Tag: policy

Boeing lobbies for renewal of the Export-Import Bank

9:37 am

Boeing on Monday told its satellite workers that it will eventually lay off hundreds because of lost contracts due to the failure of Congress to renew the Export-Import Bank.

Boeing Co (BA.N) on Monday told its workers that it expected to cut as many as “several hundred” jobs in its satellite business through the end of 2015 due to a downturn in U.S. military spending and delays in commercial satellite orders. Multiple commercial orders were being delayed by recent failures of launch vehicles and uncertainties about the future availability of financing from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, whose government charter lapsed on June 30, the company told key managers in an internal communication.

Boeing spokesman Tim Neale confirmed the reductions and said the total number of people affected would be finalized in coming months. Some could find work in other parts of Boeing, he said. [emphasis mine]

This announcement is pure lobbying, no more. They might have to lay off workers, but they haven’t done it yet, and when they do the numbers are likely to be far less than they are implying. And even so, the layoffs will probably be good for the company, making it more lean and efficient.

The reason they have made this public now is to generate support for a renewal of the Export-Import Bank, which Congress allowed to expire last month. Boeing wants it back, because the company uses the low interest loans it provides (using government money) to get contracts abroad. However, they really don’t need it to do that. They could trim costs, work more efficiently, and get loans in the private sector, as every other private company is expected to do.

This announcement is really no different than the doom that was predicted prior to the arrival of sequestration. Those budget cuts were going to cause the destruction of the defense industry and the American military, while causing the airline industry to collapse because the TSA and the FAA wouldn’t have the staff to keep the planes in the air. Twas all a lie. Nothing happened, and by some miracle the government still had plenty of cash to keep things running smoothly. Similarly, Boeing can compete without the help of the government. They just have to stop whining and do it.

Leave a comment

IRS reveals Lerner used more than one personal email address

7:29 pm

Surprise! The IRS today revealed that it has just discovered that Lois Lerner used a second private personal email account, under a different name, for conducting government business.

IRS lawyer Geoffrey J. Klimas told the court that as the agency was putting together a set of documents to turn over to Judicial Watch, it realized Ms. Lerner had used yet another email account, in addition to her official one and another personal one already known to the agency. “In addition to emails to or from an email account denominated ‘Lois G. Lerner‘ or ‘Lois Home,’ some emails responsive to Judicial Watch’s request may have been sent to or received from a personal email account denominated ‘Toby Miles,’” Mr. Klimas told Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who is hearing the case.

It is unclear who Toby Miles is, but Mr. Klimas said the IRS has concluded that was “a personal email account used by Lerner.”

There is additional concern that this insecure account, not yet searched, might have been used by Lerner to communicate confidential taxpayer information.

6 comments

Wisconsin spends $1.2 million defending “John Doe” prosecutors.

8:43 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The State of Wisconsin has spent more than $1.2 million defending Democratic Party prosecutors who had instigated investigations against innnocent citizens merely because those citizens opposed that party’s agenda.

The courts have repeatedly ruled against those investigations, sometimes with very harsh words. Yet, the state continues to spend money defending them, even though the governor, Scott Walker, is a Republican and the state legislature is controlled by the Republican Party.

This quote from the article sums it up:

“They lost in the highest court in Wisconsin and they still won’t let go. And we are supposed to keep battling them on our dime while the taxpayers pick up the tab for them to harass us in court. And why is the state of Wisconsin paying legal fees for Milwaukee County officials who are being sued for violating people’s civil rights in a Milwaukee County investigation? Let Milwaukee County taxpayers pay to defend their corrupt public officials.”

If Scott Walker is serious about running for President, he should end the funding of these prosecutors now.

6 comments

Oregon forest fires blamed on federal ban on logging

7:12 pm

We’re here to help you! The logging industry is blaming the increased number of severe forest fires in Oregon during the past three years on the federal ban on logging in federal forests.

Logging on federal lands was first limited in the early 90’s. More severe limits on logging on any roadless federal land were then passed by President Bill Clinton in 2000, essentially ending the practice on federal lands.

