This is entirely inappropriate for an amateur rocketry list.
On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 3:33 AM roxanna Mason <rocketmaster.ken@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What was meant is Obama was in office in 2013 so it was under his watch. But
Clinton,Obama, both liberals and a disaster to our freedoms and country is
currently happening with the next liberal in power and it scares the hell out
of me.
Ken
On Sun, Aug 1, 2021 at 4:48 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 1 Aug 2021, roxanna Mason wrote:
Since the Bush protocol of scavenging helium from natural gas was
removed by obama, helium has become even more expensive...
Historical correction: neither Bush nor Obama had much to do with it.
The government monopoly on helium, and the scavenging program, were
established in 1925 under Coolidge, with changes made in 1960 under
Eisenhower to permit commercial competition. By 1996, the Federal Helium
Reserve was $1.4G in debt, and arguably had outlived its usefulness, and
Congress (under Clinton) passed the Helium Privatization Act to phase out
government production and sell off most of the government's reserve. But
the details were not well thought out, and there's been repeated tinkering
since (most recently the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013, passed with
strong bipartisan support in Congress), generally making a mess of the
transition. The most recent shortages were set off by Saudi Arabia's
attempts to blockade Qatar, since LNG operations there now produce a
substantial fraction of the world's helium.
Henry