# Standard boilerplate to call the main() function to begin
# the program.
if __name__ == ‘__main__’:
main()
*************************************
When I run it, it simply copies the old file to the new one, without doing the replacement. I know that it’s seeing the pattern, because if I run the replace function in an if statement, it says that it found it.
It seems to be news, so most of you probably heard that there was an explosion on the pad at LC-40 this morning, leading up to a static test fire for the upcoming launch of the AMOS satellite.
What we know so far: No one was injured, but the bird (a $200M payload) was lost. It’s a setback for Spacecom, which was about to be purchased by China pending a successful deployment. It happened prior to ignition, and SpaceX is calling it a “pad anomaly,” so it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rocket itself. But it will be a setback in SpaceX’s aggressive fall schedule until they determine the cause and how to prevent it in the future, and repair the pad.
It’s worth noting that they won’t be launching crew from that pad, but from 39B. But Phil McAlister and Kathy Lueders will want to know if the abort system would have saved crew had they been on top of the rocket. The immediate interesting question to me is whether or not they had any warning. The rocket itself has failure onset detection systems to trigger an abort, but it’s unclear if the pad itself does, and how much warning they would have had to pull the D-ring on the Dracos. Phil and Kathy had also better brace for a very stupid Congressional hearing, and we can all expect to hear a lot of illogical nonsense about how SpaceX should forget about Mars, and how this proves that reusable rockets don’t work.
[Update a couple minutes later]
One point as follow up to that last graf: SpaceX had been requesting to fuel with crew aboard, and NASA had been considering it. That’s probably out the window now.
[Update a couple more minutes later]
There were nine more flights scheduled this year. That was always unlikely, but it’s certainly not going to happen now.
Aaaaaand here’s the video. I’ve heard that people felt it in Orlando. It may have been the largest explosion at the Cape in history.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is great news, if true.
It sounds like that there was
But I’m surprised they fuel the payload on the pad. I thought that storables were filled during integration.
[Update a couple minutes later]
OK, not such good news. Jon Goff reminded me that they use hydrazine for ACS in the upper stage. Though I’d still think they’d fuel that during horizontal integration, not on the pad.
[Late-morning update]
Here’s the full OIG report on Commercial Crew that just happened to come out today. I’ll probably do a separate blog post on it. I would note that the primary reason that it continues to slip, and that NASA has no apparently problem taking six months to do a two-week review, is that space, and American access to it, isn’t important.
Because in addition to being corrupt liars, utterly indifferent to national security, she and her team are incompetent dolts. But that shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s been paying attention for the past quarter century. Which is unfortunately far too many people.
Is there any point at which the Democrats finally come to realize that she and they just aren’t up to the job? They can’t even do a decent cover up.
I’ve set it up on my linux server to…well…serve audio/video via apache in a browser tab. Other machines on the LAN (including a Windows machine) can see it, and even control it (i.e., pause, start, etc.), but as the clock ticks along, no audio or video comes through on them, in either Firefox or Chrome.
Of course, there’s always this: “Despite it being a small sample there appeared to be a slowing of cognitive decline and functional decline. The group with a high degree of amyloid removal were basically stable. If we could reproduce this it would be terrific.”
I’m heading back to California tomorrow, for the first time in about six weeks (the longest I’ve been away from home since I moved back in 2009), but meanwhile, my long-awaited piece in The New Atlantis is on line.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sorry, that’s just a preview, unless you’re a subscriber. The full piece will be free on line in the future, but I’m not sure when.
NASA is basically admitting that it will be a minimum (if they can ever get to two flights a year) of a billion dollars per flight on an ongoing basis, even ignoring DDT&E. For a 130 tonne payload, that’s over $3500/lb, more than three times the cost of Falcon Heavy.
Mr. Cofnas begins the paper with the story of Socrates, who was executed for “corrupting the youth” of Greece. Forebodingly, he adds, “[T]he philosophy of his prosecutors — that morality-threatening scientific investigation should be prohibited — flourishes even today.”
