February 28, 2006
Space Moonbats

Thomas James (who reads this stuff so you don't have to, though it's entertaining even if you do) has the latest roundup, including a certain NASA scientist who's been in the news recently.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:54 AM

No Hope For Peace

...in the Middle East. At least not until Hamas changes its charter.

Or is no more.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:01 AM

Big Space Business Numbers 2.0

If numbers get repeated often enough, like in this gallery of commercial space opportunities, they start to be believed. Business 2.0 as part of a big spread on space investment opportunities in their March cover story retells some whoppers.

Space Hotels: $5B/year by 2015

This is inconsistent with Futron and world launch capabilities and expense. First let's see if someone wins the America's Space Prize. Expensive travel means very little revenue. By 2025, very possible if space access costs drop. $2M/month would get a lot of takers if we can get 600kg worth of people, spaceship and consumables to orbit at $3000/kg including payload. A Progress at 2000-3000kg of payload lasts 2-3 months with three eaters.

Mars: $400B in exploration by 2030

If you just put NASA spending in line with US GDP growth and put 12 years of it to "Mars" you get about $400B.

Orbital labs: $10B/year by 2015

NASA can't even come up with a business case to finish ISS. So far the only demand has come from Greg Olsen so he could take a tax writeoff on his vacation. Hmm, maybe it will be a conference destination.

Solar sats: $100B/year by 2020.

You have to beat the marginal cost of hydrocarbons to make money on this. Julian Simon's Ultimate Resouce 2 indicates heavily against this. Methane hydrates, coal and uranium would have to be taxed to a standstill (which is not impossible) for this to be this big. Space elevators flip it.

Space elevator: $2B/year by 2021

If it works much bigger. It will probably be bigger than solar sats or asteroid mining. Without competition, almost all profits from solar sats and asteroid mining will accrue to the elevator owner.

Asteroid mining: $10B/year by 2030

The space access and demand curve math does not really work except for local consumption in space. But it would be a great place to colonize along with the Moon and Mars.

Moon: $104B in exploration by 2018, $250B in helium mining by 2050

The exploration comes from extrapolating the NASA budget: good bet; the He3 requires us to run out of uranium or patience for it. Not likely.

Microsats: $1.5B/year by 2018

Likely an underestimate as miniaturization, space access costs and dedicated launchers for microsats come into their own

Space Tourism: $1B/year by 2023

This will be bigger than hotels, which is not to say that it will be more than twice Futron's prediction repeated here. (The factor of 2 selfishly comes from games. The transport to and from the hotel is more expensive than the hotel stay.)

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 07:41 AM

February 26, 2006
Leavin' On A Jet Plane

...don't know when I'll be back again, but my return reservation is for Friday night. I'm off to Califor Nye A early tomorrow morning, and may be too busy to blog, as there are a lot of deliverables due this week, on top of the CEV proposal work. But I'll try to check in tomorrow.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:08 PM

A Reusable Indian Vehicle?

It doesn't sound like a smart design to me, though:

The first stage is configured as a winged body system, which will attain an altitude of around 100 km and deliver nearly half the orbital velocity. After burnout, the vehicle will re-enter the earth's atmosphere and will be made to land horizontally on a runway, like an aircraft.

In the second stage, after delivering the payload, the vehicle will be made to re-enter the atmosphere and will be recovered using airbags either in sea or land.

No description of the first-stage propulsion, but if Clark Lindsay (from whom I got the link) is right, and it's a scramjet, that's a huge mistake. And an ocean recovery with airbags? Please.

Of course, what do you expect from a government? And at least they haven't bought into the current nonsensical conventional wisdom that "Shuttle proved that reusable vehicles don't work."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:45 PM

The Fragility Of Science

Some sobering thoughts, and a warning to Daniel Dennett, from John Derbyshire:

Science is...a fragile thing, and might easily be lost. (The same applies to math. Readers of, ahem, my forthcoming book will learn about a key development in mathematical thinking that was discovered in ancient Alexandria, then lost, then rediscovered 1300 years later.) It is my belief in this fact that makes me so defensive of science, and so hostile to obscurantist thinking, under which heading I include both Left Creationists like Wieseltier and Right Creationists like the "intelligent design" crowd. They are playing with fire. So, by their absurd provocations, are the village atheists like Dennett. If we lose science (again?), we shall be plunged back into a world far less comfortable, far darker and crueller, than this one. If the LCs and the RCs join forces, they might just possibly bring on that world... if the Islamofascists don't beat them to it.

The natural tendency of human beings is to think religiously. Science and math are deeply unnatural activities, favored by only a scant few, who could easily be rounded up and dispatched by a mob of more normal human beings. Scientistic triumphalism of the Dennett variety is therefore foolish. An attitude of respectful humility by the more-scientifically inclined towards the more-religiously inclined is not only intellectually proper (at any rate to those of us non-Dennettians who think that religious belief is intellectually respectable, and that the reality of human nature should be faced honestly), it is prudent.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:46 PM

Not Fun Much Longer

At the end of an interesting article on the evolution of blondes, I found this:

Film star blondes such as Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Sharon Stone and Scarlett Johansson are held up as ideals of feminine allure. However, the future of the blonde is uncertain.

A study by the World Health Organisation found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.

Am I the only person who said "Huh?" upon reading this? I'd be interested to see the actual study, because it sure doesn't make much sense to me as reported.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:43 PM

Dispatch From Bizarro World

United For Peace And Justice (gotta love the names these wackos come up with) plans to install a new US government next month:

For Nat Turner, For Martin and Coretta, For all the Torture and Assassination in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti and many others - We will not allow the Slave Holders that Still Prevail in this Country to Rule us any longer.

They need to work on their capitalization--it's not quite random enough to reveal their full kookery.

Imprisonment and torture based on race, religion, resources or region is no different than the slavery we sought to abolish years ago. The Administration is Criminal and if they will not step down, we must storm in.

When was the last time they "stormed in" to protest any of the real torture and imprisonment based on race and religion by Middle Eastern governments? No, instead they're going to storm the White House, in protest of a policy that has actually ended much of the imprisonment and torture under Saddam Hussein.

They hope to have allies:

We are calling on all Member Nations of the U.N.,

Even Israel?

All Representatives and Justices in the World Court and International Criminal Courts, all soldiers and CIA agents and government officials who have been blackmailed by the dictators to incarcerate Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Ignoring the ambiguous grammar here (government officials were blackmailed by the dictators to incarcerate Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld? Which dictators were those? When did this happen? You'd think it would have made the news...) are they proposing to have a trial, or just incarcerate them? Or incarcerate them until trial? I'm confused.

They have a plan for a new government.

The Political Cooperative will put a new government in place that is comprised of people from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and all the organizations that have finally made us aware of the truth of the savage practices and illegal policies of our government in assassinating our own officials as well as people throughout the world who oppose their criminal activity.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch? In what way are they qualified to run a government? These people are amazing.

We need all of you to save U.S. citizens and Global Victims from their ongoing criminal activity. We are calling on the military, police, citizens and religious organizations to stand with us and help us to bring democracy back to the United States and by doing so, free the world from the wrath, occupation, theft, torture, blackmail and assassination by the Criminals in the United States Government.

Right. We'll "bring democracy back" (when did it go missing, anyway?) by storming the White House, removing duly elected officials and putting unelected people from Amnesty International in their place.

What they have done all over the world is much worse than what Saddam Hussein has done, so why are they not in jail too?

Note that we're supposed to take all of this lunacy as a given--they feel no need to explain or substantiate it in any way.

They have admitted to international and national crimes, so why have they not been taken to Court too?

Because they haven't admitted to crime of either kind, perhaps? Is this part of what some (laughably) call the "Reality-based Community"? And seriously, isn't this a call for insurrection? I suspect that these people could be jailed for this, particularly during war, if anyone actually took them seriously. But these types are generally harmless, being afraid of guns and all. It should be an amusing show on the Ides of March.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:04 PM

Foxes In The Henhouse

Anne Bayefsky points out the latest reason that the UN is not just useless for human rights, but an ongoing disaster.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:57 AM

February 25, 2006
More Insanity From Iran

I'll be that you didn't know that Tom and Jerry was a Jewish conspiracy (by that Jewish cartoon company, Disney, which must have secretly bought Hannah Barbara, or perhaps they're both co-owned by the Elders of Zion, or...who knows--it makes my head hurt?).

Yeah, let's let these folks have nukes.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:40 AM

February 24, 2006
Groundbreaking Research

Researchers have discovered that s3x with a partner is much better than m@sturb@tion. What would we do without researchers?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:55 AM

A Girly Man

That's what they found to play the latest James Bond:

An insider is quoted in Britain's Daily Star newspaper as saying: "They've started shooting here and are using the old DB5, which is absolutely sensational. It was shipped over and was ready to go but then we found out he can't drive a manual car.

"So we have had to adapt it so it's like an automatic. You don't expect that with James Bond, to be honest."

Last year, Craig admitted he is struggling to overcome his biggest fear to play Bond - he's terrified of guns.

Who'll be the next one? Boy George?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:49 AM

Missing In Action

Jim Geraghty isn't impressed by the response to the Danish cartoon controversy by the left regions of the blogosphere:

The one common refrain on the blogs of the left has been to compare the rioters, the imams threatening violence, and embassy-torchers to prominent members of the religious right. Oliver Willis huffed, “We’ve certainly learned that religious fundamentalism is the domain of the truly insane, whether that’s Pat Robertson and the Family Research Council, or Muslims rioting over a cartoon.” At the Huffington Post, Harry Shearer wrote, “It’d be fun to ask Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan what they think of this fuss, and how they’d react to similar cartoons of Jesus, and Mary.”

They would probably react similarly to the way they responded to Serrano’s art “Piss Christ” or the controversial painting depicting the Virgin Mary in feces. They would complain, protest and perhaps boycott the publication. But this facile comparison is the mark of a mind incapable of detecting distinctions, as it is hard to imagine Christian riots, burning down embassies, or large demonstrations full of banners saying “BEHEAD THOSE WHO INSULT JESUS.”

...Since the 2004 election, the Democratic Party has embraced liberal bloggers as a source of energy, excitement, campaign donations and grassroots support. They are reaching out to a motley mob of simple-minded fools whose touchstone is an irretractable belief that President Bush is the root of all evil.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:10 AM

SpaceWar.com Off Google

Simon Mansfield reports that his publication SpaceWar.com, one of his SpaceDaily family of web sites is no longer having its pages served by Google. Strangely, if you search for "Space War" you find lots of sites linking to http://www.spacewar.com, but if you search for sites linking to www.spacewar.com, the search comes up empty. To enforce Google's "Don't be evil" policy, I don't think Google's robots are smart enough to parse the following:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="war, death, destruction, ruin, hate, bad bad bad">

which have been in the keywords section for years. (Load this page and view source to see it last year.)

Space.TV corp, SpaceWar.com's parent isn't taking this lying down. "We consider the ban a violation of the recently enacted US-Australia Free Trade Agreement." We wish them a fruitful trade war.

--

2006-02-25 09:55 Update: It's back up and running. See Simon's comment.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 06:59 AM

Selective Sampling?

Hey, I'm as big a critic of the MSM as anyone, but this strikes me as a little underhanded:

...regarding the Gillette Fusion, some men clearly will like it and others won’t. But concerning objective commentary, once again bloggers show why so many people now turn to them in preference to the mainstream media.

So, they find three snarky mentions in the MSM, and then find three "objective" and "serious" reviews in the blogosphere, and somehow conclude that the MSM is frivolous, and the blogosphere serious and useful?

