It’s essentially illegal. My latest column, about NASA in the movies and in real life, at USA Today.
Virgin Galactic
Almost a year after the loss of SpaceShipTwo, Doug Messier has some questions about their switch back to a rubber engine. The answers are unsatisfactory. And there’s this perennial bit:
Despite Richard Branson’s increasingly dire pronouncements (The Time for Climate Action is Now) about how rising global temperatures and sea levels threaten the planet (and his private island home), it looks as if Virgin Galactic will go back to using a carbon spewing rubber hybrid rocket engine to power SpaceShipTwo.
That’s the word from Virgin Galactic officials in Mojave, who say that the rubber/nitrous oxide engine they previously abandoned is now performing better than the supposedly superior nylon/nitrous oxide engine they abandoned it for in May 2014. It’s not entirely certain, but it looks that way.
Branson won’t lose any sleep over this further expansion of his carbon footprint. He never has. Anyone who can passionately advocate for the climate while flying around the world in a private jet, expanding his fuel-gulping airlines, launching three new massive cruise ships, and burning rubber in the upper atmosphere is clearly untroubled by irony or contradictions. Here’s a guy who urges billions in new public spending on climate change while living as a tax exile in the British Virgin Islands.
As Emerson said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
A New Desalinization Method
If this works out, it would be huge. It might be useful for Martian water, too.
“Space Exploration”
I hate op-eds like this. They’re meaningless.
I oppose "space exploration." It's a meaningless phrase. I favor space development.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) October 20, 2015
New NASA Human Spaceflight Rules
I have trouble caring about this, given the programmatic unlikelihood of SLS/Orion.
That Mysterious “Stalking” Russian Satellite
Reusable Mars Landers
Yes, throwing them away makes no sense. That’s Apollo-to-Mars thinking.
Creating fully reusable transportation infrastructure will be a key element of my Kickstarter report.
Trey Gowdy
“These have been among the worst weeks of my life.”
This is infuriating. There are few people whose integrity I respect more in Congress.
[Update a while later]
What we know now versus what we knew then about Benghazi.
Trump’s Immigration Policies
No, they wouldn’t have prevented 911. And no, Ben Carson, neither would have declaring oil independence.
The frightening thing, of course, is that neither of these positions are as disconnected from geopolitical reality as Obama’s remain, almost seven years into his presidency. But now we just have to hold on and survive the next fifteen months.
Peggy Noonan
Sorry, like David Brooks, she forfeited any reasons to take her views seriously in 2008. It was perfectly obvious to many of us that Barack Obama was a radical (he told us so himself, in his pledge to “fundamentally transform America”), in his years in Wright’s pews, in his associations with Ayers and Khalidi, in his socialist run in the 90s with the New Party, in his seeking of Marxists in college. I was right, she was wrong.