Appropriately for a Wired reporter, Joshua Davis has an interesting embedded report of the battlefield technology employed in Iraq. It didn’t all go as smoothly as some reports would indicate.

“When we were deployed from the States,” says Lieutenant Marc Lewis – the commander of the convoy’s 27 heavy equipment trucks – “they told us that we would be given encrypted, military-issue radios when we got here. When we arrived, they told us we should have brought our own.”

What Lewis brought was four Motorola Talkabouts, each with a range of about 1,000 feet. In the half-dozen convoy trips he’s made since arriving in country, Lewis has taken to distributing a Talkabout to the first and last trucks. The other two go to vehicles at strategic points in between. It’s hardly secure. Anybody with a radio could monitor the conversations.

Lewis is improvising as best he can. Before leaving the States, he bought a handheld eTrex GPS device, which he uses to track each of his forays into Iraq. In essence, he’s created a map of Iraq’s charted and uncharted freeways and desert roads. He just has no way to share it with anybody. But he is able to navigate as well as any of the tank or missile commanders he transported. I notice that at least four other soldiers in the convoy have brought their own store-bought GPS handhelds. These devices keep the convoys on track in lieu of having proper systems. “If we run out of batteries,” Lewis says when showing me his map of Iraq, “this war is screwed.”

I also liked his description of the use of commercial chat clients for secure communications.

Because anyone on Siprnet who wanted to could set up a chat, 50 rooms sprang up in the months before the war. The result: information overload. “We’ve started throwing people out of the rooms who don’t belong there,” Mims says.

“What’s funny about using Microsoft Chat,” he adds with a sly smile, “is that everybody has to choose an icon to represent themselves. Some of these guys haven’t bothered, so the program assigns them one. We’ll be in the middle of a battle and a bunch of field artillery colonels will come online in the form of these big-breasted blondes. We’ve got a few space aliens, too.”

I guess I was wrong to debunk the “man never went to the Moon” theories. Here is proof of the NASA conspiracy to fool us all.

Charles Murtaugh sees what he thinks is a contradiction between Ron Bailey and his Reasoned colleague, Jacob Sullum.

One way or another, passive smoking, and the anti-tobacco laws that it engenders, highlights an interesting contradiction among contemporary libertarians. On the one hand, folks like Ron Bailey relentlessly hype life- extension research, and denounce anti-techies like Leon Kass for opposing it. On the other hand, other folks like Bailey’s Reason colleague Jacob Sullum mocks the rationale behind smoking bans. But put them together, and what do you have? If we think we might live forever, or even for a good chunk longer than we do now, small risks like passive smoke suddenly loom much larger, and smoking bans, e.g., become a lot more, well, reasonable.

No, what becomes more reasonable is not smoking bans, but freedom to choose, including the freedom to choose to go to a restaurant or bar that allows smoking (and perhaps thereby also choose a shorter life), or the freedom to choose not to frequent such places, and thereby hope to extend one’s time on earth (albeit perhaps less enjoyably–that’s a subjective thing). While there may be a contradiction between smoking and immortality (at current technology levels), there’s no contradiction inherent in allowing individuals to make their own choices, which is what “free minds and free markets” is all about. I can’t imagine Ron and Jacob getting into any arguments about this, because there’s no true contradiction.

Charles also writes:

I’ve teed off on our prospects for immortality time and again, and I won’t rehash my arguments. I feel pretty safe predicting that we won’t see radical life extension (e.g. past 150 years) in our own lives, let alone thermodynamically-infeasible immortality, but leaving the science aside I think we’re already living with the negative side effects of dreaming of immortality. (Immortality in this life, that is.) The greatest of those negative side effects is the imagined magnification of miniscule risk factors, such as passive smoke, acrylamide in our potato chips, or radioactive waste. If we live to be 80, sure, those won’t matter much, but what if we live to be 500? The char on that overcooked burger could make all the difference!

Frankly, I find this absurd.

Charles seems to think that long life, if it happens at all, will only be a result of clean living. The reality is that it will almost certainly involve reengineering and continual repair of the human (or post-human) body. Any technology that is capable of this will find repairing damage from second-hand smoke and overcooked protein, or even radiation damage, a relatively trivial task.

Gregg Easterbrook has a reasonably good history of private space launch activities in the most recent Atlantic Monthly, and it’s worth reading for someone unfamiliar with the field, though it’s not without its flaws. He seems to be inordinately enraptured with Sea Launch, and he almost ignores the tourism market. In fact, this makes the piece a little disjointed:

…history’s first space tourists, two rich men who bought rides on old Soviet rockets launched from Kazakhstan in 2001 and 2002, paid about $20 million each to be crammed into a tiny capsule and subjected to agonizing G-forces at blast-off, to eat freeze-dried food and bump into floating Russians in orbit, and, finally, to come home motion sick. There’s a limit to that market.

