How to do it in a regular-ass car without freaking out.
Yes. I grew up driving in all manner of winter conditions. The most important thing is to go out to a vacant parking lot and practice, so you’ll know what to do in an emergency.
Forget Blue Origin Versus SpaceX
It’s a battle of new ideas versus old ones.
President, Or King?
SCOTUS is going to review the “take care” clause. This is huge, and a potential opportunity to finally rein in a tyrannical executive.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More at the WaPo from Fred Barbash:
In the view of Texas and others, Obama admitted both that he had no power under the law and that he thus, in his words, “changed the law” while pretending that he wasn’t. Bad faith.
“There generally wouldn’t be any evidence of bad faith,” Georgetown University Law Professor Randy Barnett, who formulated the winning Commerce Clause argument in the Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act, said in an interview. “But here we have public declarations [from Obama] that ‘I don’t have the authority, I don’t have the authority, I don’t have the authority’ and that ‘Congress won’t act, Congress won’t act, Congress won’t act’ and then you also have the enactment of what looks like legal rules, not just discretion, but whole classes of people who are exempt from the law, the very same law the president was urging Congress to pass….it suggests that he’s not acting in good faith.”
You don’t say.
Sad Space Anniversaries
The end of January is a time of remembrance for NASA human spaceflight, starting with the Apollo 1 anniversary on Wednesday, the Challenger anniversary (30th) on Thursday, and Columbia a week from tomorrow. Here’s one of the first pieces at Florida Today, by James Dean, on the Challenger anniversary, with some quotes from Yours Truly.
Hillary’s Server
So her staff cut and pasted data off a top-secret server so they could send it in the clear to Hillary’s email address on her unsecured server?
Someone will be or is being threatened by the FBI with a long vacation in Club Fed over this. I suspect that someone isn’t going to be willing to take the fall for Her Highness.
The Key To Coffee
The mineral content of the water? I could see a market for specialty waters for brewing.
Who Poisoned Flint?
Government did. With the help of public-employee unions.
Government is just a word for things we do together, like put charging city inhabitants for toxic drinking water.
600,000 Refugees
Germany can’t account for them.
A significant percentage of them are men of military age. This is like an invading army.
Blue Origin
They seem to have launched, and the NOTAM has ended, but no word on landing(s) yet.
[Saturday-morning update]
[Update a while later]
Here is the story from Jeff Foust, and one from TechInsider.
Orion
Construction in slow motion; Bob Zimmerman notes the snail’s pace:
Orion’s budget these days is about $1 billion per year, with a total cost expected to reach $17 billion by the time the fourth capsule is built and launched in 2023, for a project first proposed in 2004.
In other words, it will take NASA and Lockheed Martin almost 20 years to build four capsules for the cost of $17 billion. That is absurd. Compare it to commercial space: The entire budget for all the commercial crew contracts, including both cargo contracts and the manned contract, is about half that, and will produce four different vehicles, all of which will be built and flying by 2019 at the latest. And in the case of Dragon and Cygnus, more than a dozen capsules have already flown.
Is there no one in Washington with the brain power to read these numbers and come to a rational decision about SLS/Orion? It costs too much and isn’t getting us into space. Moreover, at its pace and cost it isn’t doing anything to help the American aerospace industry. Better for Congress to put money into other things, or save it entirely and reduce the deficit and thus not waste it on this pork barrel garbage.
It’s not about building a capsule, or going to Mars. Or even beyond earth orbit.