A Pleasant Evening

I just got back from a pleasant evening hanging out with some of the local space geeks (Clark Lindsey, Jeff Foust, Phil Smith, and Pat Bahn). The main topic of conversation was obviously SpaceShipOne and the ramifications of the flight. Two noteworthy things came up. First of all, Pat confirms that the giggle factor is pretty much dead as far as investors are concerned. He can’t go into details for obvious reasons, but he speaks from direct experience. Everyone suspected this would happen, but it’s nice to have real data. The second point that came up which I thought I’d mention is this: In the SS1 development program so far there have been four incidents in which the pilot saved the plane. The landing problem on the December 17th test, the uncommanded nose rise on the August 27th test, the computer failure on the May 13th shot, and the roll problem on the most recent flight. In an unmanned system each one of those would most likely have lead to loss of vehicle. The lesson is clear – pilots are good. Again, no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to alt-space, but it’s nice to have further confirmation.

Orbital Survivor

Dwayne Day says that the next frontier for reality teevee will be the high one.

My friend Dr. Day has long been a skeptic about commercial human spaceflight, but like many others, he’s slowly coming to his senses… 😉

Seriously (like most of his work) it’s a carefully researched and interesting history of the intersection between private manned space and television over the past several years. Amidst the rubble of the past failures (as is often the case) it may be about to finally succeed.

Education Reform

Via a comment on this post, I came across an interesting blog that I hadn’t seen before. The topic is k-12 education reform, something close to my heart since both my parents were high school teachers, my Mom for her whole career, and my Dad while he was in the Peace Corps[*].

I came out of an education system with high stakes testing, so I’m fairly comfortable with it. It seems to me that some sort of testing is necessary in order to measure teaching effectiveness. The stakes for the student should not be all-or-nothing, though. The ideal is testing that measures school performance, but which constitutes only a part of the student’s grade. The teacher and school should be assessed on aggregate test scores across all students, presumably with some cross comparison with other schools in similar circumstances (since it doesn’t make sense to compare inner city schools to suburban magnet schools, for example). The process of actually measuring school performance isn’t simple, but it is necessary to have some sort of feedback mechanism that focuses teacher and administrator attention on a meaningful performance metric.

Testing is a bit of a fad these days, which is a mixed blessing. At least some testing schemes are stupid and destructive (all or nothing tests that track students into the smart kids track or the regular track, for example). The diversity of schemes being tried suggests that at least some will work, and hopefully the good ones will be adopted by other states and school districts. In the meantime some of the kids being experimented on will suffer needlessly thanks to political stupidity, but the alternative is kids suffering due to political neglect, so it’s not obviously a losing proposition.

Anyway, go dig around the site a bit. Even if you don’t have kids, you are directly affected by this.

[*] incidentally, IMO the Peace Corps is probably the best investment in foreign relations that the US has ever made. High level bladiblahblah doesn’t last longer than the leadership of the foreign countries being engaged. Massive aid projects line the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats. Actual US citizens interacting one-on-one with local people and materially improving their lives spreads American ideals into the grassroots, and inoculates at least some people against rabid anti-Americanism in a way that lasts long after the volunteer has gone home.

Back In LA

I just drove back down from Mojave. While I was up there, people who were watching the news might actually have a better idea than I do of the actual flight results, because I couldn’t get into the press conference, and none of the reporters who did were talking until they’d filed.

There’s some discussion going on in this post that the damage to the vehicle may have been more severe than thought. If the fuselage literally “buckled,” that’s a Very Bad thing, and I’m not sure what it means except that either their design is wrong, or its execution is. Of course, there was damage on the last flight as well, and they flew this one. I don’t know when they were planning to announce the Ansari X-Prize attempt, but I suspect that if they’d had a picture perfect flight today, it would have come sooner than it will now. I’m betting on at least one more flight test before the official attempt, particularly since it seemed to be underperforming as well (it barely achieved altitude, and it wasn’t carrying the ballast to account for passengers).

More tweaking ahead. Of course the fact that it’s tweakable is exactly the point of the program.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Kevin Murphy has a play by play.

[Another update a couple minutes later still]

Here’s Leonard David’s account based on the press conference.

[Late night update]

Jeff Foust has the best reporting on the flight that I’ve read so far.

Spaceflight

If there were any hitches, they weren’t apparent from the viewing stand. They hit the apogee of at least a hundred kilometers, and had a smooth entry and landing. I took some pictures, but until I can figure out how to get them onto a big screen, I won’t know if they were any good, or worth posting. If you watched live on television or webcast, I’m sure that the pros did a better job than me (if for no other reason than they have much better equipment).

The question now is what effect, short and long term, this will have on the growing prospects for this new liberating industry. XCOR has gotten a lot of good publicity out of this. Here’s hoping it means investors as well. And we still await announcements from Paul Allen and Richard Branson about future plans.

