Category Archives: Technology and Society

Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Dangers Of Mars

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The movie understates them. I vehemently disagree with this, though:

Martian gravity is roughly one-third the gravity on Earth. Experiments on the International Space Station show that plants, animals and humans all suffer in weightlessness, but no one knows how living creatures will fare in reduced gravity.

“Maybe plants will be happy, maybe animals will be happy, maybe humans will be happy,” McKay says. “Or maybe not.” The effect of reduced gravity isn’t easily tested ahead of time and though probably not a huge problem, it could be a “showstopper,” McKay says.

It is easily tested ahead of time. Stop wasting money on a giant rocket and build a gravity lab. The fact that we’re not is one of the strongest indicators that neither NASA or Congress are serious about Mars.

[Update a few minutes later]

Barriers to colonizing Mars. I don’t buy this number for a minute, though:

NASA’s current Mars mission concept would set us back about $50 billion over the course of a decade, or about twice as much as the moon program cost between 1962 and 1972.

First, in current-year dollars, we spent more like a hundred billion on Apollo (the $25B is in sixties dollars). But they’re probably going to spend that much just on SLS/Orion, without any actual Mars hardware.

[Late-morning update]

Don’t worry, Matt Damon won’t get stranded on Mars, because NASA can’t get him there.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

NASA And Safety

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A long piece at Aerospace America by Debra Werner and Anatoly Zak. I haven’t had time to read the whole thing yet, but this is absurd:

“The actual loss of crew value will vary depending on the mission,” William C. Hill, NASA deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development, says by email. “This makes the loss-of-crew number one example where it is difficult to compare shuttle with Orion/SLS.” To evaluate safety, NASA analyzes risk for specific elements of a mission and aggregates those numbers. Launch and ascent gets a rating. In-space activity gets another. Atmospheric entry, descent and landing gets a third. For launch and ascent, NASA will require Lockheed Martin to show that Orion poses no more than a 1-in-1,400 risk of loss of crew. Boeing must show that SLS poses no more than a 1-in-550 risk. For Orion’s entry, descent and landing, the risk must be no more than 1 fatal accident in 650 missions.

Neither company will be capable of “showing” that for vehicles used so rarely. One in fourteen hundred for a vehicle that is not planned (and can’t be afforded) to fly more than a couple dozen times effectively means that NASA is demanding zero risk of LOC.

Someone should write a book about this sort of thing.

Oh, wait.

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

Andy Weir And Commercial Spaceflight

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He says it’s critical.

I think he’s falling into a common myth here, though (the one promulgated by Margaret Lazarus Dean):

…people like to see new things happen. We’ve had ISS [the International Space Station] up there for years. It feels like, to the layman, that NASA hasn’t done anything really new, or accomplished anything very significant in a long time. Now building a big-ass space station is actually really hard. There’s also kind of a bruised national pride that we don’t have a manned spaceflight program anymore. I think you’ll see interest in NASA get rekindled once the Orion program [NASA’s latest manned capsule] gets up and running, and we actually start sending our own astronauts back into space without hitching a ride with the Russians.

We do have a “manned spaceflight program.” It’s called ISS and Commercial Crew. If Orion ever flies, it’s not the way we’ll be getting our own astronauts into space without hitching rides. That’s what Commercial Crew will do, if Congress doesn’t succeed in sabotaging it. Orion will look like an also-ran with all of the commercial activity that will be taking place by then.

And speaking of commercial spaceflight and the need to reduce costs, Alan Boyle discussed that subject with Lori Garver:

What’s the big technological innovation to watch for in space in 2018?

“Getting the costs down to get to space. That’s key, that’s been a barrier, and that is happening. Certainly by 2018 you will have multiple launches for a lot less money.

Clearly, Congress and NASA don’t agree. They think we need a big, expensive, obsolete-before-it-first-flies expendable rocket.

[Update a few minutes later]

Lee Billings: Why the first mission to Mars probably won’t look anything like The Martian:

NASA has no plans for a large, spinning cycler spacecraft between Earth and Mars, probably because such a spacecraft is considered unaffordable. In fact, ongoing squabbles in Washington over how to divvy up NASA’s persistently flat budget means that essentially all the crucial components for the agency’s planned voyages—the heavy-lift rockets, the power sources, engines and spacecraft for deep space, the landers, surface habitats and ascent vehicles—are behind schedule and still in early stages of development, if they are being developed at all. And the agency’s Journey to Mars could all go away, very quickly, at the whim of some future President or Congressional majority. Mired in the muck of politics, NASA may not manage to land even one crew of astronauts on Mars by 2035—let alone three.