Sorry, not buying it--that's called "cherry picking the data." If they'd done some kind of exhaustive research, with numbers (e.g., 85 MSM mentions, 12 serious reviews vs 320 blog reviews, with 231 of them serious), they might have a case, but I'll bet I could could play their game by going and finding three "serious" reviews in the papers, and three snark-filled screeds from the blogs, and making exactly the opposite "case."

Which in fact is what critics of the blogosphere often do. Let's not lower ourselves to their level.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:58 AM

Woody Guthrie, Call Your Office

A return of the dust bowl?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:50 AM

Just On The Other Side

Victor Davis Hanson just came back from Iraq, and he says that the media can't tell the winners from the losers:

It is an odd war, because the side that I think is losing garners all the press, whether by blowing up the great golden dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, or blowing up an American each day. Yet we hear nothing of the other side that is ever so slowly, shrewdly undermining the enemy.

I wonder why that is?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:55 AM

February 23, 2006
Not All Of The American Press Are Wimps

EclectEcon has gathered all of the blasphemy together in one place. Peace Be Unto Him.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:24 PM

Can You Imagine The Howls From The Left

...if the judge grants Scooter Libby's request for dismissal? The Merry Fitzmas would be officially over.

Filing such things is pro forma, of course, and I'll be surprised if it's granted, but Fitzgerald's stonewalling on the evidence doesn't make his case look very good. It also seems to be on novel grounds.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:49 PM

Do You Defile Books?

This post (related to e-books) brought up an interesting subject in comments. There are people who think nothing (and in fact find it necessary) to highlight or make margin notes in books, and there are others (like me) who consider this sacrilege, and would never consider doing such a thing. I remember being in awe of books as a child, and even though they're now mass produced, and it's not a rational thing, I still can't bring myself to write in one (except perhaps to sign it, if I were to write one myself). And frankly, I never found it useful as a study aid, so there was never much pressure for me to do it.

It's not something that anyone ever taught me, or lectured me about, it's just a visceral repugnance at the thought. How weird am I (always a dangerous question with this crowd, I know...)?

The comments section is open.

[Update in the early evening]

Look, just to clarify here, I'm not saying that my position is rational, or anything. I'm just curious to see how many share it. It's really psychology research. I guess I'm wondering if it's some kind of intrinsic personality trait (like being interested in space) that's not (obviously) explainable either by upbringing or genetics.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:13 PM

How To Get Back To The Moon, Continued

I'm too busy to blog much, but the Chairforce Engineer has a follow-up to the previous discussion (see here, too) on lunar transportation architectures and L1.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:15 AM

Shoot For The Stars

Jon Goff has some useful thoughts on space system design goals, and some advice for Elon Musk:

Take a look at the EELV program, and even SpaceX. EELV's goal was to reduce the cost of launching satellites for the military from absolutely obscene to merely ridiculous (ie a 50% drop in price IIRC). So, they tried to make some incremental changes to how they build and operate their vehicles. In some areas they've gotten a lot better, but the reality is that they didn't even acheive the modest goals they set out for themselves. It isn't that they're dumb, or malicious, or incompetent. It's just that they set themselves too easy of a goal, so they didn't actually have to think outside the same high-cost artillery box that they've put themselves in over the years.

It should be pointed out that one of the reason that they haven't achieved the cost reduction goal is the collapse of flight rate. As I pointed out in my New Atlantis piece, flight rate, even for expendables, is a much higher contributor to launch cost than design is.

He also writes something that a younger Jon Goff would have found heresy:

...if they go for the BFR instead of trying to radically change the Earth-to-Orbit transportation market by going fully reusable...They're probably going to get their lunch eaten. I mean, they could possibly acquire one of the companies that actually develops a fully reusable, high-flight-rate orbital space transport. But the reality is going to be that if they don't keep pushing more and more reusability into their Falcon line, it's going to go obsolete.

That's sort of an inside joke to long-time readers of sci.space.*, but once upon a time, Jon was a, hmmmm...shall we say, vociferous proponent of expendable launchers. It would be interesting (and possibly educational to others) sometime to hear a description of how his thinking has evolved.

Now, we just have to work on his politics...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:17 AM

Why Mommy Is An Idiot

Nick Gillespie and Gerard Venderleun on the Democrats' latest PR folly.

Amazing.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:53 AM

The End Of Books?

It may be in sight.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:31 AM

February 22, 2006
Child Abuse

And now for something completely different--a family that names their kids after presidents.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:47 PM

A Whole New Meaning To "Air Guitar"

I think we have a finalist for the Darwin Awards, here:

The 16-year-old business student, from China, was "hyped up with exhilaration" when he rebounded off the bed and out of the window, coroner Tan Boon Heng told the Straits Times newspaper.

“He was jumping up and down on the bed placed against an open window while imitating a rock guitarist,” Mr Tan said...

...The boys apparently kept the window open because they liked to smoke, even though it was banned by the hostel.

And another tobacco-related death as well.

[Update in the late afternoon]

A wag at Free Republic notes that the pavement was his first, and last, hit.

Jokes aside, condolences to the family and friends.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:15 AM

No Worries

During National Engineers Week, Robert Samuelson writes that the so-called science and engineering gap is phony.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:13 AM

Prepare To Have Your Tears Jerked

...and save yourself the money for the movie ticket. It's Lego Brokeback Mountain.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:36 AM

Devilish Weather

We've lost a lot of probes in the attempt to explore Mars (though the Soviets and now Russians, have had even worse luck--have they ever had a successful Mars mission?). There even used to be grim jokes in Pasadena about the "Great Cosmic Ghoul" who ate Martian-bound robots.

But interestingly, once a mission is successful, it tends to be very successful--the rovers that landed a couple years ago were only designed (and expected to last) for three months, but they're still going strong. Michelle Thaller has an article that explains why bad weather is good for Martian explorers.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:39 AM

Cultural Imperialism

Ain't it wonderful?

People looked at me funny when I took these pictures. Why on earth is that guy taking pictures of the Red Bull? He’s American, hasn’t he seen this shit a million times already back home? What I think they don’t understand is that what’s normal in the Middle East somehow amazes (and comforts) people who have never been here. So I took pictures of the grocery store. It’s not all burkhas, camels, and caves out here.

You want a giant plasma screen TV? No problem. You can get whatever you want in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Hit his tip jar.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 AM

February 21, 2006
Appeasing Tyrants

...at Harvard (or anywhere else), doesn't work. Larry Summers is resigning:

I've been disappointed by Summers' repeated apologies for raising legitimate intellectual questions in a fair and respectful way. I consoled myself with the thought that, if Summers remained in place, he might ultimately do more for reform than he might have by standing up for principle. Now even this second-best consolation is gone, making it all the more obvious that Summers ought to have stood up to the Harvard's dictators from the start, even if it cost him his job. Now Summers must either remain silent, or hit back and implicitly acknowledge that all those apologies were bogus.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:01 AM

The Slide Down The Hill Continues

So much for childhood memories--Detroit might be closing its zoo. And of course, it's because of the evil racists:

Council member Barbara-Rose Collins said the state’s deadline for the city to sign over zoo operations to the Zoological society boiled down to disrespect. Many council members felt they were being bullied into handing over zoo operations without an agreement they were comfortable with.

Collins said, "The symbolism is that Detroit is a black city and that we’re unable to govern ourselves. So we need an overseer, the state legislature, or what have you, to step in and tell us what we must do and how to do it."

She said she will not sign off on an operating agreement until it protects Detroit’s interests and the state should not try to force them with a funding deadline.

"That is a racist attitude. I resent it very much. I’m trying not to let it color my judgments, but we’re not a plantation, blacks aren’t owned by white folks anymore," said Collins.

No, it has nothing to do with the fact that the people who run Detroit, whether white, black or purple, have run it into the ground.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:55 AM

Can We Call Them Traitors?

Ohio men planning attacks on troops in Iraq. If they're American citizens, why wouldn't this be treasonous?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:09 AM

Domesticity

In this corner, we have a hot-blooded (though it remains unclear whether she was hot) Argentinian woman who stabbed her husband for not having s3x with her. And further north, in the Sunshine State, a man beats his male roommate to death with a clawhammer (and a sledge hammer--apparently he thought he really needed to be hammered) for running out of toilet paper.

I guess that there are some cautionary tales here, somewhere, but as that great philosopher, Homer Simpson, once said, sometimes there is no moral to the story. Sometimes it's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:07 AM

The Man Who Would Not Be King

I didn't note this article by Lee Harris on the "father of our country" yesterday, when it would have been more appropriate (though it still wouldn't have been his actual birthday), but it's still certainly worth reading today, or any day. And I wholeheartedly agree with this:

Today we now call it President's Day, and no longer celebrate Washington's Birthday. This is a pity. For without the greatness, wisdom, and humanity of our first President, the office of the Presidency would almost certainly have become something radically different from what any of us are familiar with—indeed, it might well have become something that none of us would feel much like celebrating. It was not the written document called the Constitution that protected us from tyranny; it was the shining example of a single man.

The notion of "President's Day" is a travesty, and one that Congress should amend. Lumping all the presidents together, as though they're all somehow worthy of honoring on the same level as Washington and Lincoln--even the Buchanans and Hardings and Carters--just to create another three-day weekend, is a blight on those men's memory.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:50 AM

We Have A Consensus

The leader of Hamas says that negotiations with Israel are a waste of time. Glad to see that he admits it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:23 AM

Not Turning The Other Cheek

Frustrated Christians in Nigeria have struck back:

Residents and witnesses in the southern, predominantly Christian city of Onitsha said several Muslims with origins in the north were beaten to death by mobs which also burned two mosques there.

Expect the usual mindless platitudes from the usual suspects about the "cycle of violence." But as in Israel, such language indicates a symmetry that doesn't exist. The Islamists were rioting and killing people and burning chuches over cartoons. The Christians are rioting and killing people and burning mosques because they're finally, at long last, tired of the Islamists rioting and killing them, and burning their churches, and aren't going to take it any more.

If the Islamists really seek a war with the west, they should be careful what they wish for. Any time that they've had to seriously engage a motivated western military, they haven't done well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:05 AM

(Self) Selected, Not Elected

And they don't represent me. I didn't know that David Gregory was my proxy (or even that he fantasized that he was), but if so, I revoke it too.

In fact, let's start a Google campaign. David Gregory, I revoke my proxy.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:54 AM

One More Reason Not To Use IE

I don't mind most of this information being publicly available, but I sure don't want anyone to see the contents of my clipboard. I'm sticking with Firefox.

[Via Geekpress]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:25 AM

Why EML1?

Ken Murphy has a useful tutorial on the use of Earth-Moon L1 as a staging point to and from the Moon, and to other destinations.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:18 AM

The State Of Play

The latest newsletter of the Space Access Society is out, and it has a long, but good rundown of the current situation in space transportation (at least that portion of the industry that actually promises to reduce costs and improve reliability).

We are seeing signs that this industry is growing up fast. One trend is specialization - rocketship builders are starting to differentiate from rocketship operators, something that happened to the air transport industry too around the time it was getting serious.

Another is that rocketship builders are beginning to access a novel method of finance for this industry: Paying customers, both government agencies wanting a mix of tech development and delivered payloads, and commercial operators wanting actual ships to fly.

And while most company finance in this industry is still via some variant of "angel investors", aka wealthy individuals, there have been a number of signs that the venture capital industry may not be that far behind. First there's all the positive press buzz of the last year, of course. Never underestimate the herd factor in investment trends.

There are also signs of a fundamental VC investment requirement firming up: The exit strategy. One time-honored way to cash out investment in an innovative startup is by selling out to an established player that wants a foot in the new door. Arianespace showed up at the X-Prize Cup's Personal Spaceflight Symposium last fall "looking for possible connections" in this new industry. We've seen indications the US launch majors too are keeping a close eye on developments among the startups. Looking to eventually buy what they can't foster internally? It wouldn't be unprecedented.

