Jeff Foust rounds up more stories on the House cuts to the NASA budget request. A quote from Congressman Weldon:
This bill takes care of most of our needs at Kennedy Space Center, so I’m hard pressed not to support my chairman when he’s taking care of Florida.
Yup.
I’ve got mine. What did posterity ever do for me?
I also always wonder if they understand the impact of “delaying” a program for a year. A contractor has a team put together, and they can’t just put them in cold storage until Congress decides to finally fund the program. They get reassigned to other projects, and it’s hard to reassemble them later, resulting in putting together a new team, with associated learning curve. This is one of the reasons that government space programs are so inefficient and costly.
I know, I know, it shouldn’t be necessary, yet in defiance of all that is logical and decent, there are still people who think that Michael Moore’s latest crockumentary has non-zero validity or value.
Over at RLV News Clark Lindsey takes an uncharacteristicaly blunt swing at a particularly stupid article on SpaceDaily. I can’t say it any better than Clark, so go on over there and read his take.
There’s also a good item on the state of sounding rocket research (dismal). I’m a fan of sounding rockets since they offer a low cost means of doing simple space research. In science it’s often the simple experiments that have the most dramatic impact (in part because it’s harder to quibble about simple results, but that’s another post entirely). Unfortunately simple isn’t sexy, and sexy is what NASA is most interested in. Another point about sounding rockets that’s not generally well understood is that there’s a region of the atmosphere between about 50 km and 100 km which is too high for balloon research but to low for satellite research. There’s some important processes that take place in this region, and sounding rockets are really the only way to study them directly.
We’ll be reading the ceremony live, starting in less than an hour, at 7 PM PDT. You can listen here. There will be opportunities to submit questions via email and chat.
Just in case you needed another reason to avoid Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Ben has taken to towing around an effigy of George Bush with flames coming out of his pants.
Well, at least classified documents aren’t falling out of them.
You know, Jeff Goldstein has to be having a field day with this whole thing.
My mistake. No wonder the politically correct harpies aren’t trumpeting it from the front pages.
You know, it’s really sad that so many artists that I enjoy have to indulge themselves in this mindless politics. I used to love her stuff, particularly the torch songs with Nelson Riddle, but she’ll never sound the same again.
My mistake. No wonder the politically correct harpies aren’t trumpeting it from the front pages.
You know, it’s really sad that so many artists that I enjoy have to indulge themselves in this mindless politics. I used to love her stuff, particularly the torch songs with Nelson Riddle, but she’ll never sound the same again.
My mistake. No wonder the politically correct harpies aren’t trumpeting it from the front pages.
You know, it’s really sad that so many artists that I enjoy have to indulge themselves in this mindless politics. I used to love her stuff, particularly the torch songs with Nelson Riddle, but she’ll never sound the same again.
Cavuto is reporting that Berger has resigned from the Kerry campaign as an “informal advisor” (I wonder what such a “resignation” means?).
I wonder if it isn’t too late, though? It depends on why he purloined those documents. If they were used to generate Kerry speeches and talking points, and Kerry knew about it, this could be his own Watergate.
John Gizzi reminds us that the administration supports the Law of the Sea Treaty, which Reagan tried to bury twenty years ago, and even Clinton didn’t support.
I wonder if anyone in the administration understands that the principle behind this treaty is the same one behind the 1979 Moon Treaty, which would have effectively outlawed private property in space, and the implications for the new space policy? I, too, like Gizzi and Doug Bandow, would like to know what the rationale is for this policy.