These Arab nations had for decades made it policy to hold all Mediterranean shipping hostage, demanding tribute from everyone or else they would attack ships, steal their goods, and either enslave their crew and passengers or hold them for ransom. The European nations paid, endlessly, rather than fight. The U.S. initially paid, but by 1800 and the election of Jefferson as president, it was tired of paying — especially because the payments were never enough to stop the raiding, nor were they enough to free those already captured and enslaved. When the ruler of Tripoli declared war against the U.S., Jefferson was glad to oblige.

The war that followed was the first in which American troops fought on foreign soil and planted the American flag in victory. It was also the first in which joint operations by American naval and land forces led to that victory. And finally, it was the first battle for the U.S. Marines, thus establishing firmly that branch of the military.

The two books to the right tell this story most effectively, but in very different ways.

First there is The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the first Marines, and the secret mission of 1805 by Richard Zacks. Published in 2005, it is a very rich and well-researched work, while being remarkably readable because it tells the story from the point of view of the individuals involved. There is much triumph and tragedy in this story, and Zacks captures both.

Then we have Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates, written by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger and published ten years later in 2015. Unlike Zacks’ book, it does not delve as deeply into the lives of the many players, Instead, it is a fast-reading short but very thorough overview of this war.

Both books are worth reading, though The Pirate Coast is the better history. I strongly recommend you read both, however, beginning with the Kilmeade/Yaeger book.

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates is perfect introduction for educating you quickly on what happened and why. You then can follow-up with The Pirate Coast to get the deeper background. And trust me, that background is worth every second of your time. The story of William Eaton and his effort — with government approval — to bring an Arab/Greek mercenary army from Egypt across the African desert to conquer Tripoli and install a new ruler there is the stuff of movies.

In fact, it astonishes me that no Hollywood producer has ever made a film about it. It is as epic as Lawrence of Arabia, and just as compelling. Maybe more so, as it tells an American story that is foundational to our history.

And the story both books tell of this 19th century war is remarkably pertinent to modern 21st century events, which is another reason to read both. In the prologue of Kilmeade/Yaeger book the authors describe the first meeting of Jefferson and John Adams with Tripoli’s ambassador to Great Britain in London, Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. Both tried their best to convince the envoy that his government’s best policy would be to stop the piracy and instead allow open trade with America. Both were horrified however by his response:

Adams asked how the Barbary states could justify “[making] war upon nations who had done them no injury.” The response was nothing less than chilling.

According to his holy book, the Qur’an, Abdrahaman explained, “all nations which had not acknowledge the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.”

…Abdrahaman refused to play the role of “benevolent and wise man.” Despite the Americans’ horror, he wasn’t apologizing in any way. He showed no remorse or regret. He believed the actions of his fellow Muslims fully justified. “Every mussulman,” he explained, “who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise.”

To Abdrahaman, this was not complicated. In his culture, the takers of ships, the enslavers of men, the barbarians who extorted bribes for safe passage, were all justified by the teaching of the prophet Muhammad. “It was written in our Qur’an,” he said simply.

Sound familiar? It appears little has changed in the Muslim world after more than two centuries. This is the identical attitude of the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran today, based on their holy book and the warlike power-based approach to religion that Muhammad advocated. Just as in 1800s Muhammad’s words encouraged piracy and slavery, his words now drive an endless cycle of genocidal acts, against Jews and Christians worldwide, merely for being Jews and Christians.

At the end of this book there was another equally telling quote:

America had stood up to the pirates, something that most of the more established European nations hadn’t been willing to do. … In prevailing off the Barbary Coast, the United States proved that it would not only go to war for its own interests but would do what it could for oppressed citizens of other nations.

Once again, after two centuries, nothing has changed. For decades Europe was harassed by the Barbary pirates and did nothing but try to buy them off — with mixed and usually poor results. It took a new nation from the opposite side of the globe to finally clean up the situation. When America finally ended the war in 1815 the piracy was over as well, with every nation now free to enjoy safe travel in the Mediterranean for the next two centuries.

In the 21st century the Barbary Coast returned, this time in the guise of the Islamic Republic in Iran. And as in the 19th century, Europe sits with folded hands, letting the U.S. do the dirty work, despite the reality that Europe has far more to lose than we do if Iran remains emboldened and powerful. They are far more dependent on Middle East oil than we are.

What lesson can we derive from this? I think the lessons are obvious, for those with the intellectual honesty to see. Islam is fundamentally a dangerous ideology. Europe is unreliable and foolish. And America remains the hope and glory for the future, because at its base it was created to defend the right of every human to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The countdown for the launch of the 10-day Artemis-2 manned mission around the Moon continues, with the launch scheduled for 6:24 pm (Eastern) today.

For updates from NASA, go here. So far all is proceeding as planned. A step-by-step outline of the countdown itself can be found here.

A day-by-day detailed description of the planned mission can be found here. For the first day the crew will remain in Earth orbit in order to test the operation of their Orion capsule. To reiterate, the capsule’s life support system has not been flown in space previously, so this first day is critical. If there are any issues, the astronauts are still close to Earth and can return relatively quickly.

If no problems are detected during that first day, on day two the crew will fire the spacecraft’s engines and head to the Moon. At that point everything must function as planned for nine days as they travel out to the Moon, swing around it without going into orbit, and head back to Earth.

The return to Earth remains the most dangerous moment for this flight. During the 2022 unmanned test flight around the Moon, the heat shield design on Orion did not work as planned, with chunks breaking off in a manner that was unexpected and very concerning. NASA spent two years contemplating the issue, and decided to live with the same heat shield design for this mission, since replacing the shield would have delayed the launch at minimum two years. It has adjusted the return flight path in a way it thinks will mitigate the problem. As its engineers are only guessing at what caused the issue and could be wrong — having done no real life tests — we will not know if they are right until Orion splashes down.

We must pray that they are right.

I have embedded NASA’s live stream below.

At a hearing yesterday before the space subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, both the trade organization representing the five commercial space station projects as well as some members of Congress expressed strong reservations about NASA’s new plan to build a core module as a basis for helping these companies develop their space stations.

Dave Cavossa, President of the Commercial Space Federation (CSF) that represents these companies, outlined in his statement [pdf] to the committee the industry’s dissatisfaction, not so much because of the specifics of NASA’s plan but because it follows other sudden changes last year by the previous NASA administrator Sean Duffy, and is still uncertain in its outline.

Given the delays and possible shifts in strategy, industry has been left to continue spending resources to develop private space stations without a full understanding of what NASA will require from a private station, how the agency will structure the rest of the procurement and program, and when industry may see a return on investment. This uncertainty challenges the public-private partnership business model and puts the agency at risk of deorbiting ISS before private stations are operational.

The trade group proposed that NASA stick with its previous plan to fund two or more station projects, dropping Isaacman’s core module proposal. It also wanted Congress give the agency the funds to do so.

Cavossa also strongly disputed NASA’s claim that the market at present doesn’t support these commercial stations.

Cavassa said today that “industry has raised over a billion dollars in private capital” in the last six months and “several billions of dollars over the last several years.” Some of his member companies have said they’ve already sold out the available rack space on their space stations. NASA’s rationales are “flawed” and the repeated changes are “sowing confusion” in the industry reminiscent of Lucy and the Football.

Nor is Cavassa’s claim about private capital wrong. Of the five space stations under development, most have obtained investment capital exceeding several hundred million dollars, with two raising more than half a billion dollars. NASA might think the market isn’t there, but Wall Street sure seems enthused.

Of those five projects, Vast has expressed support for NASA’s new approach, while the Starlab consortium issued a press release that wholly supported NASA’s new Moon program but seemed to be less enthused about its station proposals. Another news report yesterday further suggests Axiom and Starlab are skeptical.

Two of the station builders, Axiom Space of Texas and Colorado-based Starlab Space, told me by email they are still reviewing NASA’s request for input about the alternative strategy, which was released Wednesday morning.

During the hearing at least one congressman, George Whitesides (D-California) expressed doubt about NASA’s new space station plan.

My experience with new pieces of the ISS is that it takes 10 years to build. I don’t get how, where, we’re going to get this new thing. And doesn’t that [timeframe] go beyond the lifetime of the ISS? … I just don’t see how it’s fiscally possible for NASA to afford the development and launch of a custom-built government core module, while maintaining ISS, while claiming at the same time it can’t afford to be a customer on a commercial station that is being privately financed. I just don’t understand it.

When NASA announced its new proposals last week, agency officials made it clear their core module proposal was preliminary, and that they welcomed input from the space station companies. It now appears the political winds might be moving against that core module proposal.

The Moon

NASA will now focus all work in its lunar program on getting to the surface of the Moon. Lunar Gateway is “paused,” though the language of NASA’s press release suggests more strongly that it is dead, with the agency already trying to figure out ways to “repurpose” its already built components. NASA will instead ask for proposals from private industry and its international Artemis partners to ramp up as soon as possible a phased program to establish the infrastructure on the Moon needed for the lunar base. This new focus begins with “up to 30 robotic landings in three years, starting in 2027,” and at least two manned landings per year beginning in 2028.

The graph below, presented during today’s announcement, shows the basic plan for the next few Artemis missions, which will act as the manned foundation for this entire surface-focused program. The overall program will build out the lunar base in three phases, first to test some basic infrastructure using these smaller lunar landers, second to begin establishing the base’s foundational components with intermittent manned missions, and third to begin long-term human occupancy.

The manned missions above are scheduled through ’28. For the three-phase program to build that lunar base the agency hopes to reach its third phase by 2033. And while it states it wants to work with its international partners in doing this work, it will mostly depend on the American private sector to come up with ways to achieve it.

In many ways the timeline for this program resembles an Elon Musk timeline. The overall plan makes great sense, but it will likely take longer than anticipated to achieve. Its greatest virtue however is that it is properly focused on the Moon. Gone is NASA’s ridiculous Lunar Gateway, that only served to slow development on the Moon as well as making it harder to get there. It also appears the plan is designed to phase out SLS as soon as possible, shifting to relying on privately-owned rockets instead.

Most important, the program is structured logically, building upward from small first efforts to increasingly greater challenges, something that NASA management before Isaacman did not do.

Building a replacement for ISS

The program to replace ISS is being restructured for two reasons. 1. NASA doesn’t have the funds to fund two private stations in a manner the agency considers sufficient or safe. It says its present budget is about $250 million per year. The agency also does not think there is enough commercial market to make up the difference.

To overcome this shortfall as well as fuel a private space station industry, the agency is considering a different approach. Rather than award a single insufficient contract to a private company to build a new station, it is proposing launching what it calls a new government-owned “core module” to attach initially to ISS, and later become the hub for multiple private modules. It would have six docking ports to allow more commercial tourist missions to the station as well as the later attachment of new commercial modules. Once this core module has grown enough, it would later separate from ISS when the station is retired, and serve as a core to help generate the development of one or multiple commercial separate stations.

The graphic below, from today’s presentation, shows this step-by-step process.

In many ways, it appears NASA is copying Axiom’s plan for its space station. Whether this supplants or supplements Axiom remains unknown. It is also very likely Axiom could quickly revise its station design to grab the contract for this core stage, as proposed.

The basic concept, however, is to provide a more cost effective way for NASA to build a foundational hub to help multiple private space station companies develop and build their own stations, with NASA as a major customer to all. And once again, this approach is aimed at encouraging a private sector, not building a giant NASA project. In this more than anything else the plan appears to be good news for the future of the American space industry.

Mars

NASA is proposing a new Mars mission, dubbed Space Reactor-1 Freedom, using nuclear propulsion to carry a fleet of Ingenuity-class helicopters to the Red Planet, with the goal of launching this mission by the end of 2028.

Of all the proposals announced today, this one project appears the least connected to the private sector. The nuclear engine is being built by a partnership of NASA and the Energy Department. The helicopter fleet appears to be basically Ingenuity multiplied, something that NASA can do on its own.

Only the ship itself, carrying the engine and the helicopters, could come from the private sector, with SpaceX’s Starship the prime candidate.

Thus, as a mostly government run project, I believe it will be the least likely to happen, as promised. That Isaacman seems personally committed to it, however, says my pessimistic prediction will be wrong.

Final thoughts

Overall, these program changes appear sensible and more realistic than any major NASA manned program in decades. Though it does appear to want to elevate NASA’s status across the entire landscape of American space exploration, it also does so by relying mostly on the private sector to get the job done. And it lays out a rational manned program for both low Earth orbit as well as the Moon.

There is one dangerous caveat to this logical program. NASA is still going to send four astronauts on a ten-day around the Moon in just a few weeks, using a Orion capsule with a questionable heat shield and a untested life support system. That mission remains irrational and out of place, an apparently leftover from NASA’s previous management that planned nothing in a sensible way.

If it fails and those astronauts die, it is very unclear what impact that will have Isaascman’s entire program as announced today.

I just finished one of the best histories I have ever read, and want to recommend enthusiastically to my readers. It is called Witness to Gettysburg, and was written by Richard Wheeler. My version was the 1987 edition, but a new edition was published in 2021.

Why was it so good? To understand this we need to look at the nature of the material historians use to construct their work. Some of this source material is more important than others. In the case of Wheeler’s book, he used the best material in the most vivid way possible, and put aside other materials that could have distracted from the story.

In writing my own histories of space exploration in the 20th century, I quickly learned there were two types of sources I needed to depend on. First there are what historians call original or primary sources. These are the testimonies of the actual participants, the individuals who actually did the deed and thus knew better than anyone what really happened. In the case of space, astronauts, their families, and the engineers and managers of NASA at the time made up this group.

Primary sources can also include others who were not actually participants but lived at the time and witnessed the events as they occurred. For example, news articles written by reporters as events unfolded fall into this group. So can the historian himself, if he or she was alive during those events. In the case of my own books, that made me this kind of primary source. I was alive when the space age began, and saw it unfold in real time, with my own eyes.

Any history that does not rely on these original sources, or gives them short shrift, should not be taken seriously.

