A paper on interstellar trade, three decades old. By Paul Krugman, back before he went nuts.
[Via occasional commenter Jane Bernstein]
Category Archives: Space
The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Not that he’s ever been optimistic, but “Rocketman” thinks that the end of ESAS is in sight:
MSFC and contractor engineers are looking at all sorts of band aids for the vibration problem that ARES is most prone to. The leading candidate this week is a “D” strut system between the first and second stage to reduce the vibration that will literally shake the crew to pieces. The Emperor is putting all of his chips on the table betting on the strut. But the contractors are forlorn. They know the strut has issues…and they know ARES will go away with the Emperor in short order. Its hard to work on something you know is headed for the trash heap of history.
I haven’t worked on the program for a year and a half, but I can imagine that a lot of people are eying their options to bail.
[Update in the afternoon]
Once again, Mark Whittington demonstrates his lack of comprehension of the English language.
exalt (g-zôlt)
tr.v. exalted, exalting, exalts
1. To raise in rank, character, or status; elevate: exalted the shepherd to the rank of grand vizier.
2. To glorify, praise, or honor.
3. To increase the effect or intensity of; heighten: works of art that exalt the imagination.
No one familiar with written English could imagine that my above words do any of those three things, in any way.
If and when the program does die, I will not be rejoicing. I will be grieving over the lost years and lost billions. But my grief will be tempered by the hope (though, sadly, not expectation) that we will finally start doing something sensible.
Too Big A Hurry?
Rob Coppinger writes that the Chinese are taking big risks rushing their human space program.
We’ll see. They may be going too fast for safety, but at their current general sluggish pace, they’re not going to beat us to the moon any time soon, despite Mike Griffin’s cynical scare mongering.
Tilting At The Windmill
Or maybe not. Let’s hope not. Anyway, Bigelow deserves our support in his valiant effort to make ITAR sane. Not sure off hand what we can do to help, though.
Why Is Earth Here?
Lileks seems to be a co-religionist with me:
You know, every so often I run across comments on message boards from the “12 Monkeys” demographic, the people who wish people would just disappear and leave the earth alone. If the Aftermath show has any message, it’s how useless the world would be without people. Without humans it’s just hunting and rutting, birthing and dying, a clock with no chimes. It’s always interesting how people romanticize Nature, and ascribe all manner of purpose and intelligence to it, lamenting the injuries people wreak on the innocent globe. I’d love to read an interview with Gaia in which she says that her goal all along was to come up with a species that could produce Beethoven and make rockets to send the music deep into space. Now that’s something to make the other planets sit up and take notice. You think the point is merely to provide a home for thirty billion varieties of insect? I can’t tell you how much they itch. Sorry about the earthquakes, but it’s the only way I can scratch.
I do believe in a teleology, and this belief is not scientific at all.
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Night Launch
Don’t know how many more night launches there will be for the Shuttle, I’ve never seen one up close, it’s 90% go weather wise for the flight tonight, and everything else seems on track, so we’re going to drive up and stay in Orlando tonight. Blogging may be light until the morrow, when I’ll be coming back down (Patricia has business up there).
Hang Together, Or Hang Separately
Paul Eckart, of the Boeing Corporation, writes about the benefits of cooperation in entrepreneurial space. Paul has been dong a great job of bringing investors and entrepreneurs together for the past few years, and it’s great that Boeing is supporting this activity.
More Marburger Thoughts
From Jon Goff (related to my previous post). I thought that this is a very key point, that demonstrates the absurdity of Mike’s (or at least, people like Mark Whittington’s) thinking:
There’s been talk from NASA and some of their less discerning fanboys of a “Lunar COTS”. Basically the idea is to waste $100-120B on using Constellation to setup a small ISS on the Moon, and then once its there start paying commercial entities to service said base. This creates an interesting situation. Since NASA won’t have done anything for over a decade to help make it easier for commercial entities to actually service the moon, they’ll either have to keep sustaining the base themselves while they spend the money to belatedly help develop that commercial capability. Or, if the commercial market has independently created that capability anyhow, that NASA base will likely be only a small niche market in the cislunar space.
Yes, there’s a huge logical disconnect here. Either NASA will have developed technology that makes it easy for the commercial folks to access the moon (which they currently are not) or they are counting on the commercial folks to have done that on their own, in which case, that means that there’s already a thriving lunar market, of which NASA will be a trivial part, because otherwise, it won’t have happened commercially. NASA’s current high-cost, low-activity plans really do have the effect of ensuring the worst of all worlds for them, and us.
First Poppy
With all the rain they’ve had in southern California this winter, I would expect the poppy season to be gorgeous up in Lancaster. This is a good harbinger of that:
Overlooking the first poppy at the reserve would have been easy. The stem was only a couple of inches high and wind gusts bent the young flower almost sideways. The flower was just off the exit road beyond the park’s kiosk.
“I hope it’s a sign of a good bloom that’s coming,” Scott said after she learned of the sighting.
Elgin said she hopes to pass on poppy updates to enthusiasts who phone the information center.
“I figure in the next couple of days there will be five or six more poppies show up, and each day a few more until the full bloom,” Elgin said.
“There’s indications we’ll have a decent season, but I can’t really predict one that will be exceptionally good because Mother Nature can turn right around and prove me wrong.”
Elgin said the only thing predictable about poppies at the reserve is that they’re unpredictable.
I’m going to Space Access in about three weeks, in Phoenix. When I was looking for tickets, it turned out to make a lot more sense to fly into LA, for schedule and ticket price, and I have other business there anyway, so I’m going to fly out, drive to Phoenix and back, and then fly back to Florida. But I’ll probably be going up to Mojave, so I think I’ll take a still and videocam with me, and make the little side trip in Lancaster to the preserve. And hope that it’s both sunny and not windy (an intersection of conditions that’s unfortunately rare that time of year), because that’s the only time that the flowers are really open and in full bloom.
Disconnect
John Marburger, the president’s science advisor, apparently gave an interesting speech the other day, which can be somewhat summarized by this statement:
“Exploration by a few is not the grandest achievement,” he said. “Occupation by many is grander.” (Although he added that by “occupation” he did not necessarily mean settlement but instead “routine access to resources”.) His long-term vision for the future is “one in which exploration has long since ceased and our successors reap the benefits of the new territories.”
As I noted in comments at Space Politics, this is the most visionary thing that I’ve ever known a president’s science adviser to say, and the other notable thing is that he himself says explicitly (as well as implicitly in the above comment) that space isn’t just about science. (As an aside, I’ve always thought that “Science Adviser” was too restrictive a title for that position–it’s always been science and technology.)
As I also noted over there, it’s unfortunate that NASA’s current plans are so completely unattuned to that vision, being specifically designed for “exploration by a few” (and rarely) rather than “occupation by many.” One wonders if he’s ever complained to anyone about that.