Geraghty is on the job (several posts–just keep scrolling). He’d be a disaster on guns, drugs (that one is Jacob Sullum), civil liberties, and basic integrity. And here’s Larry Tribe’s critique on his thuggish behavior and legal opportunism in the Elian Gonzales affair.
[Update late afternoon]
Jim now has all the permalinks in one post.
Rob Coppinger says that they are in fact, a fantasy (though he doesn’t explain why they require “unobtainium“).
Clark Lindsey ably responds. I think that there are several problems with Rob’s thesis, but don’t have the time to get into it right now. I will agree with him that there is no current market for them. I hope, though, that (by the same standard) he would agree that there was no market for launch vehicles in 1956. So I fail to see the point.
[Late morning update]
Jon Goff dissects Rob’s piece more thoroughly.
As for Jon’s question about when he started thinking about depots, it may have been at Space Access in (I think) 2005, when I gave an impromptu talk on the subject, as a result of my work with Dallas and Boeing on CE&R (work that was completely ignored/rejected when Mike Griffin came in and canned Craig Steidle).
Freeman Dyson continues to refuse to be part of the “consensus”:
Wearing an effusively-colored tie that set off his gray suit, Mr. Dyson began his talk at the Nassau Club by encouraging the audience to interrupt him as he spoke, since, he declared, “it’s much more fun to have an argument than do a monologue.”
In the absence of audience interruptions, Mr. Dyson had an argument anyway with the scores of people (like Al Gore) who weren’t present to defend their belief in the dire consequences of global warming. (“There’s no accounting for human folly,” Mr. Dyson said when asked about Mr. Gore’s Nobel Prize.) Saying that on a recent trip he and his wife found Greenlanders to be delighted with their warmer climate and increased tourism, Mr. Dyson suggested that representing “local warming by a global average is misleading.” In his comments at both the Nassau Club and Labyrinth, he decried the use of computer modeling to make “tremendously dogmatic” predictions about worldwide trends, without acknowledging the “messy, muddy real world” and the non-climatic effects of increased carbon dioxide. “There is no substitute for widely-conducted field operations over a long time,” he told the Nassau Club audience, citing the “enormous gaps in knowledge and sparseness of observation” that characterize the work of global warming experts.
Why can’t some people get with the program? Thankfully, though, mz will be along any minute to call Professor Dyson “stupid.”
From Henry Spencer:
In its early years, the only form of manned space exploration it favoured was an (international) Mars expedition. All other ideas that involved humans in space were counterproductive and undesirable, to hear the Planetary Society tell it.
This obsession with Mars was a bad idea then, and it’s a bad idea now. However, some of the reasons advanced against it strike me as poor – sufficiently poor that they weaken attempts to argue for a more systematic and balanced space effort.
An exclusive focus on Mars does have one thing going for it. If you believe that any resumption of manned space exploration will inevitably end the way Apollo did, with follow-on programmes cancelled and flight-ready hardware consigned to museums as soon as the programme’s first objective is met, then choosing the most interesting single destination makes sense.
However . . . haven’t we learned anything from doing that once? To me, it makes far more sense to try to build a programme that won’t crash and burn as soon as it scores its first goal. That means systematically building capabilities and infrastructure, and doing first things first even if they aren’t the most exciting parts.
Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have the societal patience necessary to do the unexciting parts, at least if the government is paying for it. Which is why we have to get private industry going ASAP.
[Early afternoon update]
I mentioned yesterday that Paul Spudis wasn’t impressed with Lou Friedman’s thoughts. He’s similarly unimpressed with The Planetary Society’s new roadmap.
[Another update a few minutes later]
Jeff Plescia has been leaving this message in comments at various places (I’ve seen it at NASA Watch and Space Politics]
As a participant in the workshop sponsored by the Planetary Society at Stanford University in February, 2008, I feel obliged to make some comments with respect to what is said in portions of the Planetary Society document “Beyond the Moon A New Roadmap for Human Space Exploration.”
Page 5 contains the statement:
“Among the conclusions of this group is that ‘the purpose of sustained human exploration is to go to Mars and beyond,’ and that a series of intermediate destinations, each with its own intrinsic value, should be established as steps toward that goal. The consensus statements and viewpoints expressed by this group of experts form the basis for the principles and recommendations contained in this document.”This statement is a blatant and intentionally dishonest misrepresentation of the recommendations and sentiments of the group.
We had extensive discussions about what the conclusion of the workshop might be. While the conclusion reported in the Roadmap was clearly the predisposition of several members of the group, particularly the organizers, it was definitively and clearly not the consensus of the group as a whole. In fact, when these words (or words to the same effect) were suggested, the group clearly indicated to the organizers that they should not be used because they were inaccurate. However, the organizers chose to ignore the group’s wishes at the end of the workshop, at the International Astronautical Congress and in the Roadmap in portraying the results of the workshop. This has occurred despite the fact that members of the group pointed out after the workshop press release that such statements were inappropriate and incorrect.
