Potpourri XVIII

Never mind space, Obama, or the economy: "V" is making a comeback!

NASA eClips has a very cool education-focused video about Ares I-X on YouTube.

Someone's made a graphic novel about Apollo 11 called "T-Minus." How'd I miss this??

NASA.gov has a copious collection of Great Moonbuggy Race pictures.

Interested in tracking your popularity or "reach" on Twitter? My wiki guru Nick passed on these links for future reference:

• http://TweetDeck.com
• http://hootsuite.com
• http://twittercounter.com
• http://www.twitalyzer.com
• http://hashtags.org

Back to politics for a moment: President Obama is going to start pushing a bill through Congress that would make illegal immigrants legal. Why not just open all the borders and be done with it? I'm all for legal immigration. My family wouldn't be here without it. But they played by the rules, became citizens, learned the language, and educated their kids and grandkids to become Americans, and we're all the better for it.

Boeing is looking to cut production of some of its airliners due to the economic slowdown. This isn't a good thing. Boeing's commercial airliners are one of the few things keeping America's trade deficit from falling deep into the sewer.

Some folks think that if Ares/Orion can't be completed on time that we should hitch a ride with the Chi-coms. Right, because they're MUCH more reliable partners than the Russkis. At least we know Soyuz can dock with ISS.

The "who's going to be the next NASA administrator?" game continues. Wouldn't it be better if Obama had a policy first? Of course he did throw $400 million more at Constellation as part of the stimulus bill, so it appears that he's sticking with the Bush policy for the moment. Fine by me. Leave Scolese in charge, and let NASA do its job!

The Ares Projects have been holding a TIM (technical interchange meeting--can't do anything without an acronym, ya know) this week on the thrust oscillation issue on Ares I. There's a pretty decent, though rather techie, blog on the Constellation site.