Category Archives: Technology and Society

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Train Wrecks In Space

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Thoughts from Wayne Hale (who I hope I’ll see tomorrow in Las Cruces) on how to avoid them:

I have a cheap seat view of the Orion/SLS development. My basic observation: those efforts are drowning in ‘process’. The biggest threat to their success is not technical; it is schedule and cost. If the design and development processes drag the projects out too far, Congress or a new Administration will throw up their hands and call a halt to the whole thing. They did once before; my intuition is that they will again unless something significant happens.

The secret of a good program – as a very senior spacecraft designer once told me – is knowing how much is enough and then not doing anything more.

Right now, inside NASA, we have trained our workforce to do it perfectly. And perfection is very costly and takes a long time. Over in the Commercial Crew Program, the senior leadership is making some progress in toning down the drive for perfection. It is a slow effort and uphill at all times. Over in the Exploration systems area, it all seems to be going the other way. Whatever anybody calls necessary for safety or improvement – without evaluating the real cost or schedule or other impact – seems to be adopted.

So I am guardedly optimistic about the commercial teams actually succeeding in flying humans in space in the next couple of years.
Not so much optimism for the exploration systems, drowning in ‘process’.

The sooner it’s canceled, the better, but I’m sure we’ll waste more billions on it before it happens.

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

The Recycling Religion

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Thoughts from John Tierney:

I realize that true believers don’t need rational reasons for their religion, but it would be nice to see a little soul-searching in regard to some stats in the article: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in the front of the plane, it’s more like 100,000 bottles — and you have to make sure not to rinse any of them with hot water, because that little extra energy could more than cancel out any greenhouse benefit of your labors.

They were told there would be no math.

Business, Technology and Society

El Faro

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Why did it head into Joaquin?

It does seem like poor judgment. Back in ’98, a month after Patricia and I took a cruise on it (and a couple months before she started a job in Puerto Rico), the Fantome went down in Hurricane Mitch, with all hands (though they’d dropped off non-essential crew in Belize City). It was kind of shocking, because we just had met many of them. They were trying to take the ship out to sea, to keep it from getting battered in the harbor. But hurricane tracking wasn’t as good back then. They thought it was going to head toward the Yucatan, and so they headed southeast, but the storm took a turn and they went right into the heart of it.

Ironically, a Honduran woman who was washed out to sea in the flooding was rescued, after she was found holding on to some floating debris by aircraft patrols looking for debris or survivors from the ship. If it hadn’t gone down she probably would have died.

[Monday-morning update]

Sad, but not surprising news. The Coast Guard is declaring the ship sunk. That’s pretty much a foregone conclusion when you’re in a major hurricane with no propulsion.

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

The IPCC

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…was told there would be no math:

His discovery explains why none of the climate models used by the IPCC reflect the evidence of recorded temperatures. The models have failed to predict the pause in global warming which has been going on for 18 years and counting.

“The model architecture was wrong,” he says. “Carbon dioxide causes only minor warming. The climate is largely driven by factors outside our control.”

There is another problem with the original climate model, which has been around since 1896.

While climate scientists have been predicting since the 1990s that changes in temperature would follow changes in carbon dioxide, the records over the past half million years show that not to be the case.

So, the new improved climate model shows CO2 is not the culprit in recent global warming. But what is?

Dr Evans has a theory: solar activity. What he calls “albedo modulation”, the waxing and waning of reflected radiation from the Sun, is the likely cause of global warming.

How could the sun possibly effect climate? Why, that’s just crazy talk!

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.