[Andrew Miller, CEO of Stimson Lumber, one of the state’s largest lumber companies] said this was a huge mistake. “As soon as the ban on logging took effect, fire conditions worsened,” he said. “Four or five years after the ban was put in place fires started to really ramp up.” The reason for the increase is simple, he said. When logging in these areas stopped, more and more trees began to fill the lands. These trees, particularly ones that have died and become dried out, rather than be chopped down by a logging company, give the fire easily combustible fuel. “Once logging was stopped the forests got older and older and more and more trees died off,” Miller said.

The article is well written, and includes a response by a Forest Service official, who dismissed the lack of logging as the cause and instead blamed the increase in fires to extreme weather and less snowfall in the western states.

I am willing to bet that a close look at the weather in the Northwest will find that the only extreme weather they have seen in the past three years has been snow, contradicting the Forest Service official’s claim. I do not know this, and could easily be wrong, but I am still willing to bet.

2 comments

“SJW zealots proved their commitment to tolerance, openness and variety by vowing not to read a work found on [an opposing] slate under any circumstances.”

5:13 pm

The story describes the battle this year in the science fiction field between Social Justice Warriors (SJW) — leftwing ideologues who want to limit the books that win the Hugo Awards to only those that support leftwing identity politics — and a slate of science fiction authors who oppose this intolerant attitude and wanted to get the Hugos opened up to a wider range of ideas.

This quote sums up the attitudes of the left quite nicely:

The facts of this case are the same as in gaming and in every other industry that social justice warriors touch. They do not care about art forms. They do not care about science fiction. They do not even particularly care about talent. They care about enriching and ennobling themselves and their friends, and pushing a twisted, discredited, divisive brand of authoritarian politics.

In politics, in the environment, in science, and in any number of other important fields in today’s society, the left really has no interest in achieving its stated goals. (Just read this one report about the EPA’s mine disaster in Colorado, for example.) Instead, the goal is power, and control, and gaining the ability to dictate how others shall live their lives — even if it destroys everything else in the process.

When Americans finally understand this, they might finally choose to throw these thugs out of power. Until then, however, expect them to continue their scorched Earth policy of destroying innocent people, because they can.

5 comments

Florida demands real skim milk be declared “imitation” because nothing was added to it.

11:12 am

You can’t make this stuff up! An all-natural creamery in Florida has been forced to destroy rather than sell its skim milk because the state’s agriculture department wants them to either artificially add vitamins or label the skim milk “imitation”, even though it came directly from the cow.

Webster’s dictionary defines skim milk as simply “milk from which cream has been removed,” with no mention of added vitamins. But Department lawyer Ashley Davis told a judge consumers expect whole milk and skim milk to have the same nutritional value and that the Wesselhoefts’ skim milk is nutritionally inferior because vitamins are removed when the milk fat is removed. “Ocheessee’s product is imitating — literally imitating — skim milk,” Davis said.

Judge Robert Hinkle said he’s not so sure consumers expect skim milk to have the same nutritional value as whole milk. “You know something’s been removed in order to make it skim milk,” he said. Hinkle also seemed to have problems with the word imitation. “It’s hard to call this imitation milk. It came right out of the cow,” Hinkle said. “Anyone who reads imitation skim milk would think it didn’t come out of a cow.” [emphasis in original]

The article also describes the story of a sausage company destroyed by similar absurd regulations.

One comment

The next Lois Lerner, this time at the Federal Election Commission

10:05 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has voiced support for Lois Lerner’s harassment of conservatives at the IRS, and wants to wield her agency’s power in the same manner.

[Critics] take special aim at the commission’s Democratic chairwoman, Ann Ravel, who also served as chairwoman of California’s equivalent to the FEC, the Fair Political Practices Commission, before coming to Washington in 2013. Ravel has lambasted the commission as “dysfunctional” because votes on enforcement issues have often resulted in ties, and she has said the commission should go beyond its role of enforcing election laws by doing more to get women and minorities elected to political office. She has complained that super PACs are “95 percent run by white men,” and that as a result, “the people who get the money are generally also white men.”

