Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

PR Stunt Delayed

11 Comments

If this report is true, it looks like NASA is not going to hit its milestone of the first test flight of the Potemkin RocketAres 1-X vehicle planned for a year from now:

Ares I-X now has little chance of making its April, 2009 launch date target, initially due to the delay of STS-125’s flight to October.

The first Ares related test flight requires the freeing of High Bay 3 inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and Pad 39B – which will first host STS-125’s Launch On Need (LON) rescue shuttle (Endeavour/LON-400) – being vacated for modifications ahead of Ares I-X.

However, a new problem has now come to light with the MLP (Mobile Launch Platform) that will be handed over from Shuttle to Constellation for the test flight. This problem relates to the stability of Ares I-X during rollout to the Pad.

The modifications to the MLP initially called for Ares I-X to be placed on one set of the existing Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) hold down posts, with a tower to be erected on the other set of hold down posts – with support for the vehicle between the tower and the interstage level.

When NASA changed contractors for the MLP work associated with Ares I-X, the design changed, omitting the adjacent tower, instead relying on three steel cables – 120 degrees apart – to help hold the vehicle steady during rollout.

Given the projected weight of the vehicle at rollout – with a heavy dummy upper stage – additional stability is now being called for, leading to a redesign of the MLP support structure.

In combination with the projected delay to handing over Shuttle resources post STS-125, internal scheduling is showing 60 to 90 days worth of delay to Ares I-X’s projected launch date.

Gee, it’s always something. Guess that’s what happens when you come up with a new vehicle concept with a ridiculously high aspect ratio, that makes a whip antenna look positively zaftig. Has anyone ever had to use guy wires on a rocket before, or is this another proud first for our nation’s space agency?

Anyway, as it goes on to point out, this probably will waterfall down through the whole schedule, further increasing the dreaded “gap.” Not that it will matter that much, once the budget gets whacked in the next administration, regardless of who is president. But then, maybe if they’d come up with an implementation that actually appeared to have some relevance to peoples’ lives, instead of redoing people’s grandfather’s space program, they’d get more public support, instead of ever less.

It’s hard to see how this ends well, at least for fans of Apollo on Steroids. But it’s mostly irrelevant to those of us who want to see large-scale human expansion into space. That will have to await the private sector.

Economics, Political Commentary

The Missing Word

21 Comments

With a computer mouse, you can precisely position the cursor wherever you want. The motion of the cursor exactly mimics the motion of the mouse in your hand. It is a positional controller.

But in many computer games, you have no direct control over position. The joystick controller only controls the rate of motion. You have to provide a direction, and speed, and hope that it will get to the desired location at the desired time. As anyone who has played such games knows, position control using a rate controller is much less precise, and often not even accurate if you’re not a good judge of such things.

In last night’s political debate (as in almost all discussions of this topic), there was a lot of talk about “cutting taxes,” and “raising taxes.” Not to pick on him in particular, but as an example, here’s the reporting by Jim Geraghty:

Hillary laughs heartily at McCain’s comment about “they’re going to raise your taxes, and they have the aud-ic-i-ty, the audacity, to hope you don’t mind!”

With her laugh, she triggered a thousand primal screams on liberal blogs.

Steph asks if she’ll make a pledge to never raise taxes for those making under $200,000 per year. She says she’s “absolutely committed to not raising taxes on those making less than $200,000.”

Obama echoes the pledge, and says he’ll cut taxes for those folks.

I don’t trust either, but I’m rather surprised that they both were willing to be pinned down in the equivalent of “read my lips, no new taxes.”

Wow. Charlie Gibson notes that when the capital gains taxes were cut under both Clinton and Bush, revenues went up.

These are the GREATEST DEBATE QUESTIONS EVER.

Wow. Hillary: “I would not raise the capital gains tax above 20 percent, if I would raise it at all… I don’t want to raise taxes on everyone.” She rips Obama’s plan to raise payroll taxes.

