All posts by Rand Simberg

Space

With Friends Like This…

5 Comments

…private spaceflight doesn’t need any enemies. Here’s a proposal from the Prometheus Institute, a libertarian think tank in California. It’s got a lot of problems.

China, already having put a human into space, further demonstrated its celestial capabilities by recently shooting down an orbiting satellite. To Washington’s Sinophobic lobby already hopped-up about inflated currency and devious trade practices, the Chinaman’s aerospace belligerence seemed to be cause for grave apprehension.

But America should not be afraid – far from it. Instead, we should be celebrating the advancement. Just like air travel in its infancy, space travel is a technology now finding its way from rich world governments and militaries to civilians around the world. And just like air travel, market competition should lead the progress.

Yes, let us celebrate the ability of the Chinese to obliterate our satellites. And maybe I missed all the “civilians” in China who are not traveling into space.

NASA, America’s space program, currently enjoys a government-created-and-backed monopoly privilege and is, along with our military, the only American entity that legally ventures into space.

For all his appreciation of private enterprise, you’d think that this guy would know that all launches other than the Shuttle are private launches. And they’re all performed legally, as licensed by the FAA.

The first space-tourist, American millionaire Dennis Tito, doled out $20 million from his own coffers to the Russian authorities for the ability to go to space with their Cosmonauts. Tito chose Russia only because NASA first rejected his proposal to fly with them on the grounds that he was not a trained astronaut. Thus, in an embarrassing bit of irony, America’s refusal to fly Capitalism’s Neil Armstrong means that the only “commercial” space carrier currently available in the world is in the former Soviet Union. (And as is true of all government-sanctioned monopolies, especially Russian ones, they charge a hefty price.) But the tide of private competition is finally turning.

None other than Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson wants to be the first to offer sub-orbital flights to the general public. Currently, his White Knight Two and the Space Ship Two spacecrafts are scheduled to undergo a test flight program later this year and then finally launch commercial operations approximately a year later. Tickets start at $200,000, or 1% of the going Russian price. Now, if one competitor can reduce the cost of space travel this drastically, imagine the result when America’s entrepreneurial craft is truly unleashed.

He’s comparing apples to omelettes. Virgin is not going to reduce the cost of going to orbit by two orders of magnitude, as is implied here. The twenty million is for a trip to an orbital space station of several days. The two hundred kilobucks is for a few minutes in suborbit. So the fare is a lot less, yes, but so is the service. He even says himself that it is “sub-orbital.” I don’t know whether he’s being clueless, or deliberately misleading here, but either way, it severely undermines his thesis in a way that will be sure to be justifiably attacked by the NASA fanboyz.

But wait! It gets better! Or worse, depending on your point of view:

America should facilitate the progress toward private space travel. First, Congress should dissolve America’s space monopoly by transferring NASA from government to private ownership.

Sure. Just hand it over to private ownership. Why didn’t we think of that?

I wonder who he thinks would take it over? Does he have any idea how much you’d have to pay anyone sane to take NASA off the government’s hands? It not only has no market value–it has negative market value. The auction would be based on whoever was willing to take the least amount of ongoing taxpayer subsidy to keep the mess going.

Second, Congress should ensure efficient entry into the space travel market, levelling the competitive field for any investor or entrepreneur, thus ensuring that no one is granted privileges or exemptions that favor one over the other.

Here is the kind of simplistic proposal that was made for the phrase, “the devil’s in the details.”

He goes on:

The government should gradually auction off each project, to ensure an orderly transition to private control, and to also make sure they do not land into the hands of a few oligarchs at Abramovich, Khodorkovsky & Co. From the outset, this policy would provide for competition and a certain degree of specialization. Those NASA projects that truly fall under the umbrella of national security should be allocated to a branch of the U.S. military, which is where they originally belonged anyway.

As is the reality in every other industry, we should let the scientists, pioneers and entrepreneurs compete in the marketplace, instead of in the halls of Congress, and let the consumer decide to whom the share of the pie shall go. As recent experience has shown, competition in the marketplace lowers prices and increases consumer choice, and will continue to do so over time.

Where to start?

Most of the projects that are described here simply will not happen if the government doesn’t fund them. The market is either non-existent, or too diffuse, for them to get private funding, given their cost. If one wants to argue that they’re a poor use of federal dollars, that’s an interesting discussion, but to assume that they’ll simply go out and get funded in the private marketplace displays a naivety that could only be found in a libertarian “think” tank.

