I see that I’m not the only one to be having trouble with Earthlink DSL in the last day or so.
Why The Government Won’t Get Us Into Space
Read Kevin Parkin’s excellent account of yesterday’s town hall meeting at JPL (in the comments section of Jeff Foust’s post announcing it), and weep:
From memory (expect lots of errors):
Estimated average audience age – 55 years
Estimated audience size – 250
Aprox. % of JPLers – 80%
Estimated people there my age (27) or younger – 10 (including the camera man, myself, and Derek Shannon (see earlier comment))Sen. Brownback gave a 5 min intro to set the stage for the town hall meeting, making it clear that he was highly interested in innovative suggestions for how to structure the legislative architecture of the exploration initiative. Rep. Rohrabacher said a few words and was congratulated by JPL President Charles Elachi on having triplets this month. Also in attendance was Buzz Aldrin and Gen. Pete Worden.
– The first audience speaker spoke eloquently and extolled the virtues of prizes and industry collaboration. Sen. Brownback asked people who did/didn’t support prizes to raise their hands. Sen. Brownback asked the audience speaker how much the prize award should be. This seems to be a point of particular interest, since Sen. Brownback asked precisely the same question of Elon Musk at the launcher hearing a couple of weeks ago. Back then, Elon Musk said something like it should be 10% of the amount the government would otherwise spend on developing that capability. This time, the answer was “as much as possible” to which there was laughter and Sen. Brownback rephrased the question, how little can we spend on prizes? Nothing as good as Elon’s answer was put forward.
– The gentleman sitting on my left believed that the focus of NASA should not be on exploring Mars but rather on studying the dynamics of Earth, global warming, etc. Knowing of Rep. Rohrabacher
Why The Government Won’t Get Us Into Space
Read Kevin Parkin’s excellent account of yesterday’s town hall meeting at JPL (in the comments section of Jeff Foust’s post announcing it), and weep:
From memory (expect lots of errors):
Estimated average audience age – 55 years
Estimated audience size – 250
Aprox. % of JPLers – 80%
Estimated people there my age (27) or younger – 10 (including the camera man, myself, and Derek Shannon (see earlier comment))Sen. Brownback gave a 5 min intro to set the stage for the town hall meeting, making it clear that he was highly interested in innovative suggestions for how to structure the legislative architecture of the exploration initiative. Rep. Rohrabacher said a few words and was congratulated by JPL President Charles Elachi on having triplets this month. Also in attendance was Buzz Aldrin and Gen. Pete Worden.
– The first audience speaker spoke eloquently and extolled the virtues of prizes and industry collaboration. Sen. Brownback asked people who did/didn’t support prizes to raise their hands. Sen. Brownback asked the audience speaker how much the prize award should be. This seems to be a point of particular interest, since Sen. Brownback asked precisely the same question of Elon Musk at the launcher hearing a couple of weeks ago. Back then, Elon Musk said something like it should be 10% of the amount the government would otherwise spend on developing that capability. This time, the answer was “as much as possible” to which there was laughter and Sen. Brownback rephrased the question, how little can we spend on prizes? Nothing as good as Elon’s answer was put forward.
– The gentleman sitting on my left believed that the focus of NASA should not be on exploring Mars but rather on studying the dynamics of Earth, global warming, etc. Knowing of Rep. Rohrabacher
Why The Government Won’t Get Us Into Space
Read Kevin Parkin’s excellent account of yesterday’s town hall meeting at JPL (in the comments section of Jeff Foust’s post announcing it), and weep:
From memory (expect lots of errors):
Estimated average audience age – 55 years
Estimated audience size – 250
Aprox. % of JPLers – 80%
Estimated people there my age (27) or younger – 10 (including the camera man, myself, and Derek Shannon (see earlier comment))Sen. Brownback gave a 5 min intro to set the stage for the town hall meeting, making it clear that he was highly interested in innovative suggestions for how to structure the legislative architecture of the exploration initiative. Rep. Rohrabacher said a few words and was congratulated by JPL President Charles Elachi on having triplets this month. Also in attendance was Buzz Aldrin and Gen. Pete Worden.
– The first audience speaker spoke eloquently and extolled the virtues of prizes and industry collaboration. Sen. Brownback asked people who did/didn’t support prizes to raise their hands. Sen. Brownback asked the audience speaker how much the prize award should be. This seems to be a point of particular interest, since Sen. Brownback asked precisely the same question of Elon Musk at the launcher hearing a couple of weeks ago. Back then, Elon Musk said something like it should be 10% of the amount the government would otherwise spend on developing that capability. This time, the answer was “as much as possible” to which there was laughter and Sen. Brownback rephrased the question, how little can we spend on prizes? Nothing as good as Elon’s answer was put forward.
