John Shannon said last year that it costs about two hundred million a month to extend the program, so this two-week delay cost another hundred million dollars (note that four months of that burn rate would provide enough resources for another entire SpaceX). That assumes, of course, that this delay will also push out the the schedule of the final flight. I don’t know enough about KSC flows to know if that’s the case, or if they can be parallel processing Atlantis, currently scheduled for the end of June.
This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news for today, May 1st, 1945, read by Alvar Liddell. Confusion continues to surround the last moments of Adolf Hitler, who died yesterday in his bunker in Berlin.
Incredibly, the world’s most-wanted man had been living in the heart of the capital of the Third Reich, in plain sight of millions of Germans who maintain they were not supporters of the Nazis and had no knowledge of the Fuhrer’s crimes again humanity.
It’s not bad, but the biggest problem with it is that we actually had no knowledge of Hitler’s fate that early. I don’t think that the west discovered what had happened to him until November, and in the interim there were many rumors that he was alive and regrouping with other diehards in some last bastions in Germany (this also helped feed the Werwolf movement). My version has the history much more accurately.
Jeff Bezos is investing in a fusion company (though as commenters there note, the technical explanation is pretty confusing). Maybe he wants to use it to power his spaceships.
Well, I’d like to think so, but on the evidence, if it is, it’s got more lives than a cat. On the other hand, it doesn’t bode well for the future of CNN.
Whenever I hear an unemployment number, and particularly the statistic of how many people are in the labor force or looking for jobs, I wonder where they get the data. Well, here it is, explained.
The gun running scandal in Mexico just gets worse and worse. Of course, I’m amazed that he was confirmed in the first place. The Republicans shouldn’t have rolled over the way they did, even if they didn’t have the votes.
All of this goes to show that President Obama is walking a fine line in what he wants two different groups to understand about bin Laden’s burial. There are those who question why a millionaire mass murderer who was disavowed as practicing a reputedly inauthentic version of Islam received an Islamic funeral. Sea burial itself is an American honor for which only service members, their dependents or outstanding U.S. citizens are eligible. This group is to trust that the decisions made by the Obama administration are the correct, “appropriate” ones and stop asking impertinent questions.
Meanwhile, the other group is subtly being courted with the emphasis on “conformance to Islamic requirements” throughout administration briefings. By reiterating, as Mr. Brennan did at least seven times in his Monday briefing, that the burial was done according to Islamic requirements, he has communicated that the President is more concerned about placating the feelings of Muslim extremists than closure for the American people. Families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks who want to see photos of bin Laden’s corpse must be satisfied with a presidential victory lap at Ground Zero, while radical Islamists can be comforted by Mr. Brennan’s repetitive assurances that the burial was conducted according to rites with which they’re familiar—ones which inherently confer dignity and respect to the dead.
I’ve had three radio interviews on this subject this week (including one at 6 AM this morning).
“If I had one thing to do over again I would not have talked so much about green,” Immelt said at an event sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Even though I believe in global warming and I believe in the science … it just took on a connotation that was too elitist; it was too precious and it let opponents think that if you had a green initiative, you didn’t care about jobs. I’m a businessman. That’s all I care about, is jobs.”
Hate to break it to you, but if you’re a real businessman, what you care about is profits, and not pandering to the politically correct by declaring your fealty to the planet, or job creation. The purpose of a business is not to create jobs, and if you think it is, then the business is likely to suffer, particularly if it’s all that you care about. Immelt seems like a character right out of Atlas Shrugged.