To remedy those problems, Ravel sponsored a forum at the FEC in June to talk about getting more women involved in the political process. She has also proposed broadening disclosure laws to diminish the role of outside spending, and suggested that the FEC should claim authority to regulate political content on the Web. She’s also voiced support for eliminating one member of the commission in order to create a partisan majority that doesn’t have tie votes, saying in an interview with Roll Call, “I think it would help.”

In other words, she doesn’t like how Americans vote, and wants to change the results, by any means necessary.

Her partisan willingness to use the FEC to influence elections, something it is fundamentally not supposed to do, illustrates an important aspect of the IRS scandal. Obama might be leading the way in using the government to squelch any political opposition, but he couldn’t do it if he didn’t have the support of a lot of individuals within the government, both political appointees and civil service workers.

I have a saying: “It is the audience that counts.” Having someone in charge demanding action means nothing if he or she doesn’t have a legion of supporters willing to back him or her up. It appears the fascist beliefs of many leaders in the Democratic Party and in leftwing academic circles do have that legion of supporters. We who believe in freedom and democracy had better recognize this at some point, since an unwillingness to do so (as illustrated by the Republican leadership) will only allow these fascists to gain more power.

2 comments

Eight telescope protesters arrested on road to summit of Haleakala on Maui

9:16 am

Police arrested 8 protesters on Thursday attempting to block trucks delivering construction materials for the new Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) under construction since 2012 on the summit of Haleakala on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

One of those arrested has been a leader of the protests at Mauna Kea against the Thirty Meter Telescope.

The Hawaii state government continues to waffle on what it is going to do. Either they will make sure that construction of these telescopes can proceed, as per the agreements made after years of negotiation, or they are going to bow to a handful of protesters. Right now it appears that it can’t seem to make up its mind.

Meanwhile, if these protesters really have the support of a majority of Hawaiians, then astronomy in Hawaii is doomed.

Leave a comment

Ecologists try to control reporting of their presentations

9:37 am

At its annual conference last week, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) demanded that audience members not tweet about presentations unless given permission by the speaker.

The request to gain consent from speakers before tweeting about their presentations rankled many. In a blog post, Terry Wheeler, an entomologist at McGill University in Quebec, Canada, said that ESA was “taking a step backward” from its open social-media policy of past years. But Liza Lester, a communications officer at ESA, says that the society supports tweeting at conferences and did not intend to change its stance. “It was a misunderstanding,” she says.

Writing on the Lyman Entomological Museum blog, Wheeler says that the Twitter restriction caused a lot of frustration among ESA meeting attendees and long-distance observers, who wondered why there was such a lull in social-media chatter. He notes that the last-minute announcement differs from the code of conduct printed in the conference programme, which says that attendees cannot take photographs of slides or posters without permission and that they should avoid posting online “detailed information from presentations.” Those restrictions, he writes, seem reasonable. But the policy in the programme made no mention of requiring permission to live-tweet.

For members of this science organization the restrictions might rankle, but as fellow scientists they will feel some compulsion to obey. However, science conferences like this normally encourage journalists to attend, and if so, such restrictions are garbage. If I was there as a journalist, I would tweet, photograph, and post reports on my webpage to my heart’s content, ignoring these absurd and unenforceable rules.

One comment

Russians consider building reusable rocket

9:17 am

The competition heats up: Roscosmos is studying proposals for building a reusable first stage that will use wings to return to the launchpad for later reuse.

The project draft has been created as part of Russia’s 2016-2025 space program. According to Izestia, Russia could spend over 12 billion rubles (around $180 million) on the creation of the reusable first stage before 2025. The newspaper cites space experts as saying that satellite launches could become much cheaper with the use of renewable launchers as they would allow to save millions of dollars on engines installed on the first stage of the rocket. The cost of the engines used on the current expendable launch vehicles is $10-70 million.

I’m not sure how seriously we should take this. The Russians consider lots of proposals, many times leaking the proposals to the press for any number of reasons. Most of those proposals never come to fruition.

Nonetheless, SpaceX’s effort to make its Falcon 9 first stage reusable, thus making it far less expensive than anyone else’s, is clearly influencing the Russians, as it has ULA and the Europeans. They are feeling competitive pressure, and are thus compelled to respond.

