Political Commentary

Deja Vu

Many forget, but one of the things (besides Ross Perot, and the bogus supermarket scanner story, and his seeming unfeeling toward those who felt that the recovering economy wasn’t recovering fast enough) that resulted in George Herbert Walker Bush’s loss of his second term, was the limp response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to Hurricane Andrew in the summer of 1992 before the election, in southern Florida. If his son is smart, he’ll have FEMA ready to aid the Gulf Coast immediately this weekend, if Charlie is even a small fraction as devastating as many are predicting.

[Update at noon Pacific Friday]

Welcome, Corner readers. It occurs to me that this is now likely to be worse than Andrew was, in terms of property damage. It’s at least as strong a storm, and there’s a lot more population in the current track. The Gulf Coast hasn’t been hit in over forty years, and there are a lot more people living there now than in the early sixties. It’s very likely to set a new record for financial losses from a natural disaster.

Space Science

Interesting results from cluster spacecraft

Recent results from Cluster shed some light on the mechanism that brings particles from the solar wind into the Earth’s magnetosphere, creating the Aurora and radiation belts. The basic mechanism is vortices generated in the sheared flow region between the magnetosphere and the solar wind. The mechanism behind the vortices is called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and it’s fairly generic to low velocity sheared flows, as the discussed in the article.

The same mechanism will affect any craft powered by mini-magnetospheric plasma propulsion (M2P2), but the particle transport will be the other way – from inside the magnetic bubble to outside (since the inner particle density will be higher than the solar wind particle density, at least in the tail region). This will cause loss of ions from the bubble, and may turn out to be the limiting factor for M2P2.

There is a nice picture of Kelvin-Helmholtz waves in the Earth’s atmosphere here.

Space

The “Giggle Factor” Evaporates?

Alan Boyle has an email interview (something that I should have done long before now, if I hadn’t been buried in other issues recently) with John Carmack, in the wake of this past weekend’s vehicle loss (though not necessarily test failure). What was most interesting, though, was a little aside at the end of his column:

…Sunday’s explosive rocket mishap put Space Transport Corp. in the national limelight as an X Prize underdog with a can-do spirit.

The result: A slew of investors have e-mailed the cash-strapped company, saying they are interested in making an investment in the partners’ dream of developing space tourism.

“The national attention has been great. We’ve gotten a flood of e-mail, a lot from potential investors,” Space Transport vice president Eric Meier said Monday after he, company president Phillip Storm and volunteers cleaned up the wreckage and debris of Rubicon 1 on the beach near Queets.

“I’m trying to raise some money, and am responding to people who have expressed interest.”

Of course, it remains to be seen whether these were serious investors. We’ll find out in the next few weeks and months.

Space

The “Giggle Factor” Evaporates?

Alan Boyle has an email interview (something that I should have done long before now, if I hadn’t been buried in other issues recently) with John Carmack, in the wake of this past weekend’s vehicle loss (though not necessarily test failure). What was most interesting, though, was a little aside at the end of his column:

…Sunday’s explosive rocket mishap put Space Transport Corp. in the national limelight as an X Prize underdog with a can-do spirit.

The result: A slew of investors have e-mailed the cash-strapped company, saying they are interested in making an investment in the partners’ dream of developing space tourism.

“The national attention has been great. We’ve gotten a flood of e-mail, a lot from potential investors,” Space Transport vice president Eric Meier said Monday after he, company president Phillip Storm and volunteers cleaned up the wreckage and debris of Rubicon 1 on the beach near Queets.

“I’m trying to raise some money, and am responding to people who have expressed interest.”

Of course, it remains to be seen whether these were serious investors. We’ll find out in the next few weeks and months.

Space

The “Giggle Factor” Evaporates?

Alan Boyle has an email interview (something that I should have done long before now, if I hadn’t been buried in other issues recently) with John Carmack, in the wake of this past weekend’s vehicle loss (though not necessarily test failure). What was most interesting, though, was a little aside at the end of his column:

…Sunday’s explosive rocket mishap put Space Transport Corp. in the national limelight as an X Prize underdog with a can-do spirit.

The result: A slew of investors have e-mailed the cash-strapped company, saying they are interested in making an investment in the partners’ dream of developing space tourism.

“The national attention has been great. We’ve gotten a flood of e-mail, a lot from potential investors,” Space Transport vice president Eric Meier said Monday after he, company president Phillip Storm and volunteers cleaned up the wreckage and debris of Rubicon 1 on the beach near Queets.

“I’m trying to raise some money, and am responding to people who have expressed interest.”

Of course, it remains to be seen whether these were serious investors. We’ll find out in the next few weeks and months.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!