My ancestors read the writing on the wall and left there for The New World in 1658 — that’s foresight

/

Anyone here seen Daphne Lamsvelt-pol?

Does anyone still left over there remember 1940?

There's private entrepreneurship, and then there's the government; no wonder the latter is trying to crush the former

/

Two very long articles by the same author, they’re worth reading in their entirety — I have — but this brief excerpt on NASA’s incompetence and sweetheart deals with its favorite contractors should be sufficient to give you the idea. You can extend this recounting to encompass the government’s defense spending and you won’t go wrong; just multiply the billons by a 100 or so.

Casey Hammer: Four years ago, unable to find a comprehensive summary of the ongoing abject failure known as the NASA SLS (Space Launch System), I wrote one. If you’re unfamiliar with the topic, you should read it first. 

It is hard to believe four years have gone by, but in all that time, the SLS has launched only once. Time flies when the rocket doesn’t. I don’t often write blogs in a sharply critical tone, so as always, the usual disclaimers apply. I write in my personal capacity as some Guy with an Opinion on the Internet. 

In 2019, NASA awarded Bechtel a contract to deliver a launch tower – a glorified steel truss far simpler than the booster catching towers SpaceX assembles in weeks – by March 2023 for a total cost of $383m.

As of today, the OIG reports that the tower will cost $2.7b and is to be finished by September 2027, but more likely 2029. For reference, the Burj Khalifa is seven times taller, contains paying tenants, hotels, and shops, and was built in five years for just $1.5b.

If you had $2.7b in 27 million $100 notes, and you piled them up, they would be so much taller than Bechtel’s non-existent launch tower that you’d need not one, not two, but 23 separate piles to exhaust the supply. Whoever wrote Bechtel’s side of the contract certainly earned their bonus. Whoever wrote NASA’s side should be made to paint the entire structure with a toothbrush – but I expect they’ve long since been on Bechtel’s payroll in some kind of advisory no-show job.

NASA managers routinely complain of difficulties in hiring and retention – difficulties they never faced 20 years ago, before the SLS and before the private space companies that, unlike NASA, are able to offer some combination of market-rate compensation, a career track that rewards ambition and competence, and a workplace that swiftly departs underperformers. 

Just imagine the mental agility required to actually want to work for an agency that continues to insist on technical doctrine no less absurd than “2+2=5” from top to bottom, from onboarding documentation all the way up to press releases, bilateral agreements and policy papers. Everyone at NASA knows the SLS is a looming catastrophe, but no-one can say it. Officially, it’s still the most powerful rocket ever built (except for Starship) and our official vehicle to the Moon and Mars! In reality, it’s insanely expensive, dangerous, and underpowered and can barely lift a reasonable payload to LEO.

Four years ago*, I wrote that the best time to cancel the SLS was 20 years before, and the second best time was then. Four years on, the program has consumed another $20b with nothing to show for it. $20b, bringing total development cost to over $100b. This program burns $12m per day! 

In the meantime, NASA has abandoned all pretense of caring about or delivering cost control on any major project, with scope, schedule, and budget blowouts affecting practically every major program and forcing the cancellation of many of them. This is symptomatic of an agency who, compromising their technical integrity on their flagship program, subsequently lost the ability to maintain technical integrity anywhere else. 

Litany of other canceled and delayed projects

(Here’s just the first of many detailed in the article — if you feel confident the government is handling your money wisely and well, read the full article and be dissuaded)

Mars Perseverance, a supposedly cheaper built-to-print replica of the Curiosity Mars rover from 2012 then required extensive re-engineering costing $2.4b, the same as the previous rover. At least it didn’t cost more! Meanwhile, much of its instrument payload was consumed by a sample handling system for a sample return mission that, at this rate, will never occur.

…. In September 2014, NASA awarded Boeing $4.2b and SpaceX (somewhat grudgingly) $2.6b to develop capsules to transport people to and from the ISS. The Shuttle’s last flight was in 2011, so this process came a bit late and resulted in nearly a decade of dependency on Roscosmos for crew transport. 

