For Masten. I’ll bet that Armadillo has a lot of exciting things happening this year as well. Stay tuned.
Category Archives: Space
Commercial Spaceflight
Past and future. An overview by Leonard David.
Gravity Wells
A nice graphical presentation.
[Via reader Brock Cusick]
The Foolishness Of Reliance On Authority
Roger Simon runs into a Hollywood nitwit who believes in global warming because NASA says so.
Point 1: “NASA” doesn’t say so. One duplicitous ideologue masquerading as a climate scientist at one particular NASA center says so. That center had to confess error on his behalf (no doubt through clenched teeth).
Point 2: “NASA” has no opinion on anything. NASA is a government agency, with thousands of employees, of varying opinions. The previous NASA administrator, in fact, famously outraged the warm mongers with his own skepticism, but if any one person could have spoken for NASA at the time, it would have been Mike Griffin, not James Hansen.
Point 3: NASA has had many spectacular achievements in the past. It has also had many spectacular failures. To rely on it, as an agency, as a source of authority for something (particularly when there is no official agency position on it) is foolish. In fact, this false sense that people have in NASA as an authority has contributed greatly to the difficulty over the past decades to raise money for private ventures. This is because investors, when doing due diligence on an investment decisions, have often gone to someone at NASA who knows nothing about the venture, and relied on their foolish advice, for no other reason than they worked for NASA.
Anyway, this gets back to the foolishness of relying on people who claim to be scientists, instead of on science itself.
Made It To Vegas
…but a lot later than we wanted, due to hellacious traffic getting out of LA. Things didn’t really start to move until we got halfway up the Cajon Pass. So, later dinner at Mandalay Bay, and then on to Colorado in the morning. But Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night. I’ll leave you with a video from another Christmas eve, forty-one years ago.
I had a piece on this story last year, on the fortieth anniversary. Hard to believe it’s been a year since I wrote that.
More Pictures From Mojave
Dale Amon has many shots of the SpaceShipTwo roll out a couple weeks ago.
The VIP BLOT Fetish
Clark Lindsey responds to Dwayne Day’s latest snarkfest against space enthusiasts.
An Orbital Mechanics Problem
Cory Doctorow needs the solution to one for a story.
There is no analytical solution to his problem — you really have to do a sim.
Conflict Of Interest?
Mark Matthews and Bobby Block have the most in-depth reporting on Chairwoman Giffords’ too-cozy relationship with NASA and Constellation defenders that I’ve seen to date. But is it actually a conflict of interest? I’m not sure about that. As the article notes, her husband is unlikely to fly on anything resulting from the POR, and while he may have a job lined up with one of the usual suspects, he’d probably be able to get it regardless. If anyone is aware of a more quid-pro-quoish possibility on this front, I’d be interested to hear about it, though, in light of the history of the Horowitz revolving door with ATK.
But what I do think is happening is that her husband is a big supporter of the POR, and he has no doubt influenced her to be one as well. I’m not excusing her behavior toward the committee or Chairman Augustine, or her apparent ignorance or flawed understanding of the issues about which she has oversight responsibility, and I wish that someone else had her job, but I just don’t see it as corrupt. I do think, though, that the criticism of her husband for romancing her with taxpayer resources is fair and legitimate.
Top Science Stories Of The Decade
Without getting into the issue of whether this year is the end of the decade, Alan Boyle has a list of science stories of the ten years of the double goose egg, of which this is definitely the last. I have a couple nits, though.
First, SpaceShipOne and the X-Prize had nothing to do with science really — they were engineering achievements. Spaceflight is not synonymous with science, and the notion that it is is one of the things that holds us back from doing more of it, and more cost effectively.
And if the 2007 Nobel prize to which he is referring was Al Gore’s, it had nothing to do with science either, unless it was bogus science, as his “documentary” was (for which the Oscar should also be revoked). It was a Peace Prize, not a science prize.