Surprise, surprise! First flight is probably going to slip into 2020, and it’s now now earlier than late 2019. As I noted on Twitter, the longer it’s delayed, the less likely it is to ever fly. And we’ll have wasted tens of billions on it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Great, the new editor in the WordPress mobile app won’t save links…
I’m in Seattle to attend a space conference being hosted by The Economist. Tomorrow night, afterward, I take a red eye to Dallas to drive down to Austin for New Worlds, then back up to Dallas Saturday night to catch an early-morning flight back to LA, so I don’t wipe out the whole weekend.
Some may remember a couple months ago, when I was in Florida, I was trying an iPad with bluetooth keyboard and mouse, to see if it was acceptable. It turned out that Apple frowns on mice with iPads. Monday, I went out and bought an ASUS ZenPad 10, with Android 6.0, and it seems to be working, but there is a weird problem. The right button on the mouse doesn’t give a menu; it acts like a back button. Which makes it impossible (for example) to open a link in a new tab. Anyone have any idea what the deal is?
Kids, would you please start fighting?
The Wright brothers weren’t alone. The Beatles fought over instruments and lyrics and melodies. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony clashed over the right way to win the right to vote. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak argued incessantly while designing the first Apple computer. None of these people succeeded in spite of the drama — they flourished because of it. Brainstorming groups generate 16 percent more ideas when the members are encouraged to criticize one another. The most creative ideas in Chinese technology companies and the best decisions in American hospitals come from teams that have real disagreements early on. Breakthrough labs in microbiology aren’t full of enthusiastic collaborators cheering one another on but of skeptical scientists challenging one another’s interpretations.
If no one ever argues, you’re not likely to give up on old ways of doing things, let alone try new ones. Disagreement is the antidote to groupthink. We’re at our most imaginative when we’re out of sync. There’s no better time than childhood to learn how to dish it out — and to take it.
Beyond the danger to free expression, this is a large part of the danger of political correctness and groupthink on campus.
Why they’re so lousy; they’re grown in eggs.
This always seemed to me like a very inefficient, 20th century manufacturing technique.
Nothing really new here for people who follow this sort of thing, but here’s as good an overview of Pentagon plans as you can get without a clearance. I think that if BFR and Blue Origin’s vehicles come to be, they’ll dramatically open new capablities and change a lot of doctrine and strategy.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related. A new report, titled Escalation and Deterrence in the Second Space Age. Looks interesting.
[Via Leonard David]
Not content to rest on his laurels, Barack Obama tries to sell even more.
It’s “the usual mix of half truths, exaggerations, omissions and outright lies.”
In other words, what we’ve come to expect from government climate reports.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Oops, Naomi Oreske caught with biased numbers on “Exxon knew.”
Gee, it’s almost as thought they have a political agenda.
Lee Billings has an interview with him. This is Scott’s (whom I’ve know well for 35 years) standard response when asked about SLS:
Heavy-lift rockets are strategic national assets, like aircraft carriers. There are some people who have talked about buying heavy-lift as a service as opposed to owning and operating, in which case the government would, of course, have to continue to own the intellectual properties so it wasn’t hostage to any one contractor. One could imagine this but, in general, building a heavy-lift rocket is no more “commercial” than building an aircraft carrier with private contractors would be.
He never explains how a rocket that almost never flies, and costs billions per flight, if and when it does, is a “strategic national asset.” It seems more like a liability to me, in the modern age of commercial spaceflight.
[Update Tuesday morning]
More thoughts from Eric Berger.
[Late-morning update]
NASA’s safety Kobayashi Maru.
This is insanity.
[Update mid-afternoon]
Bob Zimmerman righteously rants. I really find it hard to believe that this thing will ever fly with crew.
Things are heating up there, and I don’t think it’s being covered much, particularly given all the coverage of the Texas shooting. First, the Huthis fired a Scud missile at Saudi Arabia from Yemen, which the Saudis shot down, and are blaming on their puppetmasters in Iran, declaring that it may be an act of war.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese Prime Minister has resigned. In Riyadh. Because he fears for his life and that Iran is now effectively in control there. And there’s a huge shakeup going on in the House of Saud. The ancient rivalry between the Arabs and the Persians may be reaching a boiling point.
All this as Israel has been engaging in the biggest war games in almost two decades.
But nothing to worry about. No more peaceful, stable region in the world, historically, than the Middle East.
[Update a few minutes later]
And the deputy governor of Asir province was killed in a helicopter crash. Could be a coincidence, but there’s a lot going on over there.