Next come secondary sources, books and academic articles written after the fact by historians, economists, sociologists, or researchers from any number of academic fields. Such works are of great value for any historian, as they can give you a wider context and alternative interpretations of the long term consequences of what happened. They can also be invaluable for tracking down more original sources.

There is however a danger if you rely too much on these secondary sources. Often academics begin treating their analysis of events as more important than that of the primary sources, even though they weren’t there and only know of the events secondhand. When I got my masters degree in early colonial history in the 1990s I discovered this tendency to be a very big problem in academia. My history teachers wanted me to learn early colonial history from what past historians thought about it. I wanted to learn that history from the people who lived it. My teachers didn’t like that, and constantly challenged my conclusions because I was contradicting those other historians. I countered that I had read the original sources, and discovered those other historians were simply wrong.

In the end, I found I actually knew more about that history than my teachers, as they were seeped in arguing the analysis of their compatriots rather than studying the real data.

Now, back to Wheeler’s book, which focuses entirely on the battle of Gettysburg, from the moment Robert E. Lee began his invasion north to the end of the battle when he was retreating in defeat.

What made this book so good is Wheeler’s approach. To quote him in his introduction:

Witness to Gettysburg attempts something new: a telling of the story, in terms both historical and human, as largely as possible in the words of the participants, both military and civilian, both male and female.

In other words, Wheeler let the people who fought or witnessed the battle to tell the story. As much as possible, he relied on primary sources, while he stayed in the background and only inserted himself in order to clarify the context of each quote, or provide detailed maps to make the topography of the battle more easily understood.

Red indicate Confederate forces, blue the Union

The result is a vivid and very powerful and clear recreation of the battle. Wheeler is aided by the fact that Americans in the mid-1800s were not only very literate, they wrote a lot of letters and memoirs describing these events. In a sense, their writings were the equivalent of our smart phones today. Rather than lifting their camera to record what happened so that others would have multiple videos of the event, they each sat down and wrote their perspective, almost always immediately afterward. The result is that we can see Gettysburg as it unfolded from many points of view, of Union and Confederate soldiers as well as the civilians caught up in these events.

In reading a history of this kind you also get a more personal sense of the time and place. For example, the civilized behavior of both warring sides to civilians and their opponents is quite startling. Lee’s invading army treated the Pennsylvanian civilians it surrounded with diffidence and respect, even allowing them to express openly their opposition to the rebellion. Civilians were not combatants, and were to be treated kindly. And while both armies were unwavering in their desire to win by killing as many soldiers as possible, both treated the wounded and their captured prisoners decently. The wounded for example were all helped by both sides, no matter which army they came from.

In the end however Wheeler’s book makes it clear who the good guys were in this war. Before Lee’s arrival in Gettysburg the town had a small population of free black citizens, treated decently and as equals by the white population. When the Confederates arrived those blacks were rounded up to be taken back to the south as slaves. It didn’t matter they were free Americans. They were black, and the southerns automatically considered them inferior and destined to be slaves forever.

And we learn this from their own words.

It is also clear in reading Witness to Gettysburg how badly General Lee managed the battle. His choices during the engagement were routinely bad. His subordinate General James Longstreet kept trying to tell him his head-on-attack tactic was a mistake, that a flanking move would be more effective, but Lee would not listen. In the end Lee destroyed his army with no gain, and had to flee back to Virginia in defeat.

Once again, it is essential if you want to understand the past to read the perspective the people who lived it. Sadly our modern universities no longer demand this, and so we now have several generations of college-educated students who really only know the past through the cartoon ideologies of their teachers and the academics these teachers admire.

Wheeler’s book is a great way to counter that shallow education, and to get that more humane perspective of our country’s past.

I close today our week-long tour of Voyager-2’s fly-by of Uranus in January 1986 with three cool images, the two images of the planet itself above and a close-up of its rings. All three illustrate that though Voyager-2 gave us our first very good first close-up view of this distant world, it also gave us only a tiny glimpse, very superficial and lacking in any larger context.

The two images above were taken on January 17, 1986 when Voyager 2 was till 5.7 million miles away, on approach.

The picture at left has been processed to show Uranus as human eyes would see it from the vantage point of the spacecraft. The picture is a composite of images taken through blue, green and orange filters. The darker shadings at the upper right of the disk correspond to the day-night boundary on the planet. Beyond this boundary lies the hidden northern hemisphere of Uranus, which currently remains in total darkness as the planet rotates. The blue-green color results from the absorption of red light by methane gas in Uranus’ deep, cold and remarkably clear atmosphere.

The picture at right uses false color and extreme contrast enhancement to bring out subtle details in the polar region of Uranus. Images obtained through ultraviolet, violet and orange filters were respectively converted to the same blue, green and red colors used to produce the picture at left. The very slight contrasts visible in true color are greatly exaggerated here. In this false-color picture, Uranus reveals a dark polar hood surrounded by a series of progressively lighter concentric bands. One possible explanation is that a brownish haze or smog, concentrated over the pole, is arranged into bands by zonal motions of the upper atmosphere. The bright orange and yellow strip at the lower edge of the planet’s limb is an artifact of the image enhancement. In fact, the limb is dark and uniform in color around the planet.

The third cool image below of Uranus’s rings was taken just after the closest approach, when Voyager-2 was in Uranus’s shadow and looking back at its rings from a distance of 142,000 miles.

Click for original image.

From the caption:

All the previously known rings are visible here; However, some of the brightest features in the image are bright dust lanes not previously seen. The combination of this unique geometry and a long, 96 second exposure allowed this spectacular observation, acquired through the clear filter of Voyager’s wide-angle camera. The long exposure produced a noticeable, non-uniform smear as well as streaks due to trailed stars.

The total number of observations of these rings, by both Voyager-2 and other ground- and space-based telescopes, is quite few. Similarly, in the forty years since Voyager-2 scientists have used the Hubble Space Telescope and more recently the Webb Space Telescope to get more data of the planet, its moons, and its rings, but generally that data is poor or very limited. We are simply too far away to see what’s happening on Uranus with any clarity or understanding.

As for the planet’s moons, this later research has so far found 29, but other than the five largest that I have highlighted in the past week (see here, here, here, here, and here), we know little else about them. They are mere dots on images.

Yet, for us to really understand the formation of our solar system, and how the Earth got to be the life-filled planet it is, we need to map in close detail our entire solar system. Right now, however, our map is comparable to that of the New World in the half century after Columbus, filled with blank spots and guesses.

We simply don’t know very much. Worse, it appears to me we often think we know more than we do.

In the past two years a number of space startups as well as established companies have shifted their work focus from getting NASA or commercial contracts to pursuing projects from the War Department.

The best example of this has been Sierra Space, which until three years ago was entirely focused on building a Dream Chaser reusable mini-shuttle to bring cargo to and from ISS, as well as partnering with Blue Origin to build their proposed Orbital Reef space station.

Then, in late 2023 the company underwent a major management and staffing shake-up aimed at winning military and national security contracts. At the same time work on its LIFE inflatable module — intended for Orbital Reef — practically ceased, while the effort to get Dream Chaser finished seemed to slow to a crawl, eventually causing NASA to drop it as an ISS cargo vehicle.

Sierra Space however is only one example. During this time Rocket Lab shifted its focus somewhat to the military in developing HASTE, its suborbital test version of its Electron rocket, in order to win substantial hypersonic test contracts from the Pentagon. And then there’s Tory Bruno, who quit his job as CEO of the rocket company ULA to take a job at Blue Origin heading a national security team aimed at winning that company military contracts.

So what has caused this shift? Has investment in the civil space industry dried up?

Hardly. The number of rocket startups continues to grow, fueled by the many new and established satellite companies planning constellations of tens of thousands to millions of satellites as well as the orbiting manufacturing possibilities presented by the five space stations under development. There is a lot of investment capital pouring into these efforts

The reason for this shift — which really isn’t so much a shift but a new focus that many companies are adding to their portfolio — is provided by an article today in Air & Space Forces Magazine, describing the War Department’s recent decision to add $10 billion to the budget of its Golden Dome project, raising it to $185 billion, while noting this:

The Pentagon envisions Golden Dome as a vast network of sensors, satellites, and interceptors designed to protect the United States from missile threats. During a White House briefing last May, President Donald Trump—who has championed Golden Dome as a signature defense project since the start of his second term—said the program would cost $175 billion and would field an initial capability by 2028.

Since then, some analysts have released estimates that are much higher. Todd Harrison from the American Enterprise Institute has projected costs ranging anywhere from $250 billion to $2.4 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the cost at $542 billion. The cost of widespread space-based interceptors in particular is seen as likely to be high.

A new gold rush, in space

To put this bluntly, the space industry heard these numbers and immediately responded like the 49’ers during the 1850s gold rush: “Thar’s gold in dem hills!”

Nothing I am noting here is breaking news. It has been obvious within the space industry now for more than a year. I just decided it was important to document these facts here on Behind the Black, so that my readers would have the larger context of what is happening in the industry.

While at first this shift appears as if it is going to hurt the commercial side of this industry, that is a short-sighted view. Every technological development and contract won for the military will help fuel the work in commercial areas. We should see strong growth across the entire industry, making the establishment of lunar and Mars colonies easier, not harder.

All of this assumes of course that the U.S. doesn’t go bankrupt due to the ungodly debt being created by this kind of federal spending. It also assumes the Democrats won’t regain power, shutting it all down to spend money instead on aiding the worst sort of Muslim terrorists, allowing unlimited immigration from those terrorist nations, funding the queer agenda, and finally working to establish of a new Soviet nation, here in the United States — all goals that Democrats in the past two years have publicly, aggressively, and repeatedly announced as their ambition.

Stay tuned. The next few years should be very very interesting.

FCC chairman Brendan Carr this week didn’t simply make a public statement yesterday against Amazon, as I reported earlier today. The day earlier, on March 10th, he did an hour-long interview with Breibart News, providing a more complete summary of the FCC’s overall agenda since the change of administrations from Joe Biden to Donald Trump.

You can watch that interview here. To put it mildly, the shift in policy and approach at the FCC is significant, and appears to be generally moving in the right direction.

To understand the context, we need to first review the FCC’s approach during the Biden administration. My regular readers will remember the many stories during that time describing the FCC’s aggressive effort to expand its regulatory power, in many cases in areas completely exceeding its fundamental statutory authority. For example, it proposed new regulations designed to tell satellite companies how and when to de-orbit their satellites. It also wanted to its own bureaucracy for imposing those regulations, and went ahead and created it without any congressional approval. It also under Biden attempted to limit satellite operations that the astronomy community opposed, an action that was once again outside its statute authority.

Overall, the goal of the FCC under Biden was to expand the power of the administrative state, in as many areas as possible. And though there was push back from Congress, as long as a Democrat was president it was clear that this power-grab was going to grow exponentially.

After the 2024 election, however a Democrat was no longer president. Trump quickly moved in 2025 to squash the FCC’s power grab, with a stated public goal to instead streamline FCC regulations and speed license approvals.

Carr’s interview earlier this week essentially gave us an update on that Trump policy, and it appears this new anti-regulatory policy is moving forward, with a goal to eliminate ten regulations for every one regulation added. According to Carr:

We’ve gone through the FCC Code of Federal Regulations, which is our rule book. … We took each component of it and went to all the bureaus and offices, and we had everyone go through it page by page: which rule is outdated, which rule can we get rid of, which rule can we cut in half?

So far, we’ve gotten rid of, I think, just over 1,000 regulations. I think it’s 130,000 words that have been cut—300 pages that have been reduced from this Code of Federal Regulations. We’re just going to keep going to get rid of outdated, unnecessary regulations.

We’ve also taken a look at what we call dormant dockets—proceedings the FCC started and left open that create a regulatory overhang. We’ve closed, I think, something like 2,000 separate inactive proceedings at this point.

It’s one of our most productive efforts. We’re ahead of schedule on the 10-to-1 regulation requirement from the administration, where you get rid of 10 regulations for every one that you do.

This is the opposite of what was done under Biden and what was expected from Kamala Harris had she won the election. And this streamlining can only have a positive effect on the satellite and communications industry, as it will ease the burdens faced by both old and new companies.

We must still ask if this is Trump’s FCC: “Nice business
you got here. Shame if something happened to it.”

Not all is sunshine however. During this interview Carr did indicate several areas where the FCC under Trump is aggressively applying its power, though that effort seems more appropriate to the commission’s specific purpose. The FCC is working to force companies to locate their customer service call centers in the U.S. It is trying to limit robo-calls, and eliminate those that are scams. It wants to make broadcast sports events more readily available to the public, even if the owners of those events wish to do otherwise.

And it has already banned foreign-built drones from the U.S. If you want to get a license to sell a drone in the U.S., you have to build it here.

These new regulations should certainly be questioned, because anytime you give government bureaucrats power in any area there is the risk they will overuse those powers. At the same time, these Trump-era FCC policies do seem more focused towards helping American business and its citizenry. Rather than limit what Americans can do, these policies appear designed to help them, while working to limit the actions of the bad actors.

The trend is positive, but only time will tell whether it produces healthy fruit or dies on the vine.

In just a few months we will be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That signing occurred because a little over a year previously a troop of British soldiers went into the heart of Massachusetts to seize weapons and ammunition that the British government did not want Americans to possess, and ended up getting involved in a firefight with the local militia in the town of Lexington, what became known as “the shot heard round the world. That shot started the American Revolution, and eventually forced the members of the Continental Congress to declare their independence from that British government.

As with all history, though that firefight sparked vast changes in politics, history, and culture across the globe and across centuries, the event itself was the act of just one or a few individuals, in a specific moment and place, under very specific circumstances created by those greater movements of politics, history, and culture.

One man fired the gun. A few others fired back. And then a war started.

But who was that man?

In one of the best histories I have ever read, historian David Hackett Fischer attempts to answer this question. His 1994 book, Paul Revere’s Ride, centers the story on Paul Revere and that man’s actions to warn the citizens throughout Concord and Lexington of the British invasion, so that they could be prepared to fight, if necessary.

