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Rand Simberg: just a recovering aerospace engineer.
…if you are publishing research articles that use computer programs, if you want to claim that you are engaging in science, the programs are in your possession and you will not release them then I would not regard you as a scientist; I would also regard any papers based on the software as null and void.
So would, and do I. A large part of the gullibility of the general public and the media on this subject is that it doesn’t understand how computers, and programming works.
I also find it ironic that econometrics is much more rigorous, in terms of the need to present code for publication, about this than climate “science.”
In my article in The American, I suggest the following: Let’s assume that all the spending before this year is Bush’s fault. Then, using data in President Obama’s budget request for fiscal 2010 and data from the fiscal 2011 budget request, I made this chart that projects spending each year from fiscal 2010 until fiscal 2019. The purple bars represent the spending amounts the president requested in February 2009. The orange bars represent the growth in the projected spending request between February 2009 and February 2010.
In his latest budget request, President Obama added roughly $1.6 trillion in spending over the next ten years on top of what he requested last year. Can President Obama blame that extra $1.6 trillion on former President Bush? No.
…that isn’t happening. Actually, I think that the Democrats have a lot bigger problem on this score, as they continue to abandon ship, and eat their own.
Paul Spudis continues to mourn the Vision for Space Exploration. I don’t think it’s lost yet — what was really cancelled was ESAS and Apollo on Geritol. There is not currently a specific goal, but I think that it’s still possible to reform (in the literal sense of that word) the VSE over the coming months, refocused on the original intent of lunar utilization. With regard to the Chinese, I am completely unconcerned about whether or not they plant a flag. If they show signs of doing resource utilization, though, I’ll be more concerned, and I suspect that the political establishment will as well, kicking off a true new race. But we won’t know that for years, at their current snail’s pace.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of going back to the moon, Jon Goff has more thoughts on one-way-to-stay trips, which are probably the only way we’ll get back in the next decade. I’m wondering if it’s possible to do a “stone soup” project, and get commercial entities (e.g., Caterpillar) to donate components for the mission for PR purposes.
In case you’re confused, there are a couple problems with the piece that I’m trying to get fixed. First of all, obviously, that was supposed to be two billion dollars per launch not two bucks per launch (if only…). And I’ve quoted Tom Jones in the first paragraph on the second page, and farther down the page, Charlie Bolden, but there are no quote marks right now, so it makes it look as though their words are mine.
[Late afternoon update]
Jeff Greason weighs in on fairing-size issues in comments, and Jon Goff has some thoughts on heavy-lift technologies.
[Update a few minutes later]
The quotes on page two have been fixed, but we still have dollar-store prices for Ares I flights.
As I was taught, if you don’t have anything good to say…
[Update a few minutes later]
I assume that there will be a special election. I’ll bet that a Republican will have a good shot at taking the seat.
[Update a couple minutes l later]
Yup, a special election on primary day, May 18th, and it’s the only district in the country that voted for both John Kerry and John McCain. The only thing, really, that kept getting him reelected was the pork. Looks like a likely Republican pickup to me.
[Late afternoon update]
An obit from Rick Moran. With the good, the bad and the ugly.
Man, if they didn’t like the Tebow ad, they should be going ballistic over Betty White being tackled.
[Update a few minutes later]
You know, considering how many people watch for just the ads (about half, I think) they should put together a Superbowl ad show without the game, and see what kind of viewership it gets. It wouldn’t cost them a dime to produce.
There is a vital role for groups like HRW and Amnesty to play in the world. Properly understood, their mission is to use their moral authority to shame and condemn tyranny and those who wish to make the world a hospitable place for tyrants and terrorists. But moral authority requires moral clarity. HRW and Amnesty have been overtaken by activists who use their position to wage easy campaigns against open societies instead of taking on the more difficult, thankless, and sometimes dangerous struggle against closed ones.
Kind of like the global warming scam. Amnesty International should be ashamed, but it’s apparently incapable of it.
…apparently hates Americans. Though I liked the Fantastic Four and Spiderman when I was a kid, I’ve never been a big Marvel fan. This is just one more reason.
