. By The Unveiling
There’s very little news in Virgin’s announcement today, except for the pretty picture and the schedule. Many more questions are left unanswered than answered. There’s a little more, but not much more info at the New York Times (registration required). The Times piece has an error, calling SpaceShipTwo SpaceShipOne.
Are they really claiming that they’re going to start SS2 flights in June? Or just White Knight 2? And if SS2 flies in June, how many flights will there be with ballast for the propulsion system (i.e., simply drop tests) and at what point will it first fire the rocket motor? I ask because, despite Scaled’s fine for not properly training its employees in the handling of nitrous oxide, there has been no announcement as to the cause of last July’s accident. Do they know? If not, have they moved forward with engine development anyway? Or have they switched gears and gone to a different propulsion system? Seems like a pretty tight schedule, if so.
I think that they could learn a lot and start test flying the airframe this summer, assuming it’s well enough along, and perhaps they’re betting on the come when it comes to the powerplant to meet that schedule. Finally, I wonder what Burt thinks about the announcement?
Jeff Foust has more thoughts. The dual cabin design of WK2 is interesting. I wonder if that’s for additional passenger revenue?
[Update a little later]
A lot of posts and links over at Clark Lindsey’s place (not a permalink).
[Update at 5 PM EST]
Alan Boyle has more details, with some comments from Virgin. But none on propulsion. As I suspected, the initial flights for SS2 will be drop tests (naturally), which can go forward without engines.
And Alan has pretty mixed response from his commenters, some of whom sound like morons. At least I don’t have to worry about that until I get my comments fixed, which is turning out to be a much bigger deal than I thought it would. Again, if there’s an MT doctor in the house, email me at the address in the upper left corner.
[Evening update]
Clark Lindsey has more info. As I was guessing, the flight tests this summer will be WK2, not SS2, and Burt still says they don’t know what happened or what they’ll do about propulsion. That’s not good if they want to be in operations in ’09. He surely must have some options in mind. I’d recommend going with a liquid, from XCOR or someone else, and dumping the hybrid, which adds ops cost, and whose safety is overrated. But we’ll see.
Testing
This is a test post…
[Update an hour or so later]
OK, I’m in MT 4.0, but having problems. Still no comments showing up, and I can see that they’ve changed their template comment tags again (no mention about this in the upgrade instructions), so I’m glad that I didn’t waste my time trying to fix it in 3.35. More seriously, the script is crashing when I publish with no helpful messages, though it does seem to publish, so I’m going to have to dig through the server logs. I’m not very comfortable moving forward until I understand/fix that problem. If there are any MT gurus out there, I’d appreciate an email.
[Late morning update]
OK, I’ve got a semi-serious problem. When it updated my data bases, it made me an administrator for the blog, for not for the MT installation itself (even though I was previously). Comments are disabled at the system level, and I don’t have permission to go in and change this. Does anyone know how to hack the installation on the server to change my MT permissions? I’m thinking that maybe if I go in and modify the database directly, but I’ll probably have to delve pretty deeply into the MT docs (or even look at the code) to figure out how to do this.
[Update early afternoon]
Well, I made myself a superuser again by poking around in the data base, and I updated the global permissions. Supposedly now, comments are allowed. But the template continues to refuse to display them. The MT documentation is decidedly unhelpful. I’ll have to try to find some working examples and see what I’m doing wrong. So comments will still be unavailable, for now. But I’m going to resume blogging, because there’s lots of news out there.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Well, at least I found a relevant manual page, with an example. Hopefully this will get comments on the way to wellville.
Part-Way Through
I’ve done an upgrade, but there are some issues, as you can see. There are no comments.
I don’t think that the comments have been lost, and my data bases are backed up, but I may have to tinker with templates to get things working again.
[Update a while later]
OK, I’ve got the templates to display the comment field, but it’s still not showing the comments. As I said, I’m sure I haven’t lost them, and I can reupload them if necessary, but I may not get them viewable until tomorrow. And I’m only halfway through the upgrade (it’s a two-step process to get from MT 2.66 to MT 4.0). You can comment if you want, but it won’t show up until I fix this problem, whatever it is.
[Update a minute later]
OK, I know the comments exist, because I can see them from my control panel for each post. I just have to figure out what type of incantations I have to perform to make them actually display on the blog.
[Morning update]
I’ve decided that, if I have to rework templates and debug anyway, I might as well go all the way to the 4.0 upgrade first, to spare myself potentially having to do it twice. Hopefully I’ll be through this fresh hell sometime today.
A Concern With Fred’s Departure
This provides a big opening for Huckabee in the south. He may pull votes that would have otherwise gone to Thompson because they don’t want to vote for a northeasterner or McCain.
Let’s hope it’s not enough to give him enough delegates to make a difference. That’s one of the reasons I wanted Thompson to stay in, at least through super Tuesday.
A Concern With Fred’s Departure
This provides a big opening for Huckabee in the south. He may pull votes that would have otherwise gone to Thompson because they don’t want to vote for a northeasterner or McCain.
Let’s hope it’s not enough to give him enough delegates to make a difference. That’s one of the reasons I wanted Thompson to stay in, at least through super Tuesday.
A Concern With Fred’s Departure
This provides a big opening for Huckabee in the south. He may pull votes that would have otherwise gone to Thompson because they don’t want to vote for a northeasterner or McCain.
Let’s hope it’s not enough to give him enough delegates to make a difference. That’s one of the reasons I wanted Thompson to stay in, at least through super Tuesday.
Electronic Contact Lenses
A long and fascinating article on a revolutionary technology.
Hillary And Hayek
Some people never learn. Unfortunately, the comments don’t apply just to Hillary, but to Democrats in general. And even more unfortunately, to far too many Republicans and so-called conservatives as well.
Pay To Stay
Bob Krumm is doing one final fund raiser to keep Thompson in the race.
[Update at 2:30 PM Eastern]
He’s out:
“Today I have withdrawn my candidacy for President of the United States. I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort. Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people.”
Not a surprise, but disappointing nonetheless.