Space

A Space Race With China?

10 Comments

Jeff Foust lays out the case, pro and con. As he points out, there is a lot of ignorance and misinterpretation in this area, on both sides. I don’t think that we’re in a race, and if and when we are, it will become clear long before it’s “too late,” in any sense. We will not be surprised by a Chinese lunar landing.

As noted previously, the real race is not between governments, but between plodding politicized bureaucracies and cash-starved private space enterprises.

And I found this bit amusing:

It is difficult, though, to get a handle on some information, such as exactly how much money China spends on its space program; estimates vary widely and even Chinese officials have said that their budgets are “very complicated…”

Does that distinguish them in any useful way from NASA’s?

Science And Society, Technology and Society

A Cure For Diabetes?

3 Comments

It seems to work in mice:

Last year, Dr Terry Strom and his team demonstrated that they could stop the on-going destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in mice using a combination of three drugs, although they were unable to regenerate the cells.

However, when they added an extra ingredient – an enzyme called alpha 1 anti-trypsin – a significant rise in the number of beta cells was seen.

I’m not sure what the point is here:

It is exciting that these drugs could stop the immune system from attacking insulin-producing cells, but it is too early to tell whether these cells recovered in the mice or if new cells were produced.

Does it matter, from a practical standpoint? I can understand why the researchers would be curious, but a cure is a cure.

Anyway, here’s hoping that it can work in higher mammals.

History, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Confused

11 Comments

Selena Zito writes that all of the remaining presidential candidates are Scots-Irish.

Really? This is the first I’d heard that Hillary! was of Scots-Irish descent. I’d always assumed that she was from Puritan stock. That’s the way she’s always acted. And Obama is obviously, at best, only half Scots-Irish.

Zito doesn’t seem to quite get the concept, either:

How can there be such scant understanding of a 30 million-strong ethnic group that has produced so many leaders and swung most elections?

Perhaps because political academics and pollsters parse the Scottish half off with the WASP vote and define the Irish-Catholic half as blue-collar Democrats. They are neither.

There is no “Irish-Catholic half” of the Scots-Irish. Scots-Irish aren’t Irish at all. Neither are they Scottish. They were mostly Anglo-Saxon, not Celtic. They were also a violent people with an honor culture, mercenaries from the border area between England and Scotland. As the article notes, they were sent by the English to colonize Ulster, to get them out of Britain after the war between England and Scotland was settled and they had no more need for them. The ones too violent for Ulster were shipped off to America, so they’re a double distillation of the most violent culture that the British Isles produced. After they fought (mostly for the South) in the Civil War, many of them headed out west.

People who think that America is too violent blame it on the proliferation of guns. But they confuse cause and effect. We have a lot of guns because we have a lot of Scots-Irish (aka rednecks). But it comes in pretty handy during war time.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society

Proves Her Point About The Math Thing

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Charlotte Allen is embarrassed to be a woman. She gets the math wrong here, though:

Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women.

Since the statistic is on a per-mile basis, the fact that men drive more miles a year is irrelevant. So the disparity–5.1 versus 5.7–is actually quite small, and perhaps within the statistical error.

Of course, the thing that statistics like this don’t reveal is how many accidents they cause, unbeknownst to them, because they are oblivious to their surroundings. I’m always bemused by someone who I know to be a terrible driver bragging about the fact that they’ve never had an accident. Not to imply that men don’t do this as well, of course.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Crickets Chirping At The ICRC?

2 Comments

With all the hue and cry about Korans in toilets in Guantanamo, where are all the staunch defenders of the Geneva Conventions now?

The terrorists are operating within civilian areas, many times with the actual assistance of these civilians, and more often than not with their tacit approval. Brace yourselves for the palestinian propaganda offensive going into overdrive, including stories about civilian deaths, many of which may not be true.

Here’s another point:

We are lectured a great deal about the importance of democratizing the Middle East as, somehow, a strategy to defeat terrorism. I do not want to reargue this issue or make too much (again) of the fact that popular elections have thus far succeeded in empowering terrorists.

My question for the moment is this: Does this democratization ever entail any responsibility? The Palestinian “civilians” were given a choice in 2006, and they chose to elect Hamas — a choice that was overwhelming in Gaza, where the terror organization — having ousted the more “moderate” terror-mongers from Fatah — now rules. If the civilians, eyes wide open, opt to be led by a terrorist organization whose chief calling card is its pledge to destroy Israel (a sentiment shared by a large majority of the “civilian” population), how upset are we supposed to get when the said civilians get caught in the cross-fire that is provoked by the savages they elected?

