John Weidner has a nice follow up to my recent rantings about the “rocks have rights” crowd.

For those who are wondering about Blogspot, no, it hasn’t really been down a thousand+ percent of the time in the past twenty four hours (I’m not quite sure what that would mean if it were true). I’m sure that it has something to do with a flaw in my algorithm that deals with the month change. If you view the actual log, you can see that it’s actually been doing pretty well for the past few days.

It’s not a problem–it’s an opportunity to debug!

[Update at 8:11 AM PDT]

Well, obviously it’s fixed now, though it must have been jarring to people who saw it earlier, when it was up to over thirteen hundred percent down time. The problem was that it was something that was hard to test without actually jiggering with the system clock, so I just had to wait until the end of the month to see how it worked. It obviously didn’t, but now it does. It was a stupid coding error. I’ll say no more.

The piece about space tourism on ATC that Instantman mentioned earlier is available on the web.

It was a pleasant surprise. They had some good quotes from Jeff Greason, the President of XCOR. They also mentioned the Space Access meeting in Phoenix this past weekend, a report on which I’ve still to write up. The only down note came from (I’m shocked, shocked) a NASA employee.

Roughly paraphrasing: “Space is just so hard, and so expensive, and so dangerous. Maybe someday, everyday people will be able to go, but that day’s a long way off, and in the meantime, we’ll take care of things for you, by sending a few of our elite astronauts up there for no obvious purpose, at a cost of billions of dollars per year, which you can enjoy vicariously, kinda like going down to the video store and renting sex flicks. After all, if just anyone could go, and it didn’t cost all that much, how would we justify our continuing existence?”

I didn’t see the original story, but according to these letters to the editor of Dawn, a woman was recently stoned to death in Pakistan for the crime of being raped. The two rapists walked, natch…

Do you think it’s possible that the UN could take a break from investigating imaginary war crimes in Israel to look into gender oppression and apartheid in the Islamic world?

No, me either…

Just in case there was any doubt in your mind about what a corrupt scumbag Gray Davis is, check out this story in the SacBee. It’s got everything–campaign donations, money-losing state contracts, political token appointments, Larry Ellison, and of course, good ol’ Grayout himself.

If this is covered adequately, even Le Pen should be able to beat Davis this fall. Unfortunately, Davis has put the fox in charge of the investigatory henhouse.

From SpaceRef:

NASA and aerospace industry representatives will announce results of the Space Launch Initiative’s first milestone review, which narrowed the field of potential technologies and architecture designs for our nation’s next reusable launch vehicle. NASA’s Space Launch Initiative is designing the next-generation space transportation system by first developing the technologies needed to ensure a safer, more reliable system that can be operated at a much lower cost.

If I could spare any, I’d be pulling my hair. I hope that this is just inertia, and it’s something that O’Keefe will fix when he’s got the ISS budget situation under control.

There should not be a “nation’s next reusable launch vehicle.” That was (in Hayek’s words) the fatal conceit of both the Shuttle and of the ill-fated X-33 program. NASA has to get out of the vehicle development business, and simply put incentives into place for private industry to develop new vehicles. If NASA is in charge, it will be doomed to failure, and if there is a single vehicle, it will be another Shuttle-like disaster from a cost standpoint, because it will once again be one-size-fits all, excelling at nothing.

We don’t need a new launch vehicle. We need a new launch industry. And the Space Launch Initiative, in anything resembling its current incarnation, should be strangled in the cradle.

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), chairman of the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, has introduced a bill offering prizes for amateur asteroid sightings. It’s done in honor of astronaut Pete Conrad (who was also a space entrepreneur, having founded Universal Space Lines, though the article doesn’t mention it).

I was confused about the prize, however:

The first category is an award for the amateur astronomer who discovers the largest asteroid crossing in near-Earth orbit…

How will they know when someone has won? There’s no way to tell that a larger one isn’t out there somewhere still awaiting discovery. There would have to be some kind of time limit on it (say, an annual award for the largest object found in a calendar year) for this to make any sense.

What I really like about this is that it sets a precedent for government-sponsored prizes, which could have a much larger impact on improving access to space than any number of NASA’s technology programs, if properly deployed.

Here’s a nice link for anyone who wants to check out some of the latest noseart in this war.

For contrast and comparison, here’s a link for the equivalent from WW II.

Arafat is already reneging on his agreement to turn over all the prisoners to U.S. custody.