Jack Straw really put it to the French at the UN today.

The Anglosphere solidifies further.

North Korea is making new threats.

Once again, I want to extend my eternal gratitude to those people who have been determined to prevent us from having a missile defense for the past two decades.

North Korea is making new threats.

Once again, I want to extend my eternal gratitude to those people who have been determined to prevent us from having a missile defense for the past two decades.

North Korea is making new threats.

Once again, I want to extend my eternal gratitude to those people who have been determined to prevent us from having a missile defense for the past two decades.

It’s a shame that more people don’t get a good physics education–if they did, perhaps it would be more difficult to engage in sophistry and chicanery by using physics terms.

For instance, the word “energy” is well defined in physics. It is the ability to perform work, and can be quantified as the product of a force applied through a distance. As an example, dragging a block that requires ten pounds of force to move it, for ten feet, requires one hundred foot pounds of energy. Power is defined as the rate at which energy is expended (that is, the energy divided by the time required). Dragging the block quickly requires more power than doing so slowly.

Unfortunately, people who don’t understand this are taken in by charlatans–purveyors of rocks, under the delusion that certain minerals in certain shapes contain “energy” and “power” that can in turn by transmitted to their owner. This, despite the fact that they contain no quantifiable energy at all, or any apparent means to provide an energy transfer to a human being, at any rate whatsoever.

Another misunderstood concept is that of stability. Stability has a precise meaning to a physicist (and controls analyst). If, in a given position, a body is perturbed (that is, moved) slightly, and it returns to the original position on its own, it is said to be stable. If, on the other hand, a slight perturbation causes it to move away from the original position, it is said to be unstable. There is a third state, called neutral stability, which occurs if the disturbance results in the object staying in the new, perturbed position.

In the simplest physical terms, think of the stable condition as a ball at the bottom of a valley, the unstable one as a ball at the top of a hill, and the neutrally stable one as a ball on a flat surface.

Push the stable ball up the hill a bit, and it will roll back down to the bottom where it started. Push the unstable ball at the top of the hill a bit, and it rolls down the hill, away from its original position, ending up at the bottom, and then stable in its new location. The neutrally stable one on the flat surface, of course, will stay wherever you put it.

Note also that the definition might depend on the direction of the push. If a ball is on top of a plateau, on the edge, it could be neutrally stable in the direction away from the slope, but unstable in the direction toward the slope.

Like the word “natural,” one should not assign intrinsic value judgements to any of these physical states. There is no benefit to the ball being stable in its valley if you want it in, say, your own valley, the next one over.

Similarly, sometimes instability can be useful.

A stable airplane will fly “hands off” and this is how airliners and most general-aviation aircraft are designed, for added safety. But many modern fighter aircraft are designed to be aerodynamically unstable, because it turns out that this is a way to maximize performance. The penalty for flying an unstable aircraft is that it requires active and continuous control to keep it going in the direction you want it to, and pointing in the direction you want it to, and that generally means control by a computer, which results in another potential failure mode. Unstable aircraft are much more difficult (but not impossible) to fly (it actually turned out that the Wright’s original flyer was not an aerodynamically stable design). But there is no inherently right or wrong way–it’s just a matter of your requirements and designing to meet them.

If an entity is in a desirable state, then it’s also desirable that that state be stable, so it’s easy to keep it that way. If, on the other hand, the state is undesirable, stability is a bug, not a feature.

Getting from a stable state to an unstable one, or another stable one, requires the input of energy. If the ball is in the wrong valley, it has to be rolled up and over the hill, so it can roll down into the right one.

All of which is a high-falutin’ way, of course, of explaining why I want to throw something at the television when I see some windy bEUreaucrat on the East River attempting to send shivers down our collective spine by talking about the risk to “stability” of the Middle East if we remove Saddam’s cleated boot from the collective neck of the Iraqi people.

Obeisance to the false god of “stability” has gotten us, and the people of the Middle East, into the current mess.

In 1991, the first Bush administration hoped that Saddam’s regime was actually unstable, and a little push would result in his overthrow, while maintaining the “stability” of a unitary Iraq. Unfortunately, it turned out to be stable, and the little roll up the hill provided by the end of the first phase of the Gulf War (we’re actually about to enter the third, and hopefully final phase) wasn’t sufficient to get it over the hump into another stable regime. Unfortunately, the hill that it had to go up to remove Saddam proved higher than they thought, and they weren’t willing to expend the additional energy required to get it out of his stable valley, to the tragedy of the Kurds, Shi’ites and other Iraqi people over the past dozen years.

Now, again we’re told, as we were then, that removal of Saddam may “destabilize” the region. Unfortunately, the analogy for this perverse love of the status quo would be an airplane, a stable configuration, in straight and level flight, with a madman for a pilot. Ahead of it is a mountain.

Much better, for now to have a maneuverable, albeit unstable, fighter. It will require much more energy to get to that state, in this case in the form of American boots on the ground, and it will require careful and constant command and control, until we can get it over the hill, out of the valley of tyranny, and ultimately into one of liberal democracy.

And for those who think that liberal democracies are intrinsically unstable configurations, consider. Yes, France is on its Fifth Republic in a couple hundred years. But the US is still running fine, albeit with some problems, on its first. That’s the kind of stability that we want to see in the Middle East.

Martin Hutchinson provides a useful history of the UN, and an explanation of why it was a mistake for the Administration to think that it would help to go there before removing Saddam. I disagree with his headline, though. The disaster was mitigated by the fact that the uselessness of the UN as an institution, at least for collective security, is now abundantly clear.

They haven’t done the movie yet, but Flashbunny has the comic book.

The “anti-war” protestors demonstrated how peaceful they are yesterday, by rioting and sacking a convenience store in Canoga Park, California.

