Science And Society

A Modest Proposal

Here’s a guy who wants to solve global warming by mimicking volcanoes:

For two years after Pinatubo erupted, the average temperature across the Earth decreased by 0.6C.

The volcano’s location close to the equator helped make Pinatubo the perfect model for explaining how sulphur in the stratosphere could reduce global warming.

Instead, controversially, he wants to duplicate the effects of volcanic eruptions and create a man-made sulphur screen in the sky.

His solution would see hundreds of rockets filled with sulphur launched into the stratosphere. He envisages one million tonnes of sulphur to create his cooling blanket.

A million tonnes. This would be a great market for suborbital vehicles.

If you can deliver a ton per flight, that would be a million flights. Let’s say that the marginal cost per flight is a hundred thousand or so (I think we can do a lot better than that). That would be a hundred billion dollar program. That seems like a bargain compared to many of the nostrums currently proposed. And boy would it give us a flight rate.

Of course, someone over at Free Republic pooh poohs it, because he doesn’t understand the concept. Even if one were to use a Titan (can’t be done–they’re out of production), the payload he quotes for it is to GEO. Just tossing stuff up in the atmosphere, you could probably get a hundred tons at a time. In fact, even if they were still in production, a Titan would be the worst conceivable choice for this mission. Deltas would make a lot more sense–clean propellants, and new vehicles with a high-rate production line, and their upper-stage performance issues would be irrelevant, since they wouldn’t need one. But it would be crazy to do it with expendables of any kind.

With suborbitals, I’d think you could do a hundred flights a day out of a given spaceport. If there are a ten spaceports scattered around the world, that’s a thousand flights per day. At that rate, you’d get the stuff up in three years.

Space

More Nonsense From Jeffrey Bell

He may have written a dumber article in the past than this one, on how unsafe rocket planes will be, but I can’t recall it. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but in what I’ve read so far, almost every single sentence in it is wrong. I almost have to fisk it line by line, but I don’t have the time right now.

I’ll note, though, that attempting to extrapolate the safety record of 1960s research aircraft to twenty-first century operational tourism vehicles is…nutty.

The whole purpose of those programs was to learn how such vehicles operated, and about supersonic flight and spaceflight in general. We have much more knowledge now than we did then, and much better materials. The new aircraft will have much better margins. More importantly, it was a research program. Of course there were crashes–they were pushing the envelope. Tourist vehicles will be designed and operated with an entirely different philosophy.

When he notes that the X-15 broke in an aborted landing when it couldn’t do a full fuel dump, he seems to assume that the designers of modern spaceplanes are stupid, and that that their structure won’t be designed to handle fueled landing loads. His comment about the safety of SS1 verges on libelous, and his speculation that it wasn’t flown again for safety reasons is just that. SS1 was designed for one thing, and one thing only–to win the X-Prize. It was never intended to be a commercial operational vehicle.

When he claims that rocket planes will cost more to test than airliners, he provides zero data to support such a claim. When he writes:

The fatal crash rate will be at least 1-in-200 and probably more like 1-in-50.

…this is a number pulled out of his own exhaust nozzle.

I’ll leave the rest to the commenters, for now.

Political Commentary

More Revisionist History

Apparently I have to continue to correct the record, over and over and over.

This time it’s Vic Rubenfeld:

Frankly, I have to put a lot of blame for this on the Republicans, for using this tactic to impeach Bill Clinton. Having sex isn’t a crime, but he was impeached for lying about it.

Well, maybe if you were familiar with what actually happened, you wouldn’t have to do that.

Bill Clinton was not impeached for “lying about sex.” He was impeached for perjury, subornation of perjury from others, witness intimidation, and obstruction of justice, in the service of preventing a young woman from getting a fair trial in a civil law suit under a law that he signed with his own pen, but thought shouldn’t apply to King William. And he did this after having taken an oath to see that the laws of the land were faithfully executed.

Those aren’t my opinions. They’re black-letter facts. If you people are going to continue to whine about Clinton’s impeachment, at least get the history correct. Of course, this kind of spinning nonsense and mischaracterization of the president’s behavior was occurring in the media at the time, 24/7, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that people are still at it.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!