News this week:
The Obama administration … proposes to cut $524 million from the ground-based missile defense program, saying there are problems about the effectiveness of the system. Alaska-based missile interceptors will remain in place, but the program will not expand; no additional missile interceptors will be added.
There's a watchdog group who blog under the name Space Pork Kodiak, offering good insight into the realities that surround the launch facility. Sarah Palin spins and spins in favour of expanding the infrastructure of the Kodiak Launch Complex, but our friends unspin it:
"...the growth will not be number of launches or more business; just a larger white elephant marring the Narrow Cape landscape. Expand the infrastructure for less than one launch per year on average for the life of the facility.
KLC is NOT the "best equipped [launch facility] anywhere": it does not have the capacity to store more than one rocket at any one time. And, try getting your personnel to Kodiak when Mt. Redoubt erupts ash and all the flights are grounded; or the fog rolls in and flights from Anchorage can't get in for days at a time."
Things are complicated even further by a certain geological feature:
"The launch tower that was built at a cost of ten million dollars and used for only one launch stands almost directly on this fault [Narrow Cape fault]. Hence the name commonly used by locals to refer to it: "Faulty Tower"."
Other news:
Sarah Palin is turning down money for weatherization and energy efficiency grants.
Palin isn't backing down and said she still won't take the $28.6 million for energy programs.
Sarah Palin, foreign policy and defense expert, wants the Feds to continue to pour money into the "Faulty Tower".
Sarah Palin, the country's foremost energy expert, refuses to take federal money to make Alaska's buildings energy efficient.
When it comes to pork, Sarah Palin seems to be a bit fussy about which bits she's prepared to swallow.
But one thing is guaranteed: she'll make a pig's ear out of it.
Doesn't the picture look like it came straight from SarahPac? The background is uncannily similar...
.
