robot guy

Handy Zombie-Fighting Weapon

2012-01-10T22:50:00.002-07:00

When the Zombie Apocalypse arrives, you want to be prepared. A shotgun will get the job done, sure, but to a Zombie horde, a shotgun is like a dinner bell. Whoever made that noise has braaaaainnnsss. Ideally you want a noiseless weapon capable of action either at a distance or close-up. You want a Slingshot Zombiehammer.

(hat tip to Small Dead Animals)

Stratolaunch

2011-12-14T00:40:00.002-07:00

Take Microsoft VP Paul Allen, add Burt Rutan and Elon Musk, and stir:

Compare to the Skylon; this is a great idea, as it provides a completely reusable first stage and eliminates the need for a launch tower.

(via Cosmic Conservative)

Last Dragonflight

2011-11-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

“Gone away, gone ahead
Echos roll unanswered
Empty. Open. Dusty. Dead.
Why have all the weyrfolk fled?

Where have dragons gone together?
Leaving Weyrs to wind and weather.
Setting herdbeasts free of tether.
Gone, our safeguards. Gone. But wither?

Have they gone to some new Weyr?
Where cruel Threads some others fear?
Are they worlds away from here?
Why, oh why the empty Weyr?”

Something you won't see on the 99percent blog

2011-10-13T01:22:00.001-06:00

a handy guide

2011-10-11T14:59:00.002-06:00

iCon

2011-10-06T12:29:00.001-06:00

Steve Jobs has died.

9/11

2011-09-11T15:05:00.000-06:00

A way out of economic meltdown

2011-09-06T01:11:00.002-06:00

In the article Labor Day Blues, Robert Samuelson points out:

To reduce unemployment, the economy must create enough new jobs to absorb entrants into the labor market and the existing out-of-work. Shierholz has calculated how many jobs would be needed to lower unemployment (9.1 percent in August) to 5 percent over five years. Her estimate: 16.9 million. That's an average of 282,000 jobs a month. The trouble is that this rate of job creation far exceeds the present level (105,000 a month since early 2010) or even the level (240,000) achieved during the boom between 1993 and 2000.

You can tinker with Shierholz's assumptions, but the main conclusion doesn't change. Even with rapid job growth, unemployment will descend slowly. With sluggish growth -- or another recession -- it may remain high indefinitely. There are no quick fixes. Unemployment will increasingly define our economic prospects and politics.

...Still, high joblessness' harshest effects fall on the jobless. "We're creating a bifurcated society," worries Harvard economist Lawrence Katz. "We're talking about a lost generation of younger workers and displaced workers." Younger workers have a harder time starting careers. Because many skills are developed on the job, long unemployment spells can lower lifetime earnings.

(via Instapundit)

It is the youngest workers who are going to need new jobs the most. It is those entry level jobs that provide the most real-world education to a young person. Clearly, focusing attention on getting young people working has merit. So what can governments do?

The first thing they can do is look at what has already been done and examine the results. For decades, program after program has been introduced, policy after policy enacted, all intending to get young people working. Which of these have actually produced positive results? Which have failed?

The second thing to do is realize that the list of successes is very small. Indeed, it seems every time governments enact a new program or department or law intending to increase youth employment, the problem gets worse.

Let's take minimum wage laws, as an example. Suppose in some jurisdiction the minimum wage is $7 an hour. An employer, perhaps a new restaurant, has $56 per hour budgeted for entry-level employee positions. Therefore, they can hire 8 young people for their first jobs. But wait! The government of that jurisdiction raises the minimum wage to $8 an hour. The restaurant's sales haven't changed. Now there are only 7 entry level jobs available. Minimum wages laws are just one example of the job-destroying effects of trying to solve a problem by adding new rules, regulations, laws, programs and so forth for employers to deal with.

Here's another example. It is nearly impossible for a young adult starting from scratch to open their own business in much of the Western world; it is doubly difficult to do legally if that young adult wishes to employ anyone else. The amount of paperwork that is required for legal compliance with the myriad regulations and laws and bylaws across various levels of government and government agencies is beyond daunting. In Europe, if they printed it all out, the paperwork would run to something like 10 railway boxcar loads. 99.9% of all the red tape is completely irrelevant.

On the other hand, if the process of starting a small business was simple enough for an 18 year old to do in an afternoon, and if the paperwork required for operation massively reduced, then the unemployed (not just the young unemployed) would be starting businesses of their own and creating jobs.

That's not to say that all regulation and law must end. What it means is that the vast majority of such are completely unnecessary. Eliminate these unnecessary impediments, get the hell out of the way, and watch the economy recover.

AI versus AI

2011-09-01T12:19:00.001-06:00

A modest proposal for NASA

2011-08-30T07:33:00.006-06:00

The Senate wants NASA to build a specific rocket using specific contractors in specific districts. The rocket scientists in the Senate have also specified a specific payload mass: 130 tonnes. This is to be done even though NASA hasn't had a budget to work with in years, only a series of Continuing Resolutions, and all foreseeable indications are that NASA's budget is going to go down, not up. Also, there is no payload on the drawing boards that weighs 130 tons and must be launched all at once as a single unit. The two different mass specifications above are also courtesy of the Senate rocket design specialists.

If one wished to be uncharitable, one would suppose that a few Senators with powerful positions on committees overseeing NASA and with NASA contractors in their states were constraining the design space for NASA not for the good of the nation but to get themselves re-elected.

However, let's be charitable. Let's suppose the Senate rocket designers in fact have a 130 ton/ne payload in mind, a super-secret payload that has super-secret funding, because it sure isn't funded through NASA's ~~budget~~ continuing resolutions.

Let's suppose the SLS (Space Launch System or Senate Launch System, take your pick) gets built and the Senate gets to launch Super Secret Payload number 001. What? You mean that there has to be more than one payload to justify development of an entirely new rocket system?

Suppose that they get the rocket built and integrate the payload, and SLS could lift 130 tons to orbit but SSP001 is 130 tonnes. Oops! Meh, that sort of thing happens at NASA from time to time. Or suppose SSP001 is 129 tons, but once they get it up there they realize they need something twice as big. They can't do orbital rendezvous, which has hardly even been tried at all except in assembling Mir and ISS. So they'd need a rocket that could lift a 260 ton payload all at once. And eventually they'd need a rocket that could lift twice as much as that.

Well, why go for half measures? Why not just build the rocket we'll eventually need, right away?

What I propose is that NASA build a rocket capable of lifting 16 million tonnes to escape velocity. Surely that would be the biggest single payload that NASA would ever need. If we do that, then NASA will finally be able to get started with Beyond Earth Orbit manned exploration.

To be conservative, let's use 12 km/s as our delta vee and 300 s for our specific impulse. If we further assume that the mass of the ullage is negligible, the rocket equation gives us a total fully-fueled mass for our Somewhat Large Space Transport of around a billion tonnes.

Now that's a rocket!

Of course, a full flight test of such a rocket would be very expensive. And the logistics of mounting such a huge payload on top of the SLST would be difficult, thus employing lots of people in key congressional districts. There's also the minor inconvenience of there being no possible launch pad capable of supporting that mass without burning down, falling over, and then sinking into the swamp.

However, Gaia has smiled upon us, and what was once thought an environmental disaster of Biblical Plague proportions could literally be the launchpad to the future. Apparently (and I haven't been following this too closely, just what I see on CNN) the Gulf of Mexico is some sort of oil-slick covered watery desert of death due to some British guys or something. Well, liquid Oxygen and liquid Hydrogen are lighter than water, so you could just float the whole rocket out into the Gulf and you don't even need a launch tower. I totally stole that idea from Sea Dragon. Any launches of the SLST wouldn't harm any wildlife in the Gulf because that's all dead from corporate greed or something which was probably Bush's fault anyhow. My details on this are kind of hazy because I haven't been watching CNN much lately.

All the unemployed people in the Gulf States could then be put to work either by physically manhandling the 16 million tonne payload onto the SLST or by joining hands and singing Kumbaya. Either way, it's financial stimulus. It'll be a huge financial stimulus when that sucker gets launched, too.

note: The US Capitol building and its grounds cover about 16 city blocks, so about a 400 meter by 400 meter area. At 100 tonnes per square meter, that's 16 million tonnes.

Online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence Class

2011-08-20T22:47:00.004-06:00

Stanford University is giving a free online class in Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. The course is presented by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, and is based around the textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. I signed up for the course two days ago, and 13000 more signed up since then; there are now 113 thousand people signed up for this unique opportunity. Sure won't hurt their book sales, either.

love that deer in the headlights look

2011-08-18T17:38:00.001-06:00

default damfoolishness

2011-07-29T14:19:00.002-06:00

I keep seeing stuff like this article - from an Econ 101 professor no less - and it frustrates the hell out of me that people who should know better, don't. One would think that CNN could have found an Economics professor in the United States that actually knew the meaning of a basic financial term like "default".

Let's be clear about the definition of default: if the US defaults then it means that the country didn't pay the interest on the debt. Not the principal. Not SS or Medicaid or Medicare or the military. Default has nothing to do with those expenditures. Just the interest.

To further clarify: the President of the United States is legally bound by the constitution to pay the interest on the debt. The money is there, taxes more than cover that amount.

So, if the US defaults, it will be because the President chose not to pay the interest, but diverted that money away from where he is Constitutionally obligated to spend it, directing it instead to something else.

The US doesn't default if it unilaterally lowers the Social Security payments to seniors. The US isn't considered to have defaulted if it gives its military a pay cut, or cuts back on any other government expenditure. It only defaults if the US doesn't pay the interest on the debt. Econ 101 professor Steven Kyle should know this, must know this. If he doesn't then he's not competent to teach Econ 101 in the USA. However, he writes:

How to get out of this fix? Certainly the easiest solution in the short run would be for Congress to pass the one sentence of legislation required to raise the debt ceiling

The debt ceiling has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the US defaults or not. The only trigger for a default is nonpayment of interest on the debt. When Obama talks about default, that's what he's talking about - vetoing a payment of the interest on the debt.

If the US defaults, Obama owns it. It's his weapon and it is turning into an albatross around his neck.

The US debt ceiling is to the interest as your personal credit card limit is to your minimum monthly payment. Saying that the US must raise its debt ceiling to avoid default is the same as you telling your credit card company that you need a raise in your credit card limit so that you can make your minimum monthly payment. They'd laugh in your face, just as those that propose raising the debt ceiling to avoid default should be met with derision and scorn. Sadly, the same people are actually teaching Economics 101. It is to weep.

27 is a bad age for rock stars

2011-07-23T14:54:00.002-06:00

Jimi Hendrix, 1942-1971.
Janis Joplin, 1943-1970.
Jim Morrison, 1943-1971.
Kurt Cobain, 1967-1994.

Amy Winehouse, 1983-2011.

If global warming by CO2 is a problem then why...

2011-07-14T13:28:00.001-06:00

...is Coca-Cola still legal?

SixthSense Computing

2011-06-30T16:35:00.003-06:00

The interface between the physical world and the digital world becomes richer and more complex as the machines themselves improve. What once was only encoded by punchcards gave way to keyboards, then joysticks and light pens and mouses (mice? not sure if the biological plural applies) and haptic interfaces. But what if your entire physical environment could be the interface to the digital world? Enter SixthSense computing.

SixthSense is an Open Source project. The current device costs about $350 to build, and instructions on making your own will soon be made available on the SixthSense site.

Skylon spaceplane

2011-06-23T03:25:00.001-06:00

space for all of us

2011-06-02T03:30:00.001-06:00

Recently Pajamas Media held the Great PJ Media Space Debate between Rand Simberg and Bob Zubrin.

At the core of their debate is a single issue: heavy lift versus propellant depots. There are advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. However, their debate is about tactics and objectives and loses the forest in the trees.

What's missing in the debate is Vision. Now, to be sure, Bob Zubrin has a vision, an extremely detailed vision of landing a man on Mars, fast. Rand Simberg has a vision, too, of the commercial market driving down launch prices for all missions. Others have different visions - Paul Spudis wants to extract Hydrogen and Oxygen from lunar ice trapped in perma-dark craters from a base on the Moon's South pole, for instance.

All this debate over space policy is about the How and Where, but very little is about the Why.

Now, I'd wager that most of the people who care enough about space to (in some cases) make a living by writing about space, would want to go up there themselves. Each would have their own particular reasons for wanting to go. They all (not just the three above) have different destinations in mind, and different ideas about what to do once there. Each naturally tries to steer the debate towards whatever they think will accomplish their personal goals.

These visions are all worthy ideas, technically possible with today's technology, and all suffering from a lack of long-range Vision. Each group is only looking at the next decade or so. This is understandable, as after all we are debating current space policy, arguing about what to do next and how best to go about it.

Suppose one group wins out and is successful over the next ten or fifteen years. What's missing is the answer to the question "then what?" What happens after Zubrin gets a man to Mars? What happens after Simberg gets cheap access to orbit? What happens after Spudis gets his lunar base and starts producing LOX? What are we doing all these things for?

Fifty years after Kennedy proposed the moon landings, there is still no clear understanding of what we should be doing in space and why we should be doing it. Or rather, there is a reason and we've all been just kind of avoiding saying it, because the idea is so literally far out.

the goal

The goal is the settlement of space.

That implies large numbers of people living and working and raising children off the Earth. It implies not only cheap launch to orbit, but a lot of other challenges to be solved, technological and otherwise.

I started writing this blog post on May 22nd, and nine days later this keynote speech by Jeff Greason at the ISDC appeared at MoonAndBack, laying out much of what I'm talking about here in detail, in particular the difference between the tactics and objectives being discussed in the PJMedia space debate and the Goal and Strategy. Here's the slide where he lays it all out, without getting into the minutae of the tactics:

It's a pretty good starting point for discussion purposes, and as Greason says it is a strategy, not necessarily the path to be taken but in a better general direction than the status quo. And for once the Goal of all this effort - the human settlement of space - is clearly stated.

something's gotta give

For decades the US government has been living beyond its means, and the time is rapidly approaching when government will have no choice but to cut expenditures and restructure. As Jeff Greason mentioned in his ISDC speech, if in ten years NASA has no more progress than the last ten years, NASA itself could be greatly diminished. The bottom line is that NASA's budget will not increase in the coming years and may even decrease slightly, as a most-likely scenario.

NASA is going to have to change the way it does business. Greason mentioned that it is going to have to assist in developing technologies which will result in products that have other customers besides NASA in the future - and then get out of the way and move on to the next thing while private companies fill in behind them.

However, a more fundamental restructuring of NASA may be necessary to implement a Greason-esque strategy. Einstein asserted that doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results, was insanity. The same NASA centers being run the same way using the same risk-averse methods that have ossified the agency over the last several decades will not give different results. The Augustine commission recommended changing all NASA centers into Federally-Funded Research and Development Centers, like JPL is currently, and that is a good start.

However, the change at NASA might have to go even deeper than that. One way of reducing NASA's budget, without laying off a bunch of voters, is to reduce NASA to core competencies and transfer those non-core parts to another agency.

In the Winter 2011 edition of the New Atlantis, James C. Bennett proposed a United States Space Guard modeled after the Coast Guard. In his essay Bennett points out that there are many space-related functions in government outside of NASA, in agencies in which these functions are not core competencies: the Department of Transportation regulates suborbital flight; the Air Force tracks orbital debris; NASA has infrastructure operations that are not related to R&D, exploration, or space science; the Department of Commerce operates weather satellites.

All of these functions would be transferred from the respective agencies to the new Space Guard, allowing each agency to concentrate its resources on its core missions. This new entity would likely be in the Department of Commerce or the Department of Transportation, and not in the Department of Defense. For instance, since tracking orbital debris is a function not directly related to war-fighting, it is not a core function of the Air Force and thus should be transferred to the Space Guard.

Bennett also proposes new functions and responsibilities for the Space Guard: space-transportation contracting; in-house space transportation engineering expertise; space situational awareness; space debris reduction and mitigation; a "Space Reserve" capacity; enforcing order ("USSG officers would be, like Coast Guardsmen, officers of the U.S. government capable of operating as a constabulary"); and finally search, rescue, and recovery operations in space.

This idea has merit. It allows several departments to reduce their budgets (most importantly for PR purposes in the Department of Defense) without losing capability. It establishes a central civilian agency associated with the routine use of space, well inside the envelope that it is NASA's job to push. It allows NASA to ignore the routine aspects of its current operations, and instead to focus on cutting-edge research and development, exploration, and space science exclusively.

Now, the creation of yet another new government department is not going to be an easy sell in a time of budget cutting. It won't simply be a matter of money taken from the various agencies and all transferred to the new Space Guard, all done on paper with zero net spending reduction. Further budget reductions can reasonably be expected in most government departments, including Defense and NASA.

NASA will need the commercial sector to step in and provide routine launch services, and the commercial sector will need NASA as an anchor tenant and technology driver. As Greason said in the ISDC speech, the cost to the taxpayer per person in space has to come down, continuously and over a long term basis, for space settlement to ever be a reality. The only way that will happen is if the government is paying for routine services and technology development assistance and then getting out of the way of the private commercial sector.

The restructuring of NASA (and other non-military government space operations) and the implementation of the Greason strategy or one like it are a great start. However, there is still one crucial element needed to make the settlement of space a reality.

there's gold in them thar hills

Mark Twain said "Buy land, they're not making it anymore". The idea of private individuals or corporations owning land off the Earth - on the moon or other celestial bodies - is crucial to settlement. When a corporation is setting up a mining operation to produce propellant on the moon from lunar ice, it is critical to the business plan that the company has the legal right to own the propellant it produces. If a company is mining asteroid (6178) 1986 DA, it wants to know that it owns whatever Gold and Platinum and whatever else it mines there. If a young couple strikes out into the black to settle on Mars, they want to know their kids will inherit the habitat they build.

This requires legal recognition of property rights in space. The 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty prevents the United States and other nations from "national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means" of celestial bodies. However, this does not prevent the recognition of ownership by private citizens or corporations of extraterrestrial real estate.

It is this formal recognition of property rights that is the final missing element necessary for the settlement of space. This might be a function of the Space Guard, or another entity entirely. This recognition wouldn't imply American sovereignty over the property involved, just a recognition of the fact that a claim of ownership is valid. The recognition could and should be extended to non-Americans who go out and settle space, as well.

