Transterrestrial Musings

July 31, 2004
"The Senator Needs You To Move"

Mark Steyn has Senator Kerry pegged:

Kerry now says that Bush "misled" him on Iraq. But, if he was that easily suckered by a renowned moron, how much more susceptible would he be to such wily operators as Chirac. They would speak French to each other, and Jacques would blow soothingly in his ear, and Kerry would look flattered, and there'd be lots of resolutions and joint declarations, and nothing would happen. We'd be fighting the war on terror through the self-admiring inertia of windbag multilateralism.
As for the home front, Kerry says: "As President, I will not evade or equivocate; I will immediately implement the recommendations of that [the 9/11] commission." Whoa, hold on there. There's a ton of recommendations, and some of us don't like the part about concentrating all US intelligence under one cabinet secretary who serves not at the President's pleasure but for a fixed term. That effectively institutionalises the groupthink resistance to alternative ideas that led to the 9/11 failures. Leadership is about hearing different viewpoints and reaching a judgment. But Kerry gives the impression that, as long as he enjoys the perks of the top job, he's happy to subcontract his judgment to others.

He moans endlessly about the "outsourcing" of American jobs but, when it comes to his own job, he's willing to outsource American foreign policy to the mushy transnational talk-shops and to outsource homeland security to some dubious intelligence tsar. There's no sense of any strategic vision, no sense that he's thought about Iran or North Korea or any of the other powder kegs about to blow. I tried to ask him about some of these matters during the New Hampshire primary and he intoned in response, "Sometimes truly courageous leadership means having the courage not to show any leadership." (I quote from memory.)

The whole thing is like that. You know what to do.

Of course, he finished with a flourish:

...After an eternity, an aide stepped out from behind him and said, "The Senator needs you to move."
"Well, why couldn't he have said that?" muttered one of the old coots, as Kerry swept past us.

That's how I felt after the Convention: all week Senators Biden, Lieberman and Edwards made the case that the Democrats were credible on national security. Why couldn't Kerry have said that?

Because in the end he's running for President because he feels he ought to be President. That's his message to George W Bush: "The Senator needs you to move." And even then everyone else says it better.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:38 PM

Fair And Balanced

Keith Cowing has dug up some old pics of the president's father in a bunny suit, too, from way back in 1981 when he was VP.

See, I run a non-partisan website here.

Kerry's are still funnier, though.

[Update a few minutes later]

Keith says in comments that he cast a broad net, but that this was the only fish that turned up.

Note to Karl Rove: I think that it might be very effective for the president (in the interest of "changing the tone" and compassionate conservatism) to go down to the cape and have some bunnysuit shots taken of himself (though without the giant hose suppository shot). He could then make a speech honoring all the technicians and others who have to wear those outfits every day, but don't normally get praised, and to use it (unlike Kerry) as an occasion to actually talk about space policy. It would look classy and be hard for the press to make fun of, while making Kerry's response to this look even worse.

[Update a minute or so later]

D'oh!

A commenter beat me to the thought (I saw Keith's comment in email, not by reading the comments).

Once again, it's nice to have readers smarter than me.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:48 PM

The Best Argument For The Second Amendment

The Warsaw Uprising began sixty years ago. Not the ghetto uprising--the other one that essentially destroyed the city as the Nazi regime was entering its death throes. It was a true display of the evil of both Hitler and Stalin.

By the way, I happened to watch "The Pianist" last night, and I was amazed at the level of destruction shown in the movie, and was wondering how accurate it was.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:18 AM

More Moon Conference Reporting

Here's more on the Return To The Moon Conference a couple weekends ago, by Leonard David. In USA Today. It's got some new stuff that wasn't in his initial space.com piece.

[Via Thomas James, who seems to be posting more now that he's settled into his new digs in Colorado. Though shouldn't he change the name of his blog to the Colorado Mars Society?]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:04 AM

Astrononomical Oddity

You know all those things you haven't done in a blue moon? Well, get ready to do them again tonight.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:52 AM

July 30, 2004
Mindless Rhetoric

I heard Kerry dredge up another old socialist chestnut today, when he was talking about health care. "I'm going to give every citizen the same health care that senators give themselves."

That kind of demogoguery is just as nonsensical now as it is when the senator's portly colleague, the senior senator from Massachussetts, used it over two decades ago.

Does he propose to provide every American citizen with a Senator's salary? With other senatorial perks and benefits, such as free haircuts and subsidized meals? Free gym memberships?

Secret Service security details? I'll bet a lot of people in the inner cities would like that one.

How about a generous pension?

No?

Then what's his point? Why should they get senatorial health care?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:00 PM

"The Heart And Soul Of America"

Just heard a clip of Bush on his new tour (as in the title of this post)--a dig at Kerry's comment that the heart and soul of America was represented by Whoopie Goldberg & Co. He said "Springfield, Missoura." I wonder if that's a natural Texan pronunciation, or if he knows it's what the natives (outside of St. Louis) call it?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:31 PM

Betting On Iraq

If you think that the prospects for Iraq are good, here's a way to make money on your belief.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:24 PM

Too cheap to meter

DOE has decided to scrap plans for FIRE, which was originally intended to serve as an alternative to the International Thermonuclear Energy Experiment (ITER, later changed to 'Iter'). This is a bad thing for reasons too numerous to list. For one thing, it puts all the fusion eggs in one basket. For another, that basket is internationalized, so that every election, every economic shift, every change of national priorities, in every one of the major participating nations will threaten the experiment.

The original recommendation from the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee was that if there had not been a decision to proceed with Iter by the end of July 2004, then work should move ahead on FIRE. Unfortunately the Bush administration decided that Iter was a good idea, for reasons which are still not clear to me - I suspect the desire to do a little international fence-mending had something to do with it. Anyway, with Iter rejoined (the US had dropped out in 1998), FIRE is superfluous, at least if you assume Iter is going to meet its program goals, which I seriously doubt (at least, assuming that staying under budget is one of them). FIRE has been criticized for relying on pedestrian technologies like copper magnets instead of superconductors, but that's a feature, not a bug. FIRE is a much smaller and less ambitious experiment than Iter, and it's firmly in the hands of the US. Both things increase the prospects of success - the lower ambition makes the technical aspects more likely to succeed, and the single government funding source makes the political aspects less likely to force major redesigns partway through.

Given my druthers I wouldn't fund either Iter or FIRE, preferring to put money into a basket of alternative confinement concepts, and try novel things like prizes. Kerry has made energy independence a major platform plank, so if he wins there may be additional funding for fusion, but Iter is going to suck up a lot of that, and any project which runs alongside Iter will almost certainly get killed as soon as there is a funding crunch. I like the energy independence platform plank: it seems obvious to me that reducing our dependence on oil from the mideast increases the range of options for dealing with militant Islam. In particular, getting to the point where the Saudis no longer have any ability to affect the US economy seems quite desirable, since their official national religion is extremist Islam - how anyone could possibly consider them to be our allies is beyond me, but that's a post for another day.

The upshot of this latest development is that commercially viable fusion energy has receded still further into the future. Under a Kerry administration it would most likely get a little closer, but not by much, and not cheaply.

Posted by Andrew Case at 01:50 PM

Rare Earth

A just published study (actually still in preprint) suggests that Earth like planets may be quite uncommon. I'm a little skeptical about the reasoning (based on the discussion in the link: I haven't read the paper). It's quite possible that the reason we haven't found system's like Sol's is just that we don't yet have the capability. The existence of systems which evolved in an entirely different way doesn't really bear on the number of solar systems like our own except very indirectly.

Posted by Andrew Case at 12:11 PM

The Kerry Space Bunny

...just keeps going, and going, and going...

Here's the latest from Florida Today. The Kerry people didn't just shoot themselves in the unlucky rabbit's foot on this one. They kept reloading:

Kerry's campaign team asked for the pictures and helped pass them out to reporters, NASA said. Once the photos surfaced on Web sites and in newspapers, becoming joke fodder for pundits at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Kerry's campaign got defensive.
The Kerry team hinted at dirty tricks. Campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill said the pictures were not meant to go public.

NASA routinely photographs touring dignitaries and posts them online. Kerry's group included four current or former U.S. senators. Two of them, Glenn and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Melbourne, flew in space. So there was nothing unusual about publicizing the photos...

...NASA did not elaborate on whether lawyers deemed the Kerry campaign event Monday was an improper use of the Visitor Center. Nor did the agency say how it differed from the ways other politicians have used NASA locations and high-profile space events for political purposes.

It's wabbit season!

That's what irritated me about this. There was no "high-profile space event" here. It was simply using a NASA center as a prop to talk about things that had nothing to do with space. It was purely a campaign event, and despite Lori Garver's flimsy defense of him (and I like Lori), the senator continues to strike me as someone who is as profoundly unserious on the space issue as he is on all others, except for achieving his lifelong dream of being the second JFK.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:27 AM

Susan Collins

...is, to me, one of the most irritating people in public life. I'm listening to the 911 hearing stuff on the Hill. Like Algore, she talks to us like a kindergarten teacher, and she sounds a little slow herself. I really think of her as one of the dimmer bulbs in the Senate (which is really saying something, considering all the competition), and it's a little frightening to have her playing a significant role in this activity.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:17 AM

What She Said

I agree with Virginia Postrel:

Aside from the much-remarked-upon flag-waving-veteran talk, the speech was mostly made up of (in Kerry's anti-GOP words) "narrow appeals masquerading as values." Better a tongue-tied president than a demagogue.

To the limited (perhaps none) degree that it was possible, last night's speech only increased my antipathy to the junior Senator from Massachussetts.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:38 AM

July 29, 2004
What A Pathetic Life

You have to feel sorry for the poor schmuck just interviewed at the convention who said that tonight was "...the greatest moment of my life up to now."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:39 PM

Can't Go All The Way

I couldn't avoid watching Kerry's speech. I switched to Fox to watch a Simpsons rerun, but it was on every channel.

It was mostly platitudes, as expected. My summary of Kerry's foreign policy (which, assuming that the economy continues to improve, will be the main campaign issue): We will go to all lengths to avoid war, and we will only do so if we can get the French on board.

My recommendation for Karl Rove: We will go to all lengths to avoid another September 11th.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:23 PM

His Helices Unwind

Francis Crick has died. Sadly, this event wasn't prevented by being a discoverer of the secret of life.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:36 AM

July 28, 2004
Damned If I Know Either

From Lileks--too spot on to not quote a large section of:

I was at both conventions in 1992, and the GOP version was a dispirited affair. Clinton had sparkle, the big mo, and a foundering economy to hammer; Bush was your father’s Oldsmobile. “Change” was the mantra. After 12 years we needed “Change,” whatever that might be, and the sax-blowin’ shades-wearin’ hubba-double-Bubba ticket had a fresh cachet the Bush team could not match. The Buchanan speech was a disaster – and not just for its effect on the swingers. I remember sitting in a bar the night of the speech with a portly squat guy covered in GOP buttons, listening to his lament. “This isn’t my party,” he said. “Okay maybe he has a point here, or another point there, but that speech – that’s not my party.”
If Moore introduced Kerry and gave a typical speech – “The Republicans have hate for breakfast!” – how many delegates would later lament that their party had become something they no longer recognized? Don’t know. Just asking. But I do know that the 96 convention had a different attitude towards the nominees than I sense from the 04 DNC convention. Bush 41 never really fired up the troops. But in 96 people liked Dole. They knew in their bones he was going to crater, and they knew that the Dole on the stump was a dull version of the real thing. Bob Dole was smart, peppery, funny as hell (really) and lacking in that ponderous self-importance that settles into a Senator’s heart. He was really a good guy. And he was going to lose. Ah well.

I don’t sense the same affection for Kerry. I also don’t think it matters. Right now I have a browser window open to Fark, and a T-shirt ad shows Bush’s face with the logo “American Psycho.” What else do you need to know? As Teddy Kennedy said in his convention speech: “The only thing we have to fear is four more years of George Bush.” It’s really quite simple, isn’t it? We live in a manufactured climate of fear ginned up by war-crazed neocon overlords. There is no threat. The only thing we have to fear is Bush, who sits as we speak in the Oval Office sucking the marrow from Whoopi’s shin-bones.

If so, I wonder why anyone agreed to the stringent security policies that characterize this year’s conventions. Why the bomb-sniffing dogs? Why the snipers? Why the metal detectors, the invasive inspection of bags? Is it all an elaborate defense against Bush crashing the party and setting off a bomb belt, shouting God is Great, y’all!

No, they’re fearful of something else.

Damned if I know what, though. Damned if I know.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:36 PM

Despite The Headline

...this story isn't good news for John Kerry:

Despite weeks of bad war news — including a rising casualty toll and increasing criticism of the administration’s management of the war from Democrats in Congress — the presidential race in Michigan remains a toss-up.
Bush is in a statistical dead heat with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, with Bush favored, 44 percent to 40 percent, over the Massachusetts senator, the survey found.

“If I were John Kerry, I would be concerned,” pollster Steve Mitchell said. “The race is tough for Kerry. Voters may disagree with Bush on some of his tactics, but he is perceived as being strong.”

If Bush is even in Michigan (which he lost to Gore by about four points in 2000), the Dems are in big trouble.

The article doesn't suggest one of the possible reasons why. Southeast Michigan has the highest population of Iraqi-Americans (one of whom is my Baghdad-born sister-in-law) in the country.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:43 PM

Shocking

Well, actually not. This, if true, seems perfectly in character:

"Kerry would revisit ambush locations for reenacting combat scenes where he would portray the hero, catching it all on film. Kerry would take movies of himself walking around in combat gear, sometimes dressed as an infantryman walking resolutely through the terrain. He even filmed mock interviews of himself narrating his exploits. A joke circulated among Swiftees was that Kerry left Vietnam early not because he received three Purple Hearts, but because he had recorded enough film of himself to take home for his planned political campaigns."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:29 AM

From An Alternate Reality

Orrin Judd has a little snippet that shows just how out of touch some people are:

Liev Schreiber is filming a book called Everything is Illuminated and went out of his way to hire an aspiring Iraqi filmmaker who he'd seen on MTV's True Life:
"We felt really guilty about what our country had done to his country," says producer Peter Saraf. "And then, of course, he gets here, and it never occurred to me that he would say something like 'But I love George Bush--he changed my life!'"

Well, at least is shows that these people are sincere in their apparent belief that the Iraqis were better off under Saddam. While there are certainly Iraqis unhappy that we removed him from power (they blew up seventy of their compatriots just a few hours ago, after all), to just what kind of mindset would it never occur that there might be some who are grateful?

Of course, if the Republicans take my suggestion, we can be sure that it will just be dismissed as right-wing propaganda, and the Iraqi patriots will be derided and vilified as quislings.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:15 AM

Kerry Clean-Suit Flap Exposes Media Bias Against “Nerds”

America needs a "Million Nerd March" on Washington.

John Kerry is now a victim of an old prejudice that no civil rights organization has ever been willing to address. Kerry was totally unaware of this old prejudice when he arrived at Kennedy Space Center last Monday for a town hall meeting at Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s Space Coast. He got a rude awakening in the wake of that visit.

The image of Presidential candidate Kerry crawling through the Space Shuttle hatch in a NASA clean suit or “bunny suit” has been received with wild laughter by television commentators and some newspapers across the nation. That picture was splattered across many a tabloid front page in juxtaposition with an old image of actor-director Woody Allen wearing a similar suit from one of his old comedy satire films.

I think the real geeks here are the reporters and pundits who associate everything technical or scientific with comical nerdiness. A lot of folks who don't possess a clear grasp of science or technology have a disturbing tendency to ridicule others who work in those areas. When some reporters and editors saw Kerry wearing the uniform of a clean-area worker, they gleefully seized the opportunity to attack Kerry as a geek or nerd. A similarly unfair, but less pervasive response to President Bush wearing a flight suit came when he hopped out of the plane on that aircraft carrier last year. We just aren't used to seeing these drab politicians in the specialty garb of certain professions.

John Kerry is a longtime opponent of the exploration of space exploration by astronauts and onboard scientists. His Senate voting record reflects his desire to reduce America’s human space exploration effort. Regardless of his record, NASA had nothing but good intentions in mind for Senator Kerry during his visit. One of the best ways to win over an opponent to space exploration is to keep the dialog going and inviting that opponent to taste a bit of the experience.

Too many of our fellow human beings go through daily life without ever looking up or forward. Politicians tend to be highly tuned into their immediate surroundings and happenings. An effective space exploration advocate needs to understand how narrow the world of politics is. It is very important to invite people like John Kerry inside places like KSC and to give them an opportunity to both see and share the space vision through real experiences and not just lofty words about the high frontier.

I am appalled by the journalistic response to these images of Kerry. Space exploration advocacy today is not received much better than it was in the 1920s when American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard was ridiculed as the "Moon Man" by the New York Times. Legendary talk show host Johnny Carson got a lot of mileage out of mimicry of the late space scientist and commentator Carl Sagan.

