Monthly Archives: June 2004

Administrative

Hard To Keep Up

Sigh…

Well, I see that Andrew has gone off on vacation without my permission. He can be sure that I’ll dock his pay nonetheless. Either that, or I may double it. Either way, his bank account won’t know the difference.

His only way out of this impotent punishment will be to provide some interesting posts on his visit to Woods Hole.

It’s particularly annoying because I’m too busy to post as well. I’m busy conjuring up affordable and sustainable architectures for exploring the solar system, made all the more difficult by innumerable (and probably incommensurable) political constraints. While I’m doing this more than full time, I’m also trying to get the California house ready to rent, and I’m going down to Florida in a couple days to help Patricia (who I haven’t seen since the beginning of the month) continue to unpack there and get the house ready to live in.

I’ll try to get up a post or two up in the next couple days, nonetheless. In the meantime, go over to Hobbyspace and RLV News (which still needs a new name), where Clark Lindsey always seems to have enough time to check out what’s going on.

General

Off to Wood’s Hole

I’m going on vacation for a week, so I may not post anything for a while. OTOH, I’m going to Wood’s Hole, where my wife is doing research at the Marine Biological Institute and there are all kinds of fascinating people to talk to, so there may be interesting stuff to blog about when I get back.

General

Off to Wood’s Hole

I’m going on vacation for a week, so I may not post anything for a while. OTOH, I’m going to Wood’s Hole, where my wife is doing research at the Marine Biological Institute and there are all kinds of fascinating people to talk to, so there may be interesting stuff to blog about when I get back.

General

Off to Wood’s Hole

I’m going on vacation for a week, so I may not post anything for a while. OTOH, I’m going to Wood’s Hole, where my wife is doing research at the Marine Biological Institute and there are all kinds of fascinating people to talk to, so there may be interesting stuff to blog about when I get back.

General Science

Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion

The reason I’ve been a little quiet these past few days is that I’ve been preparing a talk for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science, held in Baltimore this year. I presented yesterday, and it was generally well received. The topic was technical and boring, so I won’t gn into details here. The talk that ended the session I was at was particularly interesting, though, so I thought I’d blog about it.

The talk in question was presented by J. E. Brandenburg of the Florida Space Institute, titled Microwave Enhancement of Inertial Electrostatic Confinement of Plasma for Fusion: Theory and Experiment. Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) uses two (or more) nested spherical grids charged to a high relative voltage to accelerate ions towards the common center of the grids, where they collide and fuse. Philo Farnsworth patented an IEC concept he called the Fusor, and there are all the usual conspiracy theories about suppression of his research surrounding the history of the Fusor, though I suspect the truth of the matter has a lot to do with the fact that it didn’t really work very well, at least for power generation.

Continue reading Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion →

Space

An Overall Perspective On The Reagan Space Legacy

A couple weeks ago I published a eulogy to Ronald Reagan at National Review on line, with respect to his legacy for space. It wasn’t the original piece I submitted–the original submission was longer and more comprehensive in terms of his overall space policy.

The piece that they published was better, partly because it was tighter and more succinct, and partly because, in the interests of the old saying of de mortuis nil nisi bonum, it was uncritical of his failures in space policy.

Now that he’s been interred, and it’s time to reflect on his presidency in its entirety, I’m republishing the original piece here. It will follow when you click on the “read the rest” link (unless you’re coming directly to the permalinked post, in which case it follows after the next couple paragraphs).

I’m prompted to do this for two reasons. First, because it has some perspective on the Reagan space policy that is relevant today, but also because Dwayne Day had a piece at The Space Review today that I think is too kind to Bill Clinton in that regard (and by the way, there are a lot of interesting pieces at that site today, so don’t restrict yourself to that one).

Thus, I’m providing what I hope is a relatively objective perspective of Reagan’s space policy, which was by no means completely laudatory, in anticipation of a similar one on Mr. Clinton’s, which was yet another decade-long setback, and one that the current administration is not addressing in many important ways.

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Continue reading An Overall Perspective On The Reagan Space Legacy →

Political Commentary

What He Said

Thanks, Mindles, for stating better than I could my ongoing frustration with people who assume that I’m a rabid right winger because I don’t agree with rabid left-wing positions. There’s only one part of the post with which I disagree:

Bush never saw a spending bill or entitlement he didn’t like, all small government rhetoric aside.

What “small government rhetoric”? I’ve never heard any.

I had hopes that Bush planned to shrink government, despite his talk about “compassionate conservative,” but it was hope based on faith, not evidence. All I knew was that he would be preferable to Albert Gore Jr.

I also know that he will be better than John F. Kerry.

That is to damn him with faint praise.

But I’m sure that I’ll continue to be lambasted as a right-wing Bush lover.