ve said in the recent past, keep the FAA’s head in the clouds.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The First Block 5 Reuse
Take that, STS. When they demonstrate the one-day turn, that will be history making.
[Sunday-morning update]
Commenters are noting that the one-week turnaround was for the drone ship, not the booster.
Resuscitating A Centaur
No, this isn’t about the upper stage. Glad someone is asking the important questions:
Serious question for #medtwitter: If you show up at a code, and the patient is a centaur who had a cardiac arrest, ignoring the joules question, where do you think the defib pads should go? A, assuming the heart is in the human part, or B, assuming the heart is in the horse part? pic.twitter.com/OJt9haEgx3
— Fred Wu, MD (@FredWuMD) July 28, 2018
The replies are great.
Rejuvenating Brains
Why is that mice get all the fun? I guess they suffer a lot, too, though.
Congress Tells USAF To Consider Reusables
Eric Berger has the latest.
@SciGuySpace Part of that history was the idiotic policy in the early 90s of telling USAF to use expendables, and assigning reusables to NASA, which resulted in the disastrous X-33 and X-34 programs, which "proved" that reusables couldn't be done.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) July 27, 2018
Amelia Earhart
This is the first time I’d ever heard this: Many people heard her final calls for help.
Blogging light, because I’m still at the ISS R&D conference.
Extending Lifespan In Older Mice
…with gene therapy. At some point, some of these things are going to help humans. Faster, please.
[Monday-morning update]
More from Brian Wang on not just life extension, but age-reversal. Human trials to start in maybe a couple years. But as previously noted, starting with dogs is a useful way to get around the FDA.
[Bumped]
The FISA Warrant
OK, one post (at least) before I hit the road. The big news this weekend, is that Judicial Watch (finally) got a (heavily redacted) copy. Of course, the mainstream media is lying (or to be more charitable, ignorant and desperate to maintain the narrative) about its implications. I’m seeing lots of tweets from partisan hacks in both media and politics (like Adam Schiff) that this somehow undermines the Nunes memo, when in fact it supports it.
It’s been amazing how both sides can look at the same fact pattern here, and see a completely different narrative. It’s almost like the blue/yellow dress, or the “Laurel/Yammy” thing. The other thing that’s amazing is the dramatic historical role reversal, with Democrats defending the (corrupted) intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, and going into full McCarthy mode over Russia Russia Russia. Not to mention the amnesia about the Obama administration and “the eighties called, they want their foreign policy back.”
I’d expand on this and dredge up more links if I had more time, but I have to hit the road. But feel free to comment.
[Update a few minutes later]
The FBI goes full Nixon with the FISA report.
This is a clear abuse of power, and a much bigger scandal than Watergate, perhaps the greatest one in the nation’s history.
[Tuesday-afternoon update]
Byron York: The next step is to declassify the entire thing. I think it would be better to bring in someone else to go through it with White House staff, maybe out of Bolton’s office, to determine which things would actually damage NatSec if declassified, and which are only covering up the obstruction of justice and abuse of power.
[Update a couple minutes later]
OK, not what I’ve read the piece myself, that’s basically what they’re proposing, so it’s a misleading hed. Probably not Byron’s fault.
Crazy Week
Sorry for light blogging, but Saturday I drove up to the Cape from West Palm Beach, picked up tickets for the 49th Apollo gala, drove over to Orlando, rented a tux, checked into my hotel room, got cleaned up and put on the rented duds, drove back over to Cocoa Beach, took a bus through heavy rain to KSC with other attendees. About 2300, we took the buses back to the Cocoa Hilton, where there was an after party that lasted long enough for us to go out on the beach to watch the Telsat launch of a Block 5, at 0150. Then I drove back to Orlando, fueled the rental car, got three and a half hours sleep, took the car to the airport for flight back to LAX at 0750. After I got home, I did a two-hour stint of The Space Show at 1200 PDT on Evoloterra and the Apollo anniversary, including the fact that next year will be a half century since humans first stepped on the moon (and 46 years since they last did; (only) one of those four remaining men, Harrison Schmitt, was in attendance at the gala).
Then, yesterday afternoon, I had to unpack and repack, and make final changes on my poster for this week’s ISS R&D conference in San Francisco. This morning, I had to go rent another car, and I’ll have to go pick up the poster at Staples on my way out of town, then drive up to Berkeley to stay with friends, to be at the conference tomorrow.
IOW, blogging may be light this week.
[Update a while later, before hitting the road]
Ken Kremer has the story on the Falcon Telstar launch that much of the media ignored.
Blue-Collar Space
Laura Montgomery has a couple related book reviews.