This is what happens when you have race mongers and baiters like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the black caucus and the “liberals” in the media driving the national conversation. And I hold them responsible for this:
“During the course of the investigation, we learned that the crime was related to the victim’s race,” Reynolds said.
Conklin said Hayes told investigators that he was angry about the Martin shooting and decided to attack the victim because of his race. Reynolds would not comment if the crime had anything to do with the Martin shooting.
This has been as big a case of journalistic malpractice as the Duke lacrosse affair.
No, but Tanja Masson-Zwaan has been tweeting that it’s now time to start setting up the “regime” under the Moon Treaty to redistribute the wealth:
Possibly parties to Moon agrmt 79 must start talks about regime governing exploitation, as it seems ‘about to become feasible’ 2/2 #spacelaw
Personally, I think it means that it’s now time to have the Senate actively repudiate it by vote, to indicate that we will have no part of that nonsense.
Of course, given his talent for appointing rank incompetents like Janet Moronitano and Tim “Can’t Figure Out My Taxes” Geithner, maybe he would be better than them.
Here’s a WSJ piece on it. If they do actually move an asteroid, under current precedent, they’d own it.
I won’t be covering it in real time, because I’ll be at a workshop at JPL giving a talk on propellant depots. Interestingly, Dennis Wingo gives a talk following mine on extraterrestrial resource utilization. It seems like a lot of things are coming together at the same time.
[Evening update]
Sorry, workshop link was wrong. Fixed now, I hope.
The Dragon flight has been pushed off again, apparently to do some final validation on code. There’s entirely too much political pressure on the successful outcome of this flight.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the official release from SpaceX: “After reviewing our recent progress, it was clear that we needed more time to finish hardware-in-the-loop testing and properly review and follow up on all data. While it is still possible that we could launch on May 3rd, it would be wise to add a few more days of margin in case things take longer than expected. As a result, our launch is likely to be pushed back by one week, pending coordination with NASA.”
If you’re an SLS supporter, that is. Spaceref has a NASA document from November that concludes utilizing orbital assembly and fueling for exploration missions adds no significant mission risk. Opponents of this concept have been sowing FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about this ever since it became viewed as a threat to first Ares, and now SLS. It was always a monumentally ignorant argument, that could be made only by someone unfamiliar with basic statistics and space ops (and sadly, it was once even made by the administrator himself), but now NASA has an internal document that shows what nonsense it is (and really, always was). Of course, in defense of Bolden, he knew what his audience wanted to hear.
A better question is, should they be, at least in anything resembling their current form. It won’t change until parents realize what a massive fraud the whole thing is.