Another reminder, this time from @Popehat, that there is no such thing, in terms of the First Amendment. Warning, pop-up ads.
SpaceX
…is having quite a year. And it’s not half over. Yesterday, Elon implied in a tweet that FH could fly in late September or early October.
Evergreen College
Its course catalog is bonkers.
Via Instapundit, who asks “Why is this place even accredited?”
The rot in academia is deep.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Many colleges fail to improve critical-thinking skills. Of course they do. That would get in the way of indoctrination.
The Tories’ Election Disaster
Michael Barone breaks it down. I wonder how much the recent terror attacks affected May’s reputation as Home Minister?
China And Space
They seem to be trying to get a little more innovative, but they don’t seem to be in a big hurry about it:
Reusable lift-body launchers will be developed in three stages — rocket-engine partial reusable vehicle, rocket-engine full reusable vehicle and combined cycle-engine reusable vehicle, said Lu.
The Long March carrier rockets still have room for improvement, Lu said, adding that the CALT is developing a heavy-lift launch vehicle with a payload of 140 tonnes to low Earth orbit and 50 tonnes to lunar transfer orbit.
The heavy-lift carrier rocket is currently called the Long March-9, and it should be sent into space by 2030, he said.
[Via Parabolic Arc]
The Musical Tent
Almost a decade ago, I had a post about my boyhood in Flint, MI, that got picked up by a Flint nostalgia blog. At the time, there wasn’t much response to it, but I see that the post there is now the number one search item for “Flint Musical Tent,” and there are some great memories there, including one from just a few months ago. Unfortunately, still nothing on line about the A.C. concerts. Next time I’m back there, I may see if there is anything in the library at Kettering.
NASA’s New Astronaut Class
Train for a while, maybe fly to ISS, maybe not, take jobs in industry to go to other planets. https://t.co/BwOmFKYvWg
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) June 8, 2017
The Campus Sex Police
Trump’s budget cuts funding for it. Good, except it will probably be restored by Congress. Devos needs to put the right people in place, and issue new guidance.
[Update a while later]
Related, sort of. Students are largely not learning to think in college. Because it’s more important to the universities to indoctrinate them, while taking their money and blighting their futures.
Mars
Another demonstration of how fundamentally unserious we are about it, and what a fraud NASA’s #JourneyToMars is:
“Right now we are unconsciously setting ourselves up for a very difficult Mars program in the 2020s, because of all these immediate needs,” Casey Dreier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society, tells The Verge. “We don’t want to have a problem where we’ve prepared these samples and then they just rot on the ground because we’re unable to commit to bringing them back.”
Dreier argues that, above all, the most immediate need is the development of a new Mars telecommunications orbiter. Any future spacecraft we send to the Red Planet is going to need a way to communicate with mission teams on Earth. Right now, NASA has three operational satellites orbiting Mars, but only two — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey — are primarily used for telecommunications. And these vehicles are getting old. Both orbiters have been at Mars for more than a decade and have lasted much longer than the span of their primary missions. By the time spacecraft are sent to retrieve samples from Mars, these satellites may have broken down and have stopped functioning. There are other orbiters circling Mars, operated by NASA and other space agencies, but these satellites are primarily aimed at doing science, and their orbits make them ill-suited for telecommunications, according to the Planetary Society.
But we have a giant rocket and a capsule in development that we don’t need to get to Mars, so we have that going for us.
Public Speaking
This looks like a very useful development. I find this a strange attitude:
Let’s just remember that bilingual speakers are by definition fluent in two languages yet are too often deemed uneducated or undeserving of opportunity simply for sounding not quite like the people we see on TV.
As someone really only fluent in one language, I’m always impressed by people who are bi- or multi-lingual, even if they have an accent.