July 14, 2026

I SOMEHOW MISSED THIS FROM FRIDAY’S ROCKET REPORT: Impulse Space enters military launch competition.

This week, the US Space Force brought two more companies into the pool of bidders eligible to compete for its launch contracts—Impulse Space and Relativity Space. For a rocket company, cracking into the lucrative US military launch market is both a sign of maturity, as well as an important source of revenue. The inclusion of Relativity Space, which is making credible progress toward the launch of its heavy-lift Terran R rocket, is perhaps not a huge surprise, Ars reports. But the other company, a provider of in-space propulsion, was.

The Space Force gets creative … Impulse Space is developing a “kick stage” it calls Helios, which can provide up to 9 km/s of delta-V to a payload, rapidly boosting it from low-Earth orbit to geostationary orbit about 36,000 km above the Earth’s surface. Essentially, this allows the company to transform a medium-lift rocket, such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 vehicle, and give it the performance of a larger and more powerful rocket.

Nifty.

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

QUESTION ASKED AND NOT ANSWERED:

Posted at 4:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

FAIL, BRITANNIA:

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

WHAT’S A FEW MISSING ZEROS AMONG FRIENDS?

In the summer of 2020, NPR gave an approving interview to the author of the book In Defense of Looting. Minnesota’s Somali Pirates are performing larceny on an industrial scale, which they presumably also admire.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

QUEERS FOR PALESTINE OR WHATEVER:

Posted at 4:04 pm by Stephen Green

UGH: George Floyd in medical journals: Analysis documents rise of ‘woke terminology’ in research.

The analysis covers the use of words such as indigenous knowledge, microaggression, justice, safe space, and health equity in medical journals.

Published recently by James Nuzzo, an exercise scientist and men’s health researcher, it documents “woke medical terminology” found on the PubMed database.

For example, the phrase “lived experience” appeared in the titles or abstracts of 10,631 articles indexed in PubMed, and “transgender” appeared in the titles or abstracts of 15,741 articles.

George Floyd’s death “markedly increased discussions on race in academia, including in health and medical journals,” it states. “In fact, George Floyd’s name appeared in the titles or abstracts of 269 articles indexed in PubMed between 2020 and 2025.”

Nuzzo said the trend is alarming.

“There is no evidence that implementing woke medicine improves health outcomes,” Nuzzo told The College Fix in an email interview. “In fact, the shift away from the individual patient to the patient’s group identity is presumably harmful to the patient.”

You don’t say.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

I HAVE NO CORK TO POP FOR THESE THINGS: Don’t pop the cork yet on Colorado’s renewables ‘milestone.’

The trouble is that this jubilant announcement of a “majority” renewables power grid owes more to a stark drop in coal-fired generation than the wind and solar that was added. Percentages rely on both the numerator — how much wind, solar, and hydropower was generated — as well as the denominator, or how much total generation there was.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Electric Power Monthly net generation by state data, released June 25, demonstrates this. Renewables’ utility-scale generation rose 15.8 percent year-over-year between the first quarters of 2025 (5,934 Gigawatt hours, or GWh) and 2026 (6,872 GWh). However, coal generation dropped by 62% between over that same period, from 4,342 to 1,643 GWh.

Overall, Colorado’s total in-state generation actually dropped by 922 GWh in Q1 2026 compared with Q1 2025.

The state produces less energy, and more of what we do produce is higher-cost — which explains my electric rates.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

NICE WORK, INEZ:

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

VIKING CONQUESTS CONTINUE: Hundreds of Peruvians are naming their babies after Norwegian soccer star Erling Haaland. “Apparently, the people of Peru (which is in South America) are obsessed with the Viking giant. As of Monday, some 500 new babies have been named after Erling Haaland, and you can expect that number to grow.”

Even Old Blighty isn’t safe:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Turns Out, Big Brother Is Actually a Matronly Euro-Scold. “We need to set the age at which they can, the children can, legally access social media,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said this week, which translates into American (via bad Japanese translation) as “All your screen are belong to us.”

Posted at 2:16 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE OCCUPIED ZONES:

Dhimmis are forbidden from repairing old churches and synagogues, and from building new ones.

Posted at 1:59 pm by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX targets July 16 for Starship Flight 13, reveals what went wrong on previous launch.

