Business, Media Criticism, Space, Technology and Society

“We Will Definitely Catch Up”

4 Comments

As I said, I went to the Satellite 2017 conference. Unfortunately, my flight was too early yesterday to catch this panel:

Shotwell also anticipates that using Falcon 9 rockets with pre-flown first stages will enable the company to execute on its backlog, which is currently loaded with customers that expected to have their satellites launched in 2016. SES-10 was one such mission.

“We do anticipate reflying about six vehicles, [with] pre-flown boosters this year, which should take some of the pressure off of production,” Shotwell said.

Let hope. I’ve been saying that the plans for the Apollo 8 re-enactment next year aren’t as unrealistic as some think (I give it about 30%). They have to get flying again, and they have to fly the heavy this year, and they have to get in those qualification flights, but I think those, not the Dragon itself, are the long pole in the tent. Once they have both pads going, they may in fact be able to work of that backlog, and if they’re regularly reflying first stages, that will be historic.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Biggest Jobs Gains In Years”

22 Comments

Yes, there is such a thing as an economic environment, and psychology. These are not “Obama’s jobs.”

When Obama came in, the Democrats had already had a jackboot on the neck of the economy since 2006 (including talking it down and things like Schumer helping start the bank runs), and when business (mainly small business) saw that Obama was going to be elected, they pulled in their horns to weather the storm that they hoped would last only four years. It turned out to be eight (though it was mitigated somewhat by the mid-term losses of the party of War On The Free-Market Economy). Despite Paul Krugman’s hilarious prediction, for which he should rightly be mocked until the end of time, the post-election market rally was because she lost, and this boom is part of that relief, despite Trump’s own anti-market instincts.

[Noon update]

Related: It’s an older piece, but Democrats can’t win until they recognize how terrible Obama’s economic policies were.

In other words, they can’t win.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Classic SLAPP

7 Comments

Popehat shows how this works. As he says, Colorado doesn’t have an anti-SLAPP law, but it may just get dismissed.

By the way, while I don’t generally discuss my own case, briefly, because he’s a public figure, if it ever actually gets to trial, he has to show that I acted “with malice.” Legally, what this means is that I had a “reckless disregard for the truth,” which means that I either knew what I was writing wasn’t true, or I didn’t care whether or not it was.

Whatever else you might think of him, you know who recklessly disregards the truth every day? Donald J. Trump. Though Barack Obama did it a lot, too, to cram ObamaCare down our throats (among many other things).

Administrative

Haven’t Checked Out Yet

9 Comments

In case anyone was wondering, that last post wasn’t a permanent blogging break, but I’ve been taking an unannounced temporary one. I’ll be back in CA tomorrow, and back to the usual hijinks.

[Wednesday-morning update]

The above was posted from my phone, before I got on the plane in DC on the way back to LAX. I didn’t warn about the blogging break because I didn’t plan it; it just sort of happened. I had my laptop with me the whole trip, and was on it quite a bit, but just didn’t bother to post anything (BTW, for future reference, if this happens again, and you want to see if I’m still metabolizing and on line, check my Twitter account, which remained relatively active throughout, at least in RTs).

I flew out Saturday morning to Dulles, and spent a relaxing half weekend with friends in rural Virginia, then took the train into DC Monday morning to attend the Satellite 2017 conference at the Convention Center, which I normally don’t attend, and in fact never have attended, because I’m not really a satellite sort of guy. But I’d been asked to speak at a panel on Monday afternoon, and I had other business in DC. It turned out that there were a lot of friends and useful contacts at the event, and while I was checking mail and Twitter, I just never got around to posting anything, not even a brief link, because it would have been a distraction. I in fact didn’t realize that the post had been the last one that I’d made until I saw comments there, so decided to at least put something up to assuage concerns, or disappoint those who were hoping for my demise (though I doubt that to the degree they exist at all, they spend much time here).

But in thinking about it, I may be suffering from blogging burnout to a degree, after over a decade and a half of it (last October was my 15th bloggiversary). There’s a lot going on in my life right now, both professionally and personally (good things, I hasten to add), and while in the past that might have been blog fodder, I don’t really feel motivated to discuss it long form, and the things that I do make the effort to discuss long form I try to place other places than the blog these days. I do still tweet a lot (probably too much), and maybe for now the best thing to do is to get my Twitter display working on the blog again, so it will at least be a microblog, and people who stop by will know I’m still here, even if I don’t overcome the additional energy barrier to put up an actual post.

