Death Race 2027

“I love SpaceX; it’s an amazing company. The problem is, they’re behind. They’ve pushed their timelines out, and we’re in a race against China,” Duffy said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday morning. [More]

If the goal is hurrying to beat someone else for bragging rights, with all the innumerable complexities and unforeseen potentials for disaster you don’t need to make too many mistakes. Especially when the political appointee in charge has a… a lumberjack?… background, and NASA has been distracted with woke bureaucratic priorities for decades.

You send this up and it doesn’t come back, Mr. President, the aftermath political and human damage will be every bit as disastrous. Don’t you guys dare cut any corners.

Yeah, I know, this has nothing to do with guns. But it has everything to do with giving a political advantage to the party that wants to ban them, plus I spent my boyhood years enthralled by Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo and it’s my blog.

To the Moon, Alice!

NASA’s new moon rocket sprang another dangerous fuel leak Saturday, forcing launch controllers to call off their second attempt this week to send a crew capsule into lunar orbit with test dummies. The inaugural flight is now off for weeks, if not months. [More]

So we’re up to the “coincidence” stage

Speaking of test dummies, there are reasons we don’t already have Kubrick’s space wheel and a moon base…

And speaking of space, the wife and I are supporters of the International Women’s Air & Space Museum — we got involved after she became friends with a member of the Ninety-Nines who had flown transport in WWII (and who passed on a few years back). Friday night at their annual Corks on the Concourse wine-tasting fundraiser I won the “space trivia” contest. Three of us were finalists who answered all five original questions correctly, and then we had to go into sudden death. I was the only one who knew about Wally Funk and the Mercury 13 because we’d heard her speak and bought her book at an earlier event.

I won an instructed first flight, which I gave to Sweetie because that had been a long-unrealized fantasy of hers when life, school, career, and family influenced her priorities.

Verified by MonsterInsights