Jay Manifold’s weekly Quagmire Watch is up. I particularly liked this bit:

Medact, the British affiliate of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, this week published a report that estimates the number of Iraqi civilian deaths during the invasion to range from 5,708 to 7,356. The report estimates that the number of civilian deaths after May 1, when Bush declared an end to major combat operations, ranges from 2,049 to 2,209.

Rereading this post from exactly one year ago today, we find that Medact’s pre-war casualty estimate was … wait for it … half a million.

Their undoubtedly manipulated “actual” total is, at most, 9,565.

Hint to my fellow citizens: maybe special-interest groups who make predictions that are off by a factor of 50 can’t be trusted.

As Instantman would say…indeed.

Jeff Foust critiques an ignorant editorial about weaponization of space in the San Francisco chronicle.

This is pretty damned funny. Not just the article, but all the freeper commentary.

Lileks:

The spleen, she hurts. I think it had to do with listening to the Senate debate, if that word applies, and wondering: are they always this banal? This condescending? Are bloviating prevarications the rule rather than the exception? In short: is the world?s greatest deliberative body really filled with this many dim bulbs, card sharps and overstroked dolts who confuse a leaden pause with great rhetoric? If everyone in America had been tied to a chair and forced to watch the debate Clockwork-Orange style, we?d all realize that the Senate is just a holding tank for people whose self-regard and cretinous reasoning is matched only by their demonstrable contempt for the idiots they think will lap this crap up.

and

As for Rall, who cares about him? He?ll get his reward: the great yawning indifference of history. If people barely remember Kelly and Capp nowadays, what are the chances that they?ll remember someone who appeared to draw with his thumb?

He righteously insults some other people too, who badly need insulting. Actually, my favorite bit is the ending sentences.

But don’t take my word for it. Go read it all.

There seem to be some culture clashes between the American and Russian space programs.

To quote the article:

The Russians consider themselves less rigid and more inventive than the Americans, who tend to follow every letter in the technical manuals, said Sergei Gorbunov, a spokesman for the Russian Space Agency.

“Here in Russia, we are more flexible in our approach to technical problems,” Gorbunov said. “The Americans are more conservative in dealing with technical problems, but this isn’t a fault.”

Whether it’s a fault or not, the irony can’t be lost on anyone who lived through the Cold War, in which American ingenuity and flexibility was ostensibly matched against Soviet bureaucracy, and those American characteristics supposedly defeated the Soviet Union. It’s particularly ironic, considering that such a perception would have been perfectly valid, in almost every sphere other than the space program, at least since the 1960s, when the Americans won the race to the moon.

Of course, NASA’s culture has been a subject of much discussion since the release of the Gehman Commission’s report on the loss of Columbia in February, but such discussion (and criticism) from that report has focused not on NASA’s lack of flexibility, but rather on its lassitude in following its own established safety procedures, increasing the irony still further.

And after all, it’s not at all clear that NASA’s approach is superior to the Russians’. While the Russians have had several near disasters (a fire on their space station, and a collision with it) NASA has lost over a dozen astronauts in two Shuttle disasters, while the Russians have only lost four (and none in the past three decades), in the four-plus decades since the beginning of the human space race. One could attribute that to greater ambition (NASA puts up over half a dozen at a time, whereas the Soviets and now Russians have never launched more than three at a time), but both programs have so little experience in absolute numbers, compared to any other endeavor, that such comparisons are probably meaningless.

Regardless, because we share a space station, such a cultural difference is a real problem. Perhaps it’s time to consider a way to end it–with a divorce.

And not just for potential “irreconciliable differences.”

The space station is in the wrong orbit.

Its high inclination is useful for earth observations, because it allows a greater view of the earth than one that only flew over low latitudes, but that’s the only real benefit to it. On any other technical measure, lower would be better.

Lower inclination would make it easier to reach, and allow more payload for any (non-Russian) launch vehicle, and thus reduce operating costs. Lower inclination would make it potentially useful as a staging point for missions beyond earth orbit (a use that is essentially precluded by its current location). In fact, a proposal was made just a couple days ago to move it for just the latter reason.

No, there’s really only one real reason that the space station is in the orbit that it is–politics. In 1993, the Clinton-Gore administration decided that they would finally completely pervert the nation’s space program from one that was supposedly purposed for opening up the high frontier to one that provided foreign aid to Russian space scientists, in hope that they wouldn’t twist their talents to selling nuclear and rocketry expertise to countries like North Korea, Iran, and yes, Iraq. They decided to bring the Russians into the space station program.

There was only one problem. The high-latitude Russian launch sites don’t permit launches to low earth orbital inclinations of less than 51.6 degrees.

Thus, our escalator to nowhere didn’t even start at the ground floor.

But that was then, and this is now. The Bush administration has no great desire to keep the Russians involved in the space station debacle, and there are rumors that they’d like to actually do something visionary in space. One way to make lemonade out of the ISS lemon might be to move it to a useful location, and if the Russians don’t like it, they can go build their own, since the reality of the program was that they were never true partners. They were really simply subcontractors, and not very good ones, because much of the money sent to the Russian government in the nineties for space station hardware instead went to yachts, BMWs and Cayman bank accounts for the well-connected in the Russian government.

But is such a move feasible?

Well, yes, but it won’t be cheap. Changing orbital planes in low earth orbit is not trivial–going from the current inclination of fifty two degrees to the more conventional NASA one of twenty eight (the latitude of Cape Canaveral) requires about forty percent as much velocity change as getting into orbit in the first place.

Fortunately, unlike launches, it needn’t be done all at once, so there are a lot of options for doing so, over a long period of time (perhaps a few years). Without doing an extensive analysis, I’d be surprised if it couldn’t actually be done for a billion dollars or so, even with NASA’s ways of doing business.

Now, that’s a lot of money to you and me, but to NASA, and a nation that has already spent many times that much on a space station whose use remains elusive, it’s a pittance, and possibly one well worth it.

So, would Russia, to use another old Cold War metaphor, become the spy that was sent back out in the cold, when it came to space?

Not necessarily. They’ve been negotiating with the French to use their near-equatorial launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America. If they can start launching their vehicles out of that site, they’ll be able to get into almost any orbital inclination they please, and can continue to support and participate in even a newly relocated space station.

As long, of course, as they’re finally willing to pay their own way. If not, then it might be hasta la vista, petrushka.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae, 1872-1918

[Wednesday update at lunchtime]

Porphyrogenitus has some commentary that’s pertinent to the discussion in the comments section.