Elon Musk says that there will be a Falcon 9 vertical at the Cape by year end. By my count, that’s less than two weeks from now.
Atlas Is Shrugging
Rich Karlgaard says that capital is on strike. He has some good policy recommendations that the Obama administration is unlikely to follow.
Better Climate Control
Through nanotech. J. Storrs Hall (aka JoSH) has some ideas. I have a problem with this one, though:
So you have this balloon and it floats up there twenty miles. They all have a little GPS and receiver so they can turn themselves. That’s all there is to it. What can you do with a machine like this? The machine is essentially a programmable greenhouse gas. If you set the mirrors facing the sun, it reflects all the sunlight back. If you set them sideways, it allows the sunlight to come through, and similarly for the longwave radiation coming from the back side of the earth at night.
He seems to be implying that GPS can be used to determine attitude. It can’t. It only provides velocity and position. Now it may want to know that information for other purposes, but there will have to be some other means of attitude knowledge. It seems to me the simplest way would be to just measure the sunlight hitting the mirror (which would actually be a solar cell). As you adjust your attitude, the power available will grow or shrink, and it can use the rate to control the angle. As for how to physically control the attitude, I would guess that little reaction wheels would do the job.
Of course, many of the warm mongers hate technical solutions like this, because they don’t require us to piously tighten up our hair shirts, and they don’t allow for sufficient control of the global economy.
Overwrought
Next Big Future has this week’s Carnival of Space. One of the linked articles is to an unintentionally amusing piece on the so-called “space exploration crisis”:
…it will be hard to justify a funding cut (and therefore a delay) of the Constellation Program. We already have a “5-year gap” between Shuttle decommissioning and proposed Ares launch (2010-2015), if this block on US-administered manned spaceflight is extended, the damage inflicted on NASA will be irreversible. However, I doubt we’d ever be able to measure the permanent damage caused to mankind.
Yes, if we don’t fund the current monstrosity, it will irreversibly and permanently damage NASA, and mankind. Riiiiggghhhttt. This part is pretty funny (and uninformed) as well:
It’s one thing dominating the globe, but if China or Russia leapfrogs the US for a dominance in the Solar System, it could spell disaster for the world’s only superpower and could spark a situation more reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1961. Think about it, rather than having nuclear weapon silos appear off the coast of Florida, other nations could operate with impunity in the space above the US. This might not be a reality now, but who knows what is going to happen in ten years.
Ummmm…it is a reality now. Other nations can “operate with impunity in the space above the US.” Does he think we currently have an ASAT capability? And even if it were a threat, what is Constellation going to do to solve it? It’s not even a military program.
As is often the case, the blogger ignores commercial activity, and foolishly equates whatever NASA’s latest waste of taxpayer dollars happens to be with “US-administered manned spaceflight.” Nowhere is there any discussion whatsoever of the merits of NASA’s plans — it is simply assumed that because they’re NASA’s they will advance humanity in space, and that failure to fund them will be a disaster.
Unfortunately, this kind of mindless mindset often prevails in actual policy discussions inside the Beltway, and not just on blog posts.
Suicide Terrorists
Mice finally get their revenge on cats:
An initial report from the fire marshal says mice or rats chewing through electrical wires in the ceiling are likely to have sparked the blaze.
Offers of help have been pouring in from animal lovers across Canada.
“It’s unfortunate and ironic that mice caused the fire that killed the cats,” Toronto Humane Society spokesman Ian McConachie told the BBC News website.
The cats need to ask themselves why the mice hate them.
You Know The Auto Biz Is In Dire Straits
…when Toyota is losing money:
Battered by falling demand from consumers around the world and a surging yen, Toyota and other Japanese automakers have been reducing earnings outlooks and cutting workers.
“The change that has hit the world economy is of a critical scale that comes once in a hundred years,” President Katsuaki Watanabe said at the company’s Nagoya office. The drop in vehicle sales over the last month was “far faster, wider and deeper than expected.”
Toyota forecast an operating loss of 150 billion yen ($1.66 billion) for the fiscal year ending March 2009. Toyota has never reported an operating loss since it began disclosing such figures in 1941. But it did have an operating loss in unofficial, internal calculations for the year ending March 1938 a year after the company was founded.
And they think that pouring billions down the Detroit rathole can save them in such an environment? Particularly when the union refused to give on work rules? Mickey Kaus has more, here and here.
What a disaster this administration has turned out to be at the end.
Hope’n’Change
CNN, of all places, is reporting good news from Iraq: Christmas in Baghdad:
On a large stage, children dressed in costumes representing Iraq’s many ethnic and religious groups — Kurds, Turkmen, Yazidis, Christians, Arab Muslims not defined as Sunni or Shiite — hold their hands aloft and sing “We are building Iraq!” Two young boys, a mini-policeman and a mini-soldier sporting painted-on mustaches, march stiffly and salute.
Even before I can ask Interior Ministry spokesman Major-General Abdul Karim Khalaf a question, he greets me with a big smile. “All Iraqis are Christian today!” he says.
Khalaf says sectarian and ethnic violence killed thousands of Iraqis. “Now that we have crossed that hurdle and destroyed the incubators of terrorism,” he says, “and the security situation is good, we have to go back and strengthen community ties.”
I guess now that the evil Republikkkans have been overthrown, and hope has returned to this fair land, it’s all right to report good news again. I expect that the number of homeless (at least as reported) will precipitously decline as well in the new year, despite the fact that we’re in what appears to be a quite deep recession. There are only homeless and failed wars in Republican administrations.
The Year In Science
Alan Boyle has a roundup of what happened in 2008.
How To Live On Mars
Glenn Reynolds has a review of Bob Zubrin’s new book in the Journal today. Apparently, living on Mars is much different than living on earth and not in all the ways you might think:
Evidently, there is lots of honest work on a planet under settlement (as well as a lot of potentially lucrative semi-honest work in land speculation). And the shortage of people produces a number of other differences from Earth, not least when it comes to dating, sex and parenting. “I need to discuss one fact concerning our social life that inevitably startles and amazes all new Earthling immigrants . . . ,” Mr. Zubrin writes. “On Mars, the institution of marriage still exists. I am not making this up. . . . Incredible as it sounds, people on Mars actually want to have children of their own and they form families for that purpose. Thus, while sexual attractiveness is a factor among us while seeking pairings, unlike Earth, it is not the only factor.” Concerned with getting ahead and raising families, Mars settlers view traditional attributes like loyalty and trustworthiness as far more important than do the residents of Earth, who, as best as can be determined from Mr. Zubrin’s passing allusions, live in one gigantic welfare state.
As in the past, some will satisfy themselves with the (false) safety of the mundane and coddled, and others will seek frontiers and freedom.
[Mid-morning update]
Taylor Dinerman has a review up as well, over at The Space Review.
First A Purple Cow
…and now this:
Dr Mike Edwards, an English teacher at Meoncross School in Stubbington, Hants, first spotted the squirrel outside his classroom window.
He said: ‘I was sitting in my classroom and looked out the window and saw it sitting on the fence. I had to do a double take.
‘Since then it’s been a bit of a regular at the school – everyone’s seen it.
‘We thought it might have been paint or something but then when you look at it up close, it’s an all-over coat, not in patches like you’d expect if it had been near some paint.
‘Its fur actually looks purple all the way through. It’s an absolute mystery.’
But I can tell you any how, I’d rather see than be one.