Space

Political Tourism Barriers

Here’s an interesting article, on a couple of levels.

With demand waning for its traditional service – clearing Arctic shipping lanes – the Murmansk Shipping Company, which operates the world’s only fleet of atomic icebreakers, has started offering tourists a chance to chill out at the top of the world for $20,000 per head.

The business has outraged environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth Norway, which is urging would-be ticket buyers to consider the damage a nuclear accident can do to the pristine region’s fragile ecosystem…

… The green group has found an unexpected ally in the Russian Audit Chamber. Parliament’s budgetary watchdog, after investigating partially state-owned Murmansk Shipping’s finances earlier this year, urged the government to revoke the company’s license to operate the fully state-owned icebreakers because it had “improperly used $79 million worth of state property and cheated the state out of $7.3 million in revenues,” auditor Yury Tsvetkov said June 29.

The superficial (i.e., obvious) one is the issue of whether or not we’ll let environmental groups object to tourism on grounds either real or spurious (and in particular, the notion that it shouldn’t be allowed because it’s a nuclear-powered ship is extremely spurious, and one that we should expect to confront in the future as we start to use nuclear reactors in space).

But the other one is that the Russian government itself is opposed to such tourism. That indicates to me that some there are starting to figure out what things actually cost, and that the tourist dollars don’t actually cover the operating costs.

While popular legend has it that Dennis Tito paid twenty millions bucks for his ride into space, reality is that such things are extremely negotiable, and that he actually paid much less (perhaps a little over half) of that amount. The Russian space program has survived largely on the basis of its prestige (one of the few things that Russia can surpass the US at, at least by some criteria). If they discover that tourist flights (and NASA payments) aren’t covering the true costs, will that continue?

Political Commentary

My Heart Bleeds

Not.

The SF Examiner is crying over the upcoming death of the “assault weapons” ban.

Boo hoo.

Remember all the upset with Bush when he said that he would sign a renewal?

I said that it didn’t matter, because he knew that there would never be a bill to sign. It still looks that way. Whether his pledge to sign it will still hurt him politically still remains to be seen, of course, but I can’t imagine the gun-rights activists being indifferent to a Kerry-Edwards presidency.

Space

Better Late Than Never (Or Even On Time)

The latest issue of The Space Review is up a day late (I assume due to the holiday yesterday) but it was worth waiting for. I’m too busy to post much, but go read about Oklahoma spaceports by Jeff Foust, an old study on asteroid deflection by Dwayne Day, a cautionary note to space entrepreneurs about patents from Sam Dinkin, and a report from Taylor Dinerman on the prospects for a new space military service to supercede the Air Force.

Political Commentary

Bad Business

Alan Murray implies that, with his pick of Senator John Edwards for veep, Senator Kerry just made a powerful enemy for himself.

…party wisdom that’s been passed down by former Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Strauss, and now resides with Democratic economic guru Robert Rubin, is that big business does matter to Democrats. To be successful, a Democratic presidential candidate doesn’t need the active support of America’s CEOs, but he does need to keep them on the sidelines. Jimmy Carter lost his bid for re-election at least in part because business was determined to dump him. Bill Clinton won election and re-election at least in part because the business community, while not strongly supportive, wasn’t threatened by him.

Science And Society

Suspending Too Much Disbelief

John Derbyshire, contrarian that he is, didn’t like Spiderman II.

Even comic-book movies must obey certain unities. In the realm of science fiction — and c/b movies are a species, even if a low one, of science fiction — the golden rule is: You can have one highly implausible bit of science. The rest of the science should be sound, or at least should follow logically from the central implausibility. THE TIME MACHINE is a great sci-fi novel because, once you have granted the central, fairly preposterous, premise that time travel is possible, everything else is just basic Darwinism and stellar evolution, as it was understood at the time.

The central notion in SPIDERMAN is that if you get bitten by a spider whose genes have been messed about with in a certain way, you will develop the ability to shoot 100-ft silk threads from your wrists (without, apparently, any loss of body mass). This is preposterous — though not at a sensationally high level, as spider genes can be messed around with in an infinity of ways, and we don’t actually know what would happen if you were bitten by a spider whose genes had been messed around with in way No. 29,485,672.

Having been persuaded to suspend our disbelief with respect to Spidey’s powers, we should not then be asked to swallow any more preposterosities. And we know perfectly well what whould happen if you dumped a fusion reaction into the East River — ka-BOOM.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I intend to, and won’t let this curmudgeonly review put me off of it, though I actually agree with the principle. That was one of the things that bothered me about the first movie. Once you tell me he’s been bitten by a radioactive spider, then fine, I’ll buy the superpowers on the part of Spidey. I’ll even accept the notion that, as Derbyshire points out, he doesn’t have to conserve mass.

