Seattle Transit

Matt Yglesias points out, or more accurately has it pointed out to him, that California isn’t the only major player with a big rail bond/program on the ballot this fall.

The Vision Thing

NASA Administration Mike Griffin teaches a little history:
The planned Apollo 20 mission was cancelled a few weeks after the Apollo 11 landing, and Apollo 18 and 19 were cancelled some months later. With those actions, the space program as we knew it in the 1960s was over, finished, and done. NASA is often blamed for [...]

Feeling Apocalyptic

Kevin Drum and Tom Friedman both see trouble ahead. Drum:
McCain, in his overwhelming desire for office, is unloosing [culture-war] forces that are likely to make the country only barely governable no matter who wins. This would be very bad juju at any time, but George Bush has so seriously weakened the country over the course [...]

China to Top TGV

The Chinese are growing four-lane highways like weeds, but they also want the world’s fastest high-speed rail system:
“It is possible that we can start to manufacture 380km/h trains in two years time, and put them into service on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway,” Mr Zhang told the state-owned China Daily.
Meanwhile, here in the US it’s a [...]

FAA IT Systems: Snafu

In the dog-bites-man department, the computer system the Federal Aviation Administration relies on to track flight plans is tottering:
Stratfor, along with many other industry watchers, is very concerned about the flight-plan system and evidence that the system is wearing out.
“Regardless of what caused the Aug. 26 [National Airspace Data Interchange Network] crash, [there] is a monumental challenge the [...]

Rebuilding Passenger Rail

It’s been out for a while now, but a study group says it’d take about $357B over the next 40-plus years to re-create a passenger rail system that would offer travel times competitive with the auto. That annualizes to about $8.1B a year. The group suggests that the feds pick up 80 percent of the [...]

Tanker Fight

Business Week reports on the ever-more-complicated politics surrounding the Boeing/Airbus/Northrup tanker-contract bidding. Lobbyists from both sides worked the Democratic National Convention and Boeing could be seeing its future at stake:
Adds [Lexington Institute defense analyst Loren] Thompson: “Boeing is at least as worried about their key commercial customers in the U.S. market as they are about the [...]

Shuttle, Extended

Congressional sentiment in the wake of the Georgia/Russia incident is forcing NASA to reconsider the idea of shutting down the Space Shuttle program after 2010. But former Shuttle program boss Wayne Hale says logistics already make that a practical impossibility. NASA managers began shutting down the supply chain for parts four years ago and there’s [...]

The Grid’s the Thing

The New York Times identifies a key barrier to exploiting renewable energy: the fractured state of America’s transmission grid. Eventually, Congress may have to invoke its power to regulate interstate commerce to sort things out:
Politicians in Washington have long known about the grid’s limitations but have made scant headway in solving them. They are reluctant [...]

Bell Labs Drops Basic Research

An icon retreats:
Alcatel-Lucent, the parent company of Bell Labs, is pulling out of basic science, material physics and semiconductor research and will instead be focusing on more immediately marketable areas such as networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and software.
A damn shame that is too, though truth be told Bell Labs has been in decline ever [...]