The government doesn’t want you to have access to your own genome data.
Sorry, I outgrew my nanny many decades ago.
[Via Geekpress]
Whistling Past The Graveyard
The Ares graveyard, that is. Mark Whittington once again proudly demonstrates his ignorance about space technology. Some would be embarrassed by it, but never Mark.
Now, I’m not adroit at deciphering the somewhat arcane language of NASA documents, though I’ve read my share of them. But the numbers that Jon quotes is under a column called “Current Analysis” which is to the right of a column called “TPM REQT.” That suggests, just drawing on an ability to read the English language, that the numbers quoted are a snapshot in time and do not reflect where the folks working on Constellation expect to be when the Orion and Ares start flying. Therefore not quite as alarming as Rand, Jon, or the mysterious person who calls himself “Anonymous Space” would like to imply.
You’re right. You are not adroit (though there’s nothing “arcane” about this particular document). Of course it’s a “current analysis.” That’s the only kind of analysis that one can do in the present. When it’s redone in the future, that analysis will be the current analysis. And the current analysis says that the LOC/LOM are nowhere near what was originally promised for the vehicle (just as was the case for the Shuttle). There are no obvious ways to improve it–the hazards that lower it to those numbers are essentially intrinsic to the design, and probably not mitigatible within the mass budget. There is also no obvious way to “expect” something different in the future. This reality is almost certainly the reason that the Preliminary Design Review was delayed into next year.
It should also be noted that, despite the mythology about how “safe” the Saturn/CSM were, we were damned lucky to not lose a crew during Apollo. Had we flown a lot more missions, it’s almost guaranteed that we would have. Had the oxygen tank that exploded in Apollo XIII occurred on the way back, we would have lost the crew, no matter how innovative and responsive ground control was, no matter how many times Gene Kranz declared that failure was not an option. Sometimes, failure happens. And one of the reasons that space costs so much, the way NASA does it, is that when failure isn’t an option, success gets outrageously expensive.
But it gets better:
Putting it another way, it is so of like suggesting that the LOM probability for SpaceX’s Falcon 1 will be %100 just because the first three test flights have all failed to achieve orbit.
No, that is not “putting it another way.” That is saying something entirely different and utterly irrelevant. If he’s attempting to do a Bayesian probability of future Falcon success based on its history, the next flight would have a 75% chance of failure, not a hundred percent. But there’s a big difference between making an empirical estimate from past performance, and an analytical estimate based on a probabilistic risk analysis, the latter of which is where the Orion/Ares LOC/LOM numbers come from. Ares hasn’t flown yet, so it’s absurd to compare it to Falcon’s actual record.
“Cheneyesque”
Does John Kerry have any idea how pathetic and stupid he sounds trying to paint Sarah Palin as another Dick Cheney? Apparently not.
How epic is the fail, on so many levels, of such a comparison? Of course, it also assumes that if he can get people to make such an association, that it’s politically helpful to him. This kind of idiotic projection of their own derangement and hatred on the American public is one of the reasons that the Dems haven’t been able to get a majority of the popular vote in over thirty years.
Hilarious. I just wish that Stephanopolous had asked him to elaborate.
Not Simple, Not Soon
…and not safe. Nice catch by Jon Goff that no one else seems to have picked up on:
Basically, unless this source is bogus, or I’m completely misreading things, it’s saying that even NASA admits that their odds of losing a crew or a mission using the Constellation architecture are far worse then they had originally claimed. In fact, at least for ISS missions, we’re talking almost an order of magnitude worse. For ISS, they’re claiming a LOC (probability of losing the crew on any given flight) of 1 in 231, with a LOM (loss of mission) of 1 in 19! If I’m reading this right, that means they expect right now that about 5% of missions to the space station will end up not making it to the station. For lunar missions, the LOC number is 1 in 170, and the LOM number is 1 in 9! That means of every multi-billion dollar mission, they’ve got an almost 11% chance of it being a failure. While some of these numbers have been improving, others have been getting worse.
In other words, it appears that NASA is admitting that the Ares-1 is not going to be any safer than an EELV/EELV derived launcher would’ve been, and in fact may be less reliable.
I’ve never drunk the koolaid that Ares/Orion was going to be more safe than Shuttle (or any previous system). Part of the problem is that (particularly with all of the vibration issues) they’re being forced to put systems in that introduce new failure modes. The other is that in their determination to have a crew escape system (as I’ve mentioned before), they are adding hazards on a nominal mission.
There is only one way to get a safe launch system. We have to build vehicles that we can fly repeatedly, develop operational experience, and wring the bugs out of, just as we’ve done with every other type of transportation to date. When every flight is a first flight that has to fully perform, you’re always going to have a high risk of problems. Unfortunately, NASA decided to do Apollo again instead of solve the space transportation problem.
And along those lines, I should say that I fully agree with Jon:
Quite frankly, I’d almost rather see a gap than try filling it with a kludge like keeping the shuttle flying. The fundamental problem is that even though “commercial” companies like Boeing and LM and Orbital (and hopefully SpaceX if they can get their act together) have been providing the majority of US spacelift for the past two decades, there is no commercial supplier of manned orbital spaceflight in the US. That’s the bigger problem, IMO than the fact that NASA can’t access a space station that it really doesn’t have much use for.
