Category Archives: Space Science

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space Science

Waking Up To Absurdity

61 Comments

I watched the lunar attack on NASA TV. As is usually the case with that venue, it was boring to tears.

In other news, for those who thought that non-science Nobel peace prizes had any meaning, and haven’t just become a bad joke, the committee just awarded one to the president on the same day that he was the first one to bomb the moon.

I have to repeat the words on so many lips today. For what?

There’s a big roundup of commentary over at Instapundit. Even the Obamafellators in the media are stunned.

If he were a man of any sense or honor, he would point out the absurdity, and refuse it. So we know what he’ll do.

[Update a few minutes later]

A lot of good commentary at The Corner, for example, from Yuval Levin:

It’s hard to know quite what the right response would be, but it would probably require a self-effacing show of humility (including declining the prize) that our president may not even be able to fake, let alone actually exhibit. It is a dangerous thing for a president to become a joke, and between his Olympic Committee trip and this peculiar honor, he’s getting there fast, and in a way that could do him real harm.

I wonder if any commentator, anywhere on the political spectrum, will offer a genuine straight-faced defense or case for this prize. Whoever does will no-doubt win next year’s Nobel Prize for literature.

I don’t know if they’ve ever given one for fantasy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Getting back to the original topic, Clark Lindsey has some links to preliminary LCROSS results. Let’s hope that the moon was not attacked for no good reason.

[Another update]

Actually, President Obama wasn’t the first one to bomb the moon. Kennedy did, with the Ranger program. So I guess that’s another way he’s trying to emulate him. On the other hand, he was the first to do it on the first attempt. The first few Rangers managed to throw a spacecraft at the ground and miss (those weren’t JPL’s finest days).

[Update a few minutes later]

Thoughts from Jonah:

The only thing that really bothers me is that this comes just days after the Obama administration turned a blind eye to the Dalai Lama and told the world that it’s at least considering a separate peace with the Taliban. That’s grotesque. Meanwhile, there are real peace activists and dissidents out there whose dungeons will stay just as cold and dark for another year because of this. Indeed, this news comes during a year when the Iranian people rose up against tyranny and were crushed. Surely someone in Iran — or maybe the Iranian protestors generally — could have benefitted more from receiving the prize than a president who, so far, has done virtually nothing concrete for world peace.

That wouldn’t fit the template. Like the UN, the Nobel committee has become an enabler of tyrants and dictators. I expect that Ahmadinejad will get one in a couple years, once he’s wiped those war-mongering Jews off the face of the Middle East.

[Update a while later]

A lot more at The Corner. I agree that he should be given the Cy Young award, too. After all, he intended to reach home plate with that pitch. And that’s what counts, right?

[Update a while later]

Man, oh man, I can see this going on for days:

A reader asks:

Can Obama accept the $1 million Nobel prize?

I believe, since he’s also won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his groundbreaking work demonstrating that “profit” is part of “overhead“, that the prize is being increased to $1 trillion. They give it him in small bills and if Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod can get it in the attache case they get to share the Nobel Prize for Physics.

However, under Congressman Rangel’s recently tightened federal ethics rules, the President has to give the money to an Acorn-supported child-sex brothel symbolizing in a very real sense “cooperation between peoples” of many lands. So don’t worry about it. On Monday, he’s scheduled to win the Eurovision Song Contest…

Actually, this is the first time that I’ve actually felt any sympathy for the administration. The Nobel committee has put them in a real corner where there’s almost nothing they can do that will look good. But they’ve been asking for it, going all the way back to the speech in Germany last summer.

[Update mid morning]

Frank J. is taking all the credit, natch:

A lot of you laughed when I first unveiled my peace plan over seven years ago, but who is laughing now? This morning, America crashed a probe into the moon causing an explosion. And the result? Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

As I note in comments over there, though, and above, Obama was not the first American president to attack the moon.

And help Obama win the Heisman. I think he deserves it just for questioning the BCS.

[Late morning update]

John Podhoretz disagrees that he doesn’t deserve the prize:

he Nobel Committee chose him wisely because he does, in fact, represent the organization’s highest ideals.

He is an American president queasy about the projection of American power. He is an American president who rejects the notion of American exceptionalism. He is an American president eagerly in pursuit of legitimacy to be granted him not by those who voted for him but by those who do not cast a vote and who chafe at American leadership. It is his devout wish that America become one of many nations, influencing the world indirectly or not influencing it at all, rather than “the indispensable nation,” as Madeleine Albright characterized it. He is the encapsulation, the representative, the wish fulfillment, the very embodiment, of the multilateralist impulse. He is, almost literally, a dream come true for the sorts of people who treasure and value the Nobel Peace Prize.

There’s a Michael Moore reference, too.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space Science

The Latest Lunar Bombardment

11 Comments

LCROSS will hit the moon in the middle of the night in this time zone, so I’m not sure whether I’ll get up for it. There was a lot of idiotic commentary (in comments) over here the other day. I wonder if the president will apologize for this unprovoked attack before, or after the event? Or does he only apologize for things that his predecessors did?

[Update a few minutes later]

It really is amazing to see the number of commenters sincerely worried that we’re going to knock the moon out of its orbit, or break it in half.

