Thoughts on identity politics versus reductionist politics.
As someone who is often called a racist because I disagree about a policy issue, I am enjoying the hell out of Nancy having the race card pulled on her.
Portlandization
It could happen to a town near you.
I could understand why Nancy left Los Angeles, but not why she moved to Portland.
Starship/Super-Heavy
Work is beginning on a launch pad in Florida.
This is looking serious.
[Thursday-morning update]
It’s an end of an era: Gerstenmeier and Hill are out at NASA. Thoughts from Bob Zimmerman.
Lunar Resources
Is there a conflict between science and sustainability?
Meanwhile, there is a symposium on space settlement in DC today. You can follow the livestream.
[Late-afternoon update]
I know this is what you’ve all been waiting for: The Slate article about this crap.
Though most of the symposium was actually useful and interesting, ignoring the nonsense about colonialism in North America.
The Epstein Case
It’s unlike anything Ken White has seen before (which is saying something).
I don’t know whether to be amused or appalled at the degree to which the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) are trying to simultaneously hide all of the Democrat/Clinton connections (including Wikipedia), while trying to pin it on Trump.
[Update a while later]
Was Epstein running honey traps to blackmail the power elite? It seems like the most-likely explanation.
Buzz Speaks Out
Yes, this would be a much better architecture, but unfortunately, while Buzz is probably the most famous moonwalker, he’s also not taken as seriously by many in the industry.
Two comments: I’ll have to ask Eric where he gets the $1.5B/flight number for SLS. And is he proposing to do this in the ISS orbit, or at a lower inclination?
[Update a while later]
Meanwhile, Bob Zimmerman reports that NASA is preparing us for another SLS delay.
Climate Scientists
…and their pre-traumatic-stress syndrome.
These people are certainly full of themselves.
Meanwhile, are we or are we not heading for a grand solar minimum?
And Then There Were Twenty Two
Paranoid fantasist and scumbag extraordinaire Eric Swalwell is the first to drop out of the race.
[Update a while later]
Meanwhile, Warren, Harris , and Buttigieg are on the rise, with Biden fading.
The First Moon Landing
What most people don’t know about it.
As I’ve noted for years, the reason that we haven’t been able to do Apollo again is that we just barely did it the first time, and it’s extremely unlikely that the stars will align to allow it to happen again. And that is as it should be, for America. There was a very powerful sense in which Apollo was not the right thing for a country based on entrepreneurialism and free enterprise to be doing.
I’m reading Roger Launius’s new book, in which he talks about four perspectives of Apollo. I noted to him privately that there was a fifth, that he didn’t address:
I felt a little left out. I think I represent a fifth perspective, in that I believe that Apollo was both necessary and not a waste of money for what it accomplished (a major non-military victory in the Cold War), but that it set us back in human spaceflight for decades (and continues to do so, as witness the current ongong Artemis fiasco).
He didn’t disagree.
The “Dirtbag Left”
An interesting interview of some non-woke feminists.