I have always thought that one of the aims of the Israeli pullout of Gaza was to demonstrate that the Palestinians are incapable of forming a functioning state, and of having someone accountable when Israel is attacked. If that was the goal, it seems to have succeeded. Hamas has declared war (or actually, Hamas has never not been in a state of war with Israel, since the destruction of Israel is one of its primary purposes), and now it will have to accept the consequences.

Hamas is blatantly violating just about every one of the Geneva Conventions, I suspect, but I fearlessly predict that only Israel will be charged with “war crimes.” We know that the world will claim that the death of every innocent civilian in Gaza, among whom these war criminals hide, will be Israel’s fault. No one, after all, can ever violate the Geneva Conventions except for the US and Israel, even when they don’t.

Hmmmm…I wonder what the ICRC has to say about this?

[wandering over and reading]

The most recent release related to the subject is from Thursday, in which it simply tells both sides to “use restraint” against killing civilians. It says nothing about military operations among civilians in Gaza, or indeed anything specific at all, about anyone’s behavior. I thought that they were supposed to be the defenders and upholders of the Conventions? Why can they not denounce this?

[Update a little while later]

I just reread the release at the ICRC site, and I just can’t get over it. Let’s just unpack this one graf:

Numerous rockets have been fired at the Israeli towns of Ashkelon and Sderot, hitting civilian areas and landing inside a hospital compound. At the same time, the Israel Defense Forces have carried out several air strikes inside the Gaza Strip. On both sides, there have been civilian fatalities and injuries.

Really?

“…rockets have been fired, and ‘at the same time’ the IDF have carried out several air strikes.” Surely they don’t mean literally “at the same time”? As though both Israel and Hamas decided to bomb babies, just for the hell of it?

All right, no doubt by “the same time,” they are simply expressing an equivalence between them, not literally saying that the events were simultaneous. Of course, the reality is that first the rockets were fired, with the deliberate intent of killing Israeli civilians to the maximum degree possible, given the crude aiming capability of the rockets, which was followed, afterward by air strikes from Israel whose purpose was to take out the facilities that were launching the rockets in order to prevent further rocket attacks.

This moral equivalence, with no mention whatsoever of the daily, ongoing war crimes by Hamas, is simply nauseating. The ICRC may have moral standing in the world, but it has none with me.

[Update on Sunday afternoon]

A good point in comments. The release isn’t even neutral. “Rockets were fired” (passive voice–who knows who fired them? Maybe they fired themselves?) versus the active and specific “IDF carried out air strikes.”

[Update a little later]

Here it comes. The Saudis (who else?) are accusing Israel of war crimes. And not just any war crimes, no. Nazi war crimes.

And a bad word for the state that is actually committing war crimes.

[Via LGF]

Space

The Real Space Race

19 Comments

Chair Force Engineer writes about it:

In a true competition for transporting astronauts to low earth orbit, NASA would be beaten hands-down by SpaceX at this stage in the game. SpaceX has a capsule with more astronauts (seven versus six,) a cheaper booster (Falcon 9 vs. Ares I,) and a faster schedule.

The only thing SpaceX doesn’t have is thousands of jobs, and access to billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

[Update about 5 PM EST]

Mark Whittington continues to live in a fantasyland on this subject:

My sense is that under the scenario, COTS will be cancelled and the manned space program will consist of astronauts going in circles around the Earth forever and ever.

At least until the Chinese land men on the Moon. Then there will be a rather rude awakening.

Like it or not, the only hope for near term commercial space flight in LEO is that NASA continues to explore beyond LEO.

COTS is helpful, but in no way essential for commercial human spaceflight.

SpaceX was developing the Falcon 1 and 9 before COTS, and it would continue to do so in the absence of COTS. OSC might not move forward without COTS, but Dragon development will continue, Falcon 9 development will continue, and Atlas V upgrades will continue. The real market is not COTS, which is a sideshow from a payload standpoint, but Bigelow’s private space facilities, which were also moving forward before COTS, and would continue to do so in its absence.

I simply don’t understand Mark’s blindness to these realities that intrude so rudely on his theories, and his continuing obtuse insistence that commercial space is doomed without COTS, other than some sort of faith-based belief that it is not possible to put people into space without government funding.

And the notion that China is going to land a man on the moon any time within the next twenty years, at their current pace of development (far slower than Apollo was) remains laughable. So is the notion that they would suddenly do so out of the blue and that it would be a “rude awakening.”

This isn’t the Sputnik era, in which one can slip a satellite on a missile, in a world in which there was no space-based surveillance. There will be no surprise. If the development pace of the Chinese program picks up, it will be quite obvious, given the need for either a very large Saturn-class vehicle or (if they’re smart) orbital infrastructure, long before it actually happens. We will have plenty of time to respond, from a policy perspective, should we decide to.

CFE has it right–the race is between NASA and the private sector, not between slow-paced, expensive and moribund government space programs.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!