Not just because of the damage they cause to our property, but because they generate ten times as much CO2 as all of human fossil-fuel combustion?
If that’s true, the policy implications would seem sort of profound.
Category Archives: Business
The Space Policy Mess On The Hill
Michael Listner (at his new space-law blog) has a good description of the difficulty of reconciling the House and Senate bills.
However, even if the learning period expires next week, George Nield knows that both houses want to extend it, and he’s not going to waste any resources trying to suddenly start rule making.
Bill De Blasio
Richard Gere: “He doesn’t appear to have the solutions that everyone thought.”
Not everyone, Richard. Only fools like you.
Trump Versus Fiorina
Who is the better businessperson?
I don’t really care, but it’s pretty clear to me that Fiorina would be a much better president. She’s at least willing to do her homework. And she’s not a boor with the mentality of a grade-school kid.
[Update a few minutes later]
It won’t change my vote, but this is the first coherent (and apparently long standing) position that Trump has taken with which I agree: A nationwide-ban on gun-ownership restrictions.
Yes, its a fundamental human and civil right.
[Tuesday-morning update]
I’m not generally a big Vox fan, but Timothy Lee has some interesting facts about Fiorina and her career.
[Bumped]
[Late Wednesday-morning update]
Defining Fiorina. Interesting discussion in comments.
[Bumped]
Dear Hillary
A debate over a law is never “over”:
As this debate moves forward toward the next election I would hope that Republicans and conservatives take the opportunity to remind voters that our entire system of government is, to varying degrees, a flexible and constantly shifting beast. Obamacare is, beyond question, the law of the land as it stands today. It’s also true that a couple of aspects of it have been challenged through the proper rules of order and have survived the test all the way to the highest court. But absolutely none of that has magically transformed this piece of legislation into some sort of natural law, essential human right or sacred text brought down on stone tablets from Mount Sinai.
The law of the land is as permanent as the voters decide it should be. Its expiration date may never come or it may be swept way with the next meeting of the legislature. There is no debate over the law which ever truly ends as long as there are those left who wish to debate it.
It’s almost as thought they want to silence dissent.
The Glomar Explorer
…is going to finally be scrapped.
Seems like a shame. It’s an interesting bit of history. Might make a nice toy for a(nother) billionaire.
Of course, it appears that Paul Allen is building the equivalent for space.
How We Get To Mars
Rick Tumlinson channels me in this Space News op-ed:
If settlement is the goal, Apollo redux is dead. Giant expendable government rockets hurling government employees and return vehicles at Mars won’t cut it in the long run. The main reason to do so is government public relations, as the heroes return and share their stories. If settlement is the goal, we send other kinds of PR heroes — settlers — who land and live out their days on camera, building the first community as more and more follow. Again, it’s different models. One model works for government, the other for private ventures. And since the one-way model is so much cheaper, and the people who will have working one-way systems first are private sector, they may well beat the government to Mars.
He proposes a much more viable approach, but for now, it’s politically unrealistic. Congress doesn’t want to send people to Mars. It wants to build big rockets.
"If settlement is the goal, Apollo redux is dead." And if settlement is not the goal govt HSF is a waste of money. http://t.co/GM5ksrGSvC
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) September 21, 2015
[Afternoon update]
Keith Cowing isn’t impressed.
A Stupid Space Piece
It’s stiff competition, but this may, in fact, be the stupidest space piece ever written. As Stephen Green says, the Left jumps the shark, in a rocketship.
SLS And Orion
The Senate Launch System is four years old (if you count from when NASA actually rolled out the design — it’s more like five years when it was first stipulated in the NASA authorization bill). Some thoughts at the time from Jerry Pournelle.
And Stephen Smith has a history of Orion (the capsule, not the nuclear-powered spacecraft, which just slipped another two years, and even NASA is no longer pretending will ever go to Mars):
SpaceX spent 100% of its own money to develop the Falcon 9 booster and the upcoming Falcon Heavy. The cargo Dragon capsule cost $850 million to develop; $400 million was NASA seed money, while $450 million was SpaceX money. It was only four years from SpaceX receiving its first commercial cargo contract in August 2006 to the first test flight in December 2010. The first Dragon delivery was in May 2012. Dragon was designed with the eventual goal of using it for people, so the crewed Dragon V2 would seem likely to avoid much of the design delays that might plague other commercial crew companies.
Orion and SLS have no urgency, because there’s no profit motive. The contractors get paid regardless of their pace or success; it’s required by law. Their lobbyists ensure through generous campaign contributions that Congress will prohibit any competition. Representatives of NASA space centers populate the space authorization and appropriations committees in the House and the Senate; their priority, sometimes stated explicitly, is to protect the taxpayer-funded government jobs in their districts and states.
Maybe, someday, we’ll actually see NASA crew climb into an Orion capsule atop a Space Launch System booster at Pad 39B. But it will be tens of billions of dollars after we see commercial crew companies do it for far cheaper.
Yup. I’d bet it never happens. It certainly shouldn’t.
Obama Gets It Right
It’s not often I can have a post title like that, but I agree with Glenn:
President Obama was perhaps inspired by a recent article in The Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Lukianoff and Haidt describe in some detail the way in which college sensitivities have undermined teaching, to the point that some criminal law professors — in law schools — are afraid to teach about rape, and where “trigger warnings” and concerns about “microaggressions” rule the day.
Rather than respond to such complaints with a suggestion that the complainers might be better off under professional psychological care than enrolled in institutions of higher learning, university administrations have tended to go along, even though the complainers represent a rather small fraction of the student body. The result has been a sort of arms-race of oversensitivity, in which each complaint is trumped by one still sillier, until we have reached the situation that Lukianoff, Haidt — and Obama — deplore, in which student mental health may actually suffer, and professors worry that they’ll be pilloried for saying that something “violates the law” because the word “violates” may trigger rape anxieties.
In Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the knights decide to skip a visit to Camelot because “it is a silly place.” With college costs (as President Obama has also noted) skyrocketing even as students seem to be learning less and finding greater difficulty obtaining suitable employment after graduation, higher education administrators should worry that more and more students will draw a similar conclusion. Perhaps President Obama’s warning will get their attention.
This might be the closest he’s ever come to a “Sister Souljah moment.”