New Econoblogger

Well, actually she’s been doing it for a while, but Lynne Kiesling has a new web site, called Knowledge Problem. I’ve added her to the blogroll in the “Economics/Finance” section. If you’re interested in economic analysis of technology issues from a free-market perspective (energy, bandwidth, etc.) head over there and give the professor a blog warming.

Clark Boomlet Over

He’s slipped back below Dean in the polls, though within the margin of error (look at the CNN/Gallup poll, which is the only one with a trend–he peaked in mid September). He was better off when he didn’t campaign. Or debate.

Barring something completely unforeseen (e.g., Hillary jumping in–an unlikely event given the state of the economy and the polls that show her losing to Bush 50-42), I’m having trouble seeing a scenario in which Dean doesn’t get the nomination at this point, because regardless of what national Democrats think, he’s going to have all the momentum from the early primaries.

A Critical Milestone

Chief Engineer Dan DeLong of XCOR emails:

Patricia Grace Smith, FAA Associate Administrator, has made a public statement that there are three organizations with RLV launch licenses in process at AST. They are: Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites, and XCOR Aerospace. Furthermore, she said that XCOR’s license application has been deemed “sufficiently complete”. This means the FAA now has a maximum of 180 days to either issue a license or report to Congress why they did not.

Notice the change in terminology from “substantially complete” to “sufficiently complete”. Also, I do not yet have an on-line reference for her statement. It came to me from Jeff Greason; he and Randall Clague are currently in Washington DC, and were surprised at the speediness of the announcement.

This is good news, and will establish the precedent–another first for XCOR. I assume that means the Mojave Airport has passed the environmental review, but I’m sure that someone will correct me if that’s a false inference.

I also assume that the license will be issued in less than the 180 days–I can’t see why they would delay it much at this point.

Potpourri

Clark Lindsey’s got lots of spacey goodness at RLV News today, including the latest on the X-Prize Cup, updates on regulation, thoughts on the Senate hearings, and Scaled Composites’ creative wind tunneling technique. As Glenn would say, he covers this stuff so I don’t have to!

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!