…is finally getting an engineering school.
Not sure what the rush is. It’s only been 380 years or so since it was founded. Looks like they’re not going to have an aerospace department, though.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Congressional Logic
SLS behind schedule? Increase the budget. Commercial Crew behind schedule? Cut the budget.
And of course, Commercial Crew is not in fact behind schedule. If NASA is hedging its bets by buying Soyuz into 2018, that’s because, for good reason, it has no confidence that it will get the needed funding. So Congressional actions become self fulfilling.
Nanobots
Eric Drexler foresaw this sort of thing three decades ago. It’s just the beginning.
[Update a while later]
Biotech’s potential new cancer cure:
Newly marketed drugs called checkpoint inhibitors are curing a small percentage of skin and lung cancers, once hopeless cases. More than 60,000 people have been treated with these drugs, which are sold by Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb. The treatments work by removing molecular brakes that normally keep the body’s T cells from seeing cancer as an enemy, and they have helped demonstrate that the immune system is capable of destroying cancer.
Faster, please.
The Pope’s Climate Encyclical
Trying to get through it in order to critique it, but it’s long and turgid. Really needs editing.
[Update a while later]
Anyway, the editors at National Review waded through it.
Blue Origin
The capsule looks roomy, and has big windows.
Why Haven’t We Built Cities In Space?
There’s a long piece over at Gizmodo, mostly about the NRC report. Sadly, the reporter didn’t seem to talk to anyone except Ariel Waldman:
The US has a plan for Americans to live in space. In 2012, the National Research Council was commissioned by Congress to roadmap the future of human space exploration. Last June, the team published its findings in a massive report, which called for several action steps to be taken immediately.
No, actually, the NRC report was not really a plan. It was a set of fairly vague and broad recommendations. There is no plan.
Statistically, China’s space program is a few decades behind the US, but consider these facts: Just in the last two years the country has sent ten people into space.
Really? No, not really. In the last two years, China has sent three people into space. Go back three years, and they’ve sent six.
The agency is currently working on a mission to Mars and a proposal for its own space station, which is planned for sometime in the 2020s. Soon, China will undoubtably surpass the US in its efforts for space colonization.
That’s ridiculous. China is using legacy Soviet-type hardware. No one is going to colonize space that way.
Thanks to a 2011 Congressional act that bars the US from collaborating with China’s space program, NASA is not allowed to work directly with the most quickly accelerating efforts to get humans into space. Thanks to a 2011 Congressional act that bars the US from collaborating with China’s space program, NASA is not allowed to work directly with the most quickly accelerating efforts to get humans into space. This is a huge problem. “There are only two places that are going into space,” says Waldman, referring to current crewed missions by Russia and China. “We’re not one of them, and we’re not in collaboration with the other one of them.”
This is delusional. China is not the place with the “most quickly accelerating efforts to get humans into space.” That is happening in Hawthorne and Mojave, California, and Seattle. We do not need to work with China or Russia to get into space, and we are not in a race with them.
So much of what seems to motivate any space exploration is the concept of flag planting, which the US pretty much invented: I HEREBY CLAIM THIS MOON FOR AMERICA. Take away these imperialistic aspirations and the goals of human spaceflight become unmeshed with these ideas of nation-building—and a lot more pragmatic.
Ummmmmm…no. We did not CLAIM THIS MOON FOR AMERICA. We “came in peace for all mankind.”
Anyway, you get the idea.
Restore Funding For Commercial Crew
Sign the petition. I doubt if Congress will care, though.
Satellite Servicing
NASA wants to set up a service station.
Seems like if this makes economic sense, it could be done commercially.
Mission To Mars Orbit
The FISO presentation from May has been released. I’ll definitely use this in the project, to show how it could be improved by dumping SLS/Orion.
[Update a while later]
OK, I’ve glanced through it. There isn’t much in the way of numbers (Isp, mass, etc.) to make it easy to come up with alternatives. I will note that they are looking at 17 or eighteen SLS flights over a two-decade period, or about once a year. That probably implies a couple billion per flight, ignoring all the money we’re currently wasting on development.
The Country’s In The Very Best Of Hands
Well, then I guess they do have a point that encryption wouldn’t have been very useful
Seriously, I think it’s time to completely overhaul the civil service system. We just had a cyber Pearl Harbor. Will anyone be punished? We know the answer to that one.
[Thursday-morning update]
The military-clearance OPM breach is an absolute calamity. And Obama can’t even bring himself to admit that the federal government screwed up.