Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

More SpaceX Reusability

20 Comments

For years, it was understood that NASA wanted new Dragons for its CRS missions. But today SpaceX is going to fly a used one, with the agency’s permission.

As I’ve long said, there will come a point at which a launch customer will say, “Wait, you want me to trust my ass or my payload to an unflown vehicle?” We’ll look back in amazement at the first seven decades of spaceflight, when we thought it made perfect sense to put payloads on untested systems, and then throw them away after a single flight.

[Update a few minutes later]

Note that NASA allowed this for a cargo mission. I’ll bet they’ll still want new capsules for crew for a while. Speaking of which, NASA is admitting that Boeing and SpaceX are going to have a hard time meeting the totally arbitrary LOC goal of one in 270. I love this:

“The number one safety-related concern for the program is the current situation with respect to the estimate of loss of crew,” Donald McErlean, a former engineering fellow at L-3 Communications and a member of the panel, said at the meeting. “The threshold values were considered to be challenging, and both contractors currently have a challenge to meet that precise number.”

Got that? They’re going to have difficulty meeting that “precise” number. As I noted in the book, the precision with which they calculate these utterly arbitrary numbers, given the state of knowledge about the system, is absurd. And this is the sort of thing that keeps us dependent on the Russians, when neither we nor they have any idea what their reliability or LOC number is.

Business, Economics, Education, General Science, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Dilbert One

14 Comments

…”scientists” zero:

…in a sense, the video doesn’t even refute the straw man it set up. It’s not that climate science consists only of models: obviously there are observations too. But all the attribution claims about the climatic effects of greenhouse gases are based on models. If the scientists being interviewed had any evidence otherwise, they didn’t present any.

When you can’t even knock down your own straw man, you don’t have much of an argument.

So how did the video do refuting Scott Adams’ cartoon? He joked that scientists warning of catastrophe invoke the authority of observational data when they are really making claims based on models. Check. He joked that they ignore on a post hoc basis the models that don’t look right to them. Check. He joked that their views presuppose the validity of models that reasonable people could doubt. Check. And he joked that to question any of this will lead to derision and the accusation of being a science denier. Check. In other words, the Yale video sought to rebut Adams’ cartoon and ended up being a documentary version of it.

They would appear to lack self awareness.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The Violent Left

4 Comments

They’re shocked that we’re starting to hate them back:

Cue the boring moralizing and sanctimonious whimpering of the femmy, bow-tied, submissive branch of conservatism whose obsolete members were shocked to find themselves left behind by the masses to whom these geeks’ sinecures were not the most important objective of the movement. This is where they sniff, “We’re better than that,” and one has to ask ,“Who’s we?” Because, by nature, people are not better than that. They are not designed to sit back and take it while they are abused, condescended to, and told by a classless ruling class that there are now two sets of rules and – guess what? –the old rules are only going to be enforced against them.

We don’t like the new rules – I’d sure prefer a society where no one was getting attacked, having walked through the ruins of a country that took that path – but we normals didn’t choose the new rules. The left did. It gave us Ferguson, Middlebury College, Berkeley, and “Punch a Nazi” – which, conveniently for the left, translates as “punch normals.” And many of us have had personal experiences with this New Hate – jobs lost, hassles, and worse. Some scumbags at an anti-Trump rally attacked my friend and horribly injured his dog. His freaking dog.

So when we start to adopt their rules, they’re shocked? Have they ever met human beings before? It’s not a surprise. It’s inevitable.

It won’t end well for them if they continue down this road, because we have the guns.

Space, Technology and Society

Matt Isakowitz

4 Comments

This is a huge loss to the space community. No word (yet) on how he died, but he was only twenty-nine or thirty years old. Some of us knew him since he was a kid. And my deepest condolences to Steve and his family. This has to be shattering to them.

[Tuesday-morning update]

Future leaders in space has set up a memorial fund. But I wonder if they have permission from the family?

[Update a few minutes later]

FWIW…

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!