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It’s time for this week’s Luddite Pillory, in which space-related silliness is held up for ridicule and scorn!

• “See, I told you: Armstrong converted to Islam as soon as he set foot on the moon and heard the adhan. All this is proven by their naming of their new moon-ship with an Arabic word. They deny it, but they give the game away!”

  Seriously, though: how wonderful it is that people at NASA nowadays are fans of a franchise representing the “manly virtues” and scrappy, hands-on exploration, instead of a franchise populated with prissy post-modern utopian socialists sipping tea and tediously working themselves into paralysis over some hairsplitting moral quandary as they flit about the galaxy waiting for the deus ex machina of the week to make its appearance. Of course, if that were really the source for names starting with “A”, one has to wonder why they didn’t end up with “Apophis” and “Anubis”.

• James Hansen: Fake, but appropriate.

  UPDATE: There seems to be some question regarding the accuracy of the Spectator piece, itself.

• “The monkeys and the polar bears are deep inside my consciousness now. I’ve got to do more.”

  Seeking professional help might be a good place to start.

• Blog Comment Zen. Yes, Joe: that it is.

Posted on February 27th, 2006 under Luddism. Comments: 4

I completely missed it, but yesterday was the fourth blogiversary for Marsblog.

Posted on February 24th, 2006 under Meta. Comments: 1

Peggy Noonan seems to have hit a nerve with a lot of bloggers regarding the uselessness of the TSA.

I am almost always picked for extra screening. I must be on a list of middle aged Irish-American women terrorists. I know a message is being sent: We don’t do ethnic profiling in America. But that is not, I suspect, the message anyone receives. The message people receive is: This is all nonsense. What they think is: This is all kabuki. We’re being harassed and delayed so politicians can feel good. The security personnel themselves seem to know it’s nonsense: they’re always bored and distracted as they go through my clothing, my stockings, my computer, my earrings. They don’t treat me like a terror possibility, they treat me like a sad hunk of meat.

While I am not a middle aged Irish-American woman, I must be on a similar list for people with sadly common and/or interchangeable names. I have flown three times in the past two months. The Christmas holiday trip was no big deal (despite idiotically packing about ten pounds of silverware in my carry-on bag…long story, but strangely, I got through with only a post-X-ray hand search of said bag). But three weeks back, I was unable to check in on Continental at DIA…the clerk had to bend over backwards to locate my reservation in the system, and when she printed out the ticket, I could see a lightbulb come on as she read the mysterious alphanumeric gibberish. She didn’t bother to explain, though, she just said it wasn’t a problem — after she checked my passport closely. The same thing happened at IAH on the return flight, but this time the clerk explained to me (somewhat surreptitiously) that it was because my name was flagged for some reason, probably because it is so common and someone with a similar name is “on the list”. Again, she checked my passport closely, and that was that.

This afternoon, the same thing happened when I tried to check in at American Airlines for a flight to Houston. This time, the clerk came right out and said, unsolicited, that “that sometimes happens with very common names” (and again, she checked my passport very closely). But, she said, she would do something (I don’t know what) to “take the flag off” in the “system”, so that I wouldn’t have the same problem on my return flight. We’ll see on Sunday whether it worked, or whether she actually flagged me for the extra-special latex-glove pre-flight once-over just for her own sick amusement.

And this must have been the sister of the guy who waved me into the security line at IAH three weeks ago:

After a half hour in line I get to the first security point.

“Linfah,” says the young woman who checked my ID.

“I’m sorry?”

“Linfah.” She points quickly and takes the next person’s ID.

“I’m so sorry, I don’t understand.”

Now she points impatiently. How stupid could I be?

Line Five. Oh. OK.

In my case, the security guy was completely unintelligible — I’m not sure the sounds emanating from him were even syllables. After he repeated himself twice, I finally gave up, shrugged and smiled, and walked to the X-ray belt, figuring if I was doing something wrong a guard who was actually capable of forming coherent utterances would correct me. Amazing. Not only because TSA would hire people who are unable to communicate and place them in roles where they interact with the public, but also that there are so many people like that nowadays.

Posted on February 23rd, 2006 under Meta. Comments Off

I can’t find a link to it, but according to our in-house news clipping service at work, Defense Daily is reporting that Elon Musk’s lawsuit attempting to block the ULA merger was tossed out this past week. Rather contemptuously. Seems the court didn’t see much merit in a lawsuit alleging damages to a launch business that hasn’t launched anything yet.

UPDATE: A snippet from the Defense Daily post (still no link):

Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of the Central District of California wrote in her ruling of Feb. 15 that “SpaceX’s argument is utterly devoid of any concrete factual allegations regarding any type of actual injury suffered”.

Ouch.

UPDATE 2: Aha, I missed it, but Jesse posted on this last week at Space Law Probe.

Posted on February 23rd, 2006 under Space Commerce. Comments: 1

To answer my own question, I did a little looking around this afternoon, and dug up a few blogs by current and past LPR members.

• Clay Calhoun
• Ross Kaminsky
• Joshua Sharf
• Ethan Eilan and Jon Reynolds
• Ben DeGrow

It sure seemed like there were more than seven hands raised when the subject of blogs came up at the retreat a couple of weeks back.

Posted on February 19th, 2006 under Miscellaneous. Comments Off

It’s time for this week’s Luddite Pillory, in which space-related silliness is held up for ridicule and scorn!

• I think this is supposed to be satire. It is in any case funnier (and perhaps more prudent) than this, which, while self-parodying, is not satire.

