Just in case you somehow imagined that Elton John wasn’t an idiot, this should lay the matter to rest:
Crumbling Infrastructure
Amidst huge entitlement programs, paying farmers not to grow food, pork and boondoggles, the nation’s transportation infrastructure has been badly neglected, and is quite brittle. It also makes one wonder how many other ticking time bombs there are out there.
This applies to space transportation as well. A category three hurricane could wipe out NASA’s manned space program. On some days, I’m not sure that would be a bad thing. It would force them to do something different, and break us out of the rut we’ve been in since Apollo.
Of course, there’s a big difference. The highway infrastructure was a huge improvement over the past, offering affordable mobility to hundreds of millions of Americans, with a great deal of redundancy and resiliency. The space transportation infrastructure has never been affordable to anyone but the government, or able to support more than a few dozen people in orbit per year, and it’s always been quite fragile, with no backups. Until we address this issue, we’ll never be a spacefaring nation, or accomplish the things there that many of use want. But all that NASA offers is more of the same.
Quashing Of Dissent
The Saudis are suppressing speech, and getting books burned.
Naive
So, Barack Hussein Obama made a foreign policy speech today. Apparently, he wants to (among other things) invade Pakistan. So, he wants to make nice with North Korea and Ahmadinejad, and Hugo Chavez, and the chinless opthalmologist, all of whom are essentially at war with us, but invade a key ally in the war. Boy, I think four years of this guy would make us long for Jimmy Carter. If the intent of this was to disprove Hillary’s charge that he’s naive, I suspect that the effect will be the opposite.
Jim Geraghty has deconstructed the speech.
Ethanol Scam
What’s surprising about this is the source: Rolling Stone.
Paranoid
Does John Edwards really believe this?
We have to fight back against these people. We can
McCarthyism On The Left
Like this is news:
Novak blamed liberal discrimination which he said forces young conservatives to remain “in the closet” if they hope to have a career in media.
“One of the big differences in 50 years is that the liberals have now filtered into the executive ranks of journalism. And so if you go into journalism now not in the closet but out in the open as a conservative, you’re going to have a hard time getting a job, believe me.”
Conservatives also don’t like journalism as a profession, Novak added, saying that when he goes to various colleges and universities, the young conservatives and libertarians he runs into rarely have any interest in journalism.
The syndicated columnist fit these trends into what he said was a general decline in the journalism business, despite the fact that it has become more professionalized:
“Journalism is a hard thing to gauge. When I set out with my first paper in the summer of 1948, for the Joliet Herald-News there were in the newsroom there about two or three people who had ever been to college. Journalism was not an educated person’s game. So we’re much better educated, we’re sophisticated, we have people with graduate degrees
Electric Roadster
Tesla Motors, the electric high-end sports car maker brought to you by SpaceX rocket man, Elon Musk, is sold out for one year. They are calling their August 2008 deliveries still the 2008 model year Roadster, but they have customers who have put $30,000 down instead of the usual $50,000 for the $100,000 car for deliveries through 4Q08. That’s somewhere between 25% and 50% of their academic year 08-09 production.
I wanted to buy one except for
1) “No, we don’t take trade-ins at this time”
2) No financing on the down payment until delivery (although it is refundable until about 3 months before delivery)
3) The Lotus Elise frame won’t really accommodate someone who’s 6’1″ without taking off the roof to get through the door. Maybe if I lose a second 20 pounds, I’ll try again.
I look forward to their next offering and I hope it has a slightly bigger cockpit. Other than to support Elon Musk, I want one because they are novel. That I’ll be burning cheap coal as opposed to expensive oil is a nice way to subsidize my taste for novelty.
Who Cares What He Thinks?
Seriously. I’m sure that he’s a fine engineer, and manager, but why does that mean that we should give his opinion more weight than anyone else’s on the subject of space goals? Just because someone is an expert at implementing a space program doesn’t make them one at justifying it, or determining what it should be.
As is always the case with stories like this, there are implicit underlying assumptions that are never stated. In order to argue where we should be going, one first has to decide why are going into space at all, and that’s not a subject that ever really gets discussed. I assume that Mr. Gavin is into space “exploration,” and assumes that everyone else shares that justification. He thinks that when it comes to the moon, we’ve “been there, done that,” and it’s time to go “explore” somewhere else, and that Mars is much more interesting. But what if the goal is instead, space development, or space defense, or geoengineering, or energy production? In that case, Mars makes no sense at all, and the people who want to send humans there should pay for it themselves.
Of course, I continue to wish that we could get a consensus from all the people with disparate space goals that the best approach is to make space access affordable, which will enable them all. Unfortunately, NASA is only making things worse in that regard (unless COTS, despite the paltry sums being spent on it, succeeds).
[Late afternoon update]
Rampant sarcasm has broken out in comments on this subject at Space Politics.
Altruism
Dr. Helen has some thoughts. I’m with Mark Twain and Heinlein on this issue, myself. Every action we take is, ultimately, for ourselves, if for no other reason that it makes us feel good.