I think we're a long way off from a rocketcom bubble (that would be fun, for a while...), but it's nice to see the money finally starting to flow.

It also announces the final date and location of the next Space Access conference, which is a must-go for people really into this subject.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:20 AM

February 20, 2006
"Flock Of Dodos"

Carl Zimmer reviews what looks to be an interesting and important new documentary about the science/philosophy war in the biology classrooms, and has some guest thoughts from the director, who has some thoughts about science education

2) Attitude - “Never rise above.” It’s one of the simple principles we learned in acting class. Whenever you condescend (as perhaps I did in the above paragraph) you lose the sympathy of your audience. Plain and simple. When evolutionists call intelligent designers idiots, its fine among evolutionists, but for the broader, less informed audience, it just makes everyone side with the people being condescended towards. It’s a simple principle of mass communication. Furthermore, even though Stephen Jay Gould was my hero in graduate school nearly 30 years ago, today he is culturally irrelevant for undergraduates at the introductory level. His essays, which I cherished as an introductory student back then, are now unusable. My students at USC literally asked me to never assign them his essays again. They find his style and voice to be arrogant, elitist, condescending, verbose … the list goes on and on.

One of the things that I try (probably not always with success) to do on this blog is to educate people on the issues of evolution and ID without being condescending to the latter. It gets very difficult, though, because I often get the sense that the two groups are talking entirely past each other, because each thinks that it has a monopoly on the truth, when in reality (if there is such a thing) neither does.

And along those lines, while I love Daniel Dennett's books, he continues to do the same thing, and persists in the foolish "Bright" strategy. Leon Wieseltier isn't impressed.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:40 PM

Big Versus Small

Grant Bonin is having a debate on the appropriate launch vehicle size for exploration. My attitude is either use what you have, or if you're going to spend billions of dollars developing new vehicles, focus it on something that actually reduces cost and improves reliability.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:20 AM

Stifling Of Dissent

I...errr...don't blame John Ashcroft:

To my knowledge, not a single Democratic office-holder, in Minnesota or elsewhere, has disassociated himself from the Minnesota Democratic Party's position that it is "un-American" to support our government's policies in Iraq, and that expressions of such support should be banned from the airways.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:14 AM

The Broken Space Program

Wayne Eleazer has an interesting brief history of the US military space program at today's issue of The Space Review. I was working at the Aerospace Corporation when some of the changes described were occurring in the early eighties. Clearly what they're doing now isn't working well, but I'm not sure that just going back to the SPOs is going to help. The problem is, as described, that space hardware (at least as historically developed and procured by the Air Force) is not like airplanes. Until they get some fresh thinking there, and try to make it so, I suspect that their woes will continue.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:40 AM

Yeah, That'll Work

Mugabe has a novel solution to Zimbabwe's 600+% inflation--he's going to print more money.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:07 AM

Hug An Engineer

It's that week (that few pay attention to) to celebrate the people who do much more to improve our lives than most people realize.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:05 AM

Step Right Up

Thomas James has another Carnival of the Space Moonbats.

[Update in the afternoon]

Oh, this is too weird. One of the people that Thomas links to is Elaine Supkis, but in a posting at his blog she calls herself Elaine Meinel (her maiden name, apparently). As an old L-5er, this made my antenna go up.

A little googling reveals something that I didn't know (assuming it's true). She's Carolyn Meinel's sister. I didn't know Carolyn had a sister. I also didn't know that Aden worked with the CIA.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 AM

February 18, 2006
Aerospace America and Sintered Bricks

My policy of sponsoring realistic space art to spawn realistic space economics may be bearing some fruit. I sponsored this picture from David Robinson first published in September. In January, Aerospace America had this to say:

"Picture a buggy pulled behind a rover that is outfitted with a set of magnetrons," [Larry Taylor, distinguished professor of planetary sciences at the University of Tennessee] suggests. (A magnetron is the heating element in a microwave oven.) "With the right power and microwave frequency, an astronaut could drive along, sintering the soil as he goes, making continuous brick..."

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 10:09 AM

X, Y and Z OK

I read more of the FAA EA (still 6MB) for OSIDA's spaceport at BFV in CSIA.* The most interesting things I found were the fuel and noise calculations for concepts X, Y and Z. I don't really like those designators. Concept X, let's change to concept R. Concept R has a maximum number of launches proposed of 12 in 2006, 12 in 2007, 24 in 2008, 48 in 2009, and 48 in 2010 (p. 4-2). Concept R runs on LOX and RP-1 (4-47) and needs an estimated 5761 kg of LOX and 2404 kg of RP-1. Concept R takes off and lands with a jet engine (4-39) reaches Mach 1 at 9144m (4-40), drops back to Mach 1 at 99,670m and speeds back up to Mach 1 at the same altitude and slows back down to Mach 1 at 16,459m. All these values are approximate. Let's suppose concept R starts charging $200,000 per seat in 2008. If they sell three seats at that price per flight, they could expect $14.4 million in revenue at this airport in the first year of commercial operation and $28.8 million in their second and third. I am not sure how the maxes of 12 flights in each of the first two years square with a 25-flight test program with a maiden launch in July 2007. Perhaps they will fly out of other spaceports, have some non-rocket flights, or up the maximum number out of Burns Flat.

I don't like the letter for concept Y either. Let's call it X'. Concept X' is scheduled to fly two times per year 2006-2010 (4-2). X' does not exceed Mach 1 (4-38). Concept X' runs on LOX and kerosene or alcohol (4-47). Concept X' has rocket takeoff and glide landing with 1800 lbs thrust (4-40).

I don't like the letter for concept Z as you might have guessed. Let's call it concept V. Concept V has max 2 flights in 2006 and 2007 with 3, 4 and 4 in 2008-2010. Concept V vehicles (sic) will take off with a jet engine (4-39). They will carry Jet-A fuel for the carrier vehicle and 1295kg N₂O and some HTPB for the launch vehicle (4-47) (laughing gas and rubber).

You can see pictures of concept R, X' and V on pages 2-11, 14 and 17 (although V has an Andrews Space Technology logo in the corner even if there might be a "Virgin" on the side of the carrier--it could be a SpaceDev HL-20 but the two tails and canard on the carrier scale back my expectations of that), and the picture of X' looks like a Xerus instead of a Velocity and concept R has only one tail instead of two).

In layman's terms? Expect there to be some kind of attempt at a rocket show in Burns Flat. Rocketplane is getting their spaceport. Hard to say what this means for business as the EA process was started in 2002.

*FAA=Federal Aviation Administration, EA=Environmental Assessment, OSIDA=Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority, BFV=the little known designator of the Burns Flat Vortac which I am guessing at to try to be cute, CSIA=Clinton-Sherman Industrial Airpark

--Update 2006-02-18 09:18

--Update 2006-02-18 09:46

It's actually a Gryphon Aerospace Plane from Andrews. Probably should be concept G.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 06:49 AM

Post-National Olympics

In today's Wall Street Journal, the editors note (subscription required) that we care more about individual athletes than the US team:

Today, without a common political foe to concentrate our patriotism, personalities have come to dominate broadcasts. This is an explanation, not a complaint; no one's hankering for those Cold War tensions of yore.

I think this direction should be encouraged. Rather than the Greek and modern version of national teams competing in sports instead of war, it should transcend nationalities. "Like the NBA," an Olympic basketball team should have athletes from many countries. Relays and other team sports should be composed of Star-Trek style international members.

A good way to bleed the power out of nationalism is to attack its very definition as mobile citizenship and superstates like the EU have done.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 05:07 AM

February 17, 2006
Virgin Galactic Sales Watch

NY Times has an article on "the Space Tourism Race" which is interesting mostly for the following quote:

Will Whitehorn, the president of Virgin Galactic, said that 157 people have put down deposits totaling $12.2 million to fly...

A race gets interesting when folks are funded and bending metal. Paper planes come and go. We can also have an industry without a race.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 02:47 PM

Not The Headline I Would Have Chosen

"Man Shot By Cheney Leaving Hospital"

Guess he was just finishing the job.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jane Bernstein points out that they've already fixed it.

But this time, I kept a screenshot of the original (though it lost a little quality in the conversion to jpeg to put on my server--I still have the full bitmap).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:17 PM

And They're Off

Unlike the Chinese versus NASA, this is a space race worth taking seriously:

I do wonder if Virgin Galactic/Spaceship Company will accelerate their vehicle development in response to this project if it looks probable that the Explorer vehicles will start flying next year. I think suborbital space tourism business will grow robustly beyond just those who want to claim that they were the "pioneers" in public space travel. In fact, more people will want to go once there have been lots of flights since this will help to demonstrate safe and reliable operation.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:37 AM

Prisoner Abuse Photos From Iraq

Here are some pictures that the MSM doesn't want you to see.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:54 AM

Cognitive Dissonance

This article is a few weeks old, but I missed it at the time--Max Borders writes about the Intelligent Design theories of the left.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:46 AM

The Fool's Golden State

Gerard Vanderleun writes about the decline of Florida, both the Keys and the mainland. It's funny, as someone who is currently living here, and has never particularly liked the place, he makes it sound much worse than the reality seems to me. But then, he's writing as someone who apparently did love it once upon a time, which I never have. I haven't been diving down in the Keys yet (though we still plan to), but he certainly makes it sound uninviting, and I hadn't realized that the deer were in such deep trouble.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:36 AM

No Surprise

You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Serenity (Firefly) 88% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 81% SG-1 (Stargate) 75% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 69% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 63% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 63% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 63% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 56% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 56% Moya (Farscape) 50% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 25% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 25% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

There's a problem with the quiz, though (as there often are with these things).

I wasn't quite sure how to answer the very first question:

"Peace is achieved through large single government rule (agree, disagree).

Well, I agree that this is certainly a way to achieve peace, but there seems to be a presumption to this (or at least an implication) that peace is an unalloyed good. As some anti-war types are fond of pointing out, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was largely at peace (if you don't count the random murders and torture that he occasioned on his own people), but it was hardly a desirable state. So I answered yes, but I'm not sure how that answer was interpreted by the test creators.

Also, interestingly, I see that when I go back to look at the quiz, the order of the questions is different. They must randomize it.

[Via Alan Henderson]

[Late morning update]

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that the "peace" question lowered my Firefly score. I think that whoever wrote the question did assume that a) peace is a desirable thing, per se and b) everyone would agree with that--the only issue is how it's best achieved. What's the flip side of that question? "Peace is achieved through multiple government rule?" "Peace is achieved through minimalist government?" "Peace is achieved through a well-armed citizenry?" This was a really unuseful question, as posed.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:10 AM

February 16, 2006
Bellsouth's Broken Promise

Glenn has been having problems.

Tell me about it.

I've given up on them, as far as Usenet service goes. In fact, I gave up and subscribed instead to a dedicated Usenet service, and paid extra for it, even though I'm supposed to get one with my Bellsouth DSL.

I'm about to do it for email as well (though both of these are supposed to be provided as part of my basic, and high-priced service). All week, I've been unable to send email on their smtp server (though I've been receiving it regularly). The only way I've gotten anything out is on my employer's Microsoft Exchange server (which should be an indication of how bad things are).

The only service that they've been able (or willing) to provide me reliably is bandwidth.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:59 PM

Dish Problems

So we decided to upgrade to the HD version of DirecTV, which involves (of course!) replacing, or at least supplementing our current satellite dish. It has a triple horn on it, and looks at three birds simultaneously, instead of just the one, as the standard dish does. This means that not only are azimuth and elevation important, but there's a third axis adjustment, that they call "tilt," to make sure that you're seeing all three of them.