• Speaking of the Disclosure Project…Francisco Miraval is a bit irked that aliens from across the galaxy seem to get more respect than aliens from across the border.
• Everything you wanted to know about Dennis Kucinich’s space platform. (That would be the space part of the political platform on which he is running for reelection this fall, not the mind-control weapons platforms he frets about when the foil helmet slips.)
• Elaine Supkis has a snit about Mars enthusiasts (hmm…I wonder what prompted that little outburst?). Send all of us “dumb ‘Let’s go to Mars’ lunatics” to Mars? From your fingertips to God’s monitor, Elaine.
• Bruce Gagnon is shocked, shocked that a display area at a conference on nuclear power for space applications didn’t push solar power for spacecraft and lunar outposts instead of nuclear — which is a bit like going to the Stock Show and being surprised at the lack of displays promoting vegan tofu alternaburgers.
• Bruce then tries to make a funny. To paraphrase David Spade: Leave the satire to the big boys, m’kay?

Posted on February 18th, 2006 under Luddism. Comments Off

My LPR classmate Joshua Sharf also has a blog.

Judging from the show of hands at the retreat a few weeks back, there seem to be quite a few of us. I wonder if anyone has bothered to put together an LPR blogroll?

Posted on February 16th, 2006 under Miscellaneous. Comments Off

Starchaser is starting small — with a sounding rocket.

Having worked on a sounding rocket, this get-started approach makes so much more sense to me than jumping right to an orbital vehicle from scratch (let alone jumping from a small LV to an EELV-class launcher without having flown, as Beal tried to do, or from a small LV to a flavor-for-every-taste portfolio of rockets — again without having flown — like SpaceX is trying to do).

While bits and pieces of the sounding rocket design may be transferrable to an orbital vehicle, that really isn’t the importance of starting small. What starting with a sounding rocket provides is practice in the task of designing a vehicle and getting it to flight. This would be of great value to a newly-formed company, as it develops in-house technical expertise and demonstrates here-and-now capability to potential customers and investors.

Not unimportantly, it also helps the core technical team “gel” around a shared experience — which sounds all touchy-feely, but can be of immense value to future projects. Many of the engineers I worked with on the X-33 project at Michoud I still work with on a daily basis, and it is often easier to communicate with them than with my local counterparts because we share that project as a common point of reference.

But most significantly, the experience gained by starting with a sounding rocket is cheap by comparison with creating a new orbital vehicle from scratch. Elon Musk famously says that he is putting $100 million into getting his startup off the ground, and is doing so with around 150 employees (from memory, as I can’t get to his site to verify the number). He could have started off spending a year or so developing a sounding rocket for around $15 million (trust me, it can be done), with a staff of two dozen, and perhaps thereby saved himself some of the delays and teething pains that have thus far plagued Falcon I.

Of course, a sounding rocket isn’t as glamorous as an orbital launch vehicle, nor does it have the revenue potential, so perhaps that explains the allure of going orbital.

Posted on February 13th, 2006 under Space Commerce. Comments Off

I’m too busy with the CEV proposal and other things right now to do much blogging, so instead, I’m going to try something new: a mini-carnival of space-related moonbattery.

• Bruce Gagnon and the uninformed dupes of GNAW-N-PIS are protesting against the “Symposium on Space Nuclear Power & Propulsion” this weekend. Bruce rails against Prometheus (again) in his blog post, managing to both misrepresent it as “resurrecting the nuclear rocket” (implying a connection to the unrelated NERVA/ROVER and/or Orion programs, in addition to the primary error of identifying Prometheus as a nuclear rocket when it is not), and demonstrate a total lack of awareness that Prometheus is actually getting gutted and (like so many other NASA programs of late) will probably end up getting shelved altogether before too long. As I observed in this comment, it’s so hard with Bruce to figure out if he is stupid or lying when he says such things. On the other hand, maybe he keeps flogging Prometheus knowing that it may end up being cancelled altogether, so that he can later boast that it was his group’s opposition to it that got it canned.

  Moonbat Lagniappe: Bruce actually uses the phrase “speaking truth to power” in a non-ironic way. It’s precious moments like that that…well, they don’t make his blog worth reading, but at least they dull the pain of the resultant cognitive discord a teeny tiny little bit.

• NASA PR flunkie George Deutsch comes out swinging against accusations that he tried to muzzle climate scientist James Hansen and wanted to slip a pro-creationist tilt into NASA press releases. Unfortunately for him, his explanation of that little matter about a blatant falsehood on his resume isn’t any more convincing than his blanket denials that he wanted to bend agency PR to suit his bias.
• For his part, James Hansen seems to be enjoying his Joe Wilson “whistleblower celebrity” moment, expanding on his claims to charge that NOAA is also “censoring” data on global warming. It’s good when censorship of science is met with vigorous and public opposition — surely a condemnation of censorship of papers and data questioning the anthropogenic global warming gospel will be forthcoming from Hansen in the near future.
• In Elaine Supkis’ world, Space Shuttles are ferried around on C-5 Galaxies, rather than a former American Airlines 747-123 and a former JAL 747-100SR. And you can’t convince her otherwise, because she has photographic evidence no one else can see! (Maybe it really was there when she linked to it, but NOAA censored it just like they censored her very own blog during Hurricane Rita…gotta love that Elaine, always in the thick of things!)

  Moonbat Lagniappe: “Culvert actions are a drain
  on democracy.”

Know of any other space moonbats ripe for pillorying? Drop the URL in a comment to this post (you can’t make a true link in a comment here, so just paste it in as text).

Posted on February 12th, 2006 under Luddism. Comments: 2