A mechanism in place for the recognition of property rights would allow corporate investors a way to get a return on their investment, and would provide collateral for financing for groups of settlers to set up their settlements. This in turn would lead to infrastructure improvements on Earth, in orbit, and at the various destinations, and enable further waves of settlement. Without property rights, investment will remain a trickle. With the recognition of property rights, the investment - and space settlement - will turn into a flood.

Fifty years ago today

2011-05-25T14:55:00.003-06:00

John F. Kennedy gave this speech on May 25, 1961.

moonbots 2.0

2011-05-15T15:46:00.002-06:00

Take three of my favorite things: robotics, LEGO, and space. Mix them together and stamp them with the logos of the X-Prize foundation and Google. The result is a unique educational experience: a Google Lunar X-Prize LEGO Mindstorms challenge called Moonbots 2.0:

Registration closes June 13th.

don't hit that switch

2011-05-12T00:59:00.000-06:00

(via Hack A Day)

space programs about space

2011-05-08T22:58:00.004-06:00

Trent Waddington has a problem with this segment of a Neil deGrasse Tyson speech:

To which Trent says:

It disappoints when a speaker says something like this.. it fills you with inspiration for about five seconds, only to have the nagging rational part of your brain chime in with: umm, excuse me? That's not actually true, ya know. I think kids who are inspired by such speakers to follow their dreams will feel terrible betrayal when they eventually discover they've been lied to.

In the comments section Dr. GeGrasse Tyson defended what he said, but I think Trent's point still stands: spinoffs are not a justification for a space program.

By its nature a spinoff technology must be developed for some purpose, which is later developed as a consumer product - which may be used for a vastly different purpose than for which the technology was originally developed, as with the LASIK example. And if that original purpose isn't justified, then the spinoff technology never happens at all and we would never even know what we were missing. In other words, spinoff technologies occur after the fact of justification and are thus not the justification in themselves.

We didn't establish space programs in nations all over the world so that we can have LASIK. Spinoffs like that are nice to have, but they aren't the reason that there is a NASA and JAXA and ESA and all the rest of the acronyms.

The reasons for the existence of all these space programs extend back to the geopolitics of the Cold War, and each space program has had to come up with continuous justifications for its existence. They're all trying to answer the question "why bother with space?" Or more specifically "why should a national government bother with space?"

National space programs have to walk a tightrope. On the one hand, there are the multiple potential benefits of using space - the limitless energy supply, the limitless raw materials, access to zero gee and hard vacuum and unobstructed sight lines. So, those potentialities have to be acknowledged, and it must at least appear that progress is being made in our understanding and ability to use space to our benefit.

And then there is the other side of the coin. Imagine for a moment a bank with a physical vault located somewhere deep under the surface of the moon, and a transportation structure that enables cheap trips to space. What country would have jurisdiction over that bank? Would that bank be an extra-national entity, outside the law or reach of any nation?

There are enough problems policing the inner cities now, what do you do when millions of people are living in the asteroid belt? What happens to a nation's decades-long investment if second-generation Belters start grumbling about independence?

This is a fundamental problem with national space programs. If they are wildly successful, then large numbers of their taxpaying citizens would be able to physically go beyond the reach of the tax man, spreading out over roughly kajillions of cubic miles of space.

So a national space program must appear to be making progress while simultaneously making that progress as glacial and expensive as possible. The "expensive" part is key feature, as it discourages private individuals and small businesses. The weak tea that we get in return - pretty pictures from Hubble, the occasional robot scattered here and there, the tepid pace of ISS construction - are supposed to indicate progress. It worked for NASA for decades.

Not anymore. Entrepreneurs like Burt Rutan and Elon Musk and Robert Bigelow and many, many others have started to peel back the facade. They have demonstrated that the hugely-expensive development programs NASA has historically undertaken simply don't need to be expensive. Consider: in 9 years SpaceX has gone from a clean sheet of paper to having developed two new rocket engines, two classes of rocket, and a crew capsule, all for a grand total of 800 million dollars. That might sound like a lot, but NASA's yearly budget is around $18 Billion with a B. NASA spends SpaceX's entire 9 year investment every 16 days.

The reason for the difference is that SpaceX is actually about space. Elon Musk wants to put his own boots on the soil of Mars. He realized that in order for that to happen, he had to make a business that would make it possible for large numbers of people to go into space. So, every decision about SpaceX is made with the larger goal in mind: make it possible for large numbers of people to travel to orbit. And that only happens if SpaceX makes a profit.

Robert Bigelow developed the expandable modules with a goal in mind: space hotels. He knows hotels and also knows they grow up along with any transportation infrastructure. Bigelow Aerospace has a purpose, and it is about making money in space.

Richard Branson has an actual purpose in space: making money from suborbital tourist hops, and eventually going for orbital tourism. It's the same with example after example of the new breed of space entrepreneurs: the purpose of space is to make money.

That is the way it has to be. It is the only way the large numbers of people will go into space, which is fundamentally at odds with National interests. It is also the only way that a space program will actually be about space, because the search for profit won't allow for any distraction from the goal. NASA and all the rest can keep doing what they are doing, spending huge amounts of taxpayer money for miniscule advances, which the profit-seekers leap past them. You watch.

Monbiot comes clean

2011-05-07T15:10:00.002-06:00

It took him a decade, but Guardian author George Monbiot has finally realized that environmentalism doesn't work - at least, not as it has been practiced and promoted for decades.

This is a guy at the core of the whole Green movement - it is from his name that the derogatory moniker "moonbat" derives - and if he is finally coming around, then maybe there's hope for others, too. Of course, next it will be some other nonsense ten or fifteen years down the road.

Fossil Hunter's guide to Mars

2011-04-28T23:39:00.003-06:00

I worked directly with Charles Shults as he wrote the book A Fossil Hunter's Guide to Mars, critiquing everything, proofreading, and even came up with the name for the book. So, I am very glad to see that he's getting some mainstream media exposure for his work. When he first told me he had found fossils on Mars in the Spirit and Opportunity images, I was skeptical but at least willing to see the evidence. The clincher for me was this image, taken by the rover Opportunity on Sol 111. In the bottom left corner of that NASA image you see the image at the right. That rock exhibits fivefold radial symmetry. That is, if you rotate that rock in increments of 72 degrees the pattern facing us looks the same. There is no geological process that produces rocks of this kind, no mineral with this kind of symmetry occurs in nature (although such quasicrystals are possible in tightly controlled laboratory settings, they are microscopic). The only way for such a rock to ever appear is if a life form (such as a starfish) becomes fossilized. Therefore, fossils exist on Mars. Not convinced? You can buy the book and check the evidence (presented in exhaustive detail) for yourself.

Spacex: a man on Mars in ten years

2011-04-23T22:37:00.002-06:00

Here's an interview with Elon Musk by the Wall Street Journal. Time frame for a man on Mars? "Best case, ten years. Worst case, fifteen to twenty."

Delta Robots in LEGO

2011-04-21T12:34:00.003-06:00

I love LEGO. The title of this blog might indicate some interest in robots. A few days ago I posted some free software for simulating Canfield Joints in POVray.

So, it pleased me enormously to see the LEGO Delta Robots via Hack A Day.

A Delta Robot isn't exactly the same as a Canfield joint. The parallelograms formed by the arms force the end effector to have the same orientation as the base on top. In contrast, a Stewart Platform behaves more like a Canfield joint, in that the end effector's orientation can be different than the base.

The beauty of the Canfield joint is that two such joints connected in series can act as either a Delta Robot or a Stewart Platform, with loads evenly distributed no matter what the orientation.

Here are some more videos of commercial Delta Robots in action:

Carnival of Space 193

2011-04-17T21:10:00.002-06:00

Welcome to the 193rd edition of the Carnival of Space.

We'll start out the Carnival with the most exotic objects in the universe: Black Holes. Last week's host Vega 0.0 explains the main features of a Kerr black hole.

Discovery Space news tells of a new visualization tool that helps to model the extreme nature of spacetime in colliding black holes.

Is it possible for life to exist within a black hole? Next Big Future says that it's possible.

Moving to only slightly less exotic objects, astroblogger Ian Musgrave looks for Nibiru while explaining some practical astronomy.

On the Road to Endeavour there is an eerie synchronicity in two photos, one taken on Mars and the other on Earth.

Closer to home Next Big Future has news of Moon Express, a Silicon Valley startup building robots capable of mining the surface of the moon for precious metals and rare metallic elements.

In other space commerce news, Urban Astronomer cheers on SpaceX for winning the contract to launch the next generation of Iridium satellites.

For a bit of space history, Vintage Space talks about the Saturn V - its genesis and why it was "lost".

Finally, Steve's Astro Corner looks through a Galileo telescope at Saturn, with surprising results.

That's it for this week's Carnival of Space. Carnival #194 will be held at the Planetary Society blog; if you want to be involved you can either send your entries to Emily at PSB or enter them in the Carnival of Space articles spreadsheet at Google Docs.

Canfield Joints in POVray

2011-04-16T14:48:00.004-06:00

Last June, Kirk Sorenson wrote a blog post at Selenian Boondocks about Canfield Joints. These devices enable pointing a rocket nozzle or solar panel anywhere within a hemisphere.

Part of the problem he had in describing the Canfield Joint is due to the fact that the thing operates in three dimensions, making visualization difficult with 2-D images. Over the last several years I've been using POVray to do 3D designs and animations, and I realized that a character skeleton system I published last year (bones.inc) would also work well for Canfield Joints.

So, I did a little math (OK, a LOT of math) and came up with a short POVray program that can do 3D animation of Canfield joints. The program is included in the bones.inc zip file, and the results are shown in the video below.

Given the three base angles for a Canfield joint, the software automatically calculates all the rest of the angles and the position and orientation of the distal plate. An arbitrary number of Canfield joints can be linked in series and manipulated. Now anyone with POVray can design and visualize their own Canfield joints in operation.

open source hardware

2011-04-14T18:46:00.002-06:00

Open Source Ecology
Global Village Construction Set

Artificial Intelligence 101 - part 3

2011-04-06T01:00:00.001-06:00

History of AI - from Golems to Dartmouth

It has been way too long (two years!) since I started this series, and I figure it's time to get back into it. For a refresher, here's part 1 : What is intelligence? and part 2: Why Artificial Intelligence?

What follows is by no means a definitive history of artificial intelligence. In fact, Wikipedia already has a very good entry on the history of artificial intelligence. Instead, this is a fairly brief history, with large gaps. I'm a bit more free to editorialize than Wikipedia.

distant past

Humanity has long searched for ways to get the benefits of human intelligence, without the requirements for actual humans. For most of human history, the solution was slavery - treating other human beings as if they were machines, and desiring only a small fraction of their mental potential.

Not only is slavery evil, it is also inefficient - slaves still require water, food, shelter, clothing, none of which is free. Automation of even the simplest sort is so vastly more efficient, along any metric one uses for comparison, that as soon as a task could be automated, it was.

The desire for intelligence in the inanimate has persisted through recorded history. The Golem is a fairly early example, and a cautionary tale as well. From Wikipedia:

The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late 16th century chief rabbi of Prague, also known as the Maharal, who reportedly created a golem to defend the Prague ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks and pogroms. Depending on the version of the legend, the Jews in Prague were to be either expelled or killed under the rule of Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor. To protect the Jewish community, the rabbi constructed the Golem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava river, and brought it to life through rituals and Hebrew incantations. As this golem grew, it became increasingly violent, killing gentiles and spreading fear. A different story tells of a golem that fell in love, and when rejected, became the violent monster seen in most accounts. Some versions have the golem eventually turning on its creator or attacking other Jews.

The Zombie - no, not the Night of the Living Dead type, the Haitian voodoo kind - is a similar cultural expression of this desire for (partial) human intelligence animating human bodies. In both the cases of the Golem (an artificial creature) and the Haitian Zombie (a person enslaved through artificial chemical means and cultural expectations) the desire for control of a portion of human-like intelligence to perform tasks is evident.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is another example - a not-human (because he's dead) is re-animated under the belief that the mind could still function. Once again this fictional creation of artificial intelligence is a cautionary tale, as the creature turns on his creator. As an aside, it is also the inspiration for the subtitle to this blog.

In the late 18th century, the Turk chess-playing machine was a fraud that played off the desire for automated intelligence. A skilled chess player was hidden inside an elaborately constructed table with attached mechanical "opponent", operated by the player inside via levers and gears. So clever was the mechanism for hiding the chess master inside, and so great the desire (on the part of the audience) to believe that it was possible to automate intelligence with levers and gears, that the fraud persisted for decades.

the 1800s

In 1837, Charles Babbage developed the idea of a programmable computer, and a partial first sample of the Analytical Engine, which would have been the first Turing-complete computer had it been finished. Lady Ada Byron became the first computer programmer by writing a program to compute Bernoulli numbers on the Analytical engine. This was an important step, as it proved that some tasks which were once thought to be purely mental in nature could in fact be performed by machines - that calculation could be automated.

Then in 1854, George Boole developed a variation on elementary algebra called Boolean Algebra, operating solely on "truth values" of 0 or 1 rather than on all numbers. This Boolean algebra is the basis for all digital logic.

the 1930s

In 1937, Claude Shannon published his groundbreaking master's thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits (available here). In that paper he showed that it was possible to use electromechanical relays to solve Boolean Algebra problems. In 1948 he introduced the idea of the "bit" as the smallest unit of information (among other ideas like information entropy) in the paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication (available here), which is itself the foundation of what we today call Information Theory. He showed that electronic circuits could perform logical operations, and that extraordinarily complex computations could be performed with electronics. Once again, what once had required the intelligence of a human could now be automated.

In 1936, Alan Turing described a thought experiment representing an automatic computing machine; this thought experiment has since become known as the "Turing Machine". In 1948 Turing described the idea as:

...an infinite memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares, on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behavior of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings.

Although the physical details are different, the description is identical to the operation of any computer today. Instead of a physical tape being fed through the machine, a memory address is polled and the resulting "symbol" consists of a pattern of low and high voltages on wires, what we think of as the Zeros and Ones in a byte.

If a Turing machine is capable of emulating any other Turing machine, then it is considered a Universal Turing Machine. This led to the idea of a stored-program computer - the stored program being the translation software operating in the background. Indeed, most computers today can emulate pretty much any other computer, and the process usually only requires the appropriate software.

We're not done with Alan Turing yet. Besides groundbreaking work in computational theory, he also turned his attention to artificial intelligence. He devised a thought experiment to determine whether an artificial device was actually intelligent. The Turing Test consists of a human, an AI, and a human judge. The judge has a conversation with both the AI and the human through a teletype arrangement - what we would recognize today as a chat window - and tries to decide which one is the human. If the judge can't figure it out solely from the conversation in chat, then the AI is considered intelligent, according to the Turing Test. It isn't a perfect test, but at least it was a first attempt to evaluate the quality of our efforts towards developing artificial intelligence.

So to recap: there is a historical desire for at least (or only) a portion of human intelligence to perform tasks; it was shown that the task of calculation can be automated, mechanically; calculation and complex logical operations can also be automated with electronics; calculating machines with stored programs can emulate (or simulate) other calculating machines; and it is possible to test a machine for intelligence, at least to a first-order approximation.

the birth of AI as a field of study

The 1956 Dartmouth Conference is generally regarded as the birth of AI. Indeed, the term "artificial intelligence" was coined for the conference and came to be accepted as the name for the new field of study at that conference. The Dartmouth Conference led to an explosion of work in the field that continued until about 1974.

The Dartmouth Conference is a pretty good place to stop this section. The next three parts of this series will look at three approaches to artificial intelligence: neural networks, fuzzy cognitive maps, and genetic algorithms.

Nautilus-X update

2011-02-19T00:48:00.002-07:00

I sent an email to Mark L. Holderman of NASA-JSC, asking him to respond to my last post about the Nautilus-X. Here is his response:

Hello Ed,
Thank-you for taking the time to look at Nautilus and to post the presentation on your site. [I have attached a slightly updated version; there has been some file corruption from multiple downloads]

I apologize for not responding sooner, but for some I/T reason a great many emails have been directed to the Server SPAM file; I now check it regularly.

A great deal of "detail" information is not contained in the presentation. This was by design; it was crafted to be an oral presentation with much of the technical content addressed by the speaker, who directly answers audience questions and can therefore better engage the particular interest(s) of various groups. What you have viewed is the Concept "Sales" package - it attempts to paint a picture that folks might want to find out more about. So questions, observations, critiques, no matter on what subject - and as long as they are more-or-less civil in tone, are all welcomed. If a dialog results, well then --- yahoo!

Your questions about thermal considerations are spot on. While in LEO [construction phase],the classic basting roll maneuver would likely be employed. But transit to L1, and at L1 require a different solution. Most folks don't notice the lack of thermal rejection capability in the Concept images; they are usually taken aback at the general (size) and odd structural manifestation that good engineering details are not usually assessed. Thermal load/rejection and management at L1 will be different than at LEO, will be different than during a CIS-Lunar route [repeated], and definitely different than for an inner Solar System junket[trek...I wanted to avoid that term]. So yes, Thermal management is a major technical consideration that has a couple of nifty solutions that are being pursued. One of the inflatables will have a decidedly green element associated with it....[think Silent Running w/ Bruce Dern]. It is a partial thermal shunt, not the complete solution. Radiators will still be required, along with some new Variable Conducting Heat-Pipes that the old Hughes Aircraft Corporation had utilized.

The "Winnebago" section is new-think applied to the design success of the Apollo LEM. The Lunar Excursion Module is THE most successful spacecraft ever built. Purely and completely a space-craft that journeys in the Space environment. I purposefully exclude ISS, as it is essentially a static platform. Many of its design factors were constrained by the method of its construction --- Orbiter delivery with on-orbit assembly. The OV payload bay is incredible, but it does have both constraints and strong limitations [I am from the SSP]. With that understood, Nautilus design knowingly departed from ortho/iso-grid cylinder construction to embrace the lessons learned from the Grumman "flat-panel" LEM. Load path negotiation was a nightmare back then, and early NASTRAN was an indication of a trend, not even remotely considered an absolute.

