Frank Morring says they were coincidence, and that failure is inevitable. I made the same point at PJMedia last week:
…it is important to understand that there was absolutely no relationship between OSC’s and VG’s accidents, other than they were both commercial activities. It was pure coincidence that they happened within a span of three days. But in both cases, response was rapid.
Nonetheless, a lot of ignorant people will try to use these events to shut down commercial spaceflight.
I haven’t read it deeply, but here’s some extensive technical speculation.
I’m hearing that they’re calling the tail number currently under construction “Hope.”
Not sure they thought that one through.
Let the snark commence in comments.
Francis seems to suffer from a lack of imagination:
Space analysts said planning and executing a manned mission to Mars would take years and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
French wants NASA to head in that direction, and he sees next month’s Orion launch as the inaugural milestone in a long journey.
Still, he’s circumspect.
“Unless we build the rockets and test the spacecraft needed to get into deep space, sending humans to Mars will remain a dream for centuries to come,” French said. “Whether Orion will be the vehicle, and whether it will survive the brutal budgetary cycles of Washington politics for the many years ahead that it will need to be funded, is impossible to say. It’s hard to imagine any other method succeeding.
Space historians often suffer from this malady.
Chris Bergin has the story on current status of modifications at the Cape. Launch “as early as next summer.”
Let’s hope.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: ESA and Arianespace seem to have settled on the design of their next obsolete launch system.
Why yes, yes, it is a good phrase.
It is a rejection of climate-change hysteria.
We may work up the gumption to go see it this weekend.
[Update a while later]
Related thoughts from Mark Steyn.
Dear Democrats, don’t even think about trying to run away from him.
[Afternoon update]
The epic search of Diogenes for an honest man is over.
[Update a few minutes later]
It gets worse:
I think we’d probably like to get rid of the tax exempt status for health care benefits.
Note that McCain proposed doing just that in the 2008 election. His idea was that we would get rid of this exemption and instead give people an additional tax credit valued at the average cost of health insurance. Thus, people would be held harmless by the change, but we’d get rid of this government-made distortion in how employers pay their employees.
Barack Obama, get this, demagogued that plan and accused McCain of wanting to increase taxes on people.
And meanwhile, he schemed to achieve the same thing, except without that part about giving people an additional tax credit which would offset increased taxes, and, get this, without telling people he was getting rid of the tax exemption.
Once again — subverting democracy by completely destroying the concept of Consent of the Governed.
All in a day’s work.
[Update a while later]
Obama himself was leading the discussion of how to take away the tax benefits.
It would be a huge improvement over the current mess:
I think that from the libertarian perspective, either of these proposals should be preferable to Obamacare. I’d even argue that they should both be more appealing to progressives. But the administration didn’t want simple, modest and stable; it wanted a massive, transformational legacy. Which is why, four years later, we’re still fighting about it.
Yup.