April 16, 2026

THE NEW SPACE RACE: The race to Shackleton Crater is on—will Jeff Bezos or China get there first? “The two landers will arguably be the most ambitious robotic missions ever sent to the Moon. The Endurance spacecraft, built by Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, will become the largest lunar lander in history, exceeding the size of NASA’s Apollo lunar module that ferried crews to and from the lunar surface more than 50 years ago. China’s Chang’e 7 mission will feature a smaller lander, but the project also includes an orbiter, rover, and a hopper drone to scout for hidden ice deposits.”

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green

FACE, MEET PALM:

But other than that, how’s the security on your app, Mrs. von der Leyen?

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

REQUIRED READING:

Make men men again.

Posted at 3:04 pm by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S OLDEST NAVY PILOT RETURNING TO DUTY: Top Gun 3 Officially in the Works With Tom Cruise Returning.

Tom Cruise is returning for “Top Gun 3,” Paramount announced during its CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas, as is producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

The sequel to director Joseph Kosinski’s 2022 blockbuster “Top Gun: Maverick” was first revealed to be in the works back in 2024 with scribe Ehren Kruger, who co-wrote “Maverick” with Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie.

“Top Gun: Maverick” became a blockbuster hit when many theaters were still shuttered during the COVID-19 pandemic. It grossed $1.5 billion at the global box office from a $170 million budget, giving movie theaters the jolt they needed when times were tough.

It certainly gave the left a jolt back then as well: Top Gun Hits Over $1 Billion and the Left Is Going Crazy: Here’s Why.

UPDATE:

Heh, indeed. Although in retrospect, it was pretty obvious:

Posted at 2:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

GAS: Sixth day with a drop in fuel costs over the last seven days. “Fuel costs were a little more than 1 cent per gallon cheaper compared to Wednesday’s price of $4.108 per gallon. Gas prices were over seven cents per gallon lower than a week ago, when regular gas cost $4.166 per gallon, according to AAA. This week marks the first time since February that the national average price for a gallon of regular gas was less expensive than the previous week.”

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

THE GOLDEN STATE IS A BANANA REPUBLIC:

Posted at 2:33 pm by Stephen Green

“MEN DON’T READ!” NO, WE JUST DON’T READ WHAT PROGRESSIVE WOMEN PUBLISH:

Posted at 2:02 pm by Stephen Green

IT CERTAINLY OUGHT TO: Vulcan woes will “absolutely” be a factor in Pentagon’s next rocket competition.

The US Space Force is still dealing with the near-term implications of the second grounding of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket in less than two years. The experience is likely to influence how the Pentagon buys launch services in the future, a three-star general said Tuesday.

The Vulcan rocket is one of the two primary launch vehicles the Space Force uses to put satellites into orbit, alongside SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Despite a backlog of nearly 70 launches, ULA’s Vulcan has flown just four times since debuting in January 2024.

On two of those flights, the Vulcan launcher suffered anomalies with one of its solid rocket boosters. One of the booster’s exhaust nozzles blew off in the first incident in October 2024. The same problem appeared to occur again during a Vulcan launch in February of this year. The rocket continued flying after both incidents, ultimately reaching each mission’s targeted orbit.

But the nozzle malfunctions suggest something is seriously amiss at ULA and its booster supplier, Northrop Grumman. The Vulcan rocket is many months from returning to flight for the US military. One industry source told Ars that the Space Force may not fly another mission on Vulcan before the end of the year.

Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, head of the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, said the Vulcan rocket’s reliability woes are top of mind among the military’s space leadership. On Tuesday, Garrant told Ars the experience with Vulcan “absolutely will shape” the military’s thinking the next time the Pentagon buys launch services.

The Pentagon shouldn’t have to lean too hard on any single supplier, but there’s also nobody delivering like SpaceX.

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

YES:

And here’s some additional perspective:

Posted at 1:31 pm by Stephen Green

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: We Shall Not Fight on the Beaches.

In 1973, Jean Raspail, who died aged 94 in 2020, published his dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, for which he is now mostly remembered (certainly outside of France, though he was the author of many other well-considered novels and travelogues, and narrowly missed election to the Académie française). The Camp of the Saints is a book that refuses to lie down, so to speak, despite attempts to render it invisible or make it go away.

* * * * * * * *

Immigrants are not just immigrants. What they bring with them is as important as what they are offered by the host country. If what they bring with them is an evangelizing religion that claims, however fatuously, to be the answer to all of mankind’s little problems, a religion moreover that has a very strong hold over them and that is maintained by an effective system of social ostracism in the event of dissent, they will obviously have more difficulty integrating than if they have no such religion.

Raspail’s flawed novel is an illustration of an elementary political principle. For a liberal democracy to work, there must be a demos; for there to be a demos, there must be something more in common among them than living geographically cheek-by-jowl (without at the same time demanding an absolute uniformity). To import huge numbers of people who do not share, and indeed are resistant to sharing, the minimum that holds a demos together is inimical to liberal democracy.

In this most important sense Jean Raspail was visionary, even if he did not correctly identify the source of the greatest threat. Perhaps the most revealing thing in the book is his account, in the essay that precedes the novel, of how prominent political figures either ignored or repudiated The Camp of the Saints in public, but agreed with it in private. It proved to be a disastrous disjunction.

It’s the good Dr. Dalrymple, so read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

YEP:

Posted at 12:59 pm by Stephen Green

REMINDER THAT EVEN LARRY TRIBE THOUGHT SHE WAS TOO DUMB TO BE ON THE COURT:

Flashback: Letter to Obama: Sotomayor not that smart. “One of the nation’s most respected Supreme Court scholars, Laurence Tribe of Harvard, suggested last year that President Obama not appoint Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court because she’s not smart enough. . . . Tribe wrote, ‘her reputation for being something of a bully could well make her liberal impulses backfire and simply add to the fire power of the Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas wing of the court.'”

Posted at 12:43 pm by Glenn Reynolds

QUESTIONING THE TIMING:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

GET WOKE, GO BROKE APPLIES TO CHURCHES, TOO:

Posted at 12:04 pm by Glenn Reynolds