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The great British magazine The Economist has an article about John Roberts in their Sept. 15, 2005 print edition [Update: Here's the link; subscription required]:The nominee pleases almost everybody One of the surest ways to guarantee high drama in Washington...

I was watching my TiVo'd Battlestar Galactica season finale tonight (ep: Pegasus), when something in the opening credits caught my eye. Maybe sort of a subliminal thing, as I couldn't put my finger on why I had to rewind and...

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.

Last Friday, I mentioned that I was 99% sure the sister of one of my high school classmates wrote the season two finale for Battlestar Galactica. Thanks to the the mighty, magical powers of the Internet, Anne stopped by and...

Today was a milestone day and I almost didn't realize it. This post you're reading is the 3,000th post since I moved to Typepad full-time in December of 2003; sometime today or last night long-time, valued commenter mike left the...

From David Limbaugh: I believe Gen. Russel Honore's classic admonition to reporters, Don't get stuck on stupid, was one of the best lines so far of the new millennium. Part of its enduring value is its uncanny applicability to politics...

The New York Times broke this great story two days ago. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, asked Judge Roberts for his views on New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court decision that revolutionized American libel...

This woman gets stupider -- and crazier, and more media-obsessed, and more ignorant -- almost by the hour. Peace mom Cindy Sheehan didn't change her opposition to the war in Iraq after meeting Tuesday with one of its supporters, Sen....

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