…and their own stacked deck of cards.
Probably the greatest pair of grifters in American history. And the party of grifters seems determined to put them back in the White House.
The Worst Nutrition Advice In History
The top five contenders.
Hard to argue. They’ve all been disastrous.
Ted Cruz
“He’s so smart that he is not the least impressed by the conservative foreign policy establishment.
That’s what qualifies Ted Cruz for the presidency.”
Heh.
Jeb’s Verbal Misfire On Iraq
My thoughts on what he should have said, over @Ricochet.
Another Russian Failure
There is clearly a serious QC problem in the Russian program. A Proton just suffered another Briz-M upper-stage failure, and delivered a Mexican comm sat into Sibero-stationary orbit, which isn’t particularly useful.
Way to tell that "safety is the highest priority" is that Congress trusts Russian rockets which repeatedly fail to American ones that don't.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) May 16, 2015
It's time to get our crews on American rockets. Not in 2017. Now.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) May 16, 2015
I would ride a Dragon tomorrow, even without the Max-Q abort test. Or at least, I'd do that before I'd ride a Soyuz.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) May 16, 2015
And yet, the House appropriators cut the commercial crew budget. Again.
If I were Congress, I’d go to Phil McAlister on Monday and ask him to ask SpaceX what the probability of LOC for Dragon2 is this summer.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) May 16, 2015
The Russian space industry clearly has systemic QC issues. The policy implications for this are profound, but Congress continues to ignore.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) May 16, 2015
[Update a while later]
The Russians have been averaging two-and-a-third launch failures per year for the past six years. Also worth noting that the trend is getting worse. That’s two launch failures in the past three weeks.
[Update a few minutes later]
Whoa! Two failures in one day. Apparently the reboost engines on the Progress currently at ISS failed to fire as well.
[Late-afternoon update]
Here’s a fairly comprehensive story on today’s launch failure from Stephen Clark at Spaceflightnow.
An El Nino
That’s good news for California, except for those people who live in places like along the Russian River. When it rains, it floods.
Criticizing Hillary
She, unsurprisingly, wants to ban it.
Soyuz
They still don’t know what happened on the Progress failure.
I noted at the time that this could result in a delay of the planned crew rotation on the 26th, and it has. I had a discussion with Jim Oberg on Facebook, and he didn’t think there was sufficient commonality, but he seems more concerned now:
Whatever the conclusions of that report may be, lessons can already be drawn from the accident, Oberg said.
“This and recent similar failures highlight the foolishness of judging mission success reliability based on historical statistics. It’s not just that each launch is a new roll of the dice — it’s a first roll of NEW dice,” he said. “The quality of fabrication and mission preparations reflect the CURRENT human and industrial context, and Russian space industry leaders have been so alarmed by those levels that they’ve repeatedly replaced the Russian Space Agency head with outsiders with nothing to show for it.”
This is a serious issue, and Congress’s response? To cut the funding for a Soyuz replacement.
“Leaving Orbit”
An interview with Margaret Lazarus Dean, whose new book
Part-memoir, part-historical document, part-manifesto, Margaret Lazarus Dean’s perceptive new book Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight (which will be released May 19) asks the question, ”What does it mean that we have been going to space for 50 years and have decided to stop?”
Ummmm…we haven’t “decided to stop.” We’ve been going into space continually since the Shuttle was retired. Within two years, we’ll be doing it on American vehicles from American soil.
I do think there is a popular attitude right now, popular among young and old alike, that government always mucks everything up by its very nature, that private enterprise can always do everything better, and that attitude is particularly dangerous to funding big unprofitable projects like spaceflight. I meet a lot of people who are under the impression that SpaceX is going to take over, and improve upon, everything NASA did, but that’s a misunderstanding of the scope of SpaceX’s plans. A project like going to Mars, which is the next logical step, is so massively expensive it can only be paid for by a federal government. So if we want to go there, we are going to have to learn to trust.
Nonsense.
The House Appropriations Bill
Once again, cuts Commercial Crew and space technology, and pours more money down the SLS/Orion rat hole. I hope this can get fixed in conference.
Note that, as usual, the comments by Gary Church are insane. But “Windbourne”‘s comment raises an interesting question. If you did a secret survey of NASA employees, how many of them would support SLS?