Some of us think of space heroes as only those who strap themselves into a rocketship. But people like these, who give their sweat and lives to build those ships, who take their families out to live in the desert and work incredible hours on tedious tasks to make those rockets fly, and who do so because they share the dream of an open frontier in space, they too are true heroes.
Rick Tumlinson in Space Frontier Foundation press release
Misreporting
I haven’t said anything about the “drunk astronauts” story, but I do think that it epitomizes the atrocious state of reporting on space (and any technical subject), in which it becomes sensationalized and drained of reality. Everyone assumes that the two incidents referred to were Shuttle launches, when the word I get is that it was a T-38 and a Soyuz flight. And of course it has become inflated from two (anecdotal) incidents to everyone doing shooters before each Shuttle flight. The real story, as Jim Oberg points out in this interview with a terminally clueless BBC reporter, is the special treatment of astronauts, and the (lack of sufficient) power of the flight surgeons (at least in their minds) to ground them. Of course, this is a tough problem, as we saw in the Nowak case.
There is a natural antipathy between the astronauts and the flight surgeons. From an astronaut’s point of view, an encounter with the latter can’t have a good outcome. At best, it can be a neutral one. The default is that one’s flight readiness is go. A flight surgeon can’t improve that–they can only change it for the worse. If one is sick enough to need to get permission to go, it’s unlikely to happen, since there are many trained backups, even for a given mission, who are fine. Recall Apollo XIII, when Ken Mattingly had to be replaced by Jack Swigert because he had merely been exposed to German measles, due to concern that he might come down with it during the mission. He ended up not getting them, and while the decision made sense, he had to feel frustrated (though obviously not as much as he would have had the mission been successful).
It’s not a new problem, and it’s not one likely to go away, but it would help if the media would treat it seriously. Not to mention soberly.
Too Cavalier
That’s what Cathy Young writes that civil libertarians are about terrorism.
Who Cares?
Can anyone explain to me why I (or anyone) should give a plug nickel about what Mikhail Gorbachev thinks? About anything?
“The Rule, Not The Exception”
The life of a soldier has been described as long periods of boredom punctuated by occasional moments of sheer terror. Michael Totten has a military correspondent who reports that Iraq is no different:
Even in the worst places, day-to-day activity is mundane and quiet. When attacks occur, they do so viciously. In my case, these resulted in my unit
“The Rule, Not The Exception”
The life of a soldier has been described as long periods of boredom punctuated by occasional moments of sheer terror. Michael Totten has a military correspondent who reports that Iraq is no different:
Even in the worst places, day-to-day activity is mundane and quiet. When attacks occur, they do so viciously. In my case, these resulted in my unit
“The Rule, Not The Exception”
The life of a soldier has been described as long periods of boredom punctuated by occasional moments of sheer terror. Michael Totten has a military correspondent who reports that Iraq is no different:
Even in the worst places, day-to-day activity is mundane and quiet. When attacks occur, they do so viciously. In my case, these resulted in my unit
A Tribute
…to Glen May. He was a lifelong rocketeer.”
[Update a few minutes later]
Dan Schrimpsher has more.
And Jim Bennett notes via private correspondence:
You will remember the scenes in The Right Stuff at the funerals of the test pilots; the Navy Hymn was always sung. This version includes the last verse, for space travellers, written by [Annapolis graduate] Robert Heinlein in 1947.
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd
Morons
Two points. First, the new power (for good or ill) of blogs:
The tragedy stunned space tourism supporters, many of whom were betting that Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceline would be the first in the fledgling business to send well-heeled tourists out of the atmosphere.
“I suspect that this is a major setback for Virgin Galactic, because they may have to go back to the drawing board for propulsion, for PR reasons if nothing else,” wrote former aerospace engineer and space tourism consultant Randy Simberg on his blog Transterrestrial Musings.
I guess I have to be more careful what I post. At least I used the crucial word “may…”
The second point, of course (note the emphasis), is that whoever dug this up on the Interweb couldn’t read my name correctly, and felt compelled to add the obligatory (and yet, entirely not only not necessary, but insulting diminutive “y” to it).
[Update a minute later]
Great. It’s not just the Chron. This has become the AP story, as demonstrated by the same error at the Mercury News. Thus are urban legends born.
A Hundred Dollars A Barrel?
I don’t think so, despite Derb’s hand wringing. He relies on this overwrought analysis, which doesn’t have that figure anywhere in it that I can see.
The analyst is mixing up oil prices and gas prices in that scare story. But he also completely ignores alternate sources, such as shale and tar sands, which are in huge supply (larger than crude oil reserves) in places like Colorado and Wyoming, and Alberta, and profitable at thirty bucks a barrel. This effectively puts a ceiling on oil prices in the long term, and the longer prices stay where they currently are, the more and faster those sources will be expanding capacity.
I not only don’t think we’ll have a hundred dollars a barrel next November–I don’t think that we’ll ever do so, in inflation-adjusted terms, at least not for any significant (a few weeks at most, in panicked response to some event) period of time.