– The gentleman sitting on my left believed that the focus of NASA should not be on exploring Mars but rather on studying the dynamics of Earth, global warming, etc. Knowing of Rep. Rohrabacher
ICC highlights, Day 1
The first day of the ICC conference was pretty much as expected. A bit of schmoozing, renewing contacts, that sort of thing. Today’s sessions were on Magnetic relaxation and confinement, and plasma flow and shear. The overall focus of the conference has shifted slightly since the last one I was at, in 2002. This year is much more science focused, and that’s a good thing. It’s always tempting to focus talks on your own machine and where you want to take it, but in order to move the whole enterprise down the road there has to be communication across groups working on different machines, and there has to be crossfertilization. This means that the focus needs to be on the underlying physics, not the engineering details.
Adil Hassam (one of our Principal Investigators) presented the results from MCX, and there was a fair amount of interest. It’s only been a year and a half since we started getting real results, but already we have enough under our belts to generate a fair amount of interest. It’s becoming increasingly clear that velocity shear stabilizes a wide range of instabilities, and there are now results from machines as diverse as Z-Pinches, Tokamaks, and Mirror Machines all of which show improved stability in the presence of velocity shear.
Eventually the PowerPoints from the talks and posters will be put up on the ICC2004 website, but I just checked and there’s nothing there yet. When they are put up I’ll try to remember to post a pointer – Paul Bellan of Caltech had a really cool movie in his presentation showing plasma current filaments merging, kinking, and pinching off to form a spheromak (essentially a plasma “smoke ring”).
Nuclear Waste Solutions
Andrew, my very first Fox News column, a couple of years ago, was on this very subject.
ISDC Time
If you don’t already have plans for the upcoming Memorial Day weekend (I’ll be unpacking boxes in Boca Raton…), and can get to Oklahoma City, think about attending this year’s International Space Development Conference. Info on the linked press release.
More Fusion Thoughts
Obviously I have net access here in Madison, though it’s excruciatingly slow.
Rand’s post below reminds me of an idea I had a while back, and which has a little bit of traction in the fusion community (though I think it’s had multiple independent inventors). The basic idea is to make a virtue of the neutrons produced in D-T or D-D fusion by using them to transmute nuclear waste into short lived (high radioactivity) isotopes. The isotopes could then be stored while they decay into something (relatively) stable. The benefits are many. First of all it deals with fission waste, helping to remove one of the obstacles to widespread deployment of fission power. Secondly, it doesn’t require break-even from the fusion reactor, which makes everything a heck of a lot easier. The net transmutation plant power balance is now the sum of the fusion power and the power produced by the decay of the transmuted isotopes. A transmutation plant might plausibly be fully self sustaining. Once fusion reactors are in the hands of capitalist captains of industry, they will get better, cheaper, and more reliable.
A more exciting option is a mature fission-fusion hybrid cycle in which there are multiple passes of fission fuel through the reactor wall, to generate power using a set of reactions which spits out very low activity waste, cutting the initial fission reactor part entirely out of the cycle. This, it seems to me, is the logical long-term consequence of getting the evolutionary driving force of the markeplace to bear on the problem of commercial fusion. In the very long term, of course, we will likely see pure fusion power plants, but the path there must be along a sequence of evolvable reactor designs, each of which is at least marginally profitable.
More tomorrow, when the conference proper starts.
Temperature In Hell Dropping Rapidly
James Lovelock has endorsed nuclear power.
It will be interesting to see if this creates a major schism in the watermelon community. This was always the rational position for environmentalists to take, if they really believed that carbon release was harmful, but environmentalists have rarely been rational. Either that, or they had some…other…agenda.
Revenooers
I’m still fuming.
I dropped Patricia off at LAX this morning on my way to work, to fly to Florida. She had a 7:40 flight.
She usually carries on, but today she had a couple pieces of luggage to check, so we decided that I’d park the car and help her check in. Now, to park at LAX is a minimum of three bucks for the first hour, but downstairs, at the arrival level, there are metered lots that take quarters, and I figured fifty cents would do me. Of course, this means that one has to enter the airport on the arrival level, which at 6 AM is almost empty since there are few arrivals that early. I cruised past an airport motorcycle cop, at the speed limit, or at least no faster than traffic. But he decided to pull out after me and turned on his flashers.
We pulled over, and he walked up to the car and informed me that we’d been pulled over because we didn’t have a front license plate. Now, I’ve been meaning to put it on, but the last time I tried, the screws that I bought at Pep Boys didn’t fit the holes on the front bumper. He took the license and registration (I’m a Wyoming resident, with a Wyoming drivers’ license), and took about ten minutes, presumably to run a check on this blatant and dangerous criminal. He finally came back with a ticket. It wasn’t a moving violation, and it could be dismissed, with a service fee, if I corrected the problem and drove to the DMV to get it signed off. Of course, because we’d pulled over into a side road heading away from our terminal, we had to backtrack to reenter the airport, costing even more time.
So to save a couple bucks, I now have to deal with the hassle of correcting a problem on a car that’s about to move to Florida, and we almost missed her flight. If I’d taken the upper level and parked up there, that cop wouldn’t have seen us at all, and there would have been much more traffic, resulting in many better things to do for whatever law enforcement was up there.
The coupe de grace, of course, was that, after all this, the metered lot ended up being closed.