Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

“We Cannot Survive Without You”

25 Comments

I’ve been pointing for a year now that NASA needs private providers a lot more than they need NASA. Jeff Foust has a report from the plenary session of the conference yesterday, in which Charlie Bolden confirmed it. This will, of course, cause exploding of heads in the moronosphere.

[Update a few minutes later]

And as predicted, here is the latest insanity from Mark Whittington:

Charles Bolden was reported to have told Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan that he would provide a bailout for commercial space firms “equal to that given the auto industry” if the private sector faltered in providing space transportation services. Bolden later issued a non denial denial of Cernan’s account.

This raises the question of in what sense is the Obama program “commercial.” Under the Bush era COTS program, the consequences for failure were that a commercial company would be out of the program. Originally a company called Rocket Plane/Kistler was part of COTS. But because RP/Kistler could not meet milestones, it was replaced by another company called Orbital Systems.

But under the Obama plan, the only consequences for failure would be more money pumped into the commercial companies that are developing private space craft. With the demise of Constellation, companies competing for ISS servicing contracts have become too important to fail.

So far this virtual guarantee of money has not had much of an effect on the performance of companies in the commercial space program. Recently, SpaceX successfully orbited, reentered, and landed on the ocean a prototype of its Dragon space craft.

I don’t have time to dissect it right now, so I toss it as chum to the comment sharks. I will note though, that there is no logical connection between the first and second sentences in that last paragraph. Which is not atypical of a Whittington piece.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Press Conference Coverage

11 Comments

Here’s a pretty good story from Clara Moskowitz, based on the actual event, as opposed to just the press release.

I should provide some context for Jeff Foust’s quote of me:

While this group may suppot the administration’s commercial space policies, just don’t expect them to start sporting “Obama 2012″ buttons any time soon. “I just don’t think that the president cares that much one way or the other about commercial space,” Simberg said in response to a question. “But I’m glad for that. I think if he did we’d have worse problems.”

The question this was a response to was one from Keith Cowing. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but a rough but I think accurate paraphrase would be, “You have called the president a liar on your blog. So how can you support his space policy?”

I don’t know if the people on the phones could hear my eyes rolling, but those present will attest that they were, which is why I didn’t bother to actually answer it.

By the way, I think that he does his readers a disservice by so steadfastly refusing to link to anything that I write, anywhere, but as he always tells anyone who complains, it’s his web site.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

On Asteroid Defense And The Constitution

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Thoughts from Pejman in response to a snippy post from Mark Kleiman.

Most of the discussion sidesteps the real issue, which is who is being defended, not by whom (if anyone) are we being attacked? The latter issue would only determine which government agency would be responsible for the response, not whether or not a federal response was constitutional. For instance, if the Klingons were using a gravity tractor to divert the asteroid to hit the country, then it would be up to the Air Force (or preferably the US Space Guard, if it exists at the time) to deal with it. If on the other hand, it’s a natural occurrence, then at least in terrestrial terms, it would be up the space equivalent of the Army Corps of Engineers, because it would be more in the nature of something like anticipatory flood control. Though (again preferably) both of these functions — defense and management of nature — might be under the aegis of the Space Guard. The key difference between them is that in the one case, the best defense might be a robust offense (i.e., send warships off to punish and prevent the Klingons), whereas this wouldn’t apply to a natural event.

As to whether or not asteroid defense in general, whether natural, or launched by Klingons, is constitutional, would depend to a degree on the nature of the warning we have. If, for instance, we know that it will hit the planet, but don’t know exactly where or when (and the when determines the where to a large degree, because it depends on what part of the planet has turned to be the front of it from the asteroid’s perspective at the time it hits), then it’s not just a national defense issue, but a planetary one, and we’d have to coordinate with other nations. The only acceptable solution, of course, would be to divert it from hitting the planet entirely, but in doing so, it could be that we end up making things worse (e.g., having it hit Lucifer’s Hammer style in the Pacific with accompanying ocean boiling and tsunamis, as opposed to just hitting land and creating a little ice age from all the stuff tossed up into the atmosphere, not to mention killing all the people in the vicinity).

Once we undertake to try to prevent such a tragedy, we implicitly accept legal responsibility for the outcome of our actions. I can easily imagine things getting bogged down in an international debate over the issue, which is why Rusty Schweikart wants to get the UN involved, which I can also easily imagine would only make things worse.

It’s actually similar to the arguments about hurricane diversion. Suppose we could not prevent or dampen hurricanes, but we could steer them? We might then divert them from hitting the expensive real estate in Florida but instead steer them into the Gulf where they could hit the much cheaper beaches in Mexico, for which we’d presumably compensate them. But getting these kinds of agreements would be problematic, unless (and probably even if) the level of technology was highly certain. Suppose we did have the capability to precisely steer an asteroid (this would be useful for mining them). What kind of international agreements would have to be put in place to allow us to do this? Certainly the 1972 Liability Convention would be viewed as insufficient to set hearts at ease in much of the rest of the world — no one is going to be happy about being compensated after their country has been accidentally turned into a smoking crater. I can’t see, though, how there would be anything unconstitutional per se about our doing such things.

As commenters over there note, this whole discussion mainly an opportunity for Kleiman to trot out a straw man (“Tea Partiers think that anything they dislike is unconstitutional”).

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Ronald Reagan’s Space Legacy

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Mark Whittington has an essay on it, but he misses the biggest part of it — the creation of the Office of Commercial Space Transportation (now FAA-AST), which enabled the development of the commercial spaceflight industry, as I described when Reagan died in 2004.

And, Mark, please stop demonstrating your profound ignorance of the meaning of the word “subsidy.” COTS and Commercial Crew are not subsidies.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Good Question

40 Comments

In the midst of appropriately ridiculing Al Gore, Charles Krauthammer raises an interesting point:

Look, if Godzilla appeared on the Mall this afternoon, Al Gore would say it’s global warming…

[Laughter]

…because the spores in the South Atlantic Ocean, you know, were. Look, everything is, it’s a religion. In a religion, everything is explicable. In science, you can actually deny or falsify a proposition with evidence. You find me a single piece of evidence that Al Gore would ever admit would contradict global warming and I’ll be surprised.

OK, so how is the global warming religion falsifiable? What would it take?

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Why I Eat Saturated Fats

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Because they taste good, and they have essentially no relationship with coronary risk:

Overall, the literature does not offer much support for the idea that long term saturated fat intake has a significant effect on the concentration of blood cholesterol. If it’s a factor at all, it must be rather weak, which is consistent with what has been observed in multiple non-human species (13). I think it’s likely that the diet-heart hypothesis rests in part on an over-interpretation of short-term controlled feeding studies. I’d like to see a more open discussion of this in the scientific literature. In any case, these controlled studies have typically shown that saturated fat increases both LDL and HDL, so even if saturated fat did have a small long-term effect on blood cholesterol, as hinted at by some of the observational studies, its effect on heart attack risk would still be difficult to predict.

Actually, I have a simpler explanation — it’s simply an appealing theory, from a common-sense standpoint. You are what you eat, right?

Of course, it’s always dangerous to rely on “common sense” when it comes to complex topics like biochemistry. And yet the FDA builds such murderous concepts as the food pyramid on such shoddy research and thinking. Not to mention agri-industry lobbying, of course.