…is made in Congress.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Is NASA Going Extinct?
The biggest problem with this piece (by a professor of journalism) is its fundamental false premise — that the purpose of human spaceflight is science.
We’re Number 53,000!
[Sunday morning update]
We’re up within 35,000 today, and there are three new (all five-star) reviews.
I think this is the highest ranking the book has ever had on Amazon. Sales must have picked up this week (I hawked it quite a bit while in DC, both at the conference and with a couple think tanks — I’ll probably be doing a ReasonTV interview in the next couple weeks).
Also, it’s once again number one in the category “Aviation and Space Law.” Plus, it’s selling for full retail, which I’d assume means that Amazon thinks there’s sufficient demand for it that they don’t have to discount (not that I’ve given them a lot of room to do so, but they have had it down a buck or so in the past).
[Update a while later]
OK, based on numbers at the printer, it looks like I sold 27 books last week. Compare that to 18 for the entire month of January. Hopefully those will continue to build with more publicity, and good reviews at Amazon (six right now, all five star).
[Bumped]
Gwynne Shotwell
Am interesting interview over at Forbes.
Failing Well
…is the American way. Michael Barone reviews Megan McArdle’s new book
[Update a couple minutes later]
This bit is interesting:
Her advice is to avoid enterprises that are in long-term decline, such as General Motors starting in the 1970s. In business and public policy, try to learn from well-conducted experiments — but recognize that successful trials can’t always be replicated on a large scale.
I think that also applies to NASA human spaceflight as practiced for the past fifty years.
The Space Transportation Conference
Marcia Smith has a good description of the highlights, including the discussion on space safety on Tuesday afternoon, at which I felt like the elephant in the room that no one talked about. It was an excellent conference.
Another Book Review
From John Walker.
He found a misspelling that I’ve been missing. Guess it will have to remain for the next revision (the first one will be available this week).
Green On Green
California environmentalists may not be very happy with Jerry Brown and his high-speed train to nowhere.
High-Risk Sports
Some ruminations on the possibility of death. As I note in the book, many extreme sports, not just motorsports, carry such danger, but it’s not regulated by the government. The commercial space industry will need to develop its own standards for different risk levels and activities.
Crowdfunding
Traditional capital flows from nonprofits to investment banking are being disintermediated. People, causes and businesses that need capital have access through the internet, social media and crowdfunding platforms to capital that they simply could not access before. As this trend grows, crowds will demonstrate a different sort of wisdom, sometimes funding causes that foundations wouldn’t or entrepreneurs that VCs wouldn’t.
The JOBS bill was one of the few bi-partisan things that Congress had done recently that will actually help the economy and provide more opportunities for true wealth and job creation.