Back at the beginning of the Cold War, with the threat of nuclear holocaust overhanging the nation, and the world, physicist Herman Kahn wrote a paper about “thinking the unthinkable.”

It was about nuclear war, and it ultimately resulted in the theory of “Mutually Assured Destruction,” with the appropriate acronym, MAD. No matter how horrible the consequences of some potential policy outcomes, they must be thought about, to minimize the probability of them occurring, or at least, of the damage resulting from their occurrence.

For the past month, NASA has been picking through the few recovered shattered shards of its first reusable spaceship, attempting to put together a tragic jigsaw puzzle, with misshapen pieces burned and warped, and most of them missing, in an attempt to try to find out definitively why it has to do so. But even before a conclusion has been reached, the agency has come under fire for alleged poor judgement during the flight, and for withholding information from the public in an attempt to provide upholstery for the keesters of senior management.

These accusations may turn out to be accurate but, to me, they’re premature, and, for now, misguided.

I say this not because I’m unable to believe that NASA would do such a thing, nor is it because I’m some kind of reflexive defender of the space agency. Anyone who’s been reading my columns in this space for the past year knows that, if anything, I’m the last person to defend NASA, an entity that I believe has been, in many ways, delaying and holding us back from our ultimate destiny in space for decades. In fact, I find it ironic, and frustrating, that in such circumstances I find myself in the position of defending the Shuttle program, and the agency itself. I do so not because I am happy with it, or even because I would like to see it continue to exist in its current form.

My concern is that, in a witch hunt to find out “what did they know, and when did they know it,” we’ll lose sight of the real issues, the fundamental issues of space policy that led to this disaster. In an era in which many of our government institutions have shown themselves to have feet of clay, it’s very easy to point fingers at one that has lost two orbiters with fourteen people, flown a supposedly orbiting vehicle into the Martian surface under complete agency control, and launched an ostensibly far-seeing telescope that turned out to need glasses, like some kind of multi-billion-dollar space geek. Moreover, it’s one that doesn’t seem to provide a lot of value for the money invested in it, at least as far as the ostensible purpose–progress in getting humans into space.

And of course, it’s always fun to play Monday-morning quarterback. When the apparent mode of destruction corresponds very closely with some engineers’ pre-entry predictions, it’s easy, and even gratifying, to cry “cover up”!

But in doing so, we fall into the trap of criticizing it for the wrong reasons, and once again being distracted from the real problem, which is that we don’t, as a nation, really know what we’re trying to accomplish in space. Until we resolve that issue, putting NASA into the stocks and throwing tomatoes at it is not only pointless, but counterproductive.

The people who work at NASA are, well, people. They’re even good people, for the most part. But put yourself in their place for a moment.

Columbia is in orbit, for better or worse. There may have been damage to the tiles on the wing leading edge. The damage may or may not be critical, even catastrophic. If so, due to decisions made decades earlier, decisions made by people, most of whom are retired or dead, there’s little that can be done about it. The thermal protection system has been accepted for years as a critical subsystem, just like a wing on an aircraft, and if it’s lost, the vehicle is lost. The only solution to that problem is to prevent it from being lost.

The notion that it has been fatally compromised, with no realistic solution, may be discussed as a “what if” scenario in an email, but it’s not something that can be easily contemplated as a reality.

To do so is to contemplate the loss of a quarter of the nation’s fleet of orbiters, and to consign seven brave and exemplary men and women to an almost instantaneous incineration. To do so is to “think the unthinkable.”

War gamers, military planners, RAND Corporation analysts, are used to doing so. NASA engineers are not.

Many will complain that this is a result of budget shortfall. To the degree that that’s true, it has little to do with recent NASA budgets.

It’s a result of a budget shortfall a quarter of a century ago, when we decided that we would have a single vehicle provide access for humans to orbit, when we decided that that vehicle must not only deliver humans to orbit, but sixty-thousand-pound payloads, and have a thousand miles of cross-range capability on landing, and act as a space station, rather than simply a delivery truck.

Most importantly, it’s when we decided that we would only provide half of the money that engineers said would be required to develop such a vehicle, so compromises were made, that resulted in multi-segment solids that destroyed the Challenger in 1986. It also resulted in a fragile thermal protection system that looks increasingly like it doomed Columbia a little over a month ago, in a way that was beyond the means of frustrated engineers at NASA–and the United Space Alliance, and Boeing–to do anything about, to the point that it was painful to even think about.

Let me propose some (apparently) unthinkable thinking, that might get us out of the rut that we’ve been digging since the end of Apollo.

Let’s think about multiple vehicle types for people to orbit, all American. Let’s think about vehicles that can deliver anyone who wants to go, and has the money to do so, instead of government employees. Let’s think about generating huge markets for space activities, instead of constraining ourselves to paltry notions of three, or six civil servants permanently in orbit at once. Let’s think about building infrastructure, on the ground and in orbit, that will provide “tow-trucks,” and hangars, and maintenance capability for vehicles in trouble, just as we do in every venue on earth.

Let’s think the truly unthinkable–making space not a program, but just a place.

It’s not just Patty Murray. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur is now equating Osama bin Laden to the Founding Fathers.

“One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped to cast off the British crown,” Miss Kaptur said.

You know, like George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, and all those other religious fanatics who murdered men, women and children by the buildingload to impose Christianity on the world.

Do these people ever listen to what they say?

She has some helpful advice, per the usual:

The Catholic tradition calls for embracing the poor and the dispossessed, Miss Kaptur said. Rather than initiating military action, the United States should try to counter the poverty and repression that breed terrorism in the Mideast.

Not to imply that those conditions are what breed terrorism, but that’s exactly what we’re doing, Marcy. Once Saddam is gone, repression will be immensely relieved, as will poverty, in Iraq.