Starship Flight 9 Test Scheduled for Today
This test will reuse a booster for the first time. Given the problems with the Starship in tests 7 and 8, this is an important trial. It’s scheduled for 6:30-8:30 pm Central. Here are some details about previous tests:
The pace of launches is speeding up. Bob Zimmerman (the writer, not the musician) has said that the FAA under Biden was anti-SpaceX and slowed down the pace through bureaucratic means.
So Twenty Years Ago This Month, The First YouTube Video Was Posted. From there…
The video was all of 19 seconds long and featured a “day at the zoo” with the focus being on the elephants there.
Within a year, the number of videos that had joined it topped 25 million. By the summer of 2006, 100 million video views per day had been uploaded. Then, just a short time later, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. This was Google’s second-largest acquisition at the time.
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Ike smiles
On January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower delivered his farewell address to our nation, in which he issued a couple of prescient warnings. One, regarding the dangers of the then-already burgeoning “military-industrial complex,” is well known. The other, barely. Here it is (bolding mine):
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
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Willful Blindness to Wuhan Coronavirus
When I first heard about the coronavirus outbreak, the fact that it emerged in a city with a controversial virology institute was beyond suspicious. My initial mental model for the incident was Chernobyl — a catastrophe caused by brutal totalitarian rule. Yet there was a massive crackdown on any mention of a laboratory incident. Seeing that Fauci was directly linked to the crackdown, while also having pushed forward gain-of-function research via EcoHealth Alliance in an end run around the carefully written regulations and review process, disgusted me.
As if this were not bad enough, it turns out the intelligence agencies were directly involved in this cover-up/disinformation operation (hat tip to Ed Morrissey at HotAir). The intelligence community ignored their own experts in the National Center for Medical Intelligence, who concluded it was man-made and pushed aside the FBI for coming to a similar conclusion.
Vanguard TV-3 Blew Up 67 Years Ago
As many of you know, my father co-wrote the 1955 proposal for Project Vanguard. After it won, he designed the space tracking system Minitrack and the small test vehicle satellites.
In September 1957, the head of Vanguard, Dr John Hagen, discussed the schedule of the test vehicle satellites.