Along the way Fischer produces a vivid, page-turner, based on the innumerable memoirs and letters and reports made by the people involved. For you see, the Americans who lived in Massachusetts at that time were among the most educated in the world, with almost 100% literacy and a strong passion to document everything they did or saw. In turn, the British military officers were equally educated, and were required to provide their own perspective describing in detail what happened.

Fischer takes full advantage of this very complete record, which made it possible for him to tell the story of almost every participant, in a human and very personal way. Thus, as you read his book it actually feels like you are on our modern social media, where everyone takes out a smart phone to record what’s happening, thus providing us all with many different perspectives of the same event. Only here those perspectives come from the written word, penned with thoughtful attention and a passionate dedication to telling the truth, as each person saw it.

Fischer however doesn’t just focus on that one moment. His book very carefully provides the greater context, both before and after. And he does so again from the very personal perspective of the individuals involved. You not only learn the history, you find out about the actual people who made it.

I repeat, if you want to know what happened on April 19, 1775, as we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary, you must read this book. I should add that Fischer himself should be more widely known. His work is always accurate and amazingly readable. More important, he tries always to focus on the human story, rather than on the larger social forces (such as economics or the clash of nations) that too many modern historians seem so enamored by.

As for that central moment, it turns out the facts are sadly not so simple to determine. As Fischer carefully documents, every witness gives a different answer. While most participants thought a British officer fired first, those witnesses give contradictory testimony. Some even believed the shot came from some nearby American spectators. As Fischer notes:

What probably happened was this: several shots were fired close together–one by a mounted British officer, and another by an American spectator. Men on both sides were sure they heard more than one weapon go off; men on each side were watching only their opponents. If there were several shots at about the same time then all spoke the truth as they saw it, but few were able to see the entire field.

It is possible that one of these first shots was fired delibrately, either from an emotion of the moment, or a cold-blooded intention to create a incident. More likely, there was an accident. Firearms seemed to have a mind of their own in the 18th century. Only a few years earlier, such an accident happened at a military review of the 71st Foot in Edinburgh, “some of the men’s pieces going off as they were presented.” Many weapons at Lexington, both British and American, were worn and defective. An accident may well have occurred on either side. If so, it was an accident that had been waiting to happen.

We shall never know who fired the first at Lexington, or why. But everyone on the Common saw what happened next. The British infantry heard the shots, and began to fire without orders. Their officers could not control them.

What that day wrought.

Prior to that first shot the British had ordered the American Minutemen who had gathered on the Common to throw down their weapons and disperse. And while they did not give up their weapons, their commander did order them to disperse, to not fire. Thus, when the British began firing indiscriminately they ended up killing a good number of those Minutemen.

The initial consequence? The Minutemen now organized an armed resistance, making the retreat of those British troops back to Boston a nightmare journey, killing many.

The larger consequence? The start of the American Revolution, and the birth of a new nation, dedicated to the then very radical idea that a government could be of the people, by the people, for the people, and be dedicated to the even more radical idea of providing those people the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I pay even less attention to authorization bills that have only been approved by a committee, and have not yet been voted on by either house. Such bills are ephemeral and the stuff of fantasy. It is nice to know what’s in them, but until such bills are actually approved by both houses of Congress and signed by the president, their language is even more unworthy of serious attention.

Have the pigs in the Senate learned to stop gorging themselves?

Nonetheless, the NASA authorization bill that was just approved by the Senate Commerce committee is worth reviewing, but not for the reasons that has interested the rest of the mainstream and even the aerospace press.

True, the bill extends ISS until 2032. True, it fully supports the commercial private space stations being built to replace it. True, it endorses NASA administrator Jared Isaacman’s restructuring of the Artemis program. True, it rejects all of Trump’s proposed cuts to NASA’s science programs. And true, it strongly endorses a Moon base as a first step to colonizing Mars.

All of these facts are significant, but to focus on each specifically — as it appears the entire press has done — is to miss the forest for the trees.

You see, what this authorization bill really tells us is that the Senate has finally cried “Uncle!” on SLS, Orion, and all of the NASA-designed, -owned, and -built projects that the Senate for years has supported blindly, funneling endless gobs of cash to these programs no matter how poorly they were built, how incapable they were of getting anything done, and how much money they wasted. All that mattered was to keep the pork flowing. To our lovely but corrupt Senators, that money had to be spent, regardless of how badly NASA managed and spent it.

The most recent example of this was last fall’s budget bill. In it Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) inserted language requiring NASA to fly SLS for two more missions, through Artemis-5. The amendments also funded Lunar Gateway, and ISS for five more years. It didn’t matter that SLS is too expensive, too cumbersome, and too slow to launch, making it useless for developing any viable American space program anywhere. The money had to be spent.

Something clearly has changed in this new authorization bill, which you can read here [pdf]. Its language suggests the Senate, and Cruz, are now taking a different tack. Instead of expanding these and additional government projects, the bill very clearly focuses on encouraging NASA to rely on the private sector. For example, in outlining its demand that a continuous human presence be maintained after ISS, it states right at the beginning that:

Capabilities in low-Earth orbit should include a mix of crewed and uncrewed commercial platforms [and that these] platforms in low-Earth orbit should transition from government-only enterprises to commercially led enterprises.

No more government space stations. NASA can help fund the construction of privately-owned stations, but once built it will simply buy space on them rather than own and operate them.

Even more significant is what this bill says and does not say about SLS. It says nothing about extending the rocket beyond the first five Artemis missions, as presently required by Cruz amendments in the budget bill. Instead, it expressly notes that SLS “has not met the flight rate” as required by the 2022 NASA authorization act, and that the planned more powerful upper stage is “behind schedule and over budget.” It then basically endorses Isaacman’s plan, already begun, to abandon that upper stage and replace it with ULA’s Centaur-5 upper stage, used on its Vulcan rocket.

The bill then requests a briefing in 60 days from Isaacman, reassessing SLS, its budget, and its components, including “a balancing of government and industry workforce components, roles, and responsibilities.” The bill also says this quite unequivocally:

The Administrator may enter into agreements with United States commercial providers or engage in public-private partnerships to procure capabilities and services to support the human exploration of the Moon and cislunar space.

SpaceX’s Superheavy after the October 2024 test flight,
safely captured during the very first attempt

In other words, Isaacman is almost given carte blanche to use commercial resources for NASA’s lunar program. Thus, this language quite literally lays the groundwork for replacing SLS after that fifth Artemis mission, with that replacement process beginning now.

Nor is this all. Throughout the bill the language repeatedly encourages NASA to obtain what it needs from the private sector, in low-Earth orbit, in building a lunar base, a manned spacesuit, in developing missions to Mars, etc. Rather than fund another big NASA project — as the Senate has demanded for decades — it now wants NASA to use its funds to buy such things from outside the agency.

Hallelujah and amen! We might finally have seen a miracle occur: Senators actually writing a bill to support the American people, rather than take their money to build empires and bureaucracies in DC.

I am not so naive to think this new outlook doesn’t carry hidden mines that could blow it up in an instant. The bill for one demands many reports from NASA and Isaacman, and thus reserves the right of Congress to change everything if it so desires.

The bill also very carefully makes sure some pork is distributed to NASA and other agencies. It designates the Johnson Space Center in Texas as responsible for all NASA activities on the commercial space stations, while also making clear that it wants Johnson to have that same responsibility with the future Moon base, without saying so directly. The Glenn Research Center in Ohio is also given the lead in developing communications and GPS capabilities for the lunar base.

Nor is this the only pork in the bill, though refreshingly there is far less compared to previous NASA authorization bills.

Based on this bill, it does really appear that the Senate has finally recognized that SLS — and the government itself — is not the way the United States is going to colonize the solar system. They appear to have finally realized, after almost a half century of resistance, that for the American government to conquer the heavens, the government must rely on the American people to do it.

What a concept! It is almost as if these senators have suddenly realized what country they live in. It ain’t the Soviet Union, ruled from above by government commissars, but the United States, where we have a government for, by, and of the people.

You would think they’d know this, but then they are politicians, and for them, knowledge is generally considered an unnecessary component of their work.

Meanwhile nothing is set in stone. The bill still has to be approved by the Senate, and it must match the bill the House writes up. Though no one knows where those negotiations will lead, the House has tended over the years to favor commercial space and private enterprise, so I don’t think it will change things much for the worse.

Stay tuned. While the future remains decidedly uncertain, there are hopeful glimmers, and it does appear they are growing brighter.

As this year is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it seems fitting to review a history about the Revolutionary War. In fact, I intend to do a few more such reviews in the coming months.

Let’s start however with a book that looks at that Revolution from a very different perspective.

Historian Barbara Tuchman is most well known for her early classic, The Guns of August, a book that was made famous when John Kennedy repeatedly referred to it during the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy’s recommendation not only brought the book to the attention of the general public, it made Tuchman’s career. From that day forth, her work has always been received with accolades and enthusiasm and uncritical respect.

I am here however to break that bubble, though only partly. I just finished reading The First Salute, Tuchman’s 1988 history of the Revolutionary War. Rather than tell the tale from the point of view of the Americans, as done by most historians, Tuchman’s work looks at the war from the point of view of Europe, and thus gives us a much larger and very worthwhile context.

For this I compliment Tuchman highly. Though it is well known that the arrival of the French fleet off the coast of Virginia was crucial in forcing the British army to surrender to Washington at Yorktown, the background behind that arrival has generally been given short shrift by historians. Tuchman does not, describing in detail the political maneuvering necessary between the American envoys in France and France’s government to make that fleet happen. She also describes the attitudes of the Dutch and Spain to the war, and how and why they eventually moved to support America, even though there were many reasons for them to stay out.

Her book also gives us the British perspective, revealing the amazing and continuous failures of its government and generals to wage the war with any enthusiasm or skill. It appears almost from the start that the British had no great desire to win, and that malaise and overconfidence more than anything resulted in their eventual defeat.

For example, the British never took Washington or his army seriously. When Cornwallis learned that he was about to be surrounded and trapped in Yorktown, he had time to leave. He instead sat on his hands and did nothing.

This British contempt for America was also illustrated in how it treated America politically. For example, one of the main American complaints was it was not allowed its own representatives in the British parliament, a decision I had always believed Britain applied to all its colonies. Tuchman shows this assumption was false. While it denied the North American colonies representation, its plantations in the West Indies were given from twelve to fifteen seats. The British government considered these colonies far more important, gave them respect, and thus did not lose them. To the thirteen North American colonies it instead thumbed its nose.

Great Britain’s overconfidence was also made evident by how it viewed its European counterparts. It never considered the French a serious or grave threat, and took little action to prevent its fleet from arriving in America. And it was so overconfident of victory that it was not only willing to fight the Americans on a different continent across a vast ocean, but to also at the same time declare war on France, Spain, and the Dutch, despite having limited resources not equal to the task.

Thus, Tuchman’s wider perspective of the war is very enlightening. The nature of colonies and its frontier culture always made it unlikely that Britain could have ever defeated it, but Tuchman shows us that Britain itself earned that defeat, by its own incompetence, ignorance, and overall contempt for its opponent.

Tuchman’s book however has some serious flaws, not in her facts or analysis but in her writing. First, her chronology of events in the first half of the book is often confusing, jumping forward and back sometimes in the most jumbled manner. I often had to struggle to figure out how different events fit together, as she often mixed up the time table quite unnecessarily.

Second, while her analysis of events is cogent and almost always correct, she inserts this analysis over and over again in practically every paragraph. Since her conclusions are almost always the same, she ends up repeating herself incessantly. A good editor should have cut much of this dissection, but I suspect Tuchman’s reputation and fame made it difficult to challenge her.

“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang

Thus, if you are an aficionado of the Revolutionary War and wish to learn all you can about it, I would recommend this book highly, because it provides a perspective not seen in many other histories of that time.

If however you want to sit down and read a well-written and enjoyable history of that war, this is not the book to read. You will have to struggle through the first half before it begins to pick up speed and become more coherent chronologically in the second half.

Above all, however, this history does illustrate what Washington himself believed, that God himself was on his side, that “the same bountiful Providence, which has relieved us in a variety of difficulties before, will enable us to emerge from them ultimately and crown our struggles with success.”

Tuchman illustrates the almost miraculous confluence of events that made that success possible. And in looking at those facts, it sure looks like God was playing favorites in making the birth of the United States possible.

Second, as much as there might be legal precedents that allow President Trump to initiate this action without direct congressional approval, it continues a dangerous trend ceding power away from Congress and to the presidency, in direct opposition to the intentions of the Founding Fathers in their writing of the Constitution. They very much were opposed to giving any president the power to start a war unilaterally.

Click here and here for original videos.

Having stated the reasonable objections to this military action, however, we must now take a look at the two images to the right to see its immediate and very positive consequences. Both pictures are from videos of very spontaneous demonstrations on February 28, 2026 by Iranian refugees celebrating the American/Israeli attacks against Iran.

The top picture is a screen capture from a demonstration in Georgetown, DC. The bottom picture is a screen capture from a demonstration in Austin, Texas.

Note the flags in both pictures. There are numerous flags of Iran (the version during the Shah’s rule, not the version from the Islamic Revolution). There are many American flags, of course, since these demonstrations are in America.

What is most revealing however are the Israeli flags, being enthusiastically waved by Iranians. Clearly the decades of hate against Israel and Jews by the mullahs in Iran has not had any impact on these Iranian refugees. In fact, in the video of the bottom picture they are chanting “Thank you, Bibi!”, referring to Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu as the camera pans across the crowd.

Moreover, these demonstrations took place in two Democratic Party strongholds, cities where pro-Hamas demonstrations have been routine, including rioting and violence against Jews and anyone who dared suggest Israel’s actions in Gaza might be justified.

Nor are these two demonstrations an exception. They have been the rule across the United States and Europe, as well as in Iran itself. The public — the ordinary people for whom governments are meant to serve — seem very much in favor of what President Trump and Netanyahu are doing in Iran. And they are expressing that support of both America and Israel quite unequivocally. If this doesn’t indicate to the world that Israel and the rest of the Middle East can live together in peace and mutual cooperation, nothing can.

