Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Sorry, Mark

32 Comments

But no matter how you want to idiotically mischaracterize it, “Flexible Path” is not “Look But Don’t Touch.” It is a plan to allow us to go affordably and sustainably wherever we (and our inheritors) wish in the (or at least the inner) solar system, including planetary surfaces, if we can raise the money and motivation for the additional hardware necessary to do so. And we’ll certainly be able to touch Phobos, Deimos, and near-earth objects, whether to move or mine them.

[Wednesday morning update]

If you follow the above link, you’ll see that Mark continues to fantasize that I have a “chain,” and that I “leap the length” of it. He should really broaden the range of his clichés, not to mention finding some that have some basis in objective reality. It’s of a part with his imaginary friends in the “Internet Rocketeer Club.”

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Sarah Palin

22 Comments

…as James Tiberious Kirk:

For all his talk of being different, representing “hope,” and bringing “change” Obama has turned out to be quite the bore. He is the consummate insider, a recycler of old ideas and failed policies. People wanted to beam up to the starship and explore strange new worlds. We wanted to boldly go where no man (or woman) has gone before. Obama is in the wrong franchise. He and crazy Doc Brown, I mean Joe Biden, gassed up the DeLorean and took us back in time. To 1976.

Palin passed the Kobayashi Maru. She is qualified to command the ship. She has all the qualities we want in a captain; valor, principals, vision and most of all, the ability to change the rules.

We’ll see if she’s changed them to her advantage.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

The Great Moon Debate

4 Comments

It’s started over at The Economist. It seems pretty clear that neither debater had an opportunity to see their protagonist’s input. Gold’s criticism is not of opposition to going to the moon per se, but against NASA’s ability to do it effectively, particularly with its chosen architecture. Gregg’s position (and pretty much standard boilerplate from his old Space Studies Institute days) is that the moon is important as a destination, but he is basically silent on how to get there, or even whether or not NASA should do it, or someone else.

At least for this round, they are basically talking past each other. Tomorrow should be more interesting, since they will both be able to respond to what the other said today. As I predicted previously, I suspect that they will be more in agreement than the people who set up the “debate” expect.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Why Most Journalists Are Democrats

6 Comments

A view from the Soviet socialist trenches.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems related: Obama’s quest into the magic world of anti-American mythology:

There is a reason why snobby elites on the Upper East Side of Manhattan generously donate to leftist causes and support leftist politicians. Snobs and radicals often act in accord because they are not opposites, as some believe, but rather spiritual cousins — equally despising “the bourgeois,” sharing a low view of humanity as herd animals, and sorting people not on their individual merits but by color, income, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and any other characteristic except the content of their minds. Such beliefs have often served as a veiled excuse for tyranny.

This thinking is the direct opposite of the ideal of individual liberty, on which the United States was founded and which defines this country’s exceptionalism. As such, elitist and leftist beliefs are downright un-American — a term that today has become a fighting word, used broadly by both right and left, sometimes with a completely opposite meaning. Not to be outdone, snobs and radicals have also evolved a natural loathing for American “bourgeois” principles.

But the view of America as the command center of the international capitalist conspiracy is definitely not a product of natural evolution, but rather a foreign implant going back to the days of the Cold War.

…Where’s the “imperialist propaganda” when you need it? The leftist propaganda encountered so little resistance in the land of the alleged “capitalist conspiracy” that an airbrushed version of history has almost universally replaced the truth in the media, education, and entertainment. The intended result is the widespread notion of America’s guilt. One doesn’t even need to be a leftist anymore to believe in this country’s image as a violent empire controlled by greedy capitalist oligarchies that dictate its policies.

Press, academia and the education establishment are mediocre when it comes to imparting reality and promoting critical thinking, but superlative when it comes to collectivist propagandizing.

Popular Culture, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Feeling Old

14 Comments

The morning anchor (a twenty-something, by the looks and behavior) on Fox 29 in Palm Beach was reporting on a Star Wars story, and pronounced C3PO “See Three Poh.” She was ribbed by her co-anchor, and defended herself by saying, “I’ve never seen the movie.”

I was too old to be influenced by Star Wars (in my early twenties when it came out) — 2001, a real SF movie, was my cultural touchstone, but this is the first time I’ve run into an adult that is too young.