Leave a comment

Soyuz rocket builder proposes major upgrade

8:30 am

The competition heats up: The head of the Russian company that builds the Soyuz rocket said today that a new upgrade of that rocket could be built and flying by 2022.

Russia’s future Soyuz-5 carrier rocket will be equipped with advanced new engines using ecology-friendly fuel, according to Alexander Kirilin. “One of the distinguishing features of the Soyuz-5 is the use of liquefied natural gas as fuel,” Kirilin said in an interview with RIA Novosti published on Tuesday. “The engines will be developed from scratch, which would allow us to apply a variety of advanced technological and economic characteristics that would make Soyuz-5 competitive on global markets,” Kirilin said. “The design of Soyuz-5 allows the addition of extra side blocks to make it a heavy-class rocket, but we are focusing now on a prototype with operational payload of 9 metric tons,” he added.

At the same time, Kirillin stressed that the Soyuz-5 will not compete with the ongoing development of the Angara family of carrier rockets. [emphasis mine]

Kirillin is doing a political dance with this interview. On one hand he is trying to sell to the Putin government the idea of developing a new version of the Soyuz rocket — thereby giving his company work for decades hence — in order to increase Russia’s ability to compete in the international launch market. On the other hand, he has to convince that same government that this new Soyuz will not compete with Russia’s new Angara rocket.

The two ideas are contradictory, especially if the upgrade allows the Soyuz to be modular and scalable so it can launch larger payloads, like Angara.

Kirillin’s problem is that the only investment capital available to him comes from the government, which now controls the entire Russian aerospace industry. Under this Soviet-style monolithic set-up, he is not allowed to compete with other Russian companies. However, if he doesn’t convince the government to build something, his company will no longer have a reason for existing.

In other words, creating a single government organization to run all of Russia’s space industry, as Putin’s government has done, was very counter-productive in the long run. It discourages competition while naturally causing the industry to shrink.

Leave a comment

Orbital ATK cargo contract extended

4:56 pm

The competition heats up: NASA has ordered two more cargo flights from Orbital ATK.

Orbital ATK, Dulles, Virginia, will fly two more missions under its 2008 contract for a total of 10 flights, according to Orbital ATK spokeswoman Vicki Cox. The company designated the missions OA-9e and OA-10e, Cox said. She declined to say when those flights will occur, although the company has said it plans to launch any new CRS missions it gets from NASA on Antares once it completes two deliveries using United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket. The Atlas 5 launches are slated for December and early 2016 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

NASA may also order additional cargo flights from its other CRS contractor, SpaceX of Hawthorne, California. “A modification is in work with both [CRS] providers,” NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz wrote in an Aug. 13 email. “Additional missions for SpaceX are still under discussion.”

That this contract extension occurs about the same time NASA decided to delay its decision on the second round of cargo contracts is probably not a coincidence. It suggests to me that the agency is probably seriously considering awarding one of the next contracts to a more risky proposal, such as Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser. In that case, extending the present contracts gives them some additional margin should the new contractors have problems.

One comment

IRS computer hack bigger than previously thought

3:32 pm

Government in action! A hack of IRS taxpayer information was significantly bigger than previously estimated, the IRS revealed today.

An additional 220,000 potential victims had information stolen from an IRS website as part of a sophisticated scheme to use stolen identities to claim fraudulent tax refunds, the IRS said Monday. The revelation more than doubles the total number of potential victims, to 334,000.

Well, no matter, this hack is mere chicken feed compared to the 21 million records stolen from the federal Office of Personal Management. And it hardly compares with the recent Pentagon breach, where the Chinese got almost all federal records. No, the IRS is doing a much better job then those other agencies, only being slightly incompetent and screwing up only a little.

And besides, the IRS does such a good job for Obama by harassing anyone that opposes the Democratic Party agenda! How could anyone complain about them?

One comment

“When EPA is not ignoring Supreme Court limitations on it, it is blithely disregarding rule-making laws required of it.”

