Michael Belfiore has his Sputnik thoughts up at Financial Times.
Surprise, Surprise, Surprise
The supposed derived engine from Apollo isn’t going to be very derived after all:
“This one has to generate more than 290,000 pounds of thrust,” said Mike Kynard, J-2X program manager. “Not only is the J-2X going to be more powerful, it’s going to be different. Time has seen to that. This engine has its roots in Apollo, but we aren’t just lifting their work. It’s almost a new engine.”
This notion that we were going to save money with all these new vehicles by “deriving” them from existing hardware and designs was always kind of a scam (and it’s gotten more so as the designs have departed further from the original ESAS concepts). A five-segment SRB is also essentially a new motor relative to a four-segment one, in terms of understanding the structure and stresses, particularly when all of the loads (at least for The Stick) will be compressive, rather than some from the side as they are in the current Shuttle stack. The only thing really being preserved is the very costly, but politically essential “heritage workforce.” It may be necessary for political preservation of the program in Congress, but it does nothing to reduce costs of access to space, or truly open up the frontier.
[Update a few minutes later]
Thomas James is similarly unsurprised.
[Update a few minutes later yet]
Thomas also has further thoughts on whether or not space is the new Australia (with some comments on the history of northern Michigan).
Two For The Price Of One
Glenn is kvetching about having to buy both types of HD players:
The prices have dropped enough that I might be able to buy this high-rated HD-DVD player
and this Sony Blu-Ray player
My preference, actually, is to buy two things if I have the room, and I can afford them. Bundling functions in a single unit might seem convenient and cost saving, but the problem with it is that if one component fails, you still have to either replace the entire thing, or at least replace the functionality of the part that failed. The old example would be a combination microwave/range. The microwave dies, and you not only have to go replace it, but you can’t find a stock replacement for it that will fit the range, so you have a permanently dead microwave in your kitchen, and have to take up space with the new one on or under the counter. Unless you go out and replace the entire stove, even though the range and conventional oven are just fine.
A more recent, and mundane example is these television/DVD combos
A risk analyst (like yours truly in his day job) would say that by increasing the complexity you’re increasing the probability of failure (can anyone say Space Shuttle? Apparently it really bugged NASA to have to buy both a launch vehicle and an orbital laboratory…)
But I suspect that bundling is the wave of the future, particularly as electronics continues to become less and less expensive (as living space becomes more so).
Vice President Brownback?
I don’t know how likely it is, but I thought that there was an interesting comment at this post about Giuliani’s candidacy.
I find it interesting because, rightly or wrongly, the vice president has been traditionally in charge of space policy. And while there are a lot of things that I wouldn’t want Sam Brownback in charge of, considering that his adviser on space was Pete Worden, we might be in for some very interesting space policy under him.
A Deadly Combo
It was one of the driest seasons on record in Southern California this year. The grass and weeds in the local mountains was certainly tinder dry. With the arrival of the hot Santa Ana winds, the area was ripe for a fire, and sure enough, Malibu is in flames. I remember years ago going down to the strand in Manhattan Beach, and looking across the dark South Bay at the orange glow across the water the last time this happened.
It’s a beautiful area to live, but the wealthy residents should have to carry their own insurance. But I suspect that, just is the case on barrier islands and other flood and fire zones, they’ll get help from the federal taxpayers, most of whom make much less than Malibu residents, and can’t afford to live in such places, to rebuild once again.
[Update in the afternoon]
Wow, this sounds like it might be the worst Malibu fire in history. I’m hearing that Malibu Canyon is aflame, including the Presbyterian Church (if it’s the one I’m thinking of, it has a beautiful view of the ocean below–I attended a college roommate’s wedding there years ago), the Malibu Castle is engulfed in flames, and I’m sure that Hughes Research Lab (or whatever it’s called these days after all the acquisitions) and Pepperdine are threatened.
Is Space…
An Exemplary Example Of How Crazy College Football Is This Season
The first team this season to lose to Notre Dame defeated Cal.
And the Buckeye-Spartan game was close enough to make both teams worth beating for Michigan’s strength of schedule. Assuming they beat Illinois tonight, of course…
[Sunday morning update]
Sorry, I’d linked the wrong year on the Notre Dame/UCLA game–it’s fixed now. The point remains, though.
Truth In Advertising
“Crooks And Liars” lives up to its name. At least the “Liars” part.
Retrospective
Clark Lindsey has some thoughts on the late Kistler concept, with which I largely agree:
I’ve never thought the K-1 design that they came up with was anywhere close to an ideal RLV. For example, it doesn’t allow for incremental testing to find problems without losing the vehicle as Rutan could do with the SS1. However, it was a proof of principle that even a group of conservative NASA/Apollo/Saturn engineers could sit down and design a two-stage-to-orbit (TSTO) fully reusable vehicle without breaking any laws of physics or requiring even an ounce of unobtainium. Other than the occasional anonymous commenter posting “the K-1 is crap” sort of criticism, I’ve never seen any credible person point to some particular part of the K-1 design and say this definitely is not going to work.
Kistler got 75% of the hardware built for the first K-1 when their target LEO comsat constellation market disappeared and funding dried up. Kistler had at that point spent about $800M but raised only $600M. The company itself had remained relatively small and had farmed out most of the hardware to various mainstream aerospace companies. (SpaceX decided that building many of its major components in house could save lots of money over this outsourcing approach.) People who were involved with other entrepreneurial launch vehicle companies during that period occasionally express annoyance, to say the least, that Kistler Aerospace soaked up most of the private investment available for such ventures yet still didn’t get anything into the air.
I always thought that it was a mistake to hire Apollo retreads for the job. George Mueller and company knew how to get the job done on an unlimited budget, but they didn’t have one (though they had a lot more money than anyone else). There was never any reason to think that they could do things cost effectively. My understanding is that the investors demanded that “space experts” be brought in. Unfortunately, the “space experts” they brought in simply farmed the job out to cost-plus contractors, because that’s all they knew how to do.
Whether they really “soaked up all the private money for such ventures” is hard to know, because the investors that were willing to put money into Kistler weren’t necessarily willing to put money into a company that didn’t have old Apollo hands running it. So perhaps that was their loss, not the industry’s.
Irony
Radley Balko wonders why Bush (and Cheney) haters would want Hillary!™ as president.
The 1990s, remember, weren’t exactly a decade of peace. Bill Clinton ordered more U.S. military interventions than any other post-WWII administration, and there’s no reason to think any of them were over Hillary’s protestations. She supported the U.S. military campaigns in Haiti, Kosovo, and Bosnia. She once boasted that as the tension in Kosovo mounted, she called her husband from her trip to Africa and, “I urged him to bomb.”
Hillary Clinton voted for both the Patriot Act and its reauthorization. She voted for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. She voted to loosen restrictions limiting the federal government’s ability to wiretap cell phones. In the past, she has supported a robust role for the federal government in enforcing “decency” standards in television and music. She teamed up with former Sen. Rick Santorum on a bill calling for the federal government to restrict the sale of violent video games.
Leftists concerned about the entertainment industry’s increasingly imperial stand on copyright might take a cue from copyright guru Lawrence Lessig, who wrote on his blog for Wired magazine: “Of all the Dems, I would have bet she was closest to the copyright extremists. So far, she’s done nothing to suggest to the contrary.”
What about secrecy and executive power? It’s difficult to see Hillary Clinton voluntarily handing back all of those extra-constitutional executive powers claimed by President Bush. Her husband’s administration, for example, copiously invoked dubious “executive privilege” claims to keep from complying with congressional subpoenas and open records requests