It looks like she was an architect of the Benghazi lie.
I’m sure you’re as shocked as I am.
Embracing The RLV Evolution
Comparing and contrasting NASA and private industry. I prefer the term “space transports” to RLVs, though.
Social Justice In Gaming
“Oops, I joined a cult.”
The Mann Defamation Suit
There Is No #JourneyToMars
The NASA Advisory Council is pretty remarkable to listen to today, particularly Bill Ballhaus. They’re essentially telling NASA it doesn’t have the technology or a plan. Which has always been the case. As I tweeted, the NAC needs to speak truth to Congress about SLS.
The 25th Amendment
I was thinking exactly the same thing yesterday, listening to Obama’s delusional ramblings:
Without the use of the teleprompter, his speech can be described only as “halting.” It was impossible to count the number of times he seized up, able to deaden the silence with only a drawn-out “uh,” “um” or “ahhh.”
The White House dutifully scrubbed all the halts and stutters from the official transcript, and it was impossible to count them in real time. But a sample of his incoherent word salad found him stuttering about every 15 words, which comes to more than 330 “uh-um-ahhs” in a single appearance.
This is not the same soaring speaker who inspired so many in 2008. This is a broken-down man who has lost the only gift he ever had.
Unfortunately, there is no more 2/3rd of the Congress to act on this than there is for impeachment in the Senate.
I’d also note that I don’t think he ever had a gift for extemporaneous speaking. He was always Candidate, and then President Teleprompter.
[Update a while later]
A Democrat says that Obama’s fecklessness could drag us into a nuclear war.
The Christian Terrorism Problem
No, America doesn’t have one.
Sure are a lot of Christophobes out there.
Ex-XCOR
Jeff Foust has the story on what Jeff Greason and Dan DeLong are up to (Aleta is going to join up, too, according to an email exchange I had with Jeff G. this weekend). I’ll probably have one of my own up this week.
[Afternoon update]
Alan Boyle (who it was pleasant to visit with in Seattle a couple weeks ago) has a story up now as well.
[Tuesday-afternoon update]
Here is my interview with Jeff over the weekend:
RS: How are you doing?
JG: My health is great, I’m enjoying a lot of long walks through my neighborhood in Midland, Texas, and I am excited about the next phase of my career.
RS: How long has this been in the works?
JG: It is all quite new. I made the decision to leave XCOR at the beginning of November. XCOR reorganized back in June and that took both me and Dan off of any management role on the Lynx. Due to the focus of resources on completing the Lynx, my efforts to work on next-generation R&D projects didn’t gain the traction inside XCOR that I hoped, so I didn’t feel I was in a situation where I was contributing the best that I could to the industry. Once I decided to leave XCOR, I recognized that I have a lot of experience with a problem that many companies have been frustrated by – how to shorten the vehicle prototyping cycle so that time to market is faster and the fly-learn-build cycle is faster. So I decided to set up a company to solve that problem. It’s called Agile Aero and we’re just getting started.
RS: Will you be staying in Midland?
JG: Dan, Aleta, and I all like Midland, so we’ll stay here if we can.
RS: Is anyone else involved in the new company?
JG: Dan DeLong had left XCOR for his own reasons, but since he found out what Agile Aero is working towards, he’s decided to join. Aleta Jackson was laid off just after I left, and she’s also decided to join.
Do you have any financial backers? Do you have any prospective customers?
JG: I have had some initial offers of investment and we’re certainly interested in talking to others; I expect we will need additional resources to hire more people. Realize that right now what we have is a clear understanding of the problem we want to solve – vehicle development speed. We haven’t solved it yet! But I’m confident we have the experience to do it, starting from a clean sheet of paper with our collective experience in the industry. As for customers, I’m definitely interested in talking to them because it will help us know which capabilities to demonstrate first, and I have already had some interesting “can you do something like this?” questions. I also expect we will be available to offer some expertise to other companies while we work on our core technology.
RS: Does XCOR retain rights to any IP on the orbital vehicle? Or do you still plan to do it with another entity? If so, is the new company that entity, or will that be a separate venture?
JG: Before we start working on any vehicle concept for any market, we first need to demonstrate rapid prototyping of vehicles – the faster vehicle ideas can turn into reality, the faster the time to market. Solving this problem will inform how a future vehicle system should be designed and built, and once we’ve done it, an orbital system might look quite a bit different from what I imagine today. I don’t want to make specific vehicle plans until we get the prototyping capability in place. As to whether we would do an orbital system for ourselves or for another customer, time will tell. I would love for XCOR to be one of our customers. Agile Aero intends to make a rapid prototyping capability available for many clients once we have the basic technology in hand. It is a bit like the niche that Scaled Composites used to fill – enabling other companies’ creative aerospace projects, although Agile Aero will be focused on higher performance aircraft and space vehicles. I’m extremely interested in fully reusable launch architectures, and once we have the tools in our toolbox I’d welcome such an opportunity.
[Bumped]
The Private Space Race
Political Correctness
Jonathan Chait has decided he’s been mugged enough by the campus fascists:
The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)
American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state. The continuous stream of small-scale outrages it generates is a testament to an illiberalism that runs deep down to its core (a character I tried to explain in my January essay).
Of course, given his own history, he’s not the best standard bearer for the message.