9:00 am

The story that has the quote above outlines the EPA’s recent and past history of ignoring the law and court rulings to write and impose its regulations. It also details the many times the environmental agency has used its ability to impose fines to extort concessions from private landowners, including the recent Colorado mine disaster.

Like the IRS, the EPA has become an out-of-control agency, a haven for fascists eager to use their power to squelch anyone that opposes them. With the former, this power is used by partisan Democrats to help the Democratic Party and hurt its opponents. With the latter, this power is used to destroy private property rights in the name of leftwing environmental fantasies, even if that use of power ends up doing terrible damage to the environment.

3 comments

Obamacare forces schools to cut back

11:30 am

Finding out what’s in it: Public school budgets continue to be squeezed by the cost of Obamacare.

They find they either have to cut employee hours, privatize some services, or eliminate health insurance entirely and pay the Obamacare fines. Otherwise, they can’t afford the costs.

This quote however illustrates the educational cost of Obamacare:

School officials say that it’s hard for students to adjust to having multiple part-time educators throughout the day. Chris Johnson, an administrator with the Penn Manor school district in Pennsylvania, told a publication there that, “If you start doing a half day with this person and then a half day with that person, those students don’t react well.”

Even as it bankrupts us financially, Obamacare is also bankrupting us socially. What a disaster. We desperately need to repeal it, as soon as possible.

2 comments

NASA considers using Bigelow module for deep space missions

8:56 am

The competition heats up: Rather than build something in-house for gobs of money and decades of work, NASA is considering using Bigelow Aerospace’s largest inflatable modules for its deep space missions.

What has happened is that NASA has signed a joint agreement with Bigelow to study the possibility of using Bigelow’s B330 module as a transport habitat on long flights. The agency really has no choice, as it doesn’t have the funding to develop the necessary large spacecraft for these missions, and Bigelow can provide them to it for much less.

This description of the background of Bigelow’s inflatable modules illustrates why NASA can’t build these itself:

The B330 evolved from the Genesis I and II modules that Bigelow Aerospace had launched into space. Those technology demonstrators were born out of the NASA project known as TransHab. The TransHab was an inflatable module designed for the ISS but was ultimately cancelled in 1999 due to budget constraints. The module would have provided a 4 level 27.5 feet (8.4 meter) diameter habitat for the astronauts.

After TransHab was cancelled, Bigelow worked with NASA on a technology transfer, giving Bigelow Aerospace exclusive rights to the technology. Using this technology, Bigelow designed, built and launched two technology demonstrators. They are still on orbit today. Genesis I was launched in 2006 with it’s sister ship launching in 2007. Both ships tested flight operations processes and on-board electronics and have performed above design specifications. [emphasis mine]

Unlike NASA, as a private company Bigelow was able to build this technology quickly and at a low cost. With the new agreement, the goal will be study the operation of a B330 in independent flight in low Earth orbit. Whether an actual B330 will be build and launched however is not yet clear.

4 comments

The troubles caused by Obamacare in Colorado

8:42 am

Finding out what’s in it: This excellent article outlines honestly the problems Obamacare is causing for the health insurance business, resulting in one-third increases in premiums in Colorado.

The seeds of RMHP’s current financial strain were sewn in 2014 when all health insurance carriers were required by the Affordable Care Act to sell insurance to anyone, without exception, Salazar said. That brought thousands of sick Coloradans with pre-existing conditions into the new health insurance marketplace. People previously denied insurance could now obtain coverage, she said.

In all, Colorado has added about 600,000 people to the health care system since 2013, including 140,000 people who signed up for individual coverage through Connect for Health, the state’s online health insurance marketplace. At the same time, 450,000 people enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Colorado Trust reported.

Many new enrollees were among the sickest because they failed to seek medical treatment in the past because of a lack of insurance, ErkenBrack said. The ACA prevents insurance carriers from pricing insurance products as traditionally done in the past because it prohibits the exclusion of people with pre-existing conditions, Salazar said. Without the ability to exclude or charge someone more in premiums based on health status, it’s much more difficult for insurance actuaries to establish proper premiums. Accurately anticipating the number of claims and their cost, then setting the right premium, is how insurance companies earn income.