If this is the quality of “thinking” that goes on at Prometheus, if I were a donor, I’d demand my money back.

Administrative

RSS Fixed

I think that I’ve got the RSS feed working now, over to the left. If someone wants to try it, let me know if there’s still a problem.

[Update a few minutes later]

Whoops. Guess not. Ive no idea what the problem is.

War Commentary

Anti-Cleric Revolt?

1 Comment

This seems like good news, if true:

“In the beginning, they gave their eyes and minds to the clerics; they trusted them,” said Abu Mahmoud, a moderate Sunni cleric in Baghdad, who now works deprogramming religious extremists in American detention. “It’s painful to admit, but it’s changed. People have lost too much. They say to the clerics and the parties: You cost us this.”

“When they behead someone, they say ‘Allahu akbar,’ they read Koranic verse,” said a moderate Shiite sheik from Baghdad, using the phrase for “God is great.”

“The young people, they think that is Islam,” he said. “So Islam is a failure, not only in the students’ minds, but also in the community.”

A professor at Baghdad University’s School of Law, who identified herself only as Bushra, said of her students: “They have changed their views about religion. They started to hate religious men. They make jokes about them because they feel disgusted by them.”

If militant Islam is the enemy, this seems like a victory to me. Let’s try to spread the infection throughout the Muslim world.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

New Amsterdam

68 Comments

I don’t actually watch that much network television, but I have to admit that I probably watch more Foxfare than anything else.

Tonight, there premiered a new show, called “New Amsterdam.”

It’s an interesting premise. A man who was born in the early seventeenth century (or even a century before) is given eternal (or almost eternal–hang on) life in perpetual youth. He lives that long life in what was at that time New Amsterdam, but what become shortly thereafter (once the British took it from the Dutch) New York.

He sees the village evolve into a town, then into a city, then into the greatest city in the western world (if not the world itself), which is why it was attacked six and a half years ago by those to whom the western world is an anathema to their seventh-century beliefs. But I digress.

He becomes a homicide detective in that great city, and his knowledge of the past is a great aid in solving gotham crimes.

As I said, an interesting premise. I mean, given that CSI, Wherever, is one of the biggest hits on network television, how could any producer turn it down?

But there’s a (supposedly) dark undercurrent to the story.

His eternal life is not viewed, by the story writers or himself, as a blessing. It is apparently a curse. He cannot end his life volitionally. The only way to put an end to this (apparent, and obvious, at least to the script writers) misery of endless youth and health is to find his true love.

Then he can die.

Just how perverse is that?

Let’s parse it.

OK, so you’ve “suffered” through four centuries of youthful life, in perpetual health, in a world in which your chances of dying are nil, and you apparently don’t even suffer any pain, though this is a world in which even dentistry is barbaric for at least the first three hundred years. And now, after having seen a little village purchased with beads on a little island at the mouth of a river, you’ve watched it become the most powerful city on the planet, you want to check out?

You’re in the early twenty-first century, about to enter a world in which many may join you in your longevity, though without the “burden” if having to find their true love to end it.

Well, both boo, and hoo.

Here’s the thing that makes this science fiction (or rather, speculative fiction).

In the real world, people who are offered the gift of living forever will also have the capability of ending that endless life, barring some sadistic fascist government that (like some perceptions of God) thinks that the individuals are the property of the state, and not of themselves. If they really get tired of life, they will check out, either legally and easily, or illegally and in a more difficult manner. But the will to die, if it is strong enough, will win out.

So to me, the real suspension of disbelief in this new series is not that a man could live for four hundred years, but rather, that he would have to live that long in misery.

Thus, it is more of a morality tale, based on unrealistic premises, than one based on anything resembling the true future.

I hope that no one decides that long life is a bad thing, and more importantly, that no one thinks that it is something that no one should have, based on this foolish, deathist premise.

Humor, Political Commentary

Now This Was Just Mean

2 Comments

Actually, it sounds like something I would do, if I had nothing better (or more entertaining) to do:

I just had a young lady, age 22, call me up from the Clinton campaign to see if I had voted yet. I said no, but it was raining, and I wasn’t sure I was going to get out and vote. She wanted to know who I was supporting, Hillary or Obama? I said it was difficult to choose between the two of them, and asked for her opinion. I kept that poor girl on the line for about a half hour (work-wise, I was having a slow day). I had her jumping through hoops on NAFTA, health care, the war in Afghanistan, etc. No matter what we talked about, I would get squishy and head off in a different direction (that’s my usual impersonation of a lib). I started expressing my concern that “the minority community” would feel betrayed if Obama doesn’t get the nomination. “What will this do to future of the Party?”