The addition of what is called the "exo-truss" to the entire vehicle, for managing and transmitting the Propulsion Pod(s) thrust(and Isp), will give Nautilus sufficient structural integrity. We also hope for hefty a natural frequency so that the Centrifuge can become a positive input into the overall GN&C design.

I hope this helps answer of few of your questions. If nothing else, it is hoped that Nautilus-X is utilized as a development tool/mechanism for good System(s) engineering design and produces some decent axioms for large, long-duration spacecraft design. But it is something of a nifty Concept....

Warm regards,
--- mark

First of all, thanks to Mark for shedding a little more light on this concept. The updated powerpoint (linked above) contains a few more pictures of the Nautilus-X from different angles.

Slide 32 is particularly interesting - an orthogonal view of the "underside" of the craft. It is clear from this slide that the single biggest section is that "Winnebago" at the nose. No other segment even comes close in size - everything else could probably be launched on currently- or near-term-available rockets, but that Winnebago would need something much bigger than we have right now.

I understand they are eager to use the flat panels, drawing from the Lunar Excursion Modules as an inspiration. The slide-out concept might even work just fine. That heavy lift requirement for just that one element is the problem.

If one were to imaginarily slide that command deck back and the big airlock forward, it is easy to see that this one piece could be broken up into three pieces with no slide-outs, each of which could fit on existing rockets.

I agree completely with doing the ISS demo of the centrifuge. We might get lucky with that size centrifuge and find the right amount of spin to reduce or eliminate bone loss without making astronauts dizzy. If it turns out we need a bigger centrifuge, then we've found that out early on. If not, then that's a big hurdle out of the way.

I agree with the external truss framework. It makes lots of sense. The one weak point is at the centrifuge. All thrust loads have to be transmitted through those bearings. I could see having a central truss through the centrifuge taking the load off the bearings, but having that centrifuge located coaxial with the main thrust axis in between the Winnebago and the rest of the ship gives me the willies. It might be better located right at the nose of the craft. Having two centrifuges rotating perpendicular to the centerline might even be better. It isn't clear whether the centrifuge is rotating during any boosting operations; if not, that might simplify the loading during boost.

"Silent Running w/ Bruce Dern" - oh, boy. Bruce Dern also gives me the willies. Kidding aside, I think that having lots of plants and hydroponic food and so forth will go a long way towards improving the life support system of space vessels. Hydroponic gardens are already extensively used by submarine crews around the world, and will surely be useful in long-duration space flight. Just having green growing things around will provide a psychological boost to the astronauts, but their primary use would be to help replenish the oxygen supply and to provide food. I'm all for it.

The more I look at the solar panel arrangement, the more convinced I am that the booms should be longer, and that there should be Canfield joints between the booms and the solar panels. The mechanism is far less complicated than the SARJ used on the ISS, and would allow a full hemisphere of aiming for each solar panel.

NASA designs an actual spaceship

2011-02-12T00:50:00.004-07:00

The Nautilus-X MMSEV is the closest NASA has come to a design for an honest-to-goodness spaceship in decades. There has already been extensive discussion over at Selenian Boondocks and Hobbyspace, and this is probably a couple weeks late on the subject. However, this is an idea that has considerable merit and deserves further study. So, I uploaded the Holderman powerpoint to Google Docs, and here it is:

If you click on the "open in new window" button, then you can view it in full screen.

There is a lot that I like about this design - in fact, much of it looks like items on my list of technological stepping stones to space. For one thing, it is modular. Yes yes absolutely yes. Several launches are required to put it together, all of which could be done with existing vehicles (with one exception which I'll get to later). It includes a centrifuge, which might mitigate some of the bone loss effects of microgravity. It includes inflatable modules. Above all it is a spaceship - its environment is space, it has no landing gear or reentry heat shield.

Now, there are some things I don't like about the Nautilus-X.

That big core section would require a single launch, probably on something heavier than anything in stock today. It has RV-style slide-outs for the command deck and a large airlock. Worst of all, it has flat walls - probably due to the slide-outs. The flat walls and slide-outs are brand-new technology that introduce unnecessary failure modes and complexity. This could be redone as two pieces with curved walls: the radiation mitigation chamber is one piece, the airlock and command deck are another, set "sideways" to make a T shape. These two smaller pieces could then probably be launched on existing launch vehicles.

The centrifuge radius is an educated guess. We don't know the minimum gee required to reduce or eliminate bone loss. That particular centrifuge would produce no more than a few percent of a gee (i.e. about lunar gravity at 4RPM by my estimate) before problems due to high angular velocity start to occur. If a few percent gee is enough to slow or stop bone loss, great! If not, then this centrifuge would be an added layer of complexity for limited benefit. There would be benefits, no doubt, particularly for things like eating and ablutions, but the primarily-intended benefit would be missing. The bearings on the centrifuge - allowing nearly frictionless rotation while not allowing atmosphere to escape - are going to be a novel engineering challenge.

The MMSEV is intended for very long duration missions, up to two years. Unlike satellites in low earth orbit, which spend half their time in Earth's shadow, the MMSEV would be out in cislunar space or interplanetary space constantly being exposed to the sun. The entire craft would have to do a slow "barbecue roll" to avoid overheating one side, most likely along its long axis in the opposite direction of the centrifuge. Canfield joints at the end of the beams holding the big solar panels would allow them to continuously track the sun during the barbecue roll.

It's a good start.

Update Mark Holderman responds.

demolishing global warming

2011-01-24T23:38:00.005-07:00

The theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is based upon the following principles:

the global climate is changing
carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is increasing due to human industrial activity
the increase in CO2 concentration increases the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere
this could cause a runaway effect making the earth uninhabitable

This is all presented as though it is established fact, and that the obvious conclusion is that we must greatly decrease the amount of industry worldwide -- achieved through regulation, internationalism, and so-called "green" activity.

But what if one of those principles above is wrong? What if CO2 concentration is not correlated to average global temperature? What if the current variation is in fact insignificant?

The glaciers of Greenland have yielded thousands of ice core samples to scientific survey. Significantly, the Oxygen-18 isotope concentration in the ice is a good proxy for average global temperature over a long timescale. A water molecule containing O-18 is 11% heavier than the O-16 water molecule, so it takes more energy to get a water molecule containing O-18 to evaporate into the atmosphere than it does for O-16. This heavier isotope is more abundant in the snow when the temperatures are warmer, and less abundant when it is colder globally. The ratio of O-18 to O-16 in the ice corresponds to a temperature at ancient glaciers in Greenland - a yearly average high-resolution record going back over 100000 years.

Dr. Don J. Easterbrook has an analysis of these ice core samples, analyzing the rates of change of temperature:

Temperature changes recorded in the GISP2 ice core from the Greenland Ice Sheet show that the magnitude of global warming experienced during the past century is insignificant compared to the magnitude of the profound natural climate reversals over the past 25,000 years, which preceded any significant rise of atmospheric CO2. If so many much more intense periods of warming occurred naturally in the past without increase in CO2, why should the mere coincidence of a small period of low magnitude warming this century be blamed on CO2?

So that about does it for anthropogenic global warming.

Update: Here's another view, looking at ocean sediments, providing a temperature reading dating back 65 million years. And here is the GISP2 data; see for yourself.

civility in politics?

2011-01-16T22:15:00.004-07:00

Ya gotta be kidding me. After eight years of reading about Chimpy mcBushitlerburton? After seing how the Left conducts demonstrations (oh yeah, all those balaclava-garbed idiots throwing firebombs at G20 meetings are "anarchists"), Obama's frequent threatening tone ("... so we know whose ass to kick"), and an incident where Sara Palin was hung in effigy ("For weeks the life-size mannequin of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin that hung from a noose around its neck in front of Morrisette's West Hollywood home caused little controversy.")- now you want civility?

Lemme tell ya something, princess. Politics ain't ever been civil:

update the next day: remember this from just a few months ago? I could probably dig up a hundred more examples if I wanted to.

I'm with Don Surber. Bite me.

Messing with the template. Again.

2010-12-28T02:45:00.003-07:00

Longtime readers (yes, there are a few) will notice something different today; I've changed the blog template again. This is an old tradition here at Robot Guy, going back to the very first days of this blog; the stable template of the last few years has been the anomaly.

The change was forced on me by Blogrolling.com; while I had displayed rather a lot of blogrolls, many relied upon blogrolling.com to supply their innards. Alas, blogrolling.com has performed rather flakily for a while, and I just can't use it anymore. This is unfortunate, as the Space Blogroll was ensconced in blogrolling.com, and hundred of blogs out there were showing up as a big blank.

Well, Google Reader to the rescue. I had already entered as many blogs for which I could find an RSS feed as I possibly could over the course of the last several years. Now it turns out that Google Reader can produce a blogroll from the spaceblogs feed; the new Space Blogroll now resides on the left sidebar. I will probably be adding quite a few feeds to the blogroll over the next few months. I have also added the latest posts from space blogs and space news sites over on the right sidebar, also courtesy Google Reader.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-25T00:01:00.001-07:00

An Inexpensive Space Infrastructure Improvement

2010-12-22T15:10:00.001-07:00

Recently Jon Goff, Trent Waddington, and others have proposed some innovative space missions, space business strategies, and vital space technology tests that could be undertaken within the next few years. While I agree with much of what they propose, each proposal has a significant disadvantage: they all cost some entity a lot of money, more than seven digits after the dollar sign, up front.

One of the big expenses associated with any space mission is communication with the spacecraft. I think I have an idea that will bring down part of the cost of operating spacecraft communications with the ground, one that won't break the bank in up-front costs, and which will provide a boon to radio astronomy.

Currently NASA uses the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) for communications with manned missions and the Deep Space Network for communications with missions outside cislunar space. The TDRSS consists of several satellites in geosynchronous orbit and several ground stations each consisting of several large satellite dishes, and the DSN is three satellite dish complexes in California, Spain, and Australia.

It costs a lot of money to operate these big facilities. Anyone who wants to communicate with and control their satellite either has to build their own communications systems or rent the use of NASA facilities (or their Russian equivalents). As the number of launch providers and satellites launched increases, the scheduling on the TDRSS and DSN facilities will become tighter and tighter, the cost will rise, and eventually more and bigger dishes will need to be built.

However, there is another approach that takes advantage of an Army of Davids.

Currently there are about two million ham radio operators worldwide, and millions more electronics enthusiasts. There are many successful volunteer distributed processing efforts and open source collaborative software projects. And, take a bunch of widely-separated radio telescopes and combine their data using interferometry, and you end up with the equivalent of a telescope with an effective diameter equal to the largest distance separating the individual telescopes.

What if electronics/HAM/space enthusiasts worldwide were to be involved in a collaborative effort to improve communications with spacecraft? Each person involved would need a satellite dish, a way of pointing it controlled by software, and a connection to the internet. As a satellite orbits overhead and the earth turns below, multiple small radio dishes would work in concert to act as a much bigger virtual ground station. Each individual station would track a given satellite for a short time before moving to track the next one to come along, handing off communications to other stations down the line. Encrypted uplink and downlink data would travel over the internet (peer to peer?) to wherever the control center for a given satellite happened to be - a satellite could be controlled from a home office.

Satellite operators could then simply use an online satellite control and communications service. So who would be these satellite operators? Clearly the people operating billion dollar machines are going to continue to use the TDRSS and DSN for a while yet.

If we think of big expensive satellites like Hubble and Galileo as the equivalent to mainframe computers, then the "laptop computer" version of a satellite is the nanosatellite. For such small satellites, it simply doesn't make sense to have the same operational costs for communications as for the big satellites, nor does it make sense to use the big NASA facilities for such low-value targets.

However, a network of amateur ground stations running on open-source software over the internet would provide nearly worldwide coverage for these small satellites. Over time, as the network grows it would eventually become more robust (more fault-tolerant, better coverage, higher bandwidth) than the handful of big ground stations maintained by NASA and the Russians.

A second application of this satellite dish network exists. If a ground station isn't busy communicating with a satellite, it still has to point somewhere. If two such idle ground stations are separated by a thousand kilometers and pointing in the same direction, they can act as a single radio telescope a thousand kilometers across. The more widely-separated telescopes pointing in the same direction, the better the resolution. The network of small satellite dishes thus acts both as a highly-responsive very large array radio telescope and a robust satellite communication system.

Now, how will all of this be paid for? The individual dish operators would essentially be "Outernet Service Providers" (I wish I could claim credit for the clever name Outernet, but at least one company already had that idea; feel free to suggest another name). The software and electronics and so forth might be open source, but the service provider is still investing their bandwidth and electricity on a continuing basis, and they should be paid by the megabyte for their efforts. I'm thinking that the best way to do this is to set up an organization (non-profit? a business? more than one such entity?) that charges customers (astronomers or satellite operators) for data on a per-gigabyte basis and then reimburses the dish operators on a per-megabyte basis.

Such a network of ground stations would provide greater flexibility to researchers, and lower costs and improve service for satellite operators and their customers. The technology is fairly mature, the up-front cost for an individual ground station could be very low indeed (even zero), and there could be thousands of operational stations in as little as a year from now.

update December 23: Apparently the idea has some merit, because I'm not the only one to come up with it. Anonymous posted a comment over at HobbySpace about GENSO, a "software standard which allows each ground station on the network to communicate with non-local spacecraft and share data with the spacecraft controllers via the internet". This is an ESA-led project. And Trent Waddington points out the UNIFORM project being led by Japan.

Both of those projects share the idea of a distributed network of small ground stations linked by the internet for satellite data relay. I especially like the GENSO standard - at least someone has come up with the standard already, and they have 8 ground stations already operational (6 universities and two amateurs).

What I am proposing differs in scale - instead of a handful of ground stations, I'm proposing hundreds in the short term and eventually tens of thousands of ground stations. With that kind of redundancy and global coverage, one could conceivably make an entire hemisphere into a vast virtual deep space antenna or radio telescope. The availability of such a large network would lead to a dramatic drop in communications costs, extra redundancy for the Deep Space Network, and much greater flexibility in scheduling time for the big radio telescopes.

And while the GENSO and UNIFORM efforts are ESA-led and Japan-led, I'm calling for the open-source community to step up. I'm thinking that this is a job for the crowd at Hack A Day.

Falcon 9 test launch #2

2010-12-09T14:32:00.002-07:00

What follows is the launch of the Falcon 9 carrying the Dragon capsule, followed by the post-flight press conference.

A Clue For Paul Volcker

2010-11-10T00:02:00.003-07:00

CBS News:

Paul Volcker, a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, said Tuesday he sees no short-term way to reduce high U.S. unemployment and expects slow growth for the next year or more.

Volcker's comments come after the U.S. Federal Reserve said last week it would purchase $600 billion in Treasurys in an effort to boost growth and create jobs, cutting unemployment that stands at 9.6 percent.

"I have no answer to it at the moment, and I think that is the basic problem," said Volcker when asked about unemployment at a financial forum.

"I suspect that it will gradually decline. But the basic fact of the matter is that the economic outlook is for continuing but limited increases in economic activity for the next year or more," he said.

Volcker is chairman of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and was Fed chief from 1979 until 1987 under presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He was speaking at a meeting of the International Financial Forum, a group of bankers and finance officials from the United States, China and other countries.

Have they gone completely insane? On the premise that sufficiently-advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice, I offer the following to Volcker and Obama:

Stop Spending All The Money

I mean geez, a trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're not dealing with anything that can be called money anymore. Is anyone foolish enough to buy Zimbabwe's currency? No, because it isn't real money, it's worthless.

That's what happens when you print money as fast as the presses can go, with nothing to back it, not even future promises - which is exactly what printing $600 billion to buy Treasury Bonds is doing. That's the way to hyperinflation. And when it happens to the United States, the consequences would be misery and death without historical parallel.

Britain is starting to figure it out. Pray that the new Congress forces fiscal sanity.

one first, small step

2010-11-03T11:34:00.002-06:00

The election results are in. Across the US Republicans are celebrating. However, this is only the first, smallest step on the road to restoring fiscal sanity in the US and the West in general. It is going to take a sustained effort, over every piece of legislation and over many election cycles to undo the damage cause by so-called "progressives" over the last century.

The new Congress can start right away in January by undoing vast swaths of the damage caused by Obama and Reid and Pelosi. The Health Care reform is an obvious starting point. Something so blatantly unconstitutional simply cannot stand.

Then the real digging begins. Using the US Constitution as their guide the new Congress should look at other previous legislation and strike down other unconstitutional laws. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit there.

It might take a generation.

calling Carl Pham

2010-10-29T15:32:00.001-06:00

When, oh when, will Carl Pham start his own blog?

(hey, I just think the guy needs a little nudge)

stark contrast

2010-10-06T02:24:00.002-06:00

Here's Linda McMahon debating Dick Blumenthal. The contrast between a successful business owner running for office, compared to this twit, is instructive: socialists don't have the first clue about how to create a job.

true colors

2010-10-03T15:04:00.002-06:00

Having had the East Anglia Climate Research Unit datasets discredited, the fearmongers at the forefront of the Anthropogenic Global Warming alarm have had to try other tactics, as the short film 10:10 out of the UK has shown. Far from being humorous, the film lays bare the worldview of the AGW crowd: "we have power over you, you will submit to our will or die". That's it, in a nutshell.

They supplied their own petard:

cool writing tool

2010-09-30T15:16:00.001-06:00

A few months back I stumbled upon the Check Text Readability analyzer. This produces results of a reading ease score from 0 to 100, with higher scores being easier to read. It also produces several grade levels (number of years in school) according to various different methods, and shows an average score of those.

I entered the following text into the analyzer:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

This Robert Heinlein quote yields a grade level of 15 (i.e. third year college or tech school) and a reading ease of 36.

Let's see how the analyzer works on this gem:

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.

This produced a readability of minus 32 and a grade level of 32 (i.e. in school from age 6 to 38). It is, in short, utter bovine excrement. And, that was the intention all along.

Curious, I entered other text and tried again. The famous Lorem Ipsum text produced a readability of minus 1 and a grade level of 19.

