Category Archives: Technology and Society

Ending Apolloism

I’ve posted an update on my SLS Roadblock project, for those interested. The document itself can be found here. I’ll be interested in feedback.

[Tuesday-morning update]

Related: Growing a spacecraft for artificial gravity.

Half a million dollars. 0.03% of what we’re spending annually on SLS/Orion.

[Tuesday-morning update]

I’ve fixed a few problems with the document, including some missing figures, so you might want to refresh or download again.

The Journey To Nowhere

Preserving the status quo.

Reading my Twitter feed this morning, with all the excited tweets from the NASA Social in Utah over “the most powerful rocket EVAR” has been quite depressing. It’s sad that people don’t understand what a load of bull they’re being fed.

[Update a while later]

Here’s an example of stenographing of NASA propaganda:

Hillary’s Email Crimes

The coming constitutional crisis:

How the FBI can look at all this and not recommend prosecution of someone for something in EmailGate strains the imagination. Yet President Obama has clearly signaled that it’s all no big deal. Director James Comey has a tough job before him when he takes the FBI’s official recommendations regarding EmailGate to Attorney General Lynch for action, probably sometime this summer. Since Comey is now under a cloud over the FBI’s embarrassing mishandling of Omar Mateen, the Orlando jihadist mass murderer, perhaps his resignation over that matter would be welcome in the White House, which then could find a new director more willing to bend to Obama’s wishes.

Make no mistake, there are more than a few senior intelligence officials in Washington, DC, who are livid about Hillary Clinton’s willful disregard of clearly defined laws on the handling of classified information. Her misconduct endangered sensitive intelligence programs—and lives. Even if Comey is a sacrificial lamb here, there are high-ranking spies who are perfectly willing to leak the sordid details of EmailGate to the media if the president pulls a Dick Nixon and tries to subvert our Constitution to protect himself and his designated successor.

And in the unlikely event that nobody in our nation’s capital is willing to go public with exactly what Hillary Clinton did, it now seems the Russians may do so. It’s highly plausible that Russian intelligence services, among others, have many of Clinton’s emails, perhaps all of them, given how slipshod her security arrangements were.

If Comey does resign, the Senate shouldn’t approve anyone that Obama nominates to replace him.