Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

EM-1

23 Comments

It this is true, it’s outrageously hypocritical. A dangerous pointless stunt.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from Doug Messier.

[Update a while later]

Bob Zimmerman is less than impressed.

[Tuesday-morning update]

[Bumped]

Friday-morning update]

[Bumped again]

[Update just before noon Pacific]

Listen to the press conference live here.

[Update after presser has started]

Emilee Speck is quick to the draw.

[Update a few minutes later]

Chris BerginGebhart has a more detailed story (much of which was probably pre-written).

[Update a while later]

Here‘s Jeff Foust’s take.

[Update mid afternoon]

Eric Berger: Blame the Senate for the schedule delays.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Space Science, Technology and Society, Weird

China And Asteroids

14 Comments

This sounds sort of hinky to me (as is usually the case with Chinese space announcements). They’re going to bring an asteroid into cislunar space within a decade, but don’t think they’ll have the technology to process it until four decades from now? And how does getting artificial gravity from a spinning asteroid work, exactly? Also, pretty sure there will be some intense discussions about what kind of liability China will assume under the Liability Convention if they attempt this.

Business, Health, Technology and Society

Medical Implants

4 Comments

Battery-free medical implants:

The supercapacitor they invented charges using electrolytes from biological fluids like blood serum and urine, and it would work with another device called an energy harvester, which converts heat and motion from the human body into electricity—in much the same way that self-winding watches are powered by the wearer’s body movements. That electricity is then captured by the supercapacitor.

“Combining energy harvesters with supercapacitors can provide endless power for lifelong implantable devices that may never need to be replaced,” said Maher El-Kady, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher and a co-author of the study.

Faster, please.

Business, Space, Technology and Society

Masten

6 Comments

They had an oopsie with Xaero-B. Hope it’s not too much of a setback.

[Update a while later]

[Update a few more minutes later]

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

Low-Cost Launch

The military could have it in the next half decade, but it’s going to have to work at it:

Miller argued that taking advantage of the current opportunities is going to require leadership from an organization that doesn’t exist yet in the Pentagon.

“We need an organization that’s not totally there,” he said. “We need an organization that has the right culture to understand private industry and partner with them. It needs to have the right authorities…It needs to have the right leadership and vision to go exercise this plan. We did not find any existing organization that has all the right qualities now, so we recommended creating a purpose-built organization to go execute this strategy.”

Schilling said the study was “not an indictment in any way shape or form” of the work of the Air Force’s Operationally Responsive Space Office in New Mexico.

He has to say that, but in fact it is. ORS has been pretty blinkered in its thinking. Of course, it’s not like it’s ever had a huge budget to work with.

[Update a few minutes later]

Funding to defend space systems will be in the next budget:

“Our fundamental challenge is we have to deal with space as an increasingly challenged domain,” he said at a Washington Space Business Roundtable panel discussion in Arlington, Virginia, on national security space priorities in the Trump administration. The problem is that the current systems were not built to withstand attacks, he added.

“What you will see in the budget is measured steps across the enterprise on how we address mission assurance,” he said, without going into details on how much will be proposed.

They will be “measured steps” and the work will take many several budget cycles, beyond the current future year defense program, which projects funding out for five years.

“It took us a long time to build the existing system. It is going to take a significant amount of time to transform it into the mission-assured system that is required in the future,” he said.

Yes. And the sooner they start the better. This is long overdue.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Demons Under Every Rock

12 Comments

The ever-expanding definition of “climate denial.”

These sorts of attacks, supported by multiple layers of links that never actually materially support the claims that are being made, used to be the domain of a small set of marginal activists and blogs. Atkin herself cut her teeth at Climate Progress, where her colleague Joe Romm has spent over a decade turning ad hominem into a form of toxic performance art.2

But today, these misrepresentations are served up in glossy, big-budget magazines. Climate denial has morphed, in the eyes of the climate movement, and their handmaidens in the media, into denial of green policy preferences, not climate science.

…More broadly, the expansion of the use of denier by both activists and journalists in the climate debate, a word once reserved only for Holocaust denial, mirrors a contemporary political moment in which all opposing viewpoints, whether in the eyes of the alt-right or the climate left, are increasingly viewed as illegitimate. The norms that once assured that our free press would also be a fair press have deeply eroded. Balanced reporting and fair attribution have become road kill in a world where all the incentives for both reporters and their editors are to serve up red meat for their highly segmented and polarized readerships, a dynamic that both reflects and feeds the broader polarization in our polity. It is a development that does not bode well for pluralism or democracy.

Yup.

[Update Wednesday afternoon]

Related thoughts on the Brett Stephens brouhaha: How to lose friends and alienate people.

[Bumped]

Business, Space, Space Science, Technology and Society

Red Dragon

20 Comments

2018 isn’t happening, but they may send two Dragons to Mars in 2020.

[Update a while later]

Meanwhile, in Michoud…

It’s almost metaphorical.

[Update a few minutes later]

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!