Through global warming. See, climate change ain’t all bad.
Expelled Exposed
SciAm has an article on the six things that Ben Stein doesn’t want you to know about the movie. Just the first one is sufficient to me to think the whole thing a contemptible fraud.
The Logic Of Superstition
For what it’s worth, I set my watch to the destination time zone when they close the plane doors.
Summits With Dictators
Tom Maguire says that Obama and his supporters don’t know much about history:
Obama’s supporters are too young to know any of this, but Roosevelt led the United States in the war against Hitler; the Allied policy was unconditional surrender, so there was very little for Roosevelt and Hitler to discuss, and in fact, the two did not meet at all (but they did exchange correspondence before the war).
So my guess is that Obama is thinking of the Yalta Conference with Churchill and Stalin as talking to “our enemies”, although of course we were still allied with the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan at that point. Beyond that, is the Yalta Conference something Obama and his advisers view as a success worthy of emulation? Puzzling.
Actually, one leader did have a talk with Hitler. His name was Neville Chamberlain. And we know how that worked out.
Or at least some of us do. But perhaps Obama and his supporters are unaware of that as well. Jim Geraghty has further thoughts.
Encouraging Words
In his Senate testimony, Frederick Tarantino, head of USRA, made the following interesting recommendation:
I also want to bring to the subcommittee’s attention an exciting new way in which university-led experiments with hands-on training could be boosted by NASA involvement. Within the next few years, suborbital commercial vehicles being developed by such companies as Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, Armadillo Aerospace, and Blue Origin, will provide a unique way to engage scientists and researchers. NASA has already taken the first step by issuing a request for information to help in the formulation of a Suborbital Scientist Participant Pilot Program.
By providing the opportunity for researchers and even undergraduate students to fly into space along with their experiments, not only can new experiments be conducted, but the opportunity can inspire students to engage in the math, science, and engineering. The participatory approach of the personal spaceflight industry means each suborbital launch can be experienced by thousands of people, with young people able to tune in and watch live video from space as their professors and fellow students conduct experiments in real time and experience weightlessness and the life-changing view of the earth from space. The hands-on experience will create a new generation of Principal Investigators who will be prepared to lead the flagship science and human exploration missions, later in their careers.
These new vehicles will provide low-cost access to the space environment for scientific experiments and research. The market rate for these services has already been set by the space tourist market at $100,000-$200,000 per seat, a much lower cost than existing sounding rockets.
We believe the commercial potential here could be energized by the participation of our space agency. USRA requests the subcommittee authorize NASA to follow through on the request for information by establishing the Suborbital Scientist Participant Pilot Program and issuing a NASA Research Announcement soliciting investigations. This will create a university research payloads market for these emerging commercial operations, provide a new way for university researchers to conduct experiments with student involvement and hands-on-training, and bring the involvement of NASA, and its imprimatur, to an exciting new U.S. industry.
Let’s hope that the staffers were paying attention.
Dhimmification
Sam Harris has a long piece at (of all places) the Huffington Post on the unwillingness of western civilization to stand up for its own values against radical Islam. And as others have noted (and he notes himself), this is particularly ironic:
In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very essay you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion page of Washington Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of Islam. Please note, this essay was destined for the opinion page of the paper, which had solicited my response to the controversy over Wilders’ film. The irony of its rejection seemed entirely lost on the Post, which responded to my subsequent expression of amazement by offering to pay me a “kill fee.” I declined.
A Depressing Thought
If I thought that Gene Kranz knew what he was talking about, I’d be pretty dismayed about this comment:
“This is the best game plan that I have seen since the days of President Kennedy,” Kranz said of ESAS, comparing it to the DC-3 and the B-52. “The system that Griffin’s team is putting into place will be delivering for America 50 years later…
What an insane comparison. The DC-3 and B-52 have been operating for decades because they were mission effective and affordable (the latter because they were extensively reused, and not thrown away after, or during each flight).
If a century after the founding of NASA we are still sending people into space in little capsules on large expendable rockets, that will be a testimony to a tremendous failure of national will, and of private enterprise. If that’s the best that we can do, I predict that we’ll just give up on human spaceflight, and we should. So either way, this prediction is very unlikely.
Fortunately, he’s just suffering from sixties nostalgia, and there’s little basis for his belief.
[Update a few minutes later]
Apparently that was from his oral testimony, or an answer to a question. Here’s the written testimony as submitted, which doesn’t make the DC-3 comparison, or talk about fifty years in the future.
NASA Watch has the other witnesses’ testimony as well.
[Update about 11 AM EDT]
One other point about the Kranz testimony from the Space Politics link:
Kranz stepped in and described the cost in money and schedule he experienced man-rating the Atlas and Titan for the Mercury and Gemini programs.
Comparing human rating an Atlas V to the original Atlas and Titan isn’t a useful comparison. The latter were converted ballistic missiles, whereas Atlas V was designed from scratch to be a reliable launch system. All that’s really required to human rate it is to add Failure On-Set Detection (FOSD), and ensure that its trajectory doesn’t create any blackout zones for aborts (which it has plenty of power and performance to do).
A Robust Design?
Jim Oberg has the most extensive public report yet on last months Soyuz mishap, over at IEEE Spectrum.
It’s a fascinating read, but it has to give us pause in relying on Soyuz when the Shuttle is retired.
Still Singing To The Horse
Hillary is going to stay in all the way to the convention–why should she quit? That horse might still learn to sing, or there could be more bad news for Obama. And here’s one of the more unsavory reasons that she stays in:
“I can’t stand him,” the man said. “He’s a Muslim. He’s not even pro-American as far as I’m concerned.”
Such feelings leave Clinton and the Democratic Party in a tough spot. With the largest number of remaining delegates nowbeing party insiders, they have to decide if Obama can overcome enough of that antipathy – essentially deciding if enough working-class whites will back away from the black candidate, whether because of the false Muslim rumors, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright flap or old-fashioned racism.
I think, though, that this is delusional:
A top Democratic source with insight into Bill’s and Hillary’s states of mind says the Clintons are convinced that a Democratic presidency is all but certain no matter how messy the fight for the nomination.
In that scenario – which the Obama side and some Democratic elders worry is wishful thinking at best, delusional at worst – there’s no downside for Hillary doing whatever it takes for as long as it takes.
How does anyone know what “the Clintons are convinced” of? On what basis? Because they say so? I’d say that if you want to know what the Clintons are really thinking, the least reliable method is to take them at their word. This “top Democratic source” makes the mistake of thinking that the Clintons care about the fate of the Democrat Party, despite their devastation of it in the nineties. He (or she) is the one who is being delusional, but about the Clintons, not the Clintons about the party’s chances in November.
In fact, as I’ve said before, I assume that if she doesn’t get the nomination, she’ll do what she has to in order to ensure Obama’s defeat. She doesn’t want to have to run against a Democrat incumbent in 2012. So they’re right that there’s no down side for her to stay in. They’re just confused about the reason.
Broken Logic
There’s an interesting discussion in comments over at Selenian Boondocks on the value of microgravity processing (that veers into other subjects, such as utility and value of propellant depots). I think that Jon gets the better part of the argument, and that “Googaw” is overreacting to overhype. Not to mention ignorant of orbital mechanics. As Jon says, I don’t think that he’s thought through the concept of a propellant depot in GTO.