Go read this action alert, and call your senator if they’re on the appropriations committee.
Category Archives: War Commentary
Ending Our Dependence On Moscow
Defense News has a hit and a miss. First, the hit:
…And after SpaceX unveils the manned version of its previously unmanned Dragon spacecraft this week, NASA should accelerate development of the project
Yes, though unlike me, they don’t actually propose how to do that.
Here’s the miss, and it’s a big one:
and revive the Space Launch System to put super heavy payloads into orbit.
What does “revive” the SLS mean? I thought it was ahead of schedule? That’s what its proponents keep telling me.
And what “super heavy payloads” are there that need to be put into orbit? What does this have to do with dependence on the Russians? This recommendation seems to be a complete non sequitur.
Snowden
Why is Russia harboring him? A disturbing and plausible theory:
Since Snowden took vast quantities of information, and nobody can be quite sure what information he took, Russia has gained a fabulous smokescreen for all of its actual intelligence operations in America. Russian possession of American secrets is no longer actionable evidence of Russian spies in America; the secrets, especially anything touching on surveillance and the NSA, might have come with Snowden. The logic of American counter-intelligence is broken for a generation. It is like issuing a new life to every Russian spy in America, and nine new lives to any spy in the NSA.
What a disaster.
Isolated In Space
Who is? The Russians, or NASA?
On Memorial Day
Roger Simon says “Blame me for everything.”
I think he’s being a little too hard on himself. As he says, he was young.
The first (and last) year I was eligible for the draft, I had a high number. If I’d gotten a notice, I’d have likely joined the Air Force, though my vision would have prevented me from being a pilot.
Shaming Congress
As I was just tweeting, you know what would be pretty funny? If the other ISS partners weighed in on the Russian thing.
Can you imagine the embarrassment if Canada and ESA said, “Hey, maybe NASA and Congress are afraid to fly without an abort system on the Dragon, but we think that having assured access to ISS is pretty important, even if there’s a risk to crew. Our astronauts are willing to chance it, to stick it to Rogozin. That’s what they signed up for.” I’d love to see the French tell us to stop being such merde du poulet.
The New Obama Narrative
Well, everyone has to be good at something.
The emerging narrative of Barack Obama, the one that actually comports to reality, is that he is a rare political talent but a disaster when it comes to actually governing. The list of his failures is nothing short of staggering, from shovel-ready jobs that weren’t so shovel ready to the failures of healthcare.gov to the VA debacle. But it also includes the president’s failure to tame the debt, lower poverty, decrease income inequality, and increase job creation. He promised to close Guantanamo Bay and didn’t. His administration promised to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a civilian jury in New York but they were forced to retreat because of outrage in his own party. Early on in his administration Mr. Obama put his prestige on the line to secure the Olympics for Chicago in 2016 and he failed.
Overseas the range of Obama’s failures include the Russian “reset” and Syrian “red lines” to Iran’s Green Revolution, the Egyptian overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, and Libya post-Gaddafi. The first American ambassador since the 1970s was murdered after requests for greater security for the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi were denied. (For a comprehensive overview of President Obama’s failures in the Middle East, see this outstanding essay by Abe Greenwald.) The president has strained relations with nations extending from Canada to Germany, from Israel to Afghanistan to Poland and the Czech Republic to many others. All from a man who promised to heal the planet and slow the rise of the oceans.
But that’s not all. The White House response to everything from the VA and IRS scandals to the seizure of AP phone records by the Department of Justice is that it learned about them from press reports. More and more Mr. Obama speaks as if he’s a passive actor, a bystander in his own administration, an MSNBC commentator speaking about events he has no real control over. We saw that earlier today, when the president, in trying to address the public’s growing outrage at what’s happening at the VA, insisted he “will not stand for it” and “will not tolerate” what he has stood for and tolerated for almost six years. His anger at what’s happening to our veterans seems to have coincided with the political damage it is now causing him.
Yeah, that’s pretty much the only thing that really upsets him. I hope the Democrats are proud of what they foisted on the country.
[Update a few minutes later]
How Obama because the superhero of excuses.
From Ron Fournier, who isn’t exactly part of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
A Declaration Off Space Independence From The Russians
I have an op-ed up at USA Today, blasting Congress on its absurd policies and attitudes toward human spaceflight.
A Space-Socialist Republican
Greg Autry is sort of singing my tune:
If NASA were compelled to “downselect” Commercial Crew to a single vendor, Washington power politics would clearly favor Boeing’s CST-100 capsule, a luxurious spacecraft, that while it has never flown, is on track for some unmanned flights to the ISS in about three years. This leisurely development schedule puts no pressure on SLS. While it is surely coincidently that both the SLS and CST-100 programs are headquartered in Houston, we are lucky to have Messrs. La Branche and Culberson standing between us and the utter chaos of free market competition.
…Frankly, DragonRider could fly to the ISS next month if it were subject to the same expectations of safety as NASA’s Space Shuttle. A truly conservative response to Mr. Rogozin would be to announce that the United States is ready to move a DragonRider launch forward without further testing, send eight Navy Seals to the ISS and “liberate” our space station from Russia’s state capitalist squatters.
Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far. But that’s Greg.
Merde Just Got Real
Rogozin is cutting off sales of RD-180s, and threatening to end ISS participation in 2020.
The former is much more concerning than the latter. 2020 is a long way off, and we have time to resolve that one way or the other. But Atlas V is out of business in a couple years if they don’t come up with a solution. Which is bad news for Boeing and Sierra Nevada in terms of commercial crew.