I put up a new mast, got it plumb, set the settings on the tilt and elevation to what they're supposed to be for southeast Florida (45 degrees for both), hooked up the cable, pointed it in the general azimuthal direction (about thirty degrees south of west), and got nada, bupkis, no signal.

Is the cable good? Yup, and here's the weird thing. When I drop the elevation to thirty degrees or so (fifteen below where it's supposed to be), I get a reasonably strong signal on the upper transponders of Satellite A, starting with number 22. No signal on transponders 1 and up (which are the ones you're supposed to use to align the dish). Also no signal on either of the other two birds.

So something's happening, but not what should be happening. What are the chances that this is an LNB problem? The first dish I ever installed, years ago, had a bad LNB right out of the box (which drove me crazy trying to figure out what was wrong--fortunately, part of the deal was a free upgrade to a dual LNB, and when I put in the new unit, I got the signal right away).

Is there anyone out there familiar with the situation who could diagnose this, so I can just take the LNB back to Circuit City and exchange it? Or are these symptoms of something else that I'm doing wrong (though I'm wracking my brains at this point trying to figure out what else it could be).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:07 PM

Bring On The Fatwah

From "Rusty," a stalwart over at sci.space.history:

Muhammad (((:~{>

Muhammad playing Little Orphan Annie
(((8~{>

Muhammad as a pirate
(((P~{>

Muhammad on a bad turban day
))):~{>

Muhammad with sand in his eye
(((;~{>

Muhammad wearing sunglasses
(((B~{>

Muhammad giving the raspberry.
(((:~{P>

Giving Muhammad the raspberry.

;-P

My great-great-grandfather came to America from Denmark in the 1840's.

[Friday afternoon update]

OK, equal time:

Jehovah.

Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!

(I know, I'm just making it worse for myself...)

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:47 AM

Amateurs

Glenn asks if blogging is going to lose its freshness as more (though still not many) bloggers start to make a living at it. He's not worried, though:

...why are so many people doing it? Because it's fun! And fun is good.

That's a good reason to do all sorts of things. Press accounts tend to focus on making money (perhaps because many journalists dream of walking away from their day jobs, and editors?) but money is only one reason we do things, and usually not the most important. As people get richer, and technology gets more capable, I think we'll see a lot more people doing for fun things that previously were done only for money. And I think that's a good thing.

Speaking of journalists, it's easy to see why they're both fascinated by, and frightened of blogs and bloggers. I suspect that it's because journalism is something that doesn't seem to take much skill to do well (at least as well as its largely done), or if it is, most journalists don't seem to be up to the job. It's kind of like Hollywood (or has been, up to now)--it's not so much what you know, or how much talent you have, but who you know, and how lucky you are. But the days in which a clueless journalism major could (by whatever means) get a job in the industry, and not have to worry about competition are coming, or have come, to an end.

The problem is that journalists, as a class, are rarely experts in any particular field. We always used to say in the tech proposal business that it was easier to take an engineer and teach her to write, than to take an English major and teach him engineering (there are exceptions, of course, particularly when the English major took some science classes on the side). Same applies to journalism, and any sort of expertise. The best journalists, particularly those who specialize in certain areas, such as science, or finance, are generally people who came from those fields to journalism, as opposed to being journalism majors.

It's been noted that the blogosphere is chock full of people who know things (not to mention lawyers and law professors who know how to make logical arguments, against which many journalists are utterly helpless, at least to go by the Cory Peins, not to mention Mary Mapes of the world), and this was dramatically demonstrated to journalism's detriment in the Ra^thergate affair. And now that bloggers have pulled the curtain from the journalism wizard, many journalists' dreams (to whatever degree they exist) of "walking away" and just making money blogging will probably go unfulfilled, because it's not at all clear what they will bring to the table.

For these reasons, if there is a flow of talent between blogging and professional journalism, I expect it to be largely in one direction--from the former to the latter--because that's the direction that the osmotic pressure of the talent and knowledge will dictate.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:54 AM

February 15, 2006
Is That A Lobster In Your Pants?

Or are you just happy to see me?

He's lucky--the Australian bugs don't have claws.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:53 PM

Now That's Reporting

Lara Bricker digs into the international moose cheese industry.

My sister milked a moose once, but it bit her.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:18 AM

How To Settle Space

Jeff Foust asks a question (scroll down about thirty comments):

...should settlement be an explicit goal of the space agency, with programs specifically tailored to that, or should settlement be instead a commercial initiative that is either an outgrowth of, or even completely independent from, government space efforts?

I've some thoughts on that, but no time to put them down right now. The comments section is open, however.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:16 AM

Post-Surveillance Review

Posner proposes a set of firewalls with criminal penalties and post intercept review in today's WSJ:

It is a mistake to think that the only way to prevent abuses of a surveillance program is by requiring warrants. Congress could enact a statute that would subject warrantless electronic surveillance to tight oversight and specific legal controls, as follows:

1. Oversight: The new statute would --

(a) Create a steering committee for national security electronic surveillance composed of the attorney general, the director of national intelligence, the secretary of homeland security (chairman), and a senior or retired federal judge or justice appointed by the chief justice of the United States. The committee would monitor all such surveillance to assure compliance with the Constitution and laws.

(b) Require the NSA to submit to the FISA court, every six months, a list of the names and other identifying information of all persons whose communications had been intercepted without a warrant in the previous six months, with a brief statement of why these individuals had been targeted. If the court concluded that an interception had been inappropriate, it would so report to the steering committee and the congressional intelligence committees.

2. Specific controls: The statute would --

(a) Authorize "national security electronic surveillance" outside FISA's existing framework, provided that Congress declared a national emergency and the president certified that such surveillance was necessary in the national interest. Warrants would continue to be required for all physical searches and for all electronic surveillance for which FISA's existing probable-cause requirement could be satisfied.

(b) Define "national security" narrowly, excluding "ecoterrorism," animal-rights terrorism, and other forms of political violence that, though criminal and deplorable, do not endanger the nation.

(c) Sunset after five years, or sooner if the declaration of national emergency was rescinded.

(d) Forbid any use of intercepted information for any purpose other than "national security" as defined in the statute (point b above). Thus the information could not be used as evidence or leads in a prosecution for ordinary crime. There would be heavy criminal penalties for violating this provision, to allay concern that "wild talk" picked up by electronic surveillance would lead to criminal investigations unrelated to national security.

(e) Require responsible officials to certify to the FISA court annually that there had been no violations of the statute during the preceding year. False certification would be punishable as perjury.

(f) Bar lawsuits challenging the legality of the NSA's current warrantless surveillance program. Such lawsuits would distract officials from their important duties, to no purpose given the new statute.

Destroying the negative data would be the only thing I would add to assure that Posner's robot searchers don't tell their tales to humans. I would subtract the barring of lawsuits. We need some catharsis. I would also subtract the Congressional declaration. Why should we expect the targets to give us any notice that they are on the war path?

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 06:36 AM

Too Late?

Trent Telenko thinks that Iran may already have nukes. It would fit the current pattern of their behavior, unfortunately.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:55 AM

February 14, 2006
Good Valentine's Day Advice For The Ladies

Don't get your love-life advice from Hollywood.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:53 PM

It Says, "Fitzgerald Is A Wienie"

Am I the only one who thinks that this is an hilarious story?

Prosecutors can't read Libby's handwriting

Ex-Cheney chief of staff asked to decipher notes in Plame case

Talk about Keystone Kops.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:49 AM

Aliens Having S3x

This is a pretty funny cartoon, and as Professor Volokh points out, it shows how the whole "can't show pictures of Mohammed" thing has descended into self parody.

So now, the perennially offended muslims are offended by a cartoon of which there's no way to tell from the image itself whether it's Mohammed or not--one can only tell from the context of the joke.

It reminds me of the story a few years ago about the bar in Colorado that had to stop selling teeshirts that depicted two aliens having s3x because they were too lewd for the town elders. I (and no doubt others) pointed out that if they were aliens, there was no way to tell whether or not the activity in which they were engaged was s3xu@l (sorry--I don't want to get top-listed on google for the search "aliens s3x"). They could, for example, simply have been feeding each other, or communicating somehow. One occasional commenter here, in fact, emailed me at the time that it reminded him of the old "Life in Hell" strip when Binky (or one of the other one-eared rabbits) is being chastised for smoking, and he says "I'm not smoking--I'm sucking p00p through a straw."

That's the point to which this idiocy has devolved. Eugene is right:

Well, I have to admit: The folks who are offended by this have a First Amendment right to be offended. They should feel entirely free to be offended.

The rest of us should feel entirely free, as a matter of civility as well as of law, to say: Your decision to be offended by this particular cartoon gives you no rights (again, as a matter of civility as well as of law) to tell us to stop printing it.

More on the underlying conceptual issue — the difficult but necessary distinction between (more or less) reasonable taking of offense and unreasonable taking of offense — later; I also hope then to talk in some measure about the distinction between this cartoon and others that I do think can reasonably be found to be offensive, and that probably shouldn't (as a matter of civility) have been published in the first instance, though it is proper to publish them now in order to explain the controversy. For now, it seems to me that this incident does plenty to illustrate the danger of the "it's wrong to publish any cartoons that offend people" attitude.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:33 AM

OK EA (Oklahoma Spaceport Environmental Assessment)

The FAA Oklahoma Spaceport Draft Environmental Assessment (EA) is available for download (6 MB). I haven't read it yet, but I can already say it is very similar to the Mojave Spaceport one. That's because there is an XCOR Xerus on the front cover. They are soliciting comments and will have a public meeting in Oklahoma on March 9.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 06:43 AM

Space Elevator Progress

Liftport has had a successful test.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:38 AM

February 13, 2006
Epstein's Tap Dance

Richard Epstein weighs in on the wiretap issue on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal with Executive Power on Steroids. While claiming to be for legal wiretaps, he is strongly against illegal ones:

The major danger with presidential surveillance does not lie in this particular overreaching of executive power. It's what comes next. If President Bush can ignore FISA, then he can disregard a congressional prohibition against the use of nuclear force.

Perhaps too melodramatic to be convincing. When I did Oxford debate in high school, every plan from water quality to farm policy ended with nuclear war. But there are myriad ways that presidential powers could become tyrannical if a Jacksonian president took the law into his own hands. I may not like Jackson as chief magistrate, but he sure knew how to give a good speech.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 03:28 PM

All The News Not Fit To Print

An Iraqi mayor gives thanks to America and its troops:

Our city was the main base of operations for Abu Mousab Al Zarqawi. The city was completely held hostage in the hands of his henchmen. Our schools, governmental services, businesses and offices were closed. Our streets were silent, and no one dared to walk them. Our people were barricaded in their homes out of fear; death awaited them around every corner. Terrorists occupied and controlled the only hospital in the city. Their savagery reached such a level that they stuffed the corpses of children with explosives and tossed them into the streets in order to kill grieving parents attempting to retrieve the bodies of their young. This was the situation of our city until God prepared and delivered unto them the courageous soldiers of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, who liberated this city, ridding it of Zarqawi’s followers after harsh fighting, killing many terrorists, and forcing the remaining butchers to flee the city like rats to the surrounding areas, where the bravery of other 3d ACR soldiers in Sinjar, Rabiah, Zumar and Avgani finally destroyed them.

Of course, he's probably just another imperialist Amerikkkan tool.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:18 PM

A Precious Quote

From Henry Spencer, over at sci.space.policy:

As various people have pointed out in the past, to judge by the fuss that gets made when a few of them die, astronauts clearly are priceless national assets -- exactly the sort of people you should not be risking in an experimental-class vehicle.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:33 PM

Life In The Twenty-First Century

Nanotube capacitors.

Using nanotube structures, the LEES invention promises a significant increase on the storage capacity of existing commercial ultracapacitors by storing electrical fields at an atomic level. The new LEES ultracapacitors could replace the conventional battery in everything from the smallest MP3 players through to electric automobiles and beyond, yielding batteries with a lifetime equivalent to the product they power and recharging times inside a minute. Most significantly, they promise a much smaller and lighter “battery”, and will be an enabling technology for many new concepts such as electric bicycles with the “burst” peak power of a motorcycle, or electrical trams with the capacity of a train but without the infrastructure. In automotive terms, they raise the possibility of an integrated starter/generator and the capability of ultra-efficient regenerative braking systems.

So, what's the catch? Well, no obvious violations of physics, but unfortunately, the article doesn't describe a time frame for getting them from the lab into your iPod. It seems almost inevitable, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:11 PM

$1 Billion/year in Twenty Years

I tracked down the cite to the following quote in The Economic Impact of Commercial Space Transportation on the US Economy: 2004.

Recent market studies have shown public space travel has the potential to become a billion dollar industry within 20 years.

It's the famous 2002 Futron study made public in October 2004. On the bullish side, still no accounting for games. No accounting for $200,000 starting prices (It assumes $100,000) which is bullish for price, bearish for quantity. On the bearish side, still none of the demand flown off. Why am I analyzing 4 year old data when I could be testing the market personally for a little more than the cost of a new study?

I am doing that, too.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 01:53 PM

Down The Memory Hole

Gaaahhhh...

They've changed the story. Note same link as before, but all references to Wilson and the 2003 SOTU have been deleted, just as I feared they would (thanks to emailer Abigail Brayden). Guess that story never even happened.

And of all the bad luck, I'd been keeping the original one open in a window, just in case they did this. But I had a computer freezeup this morning, had to reboot (thanks, Microsoft!) and I hadn't captured a screenshot.

But as the Abigail points out, what they did was redirect the original link to the new story. The old one is still there, with a new URL.

Interesting. Here's something else interesting. The Deseret News has a version of the story from Friday in which the wording has been changed to make it more accurate. It now reads:

Wilson's revelations cast doubt on President Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to develop a nuclear bomb and had sought to buy uranium in Africa as one of the administration's key justifications for going to war in Iraq.

I wonder who edited that one, and if it was in response to blogospheric complaints? And, of course, still no response from AP to my email.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:19 AM

A Real Paper Rocket

A lot of people disparage newcomers to the space field as having "paper rockets."

Well, at little cost, you can now make your own paper Saturn V. And here's another company that's going to be offering a paper MLP and crawler. The pictures are pretty amazing, considering the construction materials.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:45 AM

Lunar Transportation Infrastructure

Tom Cuddihy (to whom congratulations on his upcoming marriage are owed), inspired by some musings on the subject by Jon Goff, runs some numbers on reusing lunar landers, and finds that (unsurprisingly), it doesn't make sense. At least with the assumptions that he uses.

The utility of reusable space transportation elements is heavily dependent on the cost of propellants in all of the transportation nodes through which they operate. If we are going to deliver all propellants from earth, to the surface of the moon, using chemical propulsion, then it's not possible to justify reuse of the lander (and in fact it would be impossible to justify reuse of the crew module itself, except for the fact that we have to return crew, anyway). If we are to have a cost-effective cis-lunar transportation infrastructure, it's not sufficient to get the cost of LEO delivery down (though it is certainly necessary). We also either need to manufacture propellants on the moon, or deliver them to L1 via low-thrust high-Isp tugs from LEO, or both.

This was discussed (I believe--at least I wrote a lengthy input to it) in the final Boeing report on the CE&R contract (a document that NASA apparently never even bothered to look at once Steidle was fired and they came up with ESAS).

OK, enough space blogging for a while. I've got to get back to work.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:23 AM

Why NASA?

At The Space Review today, in the context of NASA's new budget, Jeff Foust reprises one of my recurring themes--that we can't make sensible policy decisions until we decide what we're trying to accomplish and what the purpose of a space program is.

These editorials all seem to follow the old argument that robots are better, cheaper, and safer means of exploring the solar system than humans. However, buried in that debate is a deeper issue that is almost never brought up in superficial newspaper editorials and other commentary: what is NASA’s underlying mission? There is an unstated assumption among just about everyone who engages in this debate—either in favor of human or robotic missions—that NASA’s purpose is some sort of space exploration, but one that is rarely defined in more specific language. That nebulous notion of “exploration” means different things to different people.

Actually, I'd go further, and say that NASA has purposes beyond exploration (e.g, encouragement of technology development, and developing a space-faring nation), but it's even harder to debate that one.

In any event, unfortunately, it remains a debate that the nation continues to avoid, and we will continue to have a policy mess until we have it and reach a conclusion.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:15 AM

Recognition

I'd like to add my name to the list of luminaries at the bottom of this letter. Jim Muncy has been an unsung (or at least not sufficiently sung) hero of commercial space for decades.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:04 AM

Is NASA Becoming Politicized?

Well, that depends on what you mean. NASA has always been politicized--it is a government agency, after all. Anyone who thinks that the agency has ever made decisions, from what part of the country in which to award a contract, to whether or not to ship money off to Russia, that weren't driven strongly by politics has no understanding of how government agencies work. The question here is, has the science that NASA purports to do and report become more politicized?

Troublingly, the answer may indeed by yes, but again, it's still nothing new. On the other hand, the Sentinel damages its credibility when it writes:

Former Administrator Sean O'Keefe made an unprecedented decision that fall to campaign on behalf of Republicans. In the final days before the election, he visited Huntsville, Ala., home of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, to endorse U.S. Rep. Bob Riley, R-Ala., for governor. A similar visit to Cocoa Beach to stump for U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Oviedo, was canceled only after O'Keefe's flight was delayed.

There's nothing unprecedented about this. Where were they when Dan Goldin was doing the same thing with Barbara Mikulski in the nineties?

Setting that aside, though, certainly hiring an unqualified political hack and college dropout for a powerful position at the Public Affairs Office (PAO) was shameful, but just as much of that thing went on in general during the Clinton years (anyone remember Craig Livingstone, the former bar bouncer made head of White House security?). And it's not like PAO has ever been a bastion of competence, either. Certainly, though, it's troubling when you have people with very little understanding of science (at least based on the quotes) telling scientists how they have to present their data (the young idiot insisted on prefixing the phrase "Big Bang" with the word "theory," as though this was somehow pejorative--ah, well, just one more blow to the reputation of journalism degrees).

But there is also this myth that science is science, and that scientists never let their own personal political viewpoints color their interpretation of the data, and that scientists can be, and are above the fray of political debates. Unfortunately, particularly when it comes to environmental issues, many scientists have allowed themselves to become political pawns in issues for which many of them have sympathy, and they often attribute too much certainty to their conclusions than is justified by the data, because they find them personally appealing from a policy perspective.

In fact, it seems to me that claims of scientific objectivity are similar (though perhaps slightly better founded, given the nature of the scientific method and peer review) to those of journalistic objectivity--the notion that somehow, despite one's personal prejudices, it's still possible to play it straight down the center. We know that in journalism, that's a nonsensical conceit, and we should be wary of the same argument made by people with science degrees.

The lesson here, I think, is that rather than have an unrealistic expectation of pure scientific objectivity coming from a government agency, we should instead expect politics to intrude, both from without and within, and always maintain a realistic and skeptical view of the process with as much transparency as possible, and keep the debate flowing freely with no assumptions of nobility on either side. Blogs can help with this.

[Update at 9 AM EST]

Thomas James has a Carnival of Space Moonbattery. It really is related, honest.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:00 AM

February 12, 2006
Payback's A Bitch

I'll bet that some Senators wish they'd been a little more reasonable about Senator Coburn's medical practice. It was surely just one more reason to be unwilling to play ball (though I suspect that in fact it probably wouldn't matter).

When Coburn disparaged an earmark for Seattle -- $500,000 for a sculpture garden -- Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., was scandalized: ``We are not going to watch the senator pick out one project and make it into a whipping boy.'' She invoked the code of comity: ``I hope we do not go down the road deciding we know better than home state senators about the merits of the projects they bring to us.'' And she warned of Armageddon: ``I tell my colleagues, if we start cutting funding for individual projects, your project may be next.'' But Coburn, who does not do earmarks, thinks Armageddon sounds like fun.

I hope he has lots of fun.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:48 PM

Crying In Their Vin

French winemakers are suffering the consequences of their government's defense of Saddam, EU policies that keep the Euro high, and resting on their own laurels. There are too many good wines in the world now to expect to sell it just because it's French:

Riot police will be on standby this week for clashes, expected to involve up to 16,000 winemakers. Many of the demonstrators feel they have nothing to lose, since up to half of them are expected to go to the wall in the next five years unless the French government - or the Europe Union - bails them out.

Critics say French wine producers have brought the crisis on themselves by arrogantly overproducing wines of indifferent quality that do not sell.

Last year Mrs Montosson did not sell a single drop from her 50-acre vineyard for eight months because she refused the price offered by her agent. "He offered me only half of what I'd got for my wine the year before," she said. "I said it was too low and refused to sell. But afterwards the prices just fell lower and lower."

It's not all about the boycott, but that has to be a major factor.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:10 PM

Blow-Up Males

Mark Steyn's latest gem:

Quite how Britain's Muslim Association found out about Mustafa Shag in order to be offended by him is not clear. It may be that there was some confusion: given that "blowup males" are one of Islam's leading exports, perhaps some believers went along expecting to find Ahmed and Walid modeling the new line of Semtex belts. Instead, they were confronted by just another filthy infidel sex gag. The Muslim Association's complaint, needless to say, is that the sex toy "insults the Prophet Muhammad -- who also has the title al-Mustapha.''

In a world in which Danish cartoons insult the prophet and Disney Piglet mugs insult the prophet and Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirl designs insult the prophet, maybe it would just be easier to make a list of things that don't insult him. Nonetheless, the Muslim Association wrote to the Ann Summers sex-shop chain, "We are asking you to have our Most Revered Prophet's name 'Mustafa' and the afflicted word 'shag' removed."

If I were a Muslim, I'd be "hurt" and "humiliated" that the revered prophet's name is given not to latex blowup males but to so many real blowup males: The leader of the 9/11 plotters? Mohammed Atta. The British Muslim who self-detonated in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif. The gunman who shot up the El Al counter at LAX? Heshamed Mohamed Hedayet. The former U.S. Army sergeant who masterminded the slaughter at the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed. The murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh? Mohammed Bouyeri. The notorious Sydney gang rapist? Mohammed Skaf. The Washington sniper? John Allen Muhammed. If I were a Muslim, I would be deeply offended that the prophet's name is the preferred appellation of so many killers and suicide bombers on every corner of the earth.

Yes. Where are all the protests about that?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:38 AM

"Brought Up To Hate"

An Egyptian muslim describes her culture:

Is it any surprise that after decades of indoctrination in a culture of hate, that people actually do hate? Arab society has created a system of relying on fear of a common enemy. It's a system that has brought them much-needed unity, cohesion and compliance in a region ravaged by tribal feuds, instability, violence, and selfish corruption. So Arab leaders blame Jews and Christians rather than provide good schools, roads, hospitals, housing, jobs, or hope to their people.

For 30 years I lived inside this war zone of oppressive dictatorships and police states. Citizens competed to appease and glorify their dictators, but they looked the other way when Muslims tortured and terrorised other Muslims. I witnessed honour killings of girls, oppression of women, female genital mutilation, polygamy and its devastating effect on family relations. All of this is destroying the Muslim faith from within.

There isn't going to be a pretty end to this.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:25 AM

February 11, 2006
The Inevitable March Continues

Wretchard says that diplomacy won't prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Not that this is news, but it's useful to continue to point out to the naifs who fantasize otherwise.