I’d rather see more focus on how NASA and DoD can help encourage and grow a strong and thriving commercial spaceflight (manned and unmanned) sector than how NASA can fix its broken internal spaceflight problems. Once the US actually gets to the point where it has a thriving manned orbital spaceflight sector, there won’t be any gaps again in the future. A strong commercial spaceflight sector with a weak NASA is still a lot better than a strong NASA and a weak commercial spaceflight sector.
Unfortunately, absent a real crisis, the politics seem determined to not encourage that to happen. And the ISS crisis, if it is perceived as one, is likely to cause a panic that still won’t cause it to happen, though it may still result in something better than ESAS (not that we could do much worse).
The Idiossey
Iowahawk has dredged up a previously unfound work of Homer:
Speak to me, O Muse, of this resourceful man
who strides so boldly upon the golden shrine at Invescos,
Between Ionic plywood columns, to the kleig light altar.
Fair Obamacles, favored of the gods, ascends to Olympus
Amidst lusty tributes and the strumming lyres of Media;
Their mounted skyboxes echo with the singing of his name
While Olbermos and Mattheus in their greasy togas wrassle
For first honor of basking in their hero’s reflected glory.
Who is this man, so bronzed in countenance,
So skilled of TelePropter, clean and articulate
whose ears like a stately urn’s protrude?
So now, daughter of Zeus, tell us his story.
And just the Cliff Notes if you don’t mind,
We don’t have all day.
Read all.
Mark Steyn On Palin
First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, “all-American”, but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I’m not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin’ Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who’s done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of “community organizer” and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.
Second, it can’t be in Senator Obama’s interest for the punditocracy to spends its time arguing about whether the Republicans’ vice-presidential pick is “even more” inexperienced than the Democrats’ presidential one.
Third, real people don’t define “experience” as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. (On the first point, at the Gun Owners of New Hampshire dinner in the 2000 campaign, I remember Orrin Hatch telling me sadly that he was stunned to discover how few Granite State voters knew who he was.) Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain’t run nothin’ but his mouth. She’s done the stuff he’s merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party’s corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign’s thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night).
Fourth, Governor Palin has what the British Labour Party politician Denis Healy likes to call a “hinterland” – a life beyond politics. Whenever Senator Obama attempts anything non-political (such as bowling), he comes over like a visiting dignitary to a foreign country getting shanghaied into some impenetrable local folk ritual. Sarah Palin isn’t just on the right side of the issues intellectually. She won’t need the usual stage-managed “hunting” trip to reassure gun owners: she’s lived the Second Amendment all her life. Likewise, on abortion, we’re often told it’s easy to be against it in principle but what if you were a woman facing a difficult birth or a handicapped child? Been there, done that.
Fifth, she complicates all the laziest Democrat pieties. Energy? Unlike Biden and Obama, she’s been to ANWR and, like most Alaskans, supports drilling there.
Sixth (see Kathleen’s link to Craig Ferguson below), I kinda like the whole naughty librarian vibe.
[Over at The Corner]
The Sarah Palin Chronicles
Heh.
It’s Sarah and John!
New campaign motto: “Come with us, if you want to live.”
This just keeps getting better.
Land For Sale
John Tierney on lunar and martian property rights.
Reading The Writing On The Wall?
Mike Griffin has kicked off a study to consider Shuttle extension for five years.
The problem, not mentioned by the article, is that this doesn’t close the gap, unless Ares is abandoned. Shuttle and Ares use the same launch infrastructure, and as long as Shuttle flies, pads and crawler cannot be modified for it. Nor does it allow us to permanently crew the station without Soyuz.
The only real solution (assuming that we want to pay the high costs of continuing Shuttle) is to put a capsule on something else (e.g., Atlas, or Falcon 9 if it ever flies), soon. Maybe Orion, maybe Dragon, maybe something else, but it looks like the Stick is on life support. In fact, as “anonymous.space” says over at Space Politics, it’s already dead. It’s just that Griffin and others have been doing CPR on the body to keep the coroner from getting to it.
What a fiasco.
Buyers’ Remorse
Boy, you really have to think that the Dems would like to have a do-over. They will be wondering for years how they managed to screw up this election so royally. The answer is their identity politics, and arrogance. But that’s not the lesson they’ll take. Which is fine with me.
[Update a couple minutes later]
A good point over at The Corner. This won’t just help with women–it will help with men. Who would you rather look at for four years: Joe Biden, or Sarah Palin?
[Update a while later]
Not that they’ve been high, but watch Bob Barr’s poll numbers drop. McCain just brought a lot of libertarian Republican home, judging from what I read at Free Republic. Hell, I might even vote for him now.
[Update a little later]
A prediction. Sarah Palin, not Hillary Clinton, will be the first woman president. And the first black president will be a Republican as well (of course, I’ve always thought that the first black and women presidents would be Republicans).