Administrative

Hitting Them Where It Hurts

I woke up yesterday morning to over three hundred trackback spams. These are a real pain in the ass, because when they come in a flood like that from a single spammer (in this case it was pr0n), it’s hard to search through them to find the random ones from others, which needs to be done to clean them all out.

Joe Katzman has been having similar problems, on a much larger scale. I’ve been thinking about shutting down trackback as well, but before I do, I think I’ll try this idea, via Annoying Old Guy in Joe’s comments section.

It looks interesting, and if everyone did it, it would make life much more difficult for these supreme scum of the earth. As I type these words I just got two series of half a dozen or so from mortgage lenders. Who knows how many they would have hit me with if I hadn’t been at the computer and could cut them off at the pass? I just wish I could cut them off at the nuts.

Space

Space Hotel Prototype

1 Comment

Leonard David says that the Bigelow mission is in orbit. I haven’t been paying enough attention to this to have any profound thoughts [When did that ever stop you before? — ed Quiet, you], but it’s clearly good news, and big news.

[Update in the afternoon]

I’m in the middle of meetings, but Clark Lindsey is continuing to follow this and provide links here and here.

Political Commentary

Ignorance (I Hope)

Some commentator on Fox just noted that in Germany, and the UK, a higher percentage of people have a favorable opinion of China than of the US.

I suspect that this is primarily a result of ignorance, as promulgated by their media (about both us and China). The alternative, which is that they no longer share our western values, is even more frightening.

Space

Unaffordable And Unsustainable?

Not that this suprises me (well, actually it does a little–even I didn’t think that it would be this high), but if this is true, it’s hard to imagine that there will be much enthusiasm for lunar missions. There certainly won’t be from me, considering the alternate uses for the money:

…individual lunar missions using a CEV, CLV. CaLV, LSAM, LSAS, etc. are now estimated to cost $5 Billion each. By comparison, Space Shuttle missions cost $0.5 billion.

As always, that Shuttle figure has to be heavily caveated. Shuttle missions at current budgets would only be half a billion if we were launching eight to ten flights a year. The last Shuttle flight cost about five billion.

Like real estate, there are three rules of per-flight costs: flight rate, flight rate, flight rate.

And ESAS doesn’t allow a high flight rate…

[Wednesday morning update]

As is almost always the case, I am frustrated by the ambiguous terminology in discussing costs. What does “individual lunar mission” mean? I took it to mean average cost based on annual operating expenses. That would imply ten billion a year for two flights a year. Is that right? If it were four flights a year, then this interpretation would imply a twenty billion annual budget. Some could interpret it to mean marginal cost, but that would be even more insane.

If the number is correct, I suspect that it was derived by taking the total life cycle costs of the program, including development, and dividing by the total number of planned missions. If that’s the case, it looks like a reasonable number. A lot more than I’m willing to pay for it as a taxpayer, but it makes sense, given typical NASA program costs.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!