This is probably the largest global crisis we've faced since the Cold War, and possibly since 1938, though it wasn't recognized as that serious a crisis at the time. We will either have to accept the reality of a nuclear Iran (and a nuclear Iran run by mullahs, not by the Iranian people) or a war with Iran to prevent that, at whatever the cost. Neither option has a low cost, but at some point, I hope that the nation will recognize that the cost of the latter will be lower.

I've lived through most of the Cold War, when we grew up thinking that our nuclear incineration was almost inevitable, with duck and cover drills in elementary school, but in many ways, I fear the future now more than I have at any previous time in my life of half a century.

We are in for ugly times, not long from now, and the best we can hope for at this point is to minimize the horror, because we've allowed a new totalitarianism to grow, unhampered, for too long. Let us just hope that we can act sooner than Chamberlain did.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:16 PM

No Response From AP

Yesterday, after noting the false reporting on the president's 2003 SOTU address, I attempted to contact the reporter directly. Unfortunately, AP doesn't make this very easy to do. If you go their contact page, it just says that for any queries to correspondents, to send an email to info@ap.org. I should also note that the reporter is not listed under any of the categories I checked (national reporting, news features, or regional reporters). (S)he may be a freelancer.

So anyway, I sent the following email to that address:

In this AP story (link from Yahoo), the reporter writes:

"Wilson's revelations cast doubt on President Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon as one of the administration's key justifications for going to war in Iraq."

Wilson's "revelations" (read, in large part, proven lies) couldn't have done this, because, the president did not make such a claim. Go back and read the address.

He said that the British government had learned that Saddam had *attempted* to purchase uranium from *Africa*. He didn't say that the attempt had succeeded, and there was no mention of Niger (Africa is a very big continent). This is an ongoing media myth that AP has a responsibility to quash, not promulgate.

It's about twenty-four hours later, and I've not even received an acknowledgment of the email, let alone a substantive response. Down the memory hole, I guess.

I note the irony of the large-font words on the contact page: "We Welcome Your Feedback." I guess they do, as long as we understand that it's apparently the information equivalent of sending it into a black hole.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:20 AM

His Own Petard

As NASA continues to chop everything in its budget other than the least cost-effective things--Shuttle, ISS and ESAS--Lou Friedman of the Planetary Society is starting to whine about the loss of space science. But Clark Lindsey points out the irony:

[Dr. Griffin's plan to delay planetary science programs] would make perfect sense if the CEV program promised to significantly lower the cost of space access and of its utilization. Lower transport costs would make all of those science projects much cheaper to build and operate and would allow for many more science missions than can be flown now.

However, as has been argued often here and in many other sites, flying capsules on Shuttle derived expendables and building a hugely expensive and seldom launched heavy lifter just isn't going to lower the cost of space very much over what it is now. While halting the Shuttle program now would help to fund a handful of space science missions, it would not help overcome the long term limitations to space exploration and development caused by the extremely high costs of getting to space...

...I'll note that much of the basic CEV architecture using Shuttle components was born via a Planetary Society sponsored study (pdf) by Griffin and several collaborators before he came to NASA.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:22 AM

Idiot Bureaucrat Defeat

Clark Lindsey has some good news on the model rocketry front--a legal victory over ATFE (a situation about which I've written previously). I love this quote from the ruling judge:

The problem in this case is that ATFE's explanation for its determination that APCP deflagrates lacks any coherence. We therefore owe no deference to ATFE's purported expertise because we cannot discern it. ATFE has neither laid out a concrete standard for classifying materials along the burn-deflagrate-detonate continuum, nor offered data specific to the burn speed of APCP when used for its 'common or primary purpose.' On this record, the agency's decision cannot withstand judicial review.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:18 AM

February 10, 2006
Snuck It Under The Radar

I get very irritated when people, even intelligent people, who I respect greatly, use the phrases "tax cuts" and "tax-rate cuts" interchangeably, and one of the things that I'd do if I were King would be to outlaw this.

But because so many are unfamiliar with the difference, the administration has managed to pull a fast one on the Beltway. They are going to require an analysis of tax proposals by scoring them dynamically, rather than (absurdly) they've done in the past, statically. What does this mean?

In the past, any time the CBO or GAO did an analysis of a proposed change in tax rate changes, they assumed that said rate changes would have no effect on the growth rate of the economy, either in the general economy, or in the specific economic sphere in which the tax change would take place. Anyone familiar with economics knows that such an assumption is...to put it gently...nonsense.

We can't necessarily know what the effect of a tax rate change will be on an economic sector, but to assume that it will be nil is ridiculous.

So, people who are "scoring" (that is, attempting to estimate what the revenue effects of a proposed tax change will be) will now have a more difficult job--they will have to attempt to estimate what the effect of the tax change will be on the affected economic sectors when coming up with their estimate of revenue change for the federal government.

Will they get it right? Who knows. But at least now, they'll have to make the attempt, instead of absurdly assuming that the effect is zero. It will also provide one more thing to argue about when we attempt to reduce tax rates, but since it will also have that effect on attempts to increase them, that's a wash, in my opinion. At least it will force a debate on the subject, and make it a respectable topic of discussion.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:27 PM

Quite A Family

Elon Musk's wife, Justine, is a horror-fiction writer with a blog, and a new book out.

Probably doesn't hurt to be married to a multi-millionaire.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:56 PM

The Big Lie Continues

AP continues to promulgate the myth:

Wilson's revelations cast doubt on President Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon as one of the administration's key justifications for going to war in Iraq.

Of course, it wasn't possible for Joe Wilson to cast doubt on such a claim, because President Bush never made such a claim, in the SOTU or elsewhere, but that never seems to stop these people. Why do they continue to think they can get away with this, when anyone can go read that speech?

We've been over this many times, but apparently, it's necessary to do so again. Here are the sixteen words:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

That's it. It doesn't say that uranium was sold to Iraq, it doesn't say Niger. It says that the British government has learned about attempts to purchase uranium from Africa. Africa is a big place. Nowhere in the speech does it claim that the attempts were successful, and nowhere in the speech is Niger mentioned. The sentence, as written in the AP story, is completely false, but many persist in believing it, because apparently it confirms their prejudices. In their minds, it's "fake but accurate."

We need to call out Ms. Locy and her editor on this.

As to the story about Libby testifying that Cheney told him to release classified info, I'll wait for some actual facts to come out, rather than rumors from unnamed sources.

[Update in the afternoon]

Powerline says that the story about Libby leaks of classified info is much ado about not much:

The NIE has been declassified since the summer of 2003, and we have quoted from it many times since then. These proceedings from the House of Representatives show that the NIE had been declassified no later than July 21, 2003. So it's not exactly a mystery whether "that happened in this instance." There are only two alternatives here: either AP reporters are too lazy to spend 30 seconds on Google to educate themselves as to what happened during the ancient history of 2003, or they write articles that are deliberately misleading.

Or outright false, as demonstrated above.

[Saturday morning update]

I've still received no response from the AP on this matter.

[Monday update]

They've redirected that URL to a new version of the story, absent the misstatements.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:33 AM

AST Conference Blogging

Unfortunately, I haven't been to the FAA Commercial Space Transportation conference (held every February) in a few years. The years that I have the time, I don't have the money, and the years that I have the money, I can't find the time (the latter, which was the case this year, is a better situation). Funny how that works.

Anyway, while I didn't go, Clark Lindsey did, and he's got a report from yesterday's festivities.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:47 AM

February 09, 2006
There Goes The Popcorn Concession

Cindy Sheehan won't be running against DiFi (whose intellect I'm also unimpressed with, though she's nowhere near the moron that Cindy Sheehan is). Too bad. It would have been an entertaining self-immolation among CA Democrats.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:12 PM

Imminent Test Firing?

The count is back on (if you can believe the blog--he says not to, probably to cover his keister). If there were no problems, the test should have occurred by now.

[Update at 4:05 PM EST]

Close, but no cigar:

A few seconds before the engine ingited [sic], the count was held. They are now safing the vehicle and we will find out soon if they will restart the count and take it all the way to ignition.

It's sounding like a good thing that they did this test before launch. I think they're finding out how hard building and flying rockets is.

[Update about 4:30 PM EST]

They've recycled the count to T-15 minutes.

I find the fact that they can take the engine all the way to ignition and recycle to a fifteen-minute count a testament to the simplicity of the system (none of this having to empty tanks and recycle to the next day stuff). I'm not sure what it says about reliability at this point, though.

[Update at 4:50 PM EST]

They've stopped the count again, but this latest post expands on my comments above about repeated launch cycles, and how far the technology has allowed us to come in that regard. It also provides some explanation of the issues they've been encountering today.

Once again, though, it points out that they weren't ready for prime time when it came to launching (and that these test firing rehearsals were a good idea). That's what test flights are for, and so far, while they haven't launched, they haven't lost anything, either, except some time. Hopefully, this "shakedown cruise" will reveal a lot of things that will give them better schedule reliability in the future.

[Another update a couple minutes later]

It really is a family affair. Note the last name of the commenter to this latest post.

[Update a few minutes later, for those not following the Kwajrocket blog]

They've emptied the propellant tanks and are analyzing data, but it doesn't sound like they've yet given up on an engine firing today.

[Late night update]

Two to four weeks (sorry, no permalink--just click on the link to "New Launch Date Update.")

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:08 PM

To Increase Demand For Chicken Soup?

Syria accuses Israel of creating the bird flu:

An article published by the newspaper argues that Israel spread the virus in the Far East to mislead the world.

Yes, those Jews are quite tricky that way.

The newspaper backed its suspicions by citing a 1998 report in the Sunday Times that Israel is developing a biological “ethnic bomb” that would kill Arabs and not Jews. According to the Times, Israeli scientists are trying to identify genes characteristic to Arabs and then develop viruses that attack these genes. The newspaper said the program is being carried out at the Institute for Biological Research in Nes Tsiona near Tel Aviv.

I'm sure that the Israelis will be marching in the streets, calling for beheadings, and burning embassies any minute, at this outrageous libel.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:42 PM

Problem At Kwaj?

They were supposed to have their engine test a few minutes ago, but they're on a hold at T-1.

[Update a few minutes later]

They haven't restarted the count, yet, but Kimbal has some pictures up. Keep checking the main page of the blog for updates.

[Update at 4:05 PM EST[

Close, but no cigar:

A few seconds before the engine ingited, the count was held. They are now safing the vehicle and we will find out soon if they will restart the count and take it all the way to ignition.

It's sounding like a good thing that they did this test before launch. I think they're finding out how hard building and flying rockets is.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:35 PM

Darwin Award Attempt

What kind of idiot would have a pet lionfish and not know how dangerous it is?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:20 PM

Shut Up, He Explained

That's what the head of Hezbollah says that President Bush and SecState Rice should do:

In Beirut, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah urged Muslims worldwide to keep demonstrating until there is an apology over the drawings and Europe passes laws forbidding insults to the prophet.

The head of the guerrilla group, which is backed by Iran and Syria, spoke before a mass Ashoura procession. Whipping up the crowds on the most solemn day for Shiites worldwide, Nasrallah declared:

"Defending the prophet should continue all over the world. Let Condoleezza Rice and Bush and all the tyrants shut up. We are an Islamic nation that cannot tolerate, be silent or be lax when they insult our prophet and sanctities."

"We will uphold the messenger of God not only by our voices but also by our blood," he told the crowds, estimated by organizers at about 700,000. Police had no final estimates but said the figure was likely to be even higher.

You know, people who talk about upholding things with their blood often get an opportunity to do so (and often futilely).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:28 AM

This Will Make Her Even More Angry

Hillary's presidential poll numbers at Rasmussen are at a low:

...just 27% of Americans say they would definitely vote for the former first lady while 43% would definitely vote against. Still, 59% of Americans believe it is somewhat or very likely that she will be the Democrat's nominee in 2008.