[Update at 9 AM PDT]

Leonard David has filed his report from Mojave.

[Another update]

Here’s a copy editor for whom the president’s new initiative can’t come a moment too soon. The San Francisco Chronicle says that SpaceShipOne made it all the way to the atmosphere. [Hat tip to Orbital Mind-Control Laser]

[Another update]

I should mention that Dale Amon has been describing this over at Samizdata as well.

Preparations

The sun is up now. I’ll have pics later. The XCOR hangar is right on the flight line, and I hear the sounds of helicopters and other aircraft (perhaps including chase planes), getting into position prior to the rollout.

I’m heading down to the viewing area, so no blogging for a while.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, one more. They’ve got White Knight halfway out of the hangar, fueling and prepping it to taxi over to the viewing area at 6:30.

Ceiling And Visibility Unlimited

During the day in the Mojave desert, the sun beats down on the ancient rock and sand through cloudless skies. Its rays are reflected back upward, and it heats the dry air. Following the inexorable law of Boyle, with no volume to contain it, it expands, and as it does, it has to go somewhere.

What this eventually means, as the late morning and afternoon progress, is wind. And not just high wind, but dynamic, changing, don’t-know-from-what-direction-it-will-come-from-one-minute-to-the-next wind, grabbing-a-seemingly-tranquil-hangar-door-right-out-of-your-hands wind. The natives know this, and expect it. In fact, overlooking the town of Mojave, along the road leading up to Tehachapi, is a wind farm, a crop of subsidized windmills. In fact, some wag last night suggested that this wasn’t a natural wind–Burt, a natural showman, had simply decided to pay for the electricity to run them in reverse to build up the suspense for the next morning’s flight.

When we arrived last night, it was gusting at (my estimate) thirty to forty knots. In XCOR’s hangar, you could hear the groans of the old metal walls straining against it. The rave last night was sandblasted by it–I could taste and feel the grit in the watermelon slices left to its untender mercies. Many, with no experience with Mojave, had two questions: could the flight occur in conditions like this? And if so, would the conditions be like this in the morning?

The answer to the first is almost certainly no. A steady wind can be managed, if one can take off into it, but no prudent pilot would attempt a takeoff or landing with high and unpredictable potential crosswinds, which could suddenly flip over a twenty-million-dollar one-of-a-kind investment, just before it was about to bear fruit.

Fortunately, the answer to the second question is also probably no.

When I got up this morning, the desert had cooled and the atmosphere had calmed, and the notorious Mojave gales had settled down to a gentle breeze, as they almost always do. It looks like it will be a gorgeous morning for history.

Yes, Virginia, There Was A Rave

Just as Leonard David predicted. Much beer was consumed, much loud hideous noise that was proclaimed to be music was heard. The good thing about it was that it did seem to be bringing in young people, and as I realize every time I look at my cohorts and see the graying of the hair, the space movement can certainly use some new blood.

I’m off to sleep, with rollout a little over six hours from now.

President Announces Controversial New Educational Initiative

LOS ANGELES (APUPI) June 20, 2004

Standing in front of the Los Angeles Times building on Spring Street and surrounded by aides, President Bush put forth a new and long-overdue proposal today, to the cheers of thousands of long-suffering readers of that paper, to start to repair the tragic situation with the American journalism system. He called it “No Reporter Left Behind.”

“For too many years have we seen the sad evidence accumulating that our nation’s media outlets and journalism schools simply aren’t achieving what they must for our nation to maintain its first-place ranking in freedom of speech and a properly informed public,” he declared. “Compared to journalists of a few decades ago, today’s reporters show an increasing inability to comprehend simple English or basic statistics, to exercise logic, or to even recognize that they’re Americans.”

“Now, many accuse the media of bias against my administration, but I don’t believe that. I’m here to change the tone in Washington and the nation, and I refuse to engage in such accusations. I’m sure that journalists are well meaning. As a compassionate conservative, it’s clear to me that they simply haven’t been given the education and training that they so desperately need, and we need to help them and their hardworking editors.”

The president went on to illustrate the growing problem.

“Certainly, we’re all familiar with the examples of journalistic incompetence that seem to be increasing almost daily.”

“Even after a great number of speeches and explanations, many reporters still don’t seem to understand why we are at war, or are able to even comprehend the fact that we are at war. There’s a concept in logical argument, called a ‘straw man,’ in which the debater sets up a weak argument that was never made, but pretends that his opponent did, and then knocks it down, pretending to have somehow won the argument.”

“The press, many of whom seem to suffer from attention-deficit disorder, seem to have trouble focusing on my stated reasons for this war, instead being easily distracted by these kinds of strawman arguments.”

“For instance, many of the slower journalists continue to mistakenly claim that, because we haven’t yet found stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, the threat from Saddam wasn’t imminent, and that the war therefore wasn’t justified. This despite the fact that I never used imminence as a justification for the war, and in fact clearly said that the threat wasn’t imminent, but that we couldn’t wait until it was.”