It seem quite unlikely, absent a dramatic change in approach by the agency and the Congress.

And the planetary-protection issue is potentially a show stopper. We have to decide what’s more important: science, or settlement.

[Update a couple minutes later]

And here‘s the New York Times review:

The movie gently thumps several issues: It’s unambiguously on the side of science and rationalism with glints of manifest destiny, American can-do-ism and a little flag-waving folded in.

Well, that will piss off the SJWs.

[Noon update]

Ed Lu says NASA isn’t dead, but it’s lost:

“The debate about humans versus robots is beyond stupid,” he said. “Moving people outward is the whole reason for going. Otherwise, what are we doing? What is the purpose of going if not to live, go places, do things, spread humanity?”

Unmanned missions are easier because you can do them one at a time and find success through scientific breakthroughs. Lu said manned missions, on the other hand, have to be planned with a broader strategy or you’re just “doing random stuff.” And that’s the piece NASA is missing.

Asked if he thinks we’ll get back to manned missions, Lu said he’s counting on the private sector to get us there.

That’s a safer bet.

[Afternoon update]

Paul Spudis says that NASA’s Mars plans are delusional.

Yes. Yes they are.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Hillary’s Email Woes

18 Comments

…deepen:

The latest release of roughly 6,300 more pages of emails is just the latest installment of a prolonged disclosure process that has proved to be painful for Clinton’s presidential campaign. The roiling controversy has opened up the Democratic front-runner to accusations that she was trying to dodge public records rules and that she put sensitive material at risk — allegations Clinton denies.
Wednesday’s release marks the first time the State Department itself has deemed messages in Clinton’s account to warrant protection at the SECRET level — the middle tier of the national security classification system. State earlier classified one Benghazi-related message SECRET, but did so at the request of the FBI.

Well, if she denies it, that should settle it.

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

The Uncertainty Of Climate Sensitivity

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…and its implications for the Paris “negotiations”:

In my previous post Climate sensitivity: lopping off the fat tail, I argued that it is becoming increasingly difficult to defend high values of ECS. However, the uncertainty is sufficiently large that we can’t really identify a meaningful ‘best value’ of sensitivity, or rule out really high values.

A key issue is that emerging estimates of aerosol forcing are considerably lower than what was used in the AR5 determinations of ECS, implying lower values of ECS than was determined by the AR5.

This uncertainty in ECS makes emission targets rather meaningless. It will be interesting to see how this uncertainty is factored into the Paris negotiations

Note, there are other papers on this general topic that are in the review process, I expect a spate of such papers to appear during the next month.

Paris is doomed to failure, thankfully.

Business, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

NASA’s Bureaucracy

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This comment over at NASA Watch is a pretty good description of the problem, on the 57th anniversary of the agency transforming from the NACA (which it needs to return to) to NASA:

In another current post on NW, Wayne Hale laments that the lengthy list of specifications is going to kill the commercial crew effort. Why this lengthy list of specs? Maybe because the NASA people who wrote the program requirements had no actual experience in developing any space hardware, and they did not know which specs to select, so they just included them all?

I should also note that it is not because more experienced and more qualified people were not available in these instances of program management, vehicle design, or spec writing. There were people with experience in Shuttle, Spacehab (commercial), Mir systems development, and with DOD programs, but the NASA management went with people they “knew” despite their lack of experience. You can look all the way to the top of the program, the AA for manned spaceflight, and he has little more experience, and so how can he provide the guidance for others to “learn the trade”. In fact he appears to have been responsible for naming a large number of his contemporaries, all from his old organization, payload operations, to leading positions. I don’t think they’ve worked out too well.

The mission ops directorate has the right idea-they require people to be certified and as they get certified their careers progress and they move from document writer to flight controller to flight director. The other technical/engineering disciplines do not have this and so we wound up in a situation where virtually anyone with a degree can be selected for almost any position.

Now, especially after 3 decades of ISS, you have the big bureaucracy in which the main experience base is in meeting attendance. And the people without the experience in the top positions are fearful of the people who actually have any education and experience. This is a corrupt bureaucracy.

That Wayne Hale post, from five years ago, is sadly prophetic.