Last Friday, Burt Rutan, aircraft designer extraordinaire, announced that he’s building a vehicle to compete for the X-Prize.

Because of his biography, suddenly the prize and attempt are being taken seriously. After all, he’s the man who built the first aircraft to circumnavigate the globe non-stop, without refueling, so when he says that he’s going to do the seemingly impossible, or at least improbable, people listen.

Why is this important?

Several years ago, the X-Prize was originally offered (though not fully funded until a few months ago). The intention was to provide an incentive to entrepreneurs to seek a ten-million-dollar prize to deliver a low-cost suborbital ride into space. This was important because the prevailing wisdom was that spaceflight for humans was impossibly expensive. The idea was to follow on from the tradition of the Orteig prize that resulted in Charles Lindbergh’s historic solo non-stop flight from New York to Paris. The Orteig Prize was only twenty-five thousand dollars. Even considering inflation, it reveals something about modern aerospace technology (or, at least, practices) that it was necessary for the X-Prize to be four hundred times that amount in order to provide a significant motivation for contestants.

One of the interesting things about prizes is that they can have a tremendous leveraging effect. That is, they may result in much more money being spent than the value of the prize. For example, if there are ten teams competing, even if no one of them spends as much as the prize on their effort, it will still be many times as much as the prize itself. And they may actually spend more, because they can be motivated by other considerations than the cash itself, such as pride and ego, or the hope of a commercial offshoot. It is rumored that in fact the Rutan concept costs on the order of twenty million dollars–twice the size of the prize.

We might have seen some of these concepts revealed sooner, had the prize been fully funded sooner. But it was only in the past few months that the full amount was secured. This was done by, in essence, making a wager with an insurance company. The X-Prize Foundation put up the few million dollars that it had raised to date, and bought a policy that would pay off ten million dollars if someone won the prize by the end of 2004. If no one did, the policy would expire, and the money would go to the insurance company. The Foundation is betting that someone will win by the deadline, and the insurance company is betting that they won’t.

I’m wondering if, seeing Burt’s rollout event last week, the insurance company is getting nervous about having made a bad bet. It’s not one that I would have recommended taking, had they asked me. But I suspect that they asked the usual aerospace industry suspects and NASA, who probably told them that it was safe–after all, everyone knows that no one except a major aerospace company or a government space agency could build space vehicles, and they weren’t eligible for the prize, which required totally private efforts…

If Burt, or someone else does achieve the goal, it will make the insurers smarter next time someone wants to raise prize funding, and hence it will be more difficult to do this again. But it will also help change the perception of the general public and investors, which is one of the main things that has been holding back the development of private passenger spaceflight, largely for the better.

And it points out, once again, that technology is not the difficult part of doing this, despite NASA’s continual claims to the contrary. If the vehicle that Burt is building were to carry passengers per the standard FAA regulations for aircraft, it’s estimated that it will cost two to four hundred million dollars to certify it. That is, it will cost ten times as much to get it certified as it did to develop, prototype and flight test it. Given the current nascent state of the industry, such certification is both unaffordable and unreasonable.

This raises the question as to whether or not the standard aircraft certification route is appropriate for a new type of pioneering transportation. Certainly, had the current FAA regulations been in place in the 1920s and 1930s, the aviation industry would have been stillborn.

Fortunately, there may be alternative ways of getting FAA approval to such a certification. If such a vehicle is classified as a launcher, rather than an airplane, it can get a launch license through the part of the agency that does that, rather than certification from the different part of the agency that handles that.

However, this will establish some new precedents as well. Launch licenses are a well-understood process for expendable launch vehicles delivering cargo. They have never been issued for reusable vehicles, nor have they ever been issued for passenger vehicles.

I’ve noted previously that there’s an air of uncertainty over the regulation of passenger spaceflight right now. The FAA still hasn’t fully settled which parts of the agency are going to regulate this transition phase of the development of spaceflight, in which sometimes a vehicle is an aircraft, and sometimes a spacecraft.

This is a big problem because if there’s anything that investors hate more than risk, it’s uncertainty, particularly uncertainty about future government actions. As long as this issue remains unresolved, it will continue to hamper needed investment in this fledgling industry. With at least two serious funded X-Prize competitors, who are planning to, and will have to fly within the next couple years to achieve their goal, we can’t afford to have the Department of Transportation continue to dither on this issue.

