A reusable suborbital rocket company based in New Zealand. Call it Kiwispace.
[Monday morning update]
Clark Lindsey has more. Apparently I misinterpreted the project in my quick read. Payloads are recovered, but the vehicles don’t seem to be reused. I also have to say that someone who legally changes his last name for this kind of thing is a lot more fanatical about it than I am.
…is the only season that I miss in my home state. Springs are nice, but they’re basically southern Cal standard. Summer, while it can have some nice days, tends to be hot and humid. I don’t mind cold and snow per se, but southeast Michigan winters are unpredictable (a white Chistmas is hit or miss), and generally on the edge of freezing, with slush, slick ice, and ugly mud. But fall… The closest thing I can find to it in CA is to go up into the Sierra with the aspens and sycamores. And south Florida? You’re joking, right?
If we can’t be honest and realistic about the threat our civilization faces, we cannot win.
Just make sure you go before you leave earth.
What wimps. No wonder we’re making such slow progress in space.
We bought a bunch of wine at Bevmo the other week, because they were having a sale. Buy one bottle, and get another of the same thing for a nickel. Great, right?
Well, two of the bottles we bought on that basis were a nice Italian red. We drank one a couple weeks go with a home-made spaghetti sauce. Tonight, I’m making a frozen pizza. I’m tarting it up with mushrooms and red peppers, and leftover chicken, but it’s basically a thin-crust Albertson’s margherita with the extras that I’m adding.
Here’s the problem. We usually like Chianti, but we don’t have any, and all we have is this other Italian bottle. But I don’t know which bottle it is. Is it the one we paid full price for, or the one that only cost five cents? There’s no way to know, because I didn’t mark them when we bought them. If it’s the full-price one, I’m not sure I want to waste it on a frozen pizza, whereas if it’s only a nickel, it’s a bargain. So should I go with it, or the Trader Joe’s Coastal Cab?
Have they been just dormant, and not dead?
If everything continues to align as it is now, a woman will indeed be President in 2012, be it Hillary or Sarah…and we will work our heart and souls out for her on the ground whichever one it is who takes on Dr. Utopia because we just can’t let this man have a second term.
They haven’t forgotten, and a lot of Democrats have started to figure out what they already knew about The One. It will be interesting.
Not years. Months. We really need to be thinking about climate control in general, instead of how to punish carbon emitters.
…when I heard that the administration actually plans to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York criminal court. But it’s true. Tom Maguire is as flabbergasted as I am. And as the Powerline guys ask:
…suppose that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial results in an acquittal or a hung jury. Would the Obama administration really let him go? If so, they are crazy. If not, why are they holding the trial?
It’s a show trial. There are regimes that have show trials. They don’t tend to be democratic.
And will evidence from his own testimony be excluded, seeing as how it was obtained under “torture”?
Madness.
[Update a few minutes later]
Andy McCarthy is appalled as well:
We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America’s defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.
Hey, but other than that, it’s a great idea.
[Update a few minutes later]
Who are they going to find willing to sit on that jury? I sure as hell wouldn’t. No civilian should be expected to. How are they going to find anyone impartial, particularly in that location? I predict, at a minimum, their attorney will petition for change of venue, because he can’t get a fair trial in New York. Just watch.
[Afternoon update]
Why bring KSM to the US? A question by Congressman Hoekstra.
That remains my choice among NASA’s heavy-lift options. Doing a new Saturn V seems particularly crazy to me.
[Update a few minutes later]
More over at the Orlando Sentinel space blog. It’s an interesting point that one of the (many) issues with solids is that they are a lot harder to transport to the pad. And I don’t think that the human spaceflight program should be held hostage to the Pentagon’s need to keep ATK in business for military solid work. If it’s important to national security to have a solid manufacturer available, then let them pay for it, instead of perverting NASA’s launch systems and budget.
How low can the resolution go?