This conclusion is further supported by the response by almost every Arab nation in the Middle East, most of whom started off quite willing to let the U.S. and Israel do this deed, with no opposition or with covert support. Now, because of Iran’s indiscriminate attacks on Arab nations, they have all publicly joined the war, allying themselves not with the Islamic nation of Iran but with the U.S. and Israel.

I would not be surprised if Saudi Arabia soon signs the Abraham Accords. Nor would I be surprised if most of the last remaining Arab nations that have not yet done so join Saudi Arabia.

We could very well be seeing a major realignment of alliances in the Middle East that could really really harbinger the beginnings of real peace in that region. Imagine: Israel at peace with all its neighbors, because the Arabs have finally recognized that it is to their own best interest to do so as well.

Last month I lambasted NOAA’s solar science panel for its consistently failed predictions, and made a tentative prediction of my own, suggesting the ramp down to solar minimum might not be occurring as they had predicted in April 2025.

This month I can lambast myself, because the Sun in February saw a significant drop in sunspots, including three consecutive days in which the Sun was blank of spots, for the first time since 2022. This drop supports the NOAA panel prediction and makes my prediction look foolish, but it also suggests the ramp down is continuing to go faster than predicted.


The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community for both the previous solar maximum as well as the ongoing maximum. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007 for the previous maximum, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The blue curve is their revised May 2009 prediction. The red curve is the new prediction, first posted by NOAA in April 2020. At the beginning of April 2025 NOAA’s panel of solar scientists added the purple/magenta curve line, predicting that solar maximum was over, and that the ramp down to minimum had begun.

The green dot indicates the level of sunspot activity during the month of February, dropping well below all predictions.

There are several ways to interpret the graph as it presently stands. The drop in February supports the prediction of the NOAA panel, but it continues to show a ramp down that is generally faster than predicted by the purple/magenta line.

The general trend since April 2025 however could be interpreted differently, as the overall activity appears to have flattened at a level that could represent the bottom of a saddle. If the maximum does what it did in 2014, we could still see a second peak of activity, producing a double-peaked maximum.

A third interpretation is that this low but flattened level of activity is merely a pause in the ramp down. If the downward trend continues at this rate, this particular solar cycle will end up being very short, less than ten years — far shorter than predicted by the NOAA panel. For the past 250 years, short cycles were routinely high in activity. This cycle however is a weak one, so for it to be short and weak would be unprecedented. The Sun might simply be randomly holding its activity at this level as it completes the cycle at a more normal length.

All guesses. We can only wait to see what happens.

I must highlight this lack of understanding however, and how it is has consistently resulted in failed predictions for the past two solar cycles. The Sun is the biggest driver of the Earth’s climate, and we simply do not understand its behavior on a fundamental level. These cycles however do impact the climate, and if we don’t understand them and can’t reliably predict their behavior, how can we possible predict the climate over the next hundred years?

We can’t, and anyone who claims they can is either fooling themselves, or lying for other reasons (usually political).

During a update press conference today on the status of SLS, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced some major changes to the next three Artemis missions.

Isaacman began his remarks by blasting the slow launch cadence of the SLS rocket, noting that all previous NASA launch vehicles averaged about three months between launches, not three years. In order to shorten the SLS cadence to as short as ten months, he has eliminated the upgraded upper stage for SLS, required for the Artemis-3 lunar landing mission. They will standardize the equipment now being used for all further missions. It also suggests the upgraded mobile launcher — needed for that upgraded upper stage — is being canceled, though the officials refused to confirm this. It is far behind schedule and over budget.

Second, Artemis-3 will no longer be a lunar landing. It will instead fly in ’27 as a manned low-Earth-orbit mission to test rendezvous and docking with one or both of the lunar landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin. The flight will also test the spacesuits the astronauts will use on the later lunar mission, including possibly a spacewalk.

This change also appears to eliminate the need for Lunar Gateway, though this decision was not stated. Without that upgraded first stage, SLS cannot reach lunar orbit as intended. It appears the plan is to launch crew in Orion and transfer them to the lander in Earth orbit, and transport them to the Moon in those vehicles.

Third, the goal will then be to do two lunar landings in ’28 on Artemis-4 and Artemis-5. It was also clear that this is merely a target, and things could change after the ’27 mission.

These changes all make great sense and face basic reality. It never made sense to attempt the lunar landing after only one manned Artemis mission. The changes also shift focus from SLS and Orion to the rockets and spacecraft being made by the private sector. It attempts to meet Trump’s goal of landing on the Moon by ’28, but also gives the last three budgeted SLS missions a better and more realistic program. Whether SLS as designed can do this remains unclear, but no matter what, this clearly lays the groundwork for that shift from SLS to the private sector.

The officials also made it clear that this plan is still in flux, and will change depending on what happens in the next year or so.

NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) today released its annual report, and once again it demonstrated why I have been calling it corrupt and a waste of money for years.

The report can be read here [pdf], but let me warn you that its findings have nothing to do with ASAP’s original purpose (created after the 1967 Apollo 1 launchpad fire that killed three astronauts), to look at NASA projects to make sure the agency is not ignoring specific safety issues.

Instead, as it has done repeatedly in recent years, the panel focused on management goals and larger strategic issues, and as usual concluded that the best way to do things is to make NASA bigger with more control over the entire space industry.

NASA needs to better govern its contractors with respect to effective risk and safety management through appropriate contract mechanisms and consistent application of insight and oversight.

To come to this conclusion the report focused on the failures of Boeing in developing its Starliner manned capsule. To ASAP, those failures now justify taking control from the private sector. That SpaceX delivered as promised, under the same open contract terms, is barely mentioned. A normal American businessman would compare the two companies and simply continue to use SpaceX while searching for someone else besides Boeing.

ASAP instead wants to blame the entire private sector so that the government can once again rule.

Meanwhile, this corrupt panel sees nothing wrong or dangerous about the upcoming Artemis-2 mission, which will take four astronauts on a ten-day mission around the Moon using an untested life support system and returning with a questionable heat shield.

Throughout 2025, the Agency continued progress towards flight readiness. Safety and technical risks have been identified and, as appropriate, effectively addressed.

When it comes to Artemis-3, the mission to land humans on the Moon, the panel does finally note the many technical and safety risks, and questions whether NASA is ready to fly it as scheduled. It also admits that while SpaceX’s Starship is not yet ready to land humans on the Moon, “at this time it is difficult to imagine another NASA contractor capable of meeting a challenge of this scale and pace as SpaceX.”

Thank you for small blessings!

Overall, ASAP continues to be a paper-pushing waste of money. Not once in the past two decades has its recommendations on safety correctly identified the real dangers and risks. During the development of Dragon and Starliner, it consistently poo-pooed Boeing’s problems, while lambasting SpaceX repeatedly. For years it has ignored the problems with Orion and SLS, making believe — as it does now with Artemis-2 — that NASA has everything under control.

The money NASA wastes on this panel would be far better used elsewhere. Unfortunately, there is no one in Washington willing to face these facts. If anything, all signs suggest that Jared Isaacman agrees with ASAP’s findings, and intends to do exactly what it proposes, increase NASA power and control while squelching the independence and freedom of the newly reborn American private aerospace industry.

NASA today released its final investigation report on the causes behind the Starliner thruster issues during that capsule’s only manned mission in ISS, issues that almost prevented the spacecraft from docking successfully and could have left it manned and out-of-control while still in orbit.

You can read the report here [pdf]. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman made it clear in his own statement that the Starliner incident was far more serious than originally let on.

“To undertake missions that change the world, we must be transparent about both our successes and our shortcomings. We have to own our mistakes and ensure they never happen again. Beyond technical issues, it is clear that NASA permitted overarching programmatic objectives of having two providers capable of transporting astronauts to-and-from orbit, influence engineering and operational decisions, especially during and immediately after the mission. We are correcting those mistakes. Today, we are formally declaring a Type A mishap and ensuring leadership accountability so situations like this never reoccur. We look forward to working with Boeing as both organizations implement corrective actions and return Starliner to flight only when ready.”

A Type A mishap is one in which a spacecraft could become entirely uncontrollable, leading to its loss and the death of all on board. Though Starliner was NOT lost, for a short while as it hung close to ISS that result was definitely possible. Its thrusters were not working. It couldn’t maneuver to dock, nor could it maneuver to do a proper and safe de-orbit. Fortunately, engineers were able to figure out a way to get the thursters operational again so a docking could occur, but until then, it was certainly a Type A situation.

The report outlines in great detail the background behind Starliner’s thruster issues, the management confusion between NASA and Boeing, and the overall confused management at Boeing itself, including its generally lax testing standards.

The report’s recommends that NASA impose greater control over future commercial contracts, noting that under the capitalism model that NASA has been following:

NASA’s hands-off approach during contract initialization resulted in insufficient systems knowledge and available data to the government for accepting a development vehicle as a service.

NASA’s adoption of a commercial services procurement strategy through the CCP prioritized provider-led development and minimized traditional NASA insight and oversight. This contributed to the creation of the previous intermediate causes and organizational factors that produced insufficient data for NASA to fully understand system qualification of the Starliner spacecraft. This approach led to gaps in end-to-end verification, validation, and interface management, ultimately contributing to crew and mission risk. In accordance with the SAA and guiding documentation, NASA teams were prohibited from providing feedback during key design phases or requiring closure on feedback submitted.

One meatball to rule them all!

The solution: Establish a whole range of new management processes to closely supervise the development of any new spacecraft.

In other words, go back to the old system where NASA controlled all and micro-managed everything. This is a failed idea, something that NASA has tried time after time with little success. It punishes everyone, without punishing the bad apples. And if implemented could end up destroying entirely the present renaissance in space.

Ironically, the report’s recommendations completely miss the fundamentals revealed within the report itself.

What the report makes clear is that Boeing is not a company NASA can ever rely on. It failed to fix these problems in a timely manner, before the launch. It made numerous bad engineering decisions during construction. And once launched it took a generally bad approach to dealing with the problems, as they happened.

In the capitalism model, NASA must let private enterprise do the work. It is NASA’s job to buy the best products, from companies it can rely on utterly. The last thing NASA should be doing is micro-managing what those companies do.

Let freedom rule!

The solution is for NASA to stop buying products from the bad apples. Isaacman says in his statement that he “looks forward to working with Boeing” in the future. Bah. While for now it might make sense to fly Starliner on an unmanned cargo mission to ISS to once again test its systems, it should be very clear that using it for future manned missions is a very very low priority. The company has not built a good product worth buying.

If Isaacman and NASA had any faith in freedom and capitalism, both would instantly see the entire Starliner incident as an example of “Let the buyer beware.” We thought Boeing was a better company than it was. We won’t make that mistake again. Let’s find other American companies we can buy better products from!

That’s what freedom and competition is all about. The good rise to the top. The bad fall to the wayside. But you must try them all for awhile to distinguish them from each other. This report — and what it tells us about Boeing and Starliner itself — is part of that process. Competition and freedom will give NASA many alternatives, good and bad. As it learns the difference it should simply buy products from those who do good work.

Sadly, it is very unclear from this report’s conclusions whether this is the lesson NASA and Isaacman are taking from the Boeing-Starliner debacle. Instead, it looks once again like Isaacman wants to return to the old days where NASA ran everything, and private enterprise was squelched under a government space program run from DC with little freedom or innovation.

If so, NASA’s future in space will be dim indeed. The better companies, such as SpaceX, will want to work less and less with the agency, leaving it stuck with the weak sisters like Boeing.

Today is “President’s Day”, a meaningless holiday created by our stupid lords in Congress in order to denigrate George Washington by devaluing the holiday celebrating his birth, February 22nd, by applying that holiday to all presidents, from great to the trashy. This fake holiday also acted to devalue any remembrance of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February 12th, as it forced many states that used to celebrate that holiday separately to fold that celebration into today as well.

I don’t accept Congress’s stupid holiday. Instead, I separately try each year to honor both Washington and Lincoln on their actual birthdays, because without these great men the nation of my birth would never have become the great and free and prosperous place it became.

In honor of Lincoln today, I thought I’d post a short review of Russell McClintock’s fine 2008 history, Lincoln and the Decision for War. McClintock took a decidedly different look at the Civil War by focusing not on larger events, but specifically at the time period between the election of Lincoln on November 6, 1860 and the beginning of the Civil War in April 1861.

What many forget with the passage of time is that the Civil War did not start instantly with Lincoln’s victory. For six months furious negotiations took place between politicians from the North and South, with Northern politicians desperately trying to somehow convince the southern states not to secede from the Union. McClintock details those negotiations, including Lincoln’s own efforts in numerous ways to placate the most radical southern states.

You see, as much as Lincoln opposed slavery — and he truly did — he was far more committed to the American Constitution and the nation it had created. If he had to let the issue of slavery take a back burner to saving the Union, he was quite content to do so. More important, as McClintock shows, if the southern states hadn’t seceded and had stayed part of the Union, their power bloc in Congress would have been strong enough to block any anti-slavery action by Lincoln anyway. He really didn’t have sufficient political power in Congress to change anything.

For the South, none of these actual facts about Lincoln mattered. The South had developed Lincoln Derangement Syndrome, and was not going to allow itself to be ruled by Lincoln no matter what, even if that rule was weak and ineffectual. As noted by the Ohio’s radical anti-slavery senator Ben Wade in a speech on the Senate floor on December 17, 1860:

You [the South] intend either to rule or ruin this government. That is what your complaint comes to; nothing else.

As Wade noted, Lincoln had been fairly elected, by law, and this is what the South did not like. It was demanding some compromises of power to hold them within the Union, even though it had lost the election.

Sir, it would be humiliating and dishonorable to us if were to listen to a compromise by which he who has the verdict of the people in his pocket.

McClintock’s book makes very clear who wanted war, and who didn’t. The South lusted for it, led by its most radical state of South Carolina where Fort Sumter was located. The Northern states wanted to limit slavery, but were not initially willing to go to war to do so.