If the government want to encourage, rather than discourage, the development of this vital step toward becoming a truly space-faring civilization, they need to make a decision, and a smart decision–one that encompasses an intelligent balance between acceptable risk and innovation–very soon. Absent one, it may still happen, but like many other industries, it just may be chased off shore.

Amidst all the economic doom’n’gloom, the Chicago Tribune says that there will be worker shortages coming up in the not-too-distant future, with a list of jobs that will need filling. About half of them are in the health-care field.

Most of the sick in Canada aren’t carrying the virus.

This is bad news, because we’re back where we were a few weeks ago, before we thought that we’d identified it as a corona virus. Now, once again, we don’t have a good way to diagnose it, or any good hints as to how to deal with it.

Based on the statistics (a dozen or so KIA), it would appear that (other than a Ba’ath Party functionary) the most hazardous thing to be in this war was a journalist. The ratio, and probability of being killed or injured, has to be pretty high.

I note that because I, like many in the blogosphere, beat up on the media so much (usually justifiably). But we shouldn’t forget the ones who did risk, and often sacrificed, their lives to deliver to us the facts on the ground.

Due to a technicality in the state law and Republican convention scheduling, President Bush may not make it onto the Alabama ballot next year.

Due to a technicality in the state law and Republican convention scheduling, President Bush may not make it onto the Alabama ballot next year.

Due to a technicality in the state law and Republican convention scheduling, President Bush may not make it onto the Alabama ballot next year.

The Times of London has a disturbing article about a potentially unsettling event–an Iranian-style theocracy in post-Ba’athist Iraq.

The mullahs who are orchestrating this get their oxygen from Iran. We’ve been hoping (or so at least I infer) that Iran would have a pro-western (and pro-American) revolution as a result of a democracy on the border to their west. But what if, as a result of infiltration of pro-theocracy Mullahs from Iran, such an entity is still-born, or strangled in the cradle, due to coalition indiligence or inattentiveness? How, then, will the young Iranians be encouraged, rather than discouraged, from taking the fate of their nation in their own hands?

It may be that Iran will have to move much higher on the priority list in the War on “Terrorism” (scare quotes because it’s really a war on many other things, of which terrorism is simply a tactic) in order to ensure that we have a chance at a viable democracy in Iraq. We may have to preempt another country to prevent the one we recently liberated from falling under the thrall of yet another, though different, dictatorship. I don’t have any specific answers right now, but I hope that it’s something that’s being debated both at Foggy Bottom, and across the river…

Al Sharpton is officially running for President.

This should be fun.

Rebublican Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum made a comment about homosexuality and the upcoming Supreme Court decision in the Texas case the other day. Here’s what he reportedly said:

“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything,” Santorum said in the interview, published Monday.

He is the chair of the Republican Conference, the third highest ranking position in the Senate. As a result, some of the Democrats think they have another Trent Lott moment, and have called on him to step down from his leadership position.

While I was one of the leading voices to get rid of Trent Lott, I’m having trouble getting very worked up over this, for a couple reasons. First, to be honest, part of the reason that I wanted Lott to step down is that I’ve always wanted Lott to step down–he was an incompetent boob, who gave the Democrats many needless victories. I’ll never forgive him, in particular, for the sham impeachment trial, though, in retrospect, if Clinton had actually been removed, we’d probably have Mr. Gore as President today. Still I would have liked to have had a real trial, with real evidence and real witnesses. The best outcome might have been to show just how corrupt Mr. Clinton was, and for the Democrats to still refuse to remove him, which would have resulted in a more solid victory for the Republicans in 2000.

But I digress.

Despite the joy I took in the opportunity to remove him, what he said really was stupid and thoughtless, and indicative of someone who truly shouldn’t be in a party leadership position. I’m not sure the same is true of Senator Santorum’s comments.

I have to say, though I believe that homosexuals are born, not made, that what he said may be correct on its face, at least in a legal sense. If we must allow consensual gay sex, on what basis can we outlaw the other things he mentioned? Note that I am taking no position on the morality of any of those things, and in fact, not being a conservative, don’t have particularly strong feelings about them. I’ve no problem with gay marriage, or bigamy, or polygamy, or gay polygamy, or even incest (other than the problematic genetic risks). Adultery I might put into a different category, insofar as it’s a betrayal, but I still don’t think that it’s a matter for the law. Of course, he’s also mixing apples and eggs, to a certain degree, because some of the categories are various types of marriage, while others are sexual behavior.

