I just finished an essay on space visions, including Krafft Ehricke. I forgot to include lunettas and solettas, but I’ll get a chance to take another whack at it, since it’s been delayed until the spring issue of The New Atlantis.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Susan Rice
Why she wrote an email to herself.
I continue to await Horowitz’s report. I suspect it will be a bombshell.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Trump and Clinton scandals are claiming a lot of bodies, at the Justice Department. I suspect that there will be some going down at Foggy Bottom, too.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Rice’s memo implies that Comey seriously misled the Senate about his meeting with Obama. In Comey’s rant about “liars and weasels,” he displays a serious lack of self awareness.
[Update a while later]
Carter Page, useful idiot.
I can’t recall in my life such a huge disparity between the media narrative and reality.
[Update after noon]
Last link was wrong, fixed now.
I Hope So
The next memo is going to target John Brennan.
IMO, he is a partisan scumbag, and an enemy of freedom.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Sorry, broken link is fixed now.
Falcon Heavy Launch Reporting
Here‘s Loren Grush’s account (I finally met her briefly in person there).
Gwynne Shotwell
Congratulations, she’s deservedly been named Satellite Executive of the Year. She is Elon’s secret weapon.
The NASA Budget
Eric Berger has looked at it, and (unsurprisingly) the Trump administration seems to be in no hurry to get back to the moon. The NASA budget is going to become increasingly irrelevant in the next few years.
[Update a while later]
Dick Eagleson wonders not only if SLS’s days are numbered, but just how low the number is?
SLS, as currently envisioned, is a farce. Its development has been glacial and insanely expensive. It plows absolutely no significant new technological ground. It will be slow and insanely expensive to build. It is entirely expendable. Its associated spacecraft, Orion, is, at best, a Moon-craft, lacking heat shielding sufficient to withstand an Earth return from any significantly more distant point and, in any case, having life support capability for only 12 person-weeks of continuous occupancy.
But other than that, it’s great.
Last week’s launch was a major temblor, I think.
[Update early afternoon]
Here‘s Christian Davenport’s story (I saw him at the launch last week).
[Tuesday-morning update]
Katherine Mangu-Ward: It’s not a crazy idea to privatize the ISS.
Giant Rockets
Thoughts from Elon earlier in the week.
How Elon Musk wants to change space travel pic.twitter.com/KTDbbZmEuz
— The Verge (@verge) February 10, 2018
My Lawsuit
It’s been over a year since we filed a petition for a rehearing en banc from the DC Court of Appeals.
[Monday-morning update]
While doing a search for other related links, I an across this, from a year or so ago, which I find quite bizarre. He thinks both that Mann is a fraud, and that I nonetheless deserve to be sued.
Sea-Level-Rise Acceleration
Judith Curry’s latest thoughts (this is part of a series, to be continued).
The more times goes on, the less concerned I get about climate change (not that it may not change for the worse — that’s always a possibility — but in the sense that we really understand and can predict it). For example, consider the Iceland event of 1783. If that happened today, it would be much larger than anything we’ve been doing with CO2, and it’s entirely unpredictable.
As always, our best bet is to get as wealthy as possible so we’ll have the resources to deal with whatever the future holds. Instead the climate alarmists advocate polices that make energy needlessly more expensive (and hence everything more expensive, inhibiting economic growth).
[Update late afternoon]
Judith’s weekly climate roundup, which is usually interesting.
Space Transportation Conference
I’m tweeting about it, which is a better way of rapid updating than blogging, and it gets a lot more views. So…
[Update a while later]
Meanwhile, SpaceX will be testing elements of BFR next year.
Also, the failed center corefirst stage that they failed to expend from the previous Falcon 9 launch couldn’t be safely recovered, so the Air Force scuttled it with an air strike.
Yes, as per comments, I screwed up in the middle of listening to a talk on launch regulations at the same time.