Even in 1860, few Northerners proposed to interfere with slavery in the Southern states. The chief reason for this was the same imperative that dictated their political response to apparent Southern aggression: their firm commitment to the system of government created by the Founders. To them, as we shall see, that system was institutionalized by the Constitution and embodied in the Union. Specifically, the Constitution permitted neither the general government nor the free states to interfere in the domestic affairs of the slave states, and even those who felt an ethical or moral aversion to slavery believed the Union would be threatened by antislavery agitation.

So for six months the two sides negotiated, to no end. The South simply was not going to accept the legal results of the 1860 election. South Carolina declared its secession in December and placed Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor under siege. When Lincoln finally attempted to resupply the fort in April, after months of dithering and fruitless negotiations, South Carolina forces fired on the fort and the supply ships, capturing it.

Lincoln at this time wasn’t trying to stop South Carolina from seceding. He merely was acting to protect what was clearly federal property, the fort itself that the federal troops stationed there.

The attack however galvanized the North, as Lincoln knew it would. While beforehand the public had been reluctant to fight, the attack convinced them that to save the Union and the Constitution and its grand experiment in self-government, they were now forced to fight. And so the war started.

The bottom line remains however: The South wanted to keep slavery, an institution that allowed some men to own others. For those who lust power, such an institution is addictive in the extreme. For the South, the addiction was so strong they were glad to go to war to keep that addiction supplied.

The North was for freedom and the rule of law. The Constitution as they understood it allowed the South to keep its slaves, but it also allowed them the right to resist the spread of that peculiar institution. If the South wanted to keep its slaves the North was willing to tolerate that, even if it hated the idea. “Let’s find a way to live together, without fighting!”

When the South would not obey the law, however, and committed violence against the legal election results, then the North finally rose up to fight. It did so reluctantly, but when it finally did it did so with righteous anger.

My readers will of course notice some interesting parallels to our own time. The Democratic Party and its supporters today cannot accept the fact that they lost the last election. Donald Trump and the Republicans won, and Trump did so under a platform to end illegal immigration and to deport the millions of illegals who were allowed to come here during Biden’s administration. His platform also included promises to shrink the federal workforce, reduce regulation, and to eliminate raced-based hiring.

Trump is doing exactly what he promised during his 2024 campaign. The country apparently approved, because they voted for these promises quite handily.

Gadsden Flag – a symbol of unbowing defiance to oppression

And the Democrats today are acting exactly as the southern Democrats did in 1860s, refusing to accept their defeat, Trump’s victory, and more important, the will of the people. To the Democrats, maintaining their grip on power is all that matters, and if it requires them to throw out the Constitution and the rule of law to keep it, so be it.

As always, it is the power-hungry who lust for war. And the civilized struggle to avoid it, if at all possible, and only as a last resort finally rise up for battle.

We can only pray that the civilized today will have the same will to fight as freedom-loving Americans in the North did in 1860. Because I think it will be required of them.

Though I read a lot of good, detailed, and well-researched histories, I repeatedly find that if I really want to get a sense of the reality of times past, it is necessary to read something that was written by a person who lived at the time, and was an actual witness to great events.

When you do this you instantly cut through the political narratives that color all histories, whether sincere or not. Historians writing generations later bring their own viewpoint to the subject, colored by subsequent history shaped by what the original players did. So, to really understand those original players fairly, you really need to hear their side of the story, from their own lips.

Thus, I was thrilled recently when I came across a used copy of Vanished Arizona: Recollections of the Army life of a New England Woman by Martha Summerhayes. The book covers her memories from 1870 to 1900 as the wife of Jack Summerhayes, an officer in the American military stationed in the western United States, with the bulk of the story centered in Arizona.

This is an amazingly readable book. More important, it tells this story of army life from the perspective of the women who lived it. Most histories cover the battles and important events that Summerhayes’s husband Jack participated in, from defeating the Apaches and Geronimo to establishing the first settlements in early Arizona. Martha Summerhayes instead tells the story from her perspective as a woman living in an isolated fort in the hot desert wilderness of Arizona. The story is riveting, and revealing as well.

In reading her work now, 150 years later during the first half of the 21st century, I noted two important things.

John Wayne and Joanne Dru in John Ford’s
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

First, the cavalry movies of John Ford from the 1940s were remarkably accurate portrayals of this army life. Movie critics today tend to see these movies as sentimental and self-serving. Summerhayes however proves this wrong. This was really how people behaved in these western forts, with humanity, humility, and amazing wisdom. The goal wasn’t to wipe out the American Indians, but to bring the violent ones either to justice or to heel, so that everyone — whites and Indian alike — could live in peace and prosperity.

And as they did it they tried mightily to recreate the civilized life they had known in the settled east.

I must add that Summerhayes book is not the only original source material on which I base this conclusion. Another great example is Indians, Infants, and Infantry by Merrill J. Mattes, using as his framework the diaries of Elizabeth Burt, the wife of Andrew Bart, who was stationed farther north in the midwest and Rockies at about the same time. She told a very similar tale.

Second, Summerhayes’ story reveals an aspect of the American wild west that is often overlooked. When she first traveled in 1874 to Fort Apache on the eastern end of central Arizona, it took her five months. First she took the Union Pacific railroad from Jack’s previous station, Fort Cheyenne in Wyoming, to San Francisco. Then she boarded a ship that took her down the coast, around the Baja and up the Gulf of California to Yuma. She then changed ships to continue up the Colorado River to Fort Mohave, about halfway up the state on its western border with California.

She had been traveling for 35 days, and had only now landed in Arizona proper. From Fort Mohave she and her husband’s company began a three month journey east, to cross almost the entire state, traveling across the deserts and canyons of Arizona and territories controlled by the hostile Apaches. Summerhayes traveled inside an ambulance, the term then used for what we now call “a covered wagon”.

The main body of the troops marched in advance; then came the ambulances and carriages, followed by the baggage-wagons and a small rear-guard. When the troops were halted once an hour for rest, the officers, who marched with the soldiers, would come to the ambulances and chat awhile, until the bugle call for “Assembly” sounded, when they would join their commands again, the men would fall in, the call “Forward” was sounded, and the small-sized army train moved on.

That was in 1874. When in 1886 Jack Summerhayes was called back to Arizona from a post in Nevada, they traveled entirely by train. The new post was in Tucson, which had been very isolated from the rest of Arizona in the 1870s. For example, in 1877 they had traveled there by wagon from Fort McDowell (east of Phoenix), a journey of about 100 miles that took days, across very rough and poorly marked roads. Now they took “a pullman car” from Nevada to Tucson in about one day. Once there, Martha was astonished by how primitive Tucson had changed in just nine years.

The place seemed unfamiliar. I looked for the old tavern; I saw only a railway restaurant. We went in to take breakfast. … Everything seemed changed. Iced cantaloupe was served by a spick-span waiter; then, quail on toast. “Ice in Arizona?” It was like a dream, and I remarked to Jack, “This isn’t the same Arizona we knew in ’74.” and then, “I don’t believe I like it as well either; all this luxury doesn’t seem to belong to the place.”

In a little over a decade, the American wild west had gone from a remote hard-to-reach place with few basic comforts that only received mail twice a week, to a new community of wealth and prosperity tightly linked to the rest of the nation.

Martha Summerhayes

Summerhayes accepts this breath-taking change in manner so matter-of-factly it’s as if she almost doesn’t notice it. She does of course, but to her and her generation, that change was entirely expected. Americans were building a new nation, and they intended to do it as fast as possible.

All in all, Martha Summerhayes’ story is inspirational in its simple courage faced with endless discomfort and difficulty. Army life in the wilderness was not easy, especially for a woman raising two infants. And yet she persevered, and in the end looked back at those hard times with nostalgia. The memories made her appreciate the luxuries of later life. As she said in her conclusion:

I am glad to have known the army: the soldiers, the line, and the Staff; it is good to think of honor and chivalry, obedience to duty and the pride of arms; to have lived amongst men whose motives were unselfish and whose aims were high; amongst men who served an ideal; who stood ready, at the call of their country, to give their lives for a government which is, to them, the best in the world.

Such people should not be forgotten, especially because they made possible the nation we live in and benefit from.

Though a number of my election predictions in this essay turned out wrong, the essay does provide the basics of what happened in 2020, and could still happen in 2028 and beyond, if a real effort is not made to regain some control of this election tampering. And not surprising, the Democrats are now opposing any such reforms with great enthusiasm, using their slander and demagoguery tactics to rile up their base, helped enthusiastically by the propaganda press that works as their public relations arm.

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How the localized nature of Democrat vote tampering will influence the 2022 election

Based on the ample evidence of election fraud, corruption, and vote tampering done repeatedly by Democrats nationwide during the 2020 election, we can expect these politicians and their minions to commit similar election crimes in the upcoming 2022 mid-term elections, especially because the effort by some Republicans to reform their state election systems in the key purple states was so effectively blocked by Democrats, by many quisling Republicans, and by a willing leftist press.

It is however important to understand where that election tampering was done in 2020 in order to understand the election fraud to come, as well as creating a strategy to prevent it. As real estate agents like to say, “Location is everything!”, and it appears this applies to election fraud as well.

The 2020 fraud in Democratically-controlled
Fulton County (Atlanta), Georgia.

In 2020, in states that were purple and where the final result was in doubt, the Democrats took advantage of their total control of the local urban voting districts in those states — where there are very few Republican voters — to tilt the results. In such places (Philadelphia, New York, Atlanta, Detroit, Phoenix) the government is essentially a one-party Democrat operation. Many election districts in these cities have no Republican election judges at all. If the Democrats wish to commit election fraud, there is no one looking over their shoulder to question them, with some districts actually taking aggressive action in 2020 to illegally keep Republican poll watchers out.

Thus we saw strong evidence in all of these cities of pro-Democrat ballot-stuffing, of all types, from fake ballots to ballots counted multiple times to evidence the votes on the ballots themselves were changed by computer. The fraud however was strongly localized to these urban centers controlled by Democrats. The vote tampering was able to tilt the statewide results. but not the local contests.

For example, Democrat mayors in Wisconsin teamed up to have drop boxes placed illegally in unsupervised locations, where Democratic Party mules could stuff them with thousands of harvested ballots. The Wisconsin Supreme Court finally ruled on July 8, 2022 that these boxes were illegal, and violated the plain language of the state’s election laws:

The court noted that by spring 2021, municipal clerks reported that there were 570 drop boxes in 66 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. “Only the legislature may permit absentee voting via ballot drop boxes,” the court said in the ruling. “WEC [Wisconsin Election Commission] cannot. Ballot drop boxes appear nowhere in the detailed statutory system for absentee voting. WEC’s authorization of ballot drop boxes was unlawful.”

The drop box policy was pushed mostly by Democratic Party mayors and officials in Wisconsin’s largest cities, most of which are controlled heavily by Democrats.

Thus, even though there is strong evidence in recent years that overall the electorate in Wisconsin has been increasingly moving rightward — illustrated by the fact that both houses of its legislature have been controlled by Republicans since 2011 after decades of mixed control — in the 2020 election Biden won the state, and its state-wide offices have shifted to Democratic Party control.

The 2020 fraud in Democratically-controlled Maricopa County
(Phoenix-area), Arizona. Click for full graph.

Similarly, the election audit in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest county controlled mostly by the Democratic Party, found rampant evidence of ballot tampering and fraud, so much so that some election researchers are convinced the fraud in that county stole the state’s election from Trump.

The same process can be seen in Pennsylvania, in Georgia, and in other states. While local elections seem to be shifting to the right, the state-wide elections seem to be going to the left, a pattern that makes no sense.

The consequence of this localized fraud was the ability of the Democrats to change state-wide and national elections, shifting the vote totals so that Democratic Party senators, governors, and other state-wide officials won their elections, especially if the actual vote count was reasonably close. This fraud also shifted the final totals in the presidential election in several states from Trump to Biden, turning some into Biden victories and thus giving Biden the victory in the electoral college.

Expect the same localized election fraud effort in 2022. While the Democrats’ tactics will have to change somewhat because some of their fraud (such as the drop boxes in Wisconsin) has been uncovered and banned, their vote tampering effort will still be focused in those major urban cities where they have total control. We saw this illustrated again in the New York State primary on June 28th, when Republican voters in at least three election sites in New York City discovered there were no Republican ballots on hand, disenfranchising them from voting.

What will this localized fraud mean for the total election? It means that while Democrats are more likely to steal the elections on the state and national levels, they have little ability to change results at the local level. House elections are more likely to be fair, because Democrats don’t control the election process. They might be able to guarantee victory in the urban centers, but since Democrats already control those congressional seats their vote tampering gets them nothing. And in the other more balanced districts, the election will be more properly monitored, and likely will produce the expected strong victories for Republicans..

Thus, I predict that the Republicans will win control of the House, and will do so with a surprisingly large majority.

As for the Senate, the Republicans will also regain the majority, but in at least a few cases, such as in Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, election fraud could end up defeating some Republican Senate candidates, because Democrats will stuff votes in Democrat-controlled cities. In the end, the Senate might shift to Republican control, but not by much.

Similarly, expect the Democrats to hold their own in elections for statewide offices, such as governors and attorneys general, but to lose badly at the local legislative level and at school boards.

The result will be that the Democrats will not be defeated as resoundingly as the polls clearly indicate they should be. The result will be that they will not be properly punished for their increasingly authoritarian and oppressive policies that are bankrupting the nation. Their power will be reduced, but not enough to allow for any real reforms to take place.

How can we change this? Experts on war always warn military officers to avoid the mistake of fighting the last war when engaged in the next. While you can learn something from what happened before, you must not think things will be the same.

To fix our election system, it is actually less important to block the specific tactics Democrats have used and now plan to use to commit election fraud. Blocking computer manipulation and absentee ballot stuffing is good, but a more important strategy will be to recognize the localized nature of the fraud. If the Republican Party was to send a lot of poll watchers to these urban centers while saturating them with investigations, it will do much more to prevent the fraud, before it can happen.

In other words, rather than screaming about election tampering after it has happened and the Republicans have already lost elections, Republicans should focus their effort to make the tampering difficult to begin with.

Go to the scene of the crime — before the crime has been committed. Don’t let them lock you out. Don’t leave when they ask you to. Make them do things right, because they know you are there, watching.

