A blog post with the European perspective, from Jan Woerner. It’s almost as though he read my book.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Unlocking The Brain
A brain implant is allowing a locked-in woman to communicate. Faster please; this is one of my greatest nightmares.
Alpha Centauri
I think this is the future of space science.
Trump, And Climate
Thoughts from Judith Curry. tl;dr He’s not crazy:
In my post Trumping the elites, I stated that Trump’s election provided an opportunity for a more rational energy and climate policy. Many in the blog comments and the twitosphere found this to be an incomprehensible statement.
Here is what I think needs to be done, and I do see opportunities for these in a Trump administration:
- a review of climate science that includes a faithful and transparent representation of uncertainties in 21st century projections of global and regional climate change
- reopening of the ‘endangerment’ issue, as to whether warming is ‘dangerous’
- a do-over on assessing the social cost of carbon, that accounts for full uncertainty in the climate model simulations, the integrated assessment models and their inputs.
- support funding for Earth observing systems (satellite, surface, ocean) and research on natural climate variability.
Even if politics are to ‘trump’ the conclusions of these analyses, it would be clear that the Trump administration has done its due diligence on this issue in terms of gathering and assessing information. If the Trump administration were to accomplish the first 3 items, they might have a scientifically and economically defensible basis for pulling out of the Paris agreement and canceling Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
I noted the other day on Twitter that if Myron is the new EPA administrator, we’ll finally have one who is not a rabid environmentalist, and will follow the law, doing actual cost/benefit analyses. As a bonus, many EPA employees may quit (though it’s unclear if they have any marketable skills outside of government).
Trump, And Space
I was on The Space Show yesterday discussing this, but Marcia Smith has a good rundown.
The subject of fueling the Falcon while crew was aboard is mentioned there, and it came up on the show yesterday. I need to write something up on this, but my take is the usual one. It’s probably saf(er) to load crew after propellant has been loaded, but it’s not at all obvious to me that doing it with them on board is sufficiently unsafe to justify the extra cost/time. As always, the notion of “human rating” is nonsense, there is no single correct level of safety. It depends on the purpose of the mission. I’d let the astronauts decide (knowing that they will know that if they won’t accept the risk, they probably won’t fly, because others will).
Mars
Bob Zubrin reviews Ron Howard’s National Geographic series, and Elon Musk.
Patricia and I had dinner with Leonard and Barbara David Saturday night in Austin. He’s on a book tour for NatGeo for his new book that accompanies the series.
A Trump Space Program
I don’t understand where this talk about a return of Mike Griffin is coming from. I’d be very surprised if either Bob Walker or Mark Albrecht would recommend that.
[Update a few minutes later]
Not space related, but here is a report on potential cabinet members. Needless to say, I’m not as hair on fire as Jerry Coyne is. Bolton would be a good choice for Secretary of State. I think that Corker would be a disaster. Not sure about Newt.
I think, from a space perspective, the worst thing about the Trump win is that Jeff Sessions has been such a close supporter. If he becomes head of OMB, killing off SLS will be impossible, unless we can come up with something more useful for Marshall to do.
Arrival
This looks like an interesting movie.
Orion
The slow, inevitable death begins:
Entering into the transition period between presidents, NASA’s administrator, Charles Bolden, has encouraged the next White House administration to continue support for Orion and the Space Launch System rocket, which account for more than $3 billion annually. Congress, too, has expressed a strong interest in continuing work on these vehicles.
However one source told Ars that it may become necessary to choose either the Orion capsule or NASA rocket in the coming years as the space agency looks to pare back its budget, and this might necessitate going to a less expensive, more privately developed vehicle. “Look,” this source said, “if you have to cancel a program, this is a responsible way of lining up a replacement.”
It will be a bloody political battle, but ultimately, SLS won’t be far behind.
Trump, And Space
Jeff Foust’s take. I’ll be talking about this on The Space Show on Sunday.