There’s an article over at abc.com detailing the travails of the International Space Station and Shuttle programs. There are a few quotes from spaceblogger Mark Whittington.

Not much new here, at least to anyone who’s been reading my weblog for a while, but it’s nice to see these things in the mainstream press. The reporter still doesn’t get it, though–she’s reporting it as though this is all a surprise, and news.

If plans for the space station crew aren’t expanded, the panel concluded, “NASA should cease to characterize the I.S.S. as a science driven program.”

Newsflash guys–NASA has lied about that from day one. It has never been a science-driven program.

“Congress needs to own up to what it had intended to do,” he says. “If they really want a space station program, they have to fund it.”

They did fund a space station program, which is all they ever wanted. Programs create jobs and constituencies.

What they’ve never cared about (and still don’t really, at least not at the expense of other things that they care about) is actually having a useful space station.

There’s an article over at abc.com detailing the travails of the International Space Station and Shuttle programs. There are a few quotes from spaceblogger Mark Whittington.

Not much new here, at least to anyone who’s been reading my weblog for a while, but it’s nice to see these things in the mainstream press. The reporter still doesn’t get it, though–she’s reporting it as though this is all a surprise, and news.

If plans for the space station crew aren’t expanded, the panel concluded, “NASA should cease to characterize the I.S.S. as a science driven program.”

Newsflash guys–NASA has lied about that from day one. It has never been a science-driven program.

“Congress needs to own up to what it had intended to do,” he says. “If they really want a space station program, they have to fund it.”

They did fund a space station program, which is all they ever wanted. Programs create jobs and constituencies.

What they’ve never cared about (and still don’t really, at least not at the expense of other things that they care about) is actually having a useful space station.

Other people are starting to pick up on the theme, first put forth by Jay Manifold (at least as far as I know, in the blogosphere) that asteroid impacts are a larger danger than they appear, because of the possibility of even a small one being mistaken for a nuke and setting off a war.

Wendy McElroy has a good column today taking a position that I’ve long shared. The state should butt out of marriages, except to enforce contracts that the couple agrees to themselves. The current one-size-fits-all mentality is a cause of much social dysfunction.

I was at a wedding on Saturday. It was a Catholic service, and as part of it, everyone was encouraged to bless their neighbor, including the grasping and waggling of hands.

I idly wondered how long it would take if we were required to do it not only with our immediate pewmates, but for everyone in the church. How many handshakes and blessings would be involved?

It turned out to be a simple problem, and one with a solution that wouldn’t have kept us there until the wee hours, but it would certainly have added time to the service, if the logistics weren’t well planned.

Say there were a hundred people in attendance. That meant that the first person would have to shake ninety-nine hands. The second person would only have to shake ninety eight, having already shaken the hand of the first person. Using the same logic, the third would only have to do ninety seven, and so on. Thus, by induction, the total number of palm pressings would be the sum of 1 through (N-1) where N is the number of wedding attendees.

So what is that sum for, say, N equal 101?

The obvious way to solve it is to simply start adding. But a seven year old boy once came up with a much faster way, when his entire grade-school class was tasked by a teacher who wanted to give them some busy work so she could get something else done. It makes it possible to do it in your head. The answer turns out to be 5050.

If you’re interested in how he (and I) got it, click on the link for “More.”

Continue reading Math Puzzle →

After wasting billions of dollars on things like X-33, NASA has awarded four small contracts (total of about ten million) to look into ways of providing transportation to the space station commercially. While the two remaining Usual Suspects (Boeing and Lockmart) got two of the contracts, the two others went to newcomer startups Andrews Space and Technology, and Constellation Services.

They got off two flights in a single day, and on both flights, they demonstrated multiple restarts of the engines in midair. This is in preparation for a demonstration at the Oshkosh Air Show.

I’ve been focusing on the this coming Saturday, July 20, as the thirty-third anniversary of the Apollo landing. But today, July 16th, is the thirty-third anniversary of the launch, when the Saturn V rose to the heavens on a roaring pillar of fire. For a few minutes, the power generated by its engines probably exceeded the entire electrical output of the country.
The launch went off without a hitch.

[Thanks to Mark Whittington for the reminder]

It was just a matter of time.

The polio virus has been constructed from scratch in the laboratory, using instructions off the Internet. There’s no reason that the same couldn’t be done with smallpox. Fortunately, the people who would want to do so are probably still incompetent to, but we can’t count on this to be true forever.

This is also a step on the way to building true artificial lifeforms.

I said earlier that it was a simple probate case. If this report from MSNBC is correct, it may become more than that, though the thrust of the story is that the family is working out their differences. It’s hard to imagine how they could compromise, given the huge disparity between the positions–one side wants to literally destroy the body, the other to preserve it as best as can be done.

But according to the story, it may come down to a judge’s decision as to what’s the best solution. If that’s the case, then the actual ethical and scientific case for cryonics (as opposed to simply attempting to determine the wishes of the “descedant”) will become a factor in the judge’s decision, which means that it could turn into a landmark case in the field of life extension, if the family doesn’t resolve their differences.

I’ll continue to watch it with great interest.

(Thanks to Alan Boyle over at MSNBC for the heads up.)