A new announcement. Not sure how seriously to take this. Does anyone know if that’s an existing aircraft?
Category Archives: Business
Space Debris Removal
The Secure World Foundation has a released a report from the April workshop in Germany. Haven’t read it yet, but I’d suspect it’s a useful read.
Mocking The Snowflakes
The media hates it.
Admittedly, many of them are snowflakes themselves. Or just flakes.
More SpaceX Reusability
For years, it was understood that NASA wanted new Dragons for its CRS missions. But today SpaceX is going to fly a used one, with the agency’s permission.
As I’ve long said, there will come a point at which a launch customer will say, “Wait, you want me to trust my ass or my payload to an unflown vehicle?” We’ll look back in amazement at the first seven decades of spaceflight, when we thought it made perfect sense to put payloads on untested systems, and then throw them away after a single flight.
[Update a few minutes later]
Note that NASA allowed this for a cargo mission. I’ll bet they’ll still want new capsules for crew for a while. Speaking of which, NASA is admitting that Boeing and SpaceX are going to have a hard time meeting the totally arbitrary LOC goal of one in 270. I love this:
“The number one safety-related concern for the program is the current situation with respect to the estimate of loss of crew,” Donald McErlean, a former engineering fellow at L-3 Communications and a member of the panel, said at the meeting. “The threshold values were considered to be challenging, and both contractors currently have a challenge to meet that precise number.”
Got that? They’re going to have difficulty meeting that “precise” number. As I noted in the book, the precision with which they calculate these utterly arbitrary numbers, given the state of knowledge about the system, is absurd. And this is the sort of thing that keeps us dependent on the Russians, when neither we nor they have any idea what their reliability or LOC number is.
Dilbert One
…”scientists” zero:
…in a sense, the video doesn’t even refute the straw man it set up. It’s not that climate science consists only of models: obviously there are observations too. But all the attribution claims about the climatic effects of greenhouse gases are based on models. If the scientists being interviewed had any evidence otherwise, they didn’t present any.
When you can’t even knock down your own straw man, you don’t have much of an argument.
So how did the video do refuting Scott Adams’ cartoon? He joked that scientists warning of catastrophe invoke the authority of observational data when they are really making claims based on models. Check. He joked that they ignore on a post hoc basis the models that don’t look right to them. Check. He joked that their views presuppose the validity of models that reasonable people could doubt. Check. And he joked that to question any of this will lead to derision and the accusation of being a science denier. Check. In other words, the Yale video sought to rebut Adams’ cartoon and ended up being a documentary version of it.
They would appear to lack self awareness.
Thoughts On What’s Happening In Space
From me, in a podcast with Anthony Colangelo.
California’s Universal Health Care
The cost would be larger than the current state budget.
Because, you know, taxes in California aren’t high enough.
The Outer Space Treaty
Ted Cruz is having a hearing on it tomorrow. Mark Sundahl warns against outright withdrawal, or ignoring the positive aspects of it.
I’m probably going to be at the Space Tech Expo in Pasadena, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to stream it.
Old Engines
Teaching them new tricks.
Between tech advances like this, and lower fuel costs from fracking and the end of OPEC, I think we’re going to get a lot more mileage out of internal combustion, Al Gore’s mindless hysteria aside.
The Uncertainty Monster
Thoughts from Judith Curry on the current state of knowledge in climate. The warm mongers never consider the possibility that their proposed cures may in fact be worse than the disease. I personally think it’s nuts to consider climate a greater threat to humanity than poverty, and particularly energy poverty. But then, many of them don’t really care about humanity, or consider humanity a problem in and of itself.
[Update a few minutes later]
A new paper on the epistemological status of general circulation models.