Saddam Hussein has been in unending defiance of the United Nations since shortly after he invaded Kuwait. As part of a negotiated end to hostilities, he agreed to give up his ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. For over a decade, he has misled, lied, dissembled, distracted, evaded, and otherwise avoided meeting his reponsibilities under that agreement, all while running one of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet.

Last fall, the United Nations, with the acquiescence of France, Germany, Greece and Russia, gave him one final chance to meet his obligations and disarm. He has been in, and continues to be, in material breach of that commitment, in myriad ways, well documented elsewhere. He continues to, in the British phrase, “cock a snoop” at the United Nations.

So why, in defiance of the United Nations and the world, do France, Germany, Russia and Greece continue to help him delay and give him more time to achieve his foul ends?

Okay, so the President didn’t announce the new space nuclear power initiative in the State of the Union address.

He didn’t mention space at all, except in the national-security context of missile defense, and even then it was only implied–the word itself wasn’t used.

Of course, I covered my bases–I didn’t say he would, just that he might. It’s not surprising, because having heard the speech, I’m not sure that such an announcement would have fit in politically–there’s not a major constituency for such things in the country, and after pleasing some of the environmental community with the hydrogen-car initiative, he probably didn’t want to alienate the significant segment of it that’s vehemently and irrationally anti-nuclear power in any form.

That doesn’t mean that the space nuclear power program isn’t happening, of course. It’s now expected (and I’ve got much higher confidence in this prediction than the State of the Union address) that it will be announced on Monday (February 3), if not by the president, then by NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, with the unveiling of the proposed federal budget.

So what does it mean for our future in space?

I’ve become famous (or notorious) in the space community for declaring that the Emperor at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has no clothes–that we don’t need new space technology. To the degree that I proclaim that, it is with regard to earth-to-orbit transportation. I stand by that position, with the proviso that new technology can help, but it’s enhancing, not enabling, when it comes to dramatically reducing the costs of getting into space.

But as the late great science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, famously wrote, once you’re in orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere. And getting the rest of the distance, sans new technology, is indeed a challenge.

Yes, the Moon is just a few days away with chemical propulsion, and we can similarly get to Mars, and the asteroids by combining oxidizer with fuel, but the scheduled opportunities to get there are driven by the implacable rule of orbital mechanics, and always involve many months, and the outer planets are always years away, for man or machine. To get around these constraints, we do indeed need new technology.

And on most parts of the earth’s moon, night is not just a little longer than the duration of a human sleep period. It lasts for over two weeks. Solar power is not an option, unless you can store the energy to get through the long absence of the sun. It can be done, but it in turn involves other technologies, of batteries or capacitors or the pumping of currently non-existent water in non-existent reservoirs, that are even more unattainable than nuclear power, with which we have decades of experience.

Or imagine an asteroid on a course intersecting with the earth–one that could devastate human civilization when it hits in a few years. It is still far away, and too far from the sun to use solar power to do anything useful to change its course.

Space nuclear power can solve all of these problems.

It is compact, it is well understood (by the relevant technologists), it can be employed with safety, and it is more than ample for the requirements. That NASA hasn’t been investing in it over the past couple decades was due not to the lack of need for it, but because of politics and bureaucratic fear of objections by the ignorant but noisy purveyors of hysteria.

There are (at least) two types of nuclear power for space applications. One has been used for years, and is the cause of NASA’s previous hesitance to advance the technology, due to uninformed protests against it in the past. This is called radioisotope thermal generation (RTG), in which a decaying amount of radioactive material (generally plutonium) emits heat to create a small amount of electricity via a thermocouple. This is the means by which we’ve powered the electronics of all of our spacecraft to the outer planets (i.e., Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus) without which we wouldn’t have gathered the spectacular pictures and knowledge over the past three decades, despite the technofantasies of the anti-nuke crowd.

But the limited capabilities of RTGs, while useful to provide electrical power for the electronics of our previous limited space endeavors, will not be adequate for the applications described above. For those, we will need robust, high-power systems: to melt the frigid ice of the Moon and comets into life-giving water: to take that same water and convert it to steam for propulsion and power: to power the plasma ships that will make trips to other planets and planetary bodies a matter of weeks, rather than months or years, at schedules of our choosing; to break the chemical bonds of lunar silicates and stony iron asteroids to build a new industrial age off our home planet.

Such systems mean actual nuclear reactors in space, something that the Russians have had, but we have not. Unfortunately, when the Russians did it, it was as the Soviet Union, a totalitarian dictatorship whose consideration for things like safety was…imperfect.