To pay for these sick customers the insurance companies are forced to raise rates. In this case, they need a 34% increase to pay the cost. If they don’t get it, they will lose money and eventually go out of business. And if they do get it, they face ruin anyway because no one can afford these rates.

Thank you Democrats and Obama! Your wisdom in destroying the health insurance industry knows no bounds! It is just what the American people wanted!

11 comments

The mobile launch building at Vostochny

8:27 am

At their new spaceport at Vostochny, the Russians are building a moveable launch building that will enclose their Soyuz rockets prior to launch.

Painted in elegant blue and white and standing almost 50 meters high, the Mobile Service Tower, MBO (for Mobilnaya Bashnya Obsluzhivaniya), is designed to provide personnel access to the Soyuz rocket during the countdown to liftoff from its launch pad in Vostochny. The structure can be also used to service the pad after launch and to process the rocket in case of an aborted liftoff.

With the tower in place, technicians can easily reach practically any part of the rocket as high as 37 meters above the surface of the launch pad. Internal access bridges of the tower surround the upper portion of the first and second stage, the third stage and the payload fairing.

The article also notes that “for decades, Soviet soldiers and officers and later their Russian civilian successors had to brave winter cold and summer heat preparing Soyuz rockets for launch on open-air gantries in Baikonur and Plesetsk. But in a sign how times have changed, the new generation of rocketeers will be protected from snow and rain with a climate-controlled tower completely enclosing the Soyuz rocket before liftoff from its newest launch pad at Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome.”

The irony here is profound. Big moveable buildings is how NASA has been doing it since Apollo. It is also what Boeing’s Delta family of rockets uses at Vandenberg in California. It is also why the Saturn 5 was and the Delta is so expensive to launch.

SpaceX abandoned such complicated structures in designing its Falcon 9, and instead decided to copy the old Soviet method of simple buildings for horizontal assembly and the simple horizontal transport to the launchpad. This appears to save a lot of money while simplifying rocket assembly.

That the Russians are now copying NASA’s more expensive but fancy mobile building approach means that, once again, their government is making decisions not based on efficiency but the prestige their political decisions can give them. From a competitive perspective, this is not going to benefit the Russia space effort, in the slightest.

But their workers will be more comfortable while they assembly those rockets!

2 comments

Mauna Kea visitor center reopens

5:47 pm

The visitor center on Mauna Kea was reopened this weekend after a month closure that supposedly forbid access by the public.

And yet, for that entire month, the state has allowed the protesters opposing construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) to remain camped across the street.

To me, this illustrates where the state’s loyalties lie. They might talk a tough game, but they are really doing nothing to enforce the law and the legally negotiated agreements between the astronomical community and the various Hawaiian cultural institutions that had agreed on the conditions for building TMT. By allowing the protesters to continue to break the law and set up house on the mountain, the state is saying they really want construction to cease.

I say, maybe the time has come for astronomers to agree, and move lock, stock, and barrel south to Chile. In addition, maybe tourists should consider other places to visit, rather than a place that exhibits such hostility to outsiders.

8 comments

Houston trying to steal land from two churches

2:09 pm

Fascists: Having failed to intimidate religious leaders when the city of Houston tried to subpoena their sermons, the city is now trying to use eminent domain procedures to shut down two churches.

The fifth ward is located just outside of downtown. Property values in the area have skyrocketed and continue to climb. The City of Houston offered to purchase the churches. When the churches refused, the city came back with threats of using eminent domain to acquire the property as part of an urban development plan.

More here. Texas state law, written and passed after the Supreme Court decision in Kelo v New London, expressly forbids this kind of eminent domain taking. Moreover, the taking appears to specifically violate the first amendment rights of these two churches.

Quick! Guess what to which political party the Houston mayor belongs!

14 comments

NASA extends Russian crew ferry contract through 2019 for $490 million

8:09 pm

Lobbying Congress: Claiming that the unwillingness of Congress to fully fund its effort to build commercial manned space ferries, NASA announced today that it has extended its contract with the Russians through 2019, at a cost of $490 million.