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule first flew in 2019 and in 2020 brought astronauts to and from the space station. As of September 2024, it’s flown thirteen flights (three private) to the ISS, two other private flights including the highest ever Earth orbit and first private space walk, and carried 54 people in space.

In contrast, Boeing’s Starliner only flew two astronauts to the ISS, after two previous launches with a series of failures and near misses. Despite being a much simpler design than Crew Dragon, Starliner has suffered from:

  • A set of critical software failures during its first flight, in which untested software outsourced to foreign developers both failed to obtain accurate clock information from the launch vehicle, and also incorrectly mapped thruster and inertial coordinate systems, essentially reading the wrong map upside down. As a result, this uncrewed mission burned through all its propellant and was unable to dock with the station. Boeing was compelled to refly the mission.

  • A set of parachute failures, including both crashes during testing and later, the discovery mere weeks before the first crewed launch that critical clips had not been closed before being obscured behind an uninspectable flap. In other words, had this chance discovery not been made and the mission flown with astronauts, the parachutes would have opened and pulled away from the capsule, which would have then plummeted into the ground killing everyone. 

  • The wiring harnesses were wrapped with flammable tape, requiring a difficult replacement operation.

  • The thrusters suffered failures on all three flights, due to incorrect thermal environment data being provided to the subcontractor, overheating, helium leaks and seal failures. The subcontractor? Aerojet Rocketdyne. I’m beginning to sense a pattern here…

Unlike SLS and Orion, however, Starliner was developed under a fixed price contract (Boeing’s first and last!) resulting in net losses to Boeing of $1.6b so far – enough to build another whole Burj Khalifa.

Conway’s Law explains that product structure mirrors the organizational structure that built it. The dysfunction of Boeing’s Starliner development program is plain for everyone to see in the achingly embarrassing ongoing failures of the physical hardware. The software failures show that the thruster teams didn’t talk to the structural teams and the GNC teams. The thruster failures show that the systems engineers didn’t talk to the subcontractors and mission designers. The parachute failures showed that process safety engineering was nowhere near close out operations. The wiring harness issue shows that NASA’s requirements oversight team were not functioning as a team and not conducting oversight, and likely never conducted a thorough in person physical inspection of the actual flight hardware.

I mentioned Starliner had flown two astronauts (Butch and Suni) to the space station. Once on station, the recurring thruster faults were so severe that NASA decided, over strident objections from Boeing officials, that it was safer to strand the astronauts there for a few weeks until SpaceX Crew 9 arrived, than to roll the dice and return to Earth as originally planned. In the end Starliner made an uneventful autonomous landing, but the ultimate cause of the thruster faults remains unclear since the Starliner service module burns up on re-entry. Recently, it was reported that NASA’s OIG is taking a closer look at the Commercial Crew Program in the wake of this continuing failure. I, for one, have questions about why NASA signed off on launching people to space in this turkey of a space capsule to begin with.

*That article can be found here. It’s an enlightening, albeit depressing read— Ed)

And up on Riversville Road, a contract — finally.

/

430 Riversville Road, currently priced at $1.595 million and certainly selling for less, has found a buyer. The original agent priced it at $2.499 million back in July 2023 — that has proved to have been overly optimistic.

Of note, the new agent added this to its listing description: “Enjoy everything Greenwich and desirable Glenville has to offer.” Off-hand, nothing strikes me as perceptibly desirable about Glenville and, apparently, the agent was also stumped, because her choice of pictures to illustrate her point lacks any evidence to support her claim.

Something missing here, even though there was room to post a snap or two that would have been gladly supplied by the Glenville chamber of commerce.

To its credit, the house does have a Cos Cobber pool, probably imported from that neighborhood at great expense.

