Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Down Six Points In A Month

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The president continues to drop in popularity:

How bad has Barack Obama’s decline at the polls become? Even CBS has finally realized it. Both approval and disapproval numbers have moved sharply over the last month, and in the wrong direction, as voters have discovered that Obama hasn’t a clue about the economy and creating jobs.

There was never a single reason, to anyone with a lick of economic sense, to think that Barack Obama knew the first thing about job creation. He had no experience with it in his life up to that point, and most of his chosen mentors and associates have been Marxists and other economic ignorami. Now that he’s validating those of us who were always skeptical, the rest of the rubes are catching on as well. And even CBS, with its skewed poll, can’t deny it any more.

Political Commentary, Space

Reading The Handwriting On The Wall

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Even NASA seems to realize that the end is near for Ares I.

For more than a week now, engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., including some working on Ares I, have been pulled from their current duties to study creation of a smaller version of the Ares V that could carry both crew and heavy equipment.

NASA confirms that it is looking at different versions of the Ares V, though a spokeswoman played down the significance of the review.

“This is nothing new, and as a part of these ongoing … studies the program continues to look at a wide variety of options on Ares V as is standard practice in formulation,” said NASA spokeswoman Ashley Edwards in a statement.

But NASA insiders and contractors familiar with the work say that the work is far from “standard practice” and could herald the demise of the Ares I.

“They are looking at a whole new launch architecture,” said one NASA contractor familiar with the study. “Although it’s still too early to pronounce Ares I dead, it is safe to assume that members of the committees have doubts about it.”

Gee, you think?

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Brilliant Idea

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A surtax on small business to pay for nationalizing health care:

Here’s the ugly income-tax math. First, Mr. Obama has promised to let the lower Bush tax rates expire after 2010. This would raise the top personal income tax rate to 39.6% from 35%, and the next rate to 36% from 33%. The Bush expiration would also phase out various tax deductions and exemptions, bringing the top marginal rate to as high as 41%.

Then add the Rangel Surtax of one percentage point, starting at $280,000 ($350,000 for couples), plus another percentage point at $400,000 ($500,000 for couples), rising to three points on more than $800,000 ($1 million) in 2011. But wait, there’s more. The surcharge could rise by two more percentage points in 2013 if health-care costs are larger than advertised — which is a near-certainty. Add all of this up and the top marginal tax rate would climb to 46%, which hasn’t been seen in the U.S. since the Reagan tax reform of 1986 cut the top rate to 28% from 50%.

Combined with the upcoming rise in the minimum wage, remember things like this when Democrats lie about how they’re interested in creating jobs.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Academic Diversity

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In everything but thought:

A professor who confronted me declared that he was “personally offended” by my column. He railed that his political viewpoints never affected his teaching and suggested that if I wanted a faculty with Republicans I should have attended a university in the South. “If you like conservatism you can certainly attend the University of Texas and you can walk past the statue of Jefferson Davis everyday on your way to class,” he wrote in an e-mail.

I was shocked by such a comment, which seemed an attempt to link Republicans with racist orthodoxy. When I wrote back expressing my offense, he neither apologized nor clarified his remarks.

Instead, he reiterated them on the record. Was such a brazen expression of partisanship representative of the faculty as a whole? I decided to speak with him in person in the hope of finding common ground.

He was eager to chat, and after five minutes our dialogue bloomed into a lively discussion. As we hammered away at the issue, one of his colleagues with whom he shared an office grew visibly agitated. Then, while I was in mid-sentence, she exploded.

“You think you’re so [expletive] cute with your little column,” she told me. “I read your piece and all you want is attention. You’re just like Bill O’Reilly. You just want to get up on your [expletive] soapbox and have people look at you.”

From the disgust with which she attacked me, you would have thought I had advocated Nazism. She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed.

This is one of the reasons that the education bubble will eventually pop. Parents aren’t going to remain willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to send their kids to Indoctrinate U.

Business, Space

Falcon 1 Status

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This post is about a half hour before launch. I’m listening to the countdown status on the webcast.

[Update a little before 11 PM EDT]

They’re now at T minus fifteen, on a weather hold, hoping to pick it up in less than half an hour at T minus three something.

[Update just before midnight EDT]

It looks like a successful launch. Congratulations, SpaceX. This is a huge milestone — the first successful delivery of a payload into orbit. Now on to a successful Falcon 9 launch later this year.

[Morning update]

The launch seemed to be entirely successful. Clark Lindsey has some thoughts on the implications. I particularly like the last one:

Sen. Shelby should be forced to watch the launch video over and over…

I’m sure he’s seething this morning, assuming that someone had the moxie to tell him about it.

Space

Will The Shuttle Launch Tonight?

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I wouldn’t bet on it. The weather at the Cape isn’t looking much better than it has been for the last few nights, including Friday night, when lightning strikes on the launch site caused a scrub for Saturday night. When the Air Force and NASA were choosing launch sites in the late fifties and early sixties, the Cape was an attractive location for many reasons, but one of the negatives was the fact that Florida is pretty much the lightning capital of the nation. More people are killed by strikes here than anywhere else (it helps to have a large population, of course). But at the time, it wasn’t truly appreciated what a problem this would be. The first major lightning issue occurred on Apollo XII (next flight after the one whose fortieth anniversary we’ll be celebrating, or at least remembering over the next few days), when lightning struck the vehicle during launch, and basically dazed the avionics. The crew had the presence of mind to do a reboot, and the mission ended up being a success.

The next major event was almost twenty years later, in the spring of 1987 (not long after the Challenger loss, and the Titan IV failure at Vandenberg that caused both systems to be shut down for some time). An Atlas-Centaur carrying a Navy comsat was destroyed by lightning that caused its control system to go haywire right after launch. The current commit criteria that kept the Shuttle from launching last night, and may do so again tonight, were derived from those events. If anyone is interested in the details, there’s an interesting paper on the subject from the Aerospace Corporation.

What I found interesting is the fact that the vehicles themselves induce the lightning. I think that this speaks to the utility of a two-stage vehicle without a long rocket exhaust plume that contacts the ground providing a conductive path. This wouldn’t be a problem for an air-launched system that could ferry. And of course, such a system wouldn’t be tied to a fixed launch site, like Cape Canaveral. As we remember Apollo, people in Brevard Country should understand and be proud that while their region played a key role in space history, and may have helped win the Cold War, geography will not always be destiny.

[Update about 8 PM eastern]

Did I call it or what?

Spacelaunch Falcon 1 attempt has been put off until 10:30 EDT.

History, Political Commentary, Space

The Folly Of Apollo

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Some thoughts from Jerry Pournelle, in response to the Derbyshire piece a few weeks ago:

Years after Apollo I had a conversation with John R. Pierce, Chief Technologist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. John said that we’d made a mistake. In Heinlein’s future history, we go to the moon in stages first developing sub-orbital capabilities, then satellites, and finally went to the Moon; and we should have done it that way this time.

At the time I get somewhat angry in my disagreement with him, but it’s pretty clear John was right. He really meant that we should have learned to build space ships, real reusable ships that could fly suborbital, then orbital, then be refueled in orbit — rather than developing a bit disintegrating totem pole that could only be used once. I think he was right, and we may have to do it all over again before we can become a space-faring nation.

This will be one of the themes of my upcoming piece at The New Atlantis.

[Monday afternoon update]

Paul Dietz notes in comments that the Pournelle response was actually to a different Derbyshire post, that I hadn’t seen. He says that Apollo wasn’t a mere folly, but a magnificent one.

[Bumped]

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