MarsBlog.net

More proof (as if our own mortgage meltdown wasn’t enough) that one should be wary of “irrational exuberance” during economic booms: Iceland’s Government Topples Amid Financial Mess

The value of the country’s krona currency has plummeted, hitting many Icelanders who took out special loans denoted in foreign currencies for new homes and cars during the boom years. In addition, Iceland must repay billions of dollars to Europeans who held accounts with subsidiaries of collapsed Icelandic banks.

Oops.

On the bright side, the krona’s slide means visiting Iceland is cheaper than usual (last I checked, the exchange rate had dropped from $1=100kr to $1=225kr). Looks like for all the crap I had to put up with on my vacation last summer, putting off visiting Iceland for another year is going to work out in my favor.

Well, so long as the Øbama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate holds off on hyperinflating the dollar until after I get back.

One curious point in the article is the description of outgoing Prime Minister Geir Haarde as a “fiscal conservative”. Wikipedia’s bio page describes his education so:

He received his bachelor’s degree in the United States at Brandeis University as a Wien Scholar, graduating with a degree in Economics, then went on to earn two Master’s degrees – in International Relations from the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University and in economics from the University of Minnesota.

Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with the economic philosophies of those schools to assess just how conservative Geir might be.

Posted on January 27th, 2009 under Meta, Miscellaneous, PPC. Tags: economy, Geir Haarde, Iceland. Comments Off

Looks like CU Boulder isn’t so kooky after all (well, okay it is, but it’s at least doing something of potential benefit to commercial space):

Aerospace company SpaceDev and the University of Colorado at Boulder have teamed to form the Center for Space Entrepreneurship, or eSpace, an incubator focused on fostering space startup companies and commercializing technologies with space applications.

The not-for-profit will be located at the Louisville offices of SpaceDev, a Sierra Nevada Corp. subsidiary.

A $1 million grant from the Metro Denver Wired initiative helped fund the creation of the incubator. Other funding came from the Colorado Office of Economic Development, CU, SpaceDev and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

The eSpace center will offer five $20,000 grants to entrepreneurs in its first year. It’s also launching design competition in CU’s Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, funding three hands-on, student projects with a $90,000 grant.

Combining CU’s academic research resources with the manufacturing infrastructure at SpaceDev should create a fertile environment for space-oriented startup companies, said Scott Tibbitts, executive director of eSpace.

Tibbitts is the founder of StarSys Research, a company that SpaceDev bought in 2005. He will make eSpace his full-time focus.

Posted on January 27th, 2009 under Space Commerce. Tags: enterpreneurs, Space Commerce, SpaceDev, StarSys, startups, UC Boulder. Comments Off

A disturbing look at the future of military automation.

One bright spot they apparently overlook in this is the fact that there really isn’t anyone with the capabilities to challenge the U.S. in battlefield automation (yet). Another is the very real possibility that (as suggested by the ‘more Kosovos, fewer Iraqs’ comment) such weapons would make and to some degree already are making large-scale war pointless and unneccessary…the roboticized wars of the future may be self-limiting to surgical attacks and short-duration, small-scale conflicts.

Still, it’s creepy to read this article and realize that it isn’t just a piece of the fictional backstory to the Terminator franchise.

Posted on January 25th, 2009 under Useful Technology. Comments: 1

More methane on Mars:

“Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas,” said Michael Mumma of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif.” Mumma is lead author of a paper describing this research that will appear in Science Express on Thursday.

Methane, four atoms of hydrogen bound to a carbon atom, is the main component of natural gas on Earth. Astrobiologists are interested in these data because organisms release much of Earth’s methane as they digest nutrients. However, other purely geological processes, like oxidation of iron, also release methane.

“Right now, we do not have enough information to tell whether biology or geology — or both — is producing the methane on Mars,” Mumma said. “But it does tell us the planet is still alive, at least in a geologic sense. It is as if Mars is challenging us, saying, ‘hey, find out what this means.’ “

Previous posts on Mars methane here and here.

As I’ve said before, extant life on Mars (or just the possibility of it) is a mixed blessing.

On the positive side, a solid indication of life would focus more scientific attention on Mars, and could provide justification for sending humans to explore the planet in person. The benefits from this would be the development of new space technologies and operations experience, and the possibility that humans could, having finally gotten there, maintain a permanent presence as settlers. (And yes, there are no doubt better means of accomplishing the same goal than another wasteful and politics-conflicted government program – or worse, a program based on international kumbayaaism.  Just thinking overly-optimistically here of the potential for such a program to disrupt the chicken-egg problem and provide us with the minimal technology set required to establish a beachhead.)  Plus, it would be interesting as a scientific curiosity, regardless of the origin to which the methane is ultimately attributed – though obviously more interesting if it turned out to be biogenic, since that attribution would merely answer one question while opening up thousands more – and for its potential to completely derail antiscientific nonsense like intelligent design and creationism.

