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In an earlier post that attracted some attention, I quoted Christopher Hitchen's piece on the organizers of the anti-war rally in Washington. Hitchens points to David Corn's LA Weekly expose on International Answer, one of the two major sponsors of...

And those caissons go rolling along

The Chief posted a comment yesterday, with a negative response to Bush's proposal to federalize the responsibility for rapid if not first response in case of disasters.

It seems that my concerns about the further erosion of states' soveriegnty have been noticed elsewhere. This DC Times OpEd by Tony Blankley goes further in exploring this issue. Check it out.

Hillary Clinton has decided to vote against John Roberts. Earlier I had suggested that she was the real bellwether of the Democrats. I had predicted she would vote for Roberts because, as Michael Corleone would say, It's the smart move....

From CNN: Oil prices fell in an unusual trading session Sunday after a weakened Hurricane Rita struck the U.S. Gulf Coast away from a major refining hub in Houston, although at least two big refineries were damaged. November Brent crude...

Going Up?...all the way to Geosychronous Orbit

A couple of articles on a concept found in science fiction from Arthur C. Clarke and others: a tethered orbital elevator system! At first glance if one is unfamiliar with the concept it sounds like something from a hallucination - but the physics works, and with recent new developments in materials technology, the means are also now available.

The big advantage: CHEAP cost to orbit, especially compared to rocketry. Check these articles out: one from this weeks Sunday (London) Telegraph, and the other from none other than the big gorilla of the blogosphere hisself: Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds writing on Tech Central Station.

Click on image to enlarge. (Image from liftport.com)

Stairway to heaven

The race is on to build the first "space elevator' - long dismissed as science fiction - to carry people and materials into orbit along a cable thousands of miles long.

In a significant step, American aviation regulators have just given permission for the opening trials of a prototype, while a competition to be launched next month follows in the wake of the $10 million (£5.6 million) "X Prize'', which led to the first privately developed craft leaving the Earth's atmosphere, briefly, last year.

Folks, this isn't pie in the sky conceptualizing - it's going into the engineering phase - that's about as concrete as it gets!

Space Program: Looking Up

I've written here in the past about NASA's work on space elevators, and on the new leaner, meaner, prize-oriented approach favored by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. Now there are some signs of real progress on a number of fronts. As I noted earlier, NASA was offering prizes for space elevator research. That's still going on, but there are some new studies suggesting that space elevators may be closer to practicality than previously thought.

Indeed!

NASA administrator says space shuttle was a mistake

Any good "hard" science fiction fan was capable of making this analysis. Among others, rocketeer Homer Hickham, author and main character of October Sky retired from NASA and wrote a novel titled Back to the Moon in which NASA is given a pretty good black eye for having become moribund with bureaucracy and political correctness.

Latest in this feeling that NASA had lost its direction comes from no less than the NASA chief administrator himself:

The space shuttle and International Space Station ? nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades ? were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth. ?It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,? Griffin said. ?We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.?

Reading between the lines, it appears to the Chief that NASA needed more von Braun and less Rube Goldberg in its design philosophy:

Asked Tuesday whether the shuttle had been a mistake, Griffin said, ?My opinion is that it was. ? It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible.? Asked whether the space station had been a mistake, he said, ?Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in.?

Sounds like we finally have a NASA chief worthy of the name after too many bureaucrats, program managers and barely-disguised political hatchetmen, and not nearly enough engineers in the lead. Hopefully now the Congresscritters will give Griffen the support needed to get us back on the road towards the stars. It's absolutely essential if our civilization is to continue to exist and improve itself.

It turns out many of the horror stories coming out of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina were, well, false. It seems the claims of social breakdown were highly exaggerated. I wait patiently for the media to correct itself....

Cindy Sheehan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue today to deliver a letter to the President asking him to pull out of Iraq. She was accompanied by... wait for it... 30 of her most hard-core loyalists. Let's be fair here. Today was...

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