But Mary Jane has no superpowers, yet she performs a superfeat near the end of the movie, when she falls off the cable that’s being flung around (face it, she wouldn’t have been able to hang on to it that long without her arms being torn off), and then catches the side of the cable car as she falls some distance toward it.

Sorry, just Not.Gonna.Happen. It defies physics and the strength, both muscular and structural, of a normal human body, even one pumped on adrenalin. I enjoyed the movie up to that point, but that bit really bugged me, because there was no good reason for it–it could have been just as exciting while being realistic.

And of course, there’s the other thing that bothered me about the movie–the ending.

Parker was under no obligation to keep Harry in the dark about his father’s end. Just because he was requested to, he didn’t agree to the request, and he did himself and Harry a disservice by allowing Harry to continue to live on in a fantasy world about his father’s true nature, a world that’s likely to cause him to attempt to kill Parker’s alter ego (and hence Parker) in the future.

At a minimum, he should have at least pointed out to Harry that the fact that Spiderman returned his father’s body to his home didn’t mean that Spiderman was the killer. He might not have accepted it, but there would have been no harm in exercising a little logic on him, even if he wanted to spare him the knowledge that his father was a murderer (though again, I think that was no favor).

Also, he’s not protecting MJ by not reciprocating her love. The key is to keep his identity a secret (though not from her). I found it highly unsatisfactory, but apparently it was more important to them to set up some dubious sequel plot than to employ logic, or ethics.

I guess that SF movies will never get made right until they hire me as a script advisor. And listen.

[Update on Tuesday]

For those endlessly or otherwise fascinated by bad movie physics, check out this site (including a review of Spidey I). It says The Core (which I haven’t seen, and probably won’t) takes the prize for the worst movie ever in this regard.

Technology and Society

Show Me The Numbers!

To paraphrase the Cuba Gooding character from “Jerry Maguire.”

I keep seeing these breathless articles in the popular media, and even the trade press, about reducing sonic boom, with its promise of practical commercial supersonic flight. The latest hype comes from Popular Science (via Clark Lindsey).

Why do I call them hype?

Two reasons.

First, I have never, ever seen a single number in these articles indicating to what degree the boom is attenuated. Maybe it’s just my suspicious nature, but I suspect that if we could see those numbers, we might be less impressed.

Second, there is never any mention in these articles about the other problem that is holding back practical supersonic flight, which is all of the drag associated with the shock. Even if by some legerdemain with vehicle contours they can reduce the boom sufficiently to allow overflight of land, the operating costs will remain horrific and unaffordable to most, because of the tremendous amount of wave drag from the shock system and skin drag from the huge swept delta wings that all of these concepts continue to employ.

That means that at best, it will remain another Concorde, though perhaps one that can fly coast to coast–an expensive ride only for the rich.

I find this topic particularly frustrating because I’ve been aware for a number of years of a technology with the potential to effectively eliminate shock, with both the sonic boom and the tremendous drag associated with it, but there has never been any interest in pursuing it, from either NASA or industry.

Anyway, I’ll take this stuff seriously when I see some quantification of just how much they’re reducing the overpressure, and some indication of understanding of the drag problem, instead of focusing entirely on the boom.

[Update in the afternoon]

Clark points out in comments that they do show some numbers in a slideshow.

Color me unimpressed. There’s never been any doubt that one can reduce boom through body shaping–the issue is whether you can get enough reduction to solve the problem. This graph shows a softer peak, from a little over 1.2 PSF to about 9 PSF. So they’re reducing it by about thirty percent.

Big whoop. Still gonna break windows.

Is there any reason to think that they can do significantly better than this graph would indicate, particularly for a large transport? There’s none provided in the article. In fact, they even admit in the caption here, “Designers of the modified F-5E weren’t trying to eliminate the sonic boom, but prove that aircraft shaping can lessen this signature of supersonic flight.”

Big deal–we knew that.

And as Clark notes, there remains no mention of the drag issue.

Still looks like hype to me, similar to that over hypersonics. It may be beneficial for some military apps, but there’s no reason to think that it will usher in a new era of commercial air transport, or even make supersonic bizjets practical, despite the pretty pictures.

General

Shop Goggles?!

Well, I guess later was sooner than I thought.

I repeat for emphasis (including obligatory whiz bang): Shop goggles?!

I always knew (well, as long as I’ve known him, which is getting to be a disturbingly long time) that Instapundit was a geek, but I never realized he was such a girlie boy.

Administrative

Checking In

The flight went as well as a red eye can, but I’m suffering from ASDD (Adult Sleep Deficit Disorder). As you can see, sometime this morning, the phone company fixed the line, and we now have not only voice, but a reasonable high-speed DSL connection.

More later.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!