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Rocket Man Bad

Hey, remember how two astronauts are stranded on the ISS because of a bad Boeing return vehicle?

If you are like us, when you read this question, you thought “Ah, yes, I remember now, what’s up with that? Are they still up there?”

Yes, they are, worryingly.

And the media is almost completely silent on a story that should be capturing the public’s imagination (and indignation).

At first the Party Line from NASA was to berate anyone for using the s-word. The return vehicle was (almost certainly probably kind-of!) safe and they were just running extra tests out of an abundance of caution.

But as time has been going on, and the astronauts have been staying up there without using their vehicle, that explanation has become less and less credible. SpaceX’s Dragon ship could have brought the astronauts back at any time, but hasn’t, and NASA has been insisting that that option is not being contemplated.

Eric Berger, Space Editor (how cool is that?) of the excellent tech nerd publication Ars Technica, has now broken the story that NASA is finally bending to reality and working with SpaceX on a solution.

It’s obvious what is happening here: the story is a humiliation for Boeing, a very politically well-connected company which is already in serious PR, legal, and political trouble over previous safety lapses. If SpaceX were to have to rescue two astronauts stranded by bad Boeing equipment, it would be a further humiliation for the beleaguered company.

It would also be a great PR coup for SpaceX’s founder Elon Musk. And the Biden Administration doesn’t like Elon Musk’s politics.

Of course, none of that should be a consideration with the life of two American astronauts on the line.

But it is 2024, and institutions and norms have long crumbled…

Policy Links

#StateOfTheWeb – Do you remember what the World Wide Web was like in the 1990s? Economist Noah Smith with a good reminder: “A decade ago I felt like I could find anything on the Web. Now I feel like I can barely find anything. People just don’t put information on web pages anymore. … Yes I know search engines started to suck, and it’s all AI slop and ads. I know this. I wrote a long post about it. But I’m talking about something else. Websites disappear over time, and hobbyists aren’t making new ones. The blunt fact is, if people don’t constantly put info up on the Web, the Web becomes useless over time as the old pages disappear. And most people putting info on the Web were always hobbyists. No search engine OR AI can find something that *doesn’t exist*. A third of links from 2019 have gone dark. That’s how fast the Web evaporates. That’s how much effort is needed to sustain the Web. And most of that effort is from hobbyists.”

#BadStudies – Excellent debunking by Philippe Lemoine of CSPI of a terrible economics study. It’s important to highlight things like this. Two things should be borne in mind: almost all of this stuff is directly or indirectly taxpayer-funded (so it’s a policy problem), and academic fraud/incompetence goes way beyond the Grievance Studies departments.

#DEI – DEI is bad. DEI plus medicine is a disaster. But medical schools have started to teach “health equity.” Daniel Buck explains.

#AI – “The ignominious California regulation SB1047… would essentially kill open source AI and significantly slow down or stop AI innovation.” More.

#Labor – The NLRB just enacted a new rule called “Fair Choice – Employee Final Choice Rule,” which “eliminates the right of employees to insist on an election to verify that they genuinely support the union their employer has struck a deal with.” CEI’s Sean Higgins explains why that’s very bad.

#Governance – We love this nerdy stuff. The Hamilton Project has written an entire report on the importance of government-collected data. Amen. We will be reading this.

#Energy – One of the biggest obstacles to abundant, cheap energy in the US is the permitting process. Which is why Joe Manchin’s permitting reform bill is very welcome. R Street’s Philip Rossetti has more.

#TaxEvasion – AEIR’s Robert McGee has some ideas on how to reduce tax evasion without sending IRS agents to knock down people’s doors.

#NatCon – The war over the future of conservatism continues. At Acton Institute, Dan Hugger argues that “national conservatism” is fundamentally incoherent.

#Reg – “Since January 1, the federal government has published rules that imposed $1.29 trillion in total net costs and 69 million hours of net annual paperwork burden increases.” Via

Friday Essays

Max Meyer has launched a new magazine, something we always welcome. It is called Arena and has a striking motto: “The New Needs Friends.” It is a magazine designed to (beautifully) celebrate great American builders and new technology. Here’s their “Manifesto” and the first feature is an essay on the creator of Windows Phone and his story in the trenches of the 30-year smartphone war. We are very excited to see what Arena does and look forward to supporting them.

Jacob Helberg, 11 Elements of American AI Supremacy. Highly clarifying on what policymakers should do to ensure American supremacy in AI.

The great Ed Whelan of EPPC has written a piece for the National Review magazine on what a second Trump Administration would mean for the conservative legal movement.

The Boy Scouts of America has dropped the “boy.” Scouting is an amazing institution which has helped so many boys and girls mature into adults, and learn about nature, work, and leadership, and of course one of the things that makes it what it is is that it is gendered. Boy scouts on one side, girl scouts on the other. But, writes the indispensable Heather Mac Donald at City Journal in an essay into that organization’s descent into gender absurdity: “The Boy Scouts of America has a Chief Diversity Officer & Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion. The organization requires all Eagle Scouts to earn a badge in diversity, equity, and inclusion. (…) The word “boy” has been routed from the organization’s promotional materials and replaced with ‘youth'”

At National Affairs, Robert P. Saldin writes about the all-important issue (you know this is true) of gaming the CBO.

Chart of the Day

Meme of the Day

There were so many memes about Olympic shooting, and especially about the Turkish shooter who showed up in jeans and won silver. This one particularly resonated with us: