No, Mr. President. It was best built by America’s entrepreneurs.
This is one of many reasons why high-speed rail will be a fiscal disaster.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Space Launch System
Larva Breeders
Ummmmmm…no. Just no.
Though they might be useful in space.
Randall Munroe’s Time Comic
The back story.
This is something that used to concern space activists even in the seventies:
“In my comic, our civilization is long gone. Every civilization with written records has existed for less than 5,000 years; it seems optimistic to hope that the current one will last for 10,000 more,” Munroe told WIRED. “And as astronomer Fred Hoyle has pointed out, since we’ve stripped away the easily-accessed fossil fuels, whatever civilization comes along next won’t be able to jump-start an industrial revolution the way we did.”
You could think of fossil fuels as the yolk of an egg. If we eat it up, but fail to hatch and get into space, then this planet won’t reproduce.
Remembering Ploesti
Thoughts on energy and war from Bob Zubrin:
In World War II, we controlled the oil. In this war, the enemy does. This is an unacceptable situation, because it places our fate in the hands of people who want to kill us. In World War II, we had no compunction about destroying the Nazi fuel-making facilities at Ploesti and Leuna, or about systematically sinking the Japanese tanker fleet, because we didn’t need their oil. As we have seen, those attacks were incredibly effective in breaking the enemy’s power. On May 12, 1944, the day of the Leuna raid, the Third Reich ruled an empire comprising nearly all of continental Europe, with a collective population and industrial potential exceeding that of the United States. A year later, it did not exist. Once Japan’s tanker fleet was sunk, the collapse of its empire was almost as fast. Today we are confronted by an enemy without a shadow of the armaments of the Axis; all the Islamist countries have is oil. Were we to destroy that power, they would be left with nothing at all. But we can’t hit them where it would truly hurt, because our economy needs their oil to survive.
And we have people in power who think that climate change is a bigger risk than totalitarianism. Because, you know, in many ways, they don’t mind totalitarianism that much, as long as it’s their own.
If You’re Going To Take Mars…
First, I don’t have any particular itch to go to, or send people to Mars. I think it can wait. I also see the potential to repeat the error of Apollo if we follow Dr. Thronson’s advice:
A useful tautology: humanity’s second—or third or fourth—mission to Mars will never happen unless there is a first one. Vastly more resources have been expended on concept design and technologies that appear to be necessary for sustained Martian exploration, with comparatively fewer specifically on the most essential mission, the first one. Just as with all programs of human exploration, the first Mars expedition will be very—very!—different from every one that follows. It will have to be more limited, more focused, and necessarily affordable from the start. More will be learned on a first mission, no matter how limited it is some respects, than on any subsequent one. However, in the current, uncritical, and comfortable environment for proliferating concepts for human exploration beyond LEO, there seems to be only modest interest in the difficult process of in-depth, critically reviewed engineering designs for the first Mars mission.
I disagree that “all programs of human exploration” had a first mission that was “very-very! different” from those that followed. The Vikings did nothing different on their succeeding journeys than they did on their previous ones. Neither did the Polynesians. There was little difference between Columbus’s first voyage, and his subsequent ones, or those of others. They all used the same basic technology. There were no significant differences until the technology evolved — more efficient sails, canned food, ship-board clocks for navigation, steel hulls, steam engines. Similarly, most exploration of the North American continent were very similar, from the initial ones by the early French explorers to Lewis and Clark, through Walker and Fremont. Not until the development of first the Conestoga, and then the railroad was there any significant improvement. In fact, as I write in the book:
Once Columbus showed the way, fortune seekers and settlers didn’t wait for shipboard clocks, or steam engines, or steel hulls. They set sail for the New World with what they had. A century or so ago, Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét wrote a poem about the days of sail, whose first stanza was:
There was a time before our time,
It will not come again,
When the best ships still were wooden ships
But the men were iron men.