This strategy is not only more efficient and effective, it will likely result in some solid and very legitimate Republican victories.

In watching the movie tonight again and reliving the myth I grew up with — that great things are possible if you believe and follow sincerely Superman’s motto of “truth, justice, and the American way” — I decided to repost my essay from 2020 where I attempted to explain what that motto really meant.

Enjoy!
———————

George Reeves as the heroic Superman as envisioned
in the 1950s television show, emulated later by Richard
Donner in his 1978 movie. Click for show’s opening credits.

Truth, Justice, and the American Way

The words spoken during the opening credits of a 1950s children’s television show:

Faster than a speeding bullet.
More powerful than a locomotive.
Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Look up in the sky!
It’s a bird.
It’s a plane.
It’s Superman!

Yes, it’s Superman, strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.

Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way.

That television show was obviously Superman, starring George Reeves, and these opening words expressed the mythology and basic ideals by which this most popular of all comic-book super-heroes lived.

I grew up with those words. They had been bequeathed to me by the American generation that had fought and won World War II against the genocidal Nazis, and expressed the fundamental ideals of that generation.

Much of the meaning of these fundamental ideals is outright and clear.

Truth means you always strive to be honest, and when you make a mistake you admit to it, without flinching. Or as Superman says quite clearly in the 1978 film, “I never lie,” saying this immediately after repeating that he is here “to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.”

Justice means you strive to administer the rules fairly so that the innocent are protected and the guilty are punished properly. It also means that you treat others justly, with respect and kindness, while defiantly standing up to those who would do the weak harm.

The phrase “the American Way” however is more puzzling. As a child I accepted it, but I have spent a lifetime as a historian and reader trying to understand it on a more fundamental level. The writers in the 1950s who gave that task to Superman knew what it meant, and assumed everyone else did. By the 1950s and 1960s they however no longer did a good job of teaching its meaning to my sixties generation, and many from my time grew up not understanding it.

I think I finally hit upon its basic meaning in writing Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8. As I said in trying to explain why the astronauts on that mission choose to read the first twelve verses of the Old Testament on Christmas Eve while orbiting the Moon,

These three men had stood on the fringes of human experience, tracing a warm line into the dark and cold emptiness of endless space, and had tried to bring more than mere life to that emptiness.

Their words were not original. They read words that had been written in the dim past by, as some believed, God Almighty.

Those words, however, expressed for these three men a heartfelt belief that the universe was more than mere energy and matter. Not only did a spirit lurk behind the veil of the terrifying black dark that surrounded them, it impelled them to live their lives a certain way, in a certain manner.

Their decision to read from the Bible also expressed, albeit indirectly, their passionate love of freedom. No one told them what to read, and in fact most of the officials at NASA and in the government were completely surprised by their message. And that was how it should be. Borman, Lovell, and Anders were free men, expressing their beliefs freely. While their government might have financed the journey, it could not tell them what to think or say once they got there. If these free men wished to pray aloud to the world’s population as they circled the moon, so be it.

Their words also expressed their deep humility and abiding good will. They had been given this glorious opportunity to brag, and instead chose to pray, finding words that would include as many people as possible in the message.

Their voices, beamed across hundreds of thousands of miles by technology inconceivable ten years earlier, resonated with their country’s roots as well. The Pilgrims had not merely gone to explore a new land — they had emigrated as families in order to build in that new land a human society.

And so, like the Pilgrims, wherever the three men in Apollo 8 had gone they had brought their families, their religion, and their way of life. In Houston they had found empty fields and built a community. Their lives had echoed the words of John Winthrop, leader of the first Puritan expedition, who as he and his fellow settlers first approached Massachusetts Bay in 1630 had urged them

to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection….We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.

[If we do this,] the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us….He shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations…we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

The community the three men in Apollo 8 wished to bring into the empty reaches of space was an American one, filled with a belief that given two strong arms, a willing heart, and the freedom to follow one’s dreams, anything was possible. They, like the Puritans, had put their lives on the line to express this ideal.

To put it more plainly, the American Way aims at building a just and truthful society in which to raise children. No matter what happened, the security, freedom, and prosperity of the next generation — the future — took paramount. It was for this reason my generation, the sixties Baby Boom generation, was raised with more wealth and prosperity and freedom than any generation ever in the entire history of the human race. At the moment of our birth following World War II the American nation was at a pinnacle of success, resulting from a hundred and fifty years of passionate effort by generations of free Americans toiling as families to build a better place for their children. You made your marriage work because to subject your children to the agony of divorce — for something those children had nothing to do with — was not only unjust and cruel, it would damage them badly. Children above all need a secure home to flourish, and it was the American Way to provide that.

Freedom, bounded by such responsibilities, was also required by the American Way. You can’t have truth or justice when people aren’t free, because without freedom evil people hankering merely for power will have the ability to squelch both truth and justice, as well as the dreams of those future generations.

That in a nutshell is a quick summary of the American Way. Unfortunately, for reasons that are complex and fundamental to human nature but also quite mysterious and tragic, that blessed sixties generation were either not taught these ideals, did not understand them, or outright rejected them. They cared far less about giving their children a secure well-educated foundation. Each person’s private desires now took precedent over their children. Sex, drugs, and rock & roll were the rule. The numbers of divorces skyrocketed. And as sociologist and Democratic politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted in 1986,

a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families . . . never acquiring any stable rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.

We are now reaping that whirlwind. This nation and its fundamental ideals are now under vicious attack by the children and grandchildren of the Baby Boomers, who claim they are fighting hate and fascism but are actually hate-filled ignorant fascists in everything they do. Worse they are not simply ignorant (tearing down and defacing in the name of “Black Lives Matter” monuments to Lincoln, Grant, Jefferson, Washington, and former black slaves, all of whom fought for freedom and equal rights), but willfully ignorant. You cannot teach them how wrong they are, because they are certain they are right, and anyone who disagrees with them must be evil and destroyed.

In their hate and ignorance they are destroying the freest, most prosperous, and most capable civilization ever created in human history, a civilization so focused on protecting the rights of the oppressed and the weak that the oppressed and weak have struggled unceasingly to come here.

As violent and as bigoted and as hateful as these mindless radical leftists are, however I have no hate in my heart for them. I feel terrible sorrow at the harm they are doing to themselves and to their own children, who will not grow up as free or as prosperous. I will oppose them with all my might, but I will do so without hate.

I do have however a deep and unquenchable anger, not aimed at these childish barbarians, but at our bankrupt leaders, both from the left and the right.

On the left there has been unqualified support for this destruction and hate. The rioting and looting has routinely been in Democratic Party strongholds, where elected officials have not only condoned it, they have sometimes come out to outright endorse it. When rioters pull down statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant the response is not horror but a demand that we rethink our entire past history, because these rioters must be right.

Even Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden bows to the rioters, now calling for the renaming of every American military base named after a Confederate leader. And if you think this renaming will end there, you are either naive, or willfully blind.

On the right we have had non-action, or even quisling betrayal. Within days of these protests we have had for only one example Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) kowtowing to the mob.

“I can only speak for myself on this issue. If it’s appropriate to take another look at these names I’m OK with that,” McConnell said. “Whatever is ultimately decided I don’t have a problem with.”

Trump meanwhile has condemned the destruction, but he has also done nothing, and has actually called doing nothing his strategy. As he noted during this past weekend’s rally in Tulsa about the take-over by Marxist protesters of a section of Seattle,

Now I may be wrong, but it’s probably better for us to just watch that disaster (applause). I flew in with some [Republican] congressmen … and said to them, “Congressmen, what do you think, I can straighten it out fast, should we just go in?”

“No sir [they said], let it simmer for a little while. Let people see what radical left Democrats will do to our country.”

In other words, let’s let the bad guys have their riots and looting and petty dictatorships while instigating their own American Kristalnacht, even as they discredit and destroy the American dream. Better appeasement and bowing to them than face a worse firestorm of protest from them should we move to stop them.

For sure there is something to be said about such a strategy. Assuming the November election is fairly run, and the votes are counted accurately, showing the general public the failure of Democratic leadership certainly seems to be a good strategy.

The danger is that this strategy also assumes a fair and accurately counted election. No one however should any longer assume such a thing from the Democratic Party. They have shown with these riots and protests that they are willing to do anything to gain power, and faking an election will certainly be one of those actions. And their taking over large sections of the country by the use of violence will give them even more power to do exactly that. Do not expect the vote counts in any Democratically-controlled state or city to be reliable. They will be faked, without any doubt.

And the inaction of Trump and his fellow Republicans will have made that possible.

I meanwhile stand by the words that opened that 1950s Superman television show. Those words actually epitomized the American belief that with freedom and honesty and responsibility all things are possible, that it was possible to change the course of mighty rivers, to do great things, to even go to the Moon.

I fear that the generations to come will not be enriched by that vision. They will instead live in a dark age where truth and justice take a back seat to power and oppression.

And it will happen all because we today did not have the necessary courage to stand up for those ideals, but bowed in fear to the violence and hate of our modern leftist despots.

Click to see video in tweet.

The comparison between the tactics of the Nazi storm troopers and our modern Antifa thugs is apt. It illustrates the time we now live in. It also immediately made me want to repost my 2020 essay, Genocide is coming to America. That essay sadly remains pertinent, because the same unwillingness of decent Germans to believe the Nazis were a threat is the same unwillingness of too many modern Americans to believe the same thing about Antifa and the Democratic Party (which now enthusiastically uses Antifa as its storm troopers).

Worse, we now have a large minority of Americans who support this violent behavior. To them, violence is wholly justified against those who disagree with them. The proof of this horrible fact was demonstrated in the 2025 elections, where in Virginia a Democrat won his election despite openly wishing death not only on a Republican but on that Republican’s children, while in New York an anti-Semitic communist won election as mayor.

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Genocide is coming to America

In my last visit to Israel in 2018, my brother and sister-in-law took me sight-seeing to the northern parts of Israel near the Sea of Galilee. On our first night, we stayed at the home of one of their older friends, a man in his seventies.

That night we sat around their kitchen table so that they could catch up on family matters. At one point in the conversation our host reminisced about an older woman, now gone, who he had known in his childhood in the 1950s who had lived in Germany before and during World War II and had survived a concentration camp.

To paraphrase the story he told us, what this woman always remembered most starkly about that time, especially in the 1930s, was how difficult it was to get German friends who were not Jewish to believe the horrors she and other Jews were going through. To her, their calm nonchalant dismissal of the Nazi bigotry and oppression of Jews — too unbelievable to take seriously — was what had horrified her the most. Even twenty years later, it was this dismissal that appalled her the most, despite her time in a concentration camp and the death she had seen around her.

As he told us this story, what struck me was how similar my own experience has been. Time after time for the past four decades my liberal friends and relatives have refused to believe anything I say to them — always based on actual events — about politics and the growing corruption and bigotry within the Democratic Party. Like those decent Germans in the 1930s, these decent Americans find reasons to quickly dismiss what I say, without making any effort to find out if there is any merit to it.

In fact, less than two days after this very conversation it happened again. At one point I made mention to my brother, who remains a very typical Jewish liberal, the growing pro-Democrat partisan extremism of modern American journalism, to the point of blackballing conservative writers. He immediately told me that couldn’t be true. When I then told him I have experienced this shunning personally because of my political positions, often resulting in the loss of jobs and the rejection of my writing, he shrugged, giving me that same look of dismissal that I am sure that German woman in 1930s Germany saw many times. What I said was simply too unbelievable to be true, even though I had actually experienced it.

In the past few weeks the United States has had the following stories, all also clearly too unbelievable to be true. First we have documented evidence that the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter organization — that many decent people and large corporations are now throwing lots of money and support to — believes whites are subhuman and should be wiped out.

“Whiteness is not humxness,” the statement begins. “infact, white skin is sub-humxn.” The post goes on to present a genetics-based argument centred on melanin and enzyme. “White ppl are recessive genetic defects. this is factual,” the post reads towards the end. “white ppl need white supremacy as a mechanism to protect their survival as a people because all they can do is produce themselves. black ppl simply through their dominant genes can literally wipe out the white race if we had the power to.” [emphasis mine]

I could go into detail about the aggressive Marxist and violent agenda of Black Lives Matter, but they form only a small part of the general hateful trend.

Consider Senator Tammy Duckforth (D-Illinois). After Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech, she summed it up like so, “He spent all his time talking about dead traitors,” such as many Confederate war heroes.

As Charles Cooke at the National Review correctly noted,

This is a flat-out lie. It is entirely untrue. It is invented from whole cloth. You can read the speech here and see for yourself. One doesn’t have to like President Trump — or to have enjoyed his speech — in order to acknowledge that Duckworth is lying. One needs only to read what was said.

Not only did Trump spend only a small portion of his speech discussing the Civil War, when he did he focused on Lincoln and his successful effort to end slavery.

Duckworth’s lies here however are only a small example. Lying and slander has become for the Democratic Party its standard operating procedure, no different than the methods used by the Nazis.

So also has outright bigotry become normalized among Democratic politicians. For example, during a zoom meeting of a local New York City education council, one member became outraged because another member (Thomas Wrocklege), who happened to be white, held a a black child of a friend on his lap.

This innocent image of a man holding a child was the target of scorn by his fellow council members. Rachel Broshi told Wrocklage, “It hurts people when they see a white man bouncing a brown baby on their lap and they don’t know the context. That is harmful.”

Broshi, and several other council members, argued that the image of a white man holding a black child was inherently racist. When Wrocklage asked Broshi to explain why holding a friend’s nephew was racist merely due to their differing races, Broshi refused, yelling at Wrocklage, “Read a book. Read Ibram Kendi. Read ‘White Fragility.’ Read ‘How to Talk to White People.’”

Hard to believe, eh? The problem is that it happened, and worse, it will be impossible to get ordinary Democrats to believe it.

Then there is the student who had been accepted to Marquette University, posted a pro-Trump video of herself, and then found the university threatening to rescind that acceptance because of her conservative beliefs, even as she was menaced repeatedly on social media for those beliefs.

