The first launch on the way to the surface of the moon. 
It’s also the 71st anniversary of the first nuclear explosion at Trinity test site.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The anniversary of the landing is Wednesday. Bill Simon and I will be on The Space Show at 7 PM PDT to talk about the ceremony we came up with to commemorate it.
They have a nicely redesigned website. Here’s the story behind it.
Seriously, they not only taste bad, but they’re bad for you, and don’t help with weight loss. But they’re big business.
New you can use, if you’re a woman — the latest tech in self stimulation.
No, there’s nothing “strange” about them. It’s straightforward destruction of evidence, for which this administration is determined to let her skate.
[Update early afternoon]
Hillary, the Democrats and the problem of trust:
…if you think promoting trust in government is important, you should nominate someone trustworthy. But there are other priorities, apparently, and they outweigh that trustworthiness, or we’d have different nominees.
The other way you promote trust is through transparency and accountability. Voters should be able to tell what politicians and bureaucrats are doing, and when those politicians and bureaucrats do wrong they should face real consequences. We’re not doing very well on that front either.
No, we’re not.
[Update a few minutes later]
The FBI agents involved with the probe had to sign special secrecy agreements. Gee, this doesn’t look like the fix was in to let her of the hook and they were worried about leaks at all.
After losing the new docking adaptor on the launch failure a year ago, SpaceX is going to try again this month.
This is important for using Dragon or “Starliner” as a lifeboat for ISS.
Did he save it? And if so, why? An interesting bit of history of which I’d been unaware. Mondale wanted to kill it, and did manage to reduce the fleet size from seven to five (including Enterprise, which never flew). Which was economically stupid, because it saved very little money. If we’d had six vehicles, we’d have still had four after the losses of Challenger and Columbia (assuming that we hadn’t built Endeavour from spares after Challenger, and those two events would have occurred in that alternate universe). A four- or five-ship fleet would have made for a slightly different calculus after the loss of the latter, because part of the reason the program was ended was that three was too small a fleet to continue to operate for long.
Some Europeans say that’s the only place that Apollo visited.
@Lee_Ars It's hard for people to appreciate the degree to which Apollo copulated things up, in terms of space.
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) July 14, 2016
I don’t know what to make of this announcement. Chuck Lauer has been promoting Prestwick for the last couple years, but does this mean that they’ve found the money to restart Lynx development? If so, will they do it in Midland? Or Scotland? How will they reassemble the team?
Yesterday, Deputy NASA Administrator Dava Newman announced with a blog post a new publication by NASA. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but given that one of the authors is Alex McDonald, I expect that it will be very good.
Speaking of which, I’m heading down to San Diego in a few minutes to attend at least the first day of the annual ISS R&D conference. So blogging may be light.
[Update Thursday morning]
I’m back from the conference. Meanwhile, I still haven’t looked at the publication, but Leonard David has.