Hollywood is particularly cruel toward scientists and people in lab coats. Scientists and engineers are stereotyped no less than the Mexicans and Black Americans were in old movies and television programs. Movies like THE RIGHT STUFF and MARS ATTACKS! both took deadly aim at "rocket scientists."

There is no National Association for the Advancement of Scientists and Engineers to speak up for the targets of derision and ridicule. Thankfully, the real damage done to the cause of truth and science by these stereotypes may not really be that bad. Opinion polls indicate that the majority of Americans support a robust space program. Many in the general public, including scientists and technologists, also get a kick out of most of these comic stereotypes. The major downside of creating the geek stereotype is that it may discourage some of our brightest and most creative students to avoid studies and careers in science when they see how people of science are portrayed in the news and entertainment productions.

Ultimately, the Kerry photos are fair game for the press and comedians. The "Town Hall" meeting part of the KSC visit was a typically contrived campaign event. I hope that Kerry will return to KSC one day and insist on meeting with the real KSC people--the technicians, the firemen, the welders, the midlevel managers and the working engineers. I would also like to know if there was a single Republican or Green Party supporter allowed to join the "audience."

Posted by Jim McDade at 08:05 AM

July 27, 2004
Disingenuous

Ron Reagan (who wouldn't have this platform if his last name wasn't Reagan) just made a speech in which one would never know that embryonic research is perfectly legal in this country. I was also struck by this sophistry this morning listening to NPR, when they talked about "restrictions" on such research under the Bush Administration. I don't agree with the President's policy, but this is no more "restricting" such research than not funding artists by the NEA is "censorship."

The policy is that no federal funds will go to such research, not that it is forbidden. But if they told the truth about that, they probably wouldn't get the political pull that they hope to, and overthrow the evil Bush administration, that ostensibly forbids research that might have saved Ron's dad (not).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:34 PM

Politically Incorrect

I wonder if NPR host Scott Simon has just cut himself out of the fashionable cocktail circuit?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:04 PM

Freudian Slip?

Alan Colmes just announced that "...in a moment Barak Osama is going to speak."

[Update a minute later]

He just corrected himself. Doubtless someone told him what he's done in the bug in his ear.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:46 PM

Contrast

If Karl Rove is smart, the Republican convention will feature some grateful Iraqis in prime time, just as a reminder.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:15 PM

September 29th

That's the date that Burt Rutan as set for his first X-Prize attempt. And just to keep things interesting, he's not alone:

Hot on Rutan’s heels is Brian Feeney, leader of the Canadian da Vinci Project. Feeney also reported today that his team is rolling out on August 5 their completed X Prize vehicle -- the balloon-lofted Wild Fire rocket. The public unveiling will take place at the team’s Downsview Airport hanger in Toronto.
The da Vinci Project Team, widely heralded as a contender for the $10 million purse, will pursue its own Ansari X Prize space flight attempts this Fall.

And Paul Allen remains coy about future plans:

"This competition has proven that there are many different ways to attack the challenges set out by the Ansari X Prize. From the start we have approached SpaceShipOne with a 'can-do, home-brew' attitude," Allen said. "We are grateful that our previous flights have brought even more attention to the Ansari X Prize and given more momentum to the groundswell of excitement that is continuing to build for the long-term potential of affordable space exploration."

Dosn't sound like he thinks it's a stunt.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:57 PM

Cluelessness On Parade

Ann Coulter provides the actual editorial comments from the clueless USA Today editor who spiked her column.

“Apparently," said Coulter, "USA Today doesn’t like my ‘tone,’ humor, sarcasm, etc. etc., which raises the intriguing question of why they hired me to write for them in the first place. Perhaps they thought they were getting Catherine Coulter.”
In a sort of package deal, USA Today plans to have Michael Moore offer commentary at the Republican National Convention next month. “My guess is they will ‘get’ his humor” said Coulter.

Meghan Keane has given a similar treatment to Bill Clinton's speech last night.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:30 PM

More Computer voting

Via MIT's Technology Review, an item on computer voting and the upcoming election.

There was a particularly stupid an ill-informed op-ed (warning: audio link) on PRI's show Marketplace yesterday. Basically the commentator felt that since ATMs are so reliable, we should trust voting machines. This completely ignores that fact that ATM errors have multiple redundant means of catching errors, since they generate a paper trail at the time of the transaction, the customer has additional opportunities to catch errors when they receive their bank statement, and the bank has enormous incentives to ensure correct accounting if they want to stay in business. If there is a potential problem with an ATM it can be taken off line for a couple of days until it is fixed.

In the case of electronic voting machines, they are put to the test once every couple of years, set up by people with minimal training, there is no independent audit trail, and there is considerable incentive to falsify votes, knowing that if you are successful you or your allies will control the investigation into what happened. Only an independent voter-verifiable audit trail can make electronic voting credible. Unfortunately my state (MD) is dragging its feet on this issue despite a well organized effort to knock some sense into the heads of the Election Commission.

I blogged this topic earlier, and I'll do it again before the election. This is the single most important technological issue facing the US. We have the potential to completely invalidate elections. Without trust in the electoral process government has no legitimacy, and people will be forced to accept disenfranchisement or resist with force. That may sound like hyperbole, but I suggest you think carefully about the likely reaction if there is a significant split between exit polls and reported (utterly unverifiable) election results in a hotly contested election. I don't think rioting is at all unlikely, and public officials hanged from lamposts is a real possibility. It's all well and good to joke about that being a good thing, but there's no guarantee that the officials hanged are the guilty ones, or that large scale public disorder will in any way actually address the problem. Just ask Reginald Denny.

I spent four hours last night working with commonly used commercial software which crashed three times. It was MicroSoft Word, so there's something of an expectation that it's a P.O.S., but it's at least as heavily tested as the Dielbold software that I'll be using to cast my vote in November. My confidence in the system working as it should is not high.

Posted by Andrew Case at 07:31 AM

July 26, 2004
Just A Stage Prop

I predicted in comments in this post that Senator Kerry would have nothing to say about space policy during his visit to Kennedy Space Center today.

I was right.

Well, at least it's consistent with the party platform. There is zero evidence that he has any interest in space, and the president's vision, such as it is, is almost certainly dead if he's not reelected. At best, it appears that a Kerry space policy would be a return to the Clinton policy, based on the few things that he has said about it. As I said at the time, Democrats who are space enthusiasts are going to face a very tough choice in the voting booth this fall.

[Tuesday morning update]

Keith Cowing and Frank Sietzen have a relevant passage from their new book, on Kerry's views on space.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:54 PM

Kerry's "Dukakis In A Tank" Moment?

There's a pretty funny caption contest going on over here, based on a picture of Senator Kerry at Kennedy Space Center.

[Update on Tuesday]

More captions over at Happy Fun Pundit.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:28 PM

What A Shock

There's no mention of space policy in the Democrat Party platform. It mentions Apollo, but only as an example of how the nation can accomplish great (non-space-related) things when it sets its mind to it. As I noted in a comment there, it's the old "if we can send a man to the moon, why can't we solve world hunger?" platitudes.

No shock--there's been no visionary space initiative on the part of any Democrat president since Kennedy (and I'd argue that even Kennedy's wasn't that visionary, since the vision was mainly to beat the Russians to the moon).

I would expect to see the president's new vision in the Republican Party platform. It would be a monumental screwup, and indicative of its true priority, if it's not.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:08 AM

Get Out The Popcorn

Al Gore's going to speak at the convention tonight. Extrapolating from his most recent rants and ravings, I think that there's a good possibility that we'll get to watch his head actually explode, live on national television.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:36 AM

On Life Support?

NASA is still trying to salvage the Centennial Challenges program, but Congress remains resistant.

...Democrats on the subcommittee, including Reps. Nick Lampson, Sheila Jackson Lee and Bernice Johnson (all from Texas), expressed reservations about relying on prize money to spur technological innovation.
“While establishment of a NASA prize program is certainly worth considering, we should not be lulled into thinking that it is any substitute for providing adequate funding for NASA’s R&D programs,” said Lampson, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:24 AM

Space Poet

Dwayne Day says we need another Carl Sagan.

Here's my candidate for a replacement.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:21 AM

Vision Losing Focus?

Jeff Foust has a writeup on Paul Spudis' and Wendell Mendell's talks at last weekend's Return To The Moon Conference. Bottom line: as is often the case, NASA has met the enemy, and it is them.

Spudis thinks that NASA officials are deliberately misrepresenting the vision. “My point is not that they misunderstand it, but that they are misrepresenting it,” he said. “This is all done deliberately, and the agenda is to kill this, or to morph it into something that it was never intended to be.”

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:06 AM

July 25, 2004
A Visit To Cathy's World

Here's a fun interview with the very fun (based on my occasional partying with her) and smart Cathy Seipp:

I think people always considered me more of a contrarian than a traditional values conservative. The problem with the L.A. media isn't that it's dominated by liberals but that it's dominated by idiots. Occasionally someone comes along -- like Allan Mayer, founding editor of the now-defunct Buzz magazine (and a liberal) -- who's smart enough to hire people with different points of view...
...My mother...told me when I was young that when she was looking for an entry level job after graduating college, she noticed the most interesting, better paying jobs were always under "Men Wanted" instead of "Women Wanted," which is how jobs used to be advertised. So she just went ahead and applied for the "Men Wanted" jobs and usually got them. And most of the time the men who interviewed her were not outraged that she'd applied but quite nice; they just said it hadn't occurred to them that a woman might want the job. Which is how it is with most situations, I think; people aren't usually out to oppress you, they're just unimaginative.

I loved this:

I don't mind closely trimmed short beards. But those long, scraggly beards on men are like underarm hair on women. In both cases the tacit message is: "In case you were wondering what my pubic hair looks like, wonder no longer, because now you know."

She just nailed why I no longer have a beard.

RTWT

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:31 PM

"American Evita"

It looks like Christopher Anderson's new book isn't going to paint a very pretty picture of the junior Senator from New York.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:27 PM

Mysteriouser And Mysteriouser

The latest word is that not only did Berger lose documents, but he also added some to the files:

...the thrust of the federal investigation now looking into Mr. Berger's actions should center not necessarily on what was taken from the archived files but what was placed in them.

Trying to rewrite a little history?

And this part is very disturbing, at least to me:

...adding an entirely new layer of intrigue to the story is word that telephone calls made by Berger during those latter two visits may have been monitored by an "unauthorized agency."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:18 AM

Another Foreign Leader For Kerry

The endorsements just keep rolling in:

"Arafat is now waiting for the month of November in the hope that President Bush will be defeated in the presidential elections and turned out of his office," Ze'evi told the cabinet. Arafat also expects that Sharon will be toppled from the premiership, he said.

I'm sure he's hoping for renewed invitations to the White House, just like the Clinton years.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:11 AM

Irritating

Someone should tell Dari Alexander that Mackinac Island is pronounced "Mack-i-naw," not "Mack-i-nack." You can sure tell she's not a Michigan native.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:47 AM

July 24, 2004
Politically Tone Deaf

The Kerry campaign used a Rolls Royce as its press logo in Detroit. You gotta admire the attempts at spinning their way out:

Asked about the press-pass logo, Kerry spokesman David Wade said it was unintentional error by a campaign volunteer and then criticized President Bush's economic policies.
"I could say that the Rolls-Royce is the perfect symbol of who got the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but sometimes objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear," he said.

"Under President Bill Clinton, our strong economy actually helped bring Rolls-Royce jobs to the United States for American workers," Mr. Wade said. "Now, with health care costs rising and no end in sight under George Bush, American automakers say they may have to outsource jobs overseas. That's why John Kerry's health care plan offers relief to American companies and hope for the United Auto Workers who are fighting to put John Kerry and John Edwards in the White House."

I'm simultaneously amazed and appalled at people who can spout this stuff and keep a straight face.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:27 PM

They Would Know

People in Poland are saying that Farenheit 911 is propaganda, worthy of Leni Riefenstahl.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:48 PM

Too Cramped?

As a result of an MRI, Derek Lyons has some thoughts about the near-term future of the space tourism industry.

As big a space nut as I am, I'm not sure that I'll be able to go myself, at least soon, because I have a tendency to claustrophobia also.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:24 AM

Cutting Another Anchor Chain

Apparently the Kerry campaign has finally tossed Joe Wilson overboard. Check out what happens when you go to RestoreHonesty.com.

Down the memory hole.

Somehow, I suspect that, even after getting rid of Berger and Wilson, he's still got a lot of ballast to dump if he wants to win this fall, and he won't be able to do it without alienating the base. And his judgement (or lack thereof) in embracing them in the first place is one of the reasons that I'll have to hold my nose and vote for Bush this fall.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:53 AM

The Death Of Federalism

Via Obernews, an item in Slate on the Republican party's growing abandonment of federalism. For me federalism was always one of the great appeals of the Republican party (along with not hating commerce), so this trend is particularly unfortunate. As the author points out, it's a bit of a stretch to expect elected representatives at the federal level to oppose their own power (though Gingrich and company did at least make a little progress in that direction). Still, it would be nice if there was a viable political party that believed the "small is beautiful" principle applied to government.

Incidentally, if you've got libertarian leanings and you like your politics with a twist of sarcastic humor, swing by Obernews from time to time.

Posted by Andrew Case at 09:07 AM

July 23, 2004
New Bush Scandal

Iowahawk has the scoop:

Daschle also called for immediate Senate hearings into the deepening Timingate affair, chaired by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. The proposal brought a tepid response from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), prompting many to suspect that congressional Republicans were coordinating a 'stonewall' campaign to contain further scandal damage to Bush.
It is unclear how long such stonewalling efforts will succeed, as press interest in the scandal has picked up momentum over the past 48 hours. On Thursday, the CBS Evening News reported over 20 separate allegations of suspicious GOP behavior, while the New York Times is set to release a 20,000 word piece on Sunday detailing recent cases of suspicious GOP timing, with timelines showing a suspicious pattern of suspected charges of suspiciously timed alleged charging.

While space constraints limited coverage of the actual charges, Times editor Bill Keller promised the report will be "Pulitzer bait."

"The article is important because it illustrates how the Republican smear machine uses dubiously timed charges to manipute a gullible press in order to further its political agenda," said Keller. "It also importantly illustrates how the Kerry campaign is reached at 1-866-455-3779, and also gives vivid details how [a] contribution to it will be highly appreciated, and provides readers with insight about how their donation can be charged to Master Card, Visa or American Express."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:28 PM

Good News On The Regulatory Front

Emailer Jon Goff points out an article by Alan Boyle indicating that the logjam over HR 3752 has apparently been broken. It looks like the legislation can be passed this year. At least this will help things move forward on the private front (which I think is more promising anyway) even if the president's new vision doesn't get funded.

It looks like he's not going to make a public fight for it, since he didn't take the opportunity of the Apollo anniversary to say anything about it. But he may still try to twist arms behind the scenes.

[Update at 10:30 AM PDT]

Here's an interesting development. According to space.com, the president is threatening to veto the appropriations bill if it doesn't fund the new vision. Hard to know whether or not this is bluff. It would substantiate the Cowing/Seitzen thesis that the president truly wants this if he actually does veto this bill, because it would be the first bill that he'd have vetoed in his presidency. Of course, the fact that he's never vetoed a bill yet takes away some of the credibility of the threat if he's only bluffing. A president has to choose battlegrounds carefully to maintain clout, because he doesn't want to get into a position from which he has to back down.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:37 AM

Washington Worship

From Lileks today:

Part of Beinart’s frustration was Hewitt’s unwillingness to marvel at the feet of the 9/11 Commission’s report. I understand. There are few words that stir the blood of a Beltway wonk like “the Commission has issued its report.” That means that those in the government must now react, importantly, and those in the media must now react as well – dissect, digest, explain to the benighted groundlings what it means, and issue Important Recommendations by way of reasoned editorials aimed at the corridors of power, but more likely received by a schoolteacher in Iowa who photocopies it off and puts it on the bulletin board in the staff lounge with yellow highlight-lines through the better parts.
The commission has issued its report! Mo better, the commission has issued recommendations! And the Washington press corps open their beaks, spindly necks trembling, waiting for the savory worm to be dropped from the blue-ribbon mother bird.

Unless you’ve spent some time in DC you can’t imagine the tremendous self-importance that possesses the people who feed off the government. They’re like people who live in the same town where NASA has a tracking station, and think that it makes them all astronauts. And so it comes to pass that a perfectly reasonable talk show host wants to talk about an out-of-power guy stuffing annotated memos in his garters, and because he doesn’t want to talk about the two tablets handed down by A COMMISSION, he’s a blind hack.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:17 AM

Some links

SpaceToday reports that a Russian millionaire may be the next ISS tourist. The giggle factor for space tourism continues its death spiral.

