…and good riddance. He epitomized the reasons that the Republicans are often called the Stupid Party.
A couple years ago, at the Space Transportation Conference, the maroon came and gave a speech on the virtues of high-speed rail.
The First Bionic Eye
…is about to hit the U.S. market.
If ObamaCare doesn’t kill it off.
Digital Cameras
Why do I need one when I have a smartphone?
Here’s one they missed. If you’re taking a picture of something of which the subject doesn’t want a picture taken, and he grabs or smashes your camera, at least you’ll still have your phone. You should probably carry a cheaper one for that sort of thing, though.
Commercial Space
The full privatization of U.S. space transportation will bring two immediate benefits. First, America can and will recapture global leadership in commercial space transportation (we are currently fourth in launches per year, behind Russia, Europe and Ukraine), bringing thousands of good jobs back to America. Second, since NASA will be purchasing services—essentially tickets for crew and cargo—on the same commercial transportation used by the Defense Department, the department will save money, which can be used to improve U.S. national security.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of this transition will be NASA. Private industry can build the rockets, and do a much better job at lowering costs than any government agency. NASA can then focus on the important and difficult jobs that only NASA can do Among other things, this would include developing gamechanging technologies such as advanced electric propulsion that are still too risky for any company to invest in, and which will create brand-new industries in the 21st century.
A renewed and refocused NASA is critical to America’s future. So as the country struggles with trillions in debt and deficits, it makes no sense for NASA to build rockets that are already available or can be developed at much lower cost by U.S. private industry. Why spend approximately $20 billion to build an unneeded SLS super-heavy-lift rocket, for instance, when existing commercial rockets can carry payloads more often, efficiently and cheaply?
Unfortunately, it makes lots of sense once you understand that the purpose is not to actually do anything useful in space. That’s just lagniappe, if we’re lucky enough to get it.
The Columbia Disaster
The latest issue of Space Safety Magazine is dedicated to it. I disagree with Andrea’s take here, though:
The focus of commercial space is very much on cost-cutting, while vague assurances are made about safer vehicles. Sometimes safety is even presented as a stubborn obstacle to industry development and progress [I plead guilty as charged – RS]. The commercial human spaceflight industry needs to remember that the primary goal of the Shuttle Program was cutting the cost of transportation to orbit by an order of magnitude, a goal at which it failed miserably. As with the supersonic Concorde, the Shuttle was doomed by being both expensive and unsafe. Being expensive made it in turn unaffordable to undertake any further development or safety modification. But even being expensive to operate did not stop either the Shuttle or Concorde from operating for about 30 years. What ultimately ended these programs was their inadequate safety.
Probably true for Concorde, but not for Shuttle. As I write in the book: Continue reading The Columbia Disaster
The Climate-Change Cure
…is like taking chemotherapy for a cold:
I cannot see why this relatively poor generation should bear the cost of damage that will not become apparent until the time of a far richer future generation, any more than people in 1900 should have borne sacrifices to make people today slightly richer. Or why today’s poor should subsidise, through their electricity bills, today’s rich who receive subsidies for wind farms, which produce less than 0.5% of the country’s energy.
As Glenn often says, the poor don’t have the juice (literally, in this case). It’s always about the juice.
James Lovelock
We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. We need take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilisation.
What he doesn’t (or at least didn’t) understand is that they want civilization, and humanity itself, to fail.
The Hunley
Learning the answers to what happened:
…it may be that the crew, found at their seats when the sub was raised with no evidence of an attempt to abandon ship, may have been knocked out by the concussion of an explosion so close by, said Lt. Gov. Glenn McConnell, a member of the South Carolina Hunley Commission.
“I think the focus now goes down to the seconds and minutes around the attack on the Housatonic,” he said. “Did the crew get knocked out? Did some of them get knocked out? Did it cause rivets to come loose and the water rush into the hull?”
The final answers will come when scientists begin to remove encrustations from the outer hull, a process that will begin later this year. McConnell said scientists will also arrange to have a computer simulation of the attack created based on the new information. The simulation might be able to tell what effect the explosion would have on the nearby sub.
Maria Jacobsen, the senior archaeologist on the project, said small models might also be used to recreate the attack.
A fascinating archaeological project.
Another Road
The Blue elites are wrong:
It is easy to see how rational people can conclude that the only hope of preserving mass prosperity in America comes from transfers and subsidies. If we add to this the belief that only a powerful and intrusive regulatory state can prevent destructive climate change, then the case for the blue utopia looks ironclad. To save the planet, save the middle class and provide American minorities and single mothers with the basic elements of an acceptable life, we must set up a far more powerful federal government than we have ever known, and give it sweeping powers over the production and distribution of wealth.
But what if this isn’t true? What if the shift from a late-stage industrial economy to an information economy has a different social effect? What if the information revolution continues and even accelerates the democratization of political, social and cultural life by empowering ordinary people? What if the information revolution, like the industrial revolution, ultimately leads to a radical improvement in the way ordinary people live and opens up vast new horizons of human potential and freedom?
Obviously nobody knows what the future holds, and anything anybody says about the social consequences of the information revolution is mostly conjecture; still, the elegantly paternalistic pessimism of our elites about the future of the masses seems both defeatist and overdone. The information revolution, one should never forget, may be disruptive but more fundamentally it is good news. Human productivity is rising dramatically. If the bad news is that fewer and fewer people will earn a living working in factories, the good news is that a smaller and smaller percentage of the time and energy of the human race must be devoted to the manufacture of the material objects we need for daily life. Just as it’s good news overall when agricultural productivity increases and the majority of the human race no longer has to spend its time providing food, it’s good news when we as a species can free ourselves from the drudgery and monotony of factory work.
Good news is bad news for people who don’t like (other people to have) freedom. They need a crisis to not waste.
The White House War On Fox News
…is back on.
It’s all part of their general war on any political opposition, because obviously, any opposition to their enlightened “progressive” policies is illegitimate.
Whether you are liberal or conservative, libertarian, moderate or politically agnostic, everyone should be concerned when leaders of our government believe they can intentionally try to delegitimize a news organization they don’t like.
In fact, if you are a liberal – as I am – you should be the most offended, as liberalism is founded on the idea of cherishing dissent and an inviolable right to freedom of expression.
That more liberals aren’t calling out the White House for this outrageous behavior tells you something about the state of liberalism in America today.
Just another example of how they aren’t really liberal (and why I refuse to apply that label to them).
Do they have an exit strategy for their war this time? You’d think they would have learned the last time around.