Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Space Safety Regulation

24 Comments

Too much or too little? Clark Lindsey has a post linking to the two extremes. I’d say that Carolynne Campbell-Knight’s piece isn’t just overwraught, but hysterical:

Make no mistake, if a few very wealthy people get killed, the waivers they signed won’t mean a thing if they didn’t know the risks. It may make no difference whether they knew the risks or not. There will be a massive outcry, huge negative publicity and a demand for regulation and accountability. That would be the end of passenger space travel for decades and the damage to the industry would be immense. A wise industry would regulate itself, set published standards, and be open about the risks involved. It would do this before the disaster happens.

When the West was wild, it was a different era. A Wild West in space won’t be acceptable in the day of 24 hour news and the litigious society.

Right now, the risks are not being properly declared. The impression is being given that riding rockets can be as safe as a ride in a light aircraft. That simply isn’t true. Rockets are dangerous and even the most careful engineering can only make them ‘as safe as possible’. They can’t make them ‘safe’.

I’m unaware of anyone “giving the impression” that these vehicles will be as safe as light aircraft. I think that she’s just unjustifiably inferring that. Here’s what I wrote in the book:

Some will argue that part of promoting the industry is to ensure that it doesn’t kill its customers, but the industry already has ample incentive to not do that, and the FAA isn’t any smarter on that subject than the individual companies within it — everyone is still learning.

There is a popular view in the space community that the first time someone dies in private spaceflight it will somehow doom the industry. Bluntly, I believe that is nonsense, because it is based on absolutely no evidence. In fact, there is an abundance of counterevidence with examples being the early aviation industry, various extreme sports including free diving and mountaineering, and even the recent cruise-ship disaster of the Costa Concordia, in which at least thirty passengers died.

In fact, it may take just such a death, a sanguineous christening, to normalize this business, and end the mystical thinking about it.

She herself isn’t consistent on the issue:

While there are some treaties covering satellites and debris, there are no laws. There is no regulator. It’s the wild west in space. Who is going to license and oversee the new commercial ventures? Those involved in this commerce think regulation is a bad thing and that it will preclude innovation. That’s what the early railroads thought. But then the bodies started piling up. When is an aircraft a spaceship? What’s the difference? Regulators such as the FAA have no experience in spacecraft. Once you’re above the atmosphere there are no rules, certainly no laws. If the history of transportation teaches us anything, it teaches us that there will be a dangerous mess until a regulatory regime is established.

If FAA has no experience in spacecraft (actually, they do have some), then how can they, or anyone else, be expected to establish a regulatory regime, until we get some experience actually flying? Not to mention that we do in fact have definitions for aircraft and spaceships, in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act.

And as Clark notes:

The same regulations that help keep a vehicle from crashing onto third parties also help protect the second parties in the vehicle. The companies are highly motivated to provide safe space travel. While the industry will go on from an accident, it will be very difficult for the company involved to do so. There will be a long grounding and many customers will no doubt demand refunds. Some states have now limited liability exposure for space tourism operators and manufacturers, but there is no limit when gross negligence is found. An accident will also mean the end of the “learning period” in which the FAA is restricted from applying new regulations on personal spaceflight.

I’ve really got to get the book out.

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

Hillary And The NASA Letter

22 Comments

Did she really get a letter saying “no girls allowed”?

There’s no evidence of it, other than her repetition of the story (which doesn’t hold much weight with me, considering the source). As Jim Oberg points out, she certainly could have been part of the first class in 1978 that admitted women, had she applied herself. But her degrees were in political science and law, which certainly weren’t indicative of someone who desired a career in spaceflight. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that she couldn’t handle technical subjects, or math.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Futility Of Gun Laws

25 Comments

They don’t seem to work in California:

So we are again left with the question: how did the killer get this gun? It would seem as though he broke a stack of laws, without much of a struggle. It almost makes you wonder if California is barking up the wrong tree. They pass all these laws, starting with attempts to deal with a mass murder involving a mentally ill person in 1989, and they do not work. Short of house-to-house searches for guns, how are they going to be successful at enforcing these laws? Perhaps most importantly, if someone is mentally ill and intends to murder people (a capital crime), what sort of penalty is going to actually deter such a person from breaking gun-control laws?

Gun-control advocates, at least the more rational ones, will usually admit that these laws only work at the margins, by making guns harder for criminals and the mentally ill to get. I can buy that argument; all laws work only at the margins, and that is all that they have to do to justify their existence. I can also agree that when there is a large stockpile of illegal goods in circulation, it can take a while before laws aimed at those goods will remove them from the illegal marketplace. Still, when I see that laws that are decades old failed to disarm a 24 year old who could not possibly have legally acquired this weapon, I find myself wondering in what century California’s gun-control laws are going to be effective.

Because, you know, criminals don’t obey the law. By definition. And as he says, it’s not really a gun problem.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Detroit’s Van Gogh

2 Comments

…would be better off in LA:

Rather than an offense against art, a properly structured sale would represent a public-spirited update of how the art came to Detroit and other U.S. cities in the first place: as a way of providing liquidity to Europeans in need of cash. “The second world war has opened up an opportunity such as may never come again,” the DIA’s director wrote unabashedly in 1948. “Great private collections which have been held intact for a hundred years or more are being broken up.” Detroit is like an aristocratic estate forced to adjust to changing times. It can’t marry an heiress, but it might find some lucratively appreciative new homes for some of its heirlooms.

This is the just consequence of terrible voters’ decision and awful city management.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Religious Zealots

17 Comments

…who are running our public schools:

What’s up with this? It’s not based on any concern with safety. Lego guns, cap guns, bubble guns, nibbled Pop Tarts, and fingers are no threat to safety. And the wild overreaction in these cases says there’s more going on here than simple school discipline. As I said, who treats a 5-year-old this way? It smacks of fanaticism.

In fact, it seems like a kind of quasi-religious fanaticism. I think it’s about the administrative class — which runs the schools with as little input from parents as possible — doing its best to exterminate the very idea of guns. It’s some sort of wacky moral-purity crusade. If a few toddlers have to suffer along the way, that’s tough. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

But that raises two questions. First, what business do public schools have in trying to extirpate “impure” thoughts? Aren’t we supposed to celebrate diversity? And, second, why should public schools decide that a longtime staple of American childhood, the toy gun, is suddenly evil?

Suppose you wanted to raise a generation that was both frightened of guns and thought them evil, except in the hands of government employees, and wanted to make thaat generation supine, disarmed sheep, and deferential to those same people. This is exactly what you would do.

These people are stupid, or evil, or both.