You know that space tourism is being taken seriously when you can read about it in Travel and Leisure magazine. This piece by Los Angeles writer M. G. Lord was in the January issue, which Patricia just pointed out to me.
I last saw M. G. last June in Mojave for the first SpaceShipOne flight into space. I hadn’t realized that she has a new book out. It looks quite interesting. Check out the review by NASA historian Roger Launius.
Long-time readers know that I’m not real big on the “spin-off” argument for funding space exploration and technology. Still, when something like this happens, it’s certainly a nice side effect.
Since it was unearthed more than a century ago, the hoard of documents known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri has fascinated classical scholars. There are 400,000 fragments, many containing text from the great writers of antiquity. But only a small proportion have been read so far. Many were illegible.
Now scientists are using multi-spectral imaging techniques developed from satellite technology to read the papyri at Oxford University’s Sackler Library. The fragments, preserved between sheets of glass, respond to the infra-red spectrum – ink invisible to the naked eye can be seen and photographed.
On the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Rich Fruzetti has some thoughts on the questions that remain unanswered. As he points out, Islamic terrorism on US soil didn’t begin on September 11, 2001–that’s just when we first noticed it. Perhaps if we’d been more attentive earlier, we could have been spared that event.
On the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Rich Fruzetti has some thoughts on the questions that remain unanswered. As he points out, Islamic terrorism on US soil didn’t begin on September 11, 2001–that’s just when we first noticed it. Perhaps if we’d been more attentive earlier, we could have been spared that event.
On the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Rich Fruzetti has some thoughts on the questions that remain unanswered. As he points out, Islamic terrorism on US soil didn’t begin on September 11, 2001–that’s just when we first noticed it. Perhaps if we’d been more attentive earlier, we could have been spared that event.
Brian Anderson says that Air America is doomed to fail.
Jeff Foust has an article today on a recent speech by Gene Kranz (yesterday was the thirty-fifth anniversary of the successful return of the crippled Apollo XIII). It’s become popular myth as a result of Ron Howard’s movie that Gene was the director of flight control, solely responsible for getting the crew back safely, when in fact there were more than one. In my opinion, Glynn Lunney in particular gets short (in fact zero) shrift in the movie, though the work obviously had to be done in shifts.
But I’m afraid that we (and I include Gene in this) take the wrong lessons from that incident. Yes, the teamwork was splendid, and the improvisation excellent, and they did everything they needed to do to get them back. But as I commented back in days immediately following the loss of Columbia, those are necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure that we won’t lose people in space. It has to be recognized that in addition to all of the smart moves on the ground, that crew was also damn lucky. If that explosion had happened while the crew was on the surface, or on the way back from the Moon, they’d have died, no matter how much derring do was on display in Houston. A lot of other things could have gone wrong that would have killed them, and no amount of teamwork, training, and smarts would have prevented it.
Sending people into space is a risky business, and we have to accept that. It sounds nice when Gene says it, but “failure is not an option” isn’t a realistic attitude. As someone once said, when failure isn’t an option, success gets damned expensive. And of course, the easiest way to ensure that failure isn’t an option is to not even make the attempt.
My current partner in crime here, Sam Dinkin, has some interesting ideas about how to encourage space activity and drive down costs over at The Space Review today. I don’t agree with all of them, and I’m sure that in some cases there may be some bad unintended consequences, though I haven’t given them enough thought to identify any yet.
I like the idea of subsidizing EELV at the margin. Government policy in general doesn’t seem to understand the concept of marginal cost (one of the reasons that both Shuttle and ISS are programmatic disasters), and a more explicit recognition of its importance could have some good policy outcomes.
I’m not sure what he means by “privatizing ISS and Shuttle,” I think that the infrastructure to maintain both of them is too expensive for anyone to operate at a profit, even if they were given away.
Mark Steyn has more entertaining and trenchant thoughts on John Bolton’s hip handing.
As for the job Bolton’s up for, what would make Barbara Boxer and Joe Biden put their hands on hips? Child sex rings run from U.N. peacekeeping operations? Sudan sitting on the Human Rights Commission while it licenses mass murder in Darfur? Kofi Annan’s son doing a $30,000-a-year job but somehow having a spare quarter-million dollars to invest in a Swiss soccer club? There are tides in the affairs of men when someone has to put his hands on his hips and toss his curls. And, if the present depraved state of the U.N. isn’t one of them, nothing is.
I don’t know if this will be the last word on the subject, but Matt Labash certainly has the best take so far on Lord Minniehaha:
All this anarchism has made me thirsty, so I cross the street to get a Diet Coke, and take a coffee order from Churchill and Saito. All I can find, however, is a Starbucks. When I come back to the fair with two venti something-or-anothers, surly anarchists look like they want to kick my windows in, just like they did the Seattle Starbucks back at WTO ’99.
Churchill, to his credit, doesn’t subscribe to any meaningless “praxis of personal purity,” so he takes his coffee (black) with a shrug and lights a Pall Mall. I ask if he’s an anarchist, and though they have an affinity, he says no. He’s an Indigenist. Not quite sure what that entails, I ask him to explain. He’s a wordy bugger, and goes on for a good while about a “consciously synchronous level of population” and a “latitude of action that is governed in a self-regulating manner” and a “unity in the differentiation that’s consonant with natural order.” I figure this would all go down a lot easier if I’d first eaten peyote.