Emphasis mine, in all cases. Every one of these statements is absurd. No one, not the mighty Hillary, not the saintly Obama, has the power to raise or cut taxes. They don’t have a tax revenue controller. All they can do is increase or decrease tax rates. And they can’t predict with certainty whether or not this will increase, or decrease “taxes” (that is, tax revenues). The absurdity of leaving out this key word is demonstrated starkly in Charlie Gibson’s statement: “when the capital gains taxes were cut, revenues went up.” How can that be? If taxes are cut, by definition, revenues have to go down. But if he had said that when capital gains tax rates are cut, revenues go up, this is perfectly sensible (though counterintuitive to people who don’t understand that tax rates modify behavior).

I expect Democrats (and journalists, who are generally Democrats) to play such word games, but I’m always disappointed when Republicans and so-called conservatives go along with it. People who want lower tax rates (and a more vibrant economy) have to demand them, and stop talking about lower taxes. Yes, it would be nice to cut off funding to the federal government (at least if we could get spending under control), but that’s a separate issue. By conflating tax revenues with tax rates, we grant far too much power to the big government types, when we should instead be pointing out their powerlessness. There are many unintended consequences of government action, and it is always useful to point out that this is just one more–that the federal government cannot directly control how much it taxes people (that is, how much money it actually confiscates)–it can only control the the rate at which it does so.

This is just one more example of how we small-government types have to start taking back the language.

General, History, Popular Culture

Remembering Slim Chipley

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Most of my readers will find this of no interest at all, but I just ran across a new blog dedicated to remembering the good old days in Flint, Michigan. Nostalgic memories abound.

The population trend in the sidebar is depressing. When I was a kid it had a population of almost two hundred thousand, and there was an ongoing feud with Grand Rapids over whether it or Flint was the second largest city in the state (after Detroit, of course, which had its own hemorrhage of people). Now it’s down to just a little over half that.

[Update in the evening]

OK, again, unless you’re from southeast Michigan, this will be meaningless, but via the blog above, I found a coney blog. That actually understands the difference between Flint and Detroit style.

And there are those who say that it’s a lost art. For many, Angelo’s defined the Flint coney island, and once he died (my father was in the hospital with him at the same time, as they both had heart attacks in the late sixties), it became franchised, and lost the magic. But my mother used to tell me (and we even went there when I was young) that the original Flint Coney Island, on Saginaw, north of downtown, was the best. But it went under decades ago.

Anyway, I’m glad to hear that it’s a hit in Phoenix. Maybe we can keep the brand alive.

My darling Patricia doesn’t understand the appeal. But then, she’s not a fan of raw onions. Nor is she a fan of me after I ingest them. But once in a while, I have to indulge, consequences be damned…

Space

OK, What Am I Missing Here?

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NASA apparently plans its first Ares flight test a year from today.

The April 2009 flight will be the first of four test fights for the rocket’s first stage, derived from the current space shuttle’s solid-rocket boosters. In particular, NASA hopes the flight will validate measures it is now undertaking to quell an anticipated vibration issue in the booster system, which could pose problems down the line for the survivability of later variants of the rocket.

The flight will also demonstrate the abilities of the first-stage flight control systems to keep the “single stick” rocket on course, without the benefit of control fin surfaces.

For the first test flight, NASA will use a four-segment booster, topped with an empty fifth segment. Replicas of an Ares 1 second stage, Orion space capsule and launch abort system rocket will ride up top. The dummy segments will feature correct exterior detailing for aerodynamics testing, and will weigh about the same as their real-life counterparts.

“It’s made to look a lot like the Ares 1 vehicle, but it’s a very different animal,” said NASA lead ground operations engineer Tassos Abadiotakis. “We’re also going to get some aerodynamics data, some thermal data — just the basic rocketry laws to make sure what we’re proposing to go fly for Ares 1 actually is going to perform as advertised.”