Apparently some amateur rocketeer (though there's rumor he was actually a fireworks maker) blew himself up in Denver. Sad for the family, potentially very bad news for amateur rocketry.

The University of Georgia has received a 5 million grant to study electromagnetic accelerators. The piece claims they can be used for launchers, but I'm extremely skeptical. Going hypersonic in the lower atmosphere doesn't seem like a good idea to me. OTOH, for launch from the moon it could be just the ticket, but that's a long time off.

Posted by Andrew Case at 06:11 AM

July 22, 2004
The Latest Lunacy

...from Bruce Gagnon.

I don't have time to critique it properly, but I toss it out as fresh meat to the commenters and the blogosphere.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:22 PM

Beautiful

Cassini has returned a natural-color high-resolution image of Saturn's rings.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:32 PM

A Dose Of Reality

You may or may not be surprised to learn that the Commission doesn't agree with Michael Moore's foolish and libelous characterization of Bush as being "too frightened to do anything without his handlers" after learning of the second aircraft strike. From pp. 38-39:

The President was seated in a classroom when, at 9:05, Andrew Card whispered to him: “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack. ”The President told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis. The press was standing behind the children; he saw their phones and pagers start to ring. The President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening.
The President remained in the classroom for another five to seven minutes, while the children continued reading. He then returned to a holding room shortly before 9:15, where he was briefed by staff and saw television coverage. He next spoke to Vice President Cheney, Dr. Rice, New York Governor George Pataki, and FBI Director Robert Mueller. He decided to make a brief statement from the school before leaving for the airport. The Secret Service told us they were anxious to move the President to a safer location, but did not think it imperative for him to run out the door.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:45 PM

More Trousergate Thoughts

There are reports that, among other things, Berger "inadvertently" requested that the rules be suspended for his visits to the archive and have monitors removed, so he could "inadvertently" have private phone conversations from the room in which the documents were held. I can't imagine this is normal procedure.

But he also reportedly took many unescorted bathroom breaks while going over the documents. Perhaps he has a medical problem that would account for this, but one has to wonder if he also found a way to "inadvertently" dispose of inconvenient documents while not even having to leave the facility.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:12 AM

Trousergate Heating Up

Mickey has a couple questions to which I have answers:

if, as I suspect, Berger took the various drafts home simply because it's a lot easier to pore over them at home rather than at the National Archives, that may be understandable and ultimately excusable. But it would also mean Berger has tied himself up in ...er, veracity problems by saying he only took the documents "inadvertently." ... P.S.: The WSJ ed board has called for the "release [of] all the drafts of the review Mr. Berger took from the room." But wait a minute. The reason it was wrong for Berger to take the "review" documents is that they contained sensitive, classified information. If the drafts can now be actually released publicly without damaging national security, then why was it so terrible for Berger to take them home? The WSJ is making Berger's case for him.

If Berger simply took them home to review them in more comfort, then a) why didn't he simply check them out, as procedure allowed (assuming that he had a secure place to keep them)? Why be so furtive? And b) why did he not return them--why did they "inadvertently" disappear?

Sorry, but I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with an innocent explanation for this, particularly given the nature of the specific documents of interest. It appears very much to me that he was hoping that he could destroy original (and unique, with no copies) documents that may have contained very damaging information, either to him personally, or the administration that he served, or both. That is not to say, of course, that that's the case, but it's certainly how it appears.

Glenn has a lot more on this theme.

And I should add that it would certainly appear that way to the entire media establishment as well, and that this interpretation would be trumpeted from the rooftops, and most of the nation's ink supply devoted to saying it, were the political parties reversed here.

As for resolving the WSJ's call for release of the documents with Berger's behavior, that's quite simple. The Journal is calling for a declassification of the documents (in the absence of knowledge of their contents). Once declassified (perhaps with suitable redactions to protect the most important information), they can be released to the public. Whether this is a good idea or not cannot be known except to those with current access to them, though if it occurs, then we can all judge after the fact.

But they haven't been declassified, and Berger, at least in his current role as private citizen, cannot unilaterally make a decision to do so. They retain their classification level until someone decides to change it. That someone cannot be Sandy Berger, and he has to treat them properly until that situation changes. And unlike the Journal, he knows their contents. And at this point, with regard to the missing ones, he may now be the only person on the planet who does.

Or ever will.

[Update a few minutes later]

Iowahawk has further updates.

New York Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent defended the newspaper's scant coverage of the Berger imbroglio, pointing out that "newsprint doesn't grow on trees."
"If you run the numbers, printing that Berger is a Kerry advisor would have cost the newspaper over $300 in additional ink costs, not to mention the potential strain on delivery trucks," said Okrent. "The Times has a fiduciary duty to its st0ckholders and employees to keep an eye on the bottom line."

Okrent said that 'Berger' may appear in an upcoming Sunday crossword, "if [editor] Will Shortz finds a suitable 6-letter space, and comes up with a really, really hard clue."

[Update at 10:40 AM PDT]

This is pretty funny, too.

While lawmakers on both sides of the aisle celebrated the discovery of Mr. bin Laden in the former White House aide's trousers, this latest episode left Mr. Berger, once again, with much explaining to do.
The former adviser to President Clinton said that his lawyers would not permit him to divulge how, when, or why the world's most wanted man had found safe haven in his pants, but he did tell reporters, "It was an honest mistake."

At the White House, President George W. Bush ordered an immediate and thorough search of Mr. Berger's pants "to see what else might be in there," hinting that the discovery of Saddam Hussein's long-sought weapons of mass destruction might be at hand.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:07 AM

Bad, Bad, Bad idea

There's a bill working its way through congress that will criminalize sale of technology that intentionally induces a person to infringe copyright. That places all recording media under threat. This is one of those bills which is written at the behest of major corporations looking to compete via legislation rather than the marketplace.

Information simply cannot be force fit into the conventional mold of property rights law that originated in the ownership of land. Patents are workable as a means of protecting intellectual property, though they have been abused somewhat recently. Copyrights on the other hand are being abused and manipulated to an unprecedented degree. We recently saw the extension of copyright by an additional 20 years (thanks to some heavy lobbying by Disney, among others), and there's no doubt that when those 20 years are up efforts will be well under way to extend by another 20. The copyright system is broken, and this latest bill will just break it still further. We need to completely rethink the way we handle copyrights from the ground up. I can't claim to know what the answer is, but it's clear what it isn't: banning technologies just because they can infringe copyright. That is an idiotic route that leads to making pen and paper technically illegal.

Posted by Andrew Case at 06:38 AM

July 21, 2004
What's DeLay's Angle?

There's an article in the Houston Chronicle about the cuts to NASA's 2005 budget request. The Majority Leader does seem to be on the warpath about it:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Sugar Land Republican whose district includes NASA's Johnson Space Center, called the cuts "unacceptable," then warned: "It would be very hard to get this bill to the floor if it's unacceptable to me."
DeLay, the second-highest-ranking House Republican, schedules measures for floor consideration and wields considerable power over spending bills.

So, why?

I haven't looked at the cuts in detail, but they seems mainly to affect the president's new vision. One of the biggest cuts is in the Prometheus Program (largely Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter at this point), most of which would go to California (JPL and whatever contractor is selected) and DOE labs for the reactor work. No money for JSC there. The general exploration activities, including CEV, are nominally funded out of Houston, but it's managed at HQ and will go to contractors all over the place. Shuttle is fully funded, as is ISS. This action doesn't seem to be bad for JSC at all, all things considered, from a pork perspective.

So why is DeLay up in arms about it? He is supposedly, after all, one of those Republicans who are supposed to be concerned about federal spending.

Theory 1: He's greedy, and assumes that any budget cuts will affect JSC to some degree, however minor (probably a valid assumption).

Theory 2: He wants to support the president in his budget request, out of loyalty to the White House.

Theory 3: He actually believes in the vision, and wants it to be funded this coming year.

Theory 1 doesn't seem worth holding up an appropriations bill over. I've got to surmise that it's theories 2 and 3 in some proportion. Can it be that the Hammer has become a space nut?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:49 PM

Space Show On Line

The show we broadcast last night, in which we read our ceremony on the air, is now up on the web site. There is also a link to my solo appearance on Sunday night. They'll both be on line for a week or so.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:22 PM

More Deja Vu

Kate O'Beirne agrees with me.

Anyone who doesn't appreciate how the Berger bunch has used the fortuitous timing to their advantage must have slept through the Clinton years. The defense is classic. First, the mean Republicans, then the meaningless personal testimonials--"if you knew Sandy Berger like I know Sandy Berger (or Betty Currie). . .," then the irrelevant--he is an extremely hardworking guy who was only trying to help the Commission (we're working, working, working here at the White House), and finally (the political use of FBI files, the lost billing records) the removal of the classified documents was "inadvertent."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:50 AM

Prescient

Looks like I called this one correctly. Bush continues to say that he'll sign an "assault weapon" ban, while not actually lifting a finger to make it happen. It's a safe straddle.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:45 AM

Ansari X Prize announcement in the offing

Via Space Today, there is a press conference next Tuesday to make some announcements regarding X Prize developments. More than likely this will be Rutan's official announcement. Brian Feeney of the Da Vinci Project will also be there. Let's hope he also announces a prize shot. Nothing like a little competition to rev up the ratings.

Posted by Andrew Case at 10:01 AM

Screw The Future

Jeff Foust rounds up more stories on the House cuts to the NASA budget request. A quote from Congressman Weldon:

This bill takes care of most of our needs at Kennedy Space Center, so I'm hard pressed not to support my chairman when he's taking care of Florida.

Yup.

I've got mine. What did posterity ever do for me?

I also always wonder if they understand the impact of "delaying" a program for a year. A contractor has a team put together, and they can't just put them in cold storage until Congress decides to finally fund the program. They get reassigned to other projects, and it's hard to reassemble them later, resulting in putting together a new team, with associated learning curve. This is one of the reasons that government space programs are so inefficient and costly.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:14 AM

July 20, 2004
More Moore

I know, I know, it shouldn't be necessary, yet in defiance of all that is logical and decent, there are still people who think that Michael Moore's latest crockumentary has non-zero validity or value.

Andrew Bolt, Down Under, disagrees.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:36 PM

Excellent stuff over at RLV News

Over at RLV News Clark Lindsey takes an uncharacteristicaly blunt swing at a particularly stupid article on SpaceDaily. I can't say it any better than Clark, so go on over there and read his take.

There's also a good item on the state of sounding rocket research (dismal). I'm a fan of sounding rockets since they offer a low cost means of doing simple space research. In science it's often the simple experiments that have the most dramatic impact (in part because it's harder to quibble about simple results, but that's another post entirely). Unfortunately simple isn't sexy, and sexy is what NASA is most interested in. Another point about sounding rockets that's not generally well understood is that there's a region of the atmosphere between about 50 km and 100 km which is too high for balloon research but to low for satellite research. There's some important processes that take place in this region, and sounding rockets are really the only way to study them directly.

Posted by Andrew Case at 06:33 PM

On The Air Shortly

We'll be reading the ceremony live, starting in less than an hour, at 7 PM PDT. You can listen here. There will be opportunities to submit questions via email and chat.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:24 PM

Loony And Jerry

Just in case you needed another reason to avoid Ben & Jerry's ice cream, Ben has taken to towing around an effigy of George Bush with flames coming out of his pants.

Well, at least classified documents aren't falling out of them.

You know, Jeff Goldstein has to be having a field day with this whole thing.

[a minute of so later]

Yup. He is.

[Wednesday morning update]

Tim Blair is having fun with this, too.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:40 PM

She Doesn't Like Singing For Muslims

That's what Linda Ronstadt said.

Oh, what's that? She said it about Christians?

My mistake. No wonder the politically correct harpies aren't trumpeting it from the front pages.

You know, it's really sad that so many artists that I enjoy have to indulge themselves in this mindless politics. I used to love her stuff, particularly the torch songs with Nelson Riddle, but she'll never sound the same again.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:20 PM

Cutting The Anchor Chain

Cavuto is reporting that Berger has resigned from the Kerry campaign as an "informal advisor" (I wonder what such a "resignation" means?).

I wonder if it isn't too late, though? It depends on why he purloined those documents. If they were used to generate Kerry speeches and talking points, and Kerry knew about it, this could be his own Watergate.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:12 PM

Bad Precedent

John Gizzi reminds us that the administration supports the Law of the Sea Treaty, which Reagan tried to bury twenty years ago, and even Clinton didn't support.

I wonder if anyone in the administration understands that the principle behind this treaty is the same one behind the 1979 Moon Treaty, which would have effectively outlawed private property in space, and the implications for the new space policy? I, too, like Gizzi and Doug Bandow, would like to know what the rationale is for this policy.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:42 PM

Good Timing

As Duncan Young points out in comments, the House Appropriation Committee has chosen today to announce that it's not funding the new Vision for Space Exploration next year. Casualties: the new exploration architecture studies and CEV, and the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. Zero funding. Meanwhile, the Shuttle program, which is facing overruns on its return to flight activities, gets over four billion dollars, though it's not flying.

Perhaps we'll now see how important the new policy is to the administration.

[Update at 5:45 PM PDT]

Jeff Foust has further thoughts.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:18 PM

A Reminder

I'll be on the radio tonight, discussing the anniversary and the ceremony we came up with to celebrate it.

[Update a little after noon]

I should add that it's another anniversary (several, actually--the Hitler assassination attempt was sixty years ago today, and Vince Foster's body was discovered in Fort Marcy Park eleven years ago, though how it got there still remains unclear). It has been twenty-eight years since the first Viking landed on Mars.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:10 AM

A New Generation

Thirty-five years ago, the first men from planet earth walked on the moon.

I was fourteen years old, watching it on a black and white television (though it would have made no difference if we'd had color--the images were black and white themselves). I saw Neil Armstrong step down from the ladder onto the surface, and heard him say "...one giant leap for mankind."

I wasn't thinking about the future as I watched, but as a naive teenager, I assumed that this was just the first of many such flights, that were the precursors for bases on the moon, and then flights to Mars and other places. I didn't know that Lyndon Johnson had made the decision to end the Apollo program two years earlier.

I grew up with the space program--one of my earliest recollections was sitting in my pajamas in front of the teevee, watching John Glenn become the first American in orbit. I couldn't imagine then that the last manned flight to the moon would occur in less than four years, and that it would be at least four decades, and probably more, after that before humans would return.

But later, as Apollo wound down, and Vice President Spiro Agnew's proposals for continuing manned space exploration were ridiculed, it became clear that we weren't going to see the future in space that I'd been promised by grade-school teachers and science fiction, and my interest waned through high school, to the point that I got perfunctory grades, and made no plans to attend college.

I didn't know that in that same year that the first men trod the lunar regolith, a physics professor at Princeton was doing class projects to determine the feasibility of building huge colonies in space, and moving polluting industries off the planet. And later, thirty years ago this coming September, as I spent my first year after high school working as an auto mechanic, I didn't read the issue of Physics Today in which his first seminal paper on this topic appeared.

But, laid off from the VW dealership in the wake of the 1974 recession, as Michigan unemployment hit levels not seen since the Depression, and disillusioned at the thought of spending the rest of my life unable to ever really get my fingernails clean, I decided to go to community college. I took math and science classes, and a couple years later transferred to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. There I met people who were aware of Professor O'Neill's work, and introduced me to it. My interest in space was rekindled, and it led to the career that's made me the wasted wreck of a man you see today.

Thirty-five years after Neil and Buzz walked on the moon, we have neither the NASA Mars base, or the huge spinning space colonies. But we're finally seeing new progress on a front in between those two visions. Forty years after the end of the X-15 program, we're recapitulating some of the early NASA program privately, and diversely, with the efforts of Burt Rutan and the other X-Prize contestants and suborbital ventures. They won't be diverted down a costly dead-end path of giant throwaway rockets. Instead they'll slowly and methodically evolve capabilities and markets, creating the infrastructure for low-cost access to space. Once we can afford to get, in Heinlein's immortal words, "halfway to anywhere," we'll finally be able to return to the moon, to complete the job begun by those first voyagers, and this time we'll be able to stay.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:39 AM

Thirty-Five Years Ago

Alan Henderson has a photo tribute.

Jim Oberg has some thoughts as well.

I don't agree with his thesis. If we return to the moon, I want to see it done for that other traditional motivator--not fear, but greed. And it's not obvious to me that international cooperation in space has the benefits he thinks it does, but read and judge for yourself.

[Update an hour or so later]

It's still not too late to plan a commemorative dinner tonight.

[Continuing updates]

Alan Boyle has a roundup of links, and commentary. I was sorry not to see him this past weekend at the Return to the Moon Conference.

Mark Whittington has an optimistic view of the future.

Here's space.com's tribute.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:28 AM

July 19, 2004
Trousergate?

You gotta love the comment at this post about this story.

I think it's refreshing that a Clinton Administration official is in trouble for what he put INTO his pants.

[All via Instapundit]

[Update on Tuesday morning]

Reportedly, he also "inadvertently" stuffed documents into his socks.

I'm really having deja vu here--it's bringing back memories of all the Clintonian shenanigans and evidence tampering in the nineties. It's also a stark reminder of how unserious the Clinton administration was about national security. After all, it had a commander in chief who engaged in behavior that would have exposed him to blackmail.

[Update at 10 AM]

Gerard Vanderleun can sympathize with Sandy. Well, sort of.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:00 PM

SubOrbital Scenario Planning

Over at The Space Review Sam Dinkin has a piece on scenario planning for suborbital companies. Some thoughts:

I think the most likely scenario is that the suborbital launch services industry will segment into three divisions. There will be the tourism oriented businesses, the earth observation (or reconaissance) businesses and the science oriented businesses. Obviously anyone with a vehicle can attempt to serve all three, but the requirements are not the same for the different mission profiles. Some of the science can be done on just about any vehicle, namely experiments which merely require a couple of minutes of microgravity. This covers a fair number of little experiments in materials science. Only time will tell if it's enough to sustain a business alone (I suspect not), but it's certainly enough to add a little to the revenue stream of any company willing to go after it. Other scientific missions require launch at specific locations in order to study the environment of near earth space. I suspect there's a market for launches near the poles for plasma experiments, but again, that's probably rather limited.

Earth observation requires a mobile launcher, since mobility greatly expands the number of sites that can be watched. This argues against horizontal takeoff or landing since that imposes limits. For earth observation a vertical takeoff, vertical landing vehicle like TGV's MICHELLE-B or Armadillo's Black Armadillo are most likely to be successful, though a mixed mode vehicle like Pioneer's XP which has both jet and rocket engines can overcome at least some of the limitations on range imposed by the need for a runway.

Tourism imposes few requirements on the vehicle other than safety. Tourists can reasonably be expected to travel to the launch site, and the operator can have a significant fixed infrastructure without impacting the ability to serve the target market (though the infrastructure may be expensive). The real driver for the tourism market has to be safety. Losing a ship taking pictures or running some grad student's PhD thesis experiment is bad, but it's not necessarily a killer for the business. If, on the other hand, you lose a ship with a couple of tourists on board you significantly impact your ability to recruit future customers. This suggests that tourism oriented businesses ought to be as conservative as possible in their vehicle design, and should focus on passenger survivability to the exclusion of nearly all other factors. The lowest risk incremental path forward is probably horizontal takeoff/horisontal landing, keeping operations as airplane like as possible, which is the path taken by XCOR and Scaled. The dangerous part of the flight profile is near the ground. Having a vehicle with the ability to glide (basically prolonging the fall) makes a lot of sense from the standpoint of keeping failure modes as graceful as possible. There's certainly an added appeal to VTVL from the thrillride standpoint, but from the standpoint of the operator of the vehicle keeping the passengers alive under a wider range of failure conditions probably trumps giving them the most exciting experience.

Tourism implies HTHL and earth observation implies VTVL is a little too tidy to capture the messy realities of the way the marketplace is likely to evolve. Nonetheless, the future evolution of the suborbital launch services market is almost certainly going to end up picking a prefered launch/landing mode with specializations depending on the business model of the operating company. In the very long term, when there is a large experience base of operations on VTVL ships, I suspect that the orbital vehicles that evolve from the suborbital vehicles of today will end up being DCX style tailsitters.

Posted by Andrew Case at 04:54 PM

Better Than Expected

Despite (or perhaps because of?) the recent lack of selling it on the part of the president, the public seems to support his new space plan:

More than two-thirds (68%) of the American public say they support a new plan for space exploration that would include a stepping-stone approach to return the space shuttle to flight, complete assembly of the space station, build a replacement for the shuttle, go back to the Moon and then on to Mars and beyond.
With funding for such a program expected not to exceed 1 percent of the federal budget, 42% of adults surveyed say they support the program and 26% strongly support it.

Gallup must have screwed up.

They obviously forgot to ask the question properly: "Many experts estimate that the new Bush space initiative will cost a trillion dollars, most of which will probably go to Halliburton and Enron on a no-bid contract. Do you support it, when there are so many other pressing needs, involving starving children, women and minorities, right here on earth?"

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:41 PM

We Didn't Really Go To The Moon

In honor of tomorrow's anniversary, former (and hopefully, future) space historian Dwayne Day, looking quite jaunty in his newly made Reynolds-Wrap yarmulke, has dredged up the proof, and the truth.

He left out the key elements, though--the Freemasons and Illuminati.

Bare headed, he also has the interesting and relatively unknown story of Jim Webb's phantom rocket.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:28 PM

History

This past Friday, July 16th, was the thirty-fifth anniversary of the launch of the first mission to land men on the moon. Tomorrow, July 20th, will be the thirty-fifth anniversary of that landing. I and Bill Simon, primary authors of the Evoloterra Ceremony, will be on The Space Show tomorrow night at 7 PM Pacific to discuss the anniversary and the ceremony. You can listen live here.

It's not too late to plan to get together with family and friends for dinner, and celebrate our first human visit to another world.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:12 PM

Reflections on Mike Mealling's RTTM summary

Over at RocketForge Mike Mealling has his RTTM trip report up. One line stands out, regarding changing perceptions: "What does work is creating value for a customer from their point of view and then slowly educating them through direct interaction with the product over time. But it requires the customer to have already made a decision to buy."

This is an excellent point. Only after the purchase decision is made (which may be in a metaphorical sense) can you expect the customer to be sufficiently engaged to stick with a line of argument that may fly directly in the face of things they "know" to be true. As always, it's not what people know that's an obstacle to understanding, it's what they know that ain't so. Once you have buy in (either literally or in the sense of getting seriously interested) there is a possibility of getting people to change their view. It's not just physical products that have this dynamic, it's ideas too. In fact, I'd argue that in the case of a physical product it's the idea associated with the product that's important, not the product itself.

Unfortunately people tend to be very committed to their beliefs, usually without regard to how well supported they are. Everyone likes to be told stuff they already believe to be true. It takes active effort and a commitment to truth before comfort to actively seek out opposing ideas and to take them seriously. Unfortunately very few people choose that path.

Applications to RLV development, politics and anything else is left as an exercise for the reader. Bonus points for figuring out how to get the initial buy in to RLV development needed to start the process of changing perceptions. Hint: begins with "Sub," ends with "Orbital" :-)

Posted by Andrew Case at 12:08 PM

First Book Review Of "New Moon Rising"

I've started reading the book, but I had to drive home from Vegas yesterday, whereas Michael Mealling flew, and had time to read the whole thing. He already has a review up. Mine will come later, hopefully this week.

Also, I'll note how much faster things happen today. The book was rushed to print (which, as Michael points out, shows), but it's extremely timely, and only two days after its release, we already have a published review from the buying public (not from someone given a pre-publication copy).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:38 AM

Consensus

If this on-line poll is to be believed, Arnold is right--California legislators really are girlie men. So far, the polling is running a hundred percent in favor of the proposition.

I think that the reaction of the Dems to this is hysterical, in both senses of the word.

[Update at 5:30 PM]

The legislators have gained some support. Now over one percent of the respondents don't think they're girlie men.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:33 AM

July 18, 2004
Back In LA

At least until I can get the house ready to rent and head to Florida.

I didn't get away as soon as I expected to, and hit some of the traffic coming back from Vegas. Perhaps more conference thoughts manana.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:00 PM

Signing Off

Michael Mealing informs me that he's going to shut down the wireless in a few minutes, so I'll log off for now. Perhaps more conference thoughts this evening, when I get back to LA.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:18 PM

George Mueller

"I think we've gone overboard with this notion of safety."

Dr. Mueller (who was head of the Apollo program) received (yet) a(nother) well-deserved award at the banquet last night, to a standing ovation, for his contributions to our nation's lunar efforts.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:37 AM

Theme Of The Conference

Leonard David managed to find time between other deadlines, and carousing with low lifes like me, to file his first report from the conference, even before it's over.

Brief summary: there are many institutional barriers to achieving the president's vision, and the newly emerging private sector will be key. Go read it--it's the first good overview of the conference so far (and probably overall, since it will be over in a couple hours.

[Via Mark Whittington--Leonard neglected to tell me at the bar last night that he'd filed...]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:32 AM

Clueless Critics, Revisited

Jeff Foust points out a comment by Paul Spudis at Friday's RTTM session, to the effect that people who think that the president made his announcement in January for political purposes in an election year are political ignoramuses.

I noted this myself at the time, and even named names of those ignoramuses. (Note that the article at the link says that Dwayne Day was on the Challenger Accident Investigation Board--that was a bit of brain flatulence that I've never been able to get Fox News to fix--it should read "Columbia.")

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:20 AM

RTTM Banquet

Andrew Chaiken, author of "A Man On The Moon," gave a speech at the banquet last night. It was an entertaining talk, but he seems to have a misplaced nostalgia for the era that he chronicled in his excellent book. I wasn't taking precise notes, but he said something to the effect that, when (if?) we go back, this time it will be with 3-D color high-definition television, and that this time the excitement of watching people walk once again on the moon will be sustained.

I think him far too optimistic on this score, and still out of touch with the real problem. Obviously, watching government employees gallivant on another world thrills him, but he's mistaken to project his level of interest onto the general public. He's apparently among the class of people who complain what philistines the public are, and just think that we need to make astronauts' activities more exciting to revive that old Apollo spirit.

"Well, OK, people got tired of Apollo, but that's because we just had those funky black and white images."

"Well, OK, people aren't that excited about watching people floating around in the space station, but if only we send NASA astronauts back to the moon, that will get their juices flowing. That's how we'll sustain the vision (and the funding)."

No.

The American people are not going to support a program that costs billions of dollars per year, for the vicarious "thrill" of watching a few civil servants kicking up dust on the Moon, or Mars. In fact, I won't, and there are few more hard-core space nuts than me. We are a nation of voyeurs, true (at least judging by the financial health of the pr0n industry), but many of us don't want to just watch, and even if that does content us, unless there are going to be lunar orgies, it's hard to imagine it holding our attention for long.

Only a program that promises the potential of an opportunity for them to go will elicit such support. Until the supporters of the new initiative understand this, it will remain doomed to ultimate failure.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:07 AM

Good Money After Bad

Someone mentioned this during the conference yesterday, but now I've found a URL. Costs to return the Shuttle to flight have exploded, now estimated at 1.1 billion dollars.

As someone over at sci.space.policy said, "Surprise, surprise, surprise."

IMO, most of the return to flight activities are a waste of money for bandaids, similar to the foolish "escape pole" that some insisted be added to the Shuttle after the Challenger.

They should either start flying again now, or shut the program down. Wasting all this time and money on an unfixable system that's going to be retired after twenty-five flights is pointless. We still need to revisit the CAIB recommendations in light of the new policy, something that, AFAIK, has not happened since the January 14th announcement.

Fortunately, there's at least one lawmaker with his head screwed on straight (not surprising, since Pete Worden has his ear):

This most recent cost increase isn't going to sit well with some lawmakers, said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Science, Technology and Space Subcommittee.
"We're pouring a lot of money -- $4 billion to $5 billion a year -- into the shuttle whether it flies or not," said Brownback. "There will be some real hard questions such as what are we getting out of putting more money into the shuttle."

Brownback said he would rather retire the shuttle sooner and divert its budget and accelerate NASA's plans to follow through on President Bush's vision to send astronauts back to the moon and eventually to Mars.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:45 AM

July 17, 2004
Frank Sietzen's Talk At RTTM

"If you believe that if we would only give NASA more money, then everything would be fine, you won't like the story I'm going to tell you."

"A NASA administrator [Goldin] who was even more dysfunctional than anyone thought."

"Struggling against the tide of inertia at [HQ]"

"[Bush] knows more about NASA than we ever thought. Gave instructions to O'Keefe, to go over and fix that mess up (but used a different word than mess, not fit for a family blog)."

"President was very involved, even in the details. Was never interested in a specific destination, but thought that exploring the universe was important. NASA was, to him, an embarrasment, and he didn't like to be embarrassed."

"Columbia showed that NASA was even more dysfunctional than the president had thought."

"A group of low-level staff in the White House asked if they could get together to come up with a paragraph for the president to say at the centennial of flight in December 2003. They met, unaware that there were higher-level meetings going on on space policy."

"Policy advisor from Reagan administration, met with president. 'NASA is screwed up!' President: 'I know that.' Advisor: 'Not only is NASA screwed up, but we ought to go back to the moon, and I have a white paper.'"

"President comes back from Columbia memorial, and wants to develop a vision."

"Young staffers are coming up with ideas independently."

"They develop a realization that Shuttle is a roadblock to human spaceflight. The age of the Shuttle had ended on February 1, 2003. A hinge of history had opened. The age of reusability was over [Simberg note: this is the single biggest flaw in the administration (and Aldridge Commission) thinking]."

"NASA is unaware of all this, and they want a new mission, they want an Orbital Space Plane, they want everything."

"Reconstitute the low-level staff work and come up with a vision, with a strawman policy structure and a calendar. Committee eliminates options until they get down to two or three. O'Keefe continues to ask for budget increases, claiming that they could accomplish all kinds of things with budget increases. Problem was that NASA couldn't get new money in current environment."

"Looked at two options--five percent decrease, and five percent increase. Former is "going-out-of-business" budget, and latter isn't enough for the Moon."

"Independently, five Senators met Cheney, 'NASA didn't have enough money, NASA had no vision.' (Hollings, Brownback, McCain, Breaux, and Nelson--three of them Dems)"

"OMB came up with five percent for NASA. O'Keefe met with his advisors, and asked them if they'd be willing to give up something for a new vision, and got a consensus. They gave up the Shuttle, and the space station."

"Loss of SLI means that the government won't be helping develop any new technology for the next few years."

"O'Keefe would have given up anything, to save his agency. Why? Because he caught the bug from the president of the United States."

"Marburger: 'Mr. President, I think that the objective should be a return to the Moon.' President: 'This is about exploring, not destinations.' So they went back and laid out the Moon as a test bed for exploration. Bush: 'This is about going to other destinations than the moon, right?'"

"Bush decided that he wanted to address the nation about space. Bush to speechwriter: 'Get to work on a space speech.' Speechwriter (who had never heard of any of this): 'What!?' President: 'You heard me.'"

Now describing how they got their story out before the speech, and almost got scooped because no one would believe them.

[shot at Leonard David]: "The UPI editor wouldn't run the story without being able to verify this." [To Leonard] "You don't have a problem like that at Space.com."

"President to O'Keefe: If you get this mission, you can't go about it in the way that NASA does today. You have to get things operating more like FFRDCs, you have to involve entrepreneurs and private enterprise, and you have to get out of the launch business."

"Stovepiping ends on August 1st. People at centers start to report direct to HQ instead of to the center directors. Some of rank and file are fighting this tooth and nail. Can you imagine an agency that was given the greatest vision in space in the history of the space program, fighting it? There are people who are against this, because they are afraid."

"Sean O'Keefe has a trick for people who complain that he can't do something. He reaches into a desk drawer, and pulls out an application for the Post Office. 'You apparently don't want to work for NASA...'"

"Things don't look good for the initiative if Kerry is elected, and even if President is reelected, it's not clear whether Congress will fund it. To initiate reforms requires more than one group of reformers. If there is a fight over civil space, he [the president[ has to win."

"This is not the vice president's story--he only appears in the book three times. This is the president's program."

Taking questions now. Jeff Krukin: "Is there any sense that all of this could be made irrelevant by things happening in the private sector"?

Answer: "Yes, O'Keefe has met with Musk, and O'Keefe is very skeptical about the ability of the conventional space industry to do things affordably. Was particularly disturbed by cost estimates for OSP. Has been reaching out to the smaller players."

"Estimate cost of getting to the Moon by 2020 is 64 billion dollars. They found nine billion for a down payment by 2009, but they won't be able to afford it all without much lower costs from the private sector (and that doesn't mean traditional contractors)."

Andrew Chaiken: "Trying to reconcile the stories of the Texas governor who never visited JSC with this new space visionary president."

Answer: "Read Paul O'Neill's book. Describes a completely different president than the one O'Keefe described. Was confronted with embarrassment of dysfunctional space program. If it would have been Paul O'Neill as head of NASA, it would have been like talking to a wall--O'Keefe's personal relationship with Bush was key to making this happen (is personal social friend with the family). Complaint about lack of vision and money from Congress was essential, and if Columbia hadn't happened, we would not have gotten the new policies. Kids working in White House were necessary as well--everything came together."

"Different than his father's space policy, because it recognizes budget realities."

Now drawing the inevitable comparison with Jim Webb, the administrator during Apollo.