To support his case, Mr. Cofnas focuses on the taboo subject of group differences in intelligence, which he says is suppressed by those who believe that even discussing the topic is “morally wrong or morally dangerous.”
Those who embrace such a viewpoint obviously do so with the honorable intention of preventing discrimination. However, the proverbial road to hell is paved with good intentions. Such misguided efforts to maintain perfect equality can hamper the advancement of knowledge. Mr. Cofnas states:
“[W]hen hypotheses are regarded as supporting certain moral values or desirable political goals, scientists often refuse to abandon them in the light of empirical evidence.”
Is he right? Absolutely, yes.
Not only do intellectuals refuse to abandon politically correct beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence, but simply questioning them can ruin a person’s career. Lawrence Summers’ tenure as president of Harvard was cut short because he suggested that there are intellectual differences between men and women. As a result of such punitive pushback, some researchers are afraid to investigate differences between male and female brains, which certainly exist. Without a doubt, this reticence is holding back the field of neuroscience.
A similar chilling effect can be seen in climatology. The only politically correct belief regarding the climate is that humans are 100% responsible for everything bad that happens and that the Four Horsemen are already marching toward Earth. Questioning that apocalyptic and unscientific belief has resulted in multiple researchers being labeled “climate deniers.” Climatology would greatly benefit from the more skeptical approach of so-called “lukewarmers,” but far too many are ostracized and demonized.
This is why I always laugh when I hear about “the Republican war on science.”
I’d add that, as I’ve long said, the results of studying statistical differences among groups should have zero effect on public policy. If you think it should, you are a collectivist, not an individualist. Or to put it another way, you are a leftist.
This is related: The analysis of Integrated Assessment Models create a trillion-dollar error. I’m glad that Nic Lewis does analyses like this (not sure how he’s funded), even if it has to be published at Judith Curry’s blog, instead of the journals.
At first glance, these suggestions from my long-time friend Linda Billings seem sort of anodyne, but she gives away the game at the end:
Deep in my brain and in my heart I think and feel that colonizing other planets and exploiting extraterrestrial resources would be immoral at this stage of human development. I’m not at all sure that Eilene Galloway would agree with me. I wish I could talk with her about it.
I’m pretty sure that Eilene would disagree. I know for certain that I do.
Things have been kind of quiet on the blog because a) I’m still busy renovating the house in Florida and more importantly, b) my bandwidth is limited here, as there’s no Internet service to the house, and I have to rely on tethering to my phone.
I didn’t post about it at the time, but my Twitter followers know that I drove up to the Cape on Saturday afternoon, with a press pass to the SpaceX launch early Sunday morning. It was the first Falcon launch I’ve seen on the east coast (I did see one pass through the clouds at the January Vandenberg launch).
It was impressive. I don’t know what the quantity distance is for that vehicle, but we were on a causeway in the middle of the Indian River at CCAFS, and I think the pad was only a couple miles away, judging from the time that I saw the ignition and started to hear (and feel) the roar. It was sufficiently bright that it temporarily shut down the center of my retinas, but I could see it all the way downrange past staging. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a rocket naked eye that far downrange. It was very impressive, but I hope it becomes routine, including the landing, if it hasn’t already. The next step is to start reflying those stages that they continue to collect (six now). I told John Taylor that SpaceX now has a bigger fleet of reusable rockets than NASA ever had.
Speaking of which, Stephanie Osborn has a guest post from a fellow former NASA colleague with thoughts on the failure of reusability of the Shuttle.
I think that whether single pour or the selected segmented design, solid rockets on a reusable crewed vehicle were a mistake. And the fact that Jim Fletcher was head of NASA (and “Barfing Jake” Garn) is also part of the explanation for building them in Utah, Florida’s environmental regulations notwithstanding.
But as I’ve noted in the past, it’s a huge fallacy of hasty generalization to attempt to draw lessons about reusability of spacecraft from that program.