But at least he’s not as rough on telemarketers as this guy.

General Science, Philosophy, Space Science

Don’t Know Much About Gravity

18 Comments

…or at least as much as we think we do. Does the gravity model need to be adjusted?

In the one probe the researchers did not confirm a noticeable anomaly with, MESSENGER, the spacecraft approached the Earth at about latitude 31 degrees north and receded from the Earth at about latitude 32 degrees south. “This near-perfect symmetry about the equator seemed to result in a very small velocity change, in contrast to the five other flybys,” Anderson explained — so small no anomaly could be confirmed.

The five other flybys involved flights whose incoming and outgoing trajectories were asymmetrical with each other in terms of their orientation with Earth’s equator.

For instance, the NEAR mission approached Earth at about latitude 20 south and receded from the planet at about latitude 72 south. The spacecraft then seemed to fly 13 millimeters per second faster than expected. While this is just one-millionth of that probe’s total velocity, the precision of the velocity measurements was 0.1 millimeters per second, carried out as they were using radio waves bounced off the craft. This suggests the anomaly seen is real — and one needing an explanation.

Well, gravity just like evolution, is (in the words of anti-evolutionists) only a theory. It’s not reality–it’s simply an attempt to model it. And for most purposes, it does a pretty good job. But one of the reasons to do space, I think, is that it gives us new laboratories to make new discoveries about basic physics, the potential of which is unforeseeable.

General Science, Philosophy, Space Science

Don’t Know Much About Gravity

…or at least as much as we think we do. Does the gravity model need to be adjusted?

In the one probe the researchers did not confirm a noticeable anomaly with, MESSENGER, the spacecraft approached the Earth at about latitude 31 degrees north and receded from the Earth at about latitude 32 degrees south. “This near-perfect symmetry about the equator seemed to result in a very small velocity change, in contrast to the five other flybys,” Anderson explained — so small no anomaly could be confirmed.

The five other flybys involved flights whose incoming and outgoing trajectories were asymmetrical with each other in terms of their orientation with Earth’s equator.

For instance, the NEAR mission approached Earth at about latitude 20 south and receded from the planet at about latitude 72 south. The spacecraft then seemed to fly 13 millimeters per second faster than expected. While this is just one-millionth of that probe’s total velocity, the precision of the velocity measurements was 0.1 millimeters per second, carried out as they were using radio waves bounced off the craft. This suggests the anomaly seen is real — and one needing an explanation.

Well, gravity just like evolution, is (in the words of anti-evolutionists) only a theory. It’s not reality–it’s simply an attempt to model it. And for most purposes, it does a pretty good job. But one of the reasons to do space, I think, is that it gives us new laboratories to make new discoveries about basic physics, the potential of which is unforeseeable.

General Science, Philosophy, Space Science

Don’t Know Much About Gravity

…or at least as much as we think we do. Does the gravity model need to be adjusted?

In the one probe the researchers did not confirm a noticeable anomaly with, MESSENGER, the spacecraft approached the Earth at about latitude 31 degrees north and receded from the Earth at about latitude 32 degrees south. “This near-perfect symmetry about the equator seemed to result in a very small velocity change, in contrast to the five other flybys,” Anderson explained — so small no anomaly could be confirmed.

The five other flybys involved flights whose incoming and outgoing trajectories were asymmetrical with each other in terms of their orientation with Earth’s equator.

For instance, the NEAR mission approached Earth at about latitude 20 south and receded from the planet at about latitude 72 south. The spacecraft then seemed to fly 13 millimeters per second faster than expected. While this is just one-millionth of that probe’s total velocity, the precision of the velocity measurements was 0.1 millimeters per second, carried out as they were using radio waves bounced off the craft. This suggests the anomaly seen is real — and one needing an explanation.

Well, gravity just like evolution, is (in the words of anti-evolutionists) only a theory. It’s not reality–it’s simply an attempt to model it. And for most purposes, it does a pretty good job. But one of the reasons to do space, I think, is that it gives us new laboratories to make new discoveries about basic physics, the potential of which is unforeseeable.