Looks like having insulted the troops and blustered defiance about it, John Kerry is cutting and running.

John Kerry suggests that people better get a good education or wind up in Iraq, suggesting that members of the armed forces are uneducated. The mind boggles on a number of levels.

More evidence that a little outside the box thinking has snuck into NASA.

While NASA is very interested in the newest thinking in rocket and space technology, the agency is also looking for strategies and products related to keeping astronauts safe and healthy in space for long periods of time, Lockyer said. The kind of cosmic radiation astronauts will face if they go to Mars or remain on the moon for long periods is known to cause significant bone loss and can lead to central-nervous-system injury and increased risk of cancer. If innovators and researchers cannot find ways to protect the astronauts, then long-term space travel will be impossible.

Looks like the Hubble repair mission is a go.

Chair Force Engineer likes (sort of) the shuttle derived Direct Launcher concept now being pushed by a group of self described NASA rebels.

Michael Barone takes a look at polls and finds them to be a poor predictor of turnout.

Taylor Dinerman gives the back of his hand to the Berkshire Eagle, a newspaper which seems to take a dim view of the new White House space policy.

The winners of the COTS competition have begun to reveal what they intend to do with the money NASA has granted them.

Dwayne Day begins a speculation on how enthusiastic JFK was about Apollo anyway. Would he have tried to cut it back or delay it had he lived?

It's been widely assumed that the 22nd District House seat in Texas--the Tom Delay seat--has been lost to the Democrats. Write in candidates never win, according to the chattering classes. Well, maybe this time will be different.

Looks like Studio 60, the latest TV project from Aaron Sorkin, he who brought us that left wing fantasy series The West Wing, is about to be cancelled.

Addendum: This however is just a tad bit snarky and Jonah should know better. If Firefly had Studio 60's timeslot and had been shown in the proper order, I'm certain that we would be starting Season Four of everyone's favorite anti Star Trek.

Addendum 2: Jonah Goldberg wants it made clear that he absolutely loves Firefly.

There is yet another alternative proposed for the return to the Moon. Unlike most of the others, it goes sort of in the opposite direction by replacing the Ares 1 and Ares 5 with one really big launcher. Two launches are still required for a lunar mission, but the savings seem to be in developing one launcher rather than two. Plus two of these new launchers greatly exceed the capacity of the Ares 1 and Ares 5.

Now, I think that at this point arguing with NASA over hardware is a fool's errand. NASA is not going to be convinced and certainly no one who can tell NASA will be convinced. (Of course this proposal seems to have arisen from some elements within NASA, so who knows?)

This "Universal Launcher Solution" has the virtue, at least on the surface, of simplifying rather than complicating things. Maybe it can be used by somebody when my idea of a lunar COTS is adopted (g).

The folks at both Armadillo and Masten look ahead to next years Lunar Lander Cup.

The Liberty Film Festival kicks off for the third year next month. My favorite documentary on the schedule:

"This is DNN" - World Premiere! (29 mins., 2006)

Directed by: Bruce Wittman. Produced by: Bart Ely. A satirical look at how today's mainstream media might cover a typical day during World War II, complete with FDR protesters, war protesters, hurricane protesters - and a mockery of FDR in a Hollywood blockbuster titled "Fahrenheit 12/7." "This is DNN" is a hilarious and long overdue lesson in historical perspective. (Comedy, 29 minutes, 2006)

I always thought that if we had today's media and political class sxity odd years ago, Ike would have been forced to resign because of D-Day.

All of this stuff about raunchy sex scenes in Jim Webb's military thrillers are certainly in good fun and, following Foley-gate, etc, certainly an example of turn about is fair play. They are also likely taken out of context. Not that it will matter to a lot of Virginians. Jim Webb is toast as a candidate for the Senate.

And, I think, so am I. So is Mrs. Curmudgeon as well. Some years ago we published a thriller, Nocturne which seems to have two scenes which would wreck any political career we might have contemplated.

Warning. The following may be too intense for young people and more sensitive adults. The first is a scene between a sixteen year old girl and an adult who should know better:

It does not, Eric Picard decided, get better than this.

As it turned out, Gabriella not only had a soft, nubile body, but a very inventive mind. She had just spent the past two hours driving Picard nuts in ways that would have shocked the Empress Messalina. It was unbelievable the things she knew how and was willing to do.

Picard now lay, exhausted and spent, with Gabriella resting her head on his chest, a tangle of dark hair, her soft breats on his stomach, and her dusky, slender legs tangled up with his somewhat whiter, stouter legs. He reveled in the gentle, relaxed feeling of lassitude.

This scene takes place in a hotel room in Venice, where the age of consent is fourteen. Not that it would matter to the voters. Nor would it matter that later in the book, Mr. Picard gets into a lot of trouble indeed because of his dalliances.

The next scene, I'm afraid, is even more disturbing. It has elements of bondage, violence against women, attempted rape, and attempted murder. Be warned.

He threw himself on top of her, fumbling with his pants with one hand, hitting her repeatedly with the other. Allison shut her eyes and tried to will herself away. The wave of pain was almost unbearable, but she did not cry out. She felt him rubbing against her, tryingf to penetrate her. He was not stiff enough, though, and that seemed to enrage him and make him hit her all the harder.

"Scream, damn you, scream!" he yelled.

So that's it, she thought. Instead of screaming, she spat at him. Spittle mixed with blood got him right in the eye. He gasped and reared back as he tried to wipe it off with the back of his hand. He screamed something incoherent and raised his hand to strike again, hard enough for a killing blow. Good bye, David my love, she thought and shut her eyes.