Riverside Sale

/

1 Club Road, nee 136 Riverside Avenue), has sold for $2.250 million. A fine old 1850 house that could stand some updating, it started at $2.995 in June and was still priced at $2.750 when it was reported as pending in August. A bold low offer can still work, sometimes, even in this market. Brother Gideon, whose listing this was, tells me that the buyers intend to retain and renovate rather than raze and replace, a decision all Riverside residents should applaud.

(One reason, possibly, for this property’s sluggish market performance might be because would-be buyers looked up the address on Zillow, and were gravely disappointed by what they found upon arrival.)

No fact checking in the state media, but the facts are out there nonetheless

/

Harris claims ad quoting her 2019 vow to ban fracking is 'mischaracterization' to make people 'afraid' of her

'There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,' Harris said while running for the 2020 Democratic nomination

More like this man, please

/

Hung Cao Annihilates Tim Kaine in Senate Debate

On Wednesday evening, Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine was destroyed by Republican challenger Hung Cao during their first and only debate. 

According to a poll published shortly after the debate, Cao was the winner, with 75 percent support to Kaine’s 25 percent support, according to WRIC.

Cao, who is an immigrant, came to the United States with his parents as a refugee from Vietnam in 1975. He is a retired Navy captain and served with special operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. He attended the United States Naval Academy. 

In the debate, the candidates were questioned about military recruitment numbers dipping. Cao pointed out that the woke agenda that has permeated the military in recent years is to blame. 

"When you're using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that's not the people we want. What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are gonna rip out their own guts, eat ‘em and ask for seconds,” Cao said. “Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”

Do you support mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants?” Cao was asked. 

“Immigration is very near and dear to my heart. When Vietnam fell, we had nowhere to go and America brought us in. My parents waited in line for seven, we all did, for seven years, to get our citizenship,” Cao said. “The last thing that my dad had hang over his bed when he passed away two years ago was his naturalization certificate.”

“I love this country so much that I wrote a blank check up to including my life to defend it for 25 years…to anybody who wants to come here, don’t ask for the American dream if you’re not willing to obey American laws and embrace the American culture…that’s the no. 1 criteria coming into the country. If you come here illegally, then you need to leave, especially if you’re a violent crime person,” he said, adding that there are 13,000 convicted murders and 16,000 convicted rapists that came across under the Biden administration’s watch.

Cao was asked again if he supports mass deportations. 

“If you came here illegally, you’re basically screwing up the whole system…you can’t jump the line,” he said.

And:

The moderators tried to silence the audience again when Cao stated, “never go against an Asian when it comes to math.” 

"Honestly, of the 227 bills that Senator Kaine has proposed, only three of them made it through… That's a 99% failure rate,” Cao said.

"Check the tape on that. That's completely wrong," Kaine retorted.

"There's two truths in the world, okay? Never walk into a target store wearing a red shirt and never go against an Asian when it comes to math. Trust me,” Cao said.

DeSantis shines, Harris declines

/

Florida National Guardsmen deliver supplies to North Carolinians — "Operation blue ridge"

David Strom: DeSantis Is America's Governor: Rescuing North Carolinians AND Deploying Guard to Ports

Ron DeSantis is undoubtedly America's most competent governor in generations and probably the most skilled in generations. 

It was DeSantis' skill at governing and fighting the leftists where it matters that attracted me to him when he was running for president, and I still believe he would have been the best president since Reagan had he won. 

But it was not to be. We chose Donald Trump because he has been battling the bad guys, and I am okay with his being the candidate. 

But if there is anything we have learned over the past year, DeSantis is even better than we knew. His ability to mobilize government resources to fix problems is unmatched, as we have seen with the latest hurricanes to hit the East Coast. He had rescue operations wrapped up lickety-split and sent the Florida National Guard to harder hit areas in North Carolina before FEMA was even getting spun up. 

There’s much more at the linked-to article, all of which is worth reading, I especially like how Strom finishes:

But what I do know is that Republicans are shining and proving their competence and compassion and that the Biden administration can't even get a photo op right.