News and Commentary on Space
This House Resolution seems to be blatantly missing two little words. Can anyone guess what they might be?
Here’s a hint: many of the 38 people being commended for their work securing MAF during Katrina were not in fact NASA employees, as the resolution implies.
Wow. Elaine has really gone off the deep end since the last time I checked in on her:
Some of the right wing clowns brought in to turn NASA into soupcon of space cadets out to conquer the universe make fun of me on their own websites. But what do they say about this? Eh? I predicted that Bush, being a malign fake human with some sort of alien parasitical life form squirming in his large intestines, would actively plot to destroy Planet Earth.
She later suggests exile to Mars for the Bush Administration, but allows that arrest would be cheaper. (Might I suggest Tretonin?)
But seriously, the item which has Elaine so exercised is merely a change in the NASA mission statement:
From 2002 until this year, NASA?s mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: ?To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.?In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase ?to understand and protect our home planet? deleted. In this year?s budget and planning documents, the agency?s mission is ?to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.?
David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush?s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.[emphasis added]
It sounds to me like NASA getting back to basics — no more pandering to environmentalists, as they have been doing since the ‘protect the planet’ phrasing was added in 2002, just a focus on what NASA has traditionally been expected to do. Indeed, this mission statement is more in line with the Declaration of Policy and Purpose in the National Aeronautics and Space Act, the legislation creating NASA:
(d) The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:
(1) The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;
(2) The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles;
(3) The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies, and living organisms through space;
(4) The establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes;
(5) The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere;
(6) The making available to agencies directly concerned with national defense of discoveries that have military value or significance, and the furnishing by such agencies, to the civilian agency established to direct and control nonmilitary aeronautical and space activities, of information as to discoveries which have value or significance to that agency;
(7) Cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations in work done pursuant to this Act and in the peaceful application of the results thereof;
(8) The most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities, and equipment; and
(9) The preservation of the United States preeminent position in aeronautics and space through research and technology development related to associated manufacturing processes.
It’s important to note that the new mission statement doesn’t preclude environmental observation and related activities, it merely subsumes such things under “scientific discovery” (item 1 above, and more directly Title IV) instead of according them equal status to the more obvious purposes of the agency (aeronautics and astronautics).
Predictably, some NASA scientists are as unhappy as Elaine with this change, since it’s their turf which has lost the equal billing, and they no longer have a mandate “hook” to hang their pet projects on when seeking funding…in other words, the change has pushed the science über alles crowd off their pedestal, and they don’t much like it.
Space Adventures is now selling spacewalks as an add-on for its ISS tourist missions. What’s interesting about this is not the fact that they’re doing it, but why:
So far, three civilian men have paid their way to the ISS, but their 10-day pleasure cruises were confined to the pressurised hulls of the Soyuz and the station.When they returned to Earth, they said they would have liked to have done a spacewalk, where the only thing separating them from the vacuum of space is a visor, says Space Adventures spokesperson Stacey Tearne.
In other words, SA is adding the spacewalk option because their previous customers expressed a desire for it — customer demand is driving the improvement/expansion of an existing service.
I love capitalism!
I wonder, though, how this add-on option will fare once Bigelow has its full-scale inflatable modules in service. No, floating about in an enormous empty volume is not the same thing as spacewalking, and you don’t get much of a view from inside an orbital balloon, but considering how much less expensive it would be for a similar sense of gravitational freedom (with the bonus of not needing a cumbersome pressure suit and all that goes with it), I would imagine it would be attractive as an affordable substitute.
On the other hand…if orbital space tourism really takes off, and there is enough of a market for spacewalks (even from cavernous Bigelow inflatables), it could drive the development of better suits. Reducing the time and effort required to prepare for and clean up after an EVA and extending the EVA’s duration would not only make the service more operationally attractive to potential customers but also reduce the cost of the service and therefore its price. If they’re made easier to conduct and less expensive, more spacewalks will be sold…which is also true of access to orbit.
Rand Simberg has been liveblogging all weekend from the Space Frontier Conference in Las Vegas. (Start here and scroll up.)