Among Democrats, the number who would definitely vote for Clinton dropped 11 percentage points over the past two weeks.

This is a microcosm of the Democrats' problem. Their base won't allow them to nominate anyone who can win a general election, whether Hillary (who is a powerhouse of the party but politically unappealing to much of the electorate) or someone who will have to tack too far left to win the nomination to find their way back to the center in the fall.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:52 AM

The Roots Of Democracy

A long, but useful and timely (given our attempts to create new ones in seemingly unfertile soil) essay over at Public Review.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:47 AM

Gargantuan

Even brobdingnagian. Lileks comments on the latest federal budget:

You can expect the news stories to fasten on that 5.5 percent cut, since the media seem to operate with three unspoken and largely unexamined assumptions: We don't spend enough on education; conservatives don't want to spend anything on education anyway since it leads to godless rational beliefs like "the Earth is round"; and a reduction in the overall rate of increase is tantamount to a reduction in funds.

Really? If you find two $5 bills and lose one, are you $5 ahead or $5 behind? The latter, if you work in Washington.

A reduction in the projected rate of growth is always a cut. Note the headlines about the `07 proposals: "Bush's $2.77 Trillion Budget Plan Calls for Medicare Cuts," said The New York Times. The Washington Post had the same idea, and graciously upped the budget total: "Bush's $2.8T Budget Proposal Cuts Domestic Programs."

To which Democrats say: But of course. To which Republicans say: If only.

Conservatives will still, for the most part, vote Republican, even if they weep and rend their garments before checking off "R." Why? Because they see Democrats as the ones more likely to tax everything that isn't nailed down, levy "gravity user fees" for things that are, take away private health care, strangle school choice and want SpecOps to get a warrant before sabotaging Iranian nuke factories.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:45 AM

Cool Toy

I'd sure feel bad if I crashed it, though. I wonder if they have a scale T-38 to train with?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:26 AM

Counting Down

Today SpaceX is going to have a test firing on the pad. If it's successful, they'll launch tomorrow (and there will supposedly be a webcast--go to the site for details). Kimbal Musk (Elon's brother?) is blogging from Kwajalein.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:29 AM

Fake Republican

There are a lot of dim bulbs in the Senate, and there's a lot of competition for the dimmest (Patty Murray, Babs Boxer, Jim Jeffords, Susan Collins come immediately to mind, and I'm sure that there are others), but my impression from every interview with him that I've ever heard is that Lincoln Chafee is not qualified (in Jonah Goldberg's famous quip) to be a spell checker in an M&M factory. The Conways have a roundup of his political prospects this fall, including some other oatmeal-brained commentary from him:

Laffey described Chafee's views on the region as "two standard deviations outside of American and Rhode Island thought." In an effort to make the point, he quoted Chafee's own words questioning the legitimacy of what the senator termed American "gripes" with Iran's nuclear program...Chafee, he said, "doesn't get it at all" that "there are some really bad people in the world."

They're upset that the National Republican Senatorial Committee continues to support him against the much more conservative Laffey, presumably on the assumption that he's the only Republican (to the infinitesimal degree that he is) that can win Rhode Island. But here's where the dim bulbedness comes into play. According to them, if even with the support of the NRSC, he loses the nomination, he'll run as an independent.

But that would seem to me to result in a Republican win, because an independent (and liberal) Chafee would split the liberal vote with the Democrat candidate, whereas the Republicans would coalesce around Laffey. So this really is a fight worth waging, and it not only doesn't necessarily risk a Senate seat for Republicans, but it might be an opportunity to replace Chafee with a real Republican, and provide a lesson to the other RINOs.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:46 AM

February 08, 2006
Not Interested

And speaking of Swedes, everyone knows that Swedish women are hot, right?

Well, these guys don't seem to think so:

Six gay penguins at a German zoo are still refusing to mate with females of the species flown in from Sweden in 2005, the zoo said on Wednesday.

But this was the funniest part:

The initiative to "turn" the penguins and make them mate had prompted a furious response from gay rights groups.

In a statement posted on its Internet website, the zoo on Wednesday sought to defend itself from fresh criticism.

"We will be delighted if the penguins form even one heterosexual couple and manage to produce first an egg, and then a little one," it said.

"But of course we accept the male couples that have formed and we are not trying to enforce heterosexuality, as we were accused of doing last year."

Will the oppression of gay penguins, and suppression of their natural orientation, never end?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:27 PM

Is George Voinovich Blubbering Again?

He should be. John Bolton has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. By a Swede.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:22 PM

A Quantified Culture

James McCormick has a fascinating book review over at Albion's Seedlings, on how westerners think differently, because of our use of math and the scientific method. Sadly, it's a trait that we may be losing as a society, because we value it too little.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:33 AM

They All Look Alike To Him

NBC Brian Williams couldn't tell the difference between Barack Obama and Harold Ford.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:02 AM

February 07, 2006
I Never Imagined

...that I'd live to see (and, well...hear) the day that a news announcer said the words, "...the cartoon death toll is up to nine."

Only in an Islamist world.

[Wednesday morning update]

Judith Weiss says (yes, yes, I know...I was shocked, too) that these demonstrations are not spontaneous. And here's more from the WSJ.

While there are people bleeding and dying in Iraq, this is, more than anything, a propaganda war. And unfortunately, our own press is largely, knowingly or not, working on the side of the enemy.

[Another update about 8:30 AM EST]

The problem is spreading to the strife-torn Midwest. Iowahawk (who's been missing in action since Christmas) has the scoop:

...outside of the Dells and a handful of violent outposts near its western Mississippi River border, Wisconsin remained a relatively calm exception to the Midwestern maelstrom surrounding it -- a fact that experts attribute to subtle differences in culture and religion.

"Unlike the ultra-extreme, radical Lutheran sectarians of Iowa and Minnesota, most ethnic Wisconsinites belong to the Wisconsin Lutheran Synod," said Joseph Killian, a Midwestern Studies professor at Emory University in Atlanta. "And if you add in three Super Bowl titles, easier access to beer, and walleye fishing, and you're going to have a much calmer and more stable culture."

All that would change in November with the publication of four cartoons in a Texas office newsletter -- cartoons that today have brought this once happily beer-goggled society to the precipice of all-out culture war.

[One more update]

Amir Tehari writes about the bonfire of the pieties.

[Update late morning]

Meryl Yourish notes some rhetorical slight of hand and subject changing at AP:

Notice how the AP explains why the cartoons are offensive to Muslims. They do not bother to explain a similarly important fact — the one that Jews had absolutely nothing to do with the publication of the cartoons. The fact that the Iranians plan to hold a Holocaust cartoon contest is utterly irrelevant to the issues at hand. But not to the AP, which will turn itself into pretzels trying to explain how the issues are similar.

They use the phrase “in a new turn” to describe this ridiculous notion. This is not a new turn to the story, it is an attempt by the Iranians to turn Muslim protests of the Western values of freedom of speech into something hateful about Jews.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:03 PM

February 06, 2006
The Power Of Multiplication

Eugene Volokh has an interesting (and frightening) series of posts on the innumeracy of both the general population and the press. There are anecdotes that I'd like to think that aren't true, but fear that they are, about science students unable to do simple arithmetic. We've become much too dependent on "computing machines."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:58 PM

Goliaths Beware

I read Glenn's new book on the plane back from California on Friday night (it was a red eye, but I have trouble sleeping on planes unless I'm very, very tired).

There won't be a lot new here to anyone (like, for instance, me) who has been reading the TCS columns on which much of this is based, over the past few years. The basic theme flows throughout--how new technologies are empowering individuals, disempowering the large companies and bureaucracies that have been viewed as the future for the past couple centuries, disintermediating goods and services, and making cottage industries more economically viable.

Examples presented (among many others) are blogs taking down big media (Ra^thergate is cited), musicians marketing and selling music without big record-company contracts, passengers fighting back on September 11th and the "American Dunkirk"--the spontaneous evacuation of lower Manhattan using private vessels to ferry people across the rivers. He also talks about upcoming revolutions in technology, such as life (and in fact, youth) extension.

Even if you are familiar with much of this through reading Instapundit, it remains worthwhile to pull it all together in one place. Interestingly, the one part of the book in which the theme seems to be subsumed, at least to me, was the section on space (already reviewed by Jesse Londin). It starts off very promising, with the chapter titled "Space: It's Not Just For Governments Any More." And he does discuss the need for tourism and private activities, and prizes. But his obvious interest in the general topic of the future of space pulls him astray from the general message of the book, as he wanders off into terraforming, space elevators, etc. While these are interesting topics (at least to me, and many readers of this web site), it's not clear how they relate to empowerment of individuals through advancing technology. They're certainly unlikely to be achieved through a grass-roots, disintermediation approach--it will take a Goliath of some kind to construct them, one suspects. Perhaps the point is that they're technologies which, once developed, whether by Davids or Goliath, in themselves might ultimately empower individuals to become space colonists.

If that was the point, I suppose that it's a useful one, but we're a long way from either of those kinds of capabilities (though space elevators are probably more feasible in the next few decades than terraforming Mars). I would have liked to see more discussion of the near term, and how we can do more with existing technologies, as space-enthusiast Davids, to slay (or at least get the attention of) the Goliath that is the federal space policy establishment (and yes, the problem is much bigger than NASA).

There's also one technical error (in my opinion). In the section on Orion, he claims that chemical rockets don't scale up well, whereas Orion does. I suspect that this guy would be surprised to learn that large chemical rockets are harder to build (though they're certainly harder to raise the money to build). In fact, I'll shock many long-time readers by saying that heavy-lift vehicles do make sense, with this caveat--they must have a large market (the failure of ability to imagine one on the part of investors, whether government or private, was Sea Dragon's downfall). Larger vehicles have less proportion of their weight as "overhead" (e.g., avionics, controllers, valves and plumbing, etc).

That quibble noted, though, I do highly recommend the book. It is indeed thought provoking (and I'm sure that my thoughts would have been far more provoked had I not already been thinking about these things for the entire young millennium). Those who are unfamiliar with these topics will find some interesting linkages between seemingly disparate trends, and much to ponder about the future directions of those trends. For only seventeen bucks plus shipping, as a valuable glimpse of the future, it's a bargain. But it could be an even better deal--Amazon should bundle it with a slingshot.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:20 PM

Heresy

Bill Whittle's been working on a movie script:

(spoiler alert!)

* Men travelling through space WITHOUT THE AID OF GOVERNMENT AGENCIES!
* People facing extreme risks and DECIDING TO TAKE THEM ANYWAY!
* Puny Earthlings using THEIR OWN MONEY ANY DAMN WAY THEY CHOOSE TO!
* Nuclear Energy being portrayed in a NON-EVIL FASHION!
* BUSINESSMEN and ENGINEERS as HEROES!
* PROTESTORS and CELEBRITIES as JOKES!

Full disclosure: I've been kicking ideas around with him over beers and comestibles over the past few months.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:16 AM

February 05, 2006
Watching The Superbowl Commercials

Boy, that one's going to piss off the TSA...

It shows a woman TSAer faking a wanding at the security line to steal a passenger's soft drink.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:05 PM

Horrific

Clark Lindsey has some more perspective on what a waste of money the Shuttle program is currently, given that we aren't even flying it (and perhaps even if we were):

* Elon Musk has spent about $100M so far on developing the line of SpaceX Falcon launchers. The first Falcon 9 launch is scheduled for 2007. He hasn't said how much more money it will take to reach that launch but I doubt it could be more than another $100M.

* Kistler says it needs a few hundred million dollars to finish its fully reusable two stage K-1 vehicle.

