Virgin Galactic spacecraft breaks sound barrier

 

Virgin Galactic announced today that its space vehicle, SpaceShip Two, made its first rocket powered flight.  SpaceShip Two is a joint venture of Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, the aircraft design firm founded by famed designer Burt Rutan.

 

The flight, which took place at Mojave, California’s Mojave Air and Space Port, began with SpaceShip Two carried aloft by the WhiteKnight Two according to a news item on the Virgin Galactic website.  The WhiteKnight climbed to 47,000 feet where SpaceShip Two was released approximately 45 minutes into the flight.  After its release, SpaceShip Two’s rocket engine was ignited for a 16 second burn that propelled the spacecraft to 55,000 feet and Mach 1.2.  SpaceShip Two’s independent flight lasted approximately 10 minutes, culminating in a landing at Mojave.

 

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Virgin Galactic

Remember the Challenger

Economist proposes “space alien” stimulus

(DeVries/Wikimedia)

In a tacit admission that the left is out of ideas on how to fix the economy, economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently proposed a new stimulus program in the form a military buildup to ward off an invasion by extraterrestrial aliens.  Drawing upon the history of the Great Depression and an episode of “the Twilight Zone,” Krugman postulated on CNN that government spending on military hardware to combat aliens would revitalize the U.S. economy in short order.  Krugman subscribes to the Keynesian belief that World War II and the debt-financed military buildup that followed finally ended the Great Depression after ten years of FDR’s debt-financed social programs failed to restart the economy.

 

In reality, the military buildup of the 1940’s and the New Deal stimulus programs were very similar.  The military draft that removed hundreds of thousands of workers from unemployment rolls had civilian equivalents in the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal government organizations that hired workers for make-work projects.  Similarly, government orders for military hardware that busied factories were akin to New Deal construction projects commissioned by the Public Works Administration and the Civil Works Administration.

 

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