Space

Four Years On

Four years ago, President Bush announced a new direction for the nation in space, perhaps the biggest space policy change since the end of Apollo, in that it forthrightly declared that there was now a national goal to send people beyond low earth orbit, where they had been stuck since 1972, a situation that was cemented with the onset of the Shuttle era, because it was our only crewed space vehicle, and it could go nowhere else.

Unfortunately, four years later, the program is bogged down with an unnecessary new launch system that will do little to improve safety and nothing to reduce costs, and for this and other reasons, it seems unlikely to survive the next administration, almost regardless of who wins. My primary hope is that at least the goal remain in place, and perhaps some fresh thought will be given to how it will be best achieved, with a lot more emphasis on the commercial sector and tying it in to national security, as the Aldridge Report advised, and NASA has completely ignored. And no, COTS doesn’t count, both because it’s inadequately funded, and because it has nothing to do with VSE–it’s simply a way to replace Shuttle logistics for ISS.

Jeff Foust has some thoughts over at The Space Review today. Here’s what I wrote as I live blogged the speech at the time, from a motel in Lauderdale-By-The-Sea.

Education

Cranking Out Code Monkeys

I’d been wondering about this. Apparently, computer “science” degrees are no longer teaching computer science. There’s no doubt that there isn’t as much demand for actual CS types as there is for programmers, but if that’s the case, they should shrink the CS departments and start up a different one, perhaps called computer applications, to teach the programmers. As it is now, I’d consider it academic fraud.

This is a generic problem, to me. The word “science” has gotten too watered down, even (especially?) in academia. Of course, it all started when someone came up with the oxymoronic major, political science…

Science And Society

“Who Says Nothing Exciting Ever Happens In Canada?”

That’s Joe Katzman’s comment at this interesting post by Donald Sensing on a major asteroid impact in North America thirteen thousand years ago.

…the worst consequence of the cataclysm was the mass extinctions of the late Pleistocene that have heretofore been attributed to overhunting by the Clovis peoples of the continent. The extinctions were additionally blamed on the Younger Dryas. The new impact theory, though, says that the comet’s multiple explosions (caused by its breakup in the high atmosphere) themselves caused the extinctions: “at least 35 genera of the continent’s mammals went extinct

Science And Society

“Who Says Nothing Exciting Ever Happens In Canada?”

That’s Joe Katzman’s comment at this interesting post by Donald Sensing on a major asteroid impact in North America thirteen thousand years ago.

…the worst consequence of the cataclysm was the mass extinctions of the late Pleistocene that have heretofore been attributed to overhunting by the Clovis peoples of the continent. The extinctions were additionally blamed on the Younger Dryas. The new impact theory, though, says that the comet’s multiple explosions (caused by its breakup in the high atmosphere) themselves caused the extinctions: “at least 35 genera of the continent’s mammals went extinct

Science And Society

“Who Says Nothing Exciting Ever Happens In Canada?”

That’s Joe Katzman’s comment at this interesting post by Donald Sensing on a major asteroid impact in North America thirteen thousand years ago.

…the worst consequence of the cataclysm was the mass extinctions of the late Pleistocene that have heretofore been attributed to overhunting by the Clovis peoples of the continent. The extinctions were additionally blamed on the Younger Dryas. The new impact theory, though, says that the comet’s multiple explosions (caused by its breakup in the high atmosphere) themselves caused the extinctions: “at least 35 genera of the continent’s mammals went extinct

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!