[Late evening update]

Frank J. was way ahead of NASA:

Now the world will be pretty convinced that America is frick’n nuts and just looking for a fight, but we need to really ingrain it into everyone’s conscious so that no one will ever even contemplate crossing us. This requires making good use of our nukes. I know, nukes can kill millions of people, but they sure aren’t doing anyone any good just sitting around. I mean, how many years has it been since we last dropped a bomb on someone? No one even thinks we’ll actually use one now. Of course, using nukes shouldn’t be done haphazardly; all uses have to be well planned out because the explosions are so cool looking that we’ll want to give the press plenty of notice so they can get pictures of the mushroom cloud from all sorts of different angles. But what to nuke? Well, usually the idea is populated cities, but, by the beliefs of my morally superior religion, killing is wrong. So why can’t we be more creative than nuking people. My idea is to nuke the moon; just say we thought we saw moon people or something. There is no one actually there to kill (unless we time it poorly) and everyone in the world could see the results. And all the other countries would exclaim, “Holy @$#%! They are nuking the moon! America has gone insane! I better go eat at McDonald’s before they think I don’t like them.”

Of course, Frank’s always been way ahead of the curve.

Space, Space Science

Water, Water, Everywhere

22 Comments

I’ve been wondering what Paul Spudis would have to say about yesterday’s press conference. Well, we need wonder no more:

What’s surprising about this new data is not the presence of water, but its pervasiveness. The published image (above) shows this water to be present from the poles down to about 60° latitude. This area subtends over 10 million square kilometers, or about one-third the surface area of the entire Moon! Although the water appears to be present only in the upper few millimeters of the surface, its total mass could be enormous, greatly exceeding the several hundred million tones estimated to be present as ice in the dark areas of the poles.

As always with good science, the new results raise many more questions than they answer. In part, this is a “chicken or egg” issue – do the newly discovered deposits result from surface alteration by water derived from the polar ice, or do they serve as a source for such deposits? How does water form, move, get destroyed or get cold-trapped on the Moon? What are rates of water deposition and removal? What and where are the ice deposits and how pure might they be? Right now we can only dimly perceive the beginnings of a whole new sub-discipline of lunar studies: polar geoscience.

Lunar geoscience. I guess the battle is lost…

Political Commentary, Space, Space Science

Our Vision, Not Yours

24 Comments

Clark Lindsey points out this article in The Atlantic about a new attempt by the Planetary Society to launch a solar sail. He also points out Ann Druyan’s and Lou Friedman’s obvious disdain for millionaires more interested in going into space themselves than developing technology or sending robots.

…she can’t get over the general timidity and lack of imagination she keeps encountering, and she’s particularly aghast at the scads of cash some ego-tripping big-money men seem willing to spend on personal space tourism: “Isn’t the whole planet enough for them?” Google’s Sergey Brin—whose company the project also appealed to, unsuccessfully, years ago—is yet another billionaire who hopes to romp around in orbit….

…“Basically, you’re asking somebody to fund an idea,” Friedman admits. He has good science at his back. But if 50 years ago Slava Linkin could not have imagined the disappearance of the U.S.S.R., it’s fair to say that Friedman would not have imagined his own country, the Cold War’s victor, with a space agency so blinkered and elephantine that he has to mount a long guerrilla operation to get his plausible vision off the ground.

He has had the same bellyful of talk about private entrepreneurial funding that Ann Druyan has, and he shares her contempt for the thrill-seeking, space-touring fat cats. But even so, a fundamental optimism survives in him, nourished not just by faith but by disbelief: “You come back to that $4 million, and the chance to take the first step to the stars—how can that not be funded?”

Well, Lou, one way might be that the “fat cats” don’t appreciate being publicly denigrated because they have different priorities than you and Ann do.

I hope that the sail gets funded — it’s a critical technology for the future that could result in reduced costs of doing solar system exploration (and maybe even interstellar, though that’s a much tougher problem). And I can understand their frustration — four million is a rounding error in the Constellation overrun, and in the new currency, in which we could express a mere trillion dollars as a “barack,” it’s only four microbaracks, a drop in the celestial bucket, and couch-cushion change inside the Beltway.

But it makes no more sense to curse millionaires who choose to spend their money on space trips than it does to curse Bill and Melinda Gates because they have better things to do with their money. I suspect that they’re upset with Brin and the others because they think that they should get it, because they’re so close — they’re interested in space — but they don’t quite. It’s probably in their minds a so-close-and-yet-so-far thing, and they view them as traitors to the cause because their space vision is flawed.

But no, Ann. For some, this “whole planet” is not enough. And it’s not enough for you, either. The difference is that you’re satisfied to send a robot emissary out, while others view that as in itself lacking vision. I could be just as churlish as you, and complain that you didn’t spend your studio’s money on developing space tourism, which will grow a large enough market to drop launch costs and improve reliability, so that projects like this solar sail would become much more affordable, and have a better chance of getting to orbit than the first failed attempt. But unlike you, I recognize that people have different visions, and that they’re not mine doesn’t make them wrong, and that their money is theirs to spend as they wish. But the latter notion has apparently gone quite out of fashion in our brave new world of ever-increasing collectivism.

[Update a while later]

I also find it amusing that she considers people who want to go into space “timid” and “lacking imagination.” Apparently her irony detector is on the fritz.