Some former officials are alarmed at Trump’s proposed cuts at DoE.
I don’t have a problem with R&D, but if this is cutting subsidies (particularly like Solyndra), slash away.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Air Force’s Overkill Problem
How much would it cost to just mass produce some WW II warbirds for this sort of thing? A P-40 with its six fifties would easily take out this stuff.
A Stupid Quiz
This is stupid. Ignores issue of where to get power for electric cars, and that a plant-based diet isn't healthy. https://t.co/AGZzNG3Xmv
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) June 12, 2017
It also assumes that the only potential future energy sources are solar or wind. Completely ignores nuclear.
Private Space Exploration
There was an interesting conference in New York last week (that I would have liked to attend if it had been in my budget). It’s still hard to raise money for it, because modern philanthropists don’t know the history
[Update a while later]
Sorry, added missing link.
U.S. Air Traffic Control
My friend Bob Poole (who has been advocating this for almost half a century) says it’s time to get it out of the sixties.
SpaceX
…is having quite a year. And it’s not half over. Yesterday, Elon implied in a tweet that FH could fly in late September or early October.
China And Space
They seem to be trying to get a little more innovative, but they don’t seem to be in a big hurry about it:
Reusable lift-body launchers will be developed in three stages — rocket-engine partial reusable vehicle, rocket-engine full reusable vehicle and combined cycle-engine reusable vehicle, said Lu.
The Long March carrier rockets still have room for improvement, Lu said, adding that the CALT is developing a heavy-lift launch vehicle with a payload of 140 tonnes to low Earth orbit and 50 tonnes to lunar transfer orbit.
The heavy-lift carrier rocket is currently called the Long March-9, and it should be sent into space by 2030, he said.
[Via Parabolic Arc]
NASA’s New Astronaut Class
Train for a while, maybe fly to ISS, maybe not, take jobs in industry to go to other planets. https://t.co/BwOmFKYvWg
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) June 8, 2017
Mars
Another demonstration of how fundamentally unserious we are about it, and what a fraud NASA’s #JourneyToMars is:
“Right now we are unconsciously setting ourselves up for a very difficult Mars program in the 2020s, because of all these immediate needs,” Casey Dreier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society, tells The Verge. “We don’t want to have a problem where we’ve prepared these samples and then they just rot on the ground because we’re unable to commit to bringing them back.”
Dreier argues that, above all, the most immediate need is the development of a new Mars telecommunications orbiter. Any future spacecraft we send to the Red Planet is going to need a way to communicate with mission teams on Earth. Right now, NASA has three operational satellites orbiting Mars, but only two — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey — are primarily used for telecommunications. And these vehicles are getting old. Both orbiters have been at Mars for more than a decade and have lasted much longer than the span of their primary missions. By the time spacecraft are sent to retrieve samples from Mars, these satellites may have broken down and have stopped functioning. There are other orbiters circling Mars, operated by NASA and other space agencies, but these satellites are primarily aimed at doing science, and their orbits make them ill-suited for telecommunications, according to the Planetary Society.
But we have a giant rocket and a capsule in development that we don’t need to get to Mars, so we have that going for us.
Public Speaking
This looks like a very useful development. I find this a strange attitude:
Let’s just remember that bilingual speakers are by definition fluent in two languages yet are too often deemed uneducated or undeserving of opportunity simply for sounding not quite like the people we see on TV.
As someone really only fluent in one language, I’m always impressed by people who are bi- or multi-lingual, even if they have an accent.