More foam cracks on the PAL ramp.
At the current flight rate, if they get it off next fall, the cost per flight will be many billions. Either fly it, or retire it, but stop wasting all this time and money on trying (in futility) to make it safe.
Technical Difficulties
I can’t get to Space Transport News using the http://www.spacetransportnews.com URL (the one I use in the blogroll), but I can get to it through Hobby Space.
Is anyone else having this problem or is it just me?
[Update]
If anyone is having the same problem, please note your ISP as well, so we can eliminate that as the issue.
What I Would Want For Christmas
…if I still lived in the Great White North. Behold, the Chevy 454 big-block snowblower. I’ll bet that sucker will toss your driveway’s contents into your neighbor’s yard. You know, the one three blocks away?
Somewhere, Tim the Toolman is grunting. And drooling.
Get down on your knees and beg, Mother Nature! Who’s your daddy now?
Speaking Of King Kong
Two women were handed pink slips for refusing to flash their mammaries at a gorilla.
Remember this whenever you think your job is bad.
When Archeology Meets Politics
Has King David’s palace been found?
In Defense Of Science
As usual (on this subject, that is), I agree with John Derbyshire:
Malraux (I think it was) said that there are two reasons to be a socialist: You may love the poor, or you may hate the rich. There are similarly two reasons to get worked up about I.D.: You may love science, or you may hate religion.
My entire and sole motivation in writing against I.D. has been love of, and reverence for, science, and indignation that people should claim a place for their theory at science’s table when they have done no science whatsoever to back it up, and plainly have no intention of doing any, and when their fundamental premises are not merely unscientific, but willfully anti-scientific.
Just A Big Gorilla
Here’s a rave review of Peter Jackson’s latest–a remake of King Kong. I have a confession to make, though:
Jack tells me all children – “at least all boys” – love King Kong.
“He is the king of all the monsters, even better than Godzilla. Kong is stronger and smarter than Godzilla, who’s just a stupid, slimy lizard.”
Sorry, but I was never a big (or even little) King Kong fan. I’ve still never watched the original all the way through. I tried one night a few years ago, and gave up. It simply didn’t hold my interest, either as a boy, or as a man. The prospect of three hours of it, even with new spectacular effects, simply doesn’t motivate me to go to the theater.
Of course, I’ve never been a fan of horror or monster movies in general (I’ve never seen any of the classics–Frankenstein, the Mummy, Dracula–and have no interest in them). Lest my all-American red-blooded male credentials be questioned, though, I do like (or at least did as a youth) the Three Stooges.
A Major Step
…toward utility fog? And get your bumper sticker.
A Lot Of Crab
Jay Manifold has some interesting statistics on the latest spectacular image from Hubble of the Crab Nebula.
The Innovator’s Dilemma
We have here a perfect example, in an area that I’ve noted previously:
During the whole time I was there [at the San Francisco Chronicle] I constantly pleaded with the powers that be to do the online version of the classifieds right, the way it could be done with all the power of the web. At that time, 1995, craigslist was still a gleam in Craig Newmark’s eye. The Chronicle owned the classified space for the Bay Area. I created a classified section on sfgate, but it was just an online version of what was in the newspaper, no more, no less. I argued that we should add interactivity, let people purchase ads online cheaply, have pictures and links, make sfgate.com the goto place for everybody in the bay area to buy, sell, rent, and know everything.
But this was utterly impossible. It was a question of turf. There was a large department that sold and processed classified ads. It was a major source of revenue, employed a lot of people, and had a big budget. No way they were going to yield that turf to a bunch of weirdos over at the six person, unprofitable, experimental web site crew. Besides, online ads would cannabalize the whole business. Even as time went on, and craigslist grew and the sfgate website traffic and personnel grew, there was never any possibility of going up against the entrenched bureaucracy. Newspapers are the most old-fashioned organizations left alive in the marketplace. Even book publishing companies are more with it.
They couldn’t innovate themselves, because it would have wrecked an existing profit center, but by avoiding it, they let someone else do it to them instead.
This is the fix that NASA is in as well. They can’t innovate, because the politicians (and their own internal fiefdoms and rice-bowl sitters) won’t let them shed the jobs in Houston and Huntsville and at the Cape that would be destroyed. So instead, they’ll be put out of business in a few years.
Of course, given that (unlike newspapers) they’re not a business, it’s possible that they’ll continue to get their multi-billion dollar stipend from Washington, but it’s hard to believe that even they will be able to continue to persuasively justify their hyperexpensive elitist activities in an era of cheap private access to space.