Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

SpaceX’s Busy Weekend

12 Comments

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.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

New Nukes

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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.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The SLS Mess

19 Comments

A recognition by NASA that the vehicle has no missions. Too bad Congress doesn’t understand that.

This is what happens when you come up with Design Reference Missions to match a design, instead of the right way around.

[Update Wednesday morning]

More from Loren Grush over at The Verge:

But the SLS is expensive, and NASA’s budget is at the lowest it has been in decades, even with the new budget allotment of $19.3 billion for the 2016 fiscal year. The cost of developing the SLS through 2017 is expected to total $18 billion. And once the rocket is built, each launch is going to cost somewhere between $500 and $700 million, which makes it unlikely that the rocket will carry astronauts more than once a year.

If they’re only flying once a year, there’s no way the launch cost is that low. It’s at least two billion. I don’t know where that $500-$700M number comes from, but it’s probably marginal cost, which is a meaningless number for a vehicle with such a low flight rate.

[Bumped]

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, Weird

Writing A Constitution

25 Comments

…for Mars.

They seem to be a little confused about positive versus negative rights. You may have a right to leave, but you can’t demand that someone else pay for it. A “right to oxygen”? Not obvious how to handle that one. The solution to how to overthrow a tyrannical government is, of course, a Second Amendment.

[Wednesday-morning update]

Can a democracy exist on Mars?

…naive, wish­ful think­ing seems to under­pin all of the very hard ques­tions about what gov­er­nance and daily life on Mars might pos­si­bly look like. One rea­son could be the par­tic­i­pants: the orga­nizer of these events is an astro­bi­ol­o­gist, and they seem to have got­ten their insight into pol­i­tics from writ­ers like Stephen Bax­ter. This is not a dig against either men — astro­bi­ol­ogy is an incred­i­bly inter­est­ing sub­ject, and I love Baxter’s books — but they are not experts in gov­er­nance or nation-building (which is what a colony will be). There is, luck­ily, an entire field of aca­d­e­mic study devoted to these ques­tions: aca­d­e­mics who have spent decades under­stand­ing how and why regimes can be resisted, how to build new nations, and so on. They don’t seem to have been included in this discussion.

Instead it looks like most other efforts at imag­in­ing space colonies: well mean­ing but ulti­mately naive tech­nocrats imag­in­ing a west­ern tech­no­cratic soci­ety as the best struc­ture. And just like with Musk’s con­cept of a Mars colony, the seri­ous eco­nomic issues at play here, which are a big deal in design­ing any soci­ety, are ignored. They assume it will be a mostly-deregulated lib­er­tar­ian eco­nomic sys­tem, again despite the inescapable fact that any space colony will have to con­cern itself pri­mary with gen­er­at­ing enough air and water to keep every­one alive. It is utterly baffling.

As he notes, tech people aren’t necessarily the best people to design a functional society.