For what it’s worth. Thanks, Lou.
Maybe it’s like the climate change “consensus,” from which many scientists are now running.
Jonah Goldberg explains why we should fear that Barack Obama will emulate Franklin Roosevelt:
there can be a chasm between being right and merely appearing to be right. Why anyone stakes greater value on the appearance than reality is a mystery to me.
But as Obama clearly recognizes, that was a big part of the FDR magic. FDR came into office promising “bold, persistent experimentation” — and delivered. Raymond Moley, an early member of FDR’s “brain trust,” saw the New Deal for what it was. “To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator,” Moley wrote later.
Yet Americans thought it was all part of a plan, even though experimentation and planning are in fact near opposites. Why? Because FDR always projected such confidence, even as he made things worse. But this isn’t another column about how FDR prolonged the Depression. Been there, done that. I’d rather be forward-looking.
In fact, I want to be experimental, too. So here’s my idea: Just stop.
Stop talking about bailouts and stimuli. Stop pondering ever more drastic action. Give it a rest. Let it be.
One of the main reasons there’s all of this “money on the sidelines” out there among private investors is that Wall Street doesn’t know what the government will do next. Will it bail out the auto industry? The insurance companies? Which taxes will go up? How far will interest rates go down? How long will the federal government own stakes in the banks? Will more stimulus checks go out? If so, how big will the deficit get?
Don’t just do something–stand there!
One of his readers says that this also explains the current market volatility:
Free market economics involves the application of immutable laws, and it’s those laws that allow us to forecast the effect of current events on various companies and the stocks and bonds they’ve issued. But investors will only play the game if they believe the rules aren’t going to change in the middle. When government begins ‘experimenting’, it makes it harder for investors to generate a long term forecast. This drives long term investors away from the market, or converts them into short term traders. The result is a massive increase in volatility as investors shorten their investment outlook because they can’t predict what’s going to happen far enough into the future.
Volatility is an indication of instability. It’s not a sign of a healthy economy but of an economy which has lost its way. High volatility isn’t what you expect from the worlds largest market, but from the emerging economy of a third world country. As you can see from the attached chart, when Roosevelt began his ‘bold persistent experimentation’ it drove away long term investors and that caused volatility to dramatically increase. It will almost certainly have the same effect when Obama does it.
Since he’s so determined not to learn from the mistakes of the past, I would expect him to repeat them. I’m betting that his poking and prodding will add to unemployment, reduce economic growth, and wreak havoc with the federal deficit. There is little doubt that he’s the wrong man at the wrong time. I’m just hoping that he is as devoid of principles as the Clintons, and that he finds a way to break his campaign promises or we’re in for a long painful recession, and maybe worse.
We can only hope, since we lost an opportunity to do any more than that a couple weeks ago.
Alan Boyle has a piece on what looks to be an interesting PBS series on biblical archaeology. I agree that it is not the archaeologist’s job to either prove, or disprove creation myths. His job is to, as best as can be done, utilize the scientific method to figure out what the past really was.
One of the astronauts lost a toolbag during EVA servicing:
Piper noticed that one of the two grease guns in her bag had exploded, spreading the dark, dry grease all over her camera and gloves. The grease, called Braycote, is a durable, non-flamable lubricant tough enough to handle the extreme temperatures and vacuum of space. It is needed to lubricate the cranky joint which has been grinding for more than a year.
In the midst of trying to clean up the mess, the bag of tools floated away from her. Views from a camera mounted on her helmet show it drifting slowly off towards the back of the station, some 200 miles above the earth.
“Oh, great,” she exclaimed in frustration.
I assume that by “exploded” they just mean “escaped under pressure,” and not literally a supersonic combustion.
A truly spacefaring nation would have a routine means of going and retrieving something like this. Instead, it becomes one more piece of space junk to track until it eventually enters the atmosphere, probably months or years from now.
For the first time, I’ve started deleting some comments without comment (I should say, for the first time other than spam). They come in the form: “…blah blah Simberg blah blah sh*thead blah blah blah f**k you blah blah blah idiot blah blah blah…” They are also anonymous.
Just so the cowardly anonymous moron(s) know, and perhaps won’t waste their and my time on such mindless incivility in the future.
…to the charlatans like Jim Hansen. Here are two useful books. First, Cool It
Yup. As many reviewers note, “climate change” isn’t really about science–it’s just the latest ideology to come along for the collectivists to use in their latest attempt to bend us to their will.
In response to my previous post on the subject, from Eric Scheie:
If we see the two anti-freedom strains as “your money or your sex,” it becomes quite obvious that it’s easier — a hell of a lot easier — for the government to grab your money than your genitalia.
Yet even though the anti-sex people are by no means a majority in the GOP and cannot possibly implement their schemes, more people fear the Republicans.
A great con job, if you ask me.
Yup. And it continues on.