It’s going to be a week from today, in Baltimore. Wish I could attend — I’m planning to be in DC the Monday after, but I’ll be in Florida that weekend.
A New Space Company
This was announced in Seattle in June, but in San Diego this week, Michael Suffredini repeated his plan to attach a module to ISS that could be later detached as a free flyer. I wonder where he is in terms of finding customers?
#NeverTrump
What it means, and what it doesn’t.
Yes, that’s all it means. I am not going to support Donald Trump. The notion that non-support of Trump is support of Hillary is nonsense.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Will Trump win in a blowout? It could happen. I’ve never said he can’t win the election, just that he’ll be a terrible president. Hillary will be worse.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Hillary’s people “freaked out” by the polls. They’ve been and continue to be in denial about what a truly awful candidate she is. They don’t care about lies and corruption, but Americans do.
[Update a while later]
“‘Crooked’ means crippled for Hillary Clinton“:
Democrats…have been operating on the assumption that most Americans shared Clinton’s belief that talk of her misconduct was just more slander from the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Her inability to get ahead of Trump by a comfortable margin even though he spent the weeks after clinching his nomination going off on racist tangents is remarkable. The problem for her isn’t so much that he has risen—he is still stuck at the same low number that he’s had in national polls for months—as it is that she has declined or failed to gain ground.
Looking ahead, it’s hard to predict how a race between two deeply unpopular candidates will turn out. Trump’s undisciplined character and his alienation of elements of the Republican coalition and inability to appeal to non-white and young voters may ultimately cancel out Clinton’s weaknesses. But the one thing we know for sure is that the Democrats will nominate a crippled candidate. No amount of spending or spin can sell Hillary Clinton to the American people as either honest or competent.
Yup.
[Update a while later]
“Hillary managed her emails like [other] criminals I’ve known.”
Meanwhile, here’s a deep dive into her email mess from Ars Technica. One thing not mentioned; how did the classified info get from the SCIF to her server?
The Commercial Spaceflight Federation
They have a nicely redesigned website. Here’s the story behind it.
Artificial Sweeteners
Seriously, they not only taste bad, but they’re bad for you, and don’t help with weight loss. But they’re big business.
Pleasing The Ladies
New you can use, if you’re a woman — the latest tech in self stimulation.
The Gaps In Hillary’s Email Traffic
No, there’s nothing “strange” about them. It’s straightforward destruction of evidence, for which this administration is determined to let her skate.
[Update early afternoon]
Hillary, the Democrats and the problem of trust:
…if you think promoting trust in government is important, you should nominate someone trustworthy. But there are other priorities, apparently, and they outweigh that trustworthiness, or we’d have different nominees.
The other way you promote trust is through transparency and accountability. Voters should be able to tell what politicians and bureaucrats are doing, and when those politicians and bureaucrats do wrong they should face real consequences. We’re not doing very well on that front either.
No, we’re not.
[Update a few minutes later]
The FBI agents involved with the probe had to sign special secrecy agreements. Gee, this doesn’t look like the fix was in to let her of the hook and they were worried about leaks at all.
Try, Try Again
After losing the new docking adaptor on the launch failure a year ago, SpaceX is going to try again this month.
This is important for using Dragon or “Starliner” as a lifeboat for ISS.
Jimmy Carter And The Space Shuttle
Did he save it? And if so, why? An interesting bit of history of which I’d been unaware. Mondale wanted to kill it, and did manage to reduce the fleet size from seven to five (including Enterprise, which never flew). Which was economically stupid, because it saved very little money. If we’d had six vehicles, we’d have still had four after the losses of Challenger and Columbia (assuming that we hadn’t built Endeavour from spares after Challenger, and those two events would have occurred in that alternate universe). A four- or five-ship fleet would have made for a slightly different calculus after the loss of the latter, because part of the reason the program was ended was that three was too small a fleet to continue to operate for long.
The “Lunar Gift Shop”
Some Europeans say that’s the only place that Apollo visited.
@Lee_Ars It's hard for people to appreciate the degree to which Apollo copulated things up, in terms of space.
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) July 14, 2016