Since Tuesday, I have been asking communications officials in NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate for clarification on what this extra funding will be used for and whether it’s needed. I haven’t received a response.
Because they don’t have a response. It is programmatic insanity to just throw hundreds of millions of dollars at a manager and expect them to spend it sensibly in a single year.
Eric Berger has the story, including the fact that we’ve done absolutely no research in partial gravity, which will be necessary if people want to procreate on Mars.
I’d note that while it’s never officially been confirmed, it seems unlikely, given the nature of astronauts, that no one has ever done it in space.
Shuttle had very sensitive accelerometers. It's likely that Houston was aware of any rhythmic orbital exertions. https://t.co/RNnYSfnCyi
It’s possible that with a lot of work, some extreme corner of the behavior spectrum could be isolated via specific criteria, which then merits labeling as ‘denialist’. But in truth the characteristics of our ‘proto-denialists’ above are radically different to expectations from the current framing, a framing which may have tainted the term beyond redemption. Nor is this approach a great plan even without that taint, because it tends to mask uncomfortable yet crucial truths, especially those in f) and g). So along with other errors we may end up fooling ourselves that there’s a nice clinical division between skeptics and ‘denialists’. Via naïve assumption of cause from a basic categorization of rhetoric, this is exactly the trap I believe Diethelm and McKee have fallen into. Hoofnagle goes further, dishing out labels of ‘dishonest’ and ‘crank’ yet without proper theoretical grounds; despite his noble motives many of these are bound to stick onto the wrong people. Some dishonesty and crankiness will ride any cultural wave, or backlash to such a wave, or backlash to an evidential cause that is perceived as cultural encroachment. But this does not mean that cranks and liars drive the main action; they do not. Nor can the touted methods reliably distinguish crankiness from cultural influence, or skepticism from either.
I would note (as always) that “denial,” and “denialism,” and “denialist” are not scientific terms. They’re religious ones.
Here are the proceedings of the symposium in the Netherlands. Haven’t read through them, but I expect to see a lot of support for Moon Treaty-like “solutions.”
I’ve been putting off an update for far too long, but I finally did it today. I’m hoping it will fix some site issues, including comments appearing/disappearing.