* T/Space said it can build a CEV system capable of taking crews and cargo to the ISS for around $500M.

* LockMart once promised to build the VentureStar for $6B. If they had a 100% overrun that would still be less than $13B.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:20 PM

February 04, 2006
Back In FL

I came home on a red eye last night, slept in, and awoke to a lovely thunderstorm about noon.

More later.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:29 AM

February 03, 2006
Joining The Buggy Whips

Western Union sent its last telegram last week.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:03 PM

Surreality

Victor Davis Hanson:

All this lunacy is understood only in a larger surreal landscape. Tibet is swallowed by China. Much of Greek Cyprus is gobbled up by Turkish forces. Germany is 10-percent smaller today than in 1945. Yet only in the Middle East is there even a term "occupied land," one that derived from the military defeat of an aggressive power.

Over a half-million Jews were forcibly cleansed from Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and other Arab cities after the 1967 war; but only on the West Bank are there still refugees who lost their homes. Over a million people were butchered in Rwanda; thousands die each month in Darfur. The world snoozes. Yet less than 60 are killed in a running battle in Jenin, and suddenly the 1.5 million lost in Stalingrad and Leningrad are evoked as the moral objects of comparison, as the globe is lectured about "Jeningrad."

Now the Islamic world is organizing boycotts of Denmark because one of its newspapers chose to run a cartoon supposedly lampooning the prophet Mohammed. We are supposed to forget that it is de rigueur in raucous Scandinavian popular culture to attack Christianity with impunity. Much less are we to remember that Hamas terrorists occupied and desecrated the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in a globally televised charade.

Instead, Danish officials are threatened, boycotts organized, ambassadors recalled — and, yes, Bill Clinton steps forward to offer another lip-biting apology while garnering lecture fees in the oil-rich Gulf, in the manner of his mea culpa last year to the Iranian mullacracy. There is now a pattern to Clintonian apologies — they almost always occur overseas and on someone else's subsidy...

...The only mystery is not how bizarre the news will be from the Middle East, but why the autocratic Middle Easterners feel so confident that any would pay their lunacy such attention.

The answer? Oil and nukes — and sometimes the two in combination.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:06 PM

Alt-Space On The Radio

On NPR, coming up at noon Pacific.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:07 AM

Blimps

Joe Katzman say they're part of the Air Force's future. With civilian applications. I'd love to see dirigibles come back, with modern materials, as aerial cruiseships. I think there'd be a big market for them.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:24 AM

Keeping Fingers Crossed

Clark Lindsey writes that next week's inaugural launch of the Falcon 1 is still on, and that this time it will be webcast. So there was some benefit (to those interested) in the delay.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:20 AM

February 02, 2006
On Track?

I'm still swamped at work, but Clark Lindsey has updated his commercial space timeline. I personally continue to find it quite encouraging, though 2005 wasn't nearly as groundbreaking and eventful as 2004 was.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:16 PM

Extrasolar Planet Next Steps

SpaceToday.net has a good summary of the recently discovered extra solar planet massing only five times as much as ours.

My recommendation for the planet finders is to start looking for wobbles on the wobbles of the super massive planet orbits to see if they can find smaller planets or Moons. Or wobbles on cold binary stars that circle near the hab zone of hotter primaries that may also turn up lower mass planets.

Even if we never directly detect low mass planets, big hab zone planets may be like Jupiter or Saturn and have lots of moons, some of which have comfortable gravity and an atmosphere.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 01:05 AM

February 01, 2006
How Do You Enforce It?

I agree with Ron Bailey's column on Bush's health-care proposals, until I get to his proposed solution:

My advice to President Bush on how really to jumpstart consumer-driven health care: mandatory private health insurance. Poor Americans would be offered a voucher with which they would buy private health coverage. Such vouchers could be paid for by abolishing Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Programs....Mandatory private health insurance would avoid the problem of adverse selection, provide insurance for the currently uninsured and make consumer-driven health care work for every American.

While this would be (in theory) a vast improvement over the current employer-driven mess, there's one problem, which is why I say "in theory": How is it enforced? What happens to people who don't do it? With mandatory auto insurance, one in theory revokes the privilege of driving if one doesn't obey the law, but what's the equivalent for health insurance?

I suppose the libertarian response is, "their tough luck." It's mine, too, but it doesn't seem very politically correct, or from a policy standpoint, politically palatable.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:59 PM

If There Was Any Doubt

...that John McCain is trying to rehabilitate his image with conservatives, in preparation for a run for the White House, this should put it to rest:

Sen. John McCain, who is to endorse Rep. John Shadegg for Maj Leader at a 3:15 Capitol presser, has already started calling around to some of his GOP pals in the House.

One thing to offer an endorsement to his fellow AZ'an and pork-buster, but quite another to actively whip support for his bid.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:25 PM

Suborbital Plug

Rob Wilson over at Out of the Cradle asked me to direct you to a forum where Gary Lantz, engineer at Rocketplane, is currently answering questions. My company, SpaceShot, Inc., is working with Rocketplane to provide suborbital spaceflight prizes to anyone who can enter a skill game tournament for less than $5 per entry.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 10:08 AM

More False Lessons Learned

I've been surprised at how little commentary there is in the blogosphere about today's anniversary, with the only note of it I've seen so far at NASA Watch.

Here's what I wrote at the time (off the top of my head, having just been woken up by a phone call from the east coast telling me that Columbia was missing in action over Texas). And here are some links to other things I wrote on the subject over the next few days. I'd change little of what I wrote then. Unfortunately, NASA (and Congress) don't seem to have learned the lesson from that event or, worse, they've learned the wrong lessons.

From that day three years ago, here's the lesson they should have learned:

The entire NASA budget is now in a cocked hat, because we don't know what the implications are until we know what happened. But it could mean an acceleration of the Orbital Space Plane program (I sincerely hope not, because I believe that this is entirely the wrong direction for the nation, and in fact a step backwards). What I hope that it means is an opportunity for some new and innovative ideas--not techically, but programmatically.

Once again, it demonstrates the fragility of our space transportation infrastructure, and the continuing folly of relying on a single means of getting people into space, and doing it so seldom. Until we increase our activity levels by orders of magnitude, we will continue to operate every flight as an experiment, and we will continue to spend hundreds of millions per flight, and we will continue to find it difficult to justify what we're doing. We need to open up our thinking to radically new ways, both technically and institutionally, of approaching this new frontier.

Anyway, it's a good opportunity to sit back and take stock of why the hell we have a manned space program, what we're trying to accomplish, and what's the best way to accomplish it, something that we haven't done in forty years. For that reason, while the loss of the crew and their scientific results is indeed a tragedy, some good may ultimately come out of it.

Unfortunately, while there was a minimal debate within the government, it wasn't really a public one, and the real issues never got properly thrashed out--we still, as a nation, don't really know why we're doing this. And we still have the mentality that the way to get the nation into space and keep it there is for the space agency to develop a launch system to its own specifications, with a low flight rate and high costs, with no resiliency or diversity of approaches. The CEV program looks more and more like the OSP every day. OSP was a capsule designed to go to ISS that might have evolved into a lunar transportation vehicle. CEV is a capsule originally conceived to go to the moon with an early capability to deliver crew to ISS, but the latter goal seems to have come to the forefront, with the dropping of the methane requirement and potential acceleration of the program to close the Shuttle "gap."

If CEV is successful, it will be just as expensive to operate as Shuttle, probably even if one ignores the high development costs of both it and its all-new (and yes, despite the marketing hype from NASA and ATK, the SRM-based "stick" will essentially be a new vehicle development) launcher. It will have the theoretical capability to get to the Moon (assuming that NASA can find the money to fund the ridiculously expensive Shuttle-derived heavy lifter on which they needlessly insist, and the lunar lander and departure stages), and it will probably be safer, but that in itself won't make it worth the money that it will cost, particularly when one contemplates the opportunity cost of how that hundred billion could be better spent.

The other lesson that NASA seems to have mislearned is one of basic economics. We have not been rational in the decision to return to flight. Jeff Foust notes some recent foolish congressional commentary:

"One of the arguments that NASA uses is that we have a contractual obligation to 15 other countries with the ISS," said Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL). "There is no sympathy for that argument with the Congress." Feeney said that if there is another foam-shedding incident with the shuttle (or presumably another problem of similar seriousness) "it's going to be really hard to save at that point, really hard to save" the shuttle program.

As someone who considers international cooperation in space to be (in general, though there have been exceptions, one of which is certainly not the space station) a bug, rather than a feature, I agree that Congress shouldn't let this drive the decision. But the notion that the Shuttle program's fate should be a function of whether or not we shed more foam is nonsensical.

The last Shuttle flight we had, last summer, which was the first one since that fateful day three years ago, probably cost (just guessing here--no time or reason to try to do a more precise estimate from the budgets) on the order of ten billion dollars (the amount of money we spent on the Shuttle program from February 2003 through July 2005). If they fly this spring, that flight will have cost probably another two or three billion. Every day that we keep this Shuttle program alive probably costs us about ten million dollars or so, whether we fly it or not (a number that makes one weep when one thinks of it as an X-Prize per day). And retiring one of the Orbiters, as some have suggested, will save very little money. In fact, as loved as Hubble is by the public, it doesn't make financial sense to use a Shuttle to repair it unless it is done quickly, because we could probably afford several new telescopes for the cost of maintaining the Shuttle program long enough to get the mission off.

There are only two reasons to be concerned about whether or not the foam shedding continues. The first is the risk of another vehicle loss, and the second is the risk of losing another crew.

It would make sense to worry about losing another orbiter, if the probability of loss was high, and we had to conserve the fleet for many flights. But the program is already planned to be terminated within another couple dozen flights anyway, and even if more foam is shed, the chances that it will result in another vehicle loss are pretty small--it flew many successful flights prior to all of the renewed attention to the foam issue since 2003. Yes, it's Russian roulette, but sometimes, if the odds are right (one is playing with a hundred-chamber gun, instead of a six-chamber gun, and there is a significant payoff to playing), playing Russian roulette can be a rational decision.

The reality, of course, is that every action we take is an act of Russian roulette, every decision we make a gamble--all that differs is the odds. If, against the odds, we lose another Orbiter in the next few flights, we could still finish the station with a fleet of two. We could, in fact, probably get to the goal with only one remaining, though the schedule would be further slowed (this all assumes, of course, that there aren't some new reliability issues of which we're currently unaware, which seems unlikely at this point given our experience base). So given that we plan to retire the fleet anyway, it makes sense to fly them out, to accomplish their intended purpose and get some value for the money we're spending to keep the program alive.

The other reason to avoid a loss is to avoid another loss of crew, but that makes no sense, either. Everyone in the astronaut office is as well informed on the risks as anyone can be. If there are some who aren't willing to fly in that knowledge, then there are plenty who will be happy to take their slots. If they (and the nation) don't think that it's worth a one in a hundred shot of dying to complete the space station, then the nation must not attach much importance to completing the space station, either out of some (misplaced, in my opinion) sense that doing so advances us in our goals in space (whatever they are), or in terms of keeping international agreements.

As Congressman Weldon pointed out in Jeff's post, NASA has a serious budget problem. They probably aren't going to get the money to both complete ISS and to keep CEV on schedule. They, and Congress and the White House, have to make some hard choices. The current policy, of keeping the Shuttle program going, without flying, is the worst possible one. Either retire the system now, and put the money toward our future (preferably in some other direction than ESAS, but even ESAS is better than paying for a Shuttle that doesn't fly) or start flying it now. But three years after the last tragedy (a longer period of time than when we were down after the Challenger loss) don't just keep sitting on the pot, as the billiondollarometer continues to tick away.

[Update in the afternoon]

Clark Lindsey has some other links to commentary on the anniversary.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:14 AM