Remember, when you read about all this, like the Iran “deal,” this is a non-treaty treaty. There is nothing that Obama can do on his own without Congress that can’t be undone by another president. It’s amusing to read pieces like this that assume there is.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Making Space Ships
I’m glad to see NASA funding things like this, but the amount invested is a spit in the bucket of SLS/Orion funding, though the value is far greater.
“Digging In Their Heels” On Climate
Note the implicit but potentially false assumption in this paper.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Note to global-warming alarmists: You’re doing it wrong:
The arguments about global warming too often sound more like theology than science. Oh, the word “science” gets thrown around a great deal, but it’s cited as a sacred authority, not a fallible process that staggers only awkwardly and unevenly toward the truth, with frequent lurches in the wrong direction. I cannot count the number of times someone has told me that they believe in “the science,” as if that were the name of some omniscient god who had delivered us final answers written in stone. For those people, there can be only two categories in the debate: believers and unbelievers. Apostles and heretics.
This is, of course, not how science works, and people who treat it this way are not showing their scientific bona fides; they are violating the very thing in which they profess such deep belief. One does not believe in “science” as an answer; science is a way of asking questions. At any given time, that method produces a lot of ideas, some of which are correct, and many of which are false, in part or in whole.
Yup.
[Update Wednesday morning]
The Democrats’ War On Science:
The name-calling, divisive “debate” around climate change is not just bad science and bad public policy making, but as I noted yesterday, it’s not even good political tactics. If either side could point to a lot of progress and say “Yes, it’s unsavory, but it works” — well, I still wouldn’t like it, but I’d have to concede that it was effective.
But throughout decades of increasingly angry delegitimization of the skeptics, decades in which the vilification has actually increased in volume even as most of the skeptics have moved toward the activists on the basic scientific questions, the net result in public policy has been very little.
And hopefully, will continue to be.
Blast From The Past
This is a bizarre story, to me, right out of the mid-90s. I didn’t know that NASA could grant an “exclusive license” for things that other people came up with, and I didn’t know that KST was still attempting to do tow launch.
Passage To Mars
I saw a pre-screening of the new film this morning, and talked briefly to Pascal and Jean-Christophe. Then we ran errands the rest of the day. I’ll have a review up somewhere this week. It’s a great documentary.
Risk And Ethics In Commercial Spaceflight
Sara Langston has a new paper out. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks interesting (I may not agree with it entirely, but really don’t know).
The New Space Race
The WaPo has a nice survey of all the passenger vehicles coming down the pike (so to speak). I’d note that it’s not just the Lynx Mark II that may not be built, it’s the Lynx Mark I as well.
Elon’s Mars Plans
He wants to send humans in less than a decade.
That's about when NASA plans to redo Apollo 8, probably at ten times the cost. https://t.co/JUiqNVc6Ue
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) June 2, 2016
Guns, Gorillas, And Moon Missions
Thoughts on the futile attempts to make us perfectly safe.
Gee, someone should write a book about that.
Bezos Versus Musk
They are both trying to open up space to humanity, but they have fundamentally different philosophies:
“Let me assure you, this is the best planet. We need to protect it, and the way we will is by going out into space,” [Bezos] told Recode Editor at large Walt Mossberg. “You don’t want to live in a retrograde world where we have to freeze population growth.”
Bezos says tasks that require lots of energy shouldn’t be handled on Earth. Instead, we should perform them in space, and that will happen within the next few hundred years.
“Energy is limited here. In at least a few hundred years … all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet,” Bezos added. “Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial. You shouldn’t be doing heavy energy on earth. We can build gigantic chip factories in space.”
Solar energy, for instance, is more practical for factories in space, he said.
“We don’t have to actually build them here,” he said. “The Earth shades itself, [whereas] in space you can get solar power 24/7. … The problem with other planets … people will visit Mars, and we will settle Mars, and people should because it’s cool, but for heavy industry, I would actually put it in space.”
This is the O’Neillian vision (which drove the founders of XCOR, and I continue to share, after all these decades. Mars isn’t the goal; allowing people to go wherever they want, including Mars, should be the goal. Elon’s vision (and that of the Apollo to Mars contingent) is actually quite blinkered. He is a romantic, and a planetary chauvinist (who, by the way, opposes space solar power, or at least thinks it won’t work).
But I’m happy to see them both pursue their visions. Competition is good.