The Check Text Readability tool allows a writer to get a handle on the level of their writing, and can serve as a warning that the text is unnecessarily complex. Ideally the readability of any text will be as high as possible. The grade level of the audience can also be considered. For instance, if the target audience is teenagers the grade should be around around 8 to 12. Here's another sample from something I wrote three years ago:

So, what should NASA be doing, beyond just developing those enabling technologies? If they are going to go about doing the Vision for Space Exploration, then what is the better way to do it?

The solution is to decouple the mission from the implementation. It matters that it gets done, not that NASA does it or that the agency does it in a specific carved-in-stone way. NASA can't do it all by itself anymore, so it shouldn't even try. No more of this business of NASA building their own brand new launch vehicles and their own brand new manned capsules and their own brand new moon landers and their own brand new moonbases and micromanaging every detail. It is a brittle way of doing things, and the slightest hiccup in the yearly budget process or the slightest failure along that critical path brings everything to a screeching halt.

Grade 11 and 60 readability. It's simple enough for even a congressman to understand.

deja vu

2010-09-29T02:19:00.002-06:00

Here's Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus on CNBC early Friday morning, September 17th:

The part that rang a bell for me was from 4:27 to 5:39 -- "every day there's a new regulation... I can't plan"

(a week passes by...)

I was going to post this on the 18th, but I just couldn't put my finger on what it was that rang that bell about that phrase. Just now it occurred to me: it's 2010, and they probably number the new regulations in sequential order. Would we be up to directive 2010-289 yet? (Let's see... 30 days hath November... I guess we'll have to wait for October 16th for regulation 10-289, assuming a new one appears daily.)

no kidding

2010-09-24T18:15:00.001-06:00

Via Instapundit, this:

they wanted "a natural life" but that they had ended up living "surrounded by wild animals".

I think my irony meter just exploded.

lost pioneer

2010-09-22T00:07:00.001-06:00

Bob Truax has died.

from the department of "give your freaking head a shake"

2010-09-14T14:31:00.002-06:00

Female reporter gets harassed in NY Jets locker room

Well, duh. Imagine the reaction if a male reporter was in the locker room of, for instance, the US Olympic synchronized swimming team. He'd be branded as a pervert and his career would basically be over. And now the NY Jets are apologizing to her?

Either you're equal or you're not. If not, get the hell out of the mens' locker room, stupid.

Apparently, they were right

2010-09-04T23:34:00.005-06:00

... you can't stop the signal:

Browncoats: Redemption Online Premiere from browncoatsmovie on Vimeo.

A couple things to note:

First, this is a sequel to a five-year-old movie which wasn't exactly a blockbuster. Serenity didn't make back the producers' investment domestically, but foreign distribution and DVD sales helped it eventually make a profit. It was no Star Wars or Star Trek.

That movie was itself only made due to widespread fan support for Firefly, a TV series canceled after only thirteen episodes (while being preempted and bounced around the weekly schedule, and shown out of chronological order, with the pilot episode shown last).

Second, this is a feature-length fan-made film. It's all the result of donations and volunteer effort. Nobody's getting paid for this. Look at the production values. This is easily comparable to Star Trek Phase II.

With distribution like this blog and others, and with the film (and music) production and distribution tools available to everyone with a computer, are we seeing an end to the big entertainment empire system? Could it be that someone with a good story can get it made into a movie all by themselves? (and of course, collect all the merchandising profits, something the fans can't do in this case) It would be like unleashing a million Clerks-era Kevin Smiths making do on even smaller budgets or no budget at all.

I was a fan back in 2005, showed Firefly to anyone who would watch, was on the Browncoats forum, went to the bloggers' pre-screening of the movie Serenity, and have waited in vain for more.

And now after five years of nothing from the Universal Studios, the fans themselves stepped up to make a sequel.

Awesome.

space philosophies

2010-08-30T00:45:00.001-06:00

Something Rick Tumlinson said at the Orphans of Apollo premiere explains a lot of the arguments among space enthusiasts. He proposed three different space philosophies: von Braunian, Saganite, and O'Neillian. This was later expanded upon by Trent Waddington.

It makes a lot of sense. It makes the "manned versus unmanned" debate into a debate between the von Braun and O'Neill groups on one side with the Sagan group on the other. And the end of the Constellation program pits the von Braun idea against the O'Neill idea.

Recently Bob Werb wrote:

A friend of ours in DC describes the opposition to the proposed NASA budget as the “homers, haters and boomers.” The homers want as much federal spending as possible in their home state or district. The haters reflexively oppose anything at all that comes out of an Administration they despise. The boomers are nostalgic for the 60s and want to recreate the imagined glories of Apollo. Some of our most vigorous opponents affiliate with two, or even three of these disjointed fellowships (as do many on the other side.)

(hat tip to Rand Simberg)

There is no question that there are major divisions in the space community. Bob’s also right that the people that actually care about the topic – and who see it as the answer for so many of the problems here on Earth – are a small fraction of the population.

However, I think he’s got his categories wrong. I very much doubt that anyone in the space community rejects Obama’s position purely out of hate for the man or his other policies or even his political party. Indeed, it often seems as though on the one issue of space Republican and Democrat positions are switched around completely.

This might be due to the fact that there are so few people – and in particular so few Congressmen – who are actually interested in space in general or NASA in particular. Those outliers might be swaying the majority that doesn't care about space.

Similarly one cannot say that all Boomers are nostalgic for Apollo, nor are the “Homers” simply looking out for their own district at the expense of the country and its future. The categorizations just don't match reality.

I think that what Tumlinson and Waddington pointed out is on the right track, but symptomatic of something deeper. There are underlying reasons that lead people into these philosophical camps, and it goes beyond the old Left/Right labels. And, if those underlying reasons are not addressed, then no amount of discussion is going to budge anyone from the position they already hold.

Why is this important? Bob Werb goes on:

But the real enemy of progress in civil space is a dramatically more insidious opponent that infects the body politic, an adversary so sinister and commonplace that we have come to take it for granted, the corrosive background noise of democracy. Our real enemy is apathy... If you are one of the elect few willing to act, you should pick up the phone today and call your Congressperson to say that they should vote against whichever version of the NASA authorization bill comes up for a vote.

Well, that's all well and good for this budget, but the same problems remain after a Continuing Resolution. There are still the same deadlocked factions, arguing so much and jerking policy this way and that such that nothing ever gets done.

There is no consensus on what we should be doing in space, how to do it, and why we are doing it at all. And, we'll never figure that out unless we know why we hold the positions we do in our ongoing debate.

What makes some people decide that the only justifiable purpose for spaceflight is exploration? Or colonization? Or profit? What makes some people recoil at the thought of private ownership of extraterrestrial property, while others embrace the idea? What makes some people believe that humanity should not leave the planet and "contaminate" other worlds with our presence? What makes some believe that only national governments - or even a coalition of such, or the UN itself - should send people to deep space, while others have already ponied up the cash to go to orbit by themselves? What shapes our ideas about the future of spaceflight in general and NASA in particular?

The answers to these questions can be traced directly to political and economic philosophy. We are used to the Left/Right scale of economic freedom, with the least on the Left and the most on the Right. This is only one dimension, however, and by itself is inadequate. The other dimension is political control by the government, with the least at the Libertarian bottom of the scale and the most at the Authoritarian top of the scale.

This would divide people (and political systems, and squabbling space enthusiasts) into four quadrants: Authoritarian Left, Authoritarian Right, Libertarian Left, and Libertarian Right. Of course, this is not exactly rigorous and the axes are probably not strictly Cartesian but it is a fair second approximation.

To Godwin myself, it would place the Nazis so far up the Authoritarian scale that any Left/Right leanings would be irrelevant and lost in the noise. Both the Republicans and the Democrats would be more Authoritarian than Libertarian, and on the whole just marginally to the Right and Left, respectively. The Tea Party is more Libertarian than Authoritarian, and marginally on the Right. The people who mistakenly call themselves Anarchists as they riot at various venues are so far from political control that once again their Left/Right leanings are irrelevant and lost in the noise. You get the idea.

Let's take a look at how each quadrant would view Beyond Earth Orbit spaceflight. In what follows the positions expressed are intended to be representative of roughly the centers of each quadrant. The fringe positions - the outliers of a group already made of outliers - would range from the Machiavellian to the ridiculous.

Authoritarian Left: The moon and other celestial bodies are the heritage of all mankind. They don't belong to anyone, so they belong to everyone, including all future generations. Their use must somehow benefit the State. Therefore the only immediate legitimate purpose of spaceflight is scientific exploration, with the knowledge produced and any eventual resources obtained belonging to the State. Governments must control or oversee all aspects of spaceflight originating within their borders to assure the eventual benefits for all. Therefore all future spaceflight must be through State agencies and paid for by all.

Authoritarian Right: Under international law the moon and other celestial bodies may not be claimed by any government, so they cannot be "owned" by citizens of any nation. Also under international law, such places may not be used for military purposes, but can be explored for scientific research. Governments must control or oversee all aspects of spaceflight originating within their borders to assure control of access to space and to assure that big businesses with ties to Defense and other departments are rewarded with contracts. Therefore all US manned spaceflight must be carefully controlled through NASA and must maintain the large NASA workforce.

Libertarian Left: The moon and other celestial bodies are the heritage of all mankind. They don't belong to anyone, so they belong to everyone, including all future generations. Everyone should benefit equally from any advances in space. Therefore the only immediate legitimate purpose of spaceflight is scientific exploration, with the knowledge produced and any eventual resources obtained belonging to all mankind. Everyone should contribute a little bit, maybe through the UN, to those exploration efforts, since the benefits will be spread to everyone.

Libertarian Right: The moon and other celestial bodies don't belong to anyone, yet. Whoever gets there first and starts working the material effectively owns the product of their labor. The only legitimate purpose of manned or unmanned spaceflight is to make money at it. Governments should stop distorting the space industry and get the hell out of the way.

So how does this quadrant idea produce the main von Braunian, Saganite, and O'Neillian groups that Tumlinson described?

Well, they don't fall neatly into the quadrants described above. The von Braunian group is more Authoritarian than Libertarian, but split between Left and Right. The Saganite group is more Left than Right but split between Authoritarian and Libertarian. And the O'Neillian group is more Right than Left but split among Authoritarian and Libertarian. And all are closer to the center than the fringes. Thereabouts, anyhow. Other positions would be Heinleinian (Libertarian Right), Machiavellian (way up the Authoritarian scale), and the way NASA has been run since Apollo (starting von Braunian and slowly drifting Left).

I have tried to avoid strawman positions in the above, and in the case of Libertarian Left found that difficult. This is either a failure of imagination on my part or a flaw in the whole quadrant idea. If the former, mea culpa, but if the latter, then I contend that it is at least better than Left-Right alone. I am certain I only scratched the surface. If readers have additional ideas to fill in these quadrants better, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Copenhagen Suborbitals testing

2010-08-25T14:08:00.003-06:00

Right now, the launch countdown clock on Copenhagen Suborbital's website reads 4 days 18 hours. This test launch, from a floating platform in the Baltic sea, will go to a maximum of 30 km. Presumably the submarine will be used both for ~~towing~~ pushing the launch catamaran and as launch control.

Both the rocket and the submarine were built without any government funding - only volunteer labor, corporate sponsorships, donations, and the vision and guidance of Peter Madsen.

no way to run a space program

2010-08-18T23:30:00.003-06:00

So, Congress and the Senate each have their own ideas about what NASA should be doing, with Congress demanding the return of the Ares-V and the Senate going so far as to design their own "Nelson Rocket". The Senate is demanding that NASA build a rocket that uses the existing shuttle solid rocket boosters and launch pad, and that it be able to lift 70 to 100 tons to orbit. It is also insisting that NASA start on this next year.

Why? Is it merely to preserve the standing army currently employed in Shuttle launch? That standing army is the primary reason that launch costs for NASA do not go down. The Senate (led by Bill Nelson on this issue) are deliberately doing all they can to kill the space industry in the cradle, once again. It is a deliberate waste of taxpayer money in a transparent attempt to generate pork in Utah and Florida.

What possible requirement is there for such a lift capacity, when there are already commercial rockets capable of lifting 10 to 30 tons to orbit right now?

What would this lift capacity be used for? A 70 ton lift capacity is not enough to get people even as far as the moon in one launch. So, orbital rendezvous of multiple launches is going to be required to do anything useful beyond low earth orbit anyhow.

There is one thing that can be said for NASA's past 15 years with the otherwise-white-elephant International Space Station: the assembly of the station has generated an enormous amount of knowledge about rendezvous, assembly, and maintenance of large manned structures over a period of years in orbit. Orbital assembly is something NASA now has considerable experience doing.

What NASA hasn't done in more than 30 years of trying and tens of billions of dollars wasted is: build a new rocket that makes it all the way to low earth orbit.

So, once again, why not use existing commercial rockets and just have more launches, thus eliminating R&D costs and much of the operational costs. More launches means lower individual launch prices as the commercial provider can amortize fixed and sunk costs over more units sold. Going with the smaller, commercially available rockets like Delta IV, Atlas V, and Falcon 9 (and soon Taurus II) also means smaller teams required to launch any one rocket, another big cost savings.

Then NASA could use the billions that would otherwise go into heavy-lift shuttle-derived R&D and eventual operations a decade down the road into instead purchasing existing payload capacity right now.

It could also lead to a real multiplier effect, where NASA demand for launch services drives down prices to the point where other entities can start purchasing launches, thus attracting not only more customers to existing companies, but also venture capital to new companies involved in all aspects of space launch and low earth orbit operations.

NASA has already blazed the trail to low earth orbit. By taking advantage of the already available commercial option, NASA can continue to blaze the trail further, beyond low earth orbit, to the lunar poles and asteroids and beyond. They are creative people; they should be creating completely new capabilities rather than - at best- repeating old capabilities.

the oil spill from space

2010-07-15T19:41:00.001-06:00

The latest images of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as seen from space are collected here by NASA.

vuvuzela filter

2010-06-16T15:10:00.002-06:00

Yeah, they're ruining the world cup. But you can eliminate the frequency and resonant frequencies of the vuvuzela with some software. This link is an English translation of the original German page that shows how to do it with a Mac.

an interesting perspective

2010-06-11T22:57:00.002-06:00

The following was posted by Jim Davidson to the CommercialSpacePlace YahooGroup. It reads like a letter, but it is posted for all to see there, so it is a public letter and there should be no legal issues with republishing it here. What he had to say has a direct bearing on the current end-to-Constellation debate.

Dear Mark,

Well, Jackie DeWayne Reynolds asks "What's wrong with this idea?" so it occurs to me to answer.

> Unfortunately for advocates of commercial space
> development, however, the market for access to space is
> being met at the current price of launch.

This comment supposes that there is no unmet demand that is not permitted to have access to space. There are plenty of examples of companies that have been shut down (Walt Anderson's MirCorp, Gary Hudson's Rotary Rocket, my own Space Travel Services, to name just three of dozens that come to mind) which suggest a substantial unmet demand. Certainly Reynolds has not examined the requests for export licences and other government permits that have been refused to all and sundry who request them. So I regard this claim that the market is being met to be amusing in the extreme, to the extent that it is not horrifyingly sad.

In December 1990 and January 1991, Space Travel Services demonstrated an unmet demand of over 650,000 people who would be eager to have a *chance* to travel in space for $2.99. Since Reynolds hasn't found any way to meet that demand, at any price, we'll have to dismiss the claim of the market being met.

Between 2004 and 2007, Virgin Galactic found tens of thousands of persons interested in flying in space on suborbital rides with at least dozens of these making down payment deposits on such rides. Again, this demand has not been met. Reynolds is not only wrong, but seems out of touch with current events.

> In a mixed/free
> market economy like ours, price is determined by the market
> (oligopolies and monopolies excepted, of course).

No, it isn't. The United States is not a free market economy and has not been since at least the formation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. You cannot be "just a little bit pregnant" and you cannot have "just a bit of a command economy." Really, this claim that there is any relationship between the USA economy and a free market economy is the dictionary definition of fatuous: "Foolish or silly, especially in a smug or self-satisfied way" http://thefreedictionary.com/fatuous

One can be satisfied of anything if you refuse to examine even the most basic of premises.

> Without
> greater demand for access to space, there is no impetus for
> the market to lower launch costs.

Well, gosh, we may never know. I can certainly remember when there was enough demand for re-supplying the space station with cargo flights to stimulate Andrew Beal to put up $300 million of his own money to develop cheap access to space and multiple launch sites for his big dumb boosters. And I can also remember when NASA chose to betray its previous commitments and screw Beal to the wall with a moly bolt. The fact that there was an impetus for the market to lower launch costs and that NASA then decided, in its evil and bureau-rat fashion, to force fit the "contracts" to existing aerospace giant companies only for the benefit of those companies and for the degradation of the market for cheap access to space certainly speaks volumes about how we got into this mess.

> But what if launch costs could be lowered indirectly?

What if launch costs aren't the door that you have to get through? What if space is not difficult, dangerous, expensive, and risky? What if everything you've been told about space by NASA has been a lie? What if the government lies through stolen teeth, and lies easily?

You want to open the space frontier to human exploration and settlement. The problems you face are not economic problems - there is a huge market for space tourism, there are huge markets for materials processing in space, there are huge markets for additional communications technologies, there are huge markets for energy. It is raining soup out there, all you need is the ability to get there with a bucket.

The problems you face are not technological problems. Two men landed on the surface of the Moon in 1969. Their electronics were amazingly ancient. Their communications systems were utterly bereft of TDRSS. They had no global positioning satellites. Not much more computing power than my pocket calculator. Really, please, don't talk to me about technological impediments to space achievement until you read every single one of Robert Goddard's patent applications. Especially the ones von Braun filched.

The problems are legal, bureaucratic, and political. All of the problems you face are in these areas. Now, admittedly, none of them are so complex that they couldn't be resolved fully with the use of twenty tonnes of iron returning from a 90 minute orbit and striking Washington, DC. But if you aren't that much of an extremist, then your focus has to be on finding, or founding, a free country, or more than one.

Best wishes.

Regards,

Jim

congratulations SpaceX !