Even with Apollo, the subsequent missions weren’t that different from the first, in terms of how they were carried out, except they got better at navigation and precision in landing sites, and took more equipment, such as rovers, to expand the science. So I don’t accept his premise that the first Mars landing will be significantly different than the second one. But the next series of lunar missions will doubtless be much different from Apollo, because Apollo was done in an economically unsustainable way, because there was a national imperative to do it. We have to avoid that with Mars.
I also think that there are some elements of straw man here. No, we don’t need to go to the moon to get to Mars. But we do need to develop some infrastructure if we are going to do it in anything resembling an affordable way, and no, a government-developed heavy lifter is not part of that infrastructure. But I don’t see any societal will to compel the government to do a manned Mars mission in the foreseeable future. If it happens, it will happen privately.
Search And Rescue In Tenaya Canyon
There are some lessons to be learned here. We were just up there ourselves a couple weeks ago. People don’t realize how rugged it can get coming down from the high country into Yosemite Valley, even though most of the routes are pretty well known after many decades of hiking/climbing. Without modern tech (cell phones and helicopters), they might have died from exposure up there, even in the summer.
Firefox
I just love it when it crashes right after hitting “Publish” on a blog post. (Version 22, on Fedora 19)
Fortunately, WordPress does a pretty good job of remembering.
The Slingatron
Frank J. has (literally) a killer app for it:
Will it work? I dunno. But, I’d like to see it throw something off the planet. Or someone.
Let’s start with Barack Obama. Next, Joe Biden. Then, Obama’s cabinet. Follow that up with the Democrats in Congress, and then the people that voted for them.
I’m thinking once we do that, we’ll have worked out all the bugs, and the Republicans will get the idea that we don’t mind tossing folks off the planet. Maybe they’ll straighten up and act right.
I wouldn’t bet on it. We’d probably have to demonstrate it on a few of them, too.
SLS Passes PDR
It’s hard to believe that this was said with a straight face:
“The review had to be incredibly detailed, so our plans for vehicle integration, flight software, test, verification and operations will result in a safe, affordable and sustainable vehicle design,” said Todd May, manager of the SLS Program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Emphasis mine.
Really? Affordable? And if it’s not affordable it’s not sustainable.
As for safety, here’s what I wrote in the book:
It should be noted that NASA currently plans only two flights for the SLS—one in 2017 to demonstrate the 70-ton capability, and one with a crew in 2021, to…somewhere. They have said that, when operational, it may only fly every couple of years. What are the implications of that, in terms of both cost and safety?
Cost wise, it means that each flight will cost several billion dollars, at least for those first two flights. If, once in operation, it has a two- or three-billion-dollar annual budget (a reasonable guess based on Shuttle history), and it only flies every couple of years, that means that each subsequent flight will cost anywhere from four to six billion dollars.
From a safety standpoint, it means that its operating tempo will be far too slow, and its flights far too infrequent, to safely and reliably operate the system. The launch crews will be sitting around for months with little to do, and by the time the next launch occurs they’ll have forgotten how to do it, if they haven’t left from sheer boredom to seek another job.
As a last-ditch effort to try to preserve the Shuttle in 2010, some suggested that it be maintained until we had a replacement, but to fly it only once per year to save money. The worst part of such a proposal would have been the degree to which the system would have been even less safe, given that it was designed for a launch rate of at least four flights per year. It was unsafe to fly it too often (as NASA learned in the 80s as it ramped up the flight rate before Challenger), and it would be equally so to fly it too rarely.
NASA’s nominal plans for SLS compound this folly, which is magnified by the fact that both internal NASA studies and independent industry ones have demonstrated that there is no need for such a vehicle to explore beyond earth orbit (existing launchers could do that job just fine, with orbital mating and operations), and it is eating up all the funding for systems, such as landers and orbital propellant storage facilities, that are necessary. All of this is just more indication that actually accomplishing things in space is the lowest priority for Congress (and unfortunately, the space agency itself, otherwise, the administrator would be more honest with the appropriators on the Hill).
But this PDR will be hailed by supporters nonetheless.