All posts by Andrew Case

Space

Reflections on Mike Mealling’s RTTM summary

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

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

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

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

Political Commentary

Torture and the ticking bomb

Brad DeLong makes an excellent point about the torture memo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology and Society

The latest Crypto-Gram

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

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

Space

Space Op-Ed at the Seattle PI

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

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

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

Space

COMSTAC presentations are available

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

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

Space

Interim Washington Director, SOI

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

Continue reading Interim Washington Director, SOI →

Space

Rocketforge shwag, evolvable design

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

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

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

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

Technology and Society

Some patent thoughts

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

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

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

General

Now *That’s* A Vacation

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

General

Now *That’s* A Vacation

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