The Star Wars land speeder is scheduled to head into commercial production in 2008 or 2009. It looks more like a flying saucer than a roadster. It uses ground effect. Safer and simpler than a helicopter? Stay tuned.
Here’s a brochure, a spec sheet, and a FAQ.
I asked Bruce Calkins, press contact at Moller about it.
Transterrestrial Musings: Is it street legal?
Bruce Caulkins, Moller International: It falls into a new category. While no one has claimed it, it remains to be seen who will want to regulate its use.
Somehow, I did something to screw up the scoring system for the junk folder. All of my perfectly good emails are coming in with a junk score of 100, which means that I never get any email in my Inbox (spam, on the other hand, gets much lower scores, since 100 is the highest possible one). I always have to go to the Junk folder after downloading, and tell Eudora that they’re not junk, to transfer them into the Inbox, but it never seems to learn. Anyone have any idea what the problem might be?
I’m a faithful Wolverine, but I think that the response from Lloyd Carr and the others to Jim Harbaugh’s accurate comments is ridiculous. Note that none of them actually deny the allegations (because they know they’re true). They’re just upset because he’s perceived as being “disloyal.” I think that Michigan does as well to uphold academic standards as any program with their kind of record, but the notion that they don’t coddle the athletes academically is ridiculous. It’s unfortunate that this perception carries over to the athletes that are true scholars (and Michigan has many of those as well–I attended engineering classes with some football stars during my time there), but sometimes life isn’t fair.
They would have been better off not responding at all, since he certainly didn’t intend it as a specific slam at his own school, so much as the system in general. He was merely using Michigan as an example with which he was intimately familiar. In fact, you could replace the word “Michigan” in his comments with almost any other program, except perhaps Stanford, but then, they don’t win nearly as many football games.
I’m not a constitutional law expert, but this seems strange to me:
Jefferson argued that the first-of-its-kind raid trampled congressional independence. The Constitution prohibits the executive branch from using its law enforcement powers to interfere with the lawmaking process. The Justice Department said that declaring the search unconstitutional would essentially prohibit the FBI from ever looking at a lawmaker’s documents.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected that claim. The court held that, while the search itself was constitutional, FBI agents crossed the line when they viewed every record in the office without giving Jefferson the chance to argue that some documents involved legislative business.
How does that work? What’s to keep the Congressman from arguing that all the records had to do with legislative business, and not allowing them to see anything? The real issue here, since they at least ruled the raid itself illegal, is whether or not the trial judge will throw out the untainted evidence.
Clark Lindsey, on more clueless commentating from the MSM:
In science it is not considered a valid technique to generalize from a single data point. The same is true for judging RLVs. The Space Shuttle, which is not really reused but rather is rebuilt between flights, has innumerable design flaws and shortcomings far too extensive and numerous to go into here. Predicted to become the DC-3 of launchers, to call it even the Ford Tri-Motor of launchers would be an insult to that historic plane. (Ball also mentions the X-15 but it was a experimental development program, not an operational system. It should be compared to the SS1 not the SS2.)
Commercial spaceflight vehicles are being designed and built with the goal of low cost operations rather than highest possible performance. Low cost operations can only arise when high reliability and robustness are designed into the systems from the ground up. Those features in turn will produce safe rides for the crews and passengers. (I’ll note that it will be easier to achieve safe and routine operations for suborbital spaceflight but eventually the lessons learned there will be applied to orbital systems.)
One runs into this illogic often in space discussions, as though the Shuttle proves anything at all about reusable vehicles in general.
Though it’s not as bad as that Alex Tabarrok piece a while back.
I just switched to using my web host for mail. I should have done this years ago, but I didn’t realize that I could (and still authenticate SMTP from the road). I’ve now abandoned Bell South for DNS, for Usenet, and for email. All I use them for now is just a data pipe. I have to say, though, that it did have a good spam filter, which my new mail host doesn’t. On the other hand, the spam filter may have been one of the reasons I was missing legitimate mail.
Charles Krauthammer goes to bat for them. I do think that this story is overblown, but he overstates the “spam in a can” argument. Like airline pilots, Shuttle pilots need to have a clear head at launch, in the event of an abort. As for the rest of the crew, it probably wouldn’t hurt much if they were mildly intoxicated, but the notion that one has to have a couple stiff ones to climb into the Shuttle (or the Soyuz) seems a little silly to me, regardless of how many times the joke is repeated, and he seems to be serious about it. Maybe some of the pilots in the Battle of Britain wouldn’t have been able to pass a breathalyzer test, but if so, their chances of killing the enemy, or getting home, would have been sharply reduced compared to their sober colleagues.
And he has entirely much too much faith in NASA to execute the vision, even if it gets support from the politicians.