This is pretty damned funny. Not just the article, but all the freeper commentary.

Lileks:

The spleen, she hurts. I think it had to do with listening to the Senate debate, if that word applies, and wondering: are they always this banal? This condescending? Are bloviating prevarications the rule rather than the exception? In short: is the world?s greatest deliberative body really filled with this many dim bulbs, card sharps and overstroked dolts who confuse a leaden pause with great rhetoric? If everyone in America had been tied to a chair and forced to watch the debate Clockwork-Orange style, we?d all realize that the Senate is just a holding tank for people whose self-regard and cretinous reasoning is matched only by their demonstrable contempt for the idiots they think will lap this crap up.

and

As for Rall, who cares about him? He?ll get his reward: the great yawning indifference of history. If people barely remember Kelly and Capp nowadays, what are the chances that they?ll remember someone who appeared to draw with his thumb?

He righteously insults some other people too, who badly need insulting. Actually, my favorite bit is the ending sentences.

But don’t take my word for it. Go read it all.

There seem to be some culture clashes between the American and Russian space programs.

To quote the article:

The Russians consider themselves less rigid and more inventive than the Americans, who tend to follow every letter in the technical manuals, said Sergei Gorbunov, a spokesman for the Russian Space Agency.

“Here in Russia, we are more flexible in our approach to technical problems,” Gorbunov said. “The Americans are more conservative in dealing with technical problems, but this isn’t a fault.”

Whether it’s a fault or not, the irony can’t be lost on anyone who lived through the Cold War, in which American ingenuity and flexibility was ostensibly matched against Soviet bureaucracy, and those American characteristics supposedly defeated the Soviet Union. It’s particularly ironic, considering that such a perception would have been perfectly valid, in almost every sphere other than the space program, at least since the 1960s, when the Americans won the race to the moon.

Of course, NASA’s culture has been a subject of much discussion since the release of the Gehman Commission’s report on the loss of Columbia in February, but such discussion (and criticism) from that report has focused not on NASA’s lack of flexibility, but rather on its lassitude in following its own established safety procedures, increasing the irony still further.

And after all, it’s not at all clear that NASA’s approach is superior to the Russians’. While the Russians have had several near disasters (a fire on their space station, and a collision with it) NASA has lost over a dozen astronauts in two Shuttle disasters, while the Russians have only lost four (and none in the past three decades), in the four-plus decades since the beginning of the human space race. One could attribute that to greater ambition (NASA puts up over half a dozen at a time, whereas the Soviets and now Russians have never launched more than three at a time), but both programs have so little experience in absolute numbers, compared to any other endeavor, that such comparisons are probably meaningless.

Regardless, because we share a space station, such a cultural difference is a real problem. Perhaps it’s time to consider a way to end it–with a divorce.

And not just for potential “irreconciliable differences.”

The space station is in the wrong orbit.

Its high inclination is useful for earth observations, because it allows a greater view of the earth than one that only flew over low latitudes, but that’s the only real benefit to it. On any other technical measure, lower would be better.

Lower inclination would make it easier to reach, and allow more payload for any (non-Russian) launch vehicle, and thus reduce operating costs. Lower inclination would make it potentially useful as a staging point for missions beyond earth orbit (a use that is essentially precluded by its current location). In fact, a proposal was made just a couple days ago to move it for just the latter reason.

No, there’s really only one real reason that the space station is in the orbit that it is–politics. In 1993, the Clinton-Gore administration decided that they would finally completely pervert the nation’s space program from one that was supposedly purposed for opening up the high frontier to one that provided foreign aid to Russian space scientists, in hope that they wouldn’t twist their talents to selling nuclear and rocketry expertise to countries like North Korea, Iran, and yes, Iraq. They decided to bring the Russians into the space station program.

There was only one problem. The high-latitude Russian launch sites don’t permit launches to low earth orbital inclinations of less than 51.6 degrees.

