I’m starting a new series of posts here, in which I interview people whom I consider to be at the leading edge of space entrepreneurial activity.
My first victim is Jeff Greason, a founder and head of XCOR Aerospace.
Jeff is a Caltech grad, and a former project manager at Intel. After several years of doing damned good amateur work on rocket engine analysis and design, he left Intel to work for Rotary Rocket, as head of their engine design group.
We all know the old epistemological condundrum about trees falling in forests.
I have a similar one about the DPRK’s nuclear weapons. Some in Washington have reason to believe that they already have them, and are firing up their nuclear plants to build more.
But nukes are kind of like missiles. They’re finicky devices, and there are several things that have to be gotten just right. Ultimately (unless you have a lot of experience, and access to extremely classified simulation codes), you’re not going to know whether or not they work unless you try them.
Recall that we did so at Trinity, and one of the reasons that we didn’t do an offshore demonstration for the Japanese was that we couldn’t be a hundred percent confident in the bomb working, and we only had a couple in the inventory, and it would have taken a while to build up the fuel supply to build more. If we’d told the Japanese that we were going to show them how it worked, and it didn’t, it would have damaged our credibility. With the actual bombing, if it hadn’t worked, no one would have been the wiser–the airplane would have just turned around and flown home, and anyone who saw it would have just assumed that it had gotten lost.
The North Koreans are in the same boat, if they’ve built a weapon or two. They can’t know for sure that it will work. They’ve done missile tests, but if they’d tested a nuke, even underground, we would have noticed. They simply lack the sophistication to do an undetected test (difficult even for us).
So while they may have a couple of devices that, in (someone’s) theory, will create a nuclear explosion, I’m not sure that it’s quite right to say that they have nuclear weapons. As the saying goes, in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they’re different.
By the way, I suspect that the Israelis probably do have confidence in their weapons, even if they haven’t actually tested one, because they probably are capable of reliably simulating them. And it remains possible that the flash that the Vela satellite picked up back in 1979 was an Israeli test.
I’m not sure what the policy implications of this are with respect to North Korea, but it adds at least one more column to the game-theory payoff matrix.
Where is PETA? Why haven’t they protested this?
That’s what I hope that this story, saying that the removal of Saddam may be delayed, is. Either that, or disinformation from the Administration to keep Saddam guessing.
Of course, there’s no reason that it couldn’t be both.
The Space Frontier Foundation has come out against NASA’s planned Orbital Space Plane.
While the idea of the OSP itself may or may not have merit; it is the way OSP is undertaken which is of paramount importance. Absolutely all experience of the last two decades suggests ? indeed insists ? that the OSP is doomed to failure under typical NASA acquisition strategy. The litany of NASA’s cancelled vehicle programs stretches back to the Reagan Administration’s NASP “Orient Express,” and includes the X-33, X-34, X-38, 2GRLV and now SLI. How many times can Congress abide these failures?
Public suspicions that NASA is little more than a jobs program are fueled by seeing NASA so comfortable with failure and endless retries. It is left to Congress and the White House to require that the correct lessons from these failures are learned and applied.
They’re right.
Thor Halvorssen says that Atlas has shrugged in Venezuela.
Congratulations, Glenn.
Captain Spaulding has an explanation for the extreme gender gap in enjoyment of the Three Stooges.
The Stooges’ shorts either have no storyline (besides the boys being plumbers or whatever) or a marginal one. And they will interrupt said storyline for comic business…Men are perhaps more tolerant of comedy without story than women. Just a hypothesis.
[via Dave Trowbridge]
This might also explain the differences in taste for pr0n as well.
Clark Lindsey of Hobbyspace has an interview with Dennis Wingo, who’s started a company that will make money by refueling communications satellites on orbit. I’m going to be running a few interviews with space entrepreneurs myself in the next few days.
Clark Lindsey of Hobbyspace has an interview with Dennis Wingo, who’s started a company that will make money by refueling communications satellites on orbit. I’m going to be running a few interviews with space entrepreneurs myself in the next few days.