According to a new SpaceX analysis, a sequence change in Ship’s engines, which ignite before the two rocket halves physically detach in a maneuver known as “hot staging,” led to a 90-degree error in Super Heavy’s orientation after separation. Super Heavy’s boostback burn was also cut short when five of its 33 engines failed to relight. SpaceX says it has introduced a modified startup sequence for Ship and hardware updates to Super Heavy to address the orientation anomaly and ignition issues, respectively, “along with updates to engine alarms and aborts to match the conditions seen in the multi-engine flight environment.”

Ship ran into a bit of trouble during Flight 12 but also managed to pull off some firsts. One of the spacecraft’s three vacuum-optimized Raptors was lost 40 seconds after stage separation, but it still reached its designated suborbital trajectory, demonstrating its “engine out” capabilities, according to the SpaceX update. The loss did, however, prevent Ship’s in-space engine relight attempt. SpaceX traced the failure to “interconnected causes” and has introduced a number of fixes for the upcoming Flight 13, “with additional reliability improvements planned in upcoming versions of the Raptor engine.”

Godspeed, Flight 13.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

ANALYSIS: Wes Moore’s Bronze Star was a political rescue mission.

Most veterans who were wrongly denied a military award do not get a three-star general to personally intervene for them.

They do not get direct access to the Secretary of the Army.

They do not get a U.S. senator from a state they don’t live in to sponsor the award.

They do not get a politically damaging controversy transformed into a retroactive military honor, almost without question, nearly 20 years later.

And they do not get it done from start to finish in seven days.

But Maryland Gov. Wes Moore did.

Spotlight on Maryland has learned that Moore’s pursuit of the Bronze Star medal in 2024 relied heavily on political favors, special access, inaccurate information about his Afghanistan deployment and involved the deliberate concealment of key facts regarding Moore’s end-of-deployment awards in 2006.

These revelations raise serious questions about the process used to obtain the Bronze Star presented to Moore in 2024 and whether it violated federal law.

Related: Wes Moore Attacks Local Newspaper for Deigning To Report on His Record.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

YOU DON’T SAY:

Bless the New York Post for never running out of lame excuses to run photos of attractive women.

Posted at 1:29 pm by Stephen Green

YES, IT’S TIME FOR A CRACKDOWN ON INSURRECTIONISTS AND SEDITIONISTS:

Posted at 1:29 pm by Glenn Reynolds

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE SERVER FARM: Little House On The Prairie Goes Woke.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “bootstrapping mythology” in her original works does not “square” with audiences. George Tann is a black man. Young Reboot Laura becomes friends with an Indigenous girl named Good Eagle. Good Eagle’s family befriends the Ingalls family who snaked their logs to build their home. This nice, Ingalls family stole their timber and their land but, they are gracious enough to forgive but never let them forget it. Then, there’s the reboot of the Oleson’s:

Netflix’s Ingalls family are good people, even by 2026 standards, and you can see it in contrast with the Jameses. The Jameses are town-dwelling rich folk who don’t appear in the Little House books but seem to be an adaptation of the Oleson family … The Jameses’ vision for Independence — hierarchy, respectability, a church, a school — first seduces, then repels, the more gentle-minded Ingallses, Ma and Mary. The James matriarch, Jemma, played by Mary Holland, brings a welcome comedic hateability to this sunny show.”-Rebecca Onion, Slate

Got it. The Olesons are the token MAGA family. And they’re there for comedic relief. Sounds like Rebecca Sonneshine is a bit of a passive-aggressive Nelly Oleson, don’t cha think?

That development plays surprisingly well in Ireland:

Naturally, the show runner is playing the “I don’t even know what ‘woke’ means” card to defend herself:

TV writer Rebecca Sonnenshine, who came up with the reboot of the show has this to say about the recent woke criticisms:

“I’m not even sure what ‘woke’ means to people anymore, to be honest. I know what I think it means, which is the definition of it being aware and alert to social injustice and prejudice, in particular racial prejudice. So, when people say, ‘I hope it’s not woke,’ I think, ‘Really? Oh, that’s interesting.’ But I don’t think people are using it in that manner; I think it’s just become a catch-all word for things that I don’t quite understand. If I had to sum it up, what people are afraid of is that something from their childhood will be portrayed in a way that scares them.”-Rebecca Sonneshine.

Maybe it’s for the best she didn’t bother reading the source material:

On the other hand, it’s a surprisingly diverse cast, a series perfectly made for, as the Critical Drinker would say with 100 gallons of reverb on his voice, “modern audiences:”

But will there be a season two?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll