I’m having trouble deciding what to do for my Fox News column tomorrow. I actually wrote the “Counting the Swimmers” post with the intent of running it, but it would make two NASA/SLI-bashing columns in a row, and I don’t want to sound like I’m in a rut, and all I can do is bitch and moan about NASA. I’m thinking of maybe running the solar sail piece instead, particularly since Layne liked it enough to link to it.
What do y’all think?
Over at Andrew Sullivan’s book club, where they’re discussing Lomborg’s book, one of the letter writers wrote the following:
I was preempted by at least two persons in what seems to be the key point of skepticism about the current global warming discourse, the extreme hubris involved in trying to forecast the long-term temperature of the earth based on primitive computer models, when we can’t even forecast local weather with any certainty…
I’ve heard Rush Limbaugh make this argument as well–how can we predict long-term climate when we can’t even forecast tomorrow’s showers?
While I’m a global warming skeptic myself, and it’s a seductive argument, it’s wrong. I believe that the reason that we can’t make long-term predictions about climate is because of the chaotic, non-linear nature and complexity of the phenomenon, but the ability to make long-term predictions is actually unrelated to our ability to make short-term ones.
To understand why (or at least to see another example of the two being unrelated), consider another similar phenomenon–the stock market. Most financial advisors will tell you to put your money into stocks, because over the long haul, they’re going to go up. And if you look at the sweep of finance history, such advice would have been borne out. But that doesn’t mean that they can predict what the market will do next week, or even tomorrow (if they could, they wouldn’t have to make a living providing advice…)
How can they make a long-term prediction when they can’t make a short-term one? Because the long-term one is not based on the short term–it is not a series of predictions adding up to a long one. While a broad trend can have a reasonable probability assigned to it from fundamental underlying causes, the various ups and downs as it gets there are subject to different, unforeseeable forces. There is “noise” in the pattern of climate, or markets, and this noise is what we experience as unexpected weather, or daily fluctuations in stock prices. And while we can extrapolate current data to derive a predicted signal, we can never predict noise with any reliability, by definition.
NASA is scrounging parts for the Shuttle on E-bay.
That is a consequence of our nation’s fundamentally-flawed space policy for the past thirty years. And there is nothing in the current plans that will change it.
NASA has trouble finding spares for the Shuttle for the same reason that Shuttle is so expensive to operate–because they just barely use it.
Boeing maintains a healthy array of subcontractors to support their aircraft fleet because they sell many hundreds of them, and their customers fly them many thousands of times per year. NASA flies four Orbiters a half dozen times a year (total, not per vehicle)–in a good year.
In order to keep their subcontractors alive to build parts that are either unique to the Space Shuttle, or are obsolete, but still used on the Space Shuttle (like 8086 computer processors used in the original IBM PC in 1981), it would cost NASA many more millions of dollars per year beyond the emperor’s ransom that they are already spending, and the cost per 8086 chip would be hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars per processor. Given their situation and minimal activity, it makes sense to simply find the parts used on the Internet, buy them at the bid price, and keep the system limping along.
And based on their ostensible plans for the “Shuttle replacement” from the Space Launch Initiative program, the future will be no better.
The requirements (as estimated under contract to NASA) for “the new launch system” (note that it’s singular, not plural, just as the disastrous Shuttle decision was) seem to be based on (as usual) the existing market, with linear projections. They basically describe the current geostationary communications satellite market, linearly extrapolated out many years. There has been no other market data put forth (at least publically, as would be expected of a civilian government agency) as guidance to NASA’s notion of the future need for launch vehicles.
The implications of this are that the new launch vehicle (singular) must be capable of delivering twenty thousand+ pounds to geostationary orbit, which means at least twice that to low earth orbit, to account for the stage and propellant to deliver it the rest of the way (i.e., it must have performance similar to the Shuttle).
