I just finished an essay on space visions, including Krafft Ehricke. I forgot to include lunettas and solettas, but I’ll get a chance to take another whack at it, since it’s been delayed until the spring issue of The New Atlantis.
Susan Rice
Why she wrote an email to herself.
I continue to await Horowitz’s report. I suspect it will be a bombshell.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Trump and Clinton scandals are claiming a lot of bodies, at the Justice Department. I suspect that there will be some going down at Foggy Bottom, too.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Rice’s memo implies that Comey seriously misled the Senate about his meeting with Obama. In Comey’s rant about “liars and weasels,” he displays a serious lack of self awareness.
[Update a while later]
Carter Page, useful idiot.
I can’t recall in my life such a huge disparity between the media narrative and reality.
[Update after noon]
Last link was wrong, fixed now.
For Libertarian Valentines
Eight romantic classic films.
I have to confess to having seen none of them (and only heard of three: Key Largo, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Strictly Ballroom).
The Left
It plays at oppression, and encourages tyrants.
As she notes, if they really thought that Trump was a tyrant, they’d be afraid to “resist.”
I Hope So
The next memo is going to target John Brennan.
IMO, he is a partisan scumbag, and an enemy of freedom.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Sorry, broken link is fixed now.
Falcon Heavy Launch Reporting
Here‘s Loren Grush’s account (I finally met her briefly in person there).
Gwynne Shotwell
Congratulations, she’s deservedly been named Satellite Executive of the Year. She is Elon’s secret weapon.
The NASA Budget
Eric Berger has looked at it, and (unsurprisingly) the Trump administration seems to be in no hurry to get back to the moon. The NASA budget is going to become increasingly irrelevant in the next few years.
[Update a while later]
Dick Eagleson wonders not only if SLS’s days are numbered, but just how low the number is?
SLS, as currently envisioned, is a farce. Its development has been glacial and insanely expensive. It plows absolutely no significant new technological ground. It will be slow and insanely expensive to build. It is entirely expendable. Its associated spacecraft, Orion, is, at best, a Moon-craft, lacking heat shielding sufficient to withstand an Earth return from any significantly more distant point and, in any case, having life support capability for only 12 person-weeks of continuous occupancy.
But other than that, it’s great.
Last week’s launch was a major temblor, I think.
[Update early afternoon]
Here‘s Christian Davenport’s story (I saw him at the launch last week).
[Tuesday-morning update]
Katherine Mangu-Ward: It’s not a crazy idea to privatize the ISS.
Giant Rockets
Thoughts from Elon earlier in the week.
How Elon Musk wants to change space travel pic.twitter.com/KTDbbZmEuz
— The Verge (@verge) February 10, 2018
My Lawsuit
It’s been over a year since we filed a petition for a rehearing en banc from the DC Court of Appeals.
[Monday-morning update]
While doing a search for other related links, I an across this, from a year or so ago, which I find quite bizarre. He thinks both that Mann is a fraud, and that I nonetheless deserve to be sued.