Finland has given up on its failed experiment. If only there was some sort of…oh, I don’t know…field of analysis that could have predicted this?
The Latest Idiocy At NASA
Loren Grush has the story on the cancellation of the lunar Resource Prospector:
Metzger can only speculate as to why the mission was moved. “I don’t really know what the motive was, but I’m guessing it was probably budget related,” he says. NASA’s human exploration program is currently working on a giant new rocket, the Space Launch System, which takes up a sizable portion of the annual human exploration budget. It’s also behind schedule, so it’s possible Resource Prospector was moved to the science directorate to free up funds to prevent further delays.
If this was done to provide more money to pour down the SLS rathole, is there a better example of how SLS is a roadblock to actually going back to the moon, rather than an enabler?
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) April 27, 2018
[Update late morning]
Does Bridenstine know this is happening?
[Noon update]
FWIW, here’s what Mary Lynne Dittmar has to say:
Hi – your assumption is incorrect; this has nothing to do with SLS. The issue is different mission concepts internal to NASA that need to be resolved before instrumentation and budget are reallocated. What that looks like going forward is not clear, unfortunately.
— Mary Lynne Dittmar, Ph.D. (@DittmarML) April 27, 2018
[Afternoon update]
We’re committed to lunar exploration @NASA. Resource Prospector instruments will go forward in an expanded lunar surface campaign. More landers. More science. More exploration. More prospectors. More commercial partners. Ad astra! https://t.co/FaxO6WUDow
— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) April 27, 2018
This is good news.
Comey And McCabe
The media hasn’t been reporting much on the initial release from Horowitz, but it looks like some potential bombshells in here for the Democrats.
[Update a while later]
More from Andy McCarthy.
[Update a couple minutes later]
And it wasn’t Comey’s decision to exonerate Hillary; it was Obama’s:
Bottom line: In April, President Obama and his Justice Department adopted a Hillary Clinton defense strategy of concocting a crime no one was claiming Clinton had committed: to wit, transmitting classified information with an intent to harm the United States. With media-Democrat complex help, they peddled the narrative that she could not be convicted absent this “malicious intent,” in a desperate effort to make the publicly known evidence seem weak. Meanwhile, they quietly hamstrung FBI case investigators in order to frustrate the evidence-gathering process. When damning proof nevertheless mounted, the Obama administration dismissed the whole debacle by rewriting the statute (to impose an imaginary intent standard) and by offering absurd rationalizations for not applying the statute as written.
[Update a couple more minutes later]
More thoughts from (still Democrat, as far as I know) Jonathan Turley.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Jack Goldsmith on the Deep State. It also seems relevant to this post.
[Friday-morning update]
Is Comey lying about his memos?
Probably.
In the future, I’m going to take encomia and praise of the “integrity” and probity of these Beltway denizens from other Beltway denizens with a truckload of salt.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
Donald Trump and the star chamber of horrors:
As the past year-plus of Robert Mueller’s tedious investigation has proven, there is no very great crime behind Trump’s very great fortune of having been elected the 45th president of the United States. The entire notion of Russian “collusion” (not in itself actionable in the first place) was cooked up in the witches’ cauldron that was Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The resulting brew was liberally dispensed to the cadres of media operatives pretending to be dispassionate reporters in order to assuage the failed candidate’s rage over losing what she thought—what she was assured by her friends at the CIA and the FBI—was a fixed fight.
And so the Big Lie—that Trump had collaborated with Vladimir Putin to change the course of an American election—was born.
There was and is nothing to it, of course. But that hasn’t stopped the Democrats, whose sterling moral history of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition has prepared them for just this moment.
Don’t hold back, Michael, tell them what you really think.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Comey makes surprising new claims in a disastrous Fox News interview.
Le Zone Rouge
A century after the war, an interesting example of how Twitter can be a useful medium for a photoessay.
One of the most chilling abandoned places in the world is France's Red Zone, or "Zone Rouge".
Over 100 years ago, the First World War so devastated the landscape here that people are still forbidden to enter, & the zone has become a ghostly & overgrown place. pic.twitter.com/fPDL4URKmV
— Paul ?? Cooper (@PaulMMCooper) April 25, 2018
SpaceX Starlink
Their satellite Internet system will cost $10B. And expect a couple more FH launches this year.
A NASA Research Announcement
I may respond to this.
5G Networks
Raining on the parade. I already have too many devices that want to be on the Internet.
Suicide Of The West
Juanita Broaddrick
…commemorates a terrible anniversary.
There is a whole young generation that has no idea how immoral and corrupt Bill and Hillary Clinton are. Now that the ice has been broken with Chappaquidick, I’d like to see a mini-series on their crimes in the 90s that the media refused to cover at the time.
Rocket Billionaires And Space Barons
Walter Isaacson reviews both Chris Davenport’s and Tim Fernholz’s
books.
I’ve read both, and while there’s a lot of commonality, they’re complementary.