The guy who ignored the advice of the Aldridge Commission and industry to utilize commercial providers for the Vision for Space Exploration, instead issuing no-bid cost-plus contracts for Constellation, that were overrunning and slipping more than a year per year when it was canceled, seems like an odd choice to be put in charge of reforming procurement at the Pentagon.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Getting Off The Rock
Sarah Hoyt has an interview with Jeff Greason (part 1, part 2 will be tomorrow).
[Tuesday-morning update]
Computer Problems
Did a kernel upgrade in Fedora yesterday. Rebooted today. Wouldn’t boot, had errors. Rather than simple reboot, I decided to shut the whole machine down, then turn it on again. Now it’s dead.
Guess I’ll try swapping the power supply first. If that doesn’t work, sounds like a motherboard or CPU problem.
[Update a few minutes later]
Aaaaaaand, I can’t find any spare supplies. Have to run over to Fry’s to buy one, that probably isn’t the problem…
[Update after returning from Fry’s]
Welp, before I opened the new PS, I tried firing it up again. It booted without complaint. I guess I scared it with the new PS. #HappyHalloween
Seriously, though, it’s probably still a symptom of an incipient problem, probably from overheating.
NASA’s Risk Aversion
Remember when they were insisting on new-car-smell Dragons for CRS missions? Well, they’ve now approved flight-proven boosters. As I’ve long said, there will come a day when customers will demand a discount to fly on an unproven vehicle.
[Update a while later]
With today’s launch, SpaceX will double its record for annual launches.
[Update half an hour before launch]
You can follow launch and landing at the webcast.
Mary Jane And Sex
This is a great example of correlation is not causation, and confusion of cause and effect. Hint: Consider the possibility that people who have more sex are also more open to pot.
SLS
You’ll be as shocked as I am to learn that first flight will likely slip into 2020.
Elon’s Plans
Doug Messier has a critique, with which I largely agree. He does seem to be laser focused on solving the transportation problem (which was the first one he encountered when he tried to implement his initial Mars plans). I emailed him years ago about the fact that we have no idea whether or not we can conceive/gestate in 0.4g. His response was basically, “that’s not my problem right now.”
But this blinkered mindset may not ultimately serve him well in terms of his long-term goal. It would be tragic for him if he solved the transportation problem, but not the biological one, and his dreams of Mars colonies ended up being still born, despite the cost reduction of transportation there.
The GAO And Climate
Media headline: “Climate Change Causing Billions Of Taxpayer Dollars In Disaster Relief.”
Accurate headline: “Cost Of Dealing With Weather Much Less Than Decarbonization.”
Superaccurate GPS
Coming to a smartphone near you. One-foot accuracy would be very useful in LEO (BTW, one concept I heard at the Space Settlment Summit last week was a concept for extending existing GPS to cislunar space with just a few additional birds). My question is: what velocities can it handle?
A New Space Policy
…for the Trump administration. I’ve just started to skim it.