Alec Rawls writes about the anti-Norman Borlaugs, Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore.
Liberaltarians?
Brink Lindsey, on a potential alliance between Dems and libertarians.
Brink’s a smart guy, but I don’t think so. There are too many irreconcilable differences–on guns, on the role of the government, etc.–to put together a workable coalition. In addition, I continue to object to calling collectivists liberals. In many ways, they’re the exact opposite. I’m a liberal.
Home, Home On The Missile Range
Here’s an article in the Jackson Hole Star Tribune about Frontier Astronautics, a company that has set up shop in an abandoned Atlas silo outside Chugwater, Wyoming.
One More BCS Thought
I have some updates on my previous post, but I have one more question. Who here really believes that Florida would have jumped Michigan, from number four to number three, if USC had won?
Growing Acceptance
The scientific community is starting to believe in life extension. There’s still a lot of resistance, though, as the discussion about grant titling indicates. There’s an old saying (generated, I believe, in the wake of Kuhn’s Structure Of Scientific Revolutions
Bypassing The Moon?
This is an interesting concept, but I think that it would be a tough sell politically, partially because of the false lessons learned from ISS:
The notional mission design that Farquhar presented is based on what he calls the
A Flight From Science?
A Welsh theologian laments the lack of rational discourse in today’s society.
Avoiding Genocide
I Like It
Amidst discoursing on cold winters and Superman, Lileks coins a new word: bloggist (ah, I see that the spell checquer in Firefox doesn’t recognize it–I’ll have to add it to the dictionary…done):
Want to bet that his identity was safe at the end of the comic? Would you care to wager that the Girl of Tomorrow, who came from the future to use mind-reading powers to trap an alien into a loveless marriage
The Impossible Dream
Jon Goff explains why the ESAS windmill is worth a tilt:
How are we going to find investors willing risk the money to develop on-orbit propellant transfer when they’re being told that multi-launch architectures are too unreliable? That the best way to get back to the moon is building Ares I and Ares V, and that any EELV or light launcher based system would require too many launches to be practical?
Who’s going to fund a commercial lunar transportation system if we’ve abandoned the field to those who claim the only way you can do lunar transportation is using HLVs?
Ideas matter.
Honestly, as much as I would like to see NASA change to a more commercial aligned position, I don’t really think it is likely to happen. But if we can sway the conventional wisdom that these other, more commercial approaches really are not only technically feasible, but technically and economically superior, it doesn’t really matter. In the end, NASA will do what NASA will do, but if we can convince potential investors that there really are more cost effective ways of doing things, it will have been worth it.
But if we abandon the field of ideas, and stick to our knitting, we’re setting ourselves seriously up for failure.
It’s impossible to even begin to estimate the staggering amount of damage that has been done over the past decades to our prospects of opening space, by NASA-driven public perceptions about the difficulty of doing various things in space, in terms of decimating investment prospects. The false lessons from Apollo, the Shuttle and ISS continue to haunt us today, and this current irrational fear of orbital operations just continues that destructive legacy, in my opinion.