…but Irene may not be as catastrophic as it appeared yesterday. It looks to me like the most likely major consequence, beyond flooding, will be a lot of power outage. Regardless, you should always be prepared. As Frank J says, it’s a hurricane, not a procrastinate-cane.
[Update a while later]
If you want to support relief efforts, both in the Bahamas and (next week) on the east coast, this is probably a good organization.
Where does he come up with this stuff?
Rohrabacher suggests that “several hundred million dollars” could be transferred from the SLS program to commercial crew. There are several problems with his proposal.
First, commercial crew space craft such as the SpaceX Dragon are not due to start carrying human passengers until 2015 at the earliest.
What does this mean? Where does he come up with that date, and why would they not be “due” to do it sooner? I am aware of no reason that Dragon couldn’t be flying people in a couple years, given sufficient investment. It could fly even sooner if one were willing to forgo an abort system.
The cargo version, depending on some test flights being flow successfully, would start flying next year. There is little evidence that a transfer of “several hundred million dollars” would advance the start dates of either version by as much as a day.
This is ridiculous. The request for Commercial Crew for 2012 (which starts in about a month) was $850M. The House reduced it to about $300M. Does Mark really imagine that this reduction will not impact the schedule? And that increasing it won’t accelerate it? On what basis?
On the other hand, siphoning off money from the underfunded SLS would pretty much cripple that project and add to the arguments of those who want it scrapped entirely. That may be the entire point of Rohrabacher’s proposal. However the proposal is so transparent that it is not likely to be met favorably by other members of Congress. Rohrabacher is in the strange position of being a man who has advocated free market capitalism demanding more government subsidies for a space craft whose sole purpose, at least thus far, is to service the government.
Other members of Congress don’t really give a damn, except the ones whose states and districts are affected. He continues to not understand the meaning of the word “subsidy,” and continues to turn a blind eye to the real subsidy — multi-billion cost-plus contracts for vehicles that will likely never fly.
[Update a few minutes later]
Michael Belfiore discusses the implications:
If all goes according to plan, another unmanned Dragon, also riding a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, will dock with the International Space Station this December. A strong commitment from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and independent funding from the company’s satellite launch business puts Dragon on the fast track to manned flight within three years.
“Within three years” means 2014 by my math. And as I said, the long pole in the tent is the abort system, not life support. If there were an emergency, they could fly without the abort system much sooner (Ken Bowersox has said that someone could have flown last December with a beanbag chair and scuba tank). Of course, that would only happen if space were important.
[Friday evening update]
OK, I know I shouldn’t link his stupid blog (just as an aside, it’s hilarious that after all these years, the permalinks on his blog still have double tags), but as usual he doubles down on the stupidity and reading incomprehension:
Rand Simberg reacts. He doesn’t offer any evidence to refute the position that adding just a few hundred million is not going to advance the schedule of the commercial space vehicles becoming operation, besides throwing out words like “nonsense.”
Really? I’ll repeat again (it’s right up above), though he’ll ignore it again, rather than responding to it, because he has no response:
The request for Commercial Crew for 2012 (which starts in about a month) was $850M. The House reduced it to about $300M. Does Mark really imagine that this reduction will not impact the schedule? And that increasing it won’t accelerate it? On what basis?
He goes on:
Of course, one might concede the point that if one were to pour billions of dollars into the commercial crew program, which I think Rand is implying, one might get something flying in “a couple of years.”
Note that I wrote nothing about “pouring billions of dollars into the commercial crew program.” He may be inferring it, but as almost always, what he insanely infers is not what others imply.
Also, I think Rand has also admitted, though he will likely deny it, that funding projects like the Space Launch System more than currently contemplated would advance the advent of that launch system as well.
Again, I “admitted” nothing of the kind, though I would in fact concede that if we actually do “pour billions” (that is, tens of billions) into the SLS, it’s possible that its schedule might be moved up a year or so, perhaps only two or three years past the current date after which there is no guarantee that the ISS will even be flying. How he thinks this helps his case Jehovah only knows.
The greens lobbying President Obama to block the pipeline are asking him to forgo thousands of jobs (in an election year in which jobs will could well be the major issue!) and billions of dollars in economic advantages — not to save the planet or reduce the carbon in the atmosphere, but to confer an economic and political advantage on China. If President Obama takes the green advice, the US will get almost all of the disadvantages that come from using the oil ourselves, and lose out many of the benefits.