Thus, our escalator to nowhere didn’t even start at the ground floor.

But that was then, and this is now. The Bush administration has no great desire to keep the Russians involved in the space station debacle, and there are rumors that they’d like to actually do something visionary in space. One way to make lemonade out of the ISS lemon might be to move it to a useful location, and if the Russians don’t like it, they can go build their own, since the reality of the program was that they were never true partners. They were really simply subcontractors, and not very good ones, because much of the money sent to the Russian government in the nineties for space station hardware instead went to yachts, BMWs and Cayman bank accounts for the well-connected in the Russian government.

But is such a move feasible?

Well, yes, but it won’t be cheap. Changing orbital planes in low earth orbit is not trivial–going from the current inclination of fifty two degrees to the more conventional NASA one of twenty eight (the latitude of Cape Canaveral) requires about forty percent as much velocity change as getting into orbit in the first place.

Fortunately, unlike launches, it needn’t be done all at once, so there are a lot of options for doing so, over a long period of time (perhaps a few years). Without doing an extensive analysis, I’d be surprised if it couldn’t actually be done for a billion dollars or so, even with NASA’s ways of doing business.

Now, that’s a lot of money to you and me, but to NASA, and a nation that has already spent many times that much on a space station whose use remains elusive, it’s a pittance, and possibly one well worth it.

So, would Russia, to use another old Cold War metaphor, become the spy that was sent back out in the cold, when it came to space?

Not necessarily. They’ve been negotiating with the French to use their near-equatorial launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America. If they can start launching their vehicles out of that site, they’ll be able to get into almost any orbital inclination they please, and can continue to support and participate in even a newly relocated space station.

As long, of course, as they’re finally willing to pay their own way. If not, then it might be hasta la vista, petrushka.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae, 1872-1918

[Wednesday update at lunchtime]

Porphyrogenitus has some commentary that’s pertinent to the discussion in the comments section.

Sorry, I’m working weekends, too, but just a quick note. This post by Instapundit reminds me of this post by…me, from February.

Well, what are you waiting for? Go find out what the quagmiristas are spinning this week.

Howard Lovy has an interesting post on how misperceptions among the public have led to an unnecessary fear of molecular manufacturing. If Ralph Merkle is right (and he’s a pretty smart guy, based on my own interactions with him), we can turn off the gray goo.

Posting will be light and probably intermittent for the next few weeks. I just started a fairly intense (but lucrative in the short term–something desperately needed right now) project that’s going to consume most of my time. I’ll try to keep up with columns, but blogging will be extremely limited until mid-December.

[Update in the late evening}

I’m asked in the comments section about the origin of the phrase “free ice cream.”

It was (who else?) Lileks.

He noted on his bleat that he wouldn’t be putting up much of a bleat, due to other commitments, and then said something to the effect that he felt like he was apologizing about not providing free ice cream:

As much as I feel guilty about light bleatage, I?ve always thought that the phrase ?blogging will be light today? is akin to saying ?the free ice cream cones will be 27 percent smaller today.? It?s still free ice cream. Whether the following qualifies as the equal of sugary chilled confection is up to you, of course.

…is up. But it’s not new to regular readers. It’s the same as the previous post.

In last week’s column, as an afterthought, I mentioned the unprecedented solar activity of the last few days.

It seems to be continuing, and may end up being the largest solar flare ever recorded.

Of course, this may not mean much, because it’s only in the past couple decades that we could seriously study the sun, and it’s been burning for billions of years. Such events remind us that while we’ve learned a great deal about solar physics, there remains much that we don’t understand. We’ve had such a short time during which to study it, we may be mislead into thinking that what we’ve seen in our own brief lifetimes is indicative of longer-term behavior, when in fact it may have been much hotter, or cooler than normal during what, in geological terms, is a snapshot.

There are several implications of our lack of understanding of these phenomena.