In addition, since there is no market other than this and the space station market (a few Shuttle-class flights a year), and there is a limit to the GEO market due to bandwidth and slot limitations, the market for a new vehicle is…the market for the existing Shuttle, with a few more flights for the commercial launches that it must steal from the commercial launch market, and it must be sized to satisfy both those markets.
That means that the new “vehicle” (not vehicles–sorry to keep hammering the point, but I have no alternative) must be oversized like the Shuttle, and underflown like the Shuttle. And thus overpriced…like the Shuttle, because it will have too little activity to amortize its annual operating costs (like the Shuttle), let alone its development costs.
What’s the point? Other than, that is, to continue full employment in northern Alabama, and the locales in which the contractors live?
It’s been said that, had the builders of the Golden Gate Bridge based the demand for it on the number of swimmers between San Francisco and Marin County, it would have never been built. But that is the official position of NASA and its contractors for SLI. The market is a straight-line projection of the existing market, and no unforeseen markets shall be considered.
Such a projection ignores the following (likely) possibilities that might result from lower-cost access:
A vehicle that is designed for a market that requires forty thousand pounds to low earth orbit in a single launch will be unlikely to take advantage of these markets, because it will cost too much to develop, and it will have too few flights to amortize its development or operational costs, thus increasing its per-flight costs beyond what will be possible to generate those new markets. The underlying theme is that NASA wants a (single) Shuttle replacement that can do exactly what the Shuttle does, ignoring the fact that there may be alternate, and superior, ways of achieving NASA’s true needs. The geostationary satellite market serves as a surrogate for the real agenda, allowing them to maintain the facade that it will be a “commercial” system, though this market is already more-than-adequately satisfied by the existing launchers.
Until NASA accepts that we need a new commercial space transportation industry, rather than a new launch vehicle, and that they cannot and should not attempt to predict what the markets and uses for it will be, we will remain mired in the same central-planning muck–the same five, and ten-year plans, that has been impeding our progress in space since the beginning of the Cold War.
But only from the “Moonie” newspaper. The Palestinians desecrated the church and brutalized their hostages.
Don’t expect to get the story from the mainstream press. It was all the Israelis’ fault…
Mike Todd, Jr., the innovator who gave us the late but unlamented Smell-O-Vision, has died.
There is an article in the Christian Science Monitor that describes the conlict of ostensibly Christian values over the Middle East situation.
To me, both are inadequate bases for judgment, to put it mildly:
“Jerusalem is suffering,” says Galen Bowman of Old German Baptist Brethren Church in Belkite, Ind. “We’re trying to help out. We need to support Israel” as visitors, he says, because Israel is God’s way of preparing the Messiah’s return.
and
“I think people [in my congregation] recognize the weight of the moral mandate is with the Palestinians, simply because they are occupied and oppressed,” says the Rev. Richard Signore of Bourne, Mass. “Some lay people say it’s too complex and we should leave it to the experts, but I don’t accept that. To me, this really is an issue of moral imperative for a people to have self- determination.”
The article summarizes the juxtaposition thusly:
Now, engaged Christians take sides largely according to one of two perspectives. One is that faithfulness equals pursuit of justice by ending Israel’s occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories. The other is that being faithful means supporting Israel to honor God’s prophecy as stated in Ezekiel 37:21: “I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from every quarter, and bring them to their own land.”
Sorry, but, from my perspective, both of these perspectives are loony.
My prism is democracy, pluralism, secular statism, and liberty. From that perspective, Israel has it all over the Palestinians, and the rest of the Arab world.
O’Reilly is covering the San Francisco State anti-semitic riot now.
Ann Coulter’s new book, not out until next month, went to number one on Amazon in one day.
Reader John Thacker has been diligently keeping up with the North Korean refugee saga.
First off, the three North Koreans that scaled the wall into the US
consulate in Shenyeng got sent to South Korea.
Good for us. (Although some reports seem to indicate that they wanted
to come to the USA rather than to S. Korea.)
