Thoughts from Bob Zimmerman on the latest overrun and schedule slip, and the shoddy reporting of it.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The JWST
It’s delayed again, and over budget. Again.
I would have canceled it years ago. It was a mistaken concept from the get go. For what we’ve spent on this program, we could have had orbital servicing capability, obviating the need for the origami, and even allowing servicing in situ.
The New National Space Strategy
Thoughts on it from Laura Montgomery, with its implications for Outer Space Treaty interpretation.
Vascular Health In Mice
Rejuvenation through dietary supplements.
I’m already taking NAD+.
Male Cyborgs
#ProTip: If you want to try one of these, you are not a male heterosexual. You are bisexual, and have been behaving as het to get along in society.
I don’t have zero interest in this. I have extreme negative interest in this.
[Update a while later]
No one who describes themselves as “bi-curious” is heterosexual, by definition. Articles like this annoy me in the extreme, because they promote the nonsense that everyone is gender and sexuality fluid.
[Monday-morning update]
The case of the missing link has been solved.
The Iran “Deal”
Goodbye, and good riddance.
If Obama was your defense attorney, he’d plead a life sentence for jaywalking, and call it a “deal.”
Doves worry that the elevation of Pompeo makes conflict between the United States and Iran more likely. They get it backward. We are already in a conflict with Iran, one that Iran has been winning. It was the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran that gave it the resources and opportunity to sow chaos and undermine American interests throughout Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere. What Pompeo can do is shift the conflict into terrain of our choosing and decide it on our terms.
Yup.
The Deep Space Network
Shannon Stirone has a nice essay on the history and state of affairs, and Congress’s skewed space-budget priorities.
I think the future of deep-space comm will be lasers, and it may be provided commercially.
SpaceX Had To Deliver
An article adapted from Christian Davenport’s new book, which I’m reading in Florida.
Cabotage
Glenn Reynolds says let’s end it, for the dogs. It’s a law that should have ended many decades ago.
Space Law In The UK
Behold, the new British Space Act. I and others had not-insignificant influence in forming this. They were headed down a bad European road a few years ago. They were originally going to allow the European aviation safety agency regulate it, which would have been disastrous. Instead, as we recommended, it is modeled closely on the U.S. launch-licensing system.