Health, Philosophy, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Death, And The Meaning Of Life

28 Comments

I have no idea how I will face my impending end (and I’m doing everything reasonable to put it off as long as possible), but I get meaning from my goal of moving humanity into space, and I’ll continue to do so as long as I’m alive. When I see people who win the lottery have their lives ruined over it, I suspect it’s because they don’t have any real purpose in life other than material pleasure, and have never given any serious thought to what they’d do with the winnings. I’d have no problems at all; if I had a billion dollars, I’d start a serious space venture.

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

Science And Policy

3 Comments

Words of wisdom from Daniel Sarewitz:

Whatever science you’re doing on a post-normal problem, it is always going to be incomplete, and it is always going to be subject to revision, and highly uncertain. It can be viewed from numerous scientific perspectives. So multiple scientific studies can come up with multiple results, so it leads to a profusion of truths that can be mobilized on behalf of different sets of values. Values and facts can pair up with each other in different ways.

One example I love is how everyone talks about how there’s a consensus on GMOs. Well there is consensus around a narrow part of the GMO issue, like there is a consensus around a narrow part of climate change. But the real problems have to do with the ‚what could be done?‘ questions. So for GMOs for example, when people say there is a consensus, what they mean is ‚we know they’re not a health risk‘. So I’ll accept it on health risk, I don’t have a problem with it. But then you say, ‚and we know that they’ll be an essential part of the economic future of Africa‘. Well, maybe that’s true — whose model are you using? What kind of data have you used to generate that? What are your assumptions? I mean anything dealing with projections of the future and claims about how the world is going to look, in a multi-variate, open system, are going to be subject to different people coming up with different claims and conclusions. And that’s exactly what happens.

And when you bring science into the political debate, you have to pick and choose which science you want to use. You have to match that with particular priorities about what policy problems you want to solve. I think science is really important, I think we want to be factual, I think we want to have a grip on reality and I think science can help us do that. But for problems where there are so many paths forward, so many competing values, the systems themselves are so complicated, I don’t think science is a privileged part of the solution.

…The post-normal science idea really does challenge the notion of science as a unitary thing that tells us what to do, PNS really says that we have to think of science in a different way in these contested contexts, and I don’t think most scientists want to go there. The deficit model puts them in charge: “we communicate the facts, you listen and take action.” So if the problem isn’t solved it’s not science’s problem. This is a self-serving superstition that the scientific community generally holds. And superstitions are hard to destabilize.

Over on Twitter, I’ve been having arguments with people about the proposed cut at the EPA, in which the budget for “protecting the climate,” is reduced to “only” $29M.

What in the hell does “protecting the climate” even mean?

Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

Blue Moon

23 Comments

The private sector continues to seize the initiative in space:

Blue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed that it could “only be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. I’m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.”

Last year, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed its suborbital rocket, the New Shepard, five times within less than a year, flying just past the 62-mile edge of space and then landing vertically on a landing pad at the company’s West Texas facility.

That same technology could be used to land the Blue Moon vehicle on the lunar surface, the company said. Its white paper shows what looks like a modified New Shepard rocket, standing on the moon with an American flag, a NASA logo and Blue Origin’s feather symbol.

The company said it plans to land its Blue Moon lunar lander at Shackleton Crater on the moon’s south pole. The site has nearly continuous sunlight to provide power through the spacecraft’s solar arrays. The company also chose to land there because of the “water ice in the perpetual shadow of the crater’s deep crevices.”

Water is vital not just for human survival, but also because hydrogen and oxygen in water could be transformed into rocket fuel. The moon, then, is seen as a massive gas station in space.

If this happens, SLS/Orion are dead programs walking. This is the 21st century I’ve been waiting for. We’re finally putting a stake through the heart of the Apollo Cargo Cult.

Note (as usual with such pieces in such venues) the stupidity and ignorance of the comments.

[Update a few minutes later]

Eric Berger thinks this is a big deal. So do I. I think that people are going to be very surprised at how quickly things start happening. And I suspect that 2017 will be viewed as a very important year in space history.

[Update late morning]

Miri Kramer thinks it’s “unhinged sounding.” I think that applies better to NASA sending crew to the moon on the very first flight of SLS. Even in Apollo they had test flights of the launch system.

[Update early afternoon]

Let the space tycoons lead the way. I think the transcontinental railroad analogy is very apt. NASA’s (and the National Research Council’s) “vision,” such as it is, is indeed paltry, as I wrote last year.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!