There’s an interesting discussion in comments over at Hyperbola. I do think that people are making a lot of unjustified assumptions about what the architecture will look like. Orion was part of Apollo on Geritol, and the requirements for any beyond-LEO crew system need to be rethought in light of potential new technologies.
Posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 by Rand Simberg at 10:23 am Categories: Space | 11 Comments »
I missed the first half (after giving up on our Costco trip yesterday, being unable to find a parking space and having forgotten that everyone would be stocking up for the game today, we went about game time. Lightest traffic ever…), but my favorite ad in the second half was Audi’s. Selling us green cars by showing us our ecofascist future…
I can’t wait for the video showing Hitler’s reaction to Peyton Manning’s fourth-quarter interception.
I think that it says something about the culture that, sixty-five years later, Adolf Hitler has become a pop-culture joke. Unfortunately, I think that the ideology of radical Islam and Allah will be much more resistant. Partly because when we make fun of Hitler, there aren’t riots in the streets, with threats of decapitation.
He also thought the Olympics were a shoe-in for Chicago because of his involvement (epic fail), that Corzyn would win in New Jersey, Deeds in Virginia, Coakley in Massachusetts, and that he would by himself succeed in Copenhagen. That’s 0-5 there tough guy! From NFL.com: President Obama predicts Colts victory in Super Bowl XLIV.
I’m guessing that there are a lot of donkeys who will be begging The One to stay the hell away from their campaigns this fall.
If Keynes were alive today, what would he think of President Obama’s fiscal policies?
He would roll over in his grave if he could see the things being done in his name. Keynes was opposed to large structural deficits. He thought that they chilled rather than stimulated the economy. It’s true that we’re stuck with large deficits now. The goal should be to reduce them, not to take on new spending that makes them worse.
Today, deficits are getting bigger and bigger with no plan to significantly lower them. Keynes understood what the current administration doesn’t understand that the proper policy in a democracy recognizes that today’s increase in debt must be paid in the future.
We paid down wartime deficits. Now we have continuous deficits. We used to have a rule people believed in, balanced budgets. And now that’s gone.
But misinterpreting Keynes allows them to pursue their political agenda of growth in government.
When the glacier story broke, IPCC apologists returned over and over again to a saving grace. The bogus glacier report appeared in the body of the IPCC document, but not in the much more carefully vetted Synthesis Report, in which the IPCC’s senior leadership made its specific recommendations to world leaders. So it didn’t matter that much, the apologists told us, and we can still trust the rigorously checked and reviewed Synthesis Report.
But that’s where the African rain crisis prediction is found — in the supposedly sacrosanct Synthesis Report.
So: the Synthesis Report contains a major scare prediction — 50% shortfall in North African food production just ten years from now — and there is no serious, peer-reviewed evidence that the prediction is true.
But there’s more. Much, much more.
You wonder at what point, if any, the warm-monger worshippers will realize that they’ve been scammed?
And as Mark Steyn notes (again), it’s not just a science scandal, it’s a scandal of gross journalism malpractice.
As the first commenter says, it does seem like perfectly justifiable homicide. On the other hand, as another commenter notes, it’s not like it’s “Feelings.” Whoa, whoa, whoa…
NASA sees China’s strategy for a manned lunar landing as launch vehicle intensive. While America’s notional Constellation moon project centers on a single - and still unbuilt - Ares-V “superheavy” lift booster for a direct ascent to the moon and two “lunar orbit rendezvous” operations, China will likely opt for two complex “Earth orbit rendezvous” maneuvers.
This will require four “Long March V” rockets - in the same class as the Pentagon’s Delta IV heavy lift launch vehicles - to put their cosmonauts on the moon. Launched in pairs over a two-week period from China’s new Wenchang Space Center on the South China Sea island of Hainan, the four Long March Vs will each loft 26-ton payloads into low Earth orbits. The first mission will orbit the rocket for the translunar journey which will then join a second payload of an empty lunar module (LM) and its lunar-orbit rocket motor. Those first two unmanned payloads will rendezvous in Earth orbit and then fire off for the quarter-million-mile journey to the moon.
