So says Ron Bailey. He’s right.

So says Ron Bailey. He’s right.

Over at the Speculist.

I know I’ve been dissing barsoomheads lately, but go read Phil’s interview with Bob Zubrin, to celebrate the opposition of the Red Planet.

Over at the Speculist.

I know I’ve been dissing barsoomheads lately, but go read Phil’s interview with Bob Zubrin, to celebrate the opposition of the Red Planet.

Over at the Speculist.

I know I’ve been dissing barsoomheads lately, but go read Phil’s interview with Bob Zubrin, to celebrate the opposition of the Red Planet.

I’ve heard three references today (from NPR this morning, from Greta on Fox, and from Cici Connally on Brit Hume’s show) that today is a “milestone,” because the number of US military casualties since President Bush declared major hostilities over is now equal to casualties in Iraq during the war itself.

Can someone explain to me why this is a significant number?

Two points.

First, to make such an equation is to engage in an exercise of irrational numerology. I can’t imagine why the number, or the ratio of the two numbers, is of any significance.

Second, it seems to me that, like Warren Buffet’s comparison of California with Nebraska property taxes, this makes exactly the opposite point from that intended. To wit, rather than implying that California’s taxes are too low, it really implies that Nebraska’s are too high. Similarly, for those who complain about the “high” number of deaths since the end of major combat ops (less than the murder rate of any major city in the US), it simply points out how low our casualties in the war itself were.

But leave it to the liberal…errrmm…excuse me, “progressive” media to attempt to make good news seem like bad…

That’s what the Space Frontier Foundation says (via NASA Watch/Spaceref, and Keith has a lot of good links on the subject, but unfortunately, he hasn’t upgraded his software yet to support permalinks…)

I haven’t read the whole report yet, so maybe this is in there somewhere, but in this piece from the Gray Lady, it’s clear that the admiral was willing to go further than William Rogers did after Challenger:

“We are challenging the government of the United States” to make up its mind, Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., the commission’s chairman, said yesterday, alluding to the ease with which politicians hail the shuttle program while cutting its budget by 40 percent.

“We need to decide as a nation what we want to do,” Admiral Gehman, who is retired, warned. The solution, he said, was not just a modernized shuttle. “We shouldn’t start by designing the next vehicle,” he said. “That is a trap that we’ve fallen into several times.”

The challenge places President Bush in essentially the same place President Ronald Reagan was after the Challenger explosion. Confronting a $480 billion budget deficit this year and many more years of deficits to follow, does Mr. Bush want to commit to expending the money and energy needed to remake the nation’s space program, the step the commission said was critical to averting a third disaster? Or do problems on earth, like bringing order and democracy to Iraq, battling terrorism or rebuilding another aging technological behemoth ? the electric power grid ? rank higher?

Look, folks. It’s not about money. We’re spending about one percent of the federal budget on space. We’re spending much more on agricultural supports that are starving millions in the Third World. The issue is not how much to spend, but how to spend it.

Do we want a space program that is a jobs program for politically correct engineers, or do we want a space program that actually accomplishes something in space? If so, what are we trying to accomplish?

It’s time to write your congressman and senators, and say, not I want to send astronauts to Mars, or I want to send astronauts to the Moon, but I want my children to be able to go into space, and I want to see a payoff from space, in new resources, and energy, and political freedom. And I want to go into space myself, and it’s none of your damned business why I want to go, any more than one had to fill out a form in the seventeenth century to explain why one wanted to go to America from Europe. I want a debate on the purposes of why we’re spending money on NASA, and I’m tired of the space program being used as an excuse for jobs in the right congressional districts, or foreign aid to countries that don’t act like allies, with no attention being paid to any actual accomplishments in space.

I don’t know if it will do any good, but if it doesn’t now, it never will.