Category Archives: Science And Society

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Smarter Now?

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John Tierney wonders if Dr. Holdren learned anything from his misguided bet with Julian Simon:

Dr. Simon’s victory was not (as some Lab readers suggested) a fluke based on exceptionally lucky timing, as you can see from this Wikipedia graph showing the inflation-adjusted prices for the five metals in the bet from 1950 to 2002. (Since 2002, metal prices rose sharply for several years but have since plummeted back to familiar levels.) Prices do sometimes shoot up for natural resources, but people react by finding new sources and substitutes, and prices come back down. If you look back over the past several centuries, as Dr. Simon demonstrated in his book, “The Ultimate Resource,” you’ll see that the trend was downward long before 1950, too.

What lessons Dr. Holdren learn from that bet? The only one I’m aware of is: Don’t test your theories by betting on them. After Dr. Simon collected his winnings in 1990, he offered to make another bet not just on natural resources but also on any measure of human welfare, like life expectancy or food per capita. Once again, Dr. Simon predicted that humans would adapt to new problems (like global warming) and end up better off in the future — by any measure at any future date that Dr. Holdren or Dr. Ehrlich cared to name. They refused his offer. They did, however, go on making more gloomy predictions and calculations about the problems of sustainability, as in this 1995 essay discussing how to avert future shortages of resources.

I find this particular appointment disquieting. As one of my commenters said earlier, I’d much prefer a “science advisor” who sees technology as a solution, rather than a problem. And, again, I have no idea what the implications of this pick are for space policy.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space

Doing The Right Thing Wrong

21 Comments

Mike Thomas has a misguided rant over at the Orlando Sentinel, bashing NASA and its supposed desire to go to Mars (something that is hard for me to discern, based on what it’s actually doing).

There are, broadly, two classes of NASA critics: those who think that it’s doing the wrong thing, and those who think that it’s doing the thing wrong. I fall into the latter camp, but Mr. Thomas is clearly one of the former. But his position seems to be incoherent. He thinks that NASA is supposed to be doing science (as indicated by his final words), and if so, he’s correct that manned spaceflight, as currently performed, contributes very little to it. But he doesn’t seem to think that it should be engaged in space science. He (like too many) thinks that NASA’s job is to heal the planet. My biggest fear of an Obama administration (at least in terms of space policy) is that they will agree, and divert it from its original role as an agency that looks outward, to one that looks instead inward.

Whether one believes that we should be doing more about climate change or not, Mike Griffin is correct that it is not within NASA’s charter to do the heavy (or even any) lifting in that regard. It was a heartburn that I always had with things like the Ride Report, and “Mission To Planet Earth.” If these are important things to do, then set up an agency to do them, but don’t defocus and distract NASA with them. In fact, it is much more a job for NOAA. The problem is that NOAA has no history of developing satellites, and has traditionally relied on NASA to do it for them. Perhaps that ought to change.

If NASA improperly gets assigned the task of healing the planet, it is inevitable that it will make it even harder for it to properly explore and develop space, which is what it was established to do. Now frankly, given how wrongly NASA has been doing the right thing, I’m not sure that it would be all that much of a tragedy if we were to end its manned spaceflight program. But unlike Mr. Thomas, I’d rather see it starting to do it right.

Science And Society, Technology and Society

Better Climate Control

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Through nanotech. J. Storrs Hall (aka JoSH) has some ideas. I have a problem with this one, though:

So you have this balloon and it floats up there twenty miles. They all have a little GPS and receiver so they can turn themselves. That’s all there is to it. What can you do with a machine like this? The machine is essentially a programmable greenhouse gas. If you set the mirrors facing the sun, it reflects all the sunlight back. If you set them sideways, it allows the sunlight to come through, and similarly for the longwave radiation coming from the back side of the earth at night.

He seems to be implying that GPS can be used to determine attitude. It can’t. It only provides velocity and position. Now it may want to know that information for other purposes, but there will have to be some other means of attitude knowledge. It seems to me the simplest way would be to just measure the sunlight hitting the mirror (which would actually be a solar cell). As you adjust your attitude, the power available will grow or shrink, and it can use the rate to control the angle. As for how to physically control the attitude, I would guess that little reaction wheels would do the job.

