That’s what Roger Launius says that launch technology is.
Anthropomorphising technologies? Is solar power a “cheerful” technology”?
And as Clark Lindsey points out, his comparing what’s happening with today’s emerging suborbital industry with Pan Am’s selling of reservations back in the sixties is equally bizarre.
Between him and Alex Roland, one wonders if there are any NASA or space historians (other than Dwayne Day) who aren’t clueless.
War on Terror (or rather, Islamic fundamentalism), or War on Drugs. Andrew Stuttaford is right–we can’t have both, and the attempt to do so is one of the many reasons I wish that we’d had a better choice last month. Some things the administration does simply boggle the mind.
A hundred and one years ago today, the first controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight took place. There was a much bigger deal about it last year, centennials being much more newsworthy than hundred and first anniversaries, and it was spiced up by the first supersonic flight of SpaceShipOne on the same day. In fact, looking back now, that’s probably the event that started off a very remarkable year in space–2004, even though it was a couple weeks early. I’ll put together a year-end review of what happened in space this year. In very many ways, it was the most exciting year, and one more filled with hopeful portent, since the 1960s.
I had pieces on the Wright brothers’ accomplishment at National Review, TechCentralStation, and Fox News. Those who didn’t read them then might find them of interest today.
Jeff Foust says that the Pete Worden bandwagon is gaining momentum, with open support from Senator Brownback.
I’d love to see it happen, but I just can’t believe that he’ll be named by the White House, and if he is, he may have tough sledding getting confirmed, even with the Senator’s support. Based on his history of pretty blunt comments about NASA and the mainstream aerospace industry, he threatens too many rice bowls, particularly in Houston and Florida.
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After all these years, Adolf Hitler’s greatest crime against humanity has finally been revealed. He was a tax dodger.
Mark Whittington has a pretty good summary of Sean O’Keefe’s tenure as head of the national civil space agency.
[Update at 1:30 PM EST]
He says he has no regrets, and wouldn’t change any of his decisions.
Well, perhaps the incoming administrator can fix his dumb Hubble one.
The Kyoto Treaty is effectively dead.
The conventional wisdom that it’s the United States against the rest of the world in climate change diplomacy has been turned on its head. Instead it turns out that it is the Europeans who are isolated. China, India, and most of the rest of the developing countries have joined forces with the United States to completely reject the idea of future binding GHG emission limits. At the conference here in Buenos Aires, Italy shocked its fellow European Union members when it called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. These countries recognize that stringent emission limits would be huge barriers to their economic growth and future development.
Another myth about “enlightened and progressive Europe, leading the world” falls.
Read this, too:
…climate scepticism is gaining ground in Western Europe. It is even becoming respectable. Many organisations, often cum websites, provide ample information about the views of the climate sceptics, thus breaking the de facto information monopoly of the pro-Kyoto scientists belonging to the ‘established climate science community’.
Good. Now maybe we can have a rational discussion about politically and economically realistic solutions.
Keith Cowing disagrees with (retiring) John Young’s comments (valid, in my opinion) that it’s time to accept the risk of the Shuttle and start flying again:
…to just throw up your hands, as Young has done, and say nothing has changed – and that its not worth the effort to try and get better – is defeatism of the first order. It is curious that he feels this way when you recall that a contemporary of his, Gene Kranz, coined the phrase “failure is not an option”.
It’s not defeatism–it’s realism. Shuttle’s safety flaws are intrinsic, and really unfixable for the most part, without spending much more money on it than a new, much better launch system would cost. I’ve always believed that the CAIB recommendations about what was needed to return to flight were unrealistic, and at some point NASA (and the administration) will have to admit to that as well, or stop flying. We know we’re going to retire it (so we don’t have to husband the resource of orbiters as hard as we have in the past), and we’ve got plenty of astronauts willing to fly it, so we should either start flying it again and getting some use out of it, or shut the whole thing down and apply the savings toward something with a future. As it is now, we’ve the worst of both worlds–spending billions on it every year, with no activity at all other than trying to put lipstick on a pig.
As for the quote about failure not being an option, it all sounds very inspiring, but like the Kennedy quote of “because it’s hard,” it doesn’t really make much sense when one actually parses it. As someone once said, when failure isn’t an option, success gets pretty damned expensive. If we can’t take risks, there’s no point in even attempting to venture into the cosmos.
The Economist has a serious article about the state of the space tourism industry at the end of 2004, with new details on both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. I was confused by this bit, though:
In September, news emerged that Robert Bigelow, who runs Bigelow Aerospace, a firm based in Los Angeles, was going to back a $50m prize modelled on the $10m Ansari X prize that led to the creation of SpaceShipOne.
As far as I know, Bigelow Aerospace is now, and always has been, based in Las Vegas.
Alan Boyle has a little piece today about the elevators in the tallest building in the world. But this bit is misleading:
Imagine riding in a car going almost 40 mph (60.6 kilometers per hour). Not that impressive, right? But now imagine going that same 40 mph … straight up.
That gives you some idea how elevator riders must feel in the world’s tallest building, Taipei 101.
Actually, you can’t feel speed at all. There is no difference in sensation between a twenty mph elevator and a forty mph elevator, other than perhaps vibrations transmitted through the cables and contact with the shaft. Acceleration is what you feel, so the difference is how long it takes you to get up to speed (and back down from it), not what the top speed is.
Similarly, he writes:
The cars go faster on the way up than on the way down