Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Business, Economics, Entrepreneurship, Politics on Oct 17th, 2011
I was reading an interesting article the other day that had to do with the OWS movement giving some data on the background of the “top 1%” and the “top 0.5%”. Can’t say I agree with everything in this article, but it was still worth a read. What really stood out to me though was [...]
Posted in ITAR, Politics, Space Policy on Feb 16th, 2011
I know I’ve written about this topic before, but I think it’s worth bringing it up again. When you combine the stupidity of ITAR as it exists with the difficulty of getting even a green-card for your typical foreign engineering student studying in the US, you get a particularly pathetic situation. While they’re in school, [...]
Posted in NASA, Politics, Snark, Space Policy, SpaceX on Feb 1st, 2011
So, a group of rocket engineers starts making claims about how they’re going to revolutionize the industry and deliver a vehicle for far less than has been the traditional norm. When asked how they are going to do this, they talk about stuff like “vertical integration”, “keeping stuff simple”, using a “clean-sheet approach”, and “borrowing [...]
Posted in NASA, Politics, Snark, Space Policy on Apr 16th, 2010
I know I shouldn’t take anything Mark Whittington writes seriously, but I want to write about a stupid meme that smarter people than Mark have also been bandying about–that somehow Obama’s budget proposal would surrender our leadership in space to the Russians and Chinese. I’m going to dignify this silliness with an attempt at a [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Politics, Snark, SpaceX on Mar 2nd, 2010
I predict that regardless of the outcome of SpaceX’s inaugural Falcon 9 launch, nobody is going to change their opinion. If it’s successful, Ares-huggers will suddenly begin to understand the concept that a single successful flight doesn’t prove anything about a vehicle’s overall reliability (while most on the pro-commercial space guys will start sounding like [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, COTS, ESAS, International Space Collaboration, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, NEOs, Politics, Space Development, Space Policy on Dec 14th, 2009
Amid all the recent discussion of the Augustine Committee’s results, Mark Whittington asks a question that a lot of people in Congress seem to be asking: “Why not just pay for the current program since any new program is going to cost more money anyway?” To elaborate, the line of reasoning goes that if the [...]
…I know there’s sometimes some confusion about names, but I’m pretty sure NASA isn’t short for Northern Alabama Space Administration. Someone ought to point that out to our Mr. Shelby.
I was reading my RSS feeds tonight, when I stumbled on this article. I remember discussing this concept of cycles of history with both my mom, and my brother-in-law. Jame’s Delong’s description of the “Special Interest State” I think fits our current political climate very well (both Democrat and Republican). If you’re in for more [...]
Am I the only one who notices the eerie similarities between the debate over the current “stimulus” bill and the run-up to the Iraq War? The same drumbeat of propaganda coming from the press. The same repeated warnings of imminent disaster from some quarters–if we don’t give the government the emergency powers it needs to [...]
Posted in NASA, Politics, Space Policy on Jan 3rd, 2009
There was an interesting piece about foreign policy linked to by one of the blogs I read on a regular basis (can’t remember who now). The piece was talking about the delay between when changes to the global order happen, and when elites finally start recognizing that something has changed: Now… it seems to me [...]