It’s almost like being there…without having to pay for travel, lodging, and conference fees. Thanks, Rand!
Dr. Sanity seems to be describing our favorite moonbat peacenik:
War is a always a terrible choice. No reasonable person could believe that it is benign or intrinsically “good” to wage war. Yet, it is sometimes a choice that reasonable people need to make simply because evil exists in the world and it cannot go unchecked–that is, not if you truly care about innocent human life.Pacifists cannot deal with this simple truth. In reality, they don’t care much about human suffering, misery or even death; let alone the legacy of evil in the world. Through a variety of psychological defenses, they have managed to deny, displace, distort, and project real evil away. There cannot be found even a trace of psychological insight among all those angry marchers who violently and adamantly demand peace at any price.
For the carefree members of the antiwar movement, the triumph of evil is unimportant when compared to their own narcissistic need to appear virtuous and good.
Pacifism–what is it good for? It protects the user from having to make difficult moral choices in the real world; from having to deal with real human suffering in the here and now; and most importantly, from recognizing how meaningless their own lives are.
The track record of pacifism is horrendous. Not only do “peace movements” fail to bring peace; but by protecting, appeasing, and minimizing true evil, they ensure that war–when it inevitably comes–costs even more in terms of human suffering and lives.
As promised, Aaron, here are your taunting pictures of a non-flat landscape:
Mt. Democrat:
Wheeler Mountain, North Star Mountain, and Quandary Peak to the north of Mt. Cameron/Mt. Lincoln, with Wheeler Lake in the middle:
Mt. Lincoln:
Technology that will be useful for eventual human settlement of space continues to develop: Australian research shows microbes may turn dust into gold
A group of scientists led by German-born researcher Frank Reith collected gold grains from two Australian mines more than 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) apart, and discovered that 80 percent of the grains had the bacteria living on them.”What we found out suggests that bacteria can accumulate this gold,” Reith told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his Australian office on Friday.
Reith said Ralstonia metallidurans act as microscopic soil scrubbers, soaking up heavy metals in their dissolved form and converting them into less toxic, solid forms.
I expect that someday in the not-too-distant future, technology developed from findings like this will account for a sizeable portion of the raw material inputs to industry. Not only is it useful in space, where it could be used in place of the energy- and labor-intensive processes used on Earth, but it is also useful on Earth for such things as brownfield remediation and (eventually) landfill reclamation…turning garbage to gold, literally and metaphorically.
When I first started reading this article, it sounded like good material for a post on the ongoing withering of the “giggle factor” regarding space settlement and commerce.
After reading the whole thing, though, I see that both the article and its subject actually reinforce the giggle factor:
The mother-of-two is a huge fan of the science-fiction television and film series “Star Trek”.
“I am really into sci-fi and horror so I really want to go to a big Trekkie convention in the US and dress up,” she confessed.
“I have always been fascinated with stars and space so I’m going to get a strong telescope in my garden.”
She admitted: “I am a bit of a geek”.
Star Trek? Trekkie convention? Sigh.
Space News reported last week (July 7 — sorry, no link available) that ILS would no longer be competing for launches of satellites less than 4500kg. Apparently this is because the lower end of the launch market offers insufficient return on investment — at least for ILS.
What’s interesting about this is that it’s the same market that SpaceX is after with the Falcon 5/9, as well as the Kistler K-1. Less competition from the Usual Suspects means more opportunities for the newcomers.
Great. It may be time to stop procrastinating and buy a gun.
This should hardly be a surprise. I’m only about fifteen miles up the road from Evergreen, and even two years ago when I moved here, I was told that cats and small dogs should be considered “disposable household accessories” since they so frequently disappear. (Into the bellies of big cats, one was left to infer.)
(And what kind of cruel mother names her son “Schylure”? Yeesh.)
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A young girl sets out to prove herself by resolving a long-forgotten mystery. But when she gets close to the truth, what she thought was a harmless adventure becomes a threat to the future of the independent commercial settlements on Mars.