2010-06-04T14:47:00.002-06:00

Today SpaceX launched the Falcon 9 into orbit on its first test flight. The rocket is capable of carrying up to seven people to orbit in the Dragon capsule. SpaceX is a private company that didn't even exist eight years ago and in a couple years they will be delivering people to the international space station - and the Bigelow stations due to be launched in the next few years. It's a pretty good day.

note to self

2010-05-26T04:21:00.001-06:00

must post more often, and shorter

technological stepping stones to space

2010-05-26T02:40:00.004-06:00

In developing space I listed some short term stepping stone technologies I thought NASA should pursue. Nearly four years ago Jon Goff wrote Technologies Necessary for a Spacefaring Society, where he listed several similar stepping stones, and generated a discussion which produced a few more. Putting it all together produced a more complete list of the short-term stepping stone technologies NASA and the space industry can develop to enable a sustainable (i.e. profitable) expansion of humanity into space.

Pictured at right is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century, the Lego block. The basic blocks, patented in 1958 and still compatible with pieces made today, allowed kids to build and rebuild their own toys - and the building and redesign itself was the play activity. Over the years Lego added new pieces - different dimensions, gears, axles, wheels, figurines, and so on - all compatible with earlier designs, and each new design enabling another infinity of possibilities for play. The results can be astonishing.

These stepping stone technologies are very similar to the iterations of Lego block designs. Each stepping stone allows a broad range of new capabilities, and builds on the prior capabilities developed. And just as a single Lego piece by itself is not particularly impressive, the development of these stepping stone technologies by themselves are not nearly as lofty a goal as "Apollo on steroids". Instead the primary goal of these technologies is to provide logistical (and hence economic) leverage and jumpstart the space industry, enabling sustainable human expansion through cislunar space and then the rest of the solar system: more Bang for the Buck Rogers.

I have tried to categorize the stepping stone technologies below. For some of these stepping stones it makes sense to wait until other stepping stones are in place before beginning major work and bending metal. Others can be started right away or are already being worked on by NASA and/or the space industry. This list is not exhaustive, but I figure it's a good starting point for discussion if nothing else. There are non-technological stepping stones, too, but that's a topic for another blog post.

from Earth to Low Earth Orbit and back

reusable liquid-fueled unmanned glide-back auxiliary boosters - These would replace the current strap-on solid rocket motors which provide an extra boost to rockets while in the atmosphere. Having these strap-ons helps deliver a bigger payload to orbit than possible with the core rocket by itself. Making them liquid-fueled means quicker turnaround time. UAV technology has come a long way over the last ten years as a result of warfare, but it can also be used to pilot these glide-back boosters. Having them glide back instead of splashing down eases recovery. Reusing them allows categorization of patterns of wear and highlights faults for further iterations, as well as spreading production costs over multiple launches.
recoverable / reusable rocket first stage - SpaceX is already hard at work on this and plans on doing it with the Falcon 9. Splashdown recovery is more difficult than a glide-back strapon stage, but no more difficult than recovering a shuttle SRB. Reuse of this stage should reduce the cost of access to orbit as long as refurbishment costs are low and turnaround time is reduced.
low maintenance thermal protection system - This is a key to the economical re-use of reentry hardware. It was also a big part of the cost of operating the shuttles. If the thermal protection system could be robust enough to withstand dozens of reentries before replacement, or was cheap and easy to replace each time, the turnaround time and manpower required would be greatly reduced.
intermodal transport interface - load a shipping container inside the frame (which also houses solar panels, radiators, GN&C), spin and vibration test it, add a faring, put it on the next available rocket, and go. This enables orbital access to the existing worldwide supply chain. Once a design is up to TRL-11, shipping cargo to space will require much less handling, have higher efficiency, quicker throughput rate, and lower cost. (The intermodal transport container is itself a stepping stone technology, conveniently already in widespread use.)

vehicles

tractor (tug) - This would be the cargo workhorse of cislunar space. It would have everything a regular satellite has (propulsion, guidance, navigation, control, power, temperature regulation, communications, propellant tanks, perhaps a robot arm) - the only thing it would lack is a payload. Instead it would couple itself to other orbital assets and perform tasks like proximity operations, transporting propellant to geosynchronous satellites, acting in lieu of an astronaut in teleoperated procedures, and many other tasks. Its function is similar to that of a farm tractor, semi-truck, or tugboat.
bus - These vehicles would never land, only change orbits and dock. They wouldn't need to deal with the stresses of ascent or reentry, wouldn't need landing gear, wouldn't need aerodynamics. It could be as simple as an inflatable habitable volume (like the Bigelow modules), propellant tanks, and a tractor (snapped together like Lego pieces, perhaps?)
lunar lander - This would only travel from lunar orbit (perhaps at L1?) to the lunar surface and back. There might be different types of landers for different sized jobs. These would be refueled at a propellant depot in Lunar orbit
pod - "Open the pod bay doors, HAL." A pod is a one-man spaceship with a spherical pressure vessel and several remote manipulator arms. Such a craft would allow an astronaut to wear a minimalist space suit for emergencies or very temporary sorties, but spend most of their EVA activity in relative comfort and better protected than in current spacesuits, and eliminate the need for prebreathing. EVA times could be measured in days instead of hours.
better spacesuits - NASA is already working on this with the astronaut glove prizes, but there is a huge design space to explore. Spacesuit improvement should be a never-ending project, with new milestones set as previous ones are met. And since space is a fairly big place, different environmental conditions (surface gravity, atmosphere) occur which preclude a single design.

orbital assets

consumables depots - This includes propellant depots (storing liquid Oxygen, liquid Hydrogen, RP-1, Hydrazine, N2O4, Xenon... market demand will sort out the specifics) and depots of other fungible fluid consumables (water, Nitrogen, vodka, whatever the market demands). At first only a few propellants would be stored, but as the industry builds the demand for the other consumables will increase. The existence of the first depots will themselves drive up the rate of rocket launches (of tankers of various capacities filling the depots) and reduce the cost per payload kilogram for destinations beyond LEO. Eventually depots would be established in Geosynchronous Earth orbit and the Lagrange orbits (probably starting with L1).
4-, 6-, 8-, 12- or 20-sided universal docking nodes - (the numbers chosen are the number of faces on the Platonic solids) A universal node - able to connect habitable volumes in a geometric pattern with a common interface - is sorely needed if we are to build large habitable structures in space. The current six-sided nodes on the ISS might be considered this stepping stone if the design gets published. ITAR stands in the way of the most basic Lego block.
bus stations / hotels - Habitable volumes with multiple available docking ports, these are likely to be closely associated with propellant depots. Bus stations would be used for transferring people from one mode of transportation to another. Hotels would themselves be orbital destinations. These could be several Bigelow modules connected by universal docking nodes.
maintenance facilities - Entropy increases. Stuff breaks down. If you can't fix it, you have to replace it or do without. A maintenance facility would have a storehouse of spare parts and the necessary tools and equipment to repair at least the critical items.
hangars - If you're fixing stuff in orbit, eventually you'll need to work on something in a shirtsleeve environment which is too big to fit through an airlock. You wouldn't bring a bus back to Earth to repair and relaunch, you'd just fix it in the hangar. A large substantially-leakproof hangar bay door poses some significant technical challenges. This is one stepping stone that will require other stepping stones in place.
drydock - At some point we will want to assemble very large craft from smaller components. Some kind of large frame with several robot arms on rails would make this a whole lot easier.

life support

substantially-enclosed life support system - The more enclosed the system is, the less resupply is needed. Being able to recycle CO2 and water and food with an artificial ecosystem eliminates a logistical nightmare and enables very long duration missions far out in the solar system.
artificial (centrifugal) "gravity" - So far, we know a lot about living in 1 gee (Earth's surface gravity), and have learned about some debilitating effects of long-term exposure to zero gee, and how to mitigate some of those effects. We know absolutely nothing about the effects of long-term exposure to 1/6 gee (the Moon) or 0.38 gee (Mars). We don't know if a baby can develop normally in anything less (or more) than one gee. Many of the side effects of weightlessness would be eliminated if orbital habitations are rotated to produce an artificial centrifugal "gravity". Perhaps this could be accomplished by having the habitation attached to a counterweight by a long tether, and the whole thing rotated. Again, we don't know much about the long-term effects of high angular velocity, so there's lots to be learned here.
improved radiation shielding - Outside the protection of Earth's magnetic field, the danger from solar events and cosmic rays increases enormously. We need to develop better radiation protection for long-duration missions.
advanced robotics / teleoperation - Robotics will always be an integral part of space operations. This work is already going on, and like spacesuit improvement will likely remain an indefinitely-continuing project.

orbital operations

orbital assembly - The ISS taught many lessons about orbital assembly - NASA is far more experienced at this than they are at rocket design. The assembly stepping stone will evolve along with the drydock stepping stone. Personally, I'd like to see modules click together like Legos (not exactly like Legos, but interfacing easily, mix and match as needed).
orbital maintenance - Whether it involves bringing a crippled satellite in for repairs or fixing it remotely, or just doing minor repairs on a spacesuit, this is a critical cost-saving task.
orbital fabrication and construction - Eventually we will be shipping raw materials to Earth orbit (from the surface of the moon, or from Near-Earth Asteroids) and then making them into something useful "on-site", such as constructing extremely large (kilometer-scale) rotating habitats. The earlier we figure out how to do things like make I-beams in freefall, the better.
in-situ resource utilization - producing things like Oxygen and propellant and water from materials found on the Moon, Mars, or asteroids are absolutely critical to reducing the cost of all operations in space and reducing the dependence on a supply line from Earth.

delta vee

momentum exchange tethers - These have the potential to provide a propellant-less change in trajectory for orbiting bodies and are definitely worth further examination
electrodynamic reboost - Again with the tethers. This time, interaction between the Earth's magnetic field and an electric current induced on a long tether can raise the orbit of the tether (and whatever it is attached to). Instead of using propellant to fight orbital decay, electrodynamic reboost steals an iota of the energy of Earth's magnetic field (and solar energy to produce the electric current) to magnetically repel the orbiting tether.
aerobraking - On a high-velocity return to Earth, aerobraking - temporarily dipping into the atmosphere to bleed off speed - is a propellant-minimizing way of slowing down. It's just like skipping a stone on a pond, with each successive skip at a slower speed. If you can go from a parabolic orbit to a low-eccentricity orbit without using propellant, you're ahead of the game.
nuclear thermal propulsion - If we are to travel throughout the solar system, chemical rockets aren't going to cut it. Propellant accelerated by the heat from a nuclear reactor can achieve much higher exhaust velocities than by combustion, leading to higher ISP (gas mileage).

guidance, navigation, and control

cislunar positioning system - GPS is fine if you're close to the Earth, but far enough out and you'd need some fancy astrogation and starfinders. Satellites at the Lagrange orbits could function as the cislunar equivalent of GPS, easing navigation throughout cislunar space.
lunar positioning system - as we return to the moon we will need a constellation of positioning/communication-relay satellites orbiting the moon for exactly the same reasons we have them orbiting the Earth.
x-ray pulsar positioning system (XPPS) - X-ray pulsars are natural broadcast signals all over the sky and far from the solar system. We may be able to use those properties to determine the position and velocity of an object anywhere in the solar system with fair precision. This would greatly simplify solar system navigation - and it is mostly a software problem.
cislunar traffic control - There are already thousands of satellites and many times that number of debris objects orbiting the earth. As the traffic in low earth orbit and cislunar space increases, some traffic control system will have to grow up alongside the increasing traffic - other wise, as time goes on, collisions will become a greater and greater hazard.

power

microwave power beaming - Being able to move energy from one place - say a large solar array - to another (like the Earth's surface or another satellite) absolutely requires power beaming. It is a key to opening up a space-based energy industry that could rival oil or coal or nuclear power on Earth.
low-maintenance nuclear power plants - If all goes well, eventually we will be moving far out into the solar system, where the sunlight is dim, or perhaps to the equator of the moon with its two-week nights. In these cases, solar power may not be practical. Nuclear power plants that can operate with minimal maintenance open up those areas where the sun don't shine.

administering space

2010-05-18T16:25:00.002-06:00

In developing space I suggested that NASA's new mission was administering space. NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, after all. I then went on to list a bunch of "stepping stone" technologies that NASA could be pursuing over the next few years, but I didn't really explain what I meant by administering space.

First, let's compare NASA with another Administration, the FAA. Their mandate is actually much more complicated to convey than NASA's if you try to wade through the relevant legislation. Here's what the FAA have to say about themselves:

We're responsible for the safety of civil aviation. The Federal Aviation Act of 1958 created the agency under the name Federal Aviation Agency. We adopted our present name in 1967 when we became a part of the Department of Transportation. Our major roles include:
Regulating civil aviation to promote safety
Encouraging and developing civil aeronautics, including new aviation technology
Developing and operating a system of air traffic control and navigation for both civil and military aircraft
Researching and developing the National Airspace System and civil aeronautics
Developing and carrying out programs to control aircraft noise and other environmental effects of civil aviation
Regulating U.S. commercial space transportation

That's fairly straightforward. (Well, that last bit might need a little explanation. It pretty much covers American passenger craft until they reach orbit.)

The legislation governing NASA, the Space Act (1958, amended), is much smaller and easier to read than that of the FAA. The Declaration of Policy and Purpose and section 203(a), Functions of the Administration are the most interesting part. Both those sections contain exactly the same phrase: seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space. Here's what NASA says they do:

NASA's mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research... NASA conducts its work in four principal organizations, called mission directorates:
Aeronautics: pioneers and proves new flight technologies that improve our ability to explore and which have practical applications on Earth.
Exploration Systems: creates capabilities for sustainable human and robotic exploration.
Science: explores the Earth, solar system and universe beyond; charts the best route of discovery; and reaps the benefits of Earth and space exploration for society.
Space Operations: provides critical enabling technologies for much of the rest of NASA through the space shuttle, the International Space Station and flight support.

Note the difference? The FAA has a very clear understanding of the administration part of their job. Setting regulations. Setting standards. A system of air traffic control and navigation. And every part of what the FAA says it does contains the word "civil" (i.e. civilian) or "commercial".

In fact, when you compare what the FAA says they do with what NASA says they do, it is apparent that the FAA serves civilians and commerce, but what NASA does is "improve our (NASA's?) ability to explore" or "provides critical enabling technologies for much of the rest of NASA" - in other words, NASA exists to enhance the capabilities of NASA. That's harsh, but do you see the word "commercial" or "civil" in NASA's mission directorates? Compared to the FAA, who is it that NASA is serving?

(The word "society" is there, true - but that word can mean anything one wants it to mean, including everyone in the world, and the description of the Science directorate is such a "motherhood issue" that I wouldn't change a word anyhow.)

NASA appears to have gotten stuck in part of the Space Act's section on Functions of the Administration, section 203(a)(1): plan, direct, and conduct aeronautical and space activities. That doesn't mean all of them, just do such activities. It doesn't mean building an entirely new set of rockets from scratch when comparable commercial alternatives are already available.

Section 203(a)(4) (seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space) and 203(a)(5) (encourage and provide for Federal Government use of commercially provided space services and hardware, consistent with the requirements of the Federal Government.) would pretty much prohibit such things as Ares-1 development altogether. Such a goal is too small for NASA. It would be like the FAA building their own planes instead of certifying planes built by the aircraft industry.

It should be noted that NASA does a bang-up job with section 203(a)(2) arrange for participation by the scientific community in planning scientific measurements and observations to be made through use of aeronautical and space vehicles, and conduct or arrange for the conduct of such measurements and observations. They are getting better with (3) provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof, but they can only do so much with ITAR in place.

The Aldridge commission recommended consolidating the various mission-focused enterprises within NASA's organizational structure into Science, Exploration, Aeronautics, and possibly Education. Notice something missing? Yep, the Space Operations mission directorate would be out, perhaps replaced by an Education directorate. I have something a different in mind. It might still be called Space Operations, but its function would in no way resemble the current directorate's stated purpose. More about that later.

The Aldridge commission also recommended a permanent space exploration steering council, a technical advisory board, a cost estimating organization, and special project teams on enabling technologies. I splashed some bits about the enabling technologies in developing space, because it gives some idea of the short-term goals NASA should be following, but this is just part of a larger realignment of NASA's mission (as currently envisaged by NASA) with its charter.

The FAA encourages the commercial use of airspace by providing structure: certifications for aircraft, air traffic control and navigation, pilot certification, maintenance records criteria, and so forth. Passenger and cargo planes would not be able to travel safely without this structure.

NASA can also encourage the commercial use of space, and not just by being a customer for rides to Low Earth Orbit. This is partly where these short-term enabling technologies projects come into play.

building the stepping stones

Commercial enterprises will do considerable research and development - just look at the contribution of Bell Labs to science - but there has to be some reasonable assessment of risk in order to please stockholders. If a development is too financially risky, such as developing cryogenic propellant storage and transfer in orbit, no company will be able to justify the investment to stockholders or investors no matter what the potential payoff. Nobody wants to be first, nobody wants to be third, everybody wants to be the second to get into something new.

That sort of technology is a game-changer. Storage and transfer of propellant in orbit is one small step out of many small steps - rather than giant leaps. It has a cascading effect: it helps bootstrap other stepping stones, it means a huge increase in commercial rocket production and launch rate, which in turn means new private sector jobs, and incremental improvements in vehicle design causing a rapid increase in vehicle safety, and on and on and on. That's what makes it a stepping stone.

Let's assume success. Suppose NASA takes my advice ("hey! this random blogger has an idea! let's change our whole agency!") and changes all its centers into FFRDCs like the Jet Propulsion Lab and then starts working on stepping stones like a demonstration orbital propellant depot. And suppose further that they get the sucker working after some minor tweaks - that it stores (for example) liquid Oxygen and liquid Hydrogen with minimal boil off and can transfer these propellants to or from another spacecraft. The propellant depot is now at a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 9! Hooray!

Then what?

turning it up to 11

What should happen then is that NASA publishes the relevant data: the design of the coupling between the depot and the spacecraft, communications protocols for proximity operations, temperature control techniques, procedures for using boiloff as attitude control thrust, whatever. They would establish the regulations for such things as tolerances on the couplings, procedures for measurement of propellant transfer, temperature and pressure measurement guidelines for future depots, and so on. At times NASA would be working on this alongside such government organizations as the NIST and FCC and FAA, depending on the technology involved.

And then NASA would be the agency actually administering the use of that new technology: certifying the correctness (measured to within specified tolerances) of a coupling to the orbital version of a gas pump, for instance.

In short, NASA would be retiring much of the risk which would otherwise never be borne by commercial space companies, both the technical risk and the regulatory risk. If NASA demonstrates that an orbital propellant depot can work, sets the standards and regulations for operations, and then steps aside and administers those regulations, then private companies can step up and provide services. Companies that want to supply propellant to depots or launch depots or launch spacecraft to be refueled at depots would know exactly how to interface their craft with the depot, perhaps buying NASA-certified couplings from a choice of vendors, and would borrow some of the transfer and storage technology developed by NASA to actually do the job.

With all the stepping stone technologies I mentioned in developing space, NASA's role would be the same: identify a short-term enabling technology; get it working (i.e. retire the technical risk); publish specifications, standards, and regulations for the new technology (i.e. retire the regulatory risk); administer the certification processes and ensure regulatory compliance for using the new technology.

If NASA adopts a stepping-stones approach, then at any one time there would be several such enabling technologies being researched in parallel at varying levels of technical readiness. The Aldridge commission recommendations of a permanent space exploration steering council, a technical advisory board, and a cost estimating organization, would decide on which short term enabling technologies to pursue, and what strategy to use to develop the technology - not just up the existing Technology Readiness Level scale but beyond that into technical standards and specifications and regulations for commercial and civilian use.

Most of the enabling technologies I mentioned in developing space are at about a TRL of 2 to 4. What I am proposing is that NASA not stop at a TRL of 9 (Actual system 'flight proven' through successful mission operations) but that it extend its TRL rating system beyond 9 into TRL-10 (technical standards, specifications, and regulations regarding the new technology are developed, published, and implemented) and TRL-11 (the new technology is implemented by the industry and regulation, certification, industry standards and so forth are administered by NASA).

I mentioned the Space Operations directorate above and the Aldridge report idea of perhaps eliminating it or replacing it with an Education directorate. Instead, the Space Operations directorate would be the part of NASA responsible for those TRL-10 and TRL-11 stages, and would likely be heavily involved in data-gathering during the TRL-7-8-9 stages. (Several other functions would also fall under Space Operations such as satellite and orbital debris tracking, Near-Earth Asteroid tracking, and administration of the Deep Space Network.)

So how can NASA maximize the commercial use of space while developing these stepping-stone enabling technologies from low technology readiness level right up to TRL-11? And how does this promote the development of the space industry?

more Bang for the Buck (Rogers)

Let's extend the imaginary scenario above. Suppose NASA has demonstrated a working orbital propellant depot, published interface specifications and tolerances and regulations for proximity operations and protocols for delivering full tanks and so forth, and is now certifying components as compatible, regulation-compliant, and so on. What then?

With all those specifications and regulations and so forth available to civilians, businesses can begin building matching couplings, programming their software to comply with the proximity operations regulations, that sort of thing. They don't have to do it all from scratch. They already know it will work.

And they don't have to do it all. A single company doesn't have to do everything. Company A might just include orbital propellant depot couplings to their product line, since they have expertise in manufacturing precision machining of the alloy required. Company B might buy that coupling and include it on their (launched empty) second stage of their Whizbang rocket. And NASA itself might buy it for their own use in other stepping stone technologies like a bus - or might just buy a portion of a Whizbang rocket payload to launch a deep-space robotic exploration mission, refueled in orbit for the second leg of its journey.

NASA can also encourage commercial use of space as it develops these stepping stone technologies up the Technology Readiness Levels. In many cases, the entire problem doesn't need to be solved at once. A perfect example of this is the Centennial Challenges program. This program is a tiny, tiny fraction of NASA's budget, and at that spread over many years, but the results are remarkable.

If this same idea - prizes awarded for targeted innovations in key areas - is broadened in scope, with prize values scaled according to the value to the agency, NASA can apply leverage to that money that would be impossible if NASA simply spent it in-house working on the same problems, while at the same time engaging the public directly and expanding the base of the space industry.

These prizes are a good way to get a technology from TRL-2 (Technology concept and/or application formulated) to TRL-4 (Component and/or breadboard validation in laboratory environment). Further "relevant environment" tests and improvements could either be undertaken at one of the NASA centers or opened up to the industry in the form of more prizes or commercial contracts. In all cases, the question should be, "can we use the industry to provide leverage?"

Prizes are also a good way for start-up space businesses to find a niche or several niches in what is to become a large industry. A small space business might start by just making the precision propellant couplings needed to refuel booster stages, or by just making astronaut gloves, or by making the software, actuators, and engines necessary for lunar landers. In fact, in the case of the lunar landers, there were three such companies involved and all now have a firm toehold in the industry.

NASA can also use commercial space launch providers - both suborbital and orbital - to bring some of these stepping stone technologies up through TRL-7 (System prototype demonstration in a space environment), TRL-8 (Actual system completed and 'flight qualified' through test and demonstration (ground or space)), and TRL-9 (Actual system 'flight proven' through successful mission operations), either by purchasing the entire available payload or just a portion of the payload. Such contracts would be paid for results, not cost-plus accounting which pays for costs incurred.

Once the technology has advanced to TRL-11, it is possible to get businesses in seemingly unrelated industries to become involved in the space industry. For example, a company like Nike or Reebok could start mass-producing spacesuits.

restating NASA's mission statement

NASA is the National Aeronautic and Space Administration, not the National Aeronautic and Space Industry. Everything an organization does stems from its mission statement. Extending space technology beyond flight testing and validation into industry standards and specifications and regulations allows the space industry to participate in implementing stepping stone technologies in operational systems. Incentives like prizes and contracts (and other things NASA can't do but Congress can, such as Zero Gee Zero Tax) will help leverage NASA's budget for developing the stepping stone technologies.

These stepping stones and commercial involvement also assist NASA's Science and Exploration efforts. For example, today if we want to send a rover to Mars we launch it on the (commercial!) Delta rocket. It carries its fully-fueled second stage all the way from the ground to orbit, then discards the first stage and uses the second to go to Mars.

However, if NASA develops (up to TRL-11) propellant depots and bus stations, then the second stage can be launched empty and a much larger, heavier payload can be put on top. The first stage gets discarded (and perhaps recovered and reused) and the second stage refuels in orbit, and is checked out by astronauts at the bus station. Perhaps the second stage takes it to the Earth-moon L1 propellant depot, where it is again refueled, some other previously launched components added, and then sent on its way to Mars. In the end, NASA gets a much bigger, more reliable payload for the dollar.

So, this brings me to NASA's mission statement, mentioned above. It needs to change to reflect the new civil and commercial (rather than NASA-centric) orientation. Here goes:

NASA's mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research... NASA conducts its work in four principal organizations, called mission directorates:
Aeronautics: pioneers and proves new flight technologies that improve America's ability to explore and which have practical applications for civil aeronautics.
Exploration Systems: works with industry to create capabilities for commercially-sustainable human and robotic exploration and utilization of the solar system.
Science: explores the Earth, solar system and universe beyond; charts the best route of discovery; and reaps the benefits of Earth and space exploration for society.
Space Operations: provides critical enabling technologies for civil space utilization, certifies and regulates those technologies for civil use, and provides flight support, deep space communications, and object tracking.

How's that?

I hope they're good neighbors

2010-05-14T23:56:00.002-06:00

View neighbors in a larger map

developing space

2010-05-14T05:49:00.006-06:00

(After getting about 90% of the way through writing this last week, I saw Rand Simberg's article from last year in The New Atlantis, A Space Program For The Rest Of Us, which is very similar to this and quite well-written. Check it out.)

Four years ago I wrote why go to space, which has recently become one of the more popular posts on this blog. In that post I pointed out the vast amounts of nonpolluting energy and abundant material resources available for the taking beyond low earth orbit.

The solar system offers so much wealth, and the solutions to so many problems down here, and it is certainly desirable to bring the rest of the solar system into humanity's economic sphere. So, how do we get there from here?

In order to figure out the answer to that, we first need to know where we've been and where we are now.

the space race

The space programs of both the United States and the USSR grew out of the Cold War missile research conducted by both countries, building on the knowledge of the scientists and engineers recruited out of Germany following World War II. The race was on to create intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. These were to be suborbital devices, but the payloads were very heavy. It quickly became recognized that a lighter payload would be able to make it all the way to orbit - and that surveillance from orbit would have immense logistic, strategic and tactical value.

The milestones that followed - Sputnik and Explorer, Laika, Gagarin and Shepard and Glenn, culminating in Apollo 11 - were in a very real sense battles in the most unusual war ever fought, the Space Race, which was itself only a part of the larger Cold War.

Over the course of the Space Race - roughly the period from summer 1945 to summer 1969 - a great deal of scientific research about the earth itself, the moon, low earth orbit and the solar system in general was accomplished. A lot was learned about new materials and control systems and propulsion and navigation and computing and a host of other disciplines.

However, the Space Race was never really about space, or research or exploration. It was a war, and the battlefield was itself not Outer Space - the battlefield was worldwide public opinion.

By the 1960's, both the USA and the USSR were capable of launching heavy nuclear warheads into each other's territory with reasonable precision. The problem is that demonstration of that capability is only useful in last-resort scenarios. The Space Race became a demonstration-by-proxy of this technical prowess. Every new milestone was a demonstration of both immense power and precise control.

Fighting this unusual war required a new kind of army, and a new kind of General. Sergey Korolyov and Wernher von Braun led armies of engineers, technicians, scientists, and test pilots. In the Soviet Union, this army was part of a classified military program, with only the positive results announced. In the United States, NASA was assembled as a "civilian" space agency whose every success and failure was public.

Another big difference between the two country's approaches was that the USSR had competing design centers working on the same problem, but NASA was a single agency. In effect, NASA was a more unified army approaching a single task. Ironically, the Americans out-Sovieted the Soviets. The all-too-easy (and mistaken) conclusion was that all US space effort after Apollo should continue with the same army that won the battle of Apollo.

Korolyov and von Braun were both visionaries. To them, the Space Race really was about space, or at least their visions of mankind's future in space. These great space visionaries, and others like them who shared their dreams and talents, were forced by the political realities of their time to direct their efforts through the national space programs. This was the situation for over a generation.

In a famous speech to a joint session of congress on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy took the initiative:

... I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish

In making this statement, Kennedy set the conditions for victory in the Space Race and pointed out that the goal was primarily to win worldwide public opinion, to be "impressive to mankind"; long-range exploration was secondary.

By setting the conditions for victory, Kennedy forced the Soviet Union to follow a goal of his own choosing, straight out of Sun Tzu. It was a stroke of genius and a crucial step in winning the Space Race - but it was also a huge risk and a double-edged sword. When Apollo 11 fulfilled Kennedy's victory conditions, the risk had paid off: America had won the Space Race and a battle in the public opinion war, a crucial victory in the larger Cold War. However, winning the Space Race also meant that the Space Race was over. What happens to an army once the war is over?

How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?

With the Space Race won, what was to become of NASA? After Apollo 11, there were still several Saturn V's and command modules and service modules and lunar landers and rovers in the the production pipeline, and Apollo 12 ready to go as a backup in case Apollo 11 had failed. There was Cape Canaveral with its huge Vehicle Assembly Building and the equally huge crawler transports that moved rockets from the VAB to the launch pads, the pads themselves, launch towers and gantries and fuel tanks and all sorts of other expensive infrastructure already built.

But the Space Race had been won. There was no point in achieving the old victory conditions over and over again, because that did not affect worldwide public opinion in favor of the US in the same way that Apollo 11 did. And remember, the Space Race was not about space, it was about worldwide public opinion.

Public opinion is a tricky thing to nail down. In the Cold War PR game, the goal in both the USSR and the USA was to attract other nations to their sphere of influence. It was a propaganda war. However, propaganda can have effects beyond those which are intended.

"Rocket Scientist" entered the vernacular, meaning someone exceptionally intelligent (or not so much, when used sarcastically). The phrase "If we can put a man on the moon, we can (do X)" became popular, meaning that we could take on any challenge and succeed.

However, by concentrating all the Outer Space decision-making and expertise within the single agency and focusing on a single goal with a huge budget for a decade, NASA had been built up on a pedestal. The achievement of putting men on the moon and bringing them back to Earth had been a manpower-intensive, hugely expensive research and development program.

Indeed sending men to the moon the Apollo way - "waste anything but time" - is a hugely expensive undertaking by design. To achieve the goal, NASA had to have a particular organizational structure geared to that goal. Such a specific-purpose organizational structure and culture is ill-suited to anything but its intended goal.

It was a vicious circle in the making. NASA had to operate with a difficult goal on a fast track, always. Because that is expensive, everything about it is expensive. The expense means that failure tolerance is low, so redundancy must be built in at every critical point.

On a rocket, that means additional complexity and mass. The additional mass requires additional propellant, which needs bigger tanks, which are also heavier, and now the thing needs to be redesigned - the expense just goes up and up and up. That makes the rockets expensive, so the satellites that ride them also have to be super-reliable and redundant, and hence also expensive. The high cost means that there are very few flights per year, so development costs are amortized over a very low number of total flights.

And now, with only that Space Race to use as a yardstick, the general public had also come to see anything to do with space as hugely expensive and manpower intensive, something so big that only NASA (or governments in general) could ever afford - thus completing the vicious circle.

Skylab, Shuttle, Hubble, ISS, and JPL

Wernher von Braun had a vision for the US space program after Apollo: a large rotating space station launched by numerous reusable ascent stages, big dumb boosters for launching cargo and people to the space station, orbital assembly of lunar missions, a large scale lunar base, and eventually a fleet of vehicles with dozens of astronauts headed to Mars.

His vision made sense if the Space Race had actually been about space, but it was sharply at odds with the political reality that enabled Apollo in the first place. Once Apollo 11 succeeded, the program needed to be wound down. Apollo 13 - what Gene Kranz called "(NASA's) finest hour" - was very nearly a disaster that could have undone much of the PR value of Apollo 11, and almost certainly cemented the decision to wind down the program. President Nixon cannot have been particularly fond of the association between Apollo and his hated rival Kennedy, either, not while being stuck in an expensive, unpopular foreign war inherited from Kennedy's successor.

To wind down Apollo and use up the remaining already-paid-for hardware, the number of moon missions was reduced by three - Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were canceled. One of the leftover Saturn V boosters was used to launch Skylab, and three Saturn-1B rockets launched the three Skylab crews. A fourth Saturn-1B was used in the Apollo-Soyuz test program.

Following Apollo-Soyuz there was a six year gap in American manned spaceflight capability.

In the interim, Wernher von Braun wasn't the only bright light to leave NASA. To quote Kelly Starks:

I used to work in Kranz’s department, and was basically told that at the end of Apollo, the top 10%, the real movers/shakers/geniuses that had made the place really work, had quit to find something more challenging and that wasn’t going to cut their salaries. The bottom 80% who did what it took to build the top 10%’s vision were laid off. So basically you had a agency run by folks who were the top 10% assistants and go-fer’s. Then when the agency staffed back up for shuttle they all got high ranking executive jobs at NASA.

Many things at NASA made a lot more sense after I heard that.

While Apollo was winding down and von Braun struggling vainly to have his vision implemented, NASA was developing a low earth orbital infrastructure program. This program was to include a space station and a vehicle which would be a multitasking workhorse, launching so frequently that launch costs would theoretically drop dramatically. The space shuttle was supposed to eventually launch up to 24 flights per year, based on the maximum rate of the external tank production.

Flight rates to the proposed space station and in service to the Air Force wouldn't provide enough demand for those flight rates, so all US launches, including scientific research and commercial satellites, would have to be launched on the shuttles. This effectively delayed the development of a private space industry for decades by providing an artificial barrier to entry - if you weren't already Boeing or Lockheed or Martin-Marietta or Morton-Thiokol, you weren't getting into the space industry in the United States, period.

NASA couldn't afford to do both the Shuttle and space station at the same time with their plan, so they just started with the Shuttle. Six years after Apollo-Soyuz, Columbia lifted off the pad and America returned men to space. The "gap" in American manned spaceflight capability is nothing new, and has happened twice more since then, with a 32 month gap after the Challenger disaster and a 31 month gap after Columbia.

Of course, the shuttles never achieved anywhere near 24 launches a year. In the wake of the Challenger disaster, various commercial, military and scientific payloads again began to be launched on expendable Atlas and Delta boosters rather than the shuttles. All that was left for the shuttles to launch was objects too big to be launched on Atlas or Delta, and manned orbital missions.

To bring down the cost of launch, it is essential that high flight rates be maintained, so that the up-front development costs are amortized over a large number of launches. A high flight rate also makes maximum cost-effective use of the support staff required to keep the fleet maintained and operational. Without that high flight rate, development costs are spread over fewer launches and the full workforce must be employed during long stretches of downtime.

If the flight rate is too high, that workforce is stretched too thin and potentially fatal mistakes are made; if the flight rate is too low the workforce risks losing its edge, and complacency can cause potentially fatal mistakes to be made. The low flight rate for the shuttle thus caused high operational costs on top of a higher per-launch development cost, and actually increased the cost of launch to orbit slightly.

The operational costs were further increased by the complexity of the shuttle and thus the complexity of the maintenance program. Since it was designed to do so many things to satisfy so many different - sometimes conflicting - objectives, it is like a camel, a "horse designed by a committee", with a quarter million parts.

High operational costs had a detrimental effect on the rest of NASA, as research and development was pared back in order to pay for operations. Further exploration and research took longer because budget realities forced programs to delay commencement or stretched them out for longer time frames, and those delays ended up costing NASA even more in the long run.

The International Space Station is the most glaring example of programmatic delays inflating the cost of a project. Originally projected to cost 8 billion dollars when first proposed by Ronald Reagan as Space Station Freedom, program delays and several iterations of redesign, and then further even more complex redesign as the international partners were brought on board, caused the cost to balloon, to the point where the ISS has now cost a hundred billion dollars to build.

