I’m pretty busy and don’t have time to write anything particularly profound about it (I’m about to get on a flight to the Great White North, where we may have a mini bloggerbash in Edmonton), but as I mentioned on The Space Show a couple hours ago, tomorrow will be the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, in which Gus Grissom, Roger Chafee and Ed White were suffocated and burned. Saturday will be the twentieth anniversary of the loss of the Challenger. Here were my memories of that event from a post four years ago. Jim Oberg takes advantage of the anniversary to explode (so to speak) several myths about the disaster.
And of course, next week will be the third anniversary of Columbia’s breakup over Texas. I may have more to say on that when the date arrives.
Michael, even though you are highly political and rub some folks on the other end of the political spectrum the wrong way, we do appreciate your unabashed enthusiasm for our country.
You might be surprised to know that there are a considerable number of us who have kind thoughts and feelings toward Americans and America, even when we differ on some the policies coming out of Washington.
We wanted to elect people to national office who reflect that view and not the American-bashing one that the Liberals have spewing out for 13 years. That is why we sent the Conservatives to Ottawa.
Brian Anderson has a long, but frightening essay in today’s Journal about the steady deterioration of our First Amendment rights to free speech under the steady pressure of campaign finance “reformers,” spending millions of their own money to ensure that we won’t be able to express our political opinions on line.
If we don’t do something to arrest this, the political blogosphere will be shut down by the election season of 2008. I, for one, say that they’ll take away my keyboard from my cold, dead fingers.
I’ll be on The Space Show tomorrow morning (Thursday, January 26th) from 9:30 to 11 AM Pacific, if anyone is possessed of sufficient masochism and fortitude to listen to my latest blather.
Rick Tumlinson has some space policy advice for the White House. As one of the people in attendance at the meeting last fall that Rick mentioned (and who has signed off on the consensus document that resulted), I encourage you to read the whole thing.
I doubt if they’ll pay any attention, though. I think that this administration’s space policy is pretty firmly fixed now, absent some new unexpected event (e.g., another Shuttle loss, assuming that it ever flies again), and there are many more critical issues to them at this point, both from the standpoint of the national interest and electorally. I suspect that they think that space policy is currently one of those things that ain’t broke, so there’s no need to fix it, relative to more pressing concerns. I think that the best we can hope for, at this point, is that the policy is sufficiently non-hostile to private enterprise that current NASA activities and expenditures won’t hold things back too much. This is not to say that NASA isn’t doing useful things for the private sector, but the amount of resources being expended in that direction, relative to those being spent on centralized (and ultimately unaffordable and unsustainable) fifteen-year plans, remain tragic.