Thoughts from Eric Berger, which I missed last week due to the funeral and the conference.
From my monograph:
NASA gave up on reusability a decade ago, when Mike Griffin selected Constellation, with its expendable launch systems, capsule, insertion stages and landers. It could in fact be argued that Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) gave up on it after it was given responsibility for it in the 1990s, which it turned into the failed X-33 program, which failure the center then used as an excuse to illogically claim that reusability didn’t work.
One tech I didn't recommend that NASA develop for Mars: Low-cost access to space. Private sector is already taking care of that.
The five most livable places (aside from earth). They’ll all take a lot of tech, though. Of course, if you build your own, you can put them wherever you want.
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.
And if it ever flies, it will be burning millions of taxpayer dollars per second. https://t.co/FyC80d3vEq
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.