Pfefferle’s post has been watched nearly 600,000 times and has since caught the attention of the Marquette community, some of whom began harassing Pfefferle. Others threatened her life. “I hope you get shot,” one commenter told Pfefferle. “I’d pray for you but you’re not worth it,” another user added.

“I was extremely disappointed by the incendiary comments,” Pfefferle told The College Fix in an interview. “The response from my peers has been repulsive.”

Pfefferle explained that following the TikTok, she was contacted by Brian Troyer, dean of undergraduate admissions at Marquette, who she said told her her acceptance to the school was far from certain. “[He] had the heart to tell me I wasn’t a student,” Pfefferle said. “This means that my classification is still in limbo and is currently being decided by the administration. I have been accepted, I paid for my housing, I have my roommates, I even have a complete class schedule. If that doesn’t make me a student, what does?”

Some Marquette administrators also asked Pfefferle a series of questions meant to judge her morals, she said. [emphasis mine]

Marquette officials have since backed off and reassured her that her acceptance will not be revoked, but I do not envy her. Should she continue to publicly express her political views, she should expect some quite vile treatment once a full time student there, not incomparable to the bigotry and violence experienced by Jews in 1930s Germany.

I could go on and on. The above stories are only a small sample from the past few days, and only give a taste of similar stories that have been never-ending practically every day since early in the 2016 election campaign, beginning with actual rioting and violence against attendees at various Trump election rallies.

And yet, though these examples of leftist bigotry and oppression actually happened, I know from experience, even recent experience, that it will be nigh on impossible to get many Americans who have traditionally aligned themselves with the Democratic Party to believe them.

Thus, the reason I fear that genocide is coming to America. My fear is not engendered because of the documented examples above of individuals spewing hate and the desire to kill their enemies. My fear exists because, though these hate-mongers really exist and have made clear their hate, too many decent Americans who are not filled with hate will simply look the other way. It doesn’t involve them, and besides, this is just too unbelievable to take seriously.

Instead, they will continue to make believe the documented facts above don’t exist, and so these evil people will gain in political strength and support, and will eventually be in a position of power to instigate their programs of hate and genocide.

Though these power-hungry thugs will be personally responsible for the evil they do, the larger blame will fall on the millions of Americans who looked the other way when something could have been done to stop them.

As always, I hope I am wrong. I hope that my past and recent experience is not a prediction of the future, that these same liberal but decent Americans are finally waking up. Though I remain pessimistic, no one will celebrate more than I if I discover I am wrong come election day.

And it also takes two-plus years between launches

The Artemis vision began with President Trump, but the SLS architecture and its components long predate his administration, with much of the heritage clearly traced back to the Shuttle era. As I stated during my hearings, and will say again, this is the fastest path to return humans to the Moon and achieve our near-term objectives through at least Artemis V, but it is not the most economic path and certainly not the forever path.

The flight rate is the lowest of any NASA-designed vehicle, and that should be a topic of discussion. It is why we undertake wet dress rehearsals, Pre-FRR, and FRR, and why we will not press to launch until we are absolutely ready.

These comments were also in connection with the first wet dress rehearsal countdown that NASA performed with SLS/Orion in the past few days, a rehearsal that had to be terminated early because of fuel leaks. NASA now plans to do another wet dress rehearsal, requiring it to push back the Artemis-2 launch until March.

I think there is more going on here than meets the eye.

First of all, I think Isaacman is very aware that in the first launch of SLS in 2022, there were numerous delays due to similar problems. It took three wet dress rehearsals in April through June to finally allow the agency to commit to an August launch. In every case the problem was related to hydrogen fuel leaks or improper temperatures during fueling. Then the August launch was scrubbed twice because of more fuel leaks, forcing the agency to delay the launch again until November, when it was finally able to complete the countdown and launch.

I think Isaacman is telling us indirectly that he is going to demand a perfect dress rehearsal countdown before he will be willing to sign off on the actual launch. Based on SLS’s track record, it is therefore very likely that a launch this spring will not take place. Right now the launch has been delayed until March. If one or two dress rehearsals push it back into April and later, NASA will simply run out of time in this launch window.

Nor is this unlikely. There were five countdowns for Artemis-1 before it was finally able to launch, causing several months of delays. If this happens now, SLS won’t launch until later this year.

In other words, Isaacman is telling us by his statement today that he wants to make very clear to the public — and to the politicians in DC — the problems presented by SLS/Orion’s expensive and cumbersome design. During his nomination hearings he was forced by those politicians to commit to SLS/Orion and this Moon mission. He is now I think laying the groundwork to convince these Congress critters that a major change is essential, especially if they want to get their wish of creating a lunar base ahead of the Chinese. By forcing a perfect launch countdown and thus multiple delays — for entirely right reasons — he is going to force the politicians to reconsider SLS at last.

Superheavy after the October 2024 flight,
safely captured during the very first attempt

I am of course speculating, as I really have no idea what Isaacman is really thinking. I do know however that if SLS experiences multiple dress rehearsals with problems and gets delayed by months, this is exactly what is going to happen, even if Isaacman isn’t planning it.

The public is now paying close attention, and we have a NASA administrator who is not willing to sugarcoat these delays. That combination is going to make SLS look increasingly bad as it undergoes more likely “glitches” and delays, doing so in plain sight instead of limited to space geeks who pay attention.

And these delays will look even worse in comparison to Starship/Superheavy, which should launch itself at least twice or three times in the next six months, doing spectacular things and doing them regularly and almost routinely.

One of the 20th century’s greatest movies is David Lean’s 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia. The story it tells — of the clash of cultures, of war, and of colonization — combined with the personal story of T.E. Lawrence during World War I, is one of high drama that is unforgettable to anyone who has ever seen it.

Yet, the events it tells seem too dramatic to be believed. Did Lawrence actually rescue a man in the desert, by himself and against the advice of his Arab allies who knew better? Did he actually later execute that man coldly to prevent a tribal war that would have destroyed the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire? Did he actually lead those Arab tribes across a deadly desert to take the town of Aqaba from the rear?

And did he actually lead that Arab revolt so successfully that it took Damascus ahead of the British, only to lose it because that medieval tribal culture knew nothing about modern technology?

For years I wondered about these questions and tried to find out. I read T.E. Lawrence’s own memoir of his time there, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and found it to be unclear and obscure, answering none of my questions. Other histories about World War I merely touched upon these events, treating them as a minor side show. And histories about the Middle East during that time seemed uninterested in telling this part of the story.

So, the questions remained: Did these events really happen? They seemed too good to be true.

I have now discovered that these stories are not only largely true, the reality of T.E. Lawrence’s life and his time in Arabia was even stranger than I could suppose. I learned this from Scott Anderson’s fine biography of Lawrence, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Anderson not only unveiled Lawrence in all his inexplicable glory in this book, he made clear the complex political background that shaped the Middle East, and made it as we know it today.

First, there is Lawrence himself. From childhood he was a fearless individual quite willing to push his body beyond endurance. Fascinated at a young age with archeology and ancient architecture, at the ages of 18 and 20 he criss-crossed Europe on a solo bicycle tour to see its castles and ancient fortifications for a thesis he was writing at Oxford. He followed this up with a thousand-mile solo walking tour of the Middle East at the age of 21. Prior to the trip he mentioned it to archeologist David Hogarth, who was immediately horrified.

“I’m going,” Lawrence said.
“Well, have you go the money?” Hogarth asked. “You’ll want a guide and servants to carry your tent and baggage.”
“I’m going to walk.”
The scheme was becoming more preposterous all the time. “Europeans don’t walk in Syria,” Hogarth explained. “It isn’t safe or pleasant.”
“Well,” Lawrence said, “I do.”

On this journey Lawrence made friends with archeologist Leonard Woolley, becoming enamoured with his archeological work in Syria. Lawrence soon joined him, and the next five years, until the start of World War I, were probably the happiest in Lawrence’s life, working on archeology digs in Syria. He loved the work. He loved the land. And he loved the people.

When the war started however those digs ended, and the only way Lawrence could get back to the Middle East was through the war department. His personal on the ground knowledge of the Middle East and its people was priceless, though it took the British a ridiculously long time to realize it. And so he was sent to Arabia to help Faisal and the Arab revolt fight the Turks.

Once there, almost everything described in David Lean’s movie occurred, though for dramatic reasons some events and individuals were combined or rearranged. Lawrence did save a man who was lost in the desert, against the advice of the Arabs with him. He did execute a man in cold blood to prevent a tribal war. Unlike the movie, these were separate events spaced in time, and involved two different men. But both happened, in exactly the circumstances describe.

T.E. Lawrence, in Arabia

In fact, practically every event described in Lean’s movie happened more or less as Lean and his screenwriter, Robert Bolt, portrayed it. Lawrence did propose taking Aqaba from the rear by crossing a desert the nomadic Arabs normally avoided, a victory that made Lawrence’s name forever with British officials and allowed him the power to lead that Arab revolt into Damascus. Along the way the savagery of the war changed Lawrence, making him more brutal and robbing him of the innocent love of Arabia he once had.

As I noted, the movie does compress characters and events in order to tell the story practically in a single film, but it remains remarkably true to reality, in almost every way. Such dedication to truth in art is now rare in our world. For their art, filmmakers now think it perfectly okay to rewrite history to fit their own moral and political beliefs, even if it makes no sense. Lean and Bolt refused to do this, and as a result produced a movie of true greatness.

Scott Anderson’s book however is possibly greater, because it provides more depth than any movie can. He not only tells Lawrence’s story clearly in a way that makes the reading easy, he provides the larger context of the story so you understand the reasons why things happened as they did. No one is really the villain, except maybe the Germans who started it all with their desire to conquer France and Europe. That greedy desire forced the French and British to act in their own defense, and in doing so forced them to impose their own will on the Middle East, sometimes in a dishonest and two-faced manner.

The final consequence was the Middle East of today. If you want to understand with some depth why the Arabs are the way they are, I strongly recommend you read Anderson’s book.

Since April 2025 that science panel has been predicting that the solar maximum has passed and the Sun was beginning the ramp down to solar minimum, now expected to occur around 2031-32. And in the ten months since, sunspot activity has appeared to more or less track that prediction, as indicated by the purple/magenta curve line on the graph below.

It now appears that this prediction might very well have been premature.


The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community for both the previous solar maximum as well as the ongoing maximum. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007 for the previous maximum, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The blue curve is their revised May 2009 prediction. The red curve is the new prediction, first posted by NOAA in April 2020. At the beginning of April 2025 NOAA’s panel of solar scientists added the purple/magenta curve line, predicting that solar maximum was over, and that the ramp down to minimum had begun.

Though solar activity dropped slightly in January, it was doing so from a high number in December. The result is that for the past few months activity has somewhat leveled out, not declined.

From my annotated graph above this leveling is not so obvious. If you click on the graph however to see NOAA’s original version you will see that NOAA’s scientists have revised that purple/magenta curve line, based on the actual data from the last few months, and that it now indicates that leveling.

In other words, NOAA’s panel is once again doing what it has done repeatedly over the years, adjusting its prediction based on new data to make it look like it got things right. As I wrote when they made this ramp down prediction in April 2025:

In other words, it ain’t really a prediction. All they have done is to extrapolate the present decline during the past four months, even though there is no clear evidence to justify that extrapolation. In the previous solar cycle the Sun also started a similar decline, and then activity leaped upward again, producing a double-peaked maximum. Moreover, the extrapolation will result in an extremely short maximum, which will be especially unprecedented because short maximums have routinely been associated with high maximums, not the relative weak maximum we are presently experiencing.

NOAA’s scientists have simply produced a new “prediction” based solely on recent data, because their original prediction simply failed. This games-playing allows these scientists to fool the public into thinking they know what’s going on. What it really tells us is that they continue to guess, but spin those guesses so that they can hide their ignorance.

I also noted at that time that it was still likely that the Sun would repeat what it did in the previous maximum, and instead of ramping down to minimum it could see a new burst of activity, producing another double-peaked maximum. The data from January suggests this may still happen. The recent activity in the past week adds weight to that supposition.

We simply don’t know. It is a shame however that NOAA’s scientists don’t have the courage to admit this fact.

Our bankrupt new media continues to fail us. NASA is about to send four astronauts on a ten-day mission around the Moon in a capsule with questionable engineering, and that media continues to ignore the problem. Mainstream news outlets continue to describe the mission in glowing terms, consistently ignoring that questionable engineering. In some cases the stories even make believe NASA has fixed the problem, when it has not.

The most ridiculous example is an article yesterday from an Orlando outlet, Spectrum New 13: “How the lessons learned from the Challenger disaster apply to Artemis rockets”. It focuses entirely on the O-ring problem that destroyed Challenger, noting repeatedly that NASA has fixed this issue in its SLS rocket.

Of course it has. That’s the last war, long over. Engineers fixed this issue almost four decades ago. The article however dismisses entirely the new engineering concern of today, Orion’s heat shield, which did not work as expected during its own test flight in space in 2022. It covers this issue with this single two-sentence paragraph:

However, during re-entry, it broke up into chunks instead of burning away. This issue pushed back the Artemis II and III missions, but NASA has stated it has resolved the problem.

NASA however has not resolved the problem. It is using the same heat shield now on this manned mission, and really has no reason to assume it will work any better, even if the agency has changed the re-entry flight path in an effort to mitigate the heat shield’s questionable design.

You see, NASA with Artemis-2 is doing the exact same thing it did prior to both the Challenger and Columbia accidents. After Challenger, fixing the O-ring issue was important but that wasn’t real mistake NASA made. After Columbia fixing the foam issue was important, that also wasn’t NASA’s real error. What both investigations of the accidents concluded was that NASA’s management culture had the wrong priorities, that it ignored basic problems so that it could continue to fly missions on schedule. With Challenger it was the O-rings in cold weather. Despite engineers outlining the problem repeatedly, NASA’s management pushed them aside because the agency had to keep up its launch pace.

With Columbia it was foam falling from the external tank, damaging the shuttle’s tiles. For literally years NASA engineers and managers had evidence that foam pieces were damaging shuttle tiles, and did nothing, dismissing the problem as inconsequential. Never once did anyone at the agency ask some very basic questions, because to do so would threaten the launch schedule.

