…the musical.
Did He Or Didn’t He?
Keith Cowing can’t find anyone to corroborate rumors that Bolden questioned the Ares 1X flight at Michoud, as reported at Rockets’n’Such. FWIW.
Why Should We Care?
Are you sitting down? Prepare for a real shocker. A bunch of astronauts, many of whom have the program as their current meal ticket, support continuation of the fiasco. And the joint statement was put out by ATK. Yeah, they don’t have a dog in this fight…
I found this particularly annoying:
In the joint statement, provided by Alliant, the former astronauts say: “Our top concern…is to ensure the safest possible system is utilised. This requires a proven track record, building on important lessons learned…NASA’s Constellation programme is exactly that type of effort – infused with generational lessons learned.”
Well, of course that’s your top concern. But as a taxpayer, and space enthusiast, my top concern is having a system that’s affordable, and actually contributes to opening up space, things at which Constellation will be an epic fail even if it meets its stated program objectives. If the system isn’t safe enough for them, I know where we can find a lot of other people to fly it.
The Killer App For Suborbital Flights
Alan Boyle writes that it may be not tourism, but research.
People are going to look back at the history, and wonder why we weren’t doing this decades ago. There was certainly no technological reason.
The Need For Actual Human Rights Advocates
From now on, every HRW report on Israel is going to be greeted with “you mean the Saudi-funded HRW,” or “you mean the report written by the woman [HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson] who is a great admirer of Norman Finkelstein and lobbied Kofi Annan against Israel in the middle of the Second Intifada” or “you mean the report written by the guy [Stork] who supports the anti-Israel boycott movement and has been venting his hostility to Israel for almost forty years” or “you mean HRW, the organization that fails to take down from its website anti-Israel reports even when it has admitted they are inaccurate,” and so on.
A housecleaning is needed. Transfer Stork, Whitson, and the rest of the current crew to an area in which they don’t have strong ideological priors, and bring in some real human rights advocates to replace the anti-Israel propagandists. Or just preach to the leftist, anti-Israel choir, but don’t expect anyone else to pay attention.
Unfortunately, too many will continue to do so.
Matthew Yglesias
…meets Public Choice 101. I think that, more than anything, this demonstrates the potential for utter worthlessness of a Harvard degree. As Joe Katzman notes:
That’s what happens when you take classes in theoretics where critical thinking is actively expunged, and pay $100k+ for the privilege. It’s an extremely common way to be uneducated these days.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I went over and read Joe’s link on theoretics (by Orson Scott Card), and it turned out to be a lot more than that. It’s a piece about groupthink, and how it has poisoned the theoretical physics community with string theory. It actually reminded me a lot of the conventional wisdom of space policy and launch costs.
Ignorance On Space Power
I found the comments in this piece more interesting than the article itself. Power from space may or may not make economic sense, and there are valid arguments against it, but the opposition to it displayed here is typical, and ignorant, and one of the reasons that proponents persist. From what I can see, what was being proposed was simply to revive the small-scale test using power from the ISS that was cancelled this year. But instead, we get things like this:
Why does the proposer think that it would be more efficient to beam energy from the international space station when sun beams are directly bombarding the surface of the earth already? He needs to be able to explain the physics and the economics and he apparently failed. The money needs to go to proposals that can realize fruition in 10-20 years, not some pie in the sky experiments that makes no economic sense.
…The experimental packages carried by Apollo astronauts took years to develop at great expense to meet NASA’s high standards of light weight, reliability and safety in the harsh conditions of space. You don’t just hand NASA a laser and solar cell you bought off the shelf and assembled into a crude prototype and tell them to aim it at a village in Africa during the 5 minutes a day that ISS might be overhead, assuming it’s not cloudy, assuming the villagers all wear safety laser goggles not to go blind, and so forth.
The benefits of beaming from space (though not the ISS) have been explained many times, and yet people persist in asking such foolish questions.
And then we have this:
there is NO way that any non-telecom based orbital outerspace project will be PRIVATE- COMMERCIALLY viable and self sustaining (creating a net economic surplus sufficient enough to pay down the costs of financing the project over time) until the cost of putting payload in orbit comes below 1000$ a pound. This isn’t even a discussion. Do your homework.