On the negative side, a solid indication of life could prompt arguments to prevent further direct exploration of Mars by landers or (especially) humans, and take settlement of the planet completely off the table.  Such arguments against direct exploration and settlement would center on the risk of biological cross-contamination - concern over some Martian microbe hitchhiking back to Earth and improbably devastating the “defenseless” life on this planet, or that by taking terrestrial biology with us (via microbes on nearly-but-not-perfectly sterilized landers or quite literally by sending human explorers to the surface) we would destroy any scientific value the discovery of life on an untampered-with Mars might yield.¹

Further in this vein, there is the possibility that a Mars inhabited by even primitive life would trigger a trekkish “Prime Directive” response, whereby concerned citizens would seek a prohibition on exploration and settlement of the planet based on the ’self-determination rights’ of microbes to evolve on their own, without outside interference. 

It’s impossible to predict exactly what the response would be, of course, since it will depend on the circumstances and the prevailing attitudes at the time of discovery.  One hopes rationality will prevail, but one never knows.

¹ For an example of keeping an uninhabited place pristine for scientific purity, examine the case of Surtsey: “The scientists have strict rules against not carrying any seeds to Surtsey – the idea behind no human interference is to witness colonization and secession as naturally as possible.” While the quarantine of Surtsey is a nearly-unique and highly valuable scientific experiment on Earth with negligible effects on anyone else, closing off an entire planet to human activity based on the presence of the most primitive forms of life would be excessive.

Posted on January 17th, 2009 under Luddism, Space Science. Tags: environmentalism, geology, Iceland, life, mars, methane, Surtsey. Comments: 2

One of the nice things of having few other temptations over the holidays (and spending a lot of time in airports and airplanes) was that there was time to read a few more chapters of Hayek’s Constitution of Freedom,  a project I’ve been working on in fits and starts since March 2003.

This passage on monopolies in Chapter 15, “Economic Policy and the Rule of Law”, struck me as applicable to NASA’s track record in spoiling earlier attempts to develop a private manned space industry:

In general, a free society demands not only that the government have the monopoly of coercion  but that it have the monopoly only of coercion and that in all other respects it operate on the same terms as everybody else.

…All these activities of government [ie: surveying, standardizing weights and measures, and other activities of government compatible with the "generality" attribute of the rule of law] are part of its effort to provide a favorable framework for individual decisions; they supply means which individuals can use for their own purposes.  Many other services of a more material kind fall into the same category.  Though government must  not use its power of coercion to reserve for itself activities which have nothing to do with the enforcement of the general rules of law, there is no violation of principle in its engaging in all sorts of activities on the same terms as the citizens.  If in the majority of fields there is no good reason why it should do so, there are fields in which the desirability of government action can hardly be questioned.

To this latter group belong all those services which are clearly desirable but which will not be provided by competetive enterprise because it would be either impossible or difficult to charge the individual beneficiary for them… And there are many other kinds of activity in which the government may legitimately wish to engage, in order perhaps to maintain secrecy in military preparations or to encourage the advancement of knowledge in certain fields.  But though government may at any moment be best qualified to take the lead in such fields, this provides no justification for assuming that this will always be so and therefore for giving it exclusive responsibility.  In most instances, moreover, it is by no means necessary that government engage in the actual management of such activities; the services in question can generally be provided, and more effectively provided, by the government’s assuming some or all of the financial responsibility but leaving the conduct of the affairs to independent and in some measure competitive agencies. [emphasis added]

There is considerable justification for the distrust with which business looks on all state enterprise.  There is great difficulty in ensuring that such enterprise will be conducted on the same terms as private enterprise; and it is only if this condition is satisfied that it is not objectionable in principle.  So long as government uses any of its coercive powers, and particularly its power of taxation, in order to assist its enterprises, it can always turn their position into one of actual monopoly.  To prevent this, it would be necessary that any special advantages, including subsidies, which government gives to its own enterprises in any field, should also be made available to competing private agencies.  There is no need to emphasize that it would be exceedingly difficult for government to satisfy these conditions and that the general presumption against state enterprise is thereby considerably strengthened.

In application to NASA, this suggests that its role (particularly as NACA) in developing basic knowledge for the general benefit, without a particular end use or user in mind, is a legitimate undertaking.  While private companies or privately-funded institutes could develop wing profiles or new materials, for example, Hayek’s view here would find nothing wrong with NACA/NASA doing it, so long as they did not use their privileged position as a government agency to limit or prevent other players from providing the same services.

What is particularly interesting, though, is the treatment of the ongoing appropriateness of the government providing a service.  Where initially the government may be the only entity willing or able to provide a particular service, this can’t be assumed to always be the case…technology changes over time, making it possible for private entities to profitably provide a particular service, and the earlier actions of the government entity itself can “bootstrap” a new (private) industry into being.

The question is, how does one persuade the government agency, when the time comes, to give up the monopoly role it has enjoyed to-date and share a particular undertaking with a nascent private industry?  Especially (in the case of NASA’s manned space program) when the identity and prestige of the agency is so intertwined with the undertaking in question.

Posted on January 9th, 2009 under Space Policy. Tags: coercion, Constitution of Freedom, Hayek, monopoly, NACA, nasa. Comments Off