Alan Boyle has a good rundown on upcoming attractions at Epcot and Universal. Disney is shooting for a space experience that may do a fair job of simulating almost a minute of weightlessness.

I don’t think that this will detract from the market for true weightlessness, such as Zero G Corp will offer, because you’ll be able to actually move around and do weightless stuff in the airplane. It’s really a different market. (By the way, despite the hype on their web page, they won’t be the first private provider of weightlessness in the US–as far as I know, the late Lee Weaver and I were, but they may be the first financially successful one.)

Alan asks a question at the end:

In the wake of Columbia?s loss, ?Mission: Space? may well be as close as paying customers will get to space flight for the foreseeable future. What do you think?

I think that Columbia is utterly irrelevant to how soon we get paying customers into space. The folks working X-Prize, and those developing suborbitable passenger vehicles, such as Jeff Bezos, don’t seem to be deterred, and in fact, NASA is in such disarray right now that it will probably actually encourage a lot of the entrepreneurs, because it’s too busy with its own problems to get in the way. Getting rid of Art Stephenson was a good step toward making NASA less of a problem.

P. J. O’Rourke has the current goods on Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton gives hope to every one of us potato-nosed oafs from nowhere with our shiftless relatives and our marriages that are like being sewn up in a sack full of cats. If this knight of the manure shovel, this gas pudding, can become the leader of the free world, there’s hope for us all. We observe his ragamuffin character stitched together from scraps of prevarication and ribbons of fantasy. We watch his hinge-heeled ethical contraption flap in the breeze of fundraising and personal finance. We cluck at the spectacle of a sad rip and his homely girlfriends. No annoying crick in the neck from looking up to this hero.

As someone once said, read the whole thing.

Christie Whitman is resigning.

Michael Isikoff writes in Slate that Sid (the squid) Blumenthal has a “malleable relationship with the truth.” He’s too kind, in my humble opinion.

I’m still waiting to find a review of his paen to the Clintonian saintliness that commends it, rather than exposing it for the pack of sycophantic lies that it is. If I see one, my prediction is that it will be by either Gene Lyons, or Joe Conason, both notoriously enthusiastic Clinton keester smoochers.

Michael Isikoff writes in Slate that Sid (the squid) Blumenthal has a “malleable relationship with the truth.” He’s too kind, in my humble opinion.

I’m still waiting to find a review of his paen to the Clintonian saintliness that commends it, rather than exposing it for the pack of sycophantic lies that it is. If I see one, my prediction is that it will be by either Gene Lyons, or Joe Conason, both notoriously enthusiastic Clinton keester smoochers.

Michael Isikoff writes in Slate that Sid (the squid) Blumenthal has a “malleable relationship with the truth.” He’s too kind, in my humble opinion.

I’m still waiting to find a review of his paen to the Clintonian saintliness that commends it, rather than exposing it for the pack of sycophantic lies that it is. If I see one, my prediction is that it will be by either Gene Lyons, or Joe Conason, both notoriously enthusiastic Clinton keester smoochers.

Art Stephenson, head of Marshall Space Flight Center, is retiring.

I certainly won’t miss him. He was a prominent one of the many “authoritative” voices at NASA who make false claims about the technology state, that make it harder to raise money for commercial launch vehicles.

Art Stephenson, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, said that both the X-33 and X-34 may have failed because they were too ambitious. The X-33 in particular was originally meant to be a subscale model of VentureStar, a single- stage to orbit reusable launch vehicle proposed by Lockheed Martin. Although the designs of the X-33 and VentureStar diverged to a degree over time, the company planned to use some of the technologies tested by the X-33 into VentureStar.

“We have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge from these X-programs, but one of the things we have learned is that our technology has not yet advanced to the point that we can successfully develop a new reusable launch vehicle that substantially improves safety, reliability and affordability,” he said.

This is utter Bravo Sierra.

The failure of the two programs is indicative of nothing other than NASA capability to mismanage, and no grand or general conclusions about technology readiness for reusable space vehicles could be reasonably drawn from them. If that’s what he learned from those program failures, he needs to go back to school, and learn a little epistemology. Now that he’s retired, maybe he’ll have time, and will stop doing so much damage to our future in space.