OK, so, if it’s “a very different animal,” how is it going to validate the real animal? I thought that the concern with the vibration was the fact that they’ve never flown a five-segment booster, and don’t know what its resonant modes will be. I don’t see how flying an four-segment booster with an empty casing on top resolves those concerns in any way. Why can’t they fly a five-segment booster? Presumably because it won’t be far enough along in development to allow a test flight a year from now.

And will the upper stage be just a dummy mass, or will it be active? I thought that the Ares was supposed to get roll control from the upper stage, since it has no way of doing it with the booster (as the article points out, it has no fins, and even if it did, they’d be useless once it left the atmosphere). The first stage can control pitch and yaw through gimbaling, but absent some kind of control jets on the circumference, there’s no way for it to control roll on its own.

So, just what is it that this test is supposed to accomplish? Other, of course, than getting something on the pad and flying it to maintain program momentum at a time that a new administration is coming in and considering what to do with it?

[Update on Thursday morning]

I’ve gotten more than one private email from program insiders that this is a political stunt, not a useful engineering test.

Economics, Space

Long Term Space Budgeting

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In Monday’s part 1 of “VSE and the Retirement of Baby Boomers,” Charles Miller and Jeff Foust port the conventional wisdom about budgeting to the space discussion. These are two of the most well-read, connected and smart people on space topics. I’d like to give folks addressing this issue some more texture to add some items that are not part of the conventional intergenerational budget debate which can be summarized perennially as “vote for me or things will all go to hell pretty soon if they aren’t already there”, but every year real personal income rises and real government spending minus interest payments rise; life expectancy goes up and almost all the Cassandras are proven wrong, but by then they’ve long since moved on to the next pending calamity. Here are the unconventional texture points:

  • Personal income is continuing to rise ahead of inflation such that every generation earns about twice as much per capita as the one before
  • That is, a falling percent of the federal budget should still buy more robotics, rockets, science, human spaceflight, exploration (and settlement?!) even as it buys fewer staffers and is a lower share of GDP
  • Bracket creep, estate tax and alternative minimum tax are going to increase receipts above historical revenues and changes that fix these are likely to fix macro spending issues at the same time
  • The boomers are likely to work part time or full time during retirement years
  • The boomers are more comfortable with the stock market and are likely to earn higher returns there than previous generations of pensioners
  • The boomer echo will put more workers in the worker to retiree ratio again as the boomers die off before the boomer echo generation retires
  • Between Federal, State, County and Local taxes, we are taxed together at above the monopoly rate; if there were a coordinated decrease, revenues would increase for each
  • Private spending on human spaceflight will rise and is already about 0.3% of NASA spending; depending on how you count capital spending by people like Bigelow, it’s in the single digit percent
  • First-party State, County and Local spending and incentives for space flight will increase as more states cross the income threshold of the US and USSR economies in the late 1950s which was about 1/8 what it is now for the US. California has already crossed this. Texas and New York will in the next 20 years. If space gets cheaper, Florida may enter the ranks of states that could have their own space programs. Initiative by a vocal minority may rocket this issue into the fore. Oklahoma and New Mexico are more like the USSR in the space race looking at space as a way to look far bigger than their economies suggest and to leap frog other states in an emerging industry. The Soyuz is still flying and is now profitable even as Russia has an economy 1/6 the size of the US (USSR had 1/2 the US economy in 1960) so the space portion of their strategy is validated. And may even work for New Mexico which has about 1/12 the size of the 1960 USSR economy now
  • Boomers dying will likely dry up support for a cargo-cult do-nothing NASA as memories of Apollo die with them; Obama can be seen as a coming attraction of how the next generation will treat NASA
  • Support for ITAR and missile counter proliferation will wane, but existing techniques will ossify as civilian launches start to dwarf military ones as long as there is no space 9/11 which has a mixed effect on cost of flight
  • Competition and achievement from the private sector will put pressure on budgets to achieve more value for the dollar, but at the same time make obtaining that value easier
Political Commentary

“I Don’t Recall”

It seems like Barack Obama shares a problem with Hillary!–a faulty memory when it comes to shady dealings and associates:

Dem presidential contender Barack Obama’s handlers may be telling the press Obama has NO “recollection” of a 2004 party at influence peddler Tony Rezko’s Wilmette house, but a top Sneed source claims Obama not only gave Rezko’s guest of honor, Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, a big welcome . . . but he made a few toasts!

