Link here. It does appear that the problem was a design flaw in the third stage which they have now traced to the cause of two other previous Proton failures, one going back to 1988.
They will need to redesign things, and will announce a future launch timetable in June.
This article begins by focusing on the low GDP numbers that have plagued the Obama administration, but I think this fact is far more significant:
Under previous presidents, real GDP sometimes grew massively during the first quarter. In 1950, under Truman, for example, GDP grew at an annual rate of 16.9 percent in the first quarter. In 1955, under Eisenhower, it grew at a rate of 11.9 percent. Under Johnson, in the first quarters of both 1965 and 1966, it grew at a rate of 10.2 percent. Under Nixon, it grew at 11.1 percent in the first quarter of 1971, and 10.2 percent in the first quarter of 1973, it grew at 10.2 percent. Under Ford, in the first quarter of 1976, it grew at 9.3 percent. Under Reagan, in the first quarter of 1984, real GDP grew at a rate of 8.2 percent.
But since 1984—more than three decades ago–there has been no first quarter, in any year, under any president, when real GDP grew even as fast as 5.0 percent. The closest it came was in the first quarter of 2006, when George W. Bush was president, and it hit 4.9 percent.
Note the trend downward, from 16.9% to 11.9% to 10.2% to 11.1% to 10.2% to 9.3% to 8.2% to less than 5%. The only significant other dominant social change during this seven decade period has been the steady rise of the federal government and its crushing regulatory control over all aspects of American life and business, regardless of which party has been in power. We should therefore not be surprised that there has chronic decline in the U.S.’s economic might during this time period. You can’t create new wealth if everything you do is increasingly supervised by a centralized bureaucracy that knows nothing about your business — but thinks it does.
And obviously, the solution is bigger government. Yup, that’s the answer. Just ask the Soviet Union, or Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders!
Government marches on! The Defense Department has now admitted that the improper shipment of live anthrax samples was far more widespread than they originally told us.
“As of now, 24 laboratories in 11 states and two foreign countries are believed to have received suspect samples. We continue to work closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who is leading the ongoing investigation pursuit to its statutory authorities. The Department will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates to the public,” Defense Department said in a statement.
The Defense Department had previously reported labs in nine states and Osan Air Force Base in South Korea were impacted.
Words fail me.
Link here.
Despite a generation in which radical anti-crime policies such as enforcing the law and locking up criminals slashed murder rates, there’s still plenty of debate over whether anti-crime policies work.
But no one can argue over whether pro-crime policies work.
108 people were shot in New York, Baltimore and Chicago over the weekend. Many of the casualties were saved from that terrible “school-to-prison pipeline” that bedevils promising young crack dealers and instead went straight to the morgue.
Read it all. We went though this leftwing socialist policy disaster before in the 1960s and 1970s. Some cities, like Detroit, never abandoned it. It now appears the cities that did, like New York and Baltimore, are moving to try it again. Woe on those decent citizens that live there.
Then again, they voted for these policies, so I suppose they are getting the government they deserve.
An evening pause: For a long time I tried and failed to find an original performance of this song by Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys, but could never find it. Carrie Underwood, however, does a great Ronstadt imitation at Ronstadt’s 2014 induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Hat tip Danae.
The competition heats up: Airbus Safran have come to an agreement with the European Space Agency on building Ariane 6, Europe’s next commercial rocket.
The key part of the deal is that ESA and Arianespace will be ceding ownership of the rocket to Airbus Safran.
The French government is likely to approve the sale of CNES’s 34-percent stake in the Evry, France-based Arianespace launch service provider to Airbus Safran Launchers at about the same time as the Ariane 6 development contract is signed.
With that sale, Airbus Safran will control Arianespace, which means they will also own the rocket they are building for Arianespace. This is fundamentally different than the situation with Ariane 5, which Airbus built for an Arianespace owned and run by the many-headed ESA. The result was a bloated government-run operation that never made a profit.
