Category Archives: Technology and Society

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

“The Ferrari Of Rocket Engines”

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This is what happens when a reporter has no idea what is going on, and is simply an uncritical stenographer for NASA PAO and officials:

“It is the most complicated rocket engine out there on the market, but that’s because it’s the Ferrari of rocket engines,” said Kathryn Crowe, RS-25 propulsion engineer.

“When you’re looking at designing a rocket engine, there are several different ways you can optimise it. You can optimise it through increasing its thrust, increasing the weight to thrust ratio, or increasing its overall efficiency and how it consumes your propellant. With this engine, they maximised all three.”

The resulting engine, according to Martin Burkey of the SLS strategic communications team, blows everything we currently have out of the water.

“They ‘maximized’ all three.”

Know what they didn’t optimize? They didn’t optimize on cost. Nowhere in that article does it mention that those are actually reusable rocket engines, from the Space Shuttle. But they’re going to throw them all away the next time they use them. Ferraris are expensive, too, but at least they don’t throw the car away each time they take it for a drive.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Huma

102 Comments

It’s her turn to get grilled.

As someone noted on Twitter this morning, somewhere is an underpaid IT guy who’s not going to be willing to do time for Hillary. It’s really starting to look like the White House is getting ready to throw Hillary under the bus. Does that mean Biden? Hard to see who else they’d throw their support to. He’d be the natural one to be an Obama third term.

[Update a few minutes later]

A majority (and not just “likely voters”) want there to be a criminal probe. Because they’re not as stupid as the Democrats need them to be.

And it looks like she’s not going to get Ron Fournier back:

Where do I start? How about with the Clinton campaign’s ridiculous suggestion that coughing up the server and email were voluntary acts. We know that’s bunk—because Clinton herself said she wouldn’t surrender the people’s records without a fight.

As Safire noted in the 90s, she is a congenital liar. Of course, Democrats normally like that; so is Bill, but he’s a lot better at it.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Democrats are in near-panic mode. This is hilarious:

Trippi said another Democrat might well get into the race, but that beating Clinton was a very different proposition.

“I don’t think Joe Biden has given up on his desire to run for president and I’m sure there are others out there who want to get into this race. I just don’t see a path yet for how you get to the nomination,” he said.

…That leaves many Democrats in a painful place: Believing that, in the end, Clinton will be the nominee but worrying that her vulnerabilities could negate the many advantages — from demographics to the electoral college map — that they believe the party nominee should enjoy.

The progressive strategist wondered “how much longer this drip, drip, drip” of controversy surrounding the emails would continue.

“There’s a hesitance that emerges in terms of her trustworthiness,” the source said. “At some point, people will start to ask whether this hurts her electability in the general election.”

You don’t say.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, this is hilarious, too:

But concerned Democrats keep coming back to the same question: Why did the Clinton campaign not simply hand over the private server when the controversy first erupted in March?

“It’s bizarre,” said the Democratic strategist. “Let me give you some simple strategic communications advice: Put everything out first, on your terms. If you wait, or you are forced to do it, you always lose and look bad. … That is exactly what is happening here, and I find it inexplicable.”

I know this sounds crazy, but try applying Occam’s Razor. She didn’t turn it over for the same reason she set it up in the first place, in order to protect and cover up a lot of sleazy/criminal/duplicitous activity.

[Friday-morning update]

Why Hillary’s server matters:

To illustrate why this matters so much, perhaps you will forgive me an analogy? Imagine that you are writing a manuscript by hand, and that your initial draft contains all the crossings out, substitutions, and spelling errors that initial drafts tend to include. Next, imagine that having completed that draft to your satisfaction, you make a perfect copy — minus all the changes and mistakes, of course — and then, lest anyone be privy to your imperfections, you burn the original. In such a case, handing over the finished draft would naturally be entirely useless to anyone who wanted to find out what changes you had made. Indeed, it would be of use only to those who believed that you were a perfect writer. That, effectively, is what Hillary Clinton has done here. As I noted yesterday, she may still come a cropper. But if so, it will be because she didn’t get rid of the incriminating materials when she had the chance.

As I noted in comments, one can plead the Fifth without an implication that one has done anything wrong. One cannot destroy evidence without that implication. The fact that she took this much trouble to make sure that even FBI forensics couldn’t get access to it will be viewed in court as having criminal intent.

[Late-morning update]

From a Democrat: The Party’s ticking Hillary time bomb:

For the past five months, those of us old enough to have lived through the 1990s have been enduring a deeply unpleasant bout of déjà vu-inspired dread. First the news breaks, inspiring the unavoidable thought, “How could [insert member of the Clinton family here] possibly have failed to realize that this would be a problem?” Then the barrage of counter-attacks from the Clinton machine against the story, poking holes, impugning motives, kicking up just enough dust to convince fair-minded observers that maybe, just maybe, there’s less to the story than it originally seemed. And finally, because journalists make mistakes and actually care about being able to stand behind the truth of what they publish, even those who ran the original story begin to backtrack, express uncertainties, and air self-doubts.