First off, there are already non-telecom-based projects that are viable and self sustaining (e.g., remote sensing) at current launch costs. But beyond that, the implication here is that $1000/lb is some sort of unachievable holy grail, but it’s pretty clear to anyone who understands the economics and technology that if one were in the business of launching powersats into orbit, the sheer economies of scale would drive it far below that. Not that this means that it will be economically viable, of course, but any argument against SPS that involves current high launch costs is fundamentally flawed. Then, along those lines, we get this:
Last time I looked into it, even if launch costs are assumed to be $0 space-based solar power isn’t economical.
Again, that would depend entirely on the assumptions in the analysis. And then we get this from someone claiming to be a physics professor:
Energy from space has been discussed since the 1970’s. It is a thoroughly crazy idea. The cost of putting anything (Solar cells in this case) in space is “astronomical”. The resulting microwave beam at the ground would exceed radiation standards over the wide area needed to collect it, and a buffer zone outside. If the beam ever went astray, large numbers of people would be exposed to forbidden levels of microwaves, without their knowing (until later, too late to do anything about it) they were being irradiated.
“…astronomical…” Sigh…
And the beam can’t “go astray.” This professor of physics is apparently unfamiliar with the concept of phased arrays. And who knows what a “forbidden” level is?
The saddest thing, though, is the degree to which NASA has screwed up public perceptions about this kind of thing, as demonstrated by this comment:
As cool as it would be to get solar stations up in space, NASA can barely focus itself enough to get us to the Moon, a feat we accomplished forty years ago. What chance do we even have of this working at all, regardless of the technological barriers?
Note the twin assumptions, commonly held: that NASA would do it, and that NASA can’t do it any more.
Their Long National Nightmare Is Over
I would just note that the media has to be very happy that they no longer have to cover the presidential vacation in Crawford, Texas, and that they’re back at the Cape (note for regular readers of this blog: “the Cape” means something different to space enthusiasts than it does to media elites). At least one thing is like the glory days of Clinton (who generally poll tested his vacation venues…).
Landers, Schmanders
Could we get back to the moon with an elevator?
It’s certainly a lot easier problem, and one more within current tech, than one from earth. This is the kind of innovation that NASA should have been pursuing, instead of redoing Apollo.
Of course, an interesting question is how you’d get to other locales on the moon, so you’d still need a hopper of some kind (pretty much functionally equivalent to a lander, except for total impulse requirements), but if you could manufacture fuel at the base of the elevator, you could deliver it to orbit with the elevator, and to the rest of Luna with the hoppers/tankers, really opening up the whole planet, while dramatically reducing costs of operating in cis-lunar space. For example, whether it made more sense to get to the south pole by going down the elevator, and then hopping, or direct descent from the Lagrange point using lunar propellants would be a function of the relative economics and propellant prices in the two locations. These are the kinds of studies that it would be nice to see out of an architecture revisit. It begs the development of scenario simulation tools (that would make for interesting sim games for the general populace as well…).
[Update a few minutes later]
It seems entirely possible that it would be cheaper to deliver propellant from the moon to LEO via elevator/high-Isp-tanker than from the surface of the earth. That would be a real game changer, but it would wipe out much of the new market for launchers. On the other hand, in-space transportation might become so cheap that it would open up vast new markets for other things. For instance, vacation cruises to the moon become much more affordable.
[Link via Clark]
A Grand Bargain?
There are atheists who go beyond declaring personal disbelief in God and insist that any form of god-talk, any notion of higher purpose, is incompatible with a scientific worldview. And there are religious believers who insist that evolution can’t fully account for the creation of human beings.
I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.
If both groups were to truly accept that power, the landscape might look different. Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.
The believers who need to hear this sermon aren’t just adherents of “intelligent design,” who deny that natural selection can explain biological complexity in general. There are also believers with smaller reservations about the Darwinian story. They accept that God used evolution to do his creative work (“theistic evolution”), but think that, even so, he had to step in and provide special ingredients at some point.
Perhaps the most commonly cited ingredient is the human moral sense — the sense that there is such a thing as right and wrong, along with some intuitions about which is which. Even some believers who claim to be Darwinians say that the moral sense will forever defy the explanatory power of natural selection and so leave a special place for God in human creation.
I’m not as sanguine as Bob Wright about the prospects for a truce between fundamentalist atheists and theists. I do believe in a teleology of the universe, and if he can make a scientific case for it, more power to him, but unlike creationists, I have sufficient confidence in my faith that I don’t demand that science validate it.