Immediately following this, he then backtracks slightly:

Yet in the early days of aviation, airplanes were absurdly expensive and impractical too. Budget-busting government programs dominated, and flight applications were too specialized for the typical person to care about. In 1935, when Pan Am’s first Clipper took off to chase the sun across the Pacific, air travel seemed destined always to be an experience exclusively for the super-rich; in 2001 U.S. airlines alone carried 622 million passengers, including tens of millions of the working class, and even the poor. When Federal Express proposed in 1973 to move packages anywhere overnight, the idea seemed a costly extravagance best suited to big business; now average Americans routinely get shirts or CDs delivered overnight. And in 1910, when crowds gathered throughout the United States to watch the touring Bl

Apollo astronaut Walt Cunningham has some sensible words about risk in spaceflight in this Houston Chronicle editorial.

We should replace the Shuttle as soon as possible, but not because it’s unsafe. Sorry, folks, but that’s a really dumb reason.

David Acheson has an editorial in today’s WaPo that is, as is usually the case in such editorials, based on a false and unexamined premise–that the only reason that NASA exists (at least the space side of it) is to do science.

…is manned flight necessary to NASA’s scientific mission?…

…NASA and the president would do well to take advantage of the shuttle’s inevitable downtime to have a senior scientific panel independent of NASA consider America’s scientific goals in space and whether they need to be served by manned spacecraft…

…Manned flight devours the NASA budget and starves the unmanned missions, which are far more capable in space science, all for reasons that seem to stem from the mystique of the astronaut program….

…It is time to take a mature, unemotional look at where manned spaceflight came from and where it is going, and with what technology and at what cost. Then either set it on a new path, with technology we can trust, or turn toward unmanned space science.

(emphasis mine)

The story never changes–it’s the old, “let the robots do it” argument, that never seems to pale to its admirers, and they’ll ultimately win as long as we grant their premise that science is the raison d’etre of space. Because of course, if this premise is correct, the manned space program indeed can’t be justified at current costs, and we should indeed shut it down.

But as I’ve pointed out many times, here and elsewhere, we need to stop looking at space as a reserve for scientists, and start thinking about it as a place for all potential human endeavors. Only then can we determine whether or not we should have a “manned space program,” and what form it should take.

The LA Times makes a big deal out of the fact that Max Faget has called for an end to the Shuttle program, as though it’s of some great portent. The article implies that Faget was the designer of the Shuttle, and that this is somehow like a throwing in the towel of a former die-hard supporter. The last paragraph says:

Faget said such a program might make sense, but questioned why anybody would use the same shuttle architecture that he pioneered almost 30 years ago.

It’s too bad the reporter isn’t a little more familiar with space history. Unfortunately for his thesis, Max didn’t pioneer this architecture, thirty years ago or at any other time, and he has never been a fan of this shuttle. Max designed the capsules used throughout the sixties, but he didn’t design the current space shuttle.

He had a much different concept. He envisioned a much smaller vehicle that would be launched on an expendable, or perhaps a reusable flyback booster, and it had small, stubby straight wings. He minimized entry heating with an extreme nose-up attitude, spreading the heat of the base of the vehicle, rather than concentrating it in the leading edges.

When the requirements for a thousand miles cross-range, and sixty-five-thousands pounds of payload appeared, and the budget was cut to preclude development of a reusable booster, his concept (and “architecture”) was doomed, and as this interview with George Mueller from 1989 points out, Max was never happy about it.

MUELLER: Well, the point of the problem was that it took a while to get agreement on what the configuration of the Shuttle should be. We decided we needed a fully reusable one in ’68, but boy, there were a lot of different approaches. Max Faget had a radically different approach, which at least our analysis indicated wouldn’t work, but he stuck through it for about a year. In fact, I think he still believes in it.

MAUER: This is the straight wing.

MUELLER: Straight wing.

MAUER: High angle of attack re-entry vehicle.

MUELLER: Exactly.

It appears to me that he’s simply grabbing an opportunity to finally put a stake in its heart. Of course, most people in the business are aware of this, and will discount his comments appropriately. I’m not saying that it won’t be cancelled, but if it is, it won’t be because of anything that Maxime Faget says.

[via the Pathetic Earthling.]

According to this piece in the WaPo, the latest Al Qaeda attacks in Riyadh will backfire. I both suspect and hope that he’s right.

Al Qaeda’s true motives have been revealed to Saudi citizens. It is not a desire to free the kingdom from “occupying” forces (U.S. troops were already on the way out) but a barbaric and bloody hatred of the modern world. This is a vision almost no Saudi supports. The bombings should also lead Americans and Saudis to focus on their mutual interests, the most important of which is defeating global terrorism.

If the article is correct, it also indicates a high level of desperation on the part of the terrorists:

According to Saudi intelligence sources, nine of the bombers had narrowly escaped a recent government raid. With their names in the Saudi press and a wide-ranging manhunt underway, their time was running out. In fact, a captured high-ranking member of their cell revealed that increasing pressure from Saudi and Western intelligence agencies led the group to rush its plans, resulting in a desperate, scattershot attack that injured their cause.

Also, for what it’s worth, Fareed Zakaria agrees.

Heading back down to LA today. More posting tonight or tomorrow.

In response to the subject of my previous post on John Carter McKnight’s rant about space advocates and property rights, over at Curmudgeon’s Corner, Mark Whittington has followed up by publishing a response from Alan Wasser, the author of the Space Settlement Initiative.