Appropriately for a Wired reporter, Joshua Davis has an interesting embedded report of the battlefield technology employed in Iraq. It didn’t all go as smoothly as some reports would indicate.

“When we were deployed from the States,” says Lieutenant Marc Lewis – the commander of the convoy’s 27 heavy equipment trucks – “they told us that we would be given encrypted, military-issue radios when we got here. When we arrived, they told us we should have brought our own.”

What Lewis brought was four Motorola Talkabouts, each with a range of about 1,000 feet. In the half-dozen convoy trips he’s made since arriving in country, Lewis has taken to distributing a Talkabout to the first and last trucks. The other two go to vehicles at strategic points in between. It’s hardly secure. Anybody with a radio could monitor the conversations.

Lewis is improvising as best he can. Before leaving the States, he bought a handheld eTrex GPS device, which he uses to track each of his forays into Iraq. In essence, he’s created a map of Iraq’s charted and uncharted freeways and desert roads. He just has no way to share it with anybody. But he is able to navigate as well as any of the tank or missile commanders he transported. I notice that at least four other soldiers in the convoy have brought their own store-bought GPS handhelds. These devices keep the convoys on track in lieu of having proper systems. “If we run out of batteries,” Lewis says when showing me his map of Iraq, “this war is screwed.”

I also liked his description of the use of commercial chat clients for secure communications.

Because anyone on Siprnet who wanted to could set up a chat, 50 rooms sprang up in the months before the war. The result: information overload. “We’ve started throwing people out of the rooms who don’t belong there,” Mims says.

“What’s funny about using Microsoft Chat,” he adds with a sly smile, “is that everybody has to choose an icon to represent themselves. Some of these guys haven’t bothered, so the program assigns them one. We’ll be in the middle of a battle and a bunch of field artillery colonels will come online in the form of these big-breasted blondes. We’ve got a few space aliens, too.”

I guess I was wrong to debunk the “man never went to the Moon” theories. Here is proof of the NASA conspiracy to fool us all.

Charles Murtaugh sees what he thinks is a contradiction between Ron Bailey and his Reasoned colleague, Jacob Sullum.

One way or another, passive smoking, and the anti-tobacco laws that it engenders, highlights an interesting contradiction among contemporary libertarians. On the one hand, folks like Ron Bailey relentlessly hype life- extension research, and denounce anti-techies like Leon Kass for opposing it. On the other hand, other folks like Bailey’s Reason colleague Jacob Sullum mocks the rationale behind smoking bans. But put them together, and what do you have? If we think we might live forever, or even for a good chunk longer than we do now, small risks like passive smoke suddenly loom much larger, and smoking bans, e.g., become a lot more, well, reasonable.

No, what becomes more reasonable is not smoking bans, but freedom to choose, including the freedom to choose to go to a restaurant or bar that allows smoking (and perhaps thereby also choose a shorter life), or the freedom to choose not to frequent such places, and thereby hope to extend one’s time on earth (albeit perhaps less enjoyably–that’s a subjective thing). While there may be a contradiction between smoking and immortality (at current technology levels), there’s no contradiction inherent in allowing individuals to make their own choices, which is what “free minds and free markets” is all about. I can’t imagine Ron and Jacob getting into any arguments about this, because there’s no true contradiction.

Charles also writes:

I’ve teed off on our prospects for immortality time and again, and I won’t rehash my arguments. I feel pretty safe predicting that we won’t see radical life extension (e.g. past 150 years) in our own lives, let alone thermodynamically-infeasible immortality, but leaving the science aside I think we’re already living with the negative side effects of dreaming of immortality. (Immortality in this life, that is.) The greatest of those negative side effects is the imagined magnification of miniscule risk factors, such as passive smoke, acrylamide in our potato chips, or radioactive waste. If we live to be 80, sure, those won’t matter much, but what if we live to be 500? The char on that overcooked burger could make all the difference!

Frankly, I find this absurd.

Charles seems to think that long life, if it happens at all, will only be a result of clean living. The reality is that it will almost certainly involve reengineering and continual repair of the human (or post-human) body. Any technology that is capable of this will find repairing damage from second-hand smoke and overcooked protein, or even radiation damage, a relatively trivial task.