For the next fiscal year, House Republicans have proposed allocating nearly $250 million less than the request, while Senate Republicans would offer $300 million less. If Congress doesn’t increase the allocation, Boeing and SpaceX likely will receive orders to immediately suspend all operations either next spring or summer, Bolden said. And if those orders are issued, Bolden said the existing contracts “may need to be renegotiated, likely resulting in further schedule slippage and increased cost.”

According to this article, the extension has also increased the cost per astronaut flight from $71 to $82 million.

The irony here is that I do not believe Congress’s cuts to this program have slowed SpaceX’s effort down in the slightest. I expect that, barring more flight failures or orders from NASA to stop work, they could fly their first manned Dragon flight by 2017.

Boeing however is probably dragging its feet, since it really isn’t that much interested in achieving manned flight as much as squeezing cash out of Congress. It is probably thus eagerly working with NASA in this lobbying effort.

Meanwhile, the Republican idiots in Congress are claiming — falsely — that these cuts are forced on them by sequestration. This is a lie, as they have, at the same time they have cut commercial crew, increased the budget for SLS. If they were really interested in serving the needs of the nation they would have cut SLS, which can’t accomplish anything and is a terrible waste, and sent the money to commercial crew instead.

But then, who said they were interested in serving the needs of the nation? It doesn’t appear that way to me.

Leave a comment

TMT protesters gather outside IAU conference in Hawaii

4:20 pm

Two quotes from the article I think clarify what is going on here. First, one of the protester signs illustrated very clearly the level of ignorance and foolishness of the protesters;

“We don’t want your big toy telescopes on our sacred mountain.”

Then there was this significant point noted in the article:

The demonstrators are a diverse group but are generally led by men and women in their twenties who were educated in modern Hawaiian-language immersion schools. Decades ago, children were beaten for speaking the language; today it is a source of cultural pride and a touchstone for Hawaii’s burgeoning sovereignty movement.

In other words, for the past few decades the public schools in Hawaii have been focused on teaching young Hawaiians to hate American culture and whites. Instead, race and ethnicity come before concepts of freedom and individual rights. How nice. (If you don’t believe me spend just a little time studying what these native peoples courses teach. I’ve seen it here in Arizona as well as in New York. They really do teach anti-Americanism and a hatred of whites.)

However, considering that Hawaii has been controlled exclusively by leftwing Democrats for decades, no one should be surprised.

Leave a comment

The sunspot decline continues

2:59 pm

On Monday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in July. As I have done every month since 2010, I am posting it here, below the fold, with annotations to give it context.

Sunspot counts continue to decline at a rate faster than predicted or is usual during ramp down from solar maximum. Normally the ramp down is slow and steady. This time it has so far been more precipitous. While the 2009 prediction of the solar science community (indicated by the red curve) suggests minimum will occur sometime after 2020, the actual counts suggest it will occur much sooner.

» Read more

7 comments

Solar panels more climate damaging than coal

9:02 am

Surprise, surprise! A comparison of the entire production process for both solar and coal power has found that solar power is more damaging to the environment and the climate.

Not only does the production, transport, and use of solar panels dump more total CO2 into the atmosphere than coal power plants, the manufacture of the solar panels adds many more toxic chemicals to the environment than coal.

According to Ferroni, the other huge drawback presented by PV systems are the nasty chemicals and industrial gases used for their manufacture. The production of solar panels in China entails nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), which are extremely potent heat-trapping gases that leak out during the process. NF3 has a greenhouse gas potency that is 16,600 times greater than CO2; SF6 is 23,900 times more potent. Reports show that these gases emitted annually into the atmosphere from the manufacture of solar panels is equivalent to over 70 million tonnes of CO2 in terms of greenhouse effect. In 2010 over 17.5 GW of rated capacity of solar cells were installed. Thus the emissions per square meter of solar panels comes out to be 513 kg CO2 – a huge amount!

The manufacture of solar cells also uses other chemicals like (HCl), silizium carbide, and silver among others. The total alleged warming potential of these chemicals comes out to be an estimated 30 kg CO2 per square meter of PV module. Oddly (likely to avoid embarrassment) the solar industry has yet to release any detailed data on the warming potential and impacts of the chemicals used in their manufacture.