Even without ignorant anti-nuclear hysteria, actual past entries of working Soviet nuclear reactors into the atmosphere and on the heads of unsuspecting earthly inhabitants hasn’t aided the cause of nuclear space systems. Nonetheless, this technology is absolutely necessary, it can be done safely, and NASA’s biggest challenge will not be in developing it, or even in developing it safely (though this is obviously essential as well) but in proving to the skeptics (at least the ones that matter) that they can, will and have done so.

Regardless of NASA’s frustrating lack of progress on the earth-to-orbit front, this is a critical technology that must be developed in parallel with efforts, both public and private, to make it more affordable to get off the planet where it will be useful. If they start now, perhaps by the time it’s ready for use, we’ll be ready to use it.

Dual Tragedies

In addition to Tuesday’s anniversary of the Challenger disaster seventeen years ago, Monday saw the thirty-sixth anniversary of the loss of the crew of Apollo 1. Take a moment and remember the pioneers who died to expand life into the universe.

We’re going to be going it alone with at least eight European countries. That would be the new Europe, not the old one. I guess that no one counts to “journalists” and pundits except Germany and France, though.

Domesticated animals’ personality traits seem to correlate with physical characteristics.

Robert Musil asks why chiropractery is not an accepted medical practice, but psychoanalysis is.

I haven’t gotten around to describing my disappointment with Bush’s speech last night, but he just reminded me, as I listen to his speech in Grand Rapids, that the difference between “compassionate conservatism” and big-government liberalism is getting harder and harder to discern.

I just heard him say that if some aspect of health care (I think that it was prescription drugs) was good enough for Congress, it was good enough for our senior citizens. Ted Kennedy made exactly the same argument back in the eighties, and the argument was just as stupid then.

Let’s extend it to its natural conclusion. If chauffeur service to and from the Capitol is good enough for our Congressmen, it’s good enough for our senior citizens. If free haircuts is good enough for our Congressmen, it’s good enough for our senior citizens. If large staffs and offices are good enough for our Congressmen, they’re good enough for our senior citizens.

A chicken in every pot, and chauffeurs, haircuts and office staff for everyone!

While I’m all in favor of cutting back on some congressional perks, that’s beside the point. It’s absurd to think that perquisites of office, or even benefits of employment, of elected officials should bear any relationship to government handouts to private citizens. If you think that our tax dollars should go to pay for prescription drugs for the chronologically challenged, then put forth a rational case for it, but don’t expect me to give it to them just because it’s part of the compensation of a Congressman.

The EU is going to require that farmers put a toy in every pigsty.

[Thanks to Dick Morris]

I just saw something astonishing on CNN. If you’re wondering why I’m watching CNN, instead of Fox, I’m staying in an extended-stay place in San Bruno, just across the border from South San Francisco, and that’s the only news channel on the cable. Watching Christiane Amanpour bloviate on about what “they” think of us over in the Middle East makes it seem like I went back in time, when they were the only all-news channel.

Anyway, they actually ran a story that described the possibility of terrorism if we don’t take out Saddam, and included the potential costs, which could be hundreds of billions of dollars.

Opponents of the war always dismiss the possibility that Saddam might be involved with terrorism here. I thought that I’d put together a game-theory matrix to look at a range of the possible states of the world, and their potential costs, given various actions.

Continue reading Regret →

A woman was forced to disrobe and parade in front of her co-workers by an unarmed man.

Guess not everyone has gotten the memo…

The Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed on ascent by a leaky solid rocket booster (SRB). All seven crewmembers were killed.

Here is my post from last year, and last week, on the subject.

Others’ memories of that event can be found here and here.

High Flight

by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds…and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of…wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up, the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.
And while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space…
…put out my hand, and touched the face of God

[Update at 11:15 AM PST]

I just heard CNN announced that the Challenger “exploded.” This is a common misperception. Not only did the Challenger (the orbiter itself) not explode, but no portion of the stack did, either. The orbiter broke up from aerodynamic stresses as its attitude moved away from nose forward. The “explosion” that everyone saw was simply a hydrogen fireball as the external tank collapsed from the stress of the SRB bending into it, and the propellants mixed.

While a fireball can look like an explosion, it isn’t, in the technical sense of the word. If you light a patch of gasoline on pavement, it will combust, but it’s not an explosion, which is a rapid release of energy from a high-pressure environment. What happened to the ET is more like the gasoline on pavement. It only looked so spectacular because of the large amounts of combustibles present.