Over at RLV News Clark Lindsey takes an uncharacteristicaly blunt swing at a particularly stupid article on SpaceDaily. I can’t say it any better than Clark, so go on over there and read his take.

There’s also a good item on the state of sounding rocket research (dismal). I’m a fan of sounding rockets since they offer a low cost means of doing simple space research. In science it’s often the simple experiments that have the most dramatic impact (in part because it’s harder to quibble about simple results, but that’s another post entirely). Unfortunately simple isn’t sexy, and sexy is what NASA is most interested in. Another point about sounding rockets that’s not generally well understood is that there’s a region of the atmosphere between about 50 km and 100 km which is too high for balloon research but to low for satellite research. There’s some important processes that take place in this region, and sounding rockets are really the only way to study them directly.