Asked about announcement today that NASA thinks that budget estimate for Return to Flight has more than doubled. Thinks will either shove schedule out, or ratchet up pressure on the Hill to get a budget passed.

"Rollout of the plan was botched, because they didn't involve Congress, which is under pressure for war and deficits. Senator Brownback is the key."

Dennis Wingo: "Is there a plan to keep centers like JSC and Goddard from sucking as many funds as possible"?

Answer: "Yes, aware of the problem, working on a strategy."

End of speech.

I'll have thoughts later.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:42 PM

Taking A Break

For hallway discussions. I'll be posting about Frank Sietzen's talk in forty-five minutes. He'll be talking about his and Keith Cowing's new book about the formation of the new space policy.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:44 PM

Homeland Security Stupity

Now for a brief break from conference blogging--just how idiotic is this?

Beards are out. So are jeans and athletic shoes. Suit coats are in, even on the steamiest summer days.
That dress code, imposed by the Department of Homeland Security, makes federal air marshals uneasy — and not just because casual clothes are more comfortable in cramped airline seats. The marshals fear that their appearance makes it easier for terrorists to identify them, according to a professional group representing more than 1,300 air marshals.

"If a 12-year-old can pick them out, a trained terrorist has no problem picking them out," said John D. Amat, a spokesman for the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.

Documents and memos issued by the Department of Homeland Security and field offices of the Federal Air Marshal Service say marshals must "present a professional image" and "blend unnoticed into their environment." Some air marshals have argued that the two requirements are contradictory.

No kidding.

Why don't they make them wear an Air Marshal Dillon Badge, too?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:38 PM

John Young's Speech At RTTM

"That Saturn shakes purty bad, but not near as bad as it did in the movie..." in reference to Apollo XIII.

He's describing his flight to the moon.

The Principal Investigator for the seismometer told him, "If you don't put my experiment out right, don't come back."

He's describing a spinout in a lunar rover. "Do you know what saved us? ...There was nobody coming the other way. I'm sure that when we get two rovers up there we'll have the first lunar auto accident."

He describes dust as one of the key challenges to lunar operations (a point made by a speaker yesterday, who was a designer of the rover).

He illustrates the fractal nature of the lunar surface by pointing out an object that looks like it's a few feet away from him, which is actually the distance of two football fields.

He's showing a picture of the far side, which is very heavily cratered, particularly in the highlands. He's clearly very concerned about the threat of extraterrestrial object impacts. He points out King Crater, which is 77 km in diameter (he claims that the object that created it could have wiped out Nevada and much of California.

Now he's talking about supervolcanoes, three of which are in the US (including Yellowstone and the Long Valley Caldera by Mammoth Lakes in California--I didn't catch the third one). Yellowstone is overdue to blow, and no one knows when the next one will happen. When it does, it will likely wipe out civilization.

"You're ten times more likely to die in a civilization-ending event than in a commercial airline crash. NASA is working to make airline flights ten times as safe, so you'll then be a hundred times more likely..."

He's praising Bob Bigelow for his work on inflatable structures.

"You'll know we're serious about going back to the moon when you see people heading back there with shovels."

In a question on the state of the art in new suits, talking about the need for a good glove: "The human hand is a heck of a piece of machinery, and sometimes gets into trouble going places that it doesn't belong."

Ends by showing a picture of his grandchildren: overall theme of his talk is protecting the planet. He thinks we're in a space race, but not with another country, but rather against nature.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:00 PM

Yet More RTTM Blogging

Jeff Krukin points out another shortcoming of the Aldridge Commission report. It doesn't contain the word "settlement," settling (as it were) instead for the more neutral (and neutered) phrase, "extended presence." It remains focused on exploration, and not the broader vision.

He is announcing the formation of a new Space Frontier Foundation project to rectify the public perception of space as exploration, rather than the broader view, called the "Space Settlement Project."

Sounds like a worthwhile activity.

John Young is going to speak after lunch.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:40 PM

Mr. Nuance

A quick break from conference blogging to point out yet another reason, via Mark Steyn, in the wake of the exposed lies of Joe Wilson, why I can't even consider voting for Kerry:

Some of us are on record as dismissing Wilson in the first bloom of his unmerited celebrity. But John Kerry was taken in -- to the point where he signed him up as an adviser and underwrote his Web site. What does that reveal about Mister Nuance and his superb judgment? He claims to be able to rebuild America's relationships with France, and to have excellent buddy-to-buddy relations with French political leaders. Yet anyone who's spent 10 minutes in Europe this last year knows that virtually every government there believes Iraq was trying to get uranium from Africa. Is Kerry so uncurious about America's national security he can't pick up the phone to his Paris pals and get the scoop firsthand? For all his claims to be Monsieur Sophisticate, there's something hicky and parochial in his embrace of an obvious nutcake for passing partisan advantage.

A comment from someone at Roger Simon's site, with which I have some sympathy (though I came to that realization during the 1990s, not as a result of the latest lying and viciousness in the war):

I ask myself why I feel such animosity towards the Democratic party, a party that I belonged to for so many years. Betrayal is the word I come up with, I feel betrayed by the triviality, immaturity, and sheer lunacy of the party. It's not like some other party, say the Republicans, whose oddities I can tolerate as the eccentricity of the neighbors, no, it's like finding that my wife has run off with a derelict with whom she had a long standing secret affair. Not only do I feel betrayed, but I wonder how I could have been such an idiot, overlooking all the signs and clues.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:37 AM

Live RTTM Blogging--David Gump

David Gump of Lunacorp started off his talk with a twenty-year old poster about business opportunities in space, displaying the Shuttle and the then newly announced space station program. It was a cautionary note, reminding us of all the things that can go wrong, and how the more things change...

[Update]

Central lesson learned:

Government-owned infrastruxture (with federal employees as the space workforce) is poison to commercial ventures (cannot be overcome by good intentions--institutional barriers are too deep).

Privately owned facilities (vehicles, platforms, bases) are essential to success.

He hates the phrase "space advertising." Emphasis needs to be customer rewards.

Prizes are good, but cannot be the only way for NASA to involve the private sector (same point that Jim Benson of SpaceDev made yesterday). Prizes are good for amateurs and angels, but businesses won't accept the risk of being beaten to the deadline.

Lunacorp's submittal for the NASA exploration initiative was to rely on the invisible hand, by nurturing private enterprise, and not to attempt another "Stalinist plan."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:07 AM

Live Blogging--Wendell Mendell

Thanks to Michael Mealing (see comment here), I'm back on the air, and waiting for the first talk (Wendell Mendell, lunar guru from Johnson Space Center).

[Update about 9 AM]

Dr. Mendell is relating a history of how his thoughts have evolved on getting back to the moon. Brief summary: he started out naive in the early eighties, and but eventually came to realize that NASA was incapable of carrying out the vision, and that private activities will be the key. He made a variation of a theme that I've commented on in the past (when I called space, including currently low earth orbit, a wilderness). He described it as an undeveloped country with vast resources, but no infrastructure.

[A few minutes later]

He's hammering on a theme now that Paul Spudis reinforced yesterday in the keynote address: that various players are working hard to subvert the president's initiative to support their own agendas. Moreover, the continued focus on Mars indicates that people were not listening to what the president said (he mentioned it only once, as part of the phrase "Mars and beyond").

He's knocking down the misconceptions that the only purpose of going to the Moon is to learn how to go to Mars, or to test equipment that will be used on Mars.

More thoughts on this later (and probably a column or two) after I collect my thought, and am not distracted actually listening.

[Another update]

This was mentioned briefly yesterday, but Dr. Mendell says that there is serious talk among some at NASA of doing a "touch and go" on the Moon. In other words, immediately after a lunar landing, we'll then go on to Mars, thus somehow (in their demented view) having satisfied the letter (if not the spirit) of the president's vision.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:43 AM

July 16, 2004
Sparse Posting

I'm off to the conference. I may post from there, but if not, I'll be back Sunday evening.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:35 AM

July 15, 2004
I'm A "Little Red"

According to this test.

It was more than a little irritating, though, because all (not just a few) of the questions should have had a "No Clue" option.

I generally do well on multiple-guess tests, but I don't think they're a useful gauge of knowledge, and I particularly dislike those that don't have an "I dunno" option.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:13 PM

Centennial Challenge Report

NASA has published a report (PDF) on last month's Centennial Challenges Workshop (thanks to Neil Halelamien over at sci.space.policy for the pointer).

I haven't read the whole thing, but I did go look to see what they did with my glove idea.

I regret that I wasn't there--they made some decisions that I would have argued about. I think that the glove should be 8 psi, not 4.3--a large part of the idea was to eliminate the need for prebreathing and avoid risk of the bends. I like the idea of providing plans for gloveboxes to the contestants, and think that worrying about someone injuring themselves is silly, not because it's not a danger, but because it's a danger we have to accept if we want to progress. I still like my task idea of tearing down and rebuilding an auto, or motorcycle engine. I proposed a million, and they came up with a quarter million (though they recognize that the amount may be too low--it's driven by legal constraints which will hopefully be removed in the future).

Anyway, it looks like a promising start, and Brant Sponberg should be congratulated. Let's hope he can keep the ball rolling.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:27 PM

Space Prize Hearings

SpaceRef has a summary of the hearing on prizes for space achievements, held on the Hill this morning.

Molly Macauley made an excellent point:

"Even if an offered prize is never awarded because competitors fail all attempts to win, the outcome can shed light on the state of the technology maturation. In particular, an unawarded prize can signal that even the best technological efforts aren't quite ripe at the proffered level of monetary reward. Such a result is important information for government when pursuing new technology subject to a limited budget," she said.

The DARPA Challenge is a good example of that, in my opinion.

Of course, we have the usual caviling:

"While establishment of a NASA prize program is certainly worth considering, we should not be lulled into thinking that it is any substitute for providing adequate funding for NASA's R&D programs," cautioned Subcommittee Ranking Minority Member Nick Lampson (D-TX).

Rep. Lampson is one of the representatives from JSC.

Overall, while there were some appropriate cautionary notes, there seemed to be a consensus that this was a good idea. Let's hope that they can get the funding now.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:14 PM

Torture and the ticking bomb

Brad DeLong makes an excellent point about the torture memo:

It seems to me that Yoo misses a great many points. The hypothetical he describes--Osama bin Laden himself, a ticking nuclear bomb, a city that cannot be evacuated, et cetera--is not a situation in which torture should be legal. It is, however, a situation in which torture is pardonable. If you find yourself interrogating Osama bin Laden in such a situation, you do what you must do--and then you ask the president for a pardon. And the president has the power to give you one.

That's what the procedure is with respect to torture. And I think that's what the procedure should be.

As a nation we have no compunction about asking our defenders to risk death in order to protect us. Why are we so lilly-livered about asking them to risk legal hassles? Is it really worth sacrificing the legal protections that previous generations fought (and yes, died) for in order to spare someone in a highly unlikely scenario from having to ask for a pardon? I don't think so. Not only is the indictment vanishingly unlikely to ever be brought in the first place (since it would destroy the career of the attorney general who brought it), but even if a jury could be found that was willing to strictly construe the applicable law, there is still the presidential pardon available as a final stopgap.

The reason the administration wants to have the rubber hose option legally available has nothing to do with the ticking bomb scenario. The ticking bomb is such an unambiguous case that even a blatant violation of the law is not going to be punished. The scenarios in which the legal loopholes are needed are the ambiguous ones, the ones where finding an AG willing to indict, a jury willing to convict, and a president unwilling to pardon are a real possibility. It is precisely those scenarios where torture should not be used.

The alternative is a legal regime in which torture can slip through the cracks, growing in application to more and more crimes and suspected crimes. Once our expectations are renormalized to allow torture on people suspected of terrorism, it's only a matter of time before major drug crimes are included under the theory that drug money funds terrorism. From there we slouch on to lesser drug crimes, cybercrime, and so on. Perhaps you trust the current administration not to slip down this slope. But do you trust all possible future administrations?

What we give up by not legalizing torture is a small measure of safety. What we lose by legalizing it is not just the moral high ground, but also our own future safety from abuses by our own government.

The instinct to legalize torture comes from the same misguided mode of thinking that wastes time and effort figuring out all possible scenarios in which it's legitimate to violate traffic laws. Nobody is under the impression that it's wrong to blow a stop sign if you've got a guy in the back seat with arterial bleeding and you're headed for the hospital. There is no need for a legal exception, and if a cop stops you he'll more than likely give you an escort. Ditto the ticking bomb - if Alan Dershowitz is around, he'll help you clip the electrodes to the guy's nuts.

Posted by Andrew Case at 10:29 AM

More Post-Intelligencer Thoughts

Andrew, that piece really is worse than you say.

The trouble is that the space program's purposes are inseparable from its Cold War-era context.

No, the trouble is not that they are inseparable--it's that we've never made a serious policy attempt to achieve such a separation.

He gets the NASA budget wrong (it's closer to twenty billion than fifteen). That doesn't change his point (in fact it strengthens it, to the degree that it's valid), but it's sloppy. It's also not clear that the plan will require a significant increase. That was one of the selling points of it--that by putting down the Shuttle program, we can shift funds to the new activities.

Along the way, the space commission he appointed has offered up a smorgasbord of absurd side benefits, such as possible improvements in our (so far non-existent) ability to deflect threatening incoming asteroids, of the sort that may have severely disrupted life on Earth as recently as 35 million years ago.

I guess his point is that it doesn't happen very often, so it's not a benefit. He's probably unaware that if the Tonguska event had occurred on the eastern seaboard of the US, instead of in Siberia, we could have lost millions of lives only a century ago.

It really is a typical "why pour all that money into space when we have so many problems on earth?" rant. Nothing new here.

[Update in the afternoon]

Jeez, I'm almost starting to feel sorry for the schmuck. Dwayne Day really goes after a gnat with a howitzer in the comments section.

I'd say that he's been pretty thoroughly discredited. Unfortunately, most of the PI's readers probably don't read this blog.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:12 AM

The latest Crypto-Gram

Crypto-Gram is a monthly newsletter on security issues put out by Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Internet Security. I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating. the link above is to the latest issue, which includes a well argued piece on handling terrorist suspects without skirting the Constitution. Schneier argues that it's not necessary to work around established due process rules in order to deal effectively with terrorism. There are a couple of other really good items in this issue, notably the item on economic motivations for security theater (insurance companies will give you breaks on premiums if you install X-ray machines, even if you don't use them effectively), and the item on ICS, a company selling an encryption scheme which they claim - get this - uses no math. Brilliant.

Anyway, if you're at all interested in security issues and the tradeoffs between security and liberty, go on over and take a look.

Posted by Andrew Case at 09:10 AM

Why Not NOAA?

Can someone explain to me why Aura is a NASA mission, and not a NOAA mission? It seems to me that if one wants to focus NASA better, this is the kind of thing that would be better done by a different agency.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:05 AM

Space Op-Ed at the Seattle PI

Over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Alex Roth has an op-ed piece that is simulteneously insightful and inane. It's no mean trick to pull that off, but he manages to do so. He correctly identifies some of the problems with NASA:
The trouble is that the space program's purposes are inseparable from its Cold War-era context.
...but immediately follows with this pointless slur:
The very concept of a "space station," for example, is a 1952 brainchild of Nazi rocket scientist-turned-American-Cold Warrior Wernher von Braun, who was later caricatured as "Dr. Strangelove" in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Cold War satire film.

I enjoy a good rant as much as anyone (OK, probably more than most), and Roth has certainly written a stem-winder. Unfortunately getting a few small points right is not enough. The editorial is well written from a polemical standpoint, but it utterly destroys a strawman that nobody in either the alt.space or NASA communities believes.

It's worth a few minutes just to familiarize yourself with his arguments, since they will be coming up again, and it's good to know what the other side is saying.

Posted by Andrew Case at 07:29 AM

July 14, 2004
Wild Weather

Laughing Wolf was live blogging incipient tornadoes in northern Alabama.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:55 PM

Return Of The Mainframe?

A new offering by Hewlett Packard--a PC that can be shared by four users--makes me wonder if we've finally come full circle.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:54 PM

Are They Watching Me?

I was reading this interesting article about the latest security techniques against worms, when my laptop froze up.

I've rebooted now. Just coincidence, I'm sure...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:52 PM

The Ultimate Party Balloon

Leonard David has a report from Las Vegas on what Bob Bigelow is up to with inflatable space structures. I probably haven't emphasized this activity enough. If SpaceX is successful, we will soon have a private space habitat testbed launched on a private launch vehicle.

So what’s wrong with this scenario: Private space modules, launched on private rockets, and visited by privately-built space ships?

That may not be too far-fetched. Along with Bigelow, there is a growing guild of millionaires and billionaires now tossing in their own bucks to back an array of space ventures.

