Trump Now Disavows “Send Her Back” Chant at Rally, Says He “Felt a Little Bit Badly About It”

It’s Mark Sanford’s Week Because We Say So

4. 4. Joe Biden

Also saying fake stuff about health care.

Well, at least this guy doesn’t pretend to support single-payer health care! No, Joe Biden, who released his own incremental health plan this week, is not a fan of overhauling the health care system again, has gone on the attack against those who at least claim to support single-payer systems, and used a line this week that the Surge has never heard. Sure, you get single-payer opponents from both parties frequently claiming that it would mark “the end of Medicare as we know it,” or some such. The dystopian image Biden conjured, however, is one of a “hiatus” during which everyone dies. “How many of you out there have had someone you've lost to cancer? Or cancer yourself? No time, man,” he said. “We cannot have a hiatus of six months, a year, two, three, to get something done. People desperately need help now.” The Surge is not aware of any legislative trigger clause in which health care ceases to exist while single-payer legislation works its way through Congress—though the Surge hasn’t read all of the fine print. Instead, the hellscape under which people would live during this Purge-like health care holiday would just be the system of employer-sponsored and ACA exchange plans that we have now, which Joe Biden is seeking to preserve on the theory that people like it so much.

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NASA Ignores Its Own Historic Resonances

Keith's note: 20 July 2019, the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the Moon, is also the 100th Birthday of Sir Edmund Hillary. Along with Tenzing Norgay, they became the first humans to stand atop the highest point on our planet, Mt. Everest. in 1953. Years later Hillary became friends with Neil Armstrong and the two of them travelled to the North Pole together. In 2009 Astronaut Scott Parazynski became the first person to fly in space and to stand atop Everest. He had 4 small Apollo 11 Moon rocks with him that I brought with me to Nepal. Those Moon rocks and a piece of the summit of Everest are now aboard the ISS in the cupola. A plaque mentions Hillary by name. (larger image) Oddly, despite all of the Apollo 11 hoopla, NASA has not made any mention of this historic resonance of improbable feats of exploration.

In December 2017 Astronaut Randy Bresnik took lots of photos of Everest from the ISS cupola and posted them using the Twitter hashtag #4daysovereverest As he snapped these pictures, mere inches away from his knees in the ISS Cupola was the plaque with the Everest and Moon rocks. Bresnik never made any mention of this. Nor did NASA. NASA HEOMD and PAO have been reminded of this low hanging fruit in terms of a clear historic exploration relevance. They chose not to avail themselves of it.

The whole intent of doing the Moon rock/Everest thing by Scott and I was to offer NASA a chance to invoke a real, no kidding, historic resonance between terrestrial and space exploration. Instead of using this nexus of exploration, NASA simply ignores it. Right now the wave of Apollo nostalgia is giving Artemis a brief surge. All too soon that will evaporate. Artemis needs to avail itself of every shred of historic and cultural relevance that it can muster. If NASA cannot use historic memes that have been deliberately crafted for them then this is going to be an uphill battle for the agency as it explains why tens of billions of dollars should be spent on going back to the Moon.

Just sayin'

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Google Goes Full Apollo

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Should NASA Do Mission To Planet Earth?

Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth, op ed, Lori Garver, Washington Post

"After accomplishing this amazing feat, the aerospace community has again and again sought presidential proclamations to go further. President Trump is the fifth president to proclaim we will send humans to the moon and/or Mars within a specific time frame, a decree without a value proposition that has never inspired broad public support nor come close to coming true. NASA remains one the most revered and valuable brands in the world, and the agency is at its best when given a purpose. But the public doesn't understand the purpose of spending massive amounts of money to send a few astronauts to the moon or Mars. Are we in another race, and if so, is this the most valuable display of our scientific and technological leadership? If science is the rationale, we can send robots for pennies on the dollar. In a July Pew Research Center study, 63 percent of respondents said monitoring key parts of Earth's climate system should be the highest priority for the United States' space agency -- sending astronauts to the moon was their lowest priority, at 13 percent ; 18 percent favor Mars."

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More Confusing Slides From SMD

Keith's note: Earlier today I featured a silly slide shown by NASA Astrophysics Division Director Paul Hertz to the Astro2020 Decadal Survey Committee Meeting at the National Academy of Science (Mocking Cost Overruns And Schedule Slips At NASA (Update)). If you download his entire presentation (link) you will see that there several slides which serve one purpose: to confuse anyone who tries to understand what they are trying to say.

In this slide (larger). Hertz says NASA is "not a science agency". Then he says that what "NASA is a mission-oriented agency, and science is the purpose and consequence of our space missions". So Science is what NASA does. There is a distinction lacking a difference at work here. "Science" is mentioned multiple times in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, As Amended. Hertz quotes this Act by saying "... carrying instruments and humans through space" when in fact neither the original or amended version of the Act uses these words. Instead they both say "living organisms through space". Hertz is trying to spin the language and intent of NASA's charter to say NASA does not do science - at a workshop where the next decade of space science is being planned. In the process he seems to have confused himself.

And then he includes a chart (larger) about "NASA Principles of Science" even though he claims NASA is not a science agency. My brain hurts.

Then there's this confusing chart (larger) about why flagship missions cost so much. It seems to be saying that if NASA waited longer it would cost more to build things. But that we can now build better things for less money. Hertz then says "we started Webb in 2007, it will cost $8.8 billion and it has ~10x the collection area of Hubble". OK so it will be a cool telescope - but what was the original cost of Webb supposed to be? $824.8 million was the advertised sticker price in 2002. By 2010 it had increased to $6.8 billion. But Hertz mentions none of this because the real villan is "the tyranny of inflation" according to the title on this chart. No it wasn't. Webb's obscene cost increase is not due to inflation - it is due to the fact that NASA did not know what it would cost when it started and then went on to mismanage the project for a decade - leading to delays and cost increases.

I think most people involved in the Decadal review see through Hertz's confusing charts. He has been doing this for a long time. That said, at a time when budgets are ever tighter - especially for science - you would hope that the government representatives from agencies who want to spend billions on science could at least use plain language to make their points.

Just sayin'

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NASA Wants You To Think SLS Can Do More Than A Saturn V

Let's see: a single Saturn V could place a command module & a lunar lander in low lunar orbit, put 2 people on the lunar surface, and then bring them home with lots of Moon rocks. And it did all of this half a century ago.

A single @NASA_SLS cannot do this. #Apollo50 #Artemis https://t.co/QUpR3mm9NS

— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) July 19, 2019

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