Category Archives: Space

Media Criticism, Space

“Hate” Speech

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Mark Whittington seems to suffer from an almost autistic inability to properly gauge the emotions of others — the same malady as many self-described liberals seem to suffer, when they describe as “hate speech” or “racist” words with which they simply disagree. He often irrationally refers to my posts as “rants,” or “seething,” or “filled with rage,” though in each and every case I was perfectly calm when composing them, and no one else ever sees the supposed anger. And when called on it, he can never justify it, or point to the exact words that he finds so rage filled (and indeed, ignores requests to do so, usually simply repeating the slander).

Here’s an example (not of me, this time, fortunately):

Some interesting words of wisdom from Mike Griffin along with, sadly, words of hate in the comments section.

Well, I read those comments (only two of them at the time of this posting — I can’t speak for what might appear there in the future), and I saw nothing “hateful” about them. They simply pointed out inconsistencies in the former administrator’s words, and between words and deeds. One need not “hate” someone to point out flaws in their arguments. I wonder why Mark views the world in such emotional extremes?

[Thursday morning update]

Amazing. He’s still at it.

Mind, there are a few things about which one can criticize Dr. Griffin’s tenure at NASA, mainly by using 20 20 hindsight. But really, some of the posts I have read makes one wonder if he drinks the blood of virgins and eats the flesh of the young, so filled with rage they are.

Note that (as always) he can’t point to any particular “rage-filled” post or comment, and show us the “hateful” words. Just like his imaginary friends at the “Internet Rocketeers Club,” we are simply supposed to accept that such things exist in reality, and not just in Mark’s mind.

And of course, there, as he did here, he says that I accused him of being a liberal, once again indicating his apparent inability to comprehend written English. And no, Mark, there is nothing “hateful” about pointing out either that, or your apparent inability to properly gauge others’ emotional states. It is purely an unemotional, clinical observation.

[Bumped]

History, Social Commentary, Space, Space History

Well, He Meant “…A Man…”

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…but he didn’t quite say it:

Riley and Olsson…concluded that Commander Armstrong and his family members do pronounce the word “a” in a discernible way.

And based on broadcasts from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from the surface of the Moon, it is clear that the word “a” was easily transmitted to Earth without being obliterated.

But their analysis of the intonation of the phrase strongly suggests Commander Armstrong had intended to say “a man”. There is a rising pitch in the word “man” and a falling pitch when he says “mankind”.

According to Mr Olsson: “This indicates that he’s doing what we all do in our speech, he was contrasting using speech – indicating that he knows the difference between man and mankind and that he meant man as in ‘a man’ not ‘humanity’.”

I think it’s safe to say that this has been analyzed to death at this point. It’s only been forty years.

Space, Technology and Society

Space Solar Powerballs

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Trevor Brown proposes spherical solar power satellites.

This isn’t a new idea. I wrote a paper on it back in the early nineties for an SPS conference, and I think that Geoff Landis has done some work on it as well (for instance, here’s a report of a talk that he gave on it at the 1996 ISDC, which was the last one that I attended prior to by going to Dallas two years ago — ctrl-F for “spherical”). It does vastly simplify the design issues, because it is no longer necessary to point the panels at the sun. One of the comments there needs some elaboration:

While the surface area of the sphere facing the Sun matches your calculations, the whole side would not be available for power generation. The so-called Beta angle, or the Sun angle, affects the total amount of power converted. Also, while a sphere would not need rigid station-keeping and attitude control to collect solar energy, the transmitter back to Earth certainly will. Also, a large spherical structure would be more taxing on a station-keeping/attitude control system than a more planar design. These caveats in mind, this is a creative alternative.

With regard to the needed area, the beta-angle effect means that at any orientation, you’re only getting the effective solar panel area of the cross-section of the sphere. That is, while the hemisphere has twice the area of the circular cross section, the non-zero beta angle of all points except that at the center of the illuminated area means that you need twice the solar panel that would be necessary if it were a flat circle. Add to this the fact that you have just as much area on the side in shadow, and it means that you need four times the total solar panel area to get the equivalent collection capacity of a pointed flat plate. So you have to postulate very cheap panels for this to make economic sense. But if you can get them, the simplification of the design is worth a lot.

As for pointing the transmitter, that’s actually not so tough a job. You hang it down below the sphere, and it will remain vertical, due to gravity gradient restoring torques. You could point it with control cables all around its circumference, attached to the sphere. In addition to inflating it, I also considered putting a charge on its surface to keep it spherical, but it would take a lot of ions, particularly for a big one, and inflating is probably a better solution, though subject to leaks, and the need for gas resupply.

One other point. I actually considered a fleet of them in MEO, continuously switching from one rectenna to the next as they orbit, to reduce the size of the transmitter antenna, which gets kind of humungous out at GEO.

Economics, Political Commentary, Space

DIRECT Rebuttal Thoughts

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I had missed this when they were posted, but the Chair Force Engineer had some thoughts on DIRECT a couple weeks ago, here and here.

“Wow.” Are we to believe that ESAS was designed with little or no consideration of what the supporting infrastructure would cost? It would certainly explain why we’re stuck with the unaffordable Ares I and Ares V.

I’d like to say that I’m surprised, but sadly, I’m not.

Further NASA statements such as “Ares I + Ares V uses 15 SRB segments, while two Jupiter 232’s use 16 segments” also reveal an incredibly simplistic approach to cost estimation. Such simple methods might be appropriate for pre-algebra students. Professional cost estimators ought to know better. That’s why cost estimation is so difficult; there may literally be thousands of dependent and independent variables that make up the true cost of the system over its lifetime. Saving a few million in rocket hardware may have bigger reprocussions with development dollars, standing army costs, and infrastructure costs. It’s best summed up on Slide 26, where Jupiter’s higher launch costs (measured in tens of millions per launch) are offset by the savings of billions in development costs.

We’d have to see a full life-cycle cost accounting with assumptions to know whether or not it’s a good saving to cut development cost at the price of higher ops costs. It depends on how much you’re going to fly. But I suspect that it probably is, because the up-front costs are in expensive near-term dollars whereas the flight costs are down stream and discounted, and the flight rate will probably never get big enough to justify spending more on development to reduce marginal cost per flight. That’s always the problem with expendables.

I really need to write up my talk on marginal costs from Space Access.