“They then claim that I somehow implied that the threat was imminent, even though I explicitly denied it. They clearly lack the ability to comprehend not just written English, but spoken English as well.”

“Had these slow journalists been held back until they understood logic and basic reading and listening comprehension, instead of simply being promoted up to some other assignment, some of the mistakes of the past few days might have been avoided. For example, just last week, this newspaper and many others reported that the 911 Commission had shown that there were no ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and that, again, this had somehow taken away a justification for liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam’s tyranny.”

“The facts, of course, are that the 911 commission only stated that there was no involvement of Saddam with 911, and the commission members themselves have said that there’s little distance between our position and theirs. This is, of course, irrelevant to justification for removing Saddam, since we have never claimed that Saddam was involved with 911, and in fact we’ve taken pains to make clear that we had no evidence to that effect, and we’ve never used that as a justification for removal.”

“These are just a couple examples of a much larger and broader problem.”

“We’ve all seen the damage that policies of social promotion do to promising young people like Jayson Blair, who was simply passed along from assignment to assignment without having to demonstrate the ability to meet the most basic standards of ethics.”

“We’ve seen too, the damage caused to journalists by award inflation, in which they get gold stars, or Oscars, or Runyons and Pulitzers for sub-par work. It gives them a false sense of achievement, and inhibits their ability to truly progress. We do them no favors by falsely boosting their self esteem, to the point that they are given honors of which they can’t even comprehend the significance.”

“We can no longer afford to sweep such tragic incompetencies under the carpet. This ongoing deterioration of reportage is having seriously debilitating effects on our nation’s health, on its economy, and its national security. In many important, and frightening, ways, our reporters are our future. If a foreign power had somehow foisted upon us such a system of news reporting, in the same way that we’ve somehow done it to ourselves voluntarily, we would justly consider it an act of war.”

Turning around and pointing at the building behind him, he intoned, “On this day, I stand here in front of one of the foremost symbols of that failure, a poster child for shoddy journalism, to announce a major new federal program to start to address this looming crisis. For details, I’d like to introduce Rod Paige, my Secretary of Education.”

Secretary Paige stepped up to the microphone, and after thanking the president, laid out a new proposal of federal assistance to journalism outlets and schools of journalism.

“The president’s new program is two-pronged. We all recognize that early education is key so, modeling Head Start, we’re developing a curriculum for the schools of journalism to emphasize the basics–math, science, logic. In order to encourage the use of our curriculum, we will be issuing federal grants to these institutions, up to ten percent of their annual budget, as long as the student’s test scores show improvement.”

“In addition, we are going to set up a mentoring program with local bloggers, so that these aspiring reporters can learn how to do research and fact check.”

“The second prong of our proposal is to provide grants to media organizations as well. Like the grants for the journalism schools, this will be a ten percent solution, through which, in exchange for providing them with a trifling amount of money, we will dictate reporting standards from Washington. Some of this funding will be earmarked to provide adequate dosages of Ritalin in the water systems, to help the journalists stay focused on the actual justifications for the war, and minimize distractions by red herrings.”

“We’ve had a pilot program for years with PBS and NPR, but it clearly needs to be restructured before we expand it to other press organizations. There have been no strings attached to the taxpayers’ funds, or accountability. This appalling situation has to end.”

In response to a question from the audience as to why a media organization or journalism school would be willing to sacrifice its autonomy for a small amount of its operating budget, he replied, “It’s a mystery, but it seems to work quite well for the public school system, and many of these people are products of that system, so we expect to quickly get most of them on board.”

Reaction to the proposal from the media itself was mixed.

Many members of the press in attendance seemed elated at the thought that their plight had been recognized, and that the government was finally going to help them. All had seen, and many had participated in the many documentaries about the growing problem. They, like much of the public, had viewed the sad images of rooms full of reporters scratching their heads over global warming theories, and the Bill of Rights, struggling to accomplish such seemingly simple tasks as distinguishing an automatic from a semi-automatic weapon.

Others, though, were skeptical. “It’s not a problem that can be solved by just throwing money at it,” said one editor. Another woman in attendance, a professor at the USC School of Journalism, expressed concern that budding reporters would be “taught to the test,” and unable to properly focus on critical areas such as Lacanian metacontexts of transgressive gender oppression.

No reporters from the LA Times seemed to be present, having all been assigned to dig up fresh dirt on Governor Schwarzenegger. In response to a question from the LA Daily News as to whether he thought that this seeming attack on California’s largest newspaper might cause them to further increase their support for Senator Kerry and damage his electoral prospects in the fall, the president replied, “I don’t know. You might want to ask Governor Davis about that.”

(Copyright 2004 by Rand Simberg)

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