There’s a lot of lively discussion over at Space Politics over NASA’s budget crunch and its implications for ESAS. I would note that it’s getting harder and harder to find defenders of Ares 1.
[Update at 11:30 AM EST]
Here’s another lively thread:
If NASA was somehow developing the technologies to enable very-low-cost human spaceflight, with advanced life support systems, in-situ resource utilization, and advanced propulsion systems, then maybe I could get behind the idea of a gov
…by the Marines happened 231 years ago, in the Bahamas. Before they were the US Marines.
I’m kind of amazed at the latest kerfuffle about the firing of the six US attorneys. As has been noted multiple times, they serve at the pleasure of the president. The only unorthodox thing about it, as far as I can tell, is the loophole that would allow them to be replaced absent Senate confirmation. And there seems to be a certain lack of ingenuousness in some of the reporting on it. For instance, in the piece at Slate, note this graf:
This kind of purge is legal but unprecedented. A recent report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service revealed that since 1981, no more than three U.S. attorneys had ever been forced out under similar circumstances. And now we have six in a day? What’s going on?
Unprecedented? Really? We’ll come back to that in a moment.
Note the emphasis, which is mine. What does “under similar circumstances” mean? Well, if one follows the link to the CRA report, it turns out that it means “having served less than a four-year term.” But why is it so awful for a president to remove his own appointee? The CRA report doesn’t count those removed as a result of an administration change.
Which gets us to the “unprecedented” rhetoric. Where was all the fuss and bother in 1993, when Janet Reno fired every single US attorney bar one (over ninety of them) in a single day? As Judge Bork noted:
She was not in charge from the beginning. Upon taking office, in an unexplained departure from the practice of recent Administrations, Miss Reno suddenly fired all 93 U.S. attorneys. She said the decision had been made in conjunction with the White House. Translation: The President ordered it. Just as the best place to hide a body is on a battlefield, the best way to be rid of one potentially troublesome attorney is to fire all of them. The U.S. attorney in Little Rock was replaced by a Clinton protege.
Just as Whitewater was heating up. Just a coinkydinky, one can be sure.
Yet I don’t recall it being such a big deal at the time. In fact, it’s hard to find much reportage on it from the era (something that caused some of my commenters to unjustly accuse me of lying about it a few months ago).
Guess it’s only an outrage when Republican presidents fire a few US attorneys. A wholesale slaughter isn’t very interesting, when a Democrat does it. Particularly when it’s a Democrat whom the press had just propelled into office by ignoring, or helping spin away, all of the many corruption issues and incipient scandals associated with him (certainly Clinton’s problems with ethics and aversion to truth weren’t unknown to Arkansas reporters of the era). And as Bork also notes, it set the stage for all the scandalous activity to come.
[Update]
Andy McCarthy has more on Democrat double standards in such matters, particularly from Senator Feinstein..
Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts. There’s nothing with which I’d disagree. I, too, thought that this was part of a larger strategy. Sadly, there’s been little evidence of it on the ground.
Big government is incompetent. This seems to have played out in the war, as in all else.
If I believed in a god, I’d pray. All I can do, as it is, is hope for better leaders. And think about history, in which when all was darkest, they seemed to appear.
No link yet, but Florida prosecutors have apparently reduced charges against Nowak from attempted murder to attempted kidnapping. They may have decided that they couldn’t get twelve to agree to the guilt of the murder rap. I also suspect that it may be plea bargained to probation and a lot of therapy and observation.
That of course raises the question of what the purpose of such a kidnapping would be. Hard to imagine it was for ransom.
[Evening update]
OK, I know that this is deplorable, but you shouldn’t judge a woman until you’ve driven 950 miles in her diaper…
I found this over at Free Republic. I also found it cute.
And Andrew Bolt talks about the problem with offsets, and the “do what we say, not what we do” hypocrisy:
…there’s a moral problem. Offsets are really best suited for people rich enough — like Gore — to afford them.
They let the rich pay someone else to use less so they can use more. And so the aristocrat can party on under the chandeliers, while the power-rationed peasants sit out in his dark.
Of course, one hypocrite like Gore shouldn’t discredit an entire cause. Yet it can’t be an accident that global warming attracts more hypocrites than most faiths.
There’s Tim Flannery, criss-crossing the world by jet to tell us to use less oil.
There’s British PM Tony Blair lecturing Britons to cut their emissions, but declaring it “unreasonable” to expect him therefore to stop flying off on his overseas holidays.
And there’s Prince Charles booking out all of a jet’s first and second class to fly to New York to accept a green award from Gore.
Ah, Gore again. Which reminds me of Laurie David, one of the producers of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
David, too, demands we save the world by cutting our gasses, yet turns out to be as addicted to private jets as her friend Al.
Asked recently to explain such inconvenient hypocrisy, David spluttered: “Yes, I take a private plane on holiday a couple of times a year.”
But — and here’s where she shows she’s nobler than you — “I feel horribly guilty about it.”
See? The global warming faith is more about how you feel than what you actually do. Even the makers of An Inconvenient Truth demonstrate that. What a circus.
In light of the Chinese ASAT test, this old parody post of mine seems prescient now (note the comments, particularly between me and Monte Davis).
Clark Lindsey has some thoughts on the Russian space tug:
A tug might also make practical a single stage to orbit RLV. Since a first generation SSTO will most likely provide a very small payload capacity, it would help if it only had to reach a low orbit where it would transfer cargo/crew to a tug and also pick up cargo/crew to bring back from orbit. Even with small payloads, the simplicity of SSTO RLV operations might lead to reduced LEO delivery costs when combined with a tug.
Yes, this will almost certainly be necessary, in fact, if SSTO is to become feasible with anything resembling current technology. Any SSTO vehicle has very poor off-design performance. That is, if it’s sized for a low-altitude (or a low-inclination) orbit, the performance drop off for it to go higher in either altitude or inclination is very large. For example, one could have a vehicle capable of delivering ten thousand pounds to a hundred fifty miles altitude, that would have zero or negative payload to ISS or a Bigelow hotel). This is an intrinsic problem with SSTO, by the nature of the beast. Since there’s only one stage, the entire vehicle dry weight has to be taken to the final destination, so any additional delta V represents a big payload hit. A two-stage (or more) vehicle suffers much less, because the upper stage is much smaller, and is thus less sensitive to off-design cases.
OK, I hear you saying, aha! Then just make the space station mission the nominal design case. OK, now you just increased your development costs quite a bit, because it’s now a much larger vehicle. And once you’ve done that, you’ll still never take it to the station, because you’ll quickly figure out that it now has humungous payload capability to lower altitudes, that can be transferred with the tug. Regardless of vehicle size, you’ll get a lot more payload to the station if you use the tug (some of the extra payload is used to refuel the tug).
This also allows the station to live higher, which it would like to do to increase solar insolation, and decrease drag and monatomic oxygen degradation (the current ISS altitude is an expensive compromise between the desire to have the station higher, and the need to be able to get to it with the Shuttle). That in turn will result in reduced operating costs (reducing reboost and maintenance issues, and providing more power). I in fact proposed such an architecture back in 1982, in a paper I wrote while at Rockwell. NASA wasn’t interested.
Incidents like this make me very glad that I don’t teach at a university. There apparently really is no free speech on campus, any more, unless you hew to the postmodern PC platitudes.
Two flow charts.
[Via Geek Press]