I’m going to be gone for the next week and a half (including some time at the ISDC) and am packing tonight and flying tomorrow (the next week will be in central Missouri). I’ll be doing the “have laptop, will travel” gig, though, because this is a working vacation, so I won’t be totally absent, but I’m unlikely to post much for the next day or so.
[Thursday morning update]
Travel went fine yesterday, but I didn’t get out the laptop until this morning. More posts anon.
Chair Force Engineer has been reading the DIRECT rebuttal, and says that there are problems with both the RS-68 and the SSME has an upper-stage engine. One point that he doesn’t make, but is a major issue, is that the SSME is not currently capable of air (or vacuum) start. It currently needs a lot of ground support equipment. Even ignoring the manufacturing cost (which will be recurring every flight), requalifying the hot box for second-stage work will be a major program cost and risk.
Abandoning reusables because of the Shuttle and X-33 is nuts. It’s Wile E. Coyote engineering.
Thoughts from Veronique de Rugy:
In the end, the Terminator’s tenure as a governor of the Golden State will be remembered as a disaster flick which ends with high taxes, failed promises, and gigantic spending. For instance, not only did he bail on his promise to destroy the car tax, cut spending, and bring unprecedented prosperity to California, but he also caved to the unions and now wants voters to pay for the mess he caused.
The sad part of this bad movie is that this is a guy who came into office with a very promising future and a potential to be transformative in important ways. He was pro-business, pro-small government, and open-minded. He even quoted Adam Smith.
Yet he failed in every dimension of the job.
About the best that can be said is that he became a slightly darker shade of Gray.
As Jim Geraghty notes, it goes right along with his complaining about borrowing and spending:
Other NRO folk who have much more knowledge and background in the relevant matters have commented on President Obama’s address at the graduation ceremony at Notre Dame. I’ll just add that perhaps the man who said his foes “take pride in being ignorant”, who said his opponents wanted to “do nothing” in the face of the recession and who characterized rural voters as clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment” is perhaps the wrong person to call upon the public to stop “reducing those with differing views to caricature.”
Again, the cognitive dissonance of his supporters is a wonder of nature.
I continue to be amazed that people think that this president is honest, when there is such a huge ongoing gap between words and deeds. Who was foolish enough to believe that he would actually cut the federal budget? Of course, as was the case with many of his campaign promises, I assume that his supporters just assumed and hoped that he was lying.
It’s obviously too big to fail.
[Via Greg Mankiw]
Jon Goff has been doing yeoman’s work in digging into the ESAS appendices. I’ve done a lot of this kind of architecture trade, and it is indeed extremely sensitive to assumptions. And from just this excerpt, while I haven’t read it myself (I can’t find the time from my day job, and I’m glad that Jon did), it sure looks like the game was rigged (which isn’t at all shocking in the context of all of the problems that have arisen). I was simultaneously saddened and amused by this:
I know that Mike Griffin was claiming that part of the reason for doing Ares-I was to teach NASA how to design launch vehicles again, and I guess we have documented proof of the need.
Seriously though, this is a common rookie mistake. You don’t go basing decisions worth tens of billions of dollars on an unvalidated design tool. Now, this isn’t saying that INTROS is a useless tool, just that it obviously doesn’t capture all the state of the art in stage design, and until it does, its results ought to be taken with the appropriate sized (apparently multi-ton) grain of salt.
Well, apparently NASA does exactly that. Or at least it pretends to base them on it. I don’t think that they’re going to pull the wool over Norm’s eyes, though.
Thomas James should consider self publishing. It sounds like a promising book, and there’s too little solar fiction out there.
I like the spell chequer in Firefox, but I’ve noticed that it doesn’t understand American spelling. On the previous post, it told me that “defense” was spelled incorrectly, and suggested “defence” instead. I’ve also seen it tell me that “favorite” is properly spelled “favourite.” Anyone know why?
Amusingly, I also note that it doesn’t think that “firefox” is a word.
A defense of libertarianism by Governor Sanford. Nice to hear it coming from a Republican (one of the reasons I’m not a Republican is that Republicans tend to treat libertarians like the proverbial red-headed step child).
As Goldwater said, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.