Anyone have recommendations for best place to view from not on base? I screwed up and didn’t get a base pass, and now it’s too late.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Final Frontier
It’s time to claim your piece. An interesting read on space property rights at Aeon, with a lot of quotes from your humble correspondent. [H/T to Paul Dietz]
Fossil Fuels
Matt Ridley on how they’ll save the world.
The conclusion:
The one thing that will not work is the one thing that the environmental movement insists upon: subsidizing wealthy crony capitalists to build low-density, low-output, capital-intensive, land-hungry renewable energy schemes, while telling the poor to give up the dream of getting richer through fossil fuels.
(Yes, behind paywall, but google the headline and you should be able to read it.)
[Update a while later]
I’m very sorry to hear about Piers Sellers’ illness, and hope for the best, but this NYT op-ed seems to me to be delusional:
All this as the world’s population is expected to crest at around 9.5 billion by 2050 from the current seven billion. Pope Francis and a think tank of retired military officers have drawn roughly the same conclusion from computer model predictions: The worst impacts will be felt by the world’s poorest, who are already under immense stress and have meager resources to help them adapt to the changes. They will see themselves as innocent victims of the developed world’s excesses. Looking back, the causes of the 1789 French Revolution are not a mystery to historians; looking forward, the pressure cooker for increased radicalism, of all flavors, and conflict could get hotter along with the global temperature.
Last year may also be seen in hindsight as the year of the Death of Denial. Globally speaking, most policy makers now trust the scientific evidence and predictions, even as they grapple with ways to respond to the problem. And most Americans — 70 percent, according to a recent Monmouth University poll — believe that the climate is changing. So perhaps now we can move on to the really hard part of this whole business.
I hope that will change next January. As Ridley points out (as does Alex Epstein), it is the poor who would be hit the hardest byaabandoning fossil fuels (particularly with plunging prices), much more so than by “climate change.”
Thirteen Years Ago
They had twelve days to live, but they didn’t know it, and their fate was sealed.
Trump, And Space
The headline of this piece by Mark Whittington is a perfect example of Betteridge’s Law.
SpaceX’s Busy Weekend
Apparently they test fired the recovered stage last night, as they prepare for tomorrow’s Vandenberg launch:
Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, confirmed in tweets that the company had just conducted a static test firing of the Falcon 9 first stage. “Data looks good overall, but engine 9 showed thrust fluctuations,” he wrote.
The engine in question, he said, is an “outer engine” on a ring of eight that surround a center engine. Musk suggested “debris ingestion” might be the cause of the thrust fluctuations, with more study of the engine planned.
It will be interesting to see if they have a similar problem on tomorrow’s recovered stage (assuming they succeed, of course), or if it was an anomaly. But they’ll know more after they borescope it.
Also, this is the first I’d heard that they can’t do a land landing tomorrow due to paperwork issues. I think people had been saying it was performance. And it’s pretty silly to worry about the environment, considering all the other activity going on there.
[Update a while later]
SpaceX’s success launches space start ups to new heights.
It’s hard to overestimate the psychological impact of this sort of thing. Ultimately, it will be the death knell for pork projects like SLS.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, I don’t understand this piece:
Landing on ship at sea offers a greater safety margin, especially as SpaceX ventures farther into space, said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “If you are coming back at higher speed, a small error can mean a large miss distance,” he said. “For safety purposes, you have a wider area to work with with a drone ship.”
A drone ship also offers SpaceX greater flexibility for landings, given the potential for land-based space ports to become crowded, he said. For Sunday’s launch, there’s another, even more practical consideration: SpaceX does not have a landing pad at Vandenberg. In the successful Dec. 21 rocket landing, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster came to rest less than 10 minutes after launch at a location about six miles south of the Cape Canaveral launch pad.
Does that make sense to anyone else? As far as I know, the only reason to land on a ship is because you don’t have the performance to come back to the launch site. And Koenigsmann himself said they weren’t coming to Vandenberg because they hadn’t completed environmental paperwork, not because they didn’t have a place to land.
Settling Venus
Some questions from Jon Goff. It’s one of the places that we don’t need a gee lab to know that we can live and procreate there.
The Presidential Race And Space
NASA Spaceflight is starting a series on the candidates’ views. Carson seems clueless.
The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel
The 2016 annual report is out. I haven’t read it yet, but that’s my assignment for this afternoon. In my book, I quoted extensively from the 2014 version, and was quite critical. According to initial tweets, they’re very concerned about safety in SLS/Orion. They should be.
[Update a while later]
Here’s more reporting on the SLS mess from Eric Berger.
New Nukes
A Canadian company has gotten funding to move forward on a molten-salt reactor. I think a lot of sensible people are realizing that if carbon really is a problem, nuclear is the solution, despite the insanity of people like Naomi Oreskes.
But my question is: Would this be a useful tech for space, either for electric power generation or propulsion? The company could do a spin off called Extraterrestrial Energy.