Now it’s clear from context and his history that he thinks that not only is there something wrong with all of those things, but that he also thinks that they should be therefore illegal, and that not allowing laws against consensual gay sex shoves us down the hill on a slick road to perdition. That’s not a position with which I agree, but I don’t see any comparison of that to wistfully dreaming of a return to Jim Crow. I assume that, to the degree that the objectors have a sincere objection (disregarding the simple political and partisan opportunity), it is his lumping homosexuality in with the other things, unless they’re proposing to make them all legal as well (no doubt some of them might).

The upset is over comparing homosexuality, which the modern liberal believes to be an innate characteristic over which one has no control, to other marital arrangements and behaviors that are presumably dictated by choice rather than genetics. (As another digression, I find it interesting that many people who refuse to believe in genetic determinism in, for instance, intelligence will accept it for gender and sexual orientation.) Thus, I’m assuming that they view his comments as bigoted.

Perhaps they are to a degree–as I said, I myself believe that sexual orientation is not within one’s control. But if it is, it’s one on which there’s much less societal consensus than there is on matters of race. Our public debate on sexuality and sexual orientation seems to be about where the race debate was prior to the Civil War, in which there was broad and widespread disagreement about whether people of other races were fully human, with human rights. It’s easy now to see that those who doubted this were wrong, but it really was not a settled issue back then, just as the deterministic nature of homosexuality is not today, either scientifically or societally. Thus, from that standpoint, Mr. Santorum has a legitimate viewpoint, even if it may not be scientifically correct, and I don’t think that he should be censured, or forced out of power over it. It’s a matter for the voters.

Yale law professor Jack Balkin has commented on this subject over here, echoing much of what I say, except putting more of a legal and constitutional gloss on it.

However, having said all that, I do want to expand a little on my view of the matter. While I believe that some people are born homosexual (whether because of genetics, or womb environment, or both), and others born heterosexual, I also believe that those are not the only two options.

In fact, I believe that sexual orientation (ignoring the issue of gender, which is even more complicated), which is defined as which sex you are physically attracted to, relative to your own, is not a binary situation–it is a continuum. I suspect that it’s a skewed distribution, with many or most people being heterosexual, very few being homosexual, and a gradient between them of various degrees of bi-sexuality.

Assuming homo to the left, and hetero to the right, I personally fall on the extreme right side of the distribution. While I don’t think that it is immoral to have sexual relations with the same sex, I cannot in any way contemplate doing it myself–the very thought of the act disgusts me (which is not to say that people who are homosexual disgust me per se). I can’t imagine any amount of “therapy” that would result in my seeking gratification in that way, or perhaps even tolerating it or being able to perform. Given a choice between that, and self congress, I’d choose the latter.

I assume that someone on the extreme left side of the distribution feels similarly–it’s simply not possible for them to feel attracted to someone of the opposite sex.

Of course, there are many people who fall somewhere in between. They are the ones who actually do have a “choice.” I know that they exist as well, because they are bisexual, and clearly have the capability of switch hitting. I suspect that they’re the ones who are the most outspoken on the subject, because for them, it does come down to an issue of morality, and furthermore, I suspect that they believe that everyone is like them, so that they believe that homosexuals really are being contrary and deliberately perverse.

Someone who does have a choice, who is attracted to the same sex, but also finds the opposite sex attractive, will simply think themselves superior to those who engage in what they view as sinful behavior. They’ll say to themselves “I can resist the temptation, why can’t (s)he? They must be weak and morally corrupt.” They’ll view any argument like the one that I make here simply as an excuse–they won’t believe that it’s impossible for someone to be attracted to the opposite sex–after all, they’re capable of going either way, why aren’t those perverts?

This offers an explanation for the “conversions” that are so controversial, in which (usually through some church-based therapy), homosexuals “become” heterosexual. I suspect that in the cases that it doesn’t work, it’s because you can’t make a homosexual into a heterosexual, any more than you could convert me from straight to gay. The success stories are not really conversions from homosexuality–they’re simply a persuasion of a bi-sexual (who was never truly homosexual) to no longer indulge in homosexual activities.

Homosexual behavior (which can be engaged in by both homo and bisexuals) has to be distinguished from homosexual orientation. The former is an act, while the latter is a desire, and often one that cannot be altered.

Until we develop a more sophisticated and nuanced view of issues like this, I suspect that the threads will continue to flame ignorantly on over at Free Republic, and that Republicans will continue to make potentially inflammatory statements, and that opportunistic Democrats will continue to bash them over it.