One bright spot in the post-Apollo era was the Hubble Space Telescope. Although it has produced some jaw-dropping images and changed our understanding of the universe, it too had its problems throughout its working life, right from the very beginning. Hubble was nearly a disaster at first, as it was originally launched with faulty optics, making the two billion dollar satellite nearly useless. A software patch helped considerably, as did the maintenance missions flown by the shuttles, which have upgraded the Hubble several times over the last twenty years.

Another bright spot has been the Jet Propulsion Lab, or JPL. It is a federally-funded research and development center, the only NASA center that isn't a "union shop". And, it shows: Ranger, Mariner, Viking, Voyager, Mars Pathfinder, Cassini, the Mars exploration rovers, Mars Phoenix, Deep Impact and EPOXI all have been run by JPL, making them the only organization in the world to have visited all the planets (and a comet). The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab is another example of a separate-but-partially-funded-by-NASA group that is responsible for NEAR Shoemaker, which orbited and landed on asteroid 433 Eros.

the X-Prize and newSpace

By the late 1990s, it was obvious the space program was stalled. After some preliminary cooperation with the Russians on Mir, construction of the ISS finally began in December 1998, when the Russian Zarya functional cargo block was connected to the American Unity node on mission STS-88, 25 years behind von Braun's schedule.

Generations of Americans had seen first the Apollo program and then the Shuttle program as their only measure of a space program. Because of the "waste anything but time" approach to Apollo and the horrendously expensive Shuttle operations, the public perception of space was that it was incredibly difficult and expensive, and that only governments could afford to do anything there.

In the meantime, private industry was in fact doing lots of things in low earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit, and making a huge profit doing so. Large telecommunication satellites were going up year after year, building the backbone of the internet and satellite TV and telephone services, and today extends to satellite radio. The thing private industry wasn't doing was manned launch services.

In 1995, Peter Diamandis proposed the X-Prize in a speech to the National Space Society. Based on the idea of the Orteig Prize (won by Charles Lindbergh), the X-Prize was meant to encourage the space industry in the private sector by offering a $10 million prize to the first team to send a craft capable of carrying three people (one pilot and two dummy masses) to an altitude of 100km or more twice in a two week period. No government funding was allowed.

Well, it worked. Twenty-six teams from around the world entered the competition, between them spending far more than the $10 million dollar prize money. Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites team, backed by Microsoft's Paul Allen, won the prize with two launches five days apart in autumn 2004.

Winning the X-Prize was worth far more than ten million dollars to Scaled Composites in free advertising alone. It led to a deal with Virgin Galactic to develop larger suborbital spacecraft for a potentially large tourist market.

More importantly for the industry, the X-Prize broke a barrier in public perception about the accessibility of space.

People who had been kids during the Apollo years dreamed about one day going into space themselves - only to see the reality that followed in the intervening decades, where becoming an astronaut and going into space was less likely than being struck by lightning or winning the lottery. They had seen Clarke and Kubrick's vision of the future in the movie 2001, with regular passenger service to giant orbiting space stations and the moon, and compared it to the hugely-expensive and glacial pace of advancement in space after Apollo.

And then out in the Mojave desert Mike Melvill became the first man to earn his commercial astronaut wings, followed a short time later by Brian Binnie. Scaled Composites accomplished a complete development, test, and launch program for a suborbital space vehicle for about what NASA spent every eleven hours. Had they continued flying with the same vehicle instead of moving on to a new development schedule after the X-Prize, then each suborbital flight after that would have cost Scaled about fifty thousand dollars.

The two X-Prize launches changed public perception about space - at least, it was the first chink in the armor. Here were two guys that had gone into space, and they didn't have to be part of NASA to do it. And if they could do it without NASA, then maybe space didn't have to be hugely expensive and complicated. Maybe it could be done inexpensively enough that the price point would drop, fueling demand for a growing launch rate, spreading development costs over more launches.

Maybe one the day the average person could go into space, after all.

Of course that change in perception isn't happening overnight for everyone. It doesn't need to. Only a few people needed to change their perceptions to have a much larger effect, if those people were venture capitalists or angel investors. Suddenly the "giggle factor" was gone: it was conceivable for a small team working on a small budget to not only accomplish something in space - something that was once the sole domain of governments - they could plausibly do it at a profit.

Enter NewSpace. Scaled Composites was obviously the leader in what could become a suborbital tourist market, but there are other players in that market now like Rocketplane and Armadillo Aerospace and Blue Origin and others. There is more than just that one market.

Orbital launch capability has already been demonstrated by SpaceX, which currently has their new Falcon 9 rocket on the pad awaiting its test launch. The Falcon 9 is big enough to launch cargo or passengers to the International Space Station. They are not alone in the orbital launch industry, either. Orbital Sciences corporation has had 40 successful launches since 1990, and is also working towards ISS resupply with the Cygnus/Taurus II vehicle.

These are just a few of the players in a rapidly growing private space industry. While these companies are each following their own business plans and growing their businesses, the incentives offered by the various prizes offered in the wake of the X-Prize (such as NASA's Centennial Challenges program, the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize, and others of varying size) certainly help to attract investment.

the Vision for Space Exploration and the Constellation program

By early 2004 it was a reasonably good bet that somebody was going to win the Ansari X-Prize, and whether it was Scaled or daVinci or Canadian Arrow or Rubicon or somebody else, it was pretty good odds it was gonna happen. NASA had spent the better part of two decades "going around in circles", and here private industry was ready to take the bull by the horns. In the end there were six manned spaceflights in all of 2004, and three of those had been by Scaled Composites.

On January 14th, 2004, President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration. Following this announcement, the Aldridge Commission gave a report detailing how to implement that Vision. Recommendations included:

Formation of a Permanent Space Exploration Steering Council
NASA's relationship to the private sector must be transformed to

recognize a far larger presence of private industry in space operations
have NASA itself become more focused and integrated, with clear authority and accountability
reconfigure NASA centers as Federally Funded R and D centers to enable innovation and stimulate economic development
create a technical advisory board, a cost estimating organization, and a high risk/high payoff research and technology organization
adopt proven personnel and management reforms

Form special project teams on enabling technologies
NASA reach broadly into commercial and nonprofit communities to bring in the best ideas and technologies
Congress increase the potential for commercial opportunities with incentives for entrepreneurial investment in space, including prizes and property rights
pursue international partnerships that encourage global investment
NASA seek routine input from the scientific community
NASA engage with the National Academy of Sciences on science priorities
use of discovery-based criteria for selecting destinations beyond the Moon and Mars, including access to in-situ space resources
measures to stimulate educational and general public interest

The Aldridge Commission report represented a departure from the way NASA had run itself for decades, dating back to before Apollo. It basically called for a complete reorganization of NASA's entire management structure.

NASA's answer to the Aldridge Commission was the Exploration Systems Architecture Study. This basically scrapped the majority of the Aldridge report, and the existing designs for Crew Exploration Vehicles called for in the VSE, and replaced them with new NASA administrator Michael Griffin's preferred architecture, which he developed earlier for the Planetary Society. Far from recognizing the directives in the Aldridge report, NASA instead reverted to an Apollo mode, even explicitly dubbed "Apollo on steroids" by Griffin himself during the rollout of the ESAS.

Basically the only recommendation that was met was the funding of the Centennial Challenges program, and that funding is specified by Congress, not NASA.

update: the strikethroughs and corrections in the remainder of this section are h/t Nemo.

This new Constellation architecture consisted of two new space launch systems: crew launch on the Ares-1, and cargo launch on the Ares-V. These rockets were to be based on the the parts of the space shuttle launch system, with new configurations. The Ares-1 would consist of a single shuttle solid rocket booster with ~~an external tank~~ second stage mounted on top, and then the Orion crew capsule mounted on top of that. The Ares-V would use ~~the existing~~ new 5-segment solid rocket boosters and external tank in their side-by-side configuration, with a second stage mounted on top. These would both use ~~new~~ Space Shuttle Main Engines, mounted on the bottom of the external tank for the Ares-V and air-started on the second stages, all off-the-shelf components.

~~Once NASA actually started crunching the numbers on the design, it became clear that the existing solid rocket motor wasn't up to the job of being a first stage for the rest of the rocket.~~ The new SRBs needed to be bigger by another section, going from four to five solid rocket sections. This meant that the burn rate had to be adjusted as well, and thus a new fuel grain mixture - basically, an entirely new solid rocket motor, sharing only superficial visual commonality with existing hardware.

On the shuttle system the two solid rocket motors are mounted beside the external tank at two points each, top and bottom. The tank itself acts as a "strongback" for the system, dampening vibrations from the SRBs. The orbiter provides steering with its three engines. With a single motor attached at a single point at the bottom of the Ares-1, the vibrations from spikes in thrust would become so intense that the astronauts aboard would be shaken to death, assuming control was possible at all.

A passive damping system was added to the design, which cut into the payload weight. When it became clear that even that wouldn't suffice, an active damping system was added - retrorockets that fired in the opposite direction of the thrust spikes. This cuts even more to the final payload weight, both by its own mass and by reducing the efficiency of the solid rocket motor, with the active damping system working against primary thrust. Oops! ~~Now the solid rocket booster isn't strong enough to lift it all, and we need another half a section added to the booster~~... back to the drawing board. (update: all this for a rocket that wouldn't have the capability of an existing series of rockets, the Delta IV Heavy.)

It's always a bad sign when early design stages develop kludges to fix kludges to fix kludges. The Orion capsule went from a capacity of ~~seven astronauts, to five, to three~~ six astronauts to four. (thanks, Nemo!)

The mental gymnastics required to accept Griffin's Constellation architecture over competing design architectures, and over the Aldridge report itself, were breathtaking. Flight safety records of competing systems were subject to apples-and-oranges comparisons, such as using records of Titan III and Titan IV rockets as estimates of failure rates of the completely different Delta IV Heavy, or using shuttle flight safety records (after the Challenger disaster only) as estimates of Ares reliability, with each shuttle flight counting as two Ares-1 projected flights. NASA even launched the "Ares-1x", a dummy rocket with the old solid rocket booster design and a mock-up of the upper stage, to "prove" the concept using a system sharing only superficial visual commonality with the proposed Ares-1.

where we are now

By early this year, work on the Constellation program had consumed nine billion dollars and produced PowerPoint presentations, a Potemkin rocket, and a schedule that slipped by more than a year, every year. Meanwhile SpaceX, starting from scratch eight years ago, has designed, built, tested and flown new liquid-fueled rocket engines, and had five test launches of its Falcon-1 rocket, the last two of which achieved orbit, and its big Falcon-9 fully tested and on the pad waiting for launch at Cape Canaveral. And rather than merely costing money, SpaceX has made a profit for years.

The Augustine Commission, formed in May 2009 to ensure the nation was on "a vigorous and sustainable path to achieving its boldest aspirations in space", gave its report in October 2009. Among its suggestions (it was only tasked with suggesting options, not making specific recommendations) was commercial crew launch to orbit and an Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Flexible Path option for heavy lift, leading to a "different (and significantly reduced) role for NASA. It has an advantage of potentially lower operational costs, but requires significant restructuring of NASA".

Something had to give. This year President Barack Obama began the process of canceling the Constellation program and returning NASA to the recommendations of the Aldridge Commission and the Flexible Path suggestion of the Augustine Commission. This has caused considerable criticism from such luminaries as Gene Kranz, Neil Armstrong, Michael Griffin, Paul Spudis, and others.

Some see this as the end of American manned spaceflight - after all, if every single aspect of the space program isn't handled entirely by NASA, then it isn't getting done at all, right? Because space is hard and expensive, so only governments can afford to be in the launch business at all, right? And NASA as an organization can't change its structure to follow the Aldridge recommendations, it has to stay in Apollo mode, right?

Well, maybe not.

The opposition has largely been rooted in concerns about risk and cost. This is exemplified by Eugene Cernan (perhaps mistakenly) quoting NASA administrator General Charles Bolden as saying that commercial space "may need a bailout like GM/Chrysler - may be largest bailout in history". A misunderstanding of the situation is probably going on, as Martijn Meijering said:

The question is how much of that risk should be borne by NASA. Logically, that would be most of the risk, since it is NASA that wants to do exploration. That doesn’t mean NASA cannot shop around and look for the best deal. From the perspective of taxpayers it would make sense if it did and if it used proper instruments to manage that risk: performance bonds, intellectual property rights and other assets as collateral, the right to take over operations if milestones aren’t met etc.

Under the current system NASA doesn’t use these instruments and operates under a single source cost plus regime. This is why I think all the talk of the risk of commercial suppliers is fundamentally dishonest. The essence of what’s being proposed is a new contracting mechanism, one that would allow much better management of risk. Opponents of this new regime point to the risk of bailout when that’s exactly what’s happening to the current regime.

Similarly there is dishonest talk of giving “commercial space” a seat at the table, but not the whole table. Commercial space is not a group of companies, it is a contracting mechanism. All potential suppliers, including current ones could compete on a level playing field.

It is only when you distort the truth by portraying commercial space as a specific group of companies (SpaceX, XCOR, Armadillo, Masten) that you can start portraying commercial space as risky. Changing the contracting mechanism means less risk, not more. Relying on unproven companies would be risky, but that’s not what’s being proposed.

where do we go from here?

The arguments we in the space community have (manned spaceflight versus robots, the Moon versus Mars versus Near-Earth asteroids, expendable launch versus reusable vehicles, and so on) are still largely framed on the assumption that Space equals NASA, and that the NASA of the Apollo years is the NASA of today, or the NASA of the future. The premise is that due to the expense we can only pursue one goal at a time and that a monolithic NASA has to be in charge, that all efforts must pull in the same direction or nothing at all gets done.

If the Space Race had really been about space, a number of things would have occurred differently over the last forty years. The arguments like manned-vs-robot would be moot, since access to orbit would be regular and widespread and inexpensive. However, a different path was followed which brings us to where we are today. The decisions we make today will shape the future.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". If we want different results than we have seen over the last four decades, we have to be prepared to follow a different approach.

In deciding on a direction to take, it is helpful to have a goal in mind and a way of getting there.

I touched on some of the goals for utilizing space in why go to space, but I didn't explain how we get there from here. The goals - large scale use of the available clean energy and abundant raw materials available and expanding the human presence and economy throughout the solar system - are too big for NASA to accomplish by the end of a possible second Obama term.

Instead, NASA must fundamentally change the way it runs itself and the way it interacts with the larger American and world marketplace. And the US Congress can do some things to help the process along considerably.

reforming NASA

Finding # 2 of the Aldridge Commission was:

The Commission finds that NASA’s relationship to the private sector, its organizational structure, business culture, and management processes – all largely inherited from the Apollo era – must be decisively transformed to implement the new, multi-decadal space exploration vision.

This finding is certainly correct. The nature of NASA's mission is not the same as it was during Apollo - indeed, its mission changed dramatically after Apollo, but NASA itself largely did not. If all you've got is a hammer (Apollo-era NASA) then all problems start to look like a nail (Apollo).

NASA as it is currently structured is incapable of sustaining a single multi-decade human space flight project such as Constellation, a Mars Direct mission, or even a decade-long one like Apollo. Any such initiative that spans longer than two presidential terms is unlikely to ever last long enough to get off the ground.

Instead NASA's activities have to be reorganized to follow smaller projects which knock down the technical hurdles and retire risk on the scientific and engineering challenges, which would lead to a long-term advancement of capability and reduction in cost.

Here we return to some key recommendations of the Aldridge commission. First, the various NASA centers must be reconfigured as federally funded research and development centers like the Jet Propulsion Lab. This will cut down enormously on labor costs and increase productivity because all the center workers become contract workers instead of union employees - more bang for the Buck Rogers.

Second, again quoting the Aldridge report:

Currently, NASA’s organization chart is not wired for success. The first task is to realign the NASA Headquarters organizations to support the long-term vision. There are currently too many mission-focused enterprises and the mission support functions are excessively diffuse.

The report mentioned consolidating the various mission-focused enterprises within NASA's organizational structure into Science, Exploration, Aeronautics, and possibly Education. A permanent space exploration steering council, a technical advisory board, a cost estimating organization, and a high-risk/high-payoff research and technology organization as additions to NASA's organization would help greatly in performing the smaller projects I mentioned above.

Third, the incentives for smaller private companies and startups to get involved such as prizes like the Centennial Challenges or contracts like COTS-D should be maintained and expanded. The Centennial Challenges program has already had an effect on the design of astronaut gloves far more cost-effectively than if NASA had just done it themselves.

So, what are these smaller-scale building block projects?

NASA's new mission: administering the stepping stones to the solar system

Right now, humanity has certain limited spaceflight capabilities. Increasing those capabilities in giant leaps like Apollo is expensive and politically unsustainable. However, by increasing capabilities incrementally we can build future endeavors on previous increments. Each step is one small step instead of one giant leap.

The biggest impediment to getting anywhere is the rocket equation. To get into orbit, you not only need to carry your rocket tanks and engines and payload, you need to carry the fuel and oxidizer to burn in the engines to make thrust. The fuel and oxidizer has mass, too, and so you need to carry more fuel and oxidizer to lift that weight, too. If you're going not just to orbit but to the moon, then you need to carry even more fuel and oxidizer, and if you want to get back, even more.

If you have to lift all of that fuel and oxidizer (and their tanks) off the ground every time you go to the moon, you have a situation like the Saturn V. Of that enormous rocket, all that returned was the tiny capsule on top.

But what if you didn't have to carry all that fuel and oxidizer with you all the way from the ground to the moon and back? Most of it isn't being used when it is needed, but is just hefted up as dead weight until it is used. What if instead you launched on a smaller rocket, one just able to get your capsule to orbit with an empty second stage booster? And then if that booster could be refilled in orbit and sent on the next leg of its journey?

Indeed, if you could refill a spacecraft with consumables like liquid Oxygen, Nitrogen, Hydrogen, hydrazine, water, Helium, Xenon, methane, kerosene, Nitrogen tetraoxide, Argon, or various other liquids or gases, then the craft launched from the ground wouldn't necessarily need to be the same craft that human passengers use for the next leg of the journey at all.