Hey, maybe he just drank so many toasts that he blacked out the memory. Maybe in addition to giving up smoking, he should join AA?

Must be that “new politics” I’ve heard so much about.

And Victor Davis Hanson says that Obama (and Michelle, and Jeremiah) just keep on digging:

The American people will forgive slips, even condescension IF they are followed by genuine apology and not repeated ad infinitum. But in this case, there will be a growing weariness, followed by anger, at the notion that a Presidential candidate thinks he can say whatever he wishes, associate with whomever he wants, and feel it’s the electorate’s, not his own, ensuing problem. So the rub for the Obama campaign is not simply that he has no experience outside the Ivy League and Chicago, or even that he made a Faustian bargain with the Trinity church to jump-start his career, but rather his hubris this spring — which as we speak is bringing on a summer nemesis.

I’m hoping for a fall nemesis, myself.

Political Commentary

“I Don’t Recall”

It seems like Barack Obama shares a problem with Hillary!–a faulty memory when it comes to shady dealings and associates:

Dem presidential contender Barack Obama’s handlers may be telling the press Obama has NO “recollection” of a 2004 party at influence peddler Tony Rezko’s Wilmette house, but a top Sneed source claims Obama not only gave Rezko’s guest of honor, Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, a big welcome . . . but he made a few toasts!

Hey, maybe he just drank so many toasts that he blacked out the memory. Maybe in addition to giving up smoking, he should join AA?

Must be that “new politics” I’ve heard so much about.

And Victor Davis Hanson says that Obama (and Michelle, and Jeremiah) just keep on digging:

The American people will forgive slips, even condescension IF they are followed by genuine apology and not repeated ad infinitum. But in this case, there will be a growing weariness, followed by anger, at the notion that a Presidential candidate thinks he can say whatever he wishes, associate with whomever he wants, and feel it’s the electorate’s, not his own, ensuing problem. So the rub for the Obama campaign is not simply that he has no experience outside the Ivy League and Chicago, or even that he made a Faustian bargain with the Trinity church to jump-start his career, but rather his hubris this spring — which as we speak is bringing on a summer nemesis.

I’m hoping for a fall nemesis, myself.

Political Commentary

“I Don’t Recall”

9 Comments

It seems like Barack Obama shares a problem with Hillary!–a faulty memory when it comes to shady dealings and associates:

Dem presidential contender Barack Obama’s handlers may be telling the press Obama has NO “recollection” of a 2004 party at influence peddler Tony Rezko’s Wilmette house, but a top Sneed source claims Obama not only gave Rezko’s guest of honor, Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, a big welcome . . . but he made a few toasts!

Hey, maybe he just drank so many toasts that he blacked out the memory. Maybe in addition to giving up smoking, he should join AA?

Must be that “new politics” I’ve heard so much about.

And Victor Davis Hanson says that Obama (and Michelle, and Jeremiah) just keep on digging:

The American people will forgive slips, even condescension IF they are followed by genuine apology and not repeated ad infinitum. But in this case, there will be a growing weariness, followed by anger, at the notion that a Presidential candidate thinks he can say whatever he wishes, associate with whomever he wants, and feel it’s the electorate’s, not his own, ensuing problem. So the rub for the Obama campaign is not simply that he has no experience outside the Ivy League and Chicago, or even that he made a Faustian bargain with the Trinity church to jump-start his career, but rather his hubris this spring — which as we speak is bringing on a summer nemesis.

I’m hoping for a fall nemesis, myself.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!