Space

Shuttle-Derived Wet Dreams

Ed Kyle has an overview of Mike Griffin’s plans for a Shuttle-derived launch architecture.

I think that it’s a mistake to maintain the expensive Shuttle infrastructure, and an even bigger one to make the president’s vision dependent on heavy lift vehicles, particularly when there’s only one type, with no resiliency. But as Ed points out, politically, there are a lot of influential congresscritters with Shuttle employees in their districts, so pork may rule the day once again.

Political Commentary

More Bias At Google?

They seem to be quite selective about what they find “offensive”:

…while ads for the anti-Clinton book — which featured images of the book’s cover and pictures of the former first couple — were deemed offensive, the company continues to run ads for overtly liberal advertisers with headlines such as “Hate Bush? So Do We,” and “George W. Bush f@rt doll.”

I’m sure it has nothing to do with this, though:

…98 percent of all political donations by Google employees went to support Democrats.

CEO Eric Schmidt gave the maximum legal limit of donations to Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry and to primary candidate Howard Dean.

Schmidt also contributed the maximum amount to Sen. Clinton, whose role in helping her husband intimidate his female accusers is addressed in the new book.

I think I may switch to Teoma.

General

More Eurowoes

I haven’t previously commented much about it, but it’s been clear for a while that after years of losing market share to them, Boeing now has Airbus on the ropes, and even Der Spiegel is admitting it now. I think that the 380 will turn out to be a disaster for them. Of course, Boeing has to watch their back, as some of the regional jet manufacturers, like Bombardier and Embraer start grabbing market share from their smaller planes for point to point. That’s a good thing, of course, since it will restore some competition to the market that was lost when Lockheed got out of the commercial business and Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas.

Space

Let The Tumbrels Roll

Jeff Foust asks, with regard to Griffin’s reorganization:

At what point does the standard reorganization of officials during a change of leadership become something more like a purge?

I’m not sure exactly where that point is, but it seems pretty clear to me from this WaPo article that, though they don’t use the word, we’re well beyond it.

As I’ve said before, Dr. Griffin is either going to be a spectacular success, or a spectacular failure, but either way, he’s going to do it his way. As the article points out, he’s been thinking about these issues for a long time. If I were in his position, I’d do a pretty thorough housecleaning as well, but I wouldn’t necessarily bring in all of the same people that he will.

[Update in the afternoon]

Via Keith Cowing, here’s a Slashdot discussion of this.

[Another update at 3 PM]

Thomas James says that Griffin is being Machiavellian. He means that in a good way, of course.

Space

False Choices

Jeff Foust points out a couple of editorials in the DC Examiner that set up the false choice of manned exploration versus, well, other stuff. In the one case, it’s earth sciences, though why this is NASA’s job (as opposed to, say, NOAA or NSF) isn’t said.

And both point out the continuing need for resolving my pet peeve, that we have still not had a national debate on why NASA even exists. Until we can develop some kind of consensus on why we have a government-funded space program, and particularly a manned one, we’ll continue have these pointless discussions. As it is now, the purpose is vague and chameleon like, allowing proponents of pork and hobby shops to continue to proliferate.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!