First, as I noted last week, this is a matter of great concern to planners of deep space missions because, beyond the protection of earth’s magnetic field, such solar storms could result in a heavy dose of radiation to any space travelers in transit. It could even be fatal, either quickly, or in a more long, drawn out sickness, incapacitating the crew. A better understanding of the potential hazard, and even more importantly, the ability to predict it, would make it much easier and more cost effective to come up with techniques to shield spacecraft against it.

There are implications for non-space travelers as well. After all, if the sun can vary this much, how do we know how much of “global warming” is caused by such variation, and how much by human activity? Given the societal cost that might be incurred by overreactions such as the Kyoto Treaty, it would behoove us to attempt to better understand (and if possible, predict) the effects of variations in solar activity on the global environment.

Finally, while it’s unlikely that anything will change in the near term, there is no guarantee that our sun will continue to burn in the moderate range in which life evolved on earth, and in fact, we know from observing other stars that they have life cycles. At some point, it will become first too hot, and then too cold to allow life to be sustained on earth, and perhaps in the solar system itself.

There’s an old joke about a man, nodding off during an astronomy lecture, who suddenly jerks awake and asks, “Did you say the sun would burn out in a million years?!” No, the lecturer, explains, it was a billion years. “Well,” he replies, “that’s a relief.”

Million or billion, it’s going to happen sometime, and the problem is, we can’t be sure that some dire solar event won’t occur much sooner than that. It might not wipe out life on earth, but it could make it very unpleasant for humans. This possibility, along with the continuing danger of being hit by a random celestial object and sharing the fate of the dinosaurs, is one of the most powerful arguments for us becoming seriously spacefaring as soon as possible–to get at least some of humanity’s precious eggs out of a single fragile basket.

In light of all this, it’s somewhat disturbing that Congress is considering deleting the budget for the space weather center at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA).

Given the raging solar storm over the past several days, the squabble seems absurd. The agency request is eight million, the House is offering five million, and the Senate proposes that it be funded by the Air Force, but doesn’t allocate any funding for it.

It’s particularly disturbing when considering the sums involved–a few million dollars, an infinitesimal fraction of even NOAA’s budget, let alone the federal budget, needed in order to continue to forecast events that, even ignoring the longer term issues discussed above, can have profound immediate effects on billion-dollar telecom industries, and navigation and remote sensing for much of the world. Of course, it’s not necessarily unreasonable for the Air Force to pay for it, because they have as many critical satellites as anyone, and as much of a need.

But consider–perhaps there’s another possibility. From the Space.com article, we see this quote:

Disruptions in communications, increases in radiation exposure to those flying at high altitude and potentially wide areas of power outages all can be blamed on the effects of space weather. Advance warning of a solar storm from the Colorado center, as seen during the past few days, can help institutions prepare for and minimize those effects.

“What would we do without this data? We couldn’t live without it,” said Robert Hedinger, executive vice president at Loral Skynet, which operates a constellation of Earth orbiting satellites that services much of the nation’s cable television programming and corporate communications.

Now, as it happens, Loral is in bankruptcy, but the industry as a whole is one with many billions of dollars of revenue. If, like Loral, they are also unable to “live without it,” if it’s truly a necessary cost of doing business, surely a consortium of some kind could be set up to fund the center, so that the actual beneficiaries were paying for it rather than the taxpayer.

There might be a free rider problem, of course–some might get the information who didn’t pay for it, but there are ways to handle this. It could in fact be funded by subscription–those who really needed the data would get the most timely reports, for a fee. NASA and the Air Force could be subsribers themselves. Of course, industry will no doubt take umbrage at such a proposal, being used to getting the taxpayers to subsidize something that they consider vital, but it seems to me that there’s a potential market opportunity, should anyone at NOAA prove to be entrepreneurial.

Of course, some may ask, if space weather can be privatized, why can’t terrestrial weather, which is of much more value to many people on the planet, and is offered on commercial venues, such as local television stations and newspapers, be fully privatized as well?

To which my response is…good question.