Be easy on him. Gary Cruse has started a blog.

Here’s an entertaining initial effort.

It’s blogspot, so the permalink is fubar. Scroll down to “Between Iraq And A Monica.”

…is devastated by Professor Volokh, at least with regard to homosexuality.

I’ve discussed this in the past as well. There, I also take issue with the notion of elevating the word “normal” as having some kind of moral or practical component.

That’s the title of a press release I received from the Space Frontier Foundation:

Los Angeles, July 14 ? The Space Shuttle system should be retired, and all further investments in the Shuttle ended, argued the non-profit Space Frontier Foundation today.

?A growing consensus in Congress and the space community affirms that the Shuttle system is hopelessly inadequate to our needs and cannot be made safe or affordable,? stated the group?s founder, Rick Tumlinson. ?It?s time for the venerable Space Shuttles to make way for the improvement in safety, innovation, and competitive pricing that would occur if the private sector were to be given the chance to do for space travel what commercial aviation has done for air travel.?

The Foundation points out that while NASA spends billions maintaining and flying the Space Shuttles, a new generation of privately funded commercial spaceship firms has sprung up to fly people on sub-orbital flights, conceivably for mere hundreds of thousands of dollars per ticket. Rather than continuing to waste taxpayer funds, the group believes an era of commercial orbital space flight could be in the making, if the government would nurture it using the money currently spent on government-only space systems.

?NASA should not be in charge of designing, building and operating what is essentially a glorified space truck/bus,? added Tumlinson. ?Imagine if the government had done the same thing with an airline. With no competition it would never get cheaper, better or more efficient?and no one would be able to afford to fly on it. That?s the socialist monopoly we have in space flight. It has not improved safety or access and wasted billions of tax dollars.?

To begin the hand off to the private sector, NASA should be banned from developing any replacements, and should be made to examine every alternative to safely end the Space Shuttle era, including ending Shuttle flights upon completing the international ?core? of the International Space Station (ISS); flying the Shuttle using its remote control systems in the meantime; and/or mothballing the ISS until commercial LEO transportation becomes available.

?None of the Shuttle?s capabilities are indispensable,? argued Tumlinson, ?and the ISS should not be used as an excuse to keep flying it at the risk of more astronauts? lives. If needed, the Russians can keep it going, or it can be mothballed until it can be taken over by a private Space Port Authority, and then operated, serviced and expanded by private spaceships and cargo vehicles. Now is exactly the right time for a change that can eventually open space to the people who have paid for it all.?

I agree generally, but as usual, I disagree with the part about the “risk to astronauts’ lives.” I’ve no problem with risking astronauts’ lives, nor do the astronauts, as long as it’s in a worthy endeavor. Shuttle and ISS, at this point, may or may not be, but the real risk of continuing to fly Shuttle is losing more orbiters, not losing crew. We somehow have to change this bizarre mindset that space can be made risk free.

Also, as Burt Rutan says, one of the reasons we don’t make much progress is that we don’t kill enough people (i.e., we aren’t pushing the envelope enough, and too much resources are going into safety, instead of cost reduction and performance).

I’m referring to the people who have signed up to be pioneers, of course, not third-party innocents on the ground, which is why I support AST’s launch licensing procedures (as long as they don’t attempt to get involved in certifying safety for crew and passengers).

Here’s a new blog. It’s not that new, actually–I’ve been meaning to blogroll it for a while, but its proprieter went on vacation, so I decided to wait until he got back, so as to not send folks to stale and static content.

As we all know, many law professors have been blogging, but this is the first blog that I know of from an aerospace engineering professor. It’s Spacecraft by Professor Chris Hall, at Virginia Tech in (I assume) Blacksburg. Hopefully, this is a start of a trend, because it seems to me like an excellent way to communicate with the students, as well as the rest of the world.

He’s off to a good start, with this post about timeless aerospace design laws (somewhat like Augustine’s Laws, though the latter are more about aerospace policy than engineering per se). Like him, I like this one:

6. (Mar’s Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

He seems to specialize in spacecraft dynamics, orbital mechanics and general spacecraft design. A man (again, I assume, since the given name “Chris” isn’t gender specific) after my own heart (except I was more of a systems engineer than a designer, i.e., I was better at critiquing others’ designs than coming up with my own, other than in broad concept).

I had a lot of gripes about the aerospace engineering curriculum when I was in school, and I suspect that many of them still apply, so there may be some interesting back and forth in the future. Anyway, go check it out.

I’ve been having an argument with someone in the comments section of this post. So for his benefit, and that of others who may have missed the point of that post, I’ll try to lay it out logically and clearly.

Case 1:

Owner (A) has material property, valued to him at some quantity, which may or may not be the same as its acquisition cost. Person (B) decides that he wants said property and doesn’t want to pay for it. Because of its material nature, the only way for this to occur is for B to steal it from A.

He does so.

Now B has increased his wealth by the amount that he values said material property, and A’s wealth has been decreased by the cost of reproducing it (assuming that it’s not a priceless heirloom, in which case he’s been devastated).

