Howard Lovy has a scary little email exchange about progress in molecular manufacturing.

I’m listening to the Senate hearings on the future of the space program. O’Keefe and Gehman testified earlier, at which the administrator continued to talk about how hard it is to build launch systems, and how OSP is the best we can do right now. Unfortunately, some of the senators were sympathetic to this, and there was a threat of a battle with the House over the issue.

As I type, Bob Zubrin is laying out his usual rapid-fire description of how to go to the obvious (to him) destination of Mars. He doesn’t like, or think that we need, nuclear propulsion. Nothing new.

[a few minutes later]

Now a risk management guy is talking about how to set up a safety organization at NASA.

[a few more minutes later]

Rick Tumlinson is calling for a cancellation of the Orbital Space Plane, and end to the Shuttle program, and encouraging the entrepreneurs via prizes and service contracts. He’s talking about the bounty of orbit, and the opportunity for freedom.

Now McCain is asking Huntress if we should fund the OSP. He says no. He asks Tumlinson as well, who of course says no. Now he’s asking about the implications of the China launch. Huntress says they’ll be a partner. Zubrin sees them as a competitor and wants to make it a race, calling them the tortoise to our hare.

Tumlinson is asking if we should answer their socialist space program with one of our own, or with one of free enterprise.

I’ve been getting a few spams in the comments sections–not a lot, but enough to be annoying. I’ve installed MT-Blacklist on the site. It shouldn’t bother any of the regular commenters, but I hope it will keep me from advertising vi@gra and genital enhancement techniques..

Public opinion polls can be infuriatingly misleading (or the coverage of them can) in several different ways, but here’s one that you see quite often. The Chron is reporting that four in ten Americans have had their confidence in the president reduced by his handling of Iraq.

Who cares? Does anyone think that a significant number of those were people who had high confidence in the President to start with? All it means is that low confidence got lower–it has zero electoral implications, because few of them would have voted for him regardless.

There’s some weather on the way (it’s not a permalink, but it does have as the top story right now this morning’s mass ejection from the corona, and it’s a good general link for space weather). Someone asked me in email if this will endanger the astronauts aboard Space Station Albatross.

No, not really–they’re protected for the most part by the geomagnetic field. If they were going to or from the moon, or somewhere else beyond earth, they’d be in trouble though, if they didn’t have adequate shielding.

In any event, those folks in the northern (and southern) latitudes should be seeing some spectacular aurora borealis and australis over the next night or two.

[3 PM update]

Here’s another story, and it answers the above question:

Such solar storms have the potential for knocking out communications and power grids on Earth, and can be harmful to orbiting satellites and astronauts.

The International Space Station’s current resident crew — commander Michael Foale and flight engineer Alexander Kaleri — will protect themselves by moving to a portion of the outpost that provides the most shielding from radiation.

Karl Zinsmeister says it’s time for new allies.

This site says that my blog is only 43% evil.

Frank Sietzen says that’s the inside scuttlebutt on the direction for the administration’s space policy.

Of course, the article also points out that the President’s father had such a policy, and it faltered on the shoals of a recalcitrant bureaucracy.

It’s also interesting that, at the same time, Congress is reining in the OSP horses.

While killing OSP is a good idea in general, in my opinion, it certainly makes sense not to move out with any major new initiatives until we’ve figured out what we’re trying to accomplish in space, and if Sietzen is right, we may know on December 17th. It will be somewhat ironic if Burt Rutan also flies a private spaceship into space on the same day, which, as rumor has it, he wishes to do.

[Update at 12:45 PM PST]

Leonard David has more. It has a typically stupid quote from Bob Park:

“NASA is looking a little sick. But to imagine that the cure is a larger dose of what made it sick is downright pathological,” Park noted. “Manned spaceflight is going nowhere because there’s nowhere to go.”

However, Wes Huntress says something sensible:

NASA must back away from their intense focus on the station/shuttle infrastructure as make-or-break for the agency, Huntress told SPACE.com, and the imbedded notion that the ISS is a destination. Furthermore, the space agency has to abandon the notion that the station/shuttle infrastructure is on the critical path to deep space destinations, except for research on human space physiology.

[Update at 1:12 PM PST]

Tomorrow’s Senate hearing will have a live webcast. And they have one unusual suspect testifying (not counting Bob Zubrin)–Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation. The hearing starts at 9:30 AM Eastern time.

Jeff Foust says that the developing world is misspending its space technology funds.