Now Airbus will own it instead. They have already indicated that they will trim the costs at Arianespace. More importantly, with ownership will come the freedom to compete effectively in the much more competitive launch market created by the arrival of SpaceX. No need to get permission from ESA to do things.
The Russian investigation into the latest Proton rocket has concluded that the failure was caused by a design failure in the rocket’s third stage.
While it is always possible for new design issues to be discovered, I wonder why this problem hadn’t been noticed in the decades prior to 2010, when the Proton began to have repeated failures.
Rather than simply turn off the spacecraft when its funding runs out at the end of 2015, Rosetta’s science team have proposed that the mission get a nine month extension, during which they will slowly spiral into the comet and gently land.
Their proposal is similar to what American scientists did with their NEAR spacecraft, which hadn’t been designed to land on an asteroid but was successfully eased onto the surface of Eros, where it operated for a very short time.
The competition heats up? Virgin Galactic’s replacement SpaceShipTwo has successfully lowered its landing gear for the first time.
I wish them luck, but they will have to do a lot more before I will believe them when they say they are making progress.
Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare has forced doctors to increasingly replace medical care with administrative duties, much of which has been forced on them by the law’s requirement that they switch to electronic records.
The newly elected Barack Obama told the nation in 2009 that “[electronic records just won’t save billions of dollars”—$77 billion a year, promised the administration—“and thousands of jobs, it will save lives.” He then threw a cool $27 billion at going paperless by 2015.
It’s 2015, and what have we achieved? The $27 billion is gone, of course. The $77 billion in savings became a joke. Indeed, reported the Health and Human Services inspector general in 2014, “EHR technology can make it easier to commit fraud,” as in Medicare fraud, the copy-and-paste function allowing the instant filling of vast data fields, facilitating billing inflation.
That’s just the beginning of the losses. Consider the myriad small practices that, facing ruinous transition costs in equipment, software, training and time, have closed shop, gone bankrupt or been swallowed by larger entities. This hardly stays the long arm of the health care police, however. As of Jan. 1, 2015, if you haven’t gone electronic, your Medicare payments will be cut, by 1 percent this year, rising to 3 percent (potentially 5 percent) in subsequent years.
Then there is the toll on doctors’ time and patient care. One study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that emergency-room doctors spend 43 percent of their time entering electronic records information, 28 percent with patients. Another study found that family-practice physicians spend on average 48 minutes a day just entering clinical data.
Forget the numbers. Think just of your own doctor’s visits, of how much less listening, examining, even eye contact goes on, given the need for scrolling, clicking and box checking.
The last point is absolutely true. I have found that with most doctors today, they spend most of my visit working their computer than looking at me. It is very bad medicine, which is why my best doctors refuse to do it. Either they have an assistant do it for them (raising costs of course) or they wait until the visit is over (which of course eats into the time available to see patients).
But who are we to argue with Obama and the Democrats? As well-meaning liberals, they know best and everyone else should just shut up and obey their orders.
Link here. She was attacked and subjected to significant legal harassment, merely because she wrote an op-ed on sexual politics on campus, and some people didn’t like her opinion. They then used the badly written Title IX law, passed in 1972 by Congress to “deal with gender discrimination in public education”, to get her, and her supporters, charged and interrogated repeatedly by lawyers.
Her accusers were allowed to remain anonymous. She was denied the right to use a lawyer. The specific charges against her were never provided in writing. And they were apparently based merely on the fact that her op-ed offended her accusers.
Read it all. Since the attacks against her were instigated by the students, who represent our future, this story will give you a good sense of where our society is heading. And it ain’t paradise.
Does this make you feel safer? The Department of Defense [DOD] has admitted it mistakenly shipped live anthrax spores to nine laboratories that are unequipped to handle them.
The facilities that received the samples did not have systems in place to protect lab employees against anthrax exposure because they were expecting to receive spores that had been killed with radiation. It is not clear how many people were actually exposed. The DOD says that 22 people in South Korea are getting preventive treatment, but it has not confirmed how many people in the United States are being treated.
The failure here was not just with the DOD. The labs that accepted the samples are also at fault.