Of course, many of the warm mongers hate technical solutions like this, because they don’t require us to piously tighten up our hair shirts, and they don’t allow for sufficient control of the global economy.

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

The New “Science” Advisor

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Ron Bailey has some background on Dr. Holdren.

I put the “science” in quotes, because I’ve always thought the position misnamed. It’s really about science and technology (as indicated by the name — the Office of Science and Technology Policy), and the science advisor should also be a technologist, not just a scientist. Either that, or get a different and separate advisor for technology. When you put a “science” advisor in charge of providing advice on NASA, it reinforces the false perception that NASA is primarily about science, which results in all manner of policy ills.

In any event, I hope that Dr. Holdren has modified his environmental views from the seventies, and no longer allies himself with Paul Ehrlich.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Yuval Levin has more thoughts and concerns:

Perhaps more striking is his activism well beyond his own academic specialty, arguing, for instance, that scientists have a responsibility to advance the cause of the elimination of all nuclear weapons and seeking controls on population growth. And he didn’t say all this in the 1970s either—have a good look at the speech he delivered when he assumed the leadership of the AAAS in 2006. It describes a fundamentally activist liberal mentality about the very purpose of science and its place in our kind of society. My favorite part of that speech is his call for ending population growth which, in the published text of the speech, is accompanied by this footnote:

This was the key insight in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York, 1968), as well as one of those in Harrison Brown’s prescient earlier book, The Challenge of Man’s Future (Viking, New York, 1954). The elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper, and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.

The Population Bomb was the book in which Ehrlich predicted that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death,” because all the world’s resources were running out while population was growing out of control, and there was simply no way we could sustain our civilization at modern levels of consumption and growth. Just about every one of the book’s predictions has proven wrong, and its empirical claims and methods have not held up well under later scholarly scrutiny. It certainly made a useful political point for the left, though.

I wonder if all those who complained about the supposed “politicization of science” by the Bush administration will raise worries about Holdren…don’t you?

No, actually, I don’t wonder at all. I think we know the answer to that one.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s more from John Tierney:

Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday.

Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists’ predictions of a new “age of scarcity” of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and
resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.

In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990.

I hadn’t realized that there were other bettors besides Ehrlich, or that Holdren had made the pick. To be honest, I had never heard of the guy until Obama named him. So now we shift from a “Republican war on science” to a “Democrat war on science.” Or, perhaps, a Democrat war on the economy and freedom in the ostensible name of science. And I have no idea what this portends for space policy.

[Late afternoon update]

“Solve Climate” has an extensive set of Holdren links. I sure hope that he at least gets some tough questioning in confirmation hearings.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

A Big Sloppy Wet Kiss

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That’s what Jeff Kluger gives to NASA and the Bush administration in this Time piece. The very first graf lays out the hero, and the villain:

Getting into a shouting match with the HR rep is not exactly the best way to land a job. But according to the Orlando Sentinel, that’s just what happened last week between NASA administrator Mike Griffin and Lori Garver, a member of Barack Obama’s transition team who will help decide if Griffin keeps his post once the President-elect takes office. If the contretemps did occur, it could help doom not only the NASA chief’s chances, but the space agency’s ambitious plans to get Americans back to the moon.

The fact that those last few words are a link almost make it seem like an emphasis. “Doom the space agency’s plans to get Americans back to the moon!” <sound=”dissonant organ chord, thunderclap, horses whinnying”></sound>

If you in fact follow the link, it’s to a piece that Kluger wrote about a month ago on those wonderful plans. The piece continues on, lauding the Bush administration’s foresight in coming up with a new plan, and putting the people into place to execute it. There is an implicit assumption that if Dr. Griffin is removed, and his inspiring architecture ended, that we will have to leave returning to the moon to another generation, because it’s the only way to do it.

It’s very clear that he has talked only to NASA officials who agree with the thesis, and to no one else. In fact, the only quotes he has are from Scott Horowitz and Chris Shank. With regard to Horowitz, he writes:

“At the time, the shuttle had flown 290 people, and out of those 14 were dead — nearly one in 20,” says Scott Horowitz, a four-time shuttle veteran who designed the Ares 1, one of the new boosters. “We needed something that was an order of magnitude safer.”

