perfidy

Gregg Easterbrook regains his footing after a disastrous couple weeks (ontology, rectocranial disease) with this post on NASA's latest genius plan: build a space plane!

NASA last wanted to build a space plane in the 1960s, and abandoned the project when ICBMs rendered negligible their strategic worth. It's well documented that podlike vehicles do better upon reentry than winged vehicles, and at this point the spaceplane is nothing but a decades-old dream. Furthermore, a space plane would do nothing to NASA's advantage-- it would still be expensive, dangerous, of limited use, and packed with Senate pork. From braindrizzles like this it's clear that NASA is not just useless, but actually harmful to the advance of engineering, science, and space exploration in the United States.

And these are the dudes in charge of space. /*covers face with hands

I would encourage anyone with a passing interest in space and space policy to pick up the most recent edition of the Atlantic, which features William Langeweische's killer cover story on the Columbia disaster and NASA's bumbling, fumbling, and institutional dead weight. Easterbrook covers the main point on Easterblogg so I won't belabor them here; I will only say that that X-Prize better be won, and soon.

Private Space Exploration Now!

[wik] Buckethead has kindly reminded me that he covered this NASA spaceplane garbage a while back.

[alsø wik] And don't forget to choose "That Buck Rogers Stuff" from the categories list at left for some of the darned-tootenist, bestest, pithiest, and altogether smartestest space bloviation anywhere!