Four typical pages from NASA’s Orion heat shield report,
as released to the public, with everything redacted.

Today, with Artemis-2, NASA has continued with this failed approach. It hasn’t fixed the heat shield, because to do so would cause a delay in the launch schedule. It instead has improvised a new flight trajectory upon return, in the hope this will reduce the stress on the shield so it won’t fail.

And when others demanded some answers about its own investigation into the heat shield, NASA only reluctantly released its investigation report, but redacted practically every word, as shown to the right. The agency continues to want to close its eyes to engineering failures that are right before its eyes.

Sadly, too many reporters in our propaganda press appear willing to do the same.

There is a good chance Artemis-2 will succeed, and the astronauts will come home safely. And that success will prove nothing. NASA’s space effort will continue to be dominated by the same wrong priorities that killed the astronauts on Challenger and Columbia, and is thus certain to eventually kill astronauts on a later Artemis mission. It continues to put schedule above engineering, to a level that ignores clear engineering failures that should never be ignored.

Sometimes in art there are times when culture, timing, talent, and teamwork combine to produce a magic that is eternal and beyond measure. For Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, that time occurred from 1943 to 1959, when these two men created a string of musicals so grand that each

would become not just familiar but universally beloved, played over and over again until the words and melodies had become meshed, it seemed, with one’s very existence. To have one’s complete score memorized by a whole population would, it would seem for a composer, to have been all that life has to offer.

This quote comes from Meryle Secrest’s fine 2001 biography of Richard Rodgers, Somewhere for me: a biography of Richard Rodgers. It tells a story of a man who from childhood was obsessed with writing music, who struggled for decades to write musicals where the music and song flowed naturally from the plot and characters, and who changed with time as time changed him. Outside of his music and his commitment to it, he was however a very normal man, with a marriage that at times was stormy but held together despite those storms.

But it is Rodgers’ best music — written for the lovely words of Oscar Hammerstein — for which we most remember him. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, so I lived at a time when these Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals were being memorized by a whole population. As a child my parents subscribed to a musical record club, which sent them a new album every month. I would spend hours listening to the songs from Oklahoma, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, the King and I, and Carousel. And on television I got to see Julie Andrews in a live production of Cinderella.

In listening to these songs, I quickly realized, even as a child, that there was something deeply profound in those words and music, touching something deeper than mere beauty, a more fundamental but utterly inexplicable aspect of our existence. As I wrote in 2018 when I posted an evening pause of Juanita Hall singing Bali Ha’i from South Pacific,

The song is about the draw of love and desire, which is what Bali Ha’i partly represents. However, Hammerstein’s lyrics refer to more, to the greater magic hidden in life everywhere, the mystery that lies behind the black, you might say. It is a theme he repeated in many of the songs he wrote for Richard Rodgers.

Both Rodgers and Hammerstein had been in the musical theater business for decades, though until Oklahoma had almost never worked together. Both had created numerous successful musicals, some of which were turned into movies in the 1930s. Yet none of these earlier works carried this deeper meaning, represented by Bali Ha’i, which was fundamentally typical of everything they created as a team.

What made the music so popular and profound? First it was the team itself. Hammerstein produced lyrical poetry focused on love and existence, a perfect match for the romantic beauty of Rodgers’ musical style. Before, both could create great work, but only together could the best parts of each man’s talents be augmented by the other. It was as if 2 plus 2 now equaled 6.

Second, their choice of subject matter was deeper and more profound that their earlier work. True they still wrote musicals about love stories, with plots as simple as “boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-wins-girl,” but they now placed every story in a larger historical and cultural context. Oklahoma’s love story captured the changing American west, shifting from wild cowboys, saloons, and cattle drives to towns, farms, and families. South Pacific and The Sound of Music both told their love stories in the context of World War II and the moral dilemmas it forced every person to face. And The King and I was about the clash of cultures as western civilization began to force its influence globally in the 1800s.

Julie Andrews as Cinderella, making her grand entrance
in the live 1957 television production. Click for movie.

Carousel meanwhile told a dark story about failed love, but with a hope that even in failure there is a greater God overlooking all life, whilc Cinderella reminded us that we must never let the nay-sayers crush our spirit.

For the world is full of zanies and fools
Who don’t believe in sensible rules
And won’t believe what sensible people say
And because these daft and dewey-eyed dopes keep building up impossible hopes
Impossible things are happening every day!

Finally, their choices of subject matter fit perfectly with their time. People after World War II had learned to see their lives in the greater context of world history, and wanted their art to reflect that profound experience. Rodgers and Hammerstein recognized this, felt it themselves, and thus gave the public what it wanted.

Such art is rare in life. When it arrives we should never dismiss it, but enjoy it to the fullest. Sadly, modern culture too often now treats the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein as passe and overly sentimental, a very unfair criticism illustrating more the ignorance and close-mindedness of the critic than anything about the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

I say, enjoy these masterpieces as often as you can, because greatness comes your way only rarely in life.

Blue Origin announced yesterday that it going to build a major satellite constellation — dubbed TeraWave and comprising more than 5,000 satellites — to provide internet service to the globe while also providing data center capability for those companies that wish to establish space-based cloud computing facilities.

It plans to begin launching satellites in 2027.

As I noted in today’s quick links below, such a story would normally merit a full post, “but considering Blue Origin’s inability to get almost anything off the ground, this proposal doesn’t deserve that much coverage at this point.” I just can’t get excited about any Blue Origin proposal, until they actually start launching it. For almost a decade this company has been making these kind of grand announcements, and has only so far managed to achieve one, its New Glenn rocket. And that has come years late and at a pace that is glacial.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream propaganda press immediately went bonkers over this proposal, immediately declaring most absurdly that TeraWave is already a major challenger to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. Here are just a few very typical examples:

• BBC: Bezos’ Blue Origin announces satellite rival to Musk’s Starlink
• CNBC: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launches satellite internet service to rival SpaceX, Amazon
• Business Insider: Jeff Bezos’s grand plan for a satellite constellation to rival SpaceX is coming together
• The Verge: Blue Origin’s Starlink rival TeraWave promises 6-terabit satellite internet

This adulation by the mainstream press of Bezos is far from unusual. For reasons that baffle me, the propaganda press has consistently considered any project proposal coming from a Jeff Bezos’ company to instantly be God’s gift to humanity. For more than a decade now it has been touting Blue Origin as the company that SpaceX needs to beat, flipping reality on its head. Now it ranks Blue Origin’s TeraWave constellation a major Starlink rival, when it is at least two years from even launching its first satellite.

There is one aspect of this story however that does deserve to be highlighted because it appears no one else is noticing it, which is why I after some thought I decided to write this full post. When Bezos controlled both Blue Origin and Amazon, the idea of having Amazon create the Leo constellation made sense. Bezos was doing what Musk was doing with SpaceX/Starlink, using his rocket to launch his constellation, with the revenue produced by Leo available to Bezos to fund Blue Origin space projects, as he wished.

Bezos however has stepped back from Amazon, so Blue Origin has lost that model. It can no longer profit significantly from the revenue Leo eventually produces for Amazon, as SpaceX is does with Starlink.

Artist rendering of Orbital Reef design, as of
April 2025. Click for original image.

Thus, Bezos is now creating a Blue Origin constellation for this purpose. When TeraWave launches and begins garnering customers, it will generate revenue to Blue Origin directly, which Blue Origin can then use to push Bezos’s own dreams in space.

And what are those dreams? Bezos has repeatedly said he wishes to move heavy industries into space, in order to protect the Earth from the pollution those industries produce. If he follows through with this concept, then in about a decade he will begin building such large facilities, either in orbit or on the Moon and elsewhere.

For example, Blue Origin’s proposed space station, Orbital Reef, has appeared completely dead for the past year-plus. The company has done practically no development. This could change however if TeraWave eventually pumps some cash into Blue Origin’s coffers.

But of course, such revenues are still at least a decade away, assuming Blue Origin moves fast. And that remains an decidedly uncertain possibility.

It may be emphatically said that a new empire has sprung into existence, and there is a new thing under the sun. By the Constitution now established in the United States, religious as well as civil liberty is secured.

Some serious Christians may possibly tremble for the Ark, and think the Christian religion in danger when divested of the patronage of civil power. They may fear inroads from licentiousness and infidelity, on the one hand, and from sectaries and party divisions on the other.

But we can dismiss our fears, when we consider the truth can never be a real hazard, where there is a sufficiency of light and knowledge, and full liberty to vindicate it.

Cutler’s words come from David McCullough’s 2019 history, The Pioneers, describing the effort of Cutler and a small group of New Englanders to re-create a new New England in the wilderness north of the Ohio river.

Not surprisingly, McCullough’s book is quite readable, as are all his works. What made it a revelation to me is that it revealed an aspect of this early American settlement of the west that I had been ignorant of. It wasn’t just any old Americans moving west to found new communities. At the beginning it was specifically the descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans in New England, actually organizing consciously to repeat the same thing as their ancestors, sending a group of God-fearing religious families west to build a new city on a hill, for the future of America and for their children.

Cutler himself had been crucial in lobbying Congress to establish the laws necessary to allow these first first settlers to buy land and begin settlement. He and a group of former revolutionary soldiers from New England had worked up a plan, and sent Cutler to New York and Philadelphia to convince Congress to pass the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, establishing the legal framework for settling the vast territories now open to American north and west of the Ohio river. Cutler himself wrote much of that bill, making sure it included articles requiring freedom of religion and no slavery.

In the early spring of 1788 the first group of twenty-two settlers arrived, and within a very short time they had established a town and community. By the time Cutler arrived in the late summer, the colony was so well established that families were arriving to build their own farms.

McCullough outlines this history most clearly, focusing on the specific individuals in this community who came with few skills and ended up becoming noted artists, architects, doctors, farmers, and politicians. And while Marietta would never become a major city, it certainly prospered as it laid the groundwork for the larger settlements that soon sprung up along the Ohio and in the interior.

Its founders however succeeded magnificently in one aspect much more important than size or wealth: They made sure that the same concepts that established the New England colonies would be sustained in this new western world: family, freedom, and moral commitment. Ohio and the states to the north and west all became free states, preventing the spread of slavery and making sure the north was strong enough to win the Civil War and end slavery forever.

For the next two centuries that groundwork sustained the United States, taking it through that civil war that ended slavery forever to make it a world power that freed Europe twice from power-hungry tyrants while becoming the most prosperous nation ever in the history of the human race. It became so prosperous it could send men to the Moon and back, and hardly blink an eye.

The Constitution: The framework for rebuilding America

Reading Cutler’s quote today (at the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century), I fear the fears he dismissed so calmly are finally coming true. Today America is torn by sectarian factional warfare, and the Judeo-Christian beliefs that founded it are no longer dominant. Worse, licentiousness and infidelity have become culturally supreme. It might have taken more that two centuries, but it now appears that a large percentage of Americans not only no longer believe in the basic values of the Bible and western civilization, they are fundamentally hostile to it.

Can we recover our nation and culture? I think we can, but only if we are bluntly honest about our failures now, and are boldly willing to face the hideousness required to force change. It will not be a pretty thing to push back against the ugliness of our time, of the many people who now believe it perfectly okay to invade a church during Sunday services, to attack and even kill anyone who disagrees with them. Such people cannot be reasoned with, and for reason and rationality to once again be dominant in America we will have to fight much harder than rational and reasonable people like to do.

But it must be done. Cutler and his generation knew the cost, fought the Revolutionary War to win their rights, and were willing to do what was necessary to maintain them. As Cutler noted in the quote above, they set their work in stone by writing the Constitution so that the rights of future generations would be protected. And by doing so they made it it possible to Americans to do great things for the next two centuries.

We can do no less, so that future generations will have that same chance. We need only use the tools that Cutler and his generation gave us.

In a tweet yesterday afternoon, NASA administration Isaacman essentially endorsed the decision of the NASA managers and engineers in its Artemis program who decided they could live with the engineering issues of Orion’s heat shield (as shown in the image to the right) and fly the upcoming Artemis-2 mission around the Moon carrying four astronauts with that same heat shield design.

Isaacman’s statement however suggests to me that he is not looking at this issue as closely as he should.

Human spaceflight will always involve uncertainty. NASA’s standard engineering process is to identify it early, bound the risk through rigorous analysis and testing, and apply operational mitigations that preserve margin and protect the crew. That process works best when concerns are raised early and debated transparently.

I appreciate the willingness of participants to engage on this subject, including former NASA astronaut Danny Olivas, whose perspective reflects how serious technical questions can be addressed through data, analysis, testing, and decisions grounded in the best engineering judgment available. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence is fundamentally incorrect. Instead of recognizing that the unexpected damage to Orion’s heat shield after the 2022 Artemis-1 test flight around the moon made that heat shield unacceptable on the next flight, and immediately begin work on a new shield, NASA went dark, providing no information for two years. The agency realized that replacing the shield would cause a delay, and rather than fix the engineering it decided maintaining the Artemis program schedule was more important. Its subsequent actions since seem more designed to rationalize away the problem then deal with it, a conclusion that NASA’s own inspector general came to in 2024.

The agency’s lack of transparency was made very evident when Freedom of Information requests finally forced it to release the conclusions of its own engineering investigation, and it redacted every single word.. If Isaacman was so committed to transparency and truly believes NASA’s investigation was based on “the best engineering judgment available”, why doesn’t he release that report, unredacted? Has he even looked at it himself?

I and many others pray that the Orion crew comes home safe. Good engineering management however would never allow this mission to fly manned, considering the heat shield uncertainties as well as other issues (such as flying the capsule manned using an untested life support system). That NASA’s Artemis work force is willing to do this tells us the culture that killed the astronauts on Challenger and Columbia remains unchanged. They still put schedule above engineering, and are still willing to risk lives unnecessarily.

It also tells us that Isaacman appears unwilling to stand up to this culture and force it to change. If Orion comes home safe, that will only reinforce this unsafe culture, and future missions will thus be as unsafe and unreliable.