It’s a personal one. I’m accepted to give a brief talk on space property rights at the IAC in three weeks. But media can’t give talks, and registration will be about $1500. Not sure I can justify that.
Elon Musk
I watched the webcast last night, but I was tired from building a fence, and then I had an early flight to DC this morning.
[Tuesday-afternoon update]
Thoughts from Bob Zimmerman on Elon’s design philosophy.
Mid-Air Refueling
…of drones, with flying swappable batteries.
Impeachment
It’s just another way for the Democrats to tear the country apart.
[Update a few minutes later]
Jonathan Turley: If you want impeachment, find a quid for the pro quo.
Space Nuclear Reactors
I’m not sure this is as big a proliferation concern as some say, but I have no idea where they get this “20% of all launches have failures” thing. That’s not true in general, and its far from true for U.S. systems.
Hospital Emergency Rooms
If only there were some sort of field of study that could have predicted this.
Elizabeth Warren
…and her anti-corporate fixation.
She reminds me of Woodrow Wilson, without the virulent racism.
The fact that Wall Street is saying that they won’t support her, and might even support Trump, is amusing in the context of the popular myth that the rich are Republicans.
Greta Thunberg
Asteroid Hunting
Casey Dreier has an interesting history of how NASA finally got a decent budget to fulfill its planetary-defense mandate.
Lawsuit Update
We thought we were going to hear next week if SCOTUS would grant our petition for certiori, but just heard that they’ve delayed it to the next conference on October 11. Apparently at least one justice is interested, but we can’t know if that’s because they want to move it to a less-crowded conference than next week’s for fuller discussion, or because they know they’ll turn it down, but want to write a dissent.