And then: Ka-Blam! The story is back and bigger than ever. Oh, that server we wouldn’t give to you? You can have it now, cleaned up all nice and tidy. There certainly weren’t any classified documents on there. Oh, there were? Oops, well, only those two — oh, I mean four — and don’t worry about how that’s just a “limited sample” of 40 emails out of tens of thousands; the inspector general of the Justice Department just got lucky. And hey, we deleted them, so who cares? (Freedom of information is for suckers.) Yes, of course, my “shadow” had access to that server and those classified emails, too. Why is that a problem? What, are you a member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?

Tick, tick, boom.

The amount of denial on display here is because they got away with so much in the 90s, the Dems just figure there is no limit to how much corruption, deception and cover up the American public will tolerate.

Humor, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Mark Steyn’s New Book

6 Comments

Some commentary from the author on its reception so far.

I’ll be interested to see what people like Phil Plait have to say. I suspect they’ll try to pretend it doesn’t exist.

[Thursday-morning update]

Thoughts (and a lot of excerpts) from Judith Curry.

I’m not sure that the fact he’s making a lot of money on the book reduces his chances of getting damages from Mann. I’m sure he would have preferred to have been writing other books, and he needs the money for his legal defense.

History, Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Space, Technology and Society

Supersonic Flight

40 Comments

Over @NRO, Josh Gelernter is far too credulous of Airbus’s announcement of a supersonic transport:

In April 1976, Congress banned supersonic passenger planes from landing in the United States. The ban was overturned by the courts in 1977, after it was pointed out that the Concorde — which flew at subsonic speeds around the airport — was in fact quieter than conventional jets. Never mind: Like irrational fears about nuclear power or GMOs or vaccines, sonic-boom panic sustained anti-Concorde campaigns, which successfully throttled its business. When the Concorde was announced, airlines around the world placed combined orders for more than a hundred planes. By the time it made its first flight, a quarter of the orders had been withdrawn. By the time the production line was up and running, three-quarters of the remaining orders had been canceled. Only 20 Concordes were actually built; all 20 were bought by the British and French governments, which had paid for the Concorde’s development. They were flown by BOAC and Air France.

When Pan Am launched the first transatlantic passenger flights in 1939, a round-trip ticket cost $675 — which is about $11,000 in today’s money. Clipper flights were even more exotic than Concorde flights; nonetheless, within a few decades, they had driven ocean liners out of business. Because so few Concordes made it into service, service prices never came down, part prices never came down, operation never became routine. In 2003, the Concorde died, and mankind did something it does rarely: It took a step backward.

Concorde’s problem was not laws against supersonic overland flight, but very high operating costs, and limited range, due to the excessive wave drag. The real market for supersonic flight is transpacific, but Concorde could barely make it across the Atlantic. The initial orders were probably based on overoptimistic estimates of costs, and once reality sunk in, the orders dried up.

And to equate a commercial aircraft with Apollo and our later abandonment of lunar capability is a category error, unless he meant that in both cases they were economically unsustainable, in which case, it was best to end them.

So thank God for Airbus. Finally we — as a species — are back on track. Actually, Airbus isn’t the first aerospace firm to talk about bringing back supersonic passenger flight — but it’s the biggest and the most credible. An Airbus neo-Concorde is downright plausible. The new Airbus design, we’re told, will be able to fly from London to New York in one hour — two and a half hours quicker than the Concorde. Its top speed will be 2,500 mph to Concorde’s 1,350. And, for the hippies, it will have boom-dampeners, so the noise won’t bother western Long Island, and so it will be able to fly overland. Of course, the one, big, nagging problem is that Airbus is an Anglo-French company. Are we going to take that? I’m sure Boeing and Lockheed and Grumman all have e-mail addresses.

Key words: “…we are told…”

A 2500 mph aircraft will need much more exotic materials than the Concorde did to handle the high skin temperature, and its fuel consumption will be horrific, again with limited range. Note that there’s no mention of transpacific, it’s again just a faster way to get from New York to Europe. Its market would be just as, if not more limited than Concorde. I think that this is marketing hype (like Boeing’s Sonic Cruiser a few years ago). And he doesn’t seem to be aware of changes in the industry. “Grumman” is now Northrop Grumman, and it’s a company that has zero legacy of building a commercial transport. “Lockheed” is Lockheed Martin, and it got out of the airliner business in the late seventies, after the commercial failure of the L-1011 Tri-Star. The notion that either of them are going to get in against Boeing with a supersonic transport is a flight of fancy. I am working on a concept that might make supersonic flight practical, but I see nothing about Son of Concorde that would do so.