It’s been 61 years now since that event upended U.S. space policy. It’s worth (re)reading a piece I wrote a few years ago at The New Atlantis, while we’re waiting for my most recent one to come on line. Sadly, it holds up pretty well, and I would make the same policy recommendations today.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
The Return Of The Space Visionaries
About a year ago, I started writing an essay comparing and contrasting Bezos’s versus Musk’s visions for humanity in space. As is often the case, it expanded into a history of space visions in general, and how we’re finally returning to the old ones, after the tragic detour of Apollo. It’s out in the current issue, but unfortunately, isn’t yet available on line. I expect it will be in a few weeks or less, though.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is sort of a space issue. There is a piece by Bob Zubrin laying out his concept for Moon Direct, bypassing what he calls the space toll booth (Gateway), and another by Micah Meadowcroft on how Mars will disappoint.
Kavanaugh
I’ve been too busy at the AIAA conference in Orlando to blog, and I drove down to West Palm Beach last night to get back to work on the house. But I have to say I’ve never seen anything as hypocritical and cynical as what the Democrats are doing now.
As I tweeted yesterday, if I were Grassley, I’d call Karen Monahan as a witness on Monday, to show the Democrats what a woman with a real story looks like, then watch the scum like Schumer and Feinstein howl in rage.
[Friday-afternoon update]
Yes, Dianne Feinstein should be censured.
[Bumped]
[Update a while later]
Know who I would never in a thousand years hire as my defense attorney? This woman. You’d have to be monumentally incompetent to not get your client off with a charge and (lack of) evidence like this. Telling a client with such a situation to not go to trial would be legal malpractice.
[Late-afternoon update]
Yes, rejecting Kavanaugh for this would disgrace him for life. But it would keep him off the court, which is all they care about, not her or him.
[Saturday-morning update]
Yes, let’s end the confirmation-hearing circus. It certainly isn’t required by the Constitution, and as Glenn notes, it originated in anti-Semitic opposition to Brandeis.
Informed Consent
Laura Montgomery explains the legal situation with the lunar voyage. It’s a reminder that the regulatory moratorium expires in 2023. I continue to believe that it should have no expiration date, and should remain in place indefinitely, at least until there is a political consensus that regulation is required.
Elon’s Announcement
I didn’t see it, and I couldn’t view it on my notebook because Firefox can’t handle HTML5 (WTF?).
But from what I can glean from my Twitter feed, the plan to send a bunch of artists into space excited a lot of people on Twitter not normally excited about what SpaceX has been doing (we saw a similar effect with the FH launch of the Tesla and rocket man, though some who didn’t like that love this). Anyway, I’ve been saying all weekend, and told people at the conference today that I’d be very surprised if someone booked an entire BFR flight and didn’t take friends along. The other thing that seems clear is that the schedule is slipping (Commercial Crew has slipped from November to December for test flight, and from next April to “second quarter” for first crewed launch).
Only about 5% of SpaceX resources are going to BFR currently, but once development is done on Commercial Crew, that will increase dramatically, but a 2023 lunar mission means no Mars prior to that. His flight, given the amount of the down payment, will be the highest BFR priority. Here’s a link from Business Insider.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Here‘s Eric Berger’s take.
“The First”
Apparently the Hulu feature series about a mission to Mars fails to lift off. I’ve never been a Sean Penn fan.
Branding In Space
There seems to be a lot of concern in the science journalism community about Bridenstine’s potential proposal to allow sponsorship of missions:
Bridenstine’s proposal would set a dangerous precedent for NASA’s future. By suggesting that commercial partnerships could help fund NASA’s missions, it implies that the agency is not worth funding through the usual means—annual budgets carefully negotiated and ironed out by lawmakers. And their constituents believe that the space program is important; according to a study from the Pew Research Center in June, 72 percent of Americans say it’s essential for the United States to continue to be a world leader in space exploration. If Nike is ready and willing to drop millions of dollars to sponsor the next mission to Mars, why should lawmakers bother spending any taxpayer money on it? The world’s premier space agency shouldn’t have to resort to brand sponsorships in the absence of political will. And even if brands could float the first few years of a mission, they might not have the stomach for the years, or even decades it sometimes takes for NASA’s most ambitious missions to come to fruition. [Emphasis added]
There is a false assumption here that a) the purpose of NASA spending is “space exploration,” and that the negotiations and “ironing out” have much to do with “space exploration” as opposed to zip-code engineering. The sooner that we recognize that there is in fact an absence of political will, and accept that space exploration should be privatized, the way it was until the end of WW II, the sooner we’ll start to make more progress.
[Update a few minutes later]
More from Ken Chang.
Science In Academia
The Nutrition Scam
If you have forty minutes or so, watch Nina Teicholz.
Planting The American Flag On The Moon
Bob Zimmerman isn’t impressed with the Armstrong movie.
[Update late evening, before I drive up to West Palm Beach to pick up Patricia]
Some (sadly) hilarious thoughts and links from Jim Treacher.
[Sunday update]
OK, I see that Bob Zimmerman has had second thoughts.
I’m going to reserve judgment until I see the film. I think that the proximate cause of the uproar wasn’t the decision to leave out the flag planting, but the Canadian actor’s idiotic explanation of it. As I note in comments, the movie is a biopick of Neil Armstrong, not a history of Apollo, and his great achievement was not in planting a flag on the moon, but in simply being present on its surface.