Then the lights went off.

Without providing spoilers, let me reassure one and all that things turn out alright, that Allison survives and her attacker gets what he deserves.

The point, of course, is that suggesting that a writer approves of everything his or her charecters say and do is rather foolish. Neither of us approve of older men dallying with teenagers in one instance and rape in the other. But taken out of context, the two scenes you just read would certainly be very bad for the writers were they seeking public office.

Not that I have much sympathy for Mr. Webb, mind. He has pulled enough stuff during the campaign that makes cries of unfairness in this case fall on unsympathetic ears.

By the way, Nocturne, besides at the usual venues such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble, can be found at the publishers web site.

David Freedman does an analysis of the Vision for Space Exploration that falls apart here:

Griffin has committed most of NASA's expected funding for the next several decades to a program that stands a very good chance of falling far short of the Red Planet, thanks to what may prove to be a trillion-dollar price tag.

How does Freedman arrive at that price tag, which many analysts have shown to have come out of the ether? It's unclear, but here's a clue:

This budget shift still won't come close to solving the problem, says Marco Caceres, a senior space analyst at the Teal Group, an aerospace and defense research firm. "It's sexy to talk about the moon and Mars, but it's going to be at least 2 or 3 times as expensive as NASA is estimating, and most big aerospace programs end up being 5 to 10 times as expensive as original estimates," he says. "We spent $100 billion and 30 years to build the space station, it's still not complete, and that's just hardware in low Earth orbit."

Griffin won't put a price tag on going to Mars, but NASA has released enough information over the years to permit some back-of-the-envelope calculations. The agency has predicted that getting to the moon will cost $104 billion (about 55 percent of the cost of the Apollo program in today's dollars, according to Griffin), and studies dating back to the 1960s predicted that a Mars mission would cost at least five times as much as getting to the moon. A price tag of $500 billion, then, is not unreasonable. At current funding rates, that would keep NASA off Mars for at least 50 years. In 1989 a detailed three-month study headed by Richard Truly, then the chief of NASA, put the cost at about $800 billion in today's dollars. Caceres thinks NASA will need as much as $2 trillion to complete its mission.

Now we're up to two trillion, partly based on a more than fifteen year old study that many people believe was not so much designed to facilitate beyond Low Earth Orbit exploration as to kill it. And does Caceres have any figures to support the statement "...it's going to be at least 2 or 3 times as expensive as NASA is estimating, and most big aerospace programs end up being 5 to 10 times as expensive as original estimates." If so, it's not in the article.

Freedman also used John Pike as a source. A sure sign of sloppy reporting. For example:

For example, Pike says, NASA could have got by with a much smaller vehicle than the CEV, which is three times the size of the Apollo capsule, requiring a scaling up of the launch vehicle and everything else in the program. "It's not designed to carry astronauts, it's designed to carry contractors," he says.

Neither Pike nor Freedman enlightens us as to how many astronauts would be carried in this "smaller vehicle." Launch more than one to the Moon? A possibility, one supposes, but do two, smaller rockets cost more or less than one larger one? I haven't seen a sensible analysis on that question.

More sloppiness:

A third problem is the steadily shrinking tolerance for risk at NASA, in Congress, and among the public. Some of this is obviously due in large part to the trauma of losing two shuttle crews, but it is also related to the loss of a sense of necessity. "During the Apollo program this nation was in a race, and we perceived the outcome as important to national security," says Lennard Fisk, former NASA chief scientist and a space science professor at the University of Michigan. "Now we may not be prepared to go ahead when we encounter setbacks."

I guess the men who died in the Apollo fire died in vain, since Freedman seems to have forgotten about them. Not to mention the near miss of Apollo 13. Both incidents added delays and cost to the Apollo program.

After breezily disdaining the idea of a space race with the Chinese, Freedman trots out the alt.space folks as a panacea for keeping costs down for a Mars mission. How this will be the case remains unmentioned.

Then, Freedman actually makes a few valid points about the why, as opposed to the how, of exploring space:

Ultimately, NASA's future depends not on better mission concepts and cheaper hardware so much as on the agency's ability to convince the public that space exploration is a crucial part of human destiny. "The problem with the president's vision is that there's no sense of urgency to it," Pike says. "He's the first American president since his father who has no idea why we have a space program. Up through Reagan we had competition with the Russians, and Clinton had cooperation with the Russians. Space was always a foreign policy initiative for us, and now that leaves NASA a 'how' agency with a 'why' problem." The public's interest could simply fade away, leaving America, a nation of immigrants and pioneers, without a frontier to explore for the first time in its history.

Posing the problem that way suggests a solution, however. What motivates people to open up frontiers has always been the desire to get away from problems back home, or the promise of riches. NASA could tap into either, or both.

Now, if Freedman had stuck to that he would have published a fairly good article.

Jeffrey Bell, a guy who gives cynicism a bad name, hoots derisively at the just completed X Prize Cup. I hoot right back at anyone who takes cheap shots at those who are--well--doing more than just taking cheap shots on the internet. Welcome to the Internet Rocketeer Club, Mr. Bell.

Considering Russia's long history of militarizing space, Andrei Kislyakov is certainly not in any position to have the vapors over the new White House space policy. Space will, sooner or later, be a venue of human conflict. It's inevitable. And it would be best if the United States was dominate.

Some blind people have actually been able to learn how to navigate in the same way bats, dolphins, and nuclear submarines have Human Echolocation.

The first lunar mining robot may be made in Australia.