But President Obama tells us solar power is good! It must be true!

16 comments

Orion might not be ready for 2018 test flight

8:42 am

Government in action! Last week NASA admitted that the Orion capsule and its service module might not be ready for its 2018 test flight.

Bill Gerstenmaier, head of NASA’s human spaceflight directorate, told members of the [NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration] subcommittee the Orion capsule’s European-made service module, which is being developed by Airbus Defense and Space, will probably be the last piece of the critical test flight to be ready for launch.

NASA and ESA officials, together with contractors from Orion-builder Lockheed Martin and Airbus, have discussed shipping the Orion service module from Europe to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida before it is finished. European engineers could travel to the Florida spaceport to complete construction of the service module before its integration with the Orion crew capsule, which is to be assembled by Lockheed Martin at KSC’s Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building.

Engineers plan to introduce changes to the Orion crew module after a successful orbital test flight in December 2014. The upgrades include a switch from a monolithic heat shield made of ablative Avcoat material to blocks of Avcoat, a change intended to improve the manufacturability of the thermal protection system. [emphasis mine]

I have highlighted the last paragraph above because it is written to give the false impression that the decision to change the heat shield resulted from the December 2014 test flight. The truth is that NASA had already decided to change heat shields before the test flight. Why NASA engineers are still “planning” to introduce these changes illustrates why government operations are absurdly wasteful.

Orion was first proposed by President George Bush in 2004. The first Orion contract was awarded in 2006. It is now a decade later, and NASA is suddenly warning us that they might not get a single capsule and service module built by 2018, 12 years after construction began. During that time they have spent approximately a billion dollars per year on Orion. For what?

Kennedy proposed going to the Moon in 1961. Eight years later Americans were walking there. Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. The U.S. completed the total defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan in slightly more than three years, by the spring of 1945.

Today’s NASA however can’t get a single capsule and service module built in 12 years. The contrast is striking. Anyone with the slightest bit of common sense would say that with a track record like this, this program should be shut down now.

8 comments

NASA considers offering SLS for commercial payloads

9:13 am

Squelching the competition: NASA is pushing to redesign its expensive and giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket so that it can be used to launch commercial, military, and scientific payloads as well as proposed manned exploration missions.

At the moment, SLS has no planned payloads or funded flights past its second test flight in 2021. The system is very expensive, however, and the only way other customers could afford it would be if NASA charges them far less than the actual cost to fly. In such circumstances, NASA would essentially be subsidizing SLS so that it could compete, even undercut, private commercial rockets that actually cost far less.

If NASA does this, they could very well squelch the emerging private commercial launch industry.

5 comments

Republican leaders find support for Boehner’s speakership very weak in House

10:57 pm

Whoa! The Republican leadership tried prior to the August recess to squelch an effort to oust Speaker John Boehner and discovered they did not have the votes.

House Speaker Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) had been planning to call up on the House floor last week a measure from Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) that would have removed him as Speaker of the House if it succeeded—intending to embarrass Meadows—but abandoned the plan after his entire leadership structure learned that they did not have the votes to re-elect him as Speaker before the August recess.

Though a lot of the information in the article is about complicated House rules issues, what some call “inside baseball” and quite boring, it is very much worth reading because it indicates strongly that John Boehner’s position as Speaker is very exposed. He could very well be ousted when Congress reconvenes in September.

There are 25 members who voted for a Republican alternative at the beginning of this Congress, and now there are plenty more who are disaffected with the tactics of Boehner and his allies in leadership. More members, those who want to replace Boehner suspect, will, over the course of the month of August, come out publicly against Boehner at town hall events and in interviews with media. Unless Democrats bail Boehner out in September or October, if and when such a vote for the speakership would occur, by that point there would be enough members opposed to Boehner’s re-election for him to lose his position.

Even if Boehner survives, the dynamics here suggest that the conservatives have the stronger hand, and are going to try to force him to cater to their desires — something he has not been interested in doing — or face removal.

One comment
1 … 230 231 232 233 234 … 304