He doesn’t mention that Horowitz has left the agency to “spend more time with his family.” And he has a quote from Shank:

“We’ve been moving in the right direction since the Columbia accident [in 2003],” says Chris Shank, NASA’s chief of strategic communications. “The concern is that we’ll lose that.” Lately, that concern appears well-placed.

There is no argument about why it is “the right direction” — simply a statement as though it’s fact. And what would you expect Mike Griffin’s flack to say? That there are a lot of ways to get there, and they just happened to pick this one? That they now realized as they’ve gotten into it that it wasn’t as “safe, simple and soon” as ATK’s Horowitz sold it to be?

Most notably, is who he didn’t seem to have talked to — he didn’t bother to get the side of anyone on the transition team. Here’s what he has to say about Lori Garver:

The Obama team picked Garver to run the NASA transition, in part because of her deep pedigree and long history at the space agency, which saw her climb to the rank of associate administrator. But Garver started as a PAO — NASA-speak for a public affairs officer — and never got involved in the nuts and bolts of building rockets. She is best known by most people as the person who in 2002 competed with boy-band singer Lance Bass for the chance to fly to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket. Neither of them ever left the ground.

Garver’s lack of engineering cred is especially surprising in light of the eggheads with whom Obama has been surrounding himself — most recently, Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Chu, who has reportedly been tapped to be Secretary of Energy. Garver is also not thought to be much of a fan of Griffin — who is an engineer — nor to be sold on the plans for the new moon program. What she and others are said to be considering is to scrap the plans for the Ares 1 — which is designed exclusively to carry humans — and replace it with Atlas V and Delta IV boosters, which are currently used to launch satellites but could be redesigned, or “requalified,” for humans. Griffin hates that idea, and firmly believes the Atlas and Delta are unsafe for people. One well-placed NASA source who asked not to be named reports that as much as Griffin wants to keep his job, he’ll walk away from it if he’s made to put his astronauts on top of those rockets.

NASA is right to be uneasy about just what Obama has planned for the agency since his position on space travel shifted — a lot — during the campaign. A year before the election he touted an $18 billion education program and explicitly targeted the new moon program as one he’d cut to pay for it. In January of 2008, he lined up much closer to the Bush moon plan — perhaps because Republicans were already on board and earning swing-state support as a result. Three months before the election, Obama fully endorsed the 2020 target for putting people on the moon. But that was a candidate talking and now he’s president-elect, and his choice of Garver as his transition adviser may say more than his past campaign rhetoric.

There is an implication here that in addition to the fact that she’s not technical, she has no interest in manned space. Otherwise (since obviously the evil Obama wants to kill this program, despite the fact that his views evolved to support it during the campaign), why put her in place? But to anyone who knows her, like her or not, that is lunacy. Let’s let Al Fansome do the heavy lifting in her support, in comments over at Space Politics in response to one of our favorite clueless space commentators:

WHITTINGTON: Or, cancelling VSE entirely, which is what I suspect she has in mind

Mark,

You like to talk like you know space policy, but you obviously don’t know anything about Lori Garver. You have been around for many years, but sometimes you are just a dunce.

I will prove it.

Lori has been a big supporter of the VSE.

On the day that the VSE was announced Lori was on television promoting the VSE. Check out the Lehrer News Hour on January 14, 2004 where she debate Bob Parks.

Relevant excerpts below.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june04/moon_01-14.html

LORI GARVER: I’m very enthused about the initiative. This is what we should be doing with our space program. The reason Mars is exciting when spirit land on it is because we believe we’re going further. The space program is about so much more than science. I absolutely agree, we’ve been a great space science through the robotic program. But it is because we’re going as a species that I think the public really can relate to this, and ultimately what has caused us a tremendous benefit.

and

LORI GARVER: … But again, it’s that inspiration that calls us to space, and by that it’s not going to be just robots.

and

LORI GARVER: I want my kids to have somebody who is more interesting to them. The first woman who goes to the moon — we’ve never sent any women to the moon — it’s got to be more interesting than whether or not Britney Spears got married this weekend.

and

LORI GARVER: To me, it’s definitely more than magic. I believe as humanity, as a species, we are going into space. We have explored this planet, we will continue to explore this planet and, for our very survival, we must also leave this planet. Ultimately, a lunar base as the president announced today is going to help us build new things, like a solar-powered satellite using lunar materials. That will potentially end our dependence on fossil fuels on this planet.