“We’re all aware that we’re somewhat co-dependent on each other,” Bigelow made clear. “We kind of know each other. We kind of keep track of who is doing what,” he said.

Ideally, Bigelow stated, is having a federal entity, like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) say: “Welcome home boys. We can make fast decisions. We have some discretionary money for space activities. We have some ideas and maybe you guys can save us money.”

DARPA would save money, as well as time, counting on a confab of private space entrepreneurs, Bigelow said. “I think their patriotism would surface. They would have a potential customer that has money that we can count on. And that’s going to be a customer that we can serve.”

I should note also that, since Leonard seems to be in Vegas, I expect I'll see him this weekend at the Return to the Moon conference. If all y'all go, you may as well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:04 AM

Myopic

John Derbyshire has been asking questions about why frozen sperm survives freezing, and gets a knowledgable email on the subject. The emailer does understand the issues, except for this:

A good post-thaw viability (survival of cells) is around 60% of the total of cells-- some people advertise >80% or 90-%, but that is a bit of a 'lie via statistics' game-- they don't count all the dead population in computing the percentage. We are working here with different, more efficacious, and non-toxic CPAs, of which the most promising appears to be arabinogalactin extracted from larch trees.
As you can see, this is the reason that we will never get Ted Williams back among the living. His frozen body consisting of billions of cells simply would not work with only ~60% of the cells surviving the thaw process. As one can say, God instills the soul when He wishes, and outsmarts us all.

This, of course, presumes that the only method we will have, now and forever, is crude thawing. It ignores the future possibility of different techniques for restoring the tissue to room temperature and viability (e.g., nanomachinery that repairs as it warms). It's fair to have an opinion that we may never have such capability, but it's quite foolish, I think, to believe categorically that this is so.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:53 AM

New Thinking?

I noted a while ago that Kerry's space policy sounded as though he wanted to return to the nineties. That may still be the case, but Jeff Foust says that there may be some new blood coming into his kitchen cabinet for space:

...one wonders if the briefing on SpaceShipOne may have influenced some of the language in the Kerry campaign's technology policy released last month that advocates increased use of prizes by government agencies, mentioning the X Prize by name.

If so, a Kerry presidency might not be as disastrous for space policy as I previously feared. Which is not to say, of course, that I'll vote for him.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:24 AM

July 13, 2004
More Supersonics

Kevin Murphy has some thoughts about supersonics, based on my previous post. He's skeptical.

Given that he's not stooped to calling me a scientific lightweight, and incapable of understanding mathematics, that's fine, but he doesn't really understand the whole picture, which is understandable since I haven't really presented it. This is a matter of some frustration to me, but one that I can do little about until I can persuade the company involved to put up information on the web, so that it can be critiqued and reviewed.

Regardless, I'll try to respond to his comments as best I can under the circumstances (which include limited time on my part).

...even if you have the same drag coefficient at supersonic as you do at subsonic -- your drag, and thus fuel consumption, will increase substantially.

The key clause here is "if you have the same drag coefficient at supersonic." At least for the wing, it's actually possible to do better, at least in terms of induced drag (an effect of the end of the wing, which makes it greater than two-dimensional) which is actually improved at higher speeds. The notion, right or wrong, postulates that supersonic L/D for aircraft designed under this theory will be similar to that of subsonic aircraft, so it offers the potential (if not promise) of airfares comparable to subsonic fares for the same routes.

With regard to his comments on angle of attack, they're not relevant, because any angle of attack that is non-zero will dramatically increase wave drag and induce shock waves. The aircraft's nominal design condition is zero AOA. Takeoff and time to cruise aren't an issue, either (as isn't the engine) because we can get rid of the extreme sweep that has always been associated with supersonic aircraft (a design strategem that was always a kludge to come up with a way of minimizing wave drag without solving the fundamental problem).

Something like the SR-71 engines are a likely solution, in terms of the inlet, but that's not a problem because they'll be optimized for fuel economy at cruise speed (which will constitute most of their operating time), not takeoff/landing. Also, we're not proposing anything as fast as the Blackbird--Mach 2.4 will probably be adequate.

But here is really the crux of the issue.

The claim is that with enough leading edge sharpness and the proper contouring behind, you can fly supersonically without shockwaves, except circulation (flow around the airfoil) which produces lift elimates the shockless effect. Why would this be? Well, without lift on a sharp symmetric airfoil the stagnation point would the the leading edge. If you add circulation, perhaps you move the stagnation point so that it is no longer on the leading edge. Could this be the problem? The flow splits at the stagnation point (that's where it stops), and if it isn't sharp where it splits, you get a shockwave? If that is the case, well, we're screwed. No amount of adding in balancing circulation downstream will matter, and adding it to the flow over the wing to cancel it out will mean an end to the lift from the wing. Now you could make an unsymmetrical airfoil such that at the cruise condition the stagnation point is on the sharp point of the airfoil, but you'd have shockwave drag getting to that point (or if you had to fly off design point.)

The proposal is not to build a symmetric airfoil. Stagnation points really aren't relevant.

Imagine a Busemann biplane, which is really a DeLaval nozzle inside two wings. The top of the upper wing is flat, as is the bottom of the lower wing. That allows the airflow to move past without shock. The ramping occurs within the two wings. Now, Busemann showed that this will have a shock-free flow, but because of the symmetry, it has no lift. Now imagine that the lower wing is dynamic--it's actually a supersonic airflow coming from a non-shocking duct, with a flat lower surface. The lower surface of the "biplane" (after a short ramp) is a stream of higher-energy air (to satisfy Crocco), that mixes the total flow to provide the anti-circulation to balance the wing circulation.

The idea is to provide that balance to eliminate the need for the highly entropic downstream vortices, that require far more energy than that required to simply provide that balance. It spreads the residual shocks over a much larger footprint, reducing almost to insignificance the PSF on the ground, and essentially eliminates the wave drag.

Bottom line: if this works (and I don't claim that it will--only that it's not obvious to me that it won't), this means wide-body supersonic aircraft, at non-ozone-eating altitudes, at ticket prices comparable to subsonic ones. It means obsolescing the current subsonic fleet in the same way that prop-driven airplanes were put out of business by jets, other than niches.

I think that it's worth spending a tiny fraction (how about a percent of one year's budget?) of the billion-plus dollars that NASA wasted on the High-Speed Research program, but NASA didn't agree in the late nineties, even when Congress specifically appropriated it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:46 PM

Summer Fun

I was listening to Fox just now, and they ran a report on summer camp for Palestinian children, at which instead of making lanyards and leather products, learning to swim or sail, and engaging in various sports, they are learning to sneak past Israeli checkpoints, and the virtues of dying for the Palestinian cause. You know, the kind of child abuse that Charles Johnson documents on a regular basis.

And then I recalled that people like Human Rights Watch have actually expressed concern about the use of children as soldiers. Surely, thought I, they will have had something to say about this?

I wandered over to see, and sure enough, it's a major area of concern. So I clicked on the link on the right of the page, for specific area reports, confident that I'd find the abuse described above reported in detail, with appropriate opprobrium.

But (and I know you'll be amazed to hear this), there was no obvious mention of it among the reports as listed. Oh, wait, down toward the bottom, there's a discussion of Lebanon, which at least is in the neighborhood. We discover there that some civilians have been expelled from Lebanon for refusing to join a militia.

Well, that sounds promising. Of course, am I cynical to suspect that the only reason this gets a mention is because, according to the little blurb, it is "an Israeli auxiliary militia"?

But of course.

But I wanted to be fair, so I decided to dig down another level, to the latest (2003) overall HRW report on the subject.

This showed a little more promise--it has a section called "ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES."

Surely, I thought, now we'll find out about all of this turning young Arab children into Jew-hating killbots.

Imagine my surprise again, to learn that they discuss:

Israel holding teenagers in the same prisons with adult men.
Israel using youth as informers against Hamas and Islamic Jihad
Israel allowing seventeen-year-olds to volunteer for the IDF
Arrest and interrogation of children suspected of throwing rocks, by (you guessed it) Israel

Now, arguably some of these, if true, can certainly be said to be human rights violations, but I'm straining my brain to determine how they constitute forcing children to be soldiers, which I thought was the point of this particular report. And as to the Palestinian summer camps that Charles and others point out?

There was no evidence that the Palestinian Authority (PA) recruited or used child soldiers. In May 2002, the PA addressed the United Nations Special Session on Children and advocated the application of the CRC-OP-CAC, which prohibits the use in hostilities of those under the age of eighteen.129 In 2002, the PA also reaffirmed its commitment to the Coalition not to use children in hostilities in a private communication...
...During 2002, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad disavowed the use of children after under-18s were involved in suicide bombings and armed attacks on Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. A Hamas statement in April 2002 called on mosque imams “to give this issue some mention in their sermons” and on educators “to dedicate time to address this issue without sacrificing the enthusiasm or spirit of martyrdom of our youth [ashbaluna].”134 An Islamic Jihad communiqué of April 26, citing Islamic strictures against the participation of children in war, declared: “We refuse any encouragement given to young people that might drive them to act alone or be pushed by others into action. They are not ready and not able to do so.

Well, I guess that settles it. I mean, if you can't take the word of models of probity and honesty like Yasser Arafat, and the leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, well, what's the world coming to?

Well, actually, it turns out that their motto is, like that of Ronald Reagan, "trust but verify." They recommend that "The UN should monitor Qassam Brigades, (Hamas), Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (Fatah) and Islamic Jihad to determine whether recruitment and use of children is taking place."

Maybe they might want to check in on Little Green Footballs once in a while.

[Further thoughts an hour or so later]

Maybe they're just lawyering here. Apparently it's OK to train children to be soldiers (including unculcating them with hatred for the enemy--Israeli civilians), as long as they're not actually "used." But isn't sending them through training camps a form of "recruitment"?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:32 PM

A Fowl Fate

I couldn't quite figure out how to categorize this one. There are stories of children being raised by wolves, but here's the first case, at least of which I'm aware, of a man being raised by chickens.

It will be certain to be the butt of jokes, but of course it's a tragic situation. I really mean it--once you get past the absurdity of it, it really was catastrophic for the poor guy.

But it could have been worse--he was fortunate that it happened after he had at least developed the ability to speak. Children raised without human contact from birth never develop the ability to do so--there's a certain critical point in development and the wiring of the brain during which speech is acquired, and if you miss it, you've apparently missed it forever. The story claims that he is learning (or relearning) how to speak, and presumably to eat with utensils instead of pecking.

Of course, as the old joke in the Woody Allen movie (Annie Hall?) went, they may not want to go too far in rehabilitating him. They won't get any more eggs. Besides, he may have a thrilling career ahead of him as a sports team mascot.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:35 PM

Still Time To Sign Up

Michael Mealing reminds us about this weekend's Return to the Moon conference, in Vegas. So I do too...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:29 AM

Will Bush Say Anything About Space?

On next week's thirty-fifth anniversary of the first manned lunar landing?

[Via Rob Wilson]

[Update a few minutes later]

Boeing has established an anniversary web site.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:21 AM

COMSTAC presentations are available

Via RLV News, the presentations from the most recent COMSTAC meeting are available. I haven't read any of them yet, but I figured I'd post a pointer. I'm a little snowed under trying to make sure I've read everything I ought to read in order to do a decent job for the SOI, but I think the paper by Terry Hardy on Ec[*] calculations is a good place to start. I'm beginning to think that the single best paradigm change for moving towards a sustainable and vigorous spaceflight industry is a public safety regime that doesn't use Ec as a figure of merit. Ec is a little bit like man rating in that it implicitly assumes that the norm for space vehicles is that they blow up with some regularity.

[*] for those not already familiar with it, Ec is the expected number of casualties from operations of a given launch vehicle. You need less than 30 casualties per million flights in order to get a launch license.

Posted by Andrew Case at 10:18 AM

July 12, 2004
The Meme Spreads

Reader John Breen points out this "Foxtrot" comic strip, about a little kid making an X-Prize attempt.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:32 AM

Interim Washington Director, SOI

As Rand has already blogged, I'm the new interim Washington Director of the SubOrbital Institute, since Pat Bahn is too busy actually running a company to take care of the nitty-gritty of running the Institute. This goes for many of the other Institute members, which is very good news. Unfortunately I'm paid exactly the same as I am for blogging here, but that's not zero except in dollars. Let me clarify that statement a little: I realized a few years ago that I was thinking about the problem of space access all wrong. The problem is complex and has many conceivable solutions, but only a small set of practically implementable solutions. Which solutions are practical is not obvious except in retrospect, and since we don't already have low cost space access, retrospection is not an option.

Given that the shape of the technological and economic landscape ahead of us is not well understood, it's impossible to plan in detail for the long term. That means plans have to be made in the short term, with the only long term considerations being to maximize the number of available options when the short term plan succeeds. Once you realize this, it changes everything. Thinking in the fuzzy long term about space elevators or scramjets becomes untenable, and you're forced to break everything down to the most fundamental questions.

When I first started getting serious about space access it was with a focus on mining asteroids for platinum group metals (oddly enough, I had an email exchange with Jeff Greason about this subject way back before XCOR or even Rotary). I started actually writing business plans and designing techniques to handle what I thought would be the long pole in the tent, namely prospecting. Since high value PGM rich asteroids are expected to occur with a frequency of less than one in a thousand, the prospecting phase has to be really cheap on a per-candidate basis, even if ground based spectroscopy is used to winnow the candidate pool by 90%. I figured out how to do it (sort of) if the cost of space access came down by about a factor of ten. Of course, given factors of ten to toss around at will we can also do commercially viable nuclear fusion and flying cars. Or fusion powered flying cars, for that matter.

Setting aside PGM mining for the time being, I went back to first principles. What is within reach that I really want to do? I want to go into space. Even mining asteroids isn't enough without actually being there. It'd be cool to mine asteroids, but it'd be so much cooler to actually go into space and experience spaceflight in person. That's my current focus. Not saving the world, not imagining wondrous possible futures - just me looking out of the window from 100+ kilometers above the earth.

I believe that this is the right approach to space activism. There are simply too many demands in life to keep a focus on working towards something that will never provide concrete personal benefit. Even people doing supposedly purely altruistic things like helping famine victims are constantly rewarded with positive feedback from the people they are helping. It's simply not sustainable on a personal level to work hard over the long term for no personal reward other than an idea. Sure there are individuals capable of that kind of effort, but they are exceedingly rare. Much more common are the folks who work for a while and then burn out or just lose interest.

Given the realities of near term technologies (and the irrationality of planning based on nonexistent technologies), and given the realities of human nature, the best approach to space activism is to focus on personal hands-on participation. Nobody is going to build a space elevator in their garden shed. You might, however, save up enough money to afford a ride on a suborbital vehicle. You might invest in a suborbital company with a realistic expectation of profit. In time, you might even be able to build your own suborbital vehicle. You could certainly help push for sensible regulation of the suborbital industry, with the certain knowledge that it has a positive impact right now as opposed to some unknown time in the future (if ever).

The upshot is that the reward both for blogging and for working with the SubOrbital Institute is gradual progress towards a very concrete goal - putting me personally in space. I suggest that this goal is a good one for all space activists and enthusiasts to adopt. Focus on the near term practicalities because those are the only ones you can realistically have confidence in. Everything else is speculation. The net effect of a bunch of people seriously working to get themselves into space is that costs come down, markets are established, and new opportunities move from being speculative to being attainable.

Posted by Andrew Case at 07:33 AM

A Moore's Law For Spaceflight?

Michael Turner has a piece in today's The Space Review arguing that Moore's Law won't apply to space development. His argument fails, at least to me, because it rests on a false premise (and a common myth)--that the reason access to space is expensive is because we don't have the "right" technology.

While I don't literally believe in a Moore's Law for space (in the sense that we can see seemingly never-ending halving of costs on some constant time period), I do expect to see dramatic reductions in cost in the next couple decades, but not because there are vast ranges for improvement in the technologies, but because there are is vast potential for improvement in the real problem--the heretofore lack of market.

Costs will come down dramatically when we start flying a lot more. It's that simple. Once we reach a plateau, in which the costs of propellant start to become significant in the overall costs of flight, then we should look to some new technological breakthroughs, but we're sufficiently far from that that some form of Moore's Law, at least in the short term, is actually quite likely to hold.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:53 AM

Not His Father's Space Initiative

It's Monday, and that means a new issue of The Space Review. Dwayne Day leads off the week with an interesting comparison between the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative, and the new Vision for Space Exploration.

Editor Jeff Foust also makes an interesting analogy between planetary exploration and sports.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 AM

Congratulations

...on your new job, Andrew. I think.

It's certainly a key position right now, with the legislation continuing to hang fire. Be sure to let us know what we can do to help on an ongoing basis.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:53 AM

Pants On Fire

Even while traveling, Glenn has a good roundup of links about the collapse of the credibility of Joe Wilson, and continuing pathetic efforts to defend him.

