Later today the Obama Administration will reportedly announce major changes in the U. S. space program that may amount to the effective end of manned space flight after this decade. As a guy who has been trying to mount his own mission to the Moon I’m not yet sure how I feel about this. Maybe it is a great opportunity, but probably not.
The FY2011 federal proposed budget will be published with the following changes:
— NASA’s Constellation program to replace the Space Shuttle will be cancelled and all hardware development will be stopped including Ares 1, Ares 5 and Orion.
— The Moon is no longer the first stop in the exploration program, replaced […]
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 
Today is the Labor Day holiday in the USA, so to honor the more vulnerable parts of our society and economy I’m engaging in this fantasy rethinking of our current economic crisis. If only……
This is the first of probably three columns on health care. The Obama Administration right now has in Congress legislation for reforming the U.S. health system so that sets my agenda. But the point of these columns isn’t to comment, per se, on the current proposals, but instead to look at what I believe to be my two areas of some strength — Information Technology and understanding complex systems — and see how they can be applied to this problem.
There was lots of good discussion last time about cyber warfare, cyber security, and U.S. policy, but what most respondents seemed to miss was the international nature of the IT business — all the outsourcing and offshoring that we were told was so great — and its implications for U.S. security. The upshot is that any U.S. cyber warfare czar will have to effectively function as a WORLD cyber warfare czar, a fact that neither Republican nor Democratic Administrations have yet been willing to embrace, at least in public.
