On the one hand, SpaceX has announced the date for their first planned unmanned launch of their manned Dragon spacecraft to the ISS: January 7, less than two months from now. If that works… then SpaceX will be on track to restore Americas ability to launch our own astronauts back into space. Yay! On the other hand…

Reefer Madness at NASA

In short, NASA has apparently flipped out after seeing Elon Musk,away from work, away from SpaceX property, and on his own time, smoke some weed and drink some booze. So they’re conducting safety reviews of both SpaceX and Boeing, focusing on their “workplace safety cultures.”

In that same spirit, I hope they run a similar review of themselves. I’ve heard tell that astronauts sometimes like to get tore up on their free time.

I suspect that a *lot* of this is n effort by the entrenched Old School to get into spaceX to get them to change their culture to be more Old School.