This is the kind of thing that (like all of the lying, spinning and prevarication, and unashamed defense of it, in defense of Bill Clinton in the nineties) make it impossible for me to even consider voting for a Democrat any more. As a one-time Democrat in my youth, I went through the eighties thinking that I simply had policy disagreements with them, but since the Clinton years, and particularly since 911, I now think that it's simply too dangerous to put the fate of the nation back in the hands of such people. Joe Lieberman would have been the only possible candidate who could overwhelm my increasing distaste for the Donkeys, but they rejected him, and anyone like him, quite decisively.

Golda Meier once said that the Middle East situation would only be resolved when the Palestinians started to love their children more than they hated Jews. I'll think that we'll once again have a functional two-party system, in which I can vote for the candidate rather than the affiliation, when it starts to appear that the Democrats love truth and integrity more than they hate George Bush and Republicans in general. (Which is not to say that I'll necessarily vote Republican--with the ridiculous things coming out of the Libertarian Party since September 11, right now, I have no party.)

[Update at noon Eastern]

Michael Ledeen has more.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:14 AM

July 11, 2004
On The Radio

Sorry for the short notice--it slipped my mind. I'm going to be live on The Space Show with David Livingston in about an hour. On the air in the Seattle area, and there's an internet feed here.

[Update afterward]

The interview went well, but I found out it wasn't broadcast live (thought it was on the internet). It was taped for a later broadcast. I also want to remind people that Bill Simon (transterrestrial webmaster) and I will be on the show next Tuesday. It's the thirty-fifth anniversary of the first Apollo landing, and we'll be talking about that, and the sedar-like ceremony that we developed to commemorate it.

If you're really into the significance of that date, it would be a good time to gather with family and friends, and have a dinner to help remember the first liberation of our species (and earthly life itself) from its homeworld, just as the Jews celebrate their liberation from Egypt at Passover.

Despite all the saturation coverage of space in the past year and a half, it would seem that we need such tools to educate ourselves about this new frontier, as Jay Manifold sadly points out today.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:12 PM

July 10, 2004
I Still Want My DNS!

The saga continues.

When I hardwire a DNS into my client, it works. Sort of.

I can get to transterrestrial.com, but pages from Instapundit and National Review (and who knows which else?) won't load.

This is the case not only for my original solution of Earthlink's IPs, but also for Dave Mercer's recommendation of cybertrails.com's.

What the heck is going on?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:06 PM

Rocketforge shwag, evolvable design

Mike Mealling over at RocketForge has added to his shwag offerings. In particular the Apollo LEM mug is cool, though the Skylab Mousepad is also quite geek-chic. I'm hoping he'll add an RL-10 mug (hint).

I'm a big fan of the RL-10, since it's as close to the realizing the ideal of evolvable design as any spaceflight gadget that I'm aware of, having been in use since 1963, with continuous upgrades and improvements since then. It's also the engine that was used (in yet another variant) on the DC-X, which is enough to earn it a spot in space history even without the large number of variants. I suspect that there are Russian engines which come close to the RL-10 in realizing evolvable design, but none pop immediately to mind (a reflection of ignorance more than anything else).

I'd be interested to hear of other candidates for best realized evolvable design in space hardware. Bear in mind that by "realized evolvable design" I mean not just design that is capable of incremental improvement, but design which has actually undergone substantial incremental improvement, or which has spawned a large number of useful variants. Soyuz is one obvious candidate. I suspect that there are Russian spacesuit designs which also meet the criteria for realized evolvable design.

This post honestly started out as just a pointer to the new RocketForge mug, but obviously I'm in a bit of a rambling frame of mind. For more on why you too should be a fan of the RL-10, check out the relevant collection of archived Usenet posts on Yarchive.

Posted by Andrew Case at 08:30 PM

Some patent thoughts

One of the things I did in my dissolute holiday was play Texas Hold'em with Dan Barry, among other people. The first thing in my inbox when I got back was an email from my advisor asking if I'd be willing to help someone with some patent advice. Among the first websites I visited when I got back was The Space Review, on which there is an article advising space entrepreneurs on patents, using Texas Hold'em as an example. Bizarre little chain of coincidences. Not being superstitious I'm not trying to figure out the deeper meaning, but it's a little odd.

Anyway, on the topic of patents, the article by Sam Dinkin is pretty much exactly on target, but I thought I'd mention the advice I always give people thinking about patenting an idea. This is based on all of six month's experience doing IP work, so it's far from definitive, but my job would have been simpler had I known it, so here goes: The most important thing to understand about patents is that they aren't about ideas or inventions, they are about lawsuits. The only utility of a patent is in a lawsuit or threat of a lawsuit. If your idea is unlikely to be picked up by someone else, a patent is unlikely to help. Given that the time when people are thinking about patenting an idea is right at the beginning of their business, the money and time invested will often pay off better elsewhere, such as in building a proof of concept demo. A patent can be useful in scaring away competition, but that cuts both ways - if you think you can build a genuinely better mousetrap but it infringes someone else's IP, all may not be lost. After all, it's about a lawsuit, and the patent holder doesn't always win - there are some really lousy patents out there.

Anyway, I'm repeating a bit of what Sam Dinkin said, but hopefully the repetition isn't wasted. If you have a good idea that might be patentable, go read his article, and then go read what Don Lancaster has to say on the subject. Also, check out the EFF's Patent Busting Project for some examples of some of the egregious stuff that manages to get patented. EFF is trying to bring some sanity to the subject but they could certainly use some help.

Posted by Andrew Case at 04:38 PM

July 09, 2004
Now *That's* A Vacation

You know you had a wild vacation when it takes two days to recover from it. You'd think that hanging out with a bunch of neuroscientists would be intellectually stimulating but perhaps a little light on the wild partying. You'd be wrong, at least about the partying part. The social scene surrounding the Marine Biological Laboratory is really something to behold. It was a long weekend, so there were parties every night for four straight nights, and all the parties were too good to leave before the wee hours. I ended up averaging about 5 hours sleep a night, which is nowhere near enough. Somehow biologists simply have better parties than physicists. I think it has to do with the average level of social skills. I know some very socially smooth physicists, but let's face it - the average physics geek is a little on the dorky side, and a bunch of slightly dorky people all in the same place tend to condense into a big glob of mutually reinforcing dorkiness. Biology dorks don't undergo the same transition, probably because they are fermion dorks, while physicists are boson dorks. Or something. There's actually a coherent explanation for why biologist dorks should be fermionic (having to do with the greater degree of distinction between different subfields of biology), but something tells me that it would be better not to go there. Maybe I'm not yet fully recovered from my vacation :-)

Posted by Andrew Case at 02:53 PM

I Want My DNS!

OK, I finally got it working. Sort of. I can ping the LAN. I can ping the internet. I can even get to web sites if I know the IP. But when I ping an internet domain from a client with no IP (even something as simple as yahoo.com) it goes "Huh!" as only computers can do, and sits doing nothing.

Any ideas what I have to do to get ZA (and please, no more stories about what a fool I am to use ZA--those are not helpful at this point) to allow DNS? Or diagnostics I can run to figure out where the problem is?

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I still don't know why it's not doing DNS properly, but I fixed it by assigning some DNS servers manually to the client (Earthlink's). It seems to work now, but it also seems like a kludge.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:38 PM

Johnnie And Johnnie

...sitting in a tree.
K I S S I N...

I think all this touchy-feely-huggy stuff is going to backfire on Kerry with the non-pansy male demographic.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:41 PM

He Hasn't Had Time To Be Briefed

Allah is divinely inspired today.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:54 AM

And The Pope Is Still Catholic

Check out this "Dog Bites Man" headline.

[Update a few minutes later]

I'm told that the link requires registration. It didn't require it of me--sorry about that. The headline is "Libertarian Seeks Small Government."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:59 AM

I Wonder?

...if Dick Riordan is starting to lose it?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:38 AM

I Am Quite Disturbed

...at the thought that commenter "Brian" from this post teaches undergraduates.

Scroll down a ways, and be amazed.

[Update a few minutes later]

I should add, that there's another howler there:

Regarding Newton's second law of motion, F=ma is just fine for all physics short of things traveling greater than 0.95 the speed of light, or quantum effects.

He's apparently confused, thinking that I'm referring to Einstein's Special Relativity version of Newton's Second Law, in which rest mass is converted to true mass via the factor gamma, which is a function of velocity, or F = dp/dt where p = m*v, or in the Einsteinian version, p = gamma*m*v.

Gamma is a function of velocity. It's 1/(1-v^2/c^2)^1/2 (or in words, it's the inverse of the square root of one minus the ratio of velocity squared over the speed of light squared). For low velocities, it's one divided by the square root of one minus a tiny number, or simply one, so at low velocities, mass equals mass. But for high velocities, you're starting to divide one by a very tiny number (as the difference between 1 and velocity squared over c squared becomes infinitesimal), so gamma blows up to be a huge number. That's why mass approaches infinity as its speed approaches that of light.

As I pointed out in the other thread, in the Newtonian case it is simple to take the derivative:

F = dp/dt = d(mv)/dt = m*dv/dt + v*dm/dt. But dv/dt is acceleration, so we get:

F = ma + v*dm/dt.

The Einsteinian case is a much more complicated derivative, because it's a much more complicated function of velocity. But it's not relevant, since we're not talking about near-light speeds. The fact remains that Newton's Second Law is F = ma + v*dm/dt. The only reason that we always see it as the more simple (and incorrect) F = ma, is that this is a special case in which the mass is constant (the derivative of a constant is zero, and the second term goes away). This is the case for most physics problems, but it certainly isn't for rocketry, in which the vehicle is ejecting mass (that's what makes it go).

Anyway, as I said, it's very disturbing that this person is teaching anyone, let alone undergrads.

[Update at noon Eastern]

Professor Hall, who does teach undergrads as well as grads (and I'm glad of it), expands on his comment via email:

I think Brian's a bit of a putz in his comments. However, he's right about F=ma and F=dp/dt. Derivation of the rocket equation is a little tricky to work out, as you say. However, the chain rule does not lead to the correct equation.
In the 2nd law,

F = dp/dt

F is the sum of all applied forces, and p=mv is the linear momentum of the particle of mass m.

If you apply the chain rule to this equation, you get

F = m dv/dt + v dm/dt

as you noted.

However, in order for the chain rule to make any sense here, the two v's must be the same v. What v is it?

If it's the velocity of the particle, then this equation can't apply to a rocket, since it couldn't lift off the ground. On the ground, v is zero, and initially dv/dt is zero, so F is zero. If F is zero, the linear momentum cannot change, so v remains zero.

If it's the velocity of the mass leaving the rocket, then initially F = v*dm/dt, which is essentially correct. However, the v in the dv/dt term is clearly not the velocity of the mass leaving the rocket. It's supposed to be the velocity of the rocket.

The correct derivation of the rocket thrust equation uses a control volume approach, which is essentially a summation of Newton's 2nd law over a continuum of particles of different velocities (the rocket and the propellant clearly have different velocities).

This leads to the following vector equation for rocket motion

F + ve dm/dt - vehat A (Pe-Pa) = ma

The terms on the left comprise the sum of all external forces acting on the
rocket.

F includes all the forces such as gravity, drag, ....

The term ve dm/dt is the thrust due to the rocket, where ve is the exhaust velocity and dm/dt is the mass flow rate (negative number, since m is the mass of the rocket, which is decreasing). The vehat A (Pe-Pa) term is the pressure force. Vehat is a unit vector in the direction of ve, Pe is the exhaust pressure, and Pa is the atmospheric pressure.

I'll just add that a) I'm glad that at least some of my readers and commenters are smarter than me and b) while I didn't say that the chain rule led to the rocket equation, I did imply it, and that was a mistake, and c) I had known that at one time, but it's been a long time.

And we are in agreement that Brian is a putz.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:58 AM

Late September

That's the date that, with a little luck, the insurance company loses their money. And the date after which it starts to get easier to raise money.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:46 AM

July 08, 2004
I Must Be A "Conservative"

Because I'm not opposed to the war.

This is a ridiculous assertion, but it seems to be prevalent, and I'm not the only victim of this mind-warped meme.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:43 PM

Firewalling Problem

OK, I think I've found the culprit. Zone Alarm does seem to be blocking UDP between host and client, and I can't figure out how to stop it without completely disabling my Internet firewall. It thinks that the ethernet adaptor for the LAN is to the internet, and it won't allow me to edit or change that. It's the only firewall I have, so I can't take it down.

I may have to upgrade from the free version to Zone Alarm Pro, because while the Help menu says that there's an option for setting it up for ICS, it doesn't seem to display it for the version I have.

[Update a few minutes later]

I finally figured out how to change the zone for the adaptor from "Internet" to "Trusted." My LAN is working properly now, but clients are still not seeing the internet.

[Late afternoon update]

I'm having trouble thinking that it's a Zone Alarm problem at this point, because I'm watching the log, and I've seen no activity on the LAN being blocked, even when I attempt an internet connection from a client.

I can ping the host machine, but I can't ping anything on the internet, either by name or IP.

This is most frustrating.

[Update a couple hours later]

At Ian Woollard's suggestion, I momentarily disabled Zone Alarm, and that was the problem. It seems to work if I reduce the security level for the Internet Zone from "High" to "Medium."

I'm not sure that I can configure it more specifically without getting the full version, though.

Now the question is, do I spend the forty bucks on Zone Alarm Pro, or on a router...?

I'm inclined to the former, because I can buy it on line, and it will be a good belt-suspenders system for when I get a good hardware firewall up.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:10 AM

Go For Suborbit

Apparently SpaceShipOne's problems have been resolved. Burt says that he's ready for the X-Prize flight attempts (though there's not yet been a formal announcement). Alan Boyle has the story as well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:40 AM

The Big Fat Stupid White Man

Mr. Lileks eviscerates Mr. Moore's latest bit of dementia.

Again, the high-school-level thinking: “the rest of the world.” It’s simplistic to identify Iran, Iraq and North Korea as evil. It’s simplistic to state in the immediate wake of 9/11 that nations are either with the terrorists, or the United States. But it’s a sign of complex nuanced thinking to say that “the rest of the world . . . looks at us with disdain and disgust.” Yes, the world poured out its heart; it cost them nothing. Hearts are easily tipped and just as easily refilled. When the French newspaper said “We are all Americans now” it sounded nice, and I suppose it was, but in retrospect it looks as if there was an undercurrent of appeasement and surrender: we are all Americans because we are all victims in a sense, non? We ceased to earn the precious coin of French approval when we fired the chief procurer for their favorite customer, Iraq. C’est dommage. We can live with it.
Wait until France gets a hard shot in the nose. Wait until France reacts with some nasty work. They’ll get a golf-clap from the chattering class over here and a you-go-girl from Red America. France could nuke an Algerian terrorist camp and the rest of the world would tut-tut for a day, then ask if the missiles France used were for sale. And of course the answer would be oui.

Enjoy.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AM

July 07, 2004
Economic Confusion

Stories like this, about how much owners of intellectual property are losing to piracy, always bug me, because the industry press just accepts the figure without criticism or comment.

They claim that they lost almost thirty billion dollars last year to pirated software. They derive this number by estimating the number of pirated software installations, and multiplying by the price of the product. But it's almost certain that their losses aren't that high. The only amount of money that they're out is the amount that the people using the software would have been willing to pay if they hadn't been able to get it for free.

This kind of disingenuous story occurs because people don't understand the difference between price, cost, and value. For software, the marginal cost (resources required of the seller to produce it) for the software is almost zero, while the price (the amount asked by the seller) may be very high relative to its actual value, which varies from individual to individual. No rational person will pay more for a product than they value it, so if they can't get it for free, the only amount of money that the vendor is out is the sum of the value of it for all potential buyers. Clearly, it wasn't worth the full price to many of those individuals, or they would have paid it, and I think that the amount of loss is vastly overstated--many of them would have simply gone without, rather than pay full price, so the revenue in that case would still be zero.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:36 AM

I Want To Share

My internet connection, that is.

Until I complete the move from California, and bring my Linux firewall and wireless router to Florida, I need to set up a quick'n'dirty router and port forwarder for the network here. I had a spare switch, so I just went out and picked up a second NIC for my main Windoze 2000 machine. The instructions for sharing the internet connection are seemingly simple, but they don't seem to work. I've got the new network set up in DHCP mode, and the machines are talking to each other, but I can't see the internet from the client (i.e., pinging a known IP address times out, though I can do internal network pings). I tried turning off the Zone Alarm firewall for the LAN, but it didn't seem to help. I'm obviously posting this from the machine with the working connection.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Update on Thursday morning]

OK, when I do ipconfig on the host machine, I get this:

***************************************
Windows 2000 IP Configuration

Ethernet adapter Interglobal LAN:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :

Ethernet adapter AT&T DSL Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 67.101.124.115
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 67.101.124.115

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 2:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Autoconfiguration IP Address. . . : 169.254.163.94
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.0.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :

*******************************************

Note that "Local Area Connection 2" is the physical ethernet connection for the DSL (called here AT&T DSL Connection")

netstat -n yields:

*******************************************

Active Connections

Proto Local Address Foreign Address State
TCP 127.0.0.1:445 127.0.0.1:3093 ESTABLISHED
TCP 127.0.0.1:3093 127.0.0.1:445 ESTABLISHED

*******************************************

I'm having trouble talking to client machines right now--the LAN seems to be flaky. I can ping client from host, but I can't ping host from client. More when I get one of more of the in communication.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:12 AM

Dominoes Lining Up?

