I always take news stories about space (or anything, really) in China with more than one grain of salt, but if this turns out to be true, I’ll start to take them more seriously. No serious space power is going to do much in space as long as they continue to throw all the hardware away.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Atmospheric Plant Food
Shockingly, when you increase the levels, the plants like it.
Who could have predicted such a thing?
[Update a few minutes later]
Mark Steyn versus the Big Climate enforcers.
Reusing Falcons
SpaceX has just announced that they’re going to attempt to add another vehicle to their reusable fleet, with another landing attempt at sea early next Wednesday morning from the Cape.
Meanwhile, here’s the most comprehensive analysis I’ve seen so far of how much they can reduce cost and prices, but it’s based on a lot of assumptions.I found this curious:
Musk said the fuel used on a Falcon 9 is between $200,000 and $300,000. Reserving fuel in the first stage for landing adds mass to the vehicle and deprives it of performance, effectively carrying fuel instead of extra payload — a penalty that expendable rockets do not need to pay. Musk was addressing not the performance penalty, but the issue of fuel cost, which is a non-issue in the overall economics of reusability.
Actually, much of the point of reusability is to get to the point at which one cares about propellant costs. It’s expendables in which they are a non-issue.
“A Dark Future”
In which we may not be able to predict natural variability.
Gee, just like now. This is profoundly ignorant of history. Does he imagine anyone predicted the Medieval Warm Period? Or the Little Ice Age? Has he ever heard of the Dust Bowl?
The Vegetarian Myth
Dr. Eades reviews what appears to be a very interesting book.
My thoughts: No, we can’t sustain the current human population without agriculture. But then, we’re not sure how we’re going to sustain a human population in space, either. We need advances in technology to solve either problem. I suspect that we’ll be manufacturing meat in the not-too-distant future that will have the taste, texture and nutrition of the real thing, and that will be good for all, including wildlife. But even absent that, I’d amend the old bumper sticker. Grains aren’t food. Grains are what food eats.
Silencing Dissent On Science
George Will describes the latest attempts at censorship of those who deign to disagree with our intellectual and moral superiors (just ask them!) on the Left:
“The debate is settled,” says Obama. “Climate change is a fact.” Indeed. The epithet “climate change deniers,” obviously coined to stigmatize skeptics as akin to Holocaust deniers, is designed to obscure something obvious: Of course the climate is changing; it never is not changing — neither before nor after the Medieval Warm Period (end of the 9th century to the 13th century) and the Little Ice Age (1640s to 1690s), neither of which was caused by fossil fuels.
Today, debatable questions include: To what extent is human activity contributing to climate change? Are climate change models, many of which have generated projections refuted by events, suddenly reliable enough to predict the trajectory of change? Is change necessarily ominous because today’s climate is necessarily optimum? Are the costs, in money expended and freedom curtailed, of combating climate change less than the cost of adapting to it?
But these questions may not forever be debatable. The initial target of Democratic “scientific” silencers is ExxonMobil, which they hope to demonstrate misled investors and the public about climate change. There is, however, no limiting principle to restrain unprincipled people from punishing research entities, advocacy groups and individuals.
That’s the problem with leftist opponents to limited government; there are never any limiting principles on anything.
Site Problems
I know it’s been down since last night. My provider apparently had a major SNAFU, and the whole farm was down. Just came back on line a few minutes ago.
My “Ending Apolloism” Talk At Space Access
I’ve uploaded the Powerpoint to the site.
It’s an outgrowth of my “SLS Roadblock” project, which I’m figuring out how to either wrap up or extend.
[Update a while later]
Erratum: At the time I originally created these charts, for the FISO telecon at the end of January, Dana had proposed the Space Settlement bill. He has since actually introduced it.
Vivaldi
Five reasons to switch to the new browser.
I’m going to try it, but not sure there’s an rpm for it, so may have to build.
Peer Review
It almost always provides a false sense of validity of a scientific paper.