Speaking of Russia, they appear to have thrown in the towel in their competition with SpaceX. As I told some people in the UK this week, people who think that they need to be in the launch business to be serious players in space are thinking in 20th-century terms. The future lies in figuring out what to do on orbit with cheap launch, orbital assembly, and affordable satellite technology.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
The New Anti-Semitism
Joel Kotkin writes that many Jews are delusional about their enemy.
I’ve noticed that the left media, both here and in Europe, assume that any antisemitism is “right wing” by definition. This helps cover up the source of much of it, particularly overseas. (Hint: It starts with “I”).
Trump And The Foreign-Policy Swamp
An…interesting perspective from David Goldman. The notion that “Russia Russia Russia!” is a strategy by the establishment to prevent a rapprochement with Putin is one that hadn’t occurred to me.
Waco, A Quarter Of A Century
The Branch Davidian massacre was probably the first scandal of the Clinton administration, and like all Clinton scandals, the media refused to cover it with any honesty Which is one of the reasons that they got away with so much for so long.
Related thoughts from James Bovard.
NASA Administrator
This is good news. We finally have one, and he’s the first in a long time to have his head screwed on straight with respect to private and commercial spaceflight. And (despite the fact that was a stupid criticism of Obama space policy, which had nothing to do with it, despite Charlie Bolden’s idiocy) he will never say anything about “Muslim outreach,” regardless of what news outlets he gives interviews to.
The House Freedom Caucus
They’re the only ones with any guts in Congress, unafraid to point out the obvious:
In addition to the potential crimes connected to the Steele dossier and FISA abuse, the lawmakers believe that the leaking of classified information, Clinton’s concealment of campaign payments to an opposition research firm, and Lynch’s threats to an FBI informant mentioning “reprisal” if he came forward with anti-Clinton information in 2016 also warrant investigation. The informant had provided the Bureau with information on the Uranium One scandal involving the approval in 2010 to sell roughly 20 percent of American uranium mining assets to Russia.
“We write to refer the following individuals for investigation of potential violation(s) of federal statutes,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter released by Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). “In doing so, we are especially mindful of the dissimilar degrees of zealousness that has marked the investigations into Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, respectively. Because we believe that those in positions of high authority should be treated the same as every other American, we want to be sure that the potential violations of law outlined below are vetted appropriately.”
Having real consequences for Democrats’ abuse of power would be quite the novel approach.
SJW SF Follies
I’m back in the states, (back to Florida for a couple days, then back to CA on Friday), and I woke up to this story from Sarah Hoyt over the latest mau mauing of the left against a sane SF writer.
I grew up reading SF in the sixties; I don’t know what happened to it. The Left apparently has to corrupt and rot everything it touches.
China
Is it “Sputniking” the U.S.?
I don’t know, but our procurement and R&D policies are pretty badly bolluxed up.
Commerce And SSA
I flew back to London yesterday from Bratislava (cheap non-stop flights from there, compared to Vienna) and I woke up to see that Vice-President Pence has announced a fairly significant policy change:
Space situational awareness data is currently provided by the Defense Department through organizations like the Joint Space Operations Center. The new policy, Pence said, would free up the military “to focus on protecting and defending our national security assets in space” by giving those responsibilities to the Commerce Department.
“This new policy directs the Department of Commerce to provide a basic level of space situational awareness for public and private use, based on the space catalog compiled by the Department of Defense,” Pence said.
The policy will also support partnerships between the government and private organizations for sharing space situational awareness data, technical guidelines and safety standards. “That will help minimize debris and avoid satellite collisions during launch and while in orbit,” he said.
This would not be the first time that Commerce has taken over a potential regulatory role once considered for the FAA. At the National Space Council’s February meeting, the council approved several recommendations, including those that would give Commerce responsibility for licensing “non-traditional” space applications, something the FAA had long been advocating to handle.
There are some interesting implications to this. A little over a third of a century ago, there was a bureaucratic battle over which federal agency would do launch licensing. In a meeting with Ronald Reagan, Transportation secretary Elizabeth Dole made a better case for her department than Malcolm Baldrige, then Secretary of Commerce, did for his, and the DoT got the job, which was later codified in the Commercial Space Launch Act, with the Office of Commercial Space Transportation reporting to the department secretary (first head of it was Courtney Stadd).
In the early 90s, under a “streamlining government initiative,” VP Al Gore demoted the office, putting it under the FAA, something that many (including me) criticized at the time, and for which we have been advocating reversal ever since (including a recommendation in my book). Now it would appear that not only the FAA, but the DoT itself, has lost a turf war (and I don’t mind).
But more interesting to me is the implication for an ultimate U.S. Space Guard. SAA was one of the primary drivers in advocating such an organization, as Jim Bennett described in The New Atlantis. The Coast Guard was at one time under the Department of Commerce, and the seed of this new organization could in fact grow into a more comprehensive one, perhaps with constabulary powers, and even over time uniforms and an academy.
Peak Oil
And good riddance.