You, and everybody else who is maligning her intentions, owe Lori an apology.

Now, in fairness to Mark, he may have confused VSE with ESAS/Constellation. He has never been able to understand the difference between the two. But the notion that Lori and Alan Ladwig, and George Whitesides, have an agenda to “cancel VSE” or end plans to return to the moon, is ludicrous.

Anyway, Kluger seems to be similarly unaware of her actual history, instead implying that she is just a soccer mom in space. And if he were really aware of the history, he wouldn’t have let the statement about Mike Griffin thinking EELVs are unsafe go unchallenged, and simply act as a stenographer for Shank (or whoever told him that). In fact, he would have challenged whichever NASA/Griffin defender told him that to explain what had happened in the past few years to change Dr. Griffin’s mind, because in 2003, he had a very different idea:

Griffin has made it clear that he is not opposed to using EELV vehicles effectively unmodified from their current versions to launch crewed vehicles. In a May 2003 hearing by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee on NASA’s Orbital Space Plane (OSP) program—a short-lived effort to develop a manned spacecraft that was superseded by the CEV—Griffin noted that the term “man rating” dated back to efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to modify ICBMs to carry capsules. “This involved a number of factors such as pogo suppression, structural stiffening, and other details not particularly germane to today’s expendable vehicles. The concept of ‘man rating’ in this sense is, I believe, no longer very relevant.”

He argued that EELVs and other expendable vehicles are already called upon to launch high-value unmanned payloads. “What, precisely, are the precautions that we would take to safeguard a human crew that we would deliberately omit when launching, say, a billion-dollar Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission?” he asked. “The answer is, of course, ‘none’. While we appropriately value human life very highly, the investment we make in most unmanned missions is quite sufficient to capture our full attention.”

The Atlas 5 and Delta 4 EELVs, he noted, have a specified design reliability of 98 percent, in line with experience with the premier expendable vehicles to date. If such a vehicle was used to launch a crewed spacecraft equipped with an escape system of just 90 percent reliability, he noted, the combined system would have a 1-in-500 chance of a fatal accident, “substantially better than for the Shuttle.”

So what happened in the interim to turn them into death traps?

If Kluger really wanted to provide a service to Time/CNN’s readers, he’d get out and do some real reporting, and get some dissenting opinions, instead of simply providing Mike Griffin’s NASA with a widely read forum for its propaganda. He would also come up with a slightly more sophisticated space policy template than “With Constellation, the moon, without Constellation, nothing.”

[Update a few minutes later]

Paul Spudis (who was on the Aldridge Commission) has related thoughts:

Many people have conflated the Vision with NASA’s implementation of it, but they are two very different things. Project Constellation is the architecture that NASA has chosen to implement the VSE. In its essentials, Constellation is a launch system, a spacecraft, and a mission design. NASA chose to develop a new series of launch vehicles, the Ares I and V rockets, the Orion crew “capsule” (formerly called the CEV), and a craft designed to land on the Moon, the Altair lunar lander. The mission design is to launch the crew in the Orion capsule on an Ares I into low Earth orbit, launch the Altair lander and rocket departure stage separately on the Ares V, rendezvous and dock with the lander and depart for Earth orbit to the Moon. The crew would land and explore the Moon from the Altair spacecraft, return to the Orion in lunar orbit, and return to Earth in that vehicle.

Much of the criticism of NASA in recent years is actually criticism of this architectural plan, not necessarily of the goals of the Vision (although some have questioned it). But this architecture is an implementation of the VSE; it is not the VSE itself. The Vision specified long-range goals and objectives, not the means to attain them. To briefly review, we are going to the Moon to learn the skills and develop the technologies needed to live and work productively on other worlds. And there are many ways to skin that cat.

Yes. That’s apparently too complicated a concept for many (including many journalists) to understand.