Economics, Political Commentary, Space

It’s Been Forty Years

12 Comments

Time to finally abandon the Apollo paradigm. It was a success in terms of winning the brief “space race,” but when it came to opening up space, it was an utter failure, and I agree with Paul — Mars is a planet too far right now, and such a mission would result in another false start, even if successful. We need to focus on developing the infrastructure needed to affordably go beyond earth orbit, regardless of ultimate destination. Of the options being considered by the Augustine panel, “Flexible path” offers the most promise in that regard.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Good Point On Reading The Bill

16 Comments

One of Mark Steyn’s readers points out that:

Congress passed the onerous Sarbanes-Oxley* on the premise there needed to be a new law requiring CEOs to read their financial statements and personally face legal penalties in case there are errors. Maybe Congress would be a bit more cautious if they faced jail time when their 10-year budgets didn’t pan out.

Of course, Congress is notorious for passing bills that hold others to higher standards than themselves, and that don’t apply to themselves (as the “health-care” atrocity surely won’t — they’ll continue to get their own gold-plated plan). In a sane world, SOX would be repealed (that would have a bigger stimulus effect than anything that the people in Washington have done to date), but the larger point is that this practice of holding themselves above the laws that they pass themselves was one of the things that drove the 1994 Republican revolution. In fact, fixing that was one of the ten points of the Contract With America. Time to start drafting up a new one, I think.

Business, Economics, Space

Flawed Estimating

15 Comments

A post that starts out discussing how many members the Mars Society has devolves into claims of how much Martian missions will cost.

The cost to the Moon ($150-300 B)or to Mars ($599-899 B, just small change for the better feeling) covers the round trips and the base setup for a period of 20-30 years. It would no longer be to plant a flag there stuff as the last lunar trip did. The cost is the stay and the development the new world for a period of 20-30 years each in this century. For the return to the Moon, it would cost $10-12 B each year for the 20-30 years period. For the Mars cost, it would cost $20-30 B or more each year for the period of 20-30 years.

When I see thing like this, I just shake my head. Beware prognosticators bearing costs of space activities.

No one knows, particularly because the activity itself is often ill defined, but even if not, such estimates do not, because they cannot, take into account future changes in technology, and particularly future changes in launch costs that may arise from much greater private activity. They also often make foolish assumptions about no propellant depots, and multiple launches of a heavy lifter, etc.

John Mankins offers a useful corrective, one comment later:

I’d like to make just a general observation about this topic: there is no one “firm fixed price” way to explore and develop a frontier. There are NO “prix fixe” menus for the future.

However, there are lots, and lots of choices. As it happens, some of these yield lower costs, others yield greater accomplishments, and still others result in faster (or slower) schedules. Examples include:

– What kind of propulsion will be used?
– How many crew members will go on what missions?
– Will we use local re-fueling of vehicles?
– Will missions systems be expendable or reusable?
– Will the program employ ISRU (in situ resource utilization), and if so, how soon?
– Will electrical power cost $100 per kilowatt-hour, or $0.10 per kilowatt-hour?
– Will life support closed or open?
– Will robotic systems be autonomous? capable of learning? or teleoperated? or…?

etc., etc., etc.

There are two extremes to avoid. First, we should never assume that future exploration missions will be “too cheap to meter” in order to make a sale to Congress. And Second, we should never claim that human exploration missions will be unimaginably expensive as a means of indirectly supporting other goals in space.

The space community can be its own worst enemy: we cannot allow this to happen.

We should try to stay focused on the goal of extending human presence and activity into space — using both robots and humans — and work constantly to make the accomplishment of that goal as affordable, beneficial and rapid as possible through aggressive innovation, appropriate technology advancements, and well-managed systems projects…

Not to mention a much greater utilization of the private sector, and particularly that portion of the private sector whose goal is to go to Mars (e.g., SpaceX).

Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

More Danger Than We Thought?

44 Comments

…from asteroids:

To properly explain the crater distribution, Ito and Malhotra say some other factor must have been involved. One possibility is that we simply haven’t seen all the craters yet: the ongoing lunar mapping missions may help on that score.

Another idea is that the Earth’s tidal forces tear Earth-crossing asteroids apart, creating a higher number of impacts than might otherwise be expected.

But the most exciting and potentially worrying possibility is that there exists a previously unseen population of near Earth asteroids that orbit the Sun at approximately the same distance as the Earth. These have gone unnoticed because they are smaller or darker than other asteroids, say Ito and Malhotra.

“More complete observational surveys of the near-Earth asteroids can test our prediction,” they say.

And let’s not waste too much time about it. By some reckonings, asteroid impacts represent the greatest threat to humankind that we are able to calculate.

Even more to the point, it’s not only the greatest one we can calculate, it’s probably the greatest one that we can actually mitigate (short of colonizing the galaxy).

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!