No doubt…
The Japanese are lodging their protests with the Chinese, as reported Here, and here.
The Chinese are telling the Japanese to “correct their attitude,” and claiming that they got permission to enter the embassy. The Japanese reply that they did not give agreement, and are demanding that China return the five refugees. (Sounds like a matter of honor now, perhaps?)
Perhaps. We’ll see how cowed Japan is by China.
A long-time goal of space enthusiasts is about to reach fruition–the first solar sail is about to take flight. The really neat thing about it, to me, is that it’s privately sponsored. I remember discussing this at dinner in 1982 with Rob Staehle, the JPL engineer who was planning the project that long ago as an extra-curricular activity (more recently, he was the pre-project manager for the Pluto Express mission and is now the Deputy Project Manager of the Europa mission), and it’s great to see it finally happening.
To the degree that many people are aware of the concept of solar sails, they mistakenly believe, taking the nautical analogy, that they are blown by the solar wind. But solar sails, or light sails (the more generic term, because they could be powered with lasers as well as the sun) actually get their thrust from radiation pressure. The solar wind is composed of heavy, highly-energetic particles that would blow right through a sail, destroying rather than propelling it. The sail is instead impinged by photons, the components of light.
The article linked above says that the sail absorbs them, and gains their momentum, but if this occurs, it’s actually less efficient. Ideally, the photons actually reflect off the sail, imparting twice the momentum that they would if they were absorbed. Thus, a well-designed sail has a mirrored surface, or at least a surface that acts as a mirror for the frequencies of light for which it’s designed. Also, since the lighter the vehicle, the greater the acceleration for a given force, it’s made as thin as possible while still maintaining structural integrity. Finally, since force is pressure times area, the bigger the sail, the more thrust can be attained.
Because the solar radiation pressure is so small, even for a large sail, the total force might only amount to a few pounds. But if that’s the only force acting (other than gravity), it can still add up, and with continuous acceleration, get you to an outer planet faster than chemical propulsion.
One question often asked is, if the radiation pressure always acts outward from the sun, how a sailing spacecraft can come back into the solar system. Answer: like conventional sailing ships, it tacks (though the analogy is imperfect–being in a vacuum, unlike the water for a ship, there is no medium in which it travels, and it thus has no use for a keel).
Imagine that the sail is at an angle with respect to the sun. Some of the thrust is directed radially along its orbit. Add to orbital velocity, and the energy increases, and the sail heads out to the outer system. Change the angle to subtract from it, and the sail will slow, and fall back in toward the sun. Angle it out of the orbital plane, and you can slowly perform a plane change.
If we really did want to drop nuclear waste into the sun, a sail is probably the only affordable way to do it, with the additional advantage that as the star is approached, the thrust increases as the square of the distance (twice as close means four times the thrust). Unfortunately, because they’re such delicate things, the sail might burn up before it had decreased its velocity sufficiently to drop all the way. So a final booster rocket might still be needed.
Here’s an extremely little-known fact. Solar sails played a significant role in the conceptualization and development of nanotechnology. Back in the 1970s, a young student at MIT, enamored with space, was trying to figure out how to develop the minimum thickness for a sail. He came up with a concept for laying out an ultra-thin layer of aluminum on a wax, using a technique called vacuum-vapor deposition, in which the metal would be heated to a vapor, and sprayed on a substrate in a vacuum chamber. Afterwards, the wax would be melted away, leaving the thin aluminum foil. He reasoned that he could get a sail that was only a few atoms thick–strong and reflective enough to be a good sail (as long as it was handled properly) while providing maximum performance.
One thing led to another, and he eventually came up with other techniques for building things at atomic-level scale, and gave some serious thought to the implications of such manufacturing. He wrote a book on the subject in the mid-1980s, and eventually, in 1991, received the first doctorate in the field, having played a major role in inventing it, from MIT. His name, of course, was K. Eric Drexler.