Case 2:

Owner (A) has intellectual property, valued to him at some quantity, which may or may not be the same as its acquisition cost (the marginal cost, in this case, being zero). Person (B) decides that he wants said property and doesn’t want to pay for it, and would not under any circumstances. Because of its intellectual nature, this can occur by B making a copy of it.

He does so.

Now B has increased his wealth by the amount that he values said material property, and A’s wealth has not been decreased in any way.

Which is to say that, in case one, A has clearly suffered harm, and in case two, he has clearly not.

This argument has nothing to do with property rights, which is an utterly distinct issue. It is simply making a delineation between the two situations, and it has to do with whether or not the original owner has been harmed.

Some people have trouble seeing this, and claim, for some bizarre reason, that Case 1 and Case 2 are exactly equivalent. I contend that they are not, and to make such an argument is clearly, at least to me, absurd.

Last week they said Pfc. Lynch was injured when her truck had an accident.

Now Newsweek says that she was captured standing and uninjured, and that her injuries were more consistent with beating by blunt objects, such as rifle butts.

What really happened?

I was the last of my generation to use a slide rule in college. Scientific calculators had just become affordable during my sophomore year, and the sound of keys clicking during a physics exam was pretty intimidating to those of us still sliding bamboo or twirling plastic.

I think that the younger generation has lost something in not learning to use one–it gives you a powerful insight into the nature of logarithms and mathematics in general, and it enforces an intuitive feel for orders of magnitude, because it doesn’t keep track of the decimal point for you. I recall grading exams as a TA that had utterly absurd answers on them because someone made a mistake on their calculator and didn’t bother to check it for reasonableness (example: the diameter of a copper atom is 1.3 x 10^12 meters…)

Anyway, they’re no longer manufactured, but predictably, people still collect and use them.

[Update on Monday afternoon]

Bill Simon (not the one who ran the incompetent campaign against Davis–the one who is my site designer) sends me a link to a virtual slide rule that really really works (for those who don’t even know what one looks like). It’s also the most precise slide rule ever designed.

Well, that’s actually paraphrasing the title of the latest lunatic column by Ted Rall, in which he asks if George Bush is going to cancel the elections next year.

Yes, Ted, he’s going to cancel the elections. That’s why he’s out raising a quarter of a billion dollars in campaign funds.

Well, OK, at the end of his little binge of mindlessness, he does come back to within screaming distance of reality:

Bush may be the kind of guy who sees 99 percent odds as 2 percent short of a sure thing, but I bet he’ll look at his $200 million campaign war chest and decide to let the people decide. He’ll surely want to win legitimately in 2004–albeit for the first time. Though they’re capable of anything, Bush’s people probably know that Americans wouldn’t stand for two putsches in four years.

They still can’t get over the fact that the Supreme Court wouldn’t allow Gore and his brigade of lawyers to steal the election…

The missing 727 has been found.

Immediately after its disappearance, American intelligence operators said “the plane mostly likely was taken for a criminal endeavour such as drugs or weapons smuggling”. But, they did not rule out the possibility it was stolen for use in a terrorist attack and were making every effort to get to the bottom of the mystery.

A Western diplomat in Freetown, Sierra Leone?s capital, said it was more likely the plane had simply been snatched from Luanda because its owner was reluctant to pay year-long airport taxes, totalling $50,000 (

No, despite the title of this article, which is actually a pretty devastating critique of the Orbital Space Plane and NASA’s manned spaceflight plans in general.

It gets a few things wrong (e.g., Columbia actually was capable of docking to ISS, albeit with less payload than the rest of the fleet), and I’m pretty leery about simply going back to Apollo capsules. I also disagree that the benefits of wings are “dubious,” though it may be that they don’t justify their costs.

And where have we heard this before?

The basic limitation on the operational lifetime of Shuttle, OSP, or any reusable spacecraft is not the loss rate of crews, it is the loss rate of spacecraft.

Astronauts, after all, are easily replaceable. The number of overqualified applicants vastly exceeds the demand. But the OSP vehicles will be expensive, hand-built national treasures that simply can’t be thrown away.

Just imagine what would have happened if the Shuttle fleet had actually flown the advertised 50 times a year — at a loss rate of 1 in 60 flights, we would have run out of Orbiters long ago. The same logic applies to OSP, only more so because Delta 4 and Atlas 5 are cheap, non-man-rated commercial boosters whose reliability goal is only 98%.

Unfortunately, like most such pieces, it assumes that the current manned space program goals (continuing to support ISS at some minimal level) are appropriate, and that NASA has simply come up with the wrong technical solution. The reality, of course, is that we need to completely rethink the purpose of even having a government-funded manned space program, and until we’ve done that, trying to come up with solutions is pointless.

His title is wrong. It’s not the end of manned spaceflight–it’s the beginning, as private investment is now starting to flow into the field. But it may be the end (and not necessarily inappropriately) of NASA’s operational program to provide it.