There’s another factor that has to be weighed. Getting secure oil sources for the United States isn’t just a matter of convenience; reducing US exposure to foreign blackmail, and reducing our need to consider military interventions and other actions to protect our energy supply helps make war less likely — and allows us, all things being equal, to get along with somewhat smaller armed forces than would otherwise be required.
More, forcing China to look to less stable places than Canada for its oil transfers some of the costs of global energy security to the Chinese, and also helps tie them into the development of a rule driven global system. If the US oil supply comes largely from friendly neighbors, while China (and other US competitors) must rely on unstable, far flung sources, we are going to have more flexibility in our foreign policy and China will have so many fish to fry and cats to herd that it will be less likely to think about mounting a global challenge to the US.
Don’t expect the enviroloons to think rationally about this. We should prefer ethical oil over conflict oil. Of course, in their unrealistic fantasies, we would use no oil at all, and just power everything with windmills (ignoring the bird kill) and unicorn flatulence.
[Update a while later]
Speaking of green madness (and now anger) it looks like climate models will have to be revised. Damn those extraterrestrial causes! Can’t you just leave us green Ptolemaians alone?
I have more thoughts on Senator Hutchison’s non sequitur over at Open Market.
Like all collectivists, he’s very generous — with other peoples’ money.
Democrats furiously oppose Walker because public employees unions are transmission belts, conveying money to the Democratic Party. Last year, $11.2 million in union dues was withheld from paychecks of Wisconsin’s executive branch employees and $2.6 million from paychecks at the university across the lake. Having spent improvidently on the recall elections, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the teachers union, is firing 40 percent of its staff.
Progressives want to recall Walker next year. Republicans hope they try. Wisconsin seems weary of attempts to overturn elections, and surely Obama does not want his allies squandering political money and the public’s patience. Since 1960, no Democrat has been elected president without carrying Wisconsin.
Walker has refuted the left’s sustaining conviction that a leftward-clicking ratchet guarantees that liberalism’s advances are irreversible. Progressives, eager to discern a victory hidden in their recent failures, suggest that a chastened Walker will not risk further conservatism. Actually, however, his agenda includes another clash with teachers unions over accountability and school choice, and combat over tort reform with another cohort parasitic off bad public policies — trial lawyers.
Here’s hoping he wins those fights, too.
Ben Domenech interviewed me a couple weeks ago. The podcast is up now.
The teddy bears, or dogs, or whatever they are, discuss Kay Bailey Hutchison’s latest antics.
A tour from Lileks:
We visited some houses, saw the CAVE CANEM mural, the word WELCOME embedded in the stones in front of a house. And above it all, Vesuvius . . . venting.
“Are those clouds?”
“It’s a cloudless day except for one cloud coming out of Vesuvius? I don’t think so.”
“Is it going to explode?”
“Some day. But not today.”
Some day it will, and there will probably a tour group in progress, and a few people will think “now that’s a good tour. They even give you the volcano” while others stare in horror: well, can’t say I wasn’t warned, but jeez, what are the odds.
It’s actually part of a series he’s been running all week, on his European vacation.
[Update a couple minutes later]
This is great, too:
On the ship it was Pirate Night. We got Pirates of the Caribbean bandanas in the restaurant. The menu was pirate themed. (It was also the best meal we’d had on the ship.) There was a pirate dance in the middle of dinner. There will be fireworks on board tonight; the Disney ships are the only ones entrusted with fireworks. Then a dessert buffet and general piratical merriment. I arrred well and hard at the maitre d’ when we entered: it’s table nine I’ll be wanting, me hearties – but once Bradford, our waiter, asked me if I would be dressing up, I explained that my sympathies were with the colonial administrators, just trying to get the money to the mother country without losing it to some thieves. Pirates are interesting, but not admirable, no matter how you gussy it up with yo-ho-hoing and avast-ye-matey exultations of a life unbound from convention and oppression. As all the waiters danced around the room, wearing pirate costumes, I had a vision of a ship 400 years hence, with all the waiters dressed up for Al-Qaeda night, wearing suicide vests and waving automatic weapons.
Sadly, he’s probably prophetic. Or maybe not so sadly. I’d feel a little more optimistic if we’d actually solved the pirate problem. We did for a while, but then decided to try a new, non-effective approach.