A few weeks before its annual conference, a space policy update.
Category Archives: Business
Restaurants In Seattle
…going dark as a $15 wage looms.
Morons. I find it particularly amusing that they are so precise in what they think the right number is, with Obama’s imbecilic $10.10. It’s like when Roosevelt arbitrarily raised the price of gold twenty-one cents “because it was three times seven.”
BEAM
Leonard David has the story of yesterday’s roll out in North Las Vegas.
In my view, there were three events in human spaceflight this week. The SRB firing, BEAM, and the announcement by Lockheed Martin of a long-needed space tug. Only the latter two have any relevance to the future.
California’s Water
There’s one year left, if we don’t get a wet winter.
A sane electorate would start fracking the hell out of the Monterey Shale, opening up wells of shore, and use the energy to run desalinization plants, instead of wrecking the state economy with carbon mitigation that will have zero effect on the climate, and building high-speed rail.
So we won’t be doing that. Not yet, anyway.
How To Boil A Journalist
Some thoughts on the evolving “consensus” on climate science:
…there never has been a “crunch point” forcing journalists to re-examine the issue. Instead they have just kept the same ridiculous views for over a decade even though no sane journalist coming to the subject of “global warming” after 18 years of pause, complete failure of climate models, global ice back at normal levels, no increase in climate extremes, a decrease in hurricanes and children still knowing what snow is … no journalist would swallow this non-science about doomsday warming in the face of NO EVIDENCE to support it. (Rookies might be more sceptical, but they probably quickly get indoctrinated into the journalists alarmists views)
They don’t ever look at global warming afresh. They just keep believing the same non-science they have for over a decade despite the overwhelming evidence against their insane views.
The fever (to borrow a metaphor from the alarmist-in-chief) will have to break at some point.
[Update a while later]
Naomi Klein showcases everything that is wrong with climate alarmism.
Anthony Watts
Who knew he ran a “climate denying” web site?
Seriously, having Google decide what is “true” and false is a really bad idea. For instance, it would probably make it much more difficult to break through all the crap nutrition advice.
ULA’s New Rocket
I think the full roll out is still planned for the Space Symposium next month.
The Albedo Of The Earth
A potentially revolutionary paper:
The failure of models to reproduce this hemisphere synchronicity raises interesting implications regarding the fidelity of climate model-derived sensitivity to CO2.
That’s an understatement. I’d rephrase: current climate models are utter junk.
ObamaCare’s Tangled Web
An analysis from Richard Epstein.
ULA
…may be running out of engines a lot sooner than it thought.
What a policy mess.
And on top of that, the new Falcon 9 may require additional certification:
NASA says if the Falcon 9 is upgraded in the future, the agency will review the performance and design changes and make a judgment as to whether those changes will require a new certification.
“A thrust increase alone would not immediately result in a new common launch vehicle configuration,” Buck says. “However, often such changes are accomplished by major design differences throughout the engine and include propellant tank changes that affect the burn time and vehicle mass significantly,” he says, adding that NASA considers the effect on loads, controls and aerodynamics when making such a determination. If the agency finds modifications that constitute a new launch vehicle configuration, then a certification strategy that complies with NASA regulations would be put in place and that “such a strategy would define the number of flights required to achieve NASA certification,” Buck notes.
LSP says it is unclear how many additional flights of an upgraded Falcon 9 may be necessary, if any.
“It will depend on what changes, their magnitude, and when the contractor would desire to cut them in,” Buck says, adding that the agency does not currently plan to certify the vehicle for higher-risk Cat. 3 missions, which would include planetary and astronomy missions.
And then there’s this:
Both agencies expect to complete their respective Falcon 9 certification efforts mid-year, though NASA says once the vehicle is certified to launch riskier missions, in the future it does not plan to fly science payloads on SpaceX launchers utilizing refurbished Falcon 9 cores.
“Our current Category 2 certification effort assumes the use of an un-refurbished core stage,” says NASA spokesman Joshua Buck, referring to the ongoing effort to certify the Falcon 9 to launch Earth-observation spacecraft, starting with the Jason-3 ocean altimetry mission set to lift off in June from Vandenberg AFB, California.
See, in a sane world, you’d have more confidence in hardware that had already successfully flown, not less. This would be like insisting on a brand-new airplane very time you flew. Hopefully we’ll get there over time.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Note the first comment by Dave Huntsman on this latest demonstration of NASA’s ongoing aversion to reusability, going back to the X-33 fiasco.