Business Prospects For Space Transports

For those who don’t regularly check out The Space Review (you really should), Jeff Foust has a good overview of the financing prospects for private RLVs. Summary: he’s not sanguine about the near-term prospects for getting orbital systems, but thinks that profitable suborbital ones could provide a path to them. I agree, though I’m not quite as pessimistic about orbital transports as he is. We’ll see if Elon Musk can prove him wrong by evolving from a partially reusable system to a fully reusable one.

Misplaced Outrage

As we approach the second anniversary, does anyone else have the sense that many Democrats (particularly the ones swooning over Dr. Dean) are more angry at George Bush than they are at the people who destroyed the World Trade Center?

Still A Republican Party Animal

The Onion has a great interview with P. J. O’Rourke.

…I feel like now, I guess, everybody pays lip service to libertarian?and, indeed, many conservative?ideas, and yet they keep moving forward with an increasingly bureaucratic state. It shows itself in all sorts of little ways. I’m not screaming about injustice here, or gulags. I buy a tractor two years ago, and four-fifths of the tractor manual is about not tipping over, not raising the bucket high enough to hit high-tension wire… not killing yourself, basically. The tractor itself is covered with stickers: Don’t put your hand in here. Don’t put your dick in there. And in that manual, I found out?and it cost me a thousand dollars?that when the tractor is new, 10 hours into use of the tractor, you have to re-torque the lug nuts. If you don’t, you will oval the holes. This is buried between the moron warnings. I never found it. I take the tractor in for its regular servicing, and they say my wheels are gone. A thousand dollars worth of wheels have to be replaced because I didn’t re-torque after 10 hours. How am I supposed to know that? “It’s in the manual.” You f***ing read that manual! You go through 40 pages of how not to tip over! Anyway, that’s the world that we seem to be moving into. And just because a society has absorbed these ideas and pays them lip service, anyone who’s talking about libertarian ideas and certain basic conservative principles will get people who nod politely and say, “Oh, yeah, we knew that already.” It’s a pain in the ass.

Go read the…well, you know the drill.

Dibs!

This is truly silly, and gives a bad name to those people who are seriously pursuing property rights in space. It should be simply laughed out of court.

There’s no legal precedent (at least in common law), or sense to grant property rights to remote unclaimed locations simply on the basis of a stated claim. If Orbdev had actually sent a spacecraft there first, they’d have a legitimate case, and I’d applaud them, but this is as likely (and perhaps more likely) to set back the cause of private property in space than to advance it.

“Iran Is Winning This War, Not America”

Michael Ledeen has a disturbing article over at NRO, which points out the foolishness and irrelevance of the statement by the anti-war types that “there’s no proof that Saddam had anything to do with September 11.”

Many of our analysts are currently falling into one of those linguistic traps that Ludwig Wittgenstein used to warn us about. They constantly ask, “which organization do these terrorists come from?” But they should be asking the empirical question: “Does it still make sense to talk about separate terrorist organizations?” I have been arguing for the better part of two years that we should think of the terrorists as a group of mafia families that have united around a single war plan. The divisions and distinctions of the past no longer make sense; the terror mafias are working together, and their missions are defined by the states that protect, arm, fund, and assist them: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

“Iran Is Winning This War, Not America”

Michael Ledeen has a disturbing article over at NRO, which points out the foolishness and irrelevance of the statement by the anti-war types that “there’s no proof that Saddam had anything to do with September 11.”

Many of our analysts are currently falling into one of those linguistic traps that Ludwig Wittgenstein used to warn us about. They constantly ask, “which organization do these terrorists come from?” But they should be asking the empirical question: “Does it still make sense to talk about separate terrorist organizations?” I have been arguing for the better part of two years that we should think of the terrorists as a group of mafia families that have united around a single war plan. The divisions and distinctions of the past no longer make sense; the terror mafias are working together, and their missions are defined by the states that protect, arm, fund, and assist them: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!