Once the unmanned LM is in a stable lunar orbit, the second pair of missions will be launched into Earth’s orbit; the first with another translunar rocket motor and the second with a combined payload comprising the lunar orbiting module, a modified service module, an Earth re-entry module and the manned Shenzhou capsule with three Chinese cosmonauts.
Unlike many at NASA, they’re smart enough to avoid the huge development costs of a heavy-lifter. Of course, it will still be a very expensive mission, but based on existing vehicles. We looked at these kinds of architectures at Boeing during CE&R, before Mike Griffin took over and they became anathema. Of course, we were trying to actually satisfy the requirements of the VSE and the Aldridge recommendations, something that Mike apparently never considered important.
I should add that the article is clearly wrong on this point:
October’s launch of the experimental Ares 1-X heavy lift rocket, while flawless, may well mark the end rather than the beginning of America’s next-generation Constellation manned-space program.
It was hardly “flawless,” unless you don’t consider a failure to deploy all the chutes a flaw.
Hitler is told that Constellation has been cancelled.
Of course, whoever made it falls into the common trap of equating Constellation with the human spaceflight program. I really don’t understand the thinking of people who complain that we will have to pay private industry to get to the ISS, as though Ares/Orion wouldn’t be much more expensive. I guess it’s OK to pay government employees, though, and cost-plus contractors.
Dick Shelby is being as despicable as any Democrat. If the Republicans were smart, they’d have him stand down. But there’s a reason they’re called the Stupid Party.
[Friday evening update]
For those unfamiliar with his (Democrat) past, it’s useful to know that he was once dinged as “Porker Of The Month.”
Again, if the Republicans are incapable of disciplining this kind of thing, what is the point in even having a party, or principles thereof? Did they learn nothing from Ted Stevens?
I think it’s going to be very difficult to set up such a thing that won’t be politicized. The economic and power stakes are simply too high.
[Update a couple minutes later]
What is really melting is their credibility. Well, that’s certainly indisputable, though I suspect that there will be a lot of skeptics and deniers among the watermelons.
Really, as I wrote when the story first broke, it is the people who propose to pauperize us in furtherance of their political agenda, based on falsified data and flawed techniques, who are the real criminals:
…when scientists become politicians but continue to pretend to be doing science, that is the real crime. The theory being promoted by these men was being used to justify government actions that would result in greatly diminished future economic growth of the most powerful economy on earth (and the rest of the world as well). It would make it more difficult and less affordable to address any real problems that might be caused in the future by a change in climate, whether due to human activity or other causes. It could impoverish millions in the future, with little actual change in adverse climate effects. And when such a theory has the potential to do so much unjustified harm, and it has a fraudulent basis, who are the real criminals against humanity?
I think that the scam is over. I certainly hope so.
Somehow, this reminds me of Chelsea’s comment when reprimanded for calling her Secret Service protectors her “personal trained pigs.”
“But mom and dad do it….”
Well, at least he did put some effort into learning how to salute. But it’s one more indication of the rarified academic radical atmosphere in which he has lived his entire life.
In which the government runs down and injures an opposition journalist, has the local authorities (under ultimate federal control) cite him for a crime, and then stonewalls on questions.
OK, do I think he was targeted? No.
Do I think that this is massive ass covering and abuse of power? Absolutely.
Election Day 1988 was only days away. Ronald Reagan was headlining a rally in Nevada. He said the options were the same as “when I stood before you.” Reagan framed the Democratic “choice” as one for “liberal policies of tax and spend, economic stagnation, international weakness, accommodation, and always, always blame America first.”
Paul Spudis is unhappy with the new policy, and thinks that the VSE baby go thrown out with the Constellation bathwater. I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but to disgustingly extend the metaphor, the bathwater was so polluted that the baby couldn’t have survived anyway, and it had to be done. We’ll just have to have another one, and be more careful the next time. I think we’re still fertile.
