Eric Berger discusses the possibilities for NASA administrator. I think that going with Scott would be the conventional choice, which would belie Trump’s stated desire to “drain the swamp,” but then, I’ve never believed any of Trump’s promises. I’m a little disturbed by the fact that Bob Walker seems to be no longer involved. I wonder what happened there?
[Update a few minutes later]
@Rand_Simberg I believe Walker is out because of Pence's purge of lobbyists.
Yes, absolutely. The way to persuade them to vote for your candidate is to dox and harrass them. While complaining that your opponent is a violent threat to the nation.
In my post Trumping the elites, I stated that Trump’s election provided an opportunity for a more rational energy and climate policy. Many in the blog comments and the twitosphere found this to be an incomprehensible statement.
Here is what I think needs to be done, and I do see opportunities for these in a Trump administration:
a review of climate science that includes a faithful and transparent representation of uncertainties in 21st century projections of global and regional climate change
reopening of the ‘endangerment’ issue, as to whether warming is ‘dangerous’
a do-over on assessing the social cost of carbon, that accounts for full uncertainty in the climate model simulations, the integrated assessment models and their inputs.
support funding for Earth observing systems (satellite, surface, ocean) and research on natural climate variability.
Even if politics are to ‘trump’ the conclusions of these analyses, it would be clear that the Trump administration has done its due diligence on this issue in terms of gathering and assessing information. If the Trump administration were to accomplish the first 3 items, they might have a scientifically and economically defensible basis for pulling out of the Paris agreement and canceling Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
I noted the other day on Twitter that if Myron is the new EPA administrator, we’ll finally have one who is not a rabid environmentalist, and will follow the law, doing actual cost/benefit analyses. As a bonus, many EPA employees may quit (though it’s unclear if they have any marketable skills outside of government).
I was on The Space Show yesterday discussing this, but Marcia Smith has a good rundown.
The subject of fueling the Falcon while crew was aboard is mentioned there, and it came up on the show yesterday. I need to write something up on this, but my take is the usual one. It’s probably saf(er) to load crew after propellant has been loaded, but it’s not at all obvious to me that doing it with them on board is sufficiently unsafe to justify the extra cost/time. As always, the notion of “human rating” is nonsense, there is no single correct level of safety. It depends on the purpose of the mission. I’d let the astronauts decide (knowing that they will know that if they won’t accept the risk, they probably won’t fly, because others will).