Well, well, well...

They've captured two Iranian agents in Baghdad, fomenting much of the murder and terrorism in the newly emerging nation. This, of course, is an act of war.

Allawi has been making justifiably belligerent noises toward Syria as well, saying that he wouldn't necessarily mind if coalition forces were to take offensive action there.

I wonder how far off we are from a war between Iraq, and Syria and Iran (in which we would participate on the side of Iraq)? That would be a continued draining of the swamp, and we know that a majority of the Iranians, if not the Syrians, would like to see the end of their current government. If so, it would be the next step on the path toward a saner Middle East.

The problem, of course, is that if it happens before November, the conspiracy loons will claim that Bush is going to war out of desperation, in the face of the "exciting" (oh, be still, my heart) John-John ticket, to distract the populace with another war based on "lies."

One thing that might help in the near term would be a UN resolution condemning Syria and Iran for their attempts to destabilize Iraq. Any bets on whether such a thing would pass? After all, it wouldn't be condemning the US and Israel, which is the only kind of condemnation in which the UN has shown any historical interest...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:51 AM

Intemperate

I'm not entirely sure, but I think that Andrea Harris is upset with Michael Moore.

[Caution: link is not suitable for young children. It contains the kind of words that one wishes to discourage them (and older ones as well) from using.]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:25 AM

July 06, 2004
Political Tourism Barriers

Here's an interesting article, on a couple of levels.

With demand waning for its traditional service - clearing Arctic shipping lanes - the Murmansk Shipping Company, which operates the world's only fleet of atomic icebreakers, has started offering tourists a chance to chill out at the top of the world for $20,000 per head.
The business has outraged environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth Norway, which is urging would-be ticket buyers to consider the damage a nuclear accident can do to the pristine region's fragile ecosystem...

... The green group has found an unexpected ally in the Russian Audit Chamber. Parliament's budgetary watchdog, after investigating partially state-owned Murmansk Shipping's finances earlier this year, urged the government to revoke the company's license to operate the fully state-owned icebreakers because it had "improperly used $79 million worth of state property and cheated the state out of $7.3 million in revenues," auditor Yury Tsvetkov said June 29.

The superficial (i.e., obvious) one is the issue of whether or not we'll let environmental groups object to tourism on grounds either real or spurious (and in particular, the notion that it shouldn't be allowed because it's a nuclear-powered ship is extremely spurious, and one that we should expect to confront in the future as we start to use nuclear reactors in space).

But the other one is that the Russian government itself is opposed to such tourism. That indicates to me that some there are starting to figure out what things actually cost, and that the tourist dollars don't actually cover the operating costs.

While popular legend has it that Dennis Tito paid twenty millions bucks for his ride into space, reality is that such things are extremely negotiable, and that he actually paid much less (perhaps a little over half) of that amount. The Russian space program has survived largely on the basis of its prestige (one of the few things that Russia can surpass the US at, at least by some criteria). If they discover that tourist flights (and NASA payments) aren't covering the true costs, will that continue?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:36 PM

It Would Please Me

...if I were a rain god. I'm not saying I'd make the rain fall or anything, mind you, but it would please me.

Of course, it would please me even if I weren't. I'm just that kind of guy.

On the other hand, I don't really want to see this.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:03 AM

My Heart Bleeds

Not.

The SF Examiner is crying over the upcoming death of the "assault weapons" ban.

Boo hoo.

Remember all the upset with Bush when he said that he would sign a renewal?

I said that it didn't matter, because he knew that there would never be a bill to sign. It still looks that way. Whether his pledge to sign it will still hurt him politically still remains to be seen, of course, but I can't imagine the gun-rights activists being indifferent to a Kerry-Edwards presidency.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:24 AM

Better Late Than Never (Or Even On Time)

The latest issue of The Space Review is up a day late (I assume due to the holiday yesterday) but it was worth waiting for. I'm too busy to post much, but go read about Oklahoma spaceports by Jeff Foust, an old study on asteroid deflection by Dwayne Day, a cautionary note to space entrepreneurs about patents from Sam Dinkin, and a report from Taylor Dinerman on the prospects for a new space military service to supercede the Air Force.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:58 AM

Bad Business

Alan Murray implies that, with his pick of Senator John Edwards for veep, Senator Kerry just made a powerful enemy for himself.

...party wisdom that's been passed down by former Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Strauss, and now resides with Democratic economic guru Robert Rubin, is that big business does matter to Democrats. To be successful, a Democratic presidential candidate doesn't need the active support of America's CEOs, but he does need to keep them on the sidelines. Jimmy Carter lost his bid for re-election at least in part because business was determined to dump him. Bill Clinton won election and re-election at least in part because the business community, while not strongly supportive, wasn't threatened by him.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:46 AM

July 05, 2004
Suspending Too Much Disbelief

John Derbyshire, contrarian that he is, didn't like Spiderman II.

Even comic-book movies must obey certain unities. In the realm of science fiction -- and c/b movies are a species, even if a low one, of science fiction -- the golden rule is: You can have one highly implausible bit of science. The rest of the science should be sound, or at least should follow logically from the central implausibility. THE TIME MACHINE is a great sci-fi novel because, once you have granted the central, fairly preposterous, premise that time travel is possible, everything else is just basic Darwinism and stellar evolution, as it was understood at the time.
The central notion in SPIDERMAN is that if you get bitten by a spider whose genes have been messed about with in a certain way, you will develop the ability to shoot 100-ft silk threads from your wrists (without, apparently, any loss of body mass). This is preposterous -- though not at a sensationally high level, as spider genes can be messed around with in an infinity of ways, and we don't actually know what would happen if you were bitten by a spider whose genes had been messed around with in way No. 29,485,672.

Having been persuaded to suspend our disbelief with respect to Spidey's powers, we should not then be asked to swallow any more preposterosities. And we know perfectly well what whould happen if you dumped a fusion reaction into the East River -- ka-BOOM.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but I intend to, and won't let this curmudgeonly review put me off of it, though I actually agree with the principle. That was one of the things that bothered me about the first movie. Once you tell me he's been bitten by a radioactive spider, then fine, I'll buy the superpowers on the part of Spidey. I'll even accept the notion that, as Derbyshire points out, he doesn't have to conserve mass.

But Mary Jane has no superpowers, yet she performs a superfeat near the end of the movie, when she falls off the cable that's being flung around (face it, she wouldn't have been able to hang on to it that long without her arms being torn off), and then catches the side of the cable car as she falls some distance toward it.

Sorry, just Not.Gonna.Happen. It defies physics and the strength, both muscular and structural, of a normal human body, even one pumped on adrenalin. I enjoyed the movie up to that point, but that bit really bugged me, because there was no good reason for it--it could have been just as exciting while being realistic.

And of course, there's the other thing that bothered me about the movie--the ending.

Parker was under no obligation to keep Harry in the dark about his father's end. Just because he was requested to, he didn't agree to the request, and he did himself and Harry a disservice by allowing Harry to continue to live on in a fantasy world about his father's true nature, a world that's likely to cause him to attempt to kill Parker's alter ego (and hence Parker) in the future.

At a minimum, he should have at least pointed out to Harry that the fact that Spiderman returned his father's body to his home didn't mean that Spiderman was the killer. He might not have accepted it, but there would have been no harm in exercising a little logic on him, even if he wanted to spare him the knowledge that his father was a murderer (though again, I think that was no favor).

Also, he's not protecting MJ by not reciprocating her love. The key is to keep his identity a secret (though not from her). I found it highly unsatisfactory, but apparently it was more important to them to set up some dubious sequel plot than to employ logic, or ethics.

I guess that SF movies will never get made right until they hire me as a script advisor. And listen.

[Update on Tuesday]

For those endlessly or otherwise fascinated by bad movie physics, check out this site (including a review of Spidey I). It says The Core (which I haven't seen, and probably won't) takes the prize for the worst movie ever in this regard.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:14 AM

Show Me The Numbers!

To paraphrase the Cuba Gooding character from "Jerry Maguire."

I keep seeing these breathless articles in the popular media, and even the trade press, about reducing sonic boom, with its promise of practical commercial supersonic flight. The latest hype comes from Popular Science (via Clark Lindsey).

Why do I call them hype?

Two reasons.

First, I have never, ever seen a single number in these articles indicating to what degree the boom is attenuated. Maybe it's just my suspicious nature, but I suspect that if we could see those numbers, we might be less impressed.

Second, there is never any mention in these articles about the other problem that is holding back practical supersonic flight, which is all of the drag associated with the shock. Even if by some legerdemain with vehicle contours they can reduce the boom sufficiently to allow overflight of land, the operating costs will remain horrific and unaffordable to most, because of the tremendous amount of wave drag from the shock system and skin drag from the huge swept delta wings that all of these concepts continue to employ.

That means that at best, it will remain another Concorde, though perhaps one that can fly coast to coast--an expensive ride only for the rich.

I find this topic particularly frustrating because I've been aware for a number of years of a technology with the potential to effectively eliminate shock, with both the sonic boom and the tremendous drag associated with it, but there has never been any interest in pursuing it, from either NASA or industry.

Anyway, I'll take this stuff seriously when I see some quantification of just how much they're reducing the overpressure, and some indication of understanding of the drag problem, instead of focusing entirely on the boom.

[Update in the afternoon]

Clark points out in comments that they do show some numbers in a slideshow.

Color me unimpressed. There's never been any doubt that one can reduce boom through body shaping--the issue is whether you can get enough reduction to solve the problem. This graph shows a softer peak, from a little over 1.2 PSF to about 9 PSF. So they're reducing it by about thirty percent.

Big whoop. Still gonna break windows.

Is there any reason to think that they can do significantly better than this graph would indicate, particularly for a large transport? There's none provided in the article. In fact, they even admit in the caption here, "Designers of the modified F-5E weren't trying to eliminate the sonic boom, but prove that aircraft shaping can lessen this signature of supersonic flight."

Big deal--we knew that.

And as Clark notes, there remains no mention of the drag issue.

Still looks like hype to me, similar to that over hypersonics. It may be beneficial for some military apps, but there's no reason to think that it will usher in a new era of commercial air transport, or even make supersonic bizjets practical, despite the pretty pictures.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:14 AM

July 04, 2004
Happy Independence Day

What he said (even though he wears shop goggles when he launches bottle rockets).

Here's what I wrote a year ago (it was also a Fox News column, but it seems to have been lost from their archive). It's still (sadly) pertinent on the second point as well as the first, which is timeless.

And remember, there are only sixteen shopping days left until Evoloterra Day.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:32 AM

July 03, 2004
Shop Goggles?!

Well, I guess later was sooner than I thought.

I repeat for emphasis (including obligatory whiz bang): Shop goggles?!

I always knew (well, as long as I've known him, which is getting to be a disturbingly long time) that Instapundit was a geek, but I never realized he was such a girlie boy.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:26 PM

Checking In

The flight went as well as a red eye can, but I'm suffering from ASDD (Adult Sleep Deficit Disorder). As you can see, sometime this morning, the phone company fixed the line, and we now have not only voice, but a reasonable high-speed DSL connection.

More later.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:21 PM

July 02, 2004
Congratulations

I'm headed to Boca Raton. We don't have internet connectivity there yet (and as of the last few hours, we don't even have a land line), so I don't know when I'll be logging on again, but hopefully by early in the week.

Until then, congratulations to the Cassini team. Sometimes, amidst all of the ongoing disaster of our space policy (for instance, check out this bit of micromanagement foolishness by Congress), it's easy to get jaded, but if someone had told you thirty-five years ago (the first moon landing) that there would be a satellite in orbit around Saturn sending back such spectacular close-up pictures of its rings and its many moons (most of which we were unaware at that time), you would have been amazed, even in the face of the manned moon landings. This is one of those moments (which are happening ever more frequently) in which I finally feel like I'm living in the twenty-first century.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:01 PM

Saddam Gets New Attorney, Seeks Change Of Venue

July 7, 2004

BAGHDAD (APUPI) Accused mass murderer and tyrant Saddam Hussein has hired Mark "Attorney-to-the-Extremely-Guilty" Geragos to defend him in his upcoming trial. As his first act, Mr. Geragos immediately filed with the court for a change of venue, on the grounds that it would be impossible for Mr. Hussein to get a fair trial in Iraq, a place in which he is widely known, and has been for decades.

"Go out in the street, and try to find someone who hasn't heard of Saddam Hussein, or who is unfamiliar with this case," he demanded. "Every family in Baghdad claims to be able to recount some horror story of a friend or relative who was supposedly imprisoned and tortured or murdered, ostensibly at the orders of my client. How are we supposed to find an impartial jury here?"

When asked if he had any suggestions for a new location, he replied, "It's pretty tough, given all the bad press Mr. Hussein has received all over the world, for years. I guess my preference would be to move the trial to Redwood City to reduce my commute time. It would also provide a useful contrast with my other clients, Scott Peterson and Michael Jackson. I mean, compared to Saddam, a child molestor and uxoricidal sociopath don't look all that bad."

"But if we can't move it to California, then perhaps we could get a better hearing in France."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:57 PM

That's So September 10th

So anyway, it turns out that Wood's Hole, being one of the nations finer scientific establishments, actually has internet access. Who'd a thunk it? A technological widget developed for the transmission of porn, spam, and offers from deposed Nigerian dictators, being used by scientists as a means of remote collaboration. Just goes to show the innovative and unexpected uses to which researchers can turn everyday objects.

Obviously I'm being a little ironic above. More seriously, my wife just showed me a really cool little trick that allows a >$10,000 piece of scientific equipment to be replaced by common items costing under $100. It's a neat little illustration of nonlinear thinking and creative problem solving on the part of a graduate student who simply did not have enough money to buy the high end gear, so she tried to figure out a way to do it on the cheap. Nobody told her it wouldn't work, and she was really keen on getting the work done, so she kept trying until she made it work. It's a very cool little application, so why am I being evasive about details? Well, it involves a basic technique for genetic engineering. If this was September 10th 2001, I'd blissfully blog away. In the current environment I think dropping the cost of making genetically modified organisms by over $10,000 is not necessarily in the best interest of anyone. I had a nice little post all lined up to talk about technology and creativity and the importance of persistence, but I think I'll just leave well enough alone.

It's only a matter of time before genetic engineering techniques come within reach of basically anyone with a couple million dollars. The long pole in the tent right now is just the sheer amount of time it takes to carry out all the work, and the scattershot nature of the results. Given time, and especially given volunteers willing to die, a terrorist attack using GMOs is a real possibility. Technology is advancing rapidly, and established technologies are becoming cheaper and more accessible. The only effective way of reducing the risk of a mass casualty attack is to undermine the ideas behind the ideologies that drive the attackers. There will always be people who want to cause destruction, but the fewer collaborators they have the lower their chances of success.

Posted by Andrew Case at 09:06 AM

July 01, 2004
Massachussetts

I made it safely to Wood's Hole after driving for nine hours. A good stereo system is a bulwark against madness.

One observation I've made every time I come here (this is the fourth summer) - Massachussetts drivers suck. It's not that they are incompetent a-holes like the drivers in DC. It's that they yield with absolutely no rhyme or reason. For some reason the basic principle that safety in traffic is enhanced by everyone behaving in a predictable manner is just lost on them[*]. My sample is pretty biased, so maybe this is just a Cape Cod phenomenon, but I've already had two incidents in which a dangerous situation was created by someone deciding that despite the fact that they have right of way, they'll stop and let me go. They are trying to be nice, oblivious to the fact that the people behind them think they are turning, so move to pass, just as the benevolent dimwit is waving me to move into a position to be T-boned. Perhaps its that this area is a vacation spot, so there are people from all over the place, each bringing their own local interpretation of how to behave in traffic.

[*] Incidentally, if you ever get a chance to drive in Brazil - don't do it. At least don't do it until you've aclimatized to the local driving customs. I thought Africa was bad, but Brazilians drive according to an unwritten set of rules which are universally understood by other Brazilian drivers and which bear only a passing relationship to the written traffic laws. The lack of carnage on the streets is due to the fact that everyone knows the unwritten rules, knows what to expect, and knows how other drivers will react.

Posted by Andrew Case at 06:39 PM