Ever driven or flown across North America? Even a journey of a few hundred miles is enough to illustrate the idea in action. If you're driving along an interstate or an interprovincial highway, you stop at a gas station when you need gas. Maybe there's a restaurant or a snack bar and you grab a bite to eat - then you get back on the road. If you're taking the bus you get on at one station and transfer from station to station, with each bus just going back and forth along a route between stations and gassing up along the way or stopping for food wherever available. Or you take a cab to the airport, hop on a plane, maybe transfer at a major hub or two, then take a cab from another airport to your hotel.

Well, right now there are no gas stations or bus stations or buses or semi-trailers or truck stops or hotels or other such things in orbit. If you want to accompany your intermodal shipping container from here to the moon today, you've got to bring your gas station and bus and snack bar along with you, and most of the way back.

So, we need:

orbiting propellant (and other gas and or liquid consumables) depots. The first ones would be the demonstrator models, proving required technologies like orbital propellant transfer, cryogenic storage in the space environment, solving outgassing issues, perhaps trying out things like electrodynamic reboost and using outgassing for thrust vectoring. The load launched to such a depot is fungible, relatively inexpensive, and can be launched in whatever quantity the supplier is able to provide by whomever is able to provide it. In the long run this would lead to multiple depots in multiple orbits - and an enormous increase in the number of launch service providers and in each company's total launches (amortizing R&D costs over a greater number of units). Depots then pay market rates for consumables delivered, and likewise sell it as needed.
bus stations. That's about the best way I can describe it. Each would probably be closely associated with a propellant/consumables depot. People and cargo arrive there from launch vehicles, and transfer there to other vehicles. The craft that launches a person from the Earth doesn't need to be the craft that takes him to the moon. It doesn't even have to be the same craft that takes him back to Earth - those might be launched empty at high acceleration four at a time. The bus station would be the place where people and cargo transfer from vehicle to vehicle as needed. This greatly simplifies vehicle design and manufacturing - many different vehicles can perform specialized tasks, and many different providers can make those vehicles, as long as the interfaces to the airlocks and propellant transfer interfaces are refined, standardized and published. These bus stations would likely consist of an inflatable Bigelow type module, airlocks, maybe a big robotic arm, solar panels... perhaps the ISS might be used as a test bed for bus station technology. Future bus stations could exist at other depots in low earth orbit and eventually at the Lagrange orbits.
buses. These would be basically any vehicle that transferred passengers from one orbiting bus station to another. A possible design might consist of an inflatable Bigelow module for habitation, an airlock for connecting to a bus station, some main engines, a set of (inflatable?) tanks for propellants, some solar panels and radiators, and maybe a small single person cockpit similar to the Pods in 2001. Such a vehicle could be assembled piece by piece as the parts arrive at the first bus station.
intermodal transport. The standardized shipping containers have revolutionized the shipping, trucking, and rail industries, with the same container holding a shipment from source to destination, and the mode of transport in between irrelevant. Transfer of the shipment from one mode of transportation to another or storing it at a storage facility is as simple as moving the container with a crane. The same intermodal container should be capable of shipment into space, as long as certain total mass and center of mass and other such rules are standardized. To make it efficient, the container would be loaded by crane from a truck or ship or rail car into a NASA-developed space shipment housing. This would consist of an external framework designed to support the intermodal container during launch and testing. Once the intermodal container is secured, the whole thing can be spin-tested to ensure it is centered and won't throw the rocket off course during launch.
substantially-enclosed life support system. The input is solar energy, the output is waste heat radiated to the universe, and in between a minimalist ecosystem backed up by some technology keeps people, plants, and maybe some animals alive. Everything is recycled with minimal resupply. Water, food, air, all are recycled continuously by the artificial ecosystem. The Biosphere 2 project got a good start on this and taught many lessons, and the American and Russian space programs have both done some preliminary work, but it is time to get serious about extended stays in space. That means our wastes have to be consumed by other organisms, which in turn recycle the CO2 into Oxygen and purify the water and provide a food supply. There's plenty for NASA to do in this area.
the semi truck / tractor. That intermodal container and housing by themselves are not a space vehicle. They are cargo. They won't move themselves once launched. To be a true space vehicle it needs guidance, navigation, control, communications, a power supply, and temperature control (at least for all those control systems), propulsion, and propellant. If the payload is temperature or pressure sensitive, it will probably need its own separate payload health systems. However, that same guidance etc system can be a common, open source device. With the addition of a robotic arm and the interface to a propellant depot, you have a reusable vehicle that is capable of a wide array of on-orbit cargo transfer tasks. This is particularly valuable if the cargo being transported is consumables like propellant. Such cargo could take a long time to reach a matching orbit with a depot, several months if need be, and save on the total propellant required to service the depot itself. NASA needs a space tractor.
reusable auxiliary boosters. NASA currently uses two 4-segment solid rocket boosters to help launch the space shuttles, but those are not quite what I had in mind. The first stage of a rocket may be recoverable (SpaceX is attempting this), the second stage is pretty much going to orbit, but strap-on boosters don't need to go all the way to orbit and might be re-used. To make that happen on a large scale, those boosters have to be much easier to use than the SRBs. Flyback boosters can be liquid fueled and glide back to a landing strip for quick recovery, refilling, and reuse. NASA needs to retire the risk on a number of technologies associated with making such a device work. Form there, private companies would use that technology to upgrade their own systems, enabling larger payloads by assisting existing rockets with reusable strap-on stages.
That's just a start. As these smaller goals are accomplished, each makes the others easier. And together they make the next stages ten and twenty years down the road easier and cheaper - things like lunar landers and lunar habitats and in-situ resource utilization and so forth. There should always be a small part of NASA that is looking ahead twenty years and performing initial, small-scale tests and prototyping of those twenty-years-out capabilities, because those years will continue to pass anyhow.

What Congress can do and NASA can't

ITAR must be seriously reconsidered and amended, if not outright repealed. The reason for ITAR - to supposedly keep Russia and other countries from supplying rocket technology to Iran and other pariah states - well, that horse left the barn long ago, and the lock on the barn door isn't doing any future development any good, no horses can get in or out.

Next: recognition of property rights. I have a cigarette lighter beside me. I bought it, I use it, I keep others from taking it from me, I own it. The people around me accept that it is my lighter. They don't have to defend my claim to recognize that I own it. If someone takes it from me while I'm not looking and I can't get it back, well, then somebody swiped my lighter and I don't own it anymore.

And so it is with space. Suppose I build a robot, buy a rocket, and launch it to the moon. When my robot starts digging up Platinum, well by golly I want that Platinum to be mine. Getting it back to Earth economically would be my problem, and when I sell it I want my money. My risk, my reward. That's the way capitalism works. (I wrote about this before, several times.)

The Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty are merely apparent impediments to the recognition of property rights by the United States, or indeed any other country.

Any person reading this will accept that the lighter I mentioned above belongs to me, that I have property rights to it. It is no different for, say, the New Zealand government to recognize that my lighter is mine, even though I'm not in New Zealand. If however I use that lighter to start a forest fire in New Zealand, well then the government of New Zealand would be correct to exact some sort of compensation from me, as the negligent use of my property would have infringed on some New Zealander's property rights. Simple.

So it is with extraterrestrial property. The government of New Zealand or the United States would not need to have me as a citizen or defend my claim in order to recognize the fact that I owned a chunk of asteroid if my robot was sampling the surface and making cores and assaying the samples. The government wouldn't be claiming ownership of the asteroid, they'd be recognizing the fact of my ownership - or anybody's ownership of an asteroid. Such a recognition would enable private enterprise to flourish throughout the solar system once it gets a toehold.

(Don't worry, I won't claim them all. There are about ~~1 000 000 000 000 000~~ eleventy kajillion asteroids and comets a kilometer or bigger across in the solar system.)

update: See what happens when I just pull a number out of the air? People call me on it. The main belt has about a million such asteroids, there's a bunch more in Jupiter's L4 and L5 orbits, Neptune has L4 and L5 asteroids, there's the Kuiper belt, the scattered disk, and many trillions in the Oort cloud - just counting the ones bigger than a kilometer across.

The asteroid 99942 Apophis is about 270 meters across. There are way more objects like that than bigger ones.

bones.inc

2010-05-01T00:58:00.003-06:00

I have decided to finally release bones.inc to the world. This is an "include" file that works with POVray 3.5 or higher, and allows the user to create skeletons and hang POVray object skins on them.

I have uploaded a zip file to my new website containing bones.inc, a readme file that explains how to use it, two example POVray programs that use bones.inc, and the GNU licenses allowing anyone to use, distribute, modify etc. the code or documentation. Now anyone can create their own animated 3d characters.

Animation of these characters is accomplished by setting key poses for the character and interpolating between a series of poses as the clock runs. As more skeletons and poses and movements are created, a library is built up that makes further animations easier and easier - some very complex animations are reduced to just a handful of macro calls.

A true inverse kinematics system is still lacking on bones.inc, but it may not be strictly necessary, either. Test renderings can help the animator to determine the necessary character poses fairly quickly, without using a full IK system or motion capture.

If you want to add some realistic-yet-cartoony mouths to your characters, I recommend using Rune's Lip Synch System. He also has an Inverse Kinematics Neck include file which may be useful for such things as tongues, tentacles, etc.

coming soon

2010-04-23T01:17:00.011-06:00

POVray is a very useful free Open Source 3d modeling and animation program. It is a magnificent program, capable of virtually any visual effect you can think of.

There was only one real shortcoming to POVray, in my opinion - there was no way to declare a "skeleton" and hang objects like blobs on it, then move and manipulate the skeleton.

Until now.

I am in the process of finishing up an "include" file for POVray called bones.inc, which I used to create the little video below. (Update: bones.inc is now available for download here)

Getting to this point took me the better part of a year. It might not look like much, but all of the background work is done - the actual animation of the robot took only a few simple lines of code:

// clock goes from zero to one
#declare RunTime = 0;
#if (clock<0.2)
StandToRun("Body",clock*5)
#else
#declare RunTime = (clock - 0.2)*1.25;
RunBiped("Body",RunTime)
#end
rotateSkeleton("Body",<0,-60,0>)

Other movements and combinations of movements require only that certain key poses be established - the video above uses only five poses altogether, and individual frames are interpolated between poses.

I am finishing testing right now, and only have one teensy weensy thing to add - inverse kinematics. The bones.inc include file is fully commented and also fully documented in a ReadMe file, and I'm working on some example skeletons (quadruped, snake, hexapod) and sample movements to make it easier for POVray users to incorporate animated characters in their scenes. The software will be released under the GNU general public license and the documentation under the GNU free documentation license.

Version 1.01 of bones.inc ~~should be available in about a week~~ is available now at the link above the video.

to the doctors of america

2010-03-21T21:51:00.002-06:00

Shrug.

Advice from Davy Crockett

2010-03-19T22:45:00.000-06:00

Not Yours To Give

Col. David Crockett
US Representative from Tennessee

Originally published in "The Life of Colonel David Crockett,"
by Edward Sylvester Ellis.

One day in the House of Representatives a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose:

"Mr. Speaker--I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him.

"Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week's pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks."

He took his seat. Nobody replied. The bill was put upon its passage, and, instead of passing unanimously, as was generally supposed, and as, no doubt, it would, but for that speech, it received but few votes, and, of course, was lost.

Later, when asked by a friend why he had opposed the appropriation, Crockett gave this explanation:

"Several years ago I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some other members of Congress, when our attention was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown. It was evidently a large fire. We jumped into a hack and drove over as fast as we could. In spite of all that could be done, many houses were burned and many families made houseless, and, besides, some of them had lost all but the clothes they had on. The weather was very cold, and when I saw so many women and children suffering, I felt that something ought to be done for them. The next morning a bill was introduced appropriating $20,000 for their relief. We put aside all other business and rushed it through as soon as it could be done.

"The next summer, when it began to be time to think about election, I concluded I would take a scout around among the boys of my district. I had no opposition there, but, as the election was some time off, I did not know what might turn up. When riding one day in a part of my district in which I was more of a stranger than any other, I saw a man in a field plowing and coming toward the road. I gauged my gait so that we should meet as he came to the fence. As he came up, I spoke to the man. He replied politely, but, as I thought, rather coldly.

"I began: 'Well, friend, I am one of those unfortunate beings called
candidates, and---‘

"Yes I know you; you are Colonel Crockett. I have seen you once before, and voted for you the last time you were elected. I suppose you are out electioneering now, but you had better not waste your time or mine, I shall not vote for you again."

"This was a sockdolager...I begged him to tell me what was the matter.

" ’Well, Colonel, it is hardly worth-while to waste time or words upon it. I do not see how it can be mended, but you gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting in the honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me. But I beg your pardon for expressing it in that way. I did not intend to avail myself of the privilege of the constituent to speak plainly to a candidate for the purpose of insulting or wounding you. I intend by it only to say that your understanding of the Constitution is very different from mine; and I will say to you what, but for my rudeness, I should not have said, that I believe you to be honest.
…But an understanding of the Constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is.'

" 'I admit the truth of all you say, but there must be some mistake about it, for I do not remember that I gave any vote last winter upon any constitutional question.’

“ ‘No, Colonel, there’s no mistake. Though I live in the backwoods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings of Congress. My papers say that last winter you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some sufferers by a fire in Georgetown. Is that true?’

" ‘Well, my friend; I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve its suffering women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing Treasury, and I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just as I did.'

" ‘It is not the amount, Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle. In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by a tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. 'No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose. If twice as many houses had been burned in this county as in Georgetown, neither you nor any other member of Congress would have thought of appropriating a dollar for our relief. There are about two hundred and forty members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the sufferers by contributing each one week's pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of wealthy men in and around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life.' "The congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditably; and the people about Washington, no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from the necessity of giving by giving what was not yours to give. The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution.'

" 'So you see, Colonel, you have violated the Constitution in what I consider a vital point. It is a precedent fraught with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people. I have no doubt you acted honestly, but that does not make it any better, except as far as you are personally concerned, and you see that I cannot vote for you.'

"I tell you I felt streaked. I saw if I should have opposition, and this man should go to talking, he would set others to talking, and in that district I was a gone fawn-skin. I could not answer him, and the fact is, I was so fully convinced that he was right, I did not want to. But I must satisfy him, and I said to him:

" ‘Well, my friend, you hit the nail upon the head when you said I had not sense enough to understand the Constitution. I intended to be guided by it, and thought I had studied it fully. I have heard many speeches in Congress about the powers of Congress, but what you have said here at your plow has got more hard, sound sense in it than all the fine speeches I ever heard. If I had ever taken the view of it that you have, I would have put my head into the fire before I would have given that vote; and if you will forgive me and vote for me again, if I ever vote for another unconstitutional law I wish I may be shot.'

"He laughingly replied; 'Yes, Colonel, you have sworn to that once before, but I will trust you again upon one condition. You say that you are convinced that your vote was wrong. Your acknowledgment of it will do more good than beating you for it. If, as you go around the district, you will tell people about this vote, and that you are satisfied it was wrong, I will not only vote for you, but will do what I can to keep down opposition, and, perhaps, I may exert some little influence in that way.'

" ‘If I don't’, said I, 'I wish I may be shot; and to convince you that I am in earnest in what I say I will come back this way in a week or ten days, and if you will get up a gathering of the people, I will make a speech to them. Get up a barbecue, and I will pay for it.'

" ‘No, Colonel, we are not rich people in this section, but we have plenty of provisions to contribute for a barbecue, and some to spare for those who have none. The push of crops will be over in a few days, and we can then afford a day for a barbecue. This is Thursday; I will see to getting it up on Saturday week. Come to my house on Friday, and we will go together, and I promise you a very respectable crowd to see and hear you.’

" 'Well, I will be here. But one thing more before I say good-bye. I must know your name.’

" 'My name is Bunce.'

" 'Not Horatio Bunce?'

" 'Yes.’

" 'Well, Mr. Bunce, I never saw you before, though you say you have seen me, but I know you very well. I am glad I have met you, and very proud that I may hope to have you for my friend.'

"It was one of the luckiest hits of my life that I met him. He mingled but little with the public, but was widely known for his remarkable intelligence and incorruptible integrity, and for a heart brimful and running over with kindness and benevolence, which showed themselves not only in words but in acts. He was the oracle of the whole country around him, and his fame had extended far beyond the circle of his immediate acquaintance. Though I had never met him, before, I had heard much of him, and but for this meeting it is very likely I should have had opposition, and had been beaten. One thing is very certain, no man could now stand up in that district under such a vote.

"At the appointed time I was at his house, having told our conversation to every crowd I had met, and to every man I stayed all night with, and I found that it gave the people an interest and a confidence in me stronger than I had ever seen manifested before.

"Though I was considerably fatigued when I reached his house, and, under ordinary circumstances, should have gone early to bed, I kept him up until midnight, talking about the principles and affairs of government, and got more real, true knowledge of them than I had got all my life before.

"I have known and seen much of him since, for I respect him - no, that is not the word - I reverence and love him more than any living man, and I go to see him two or three times every year; and I will tell you, sir, if every one who professes to be a Christian lived and acted and enjoyed it as he does, the religion of Christ would take the world by storm.

"But to return to my story. The next morning we went to the barbecue, and, to my surprise, found about a thousand men there. I met a good many whom I had not known before, and they and my friend introduced me around until I had got pretty well acquainted - at least, they all knew me.

"In due time notice was given that I would speak to them. They gathered up around a stand that had been erected. I opened my speech by saying:

" ‘Fellow-citizens - I present myself before you today feeling like a new man. My eyes have lately been opened to truths which ignorance or prejudice, or both, had heretofore hidden from my view. I feel that I can today offer you the ability to render you more valuable service than I have ever been able to render before. I am here today more for the purpose of acknowledging my error than to seek your votes. That I should make this acknowledgment is due to myself as well as to you. Whether you will vote for me is a matter for your consideration only.’"

"I went on to tell them about the fire and my vote for the appropriation and then told them why I was satisfied it was wrong. I closed by saying:

" ‘And now, fellow-citizens, it remains only for me to tell you that the most of the speech you have listened to with so much interest was simply a repetition of the arguments by which your neighbor, Mr. Bunce, convinced me of my error.

" ‘It is the best speech I ever made in my life, but he is entitled to the
credit for it. And now I hope he is satisfied with his convert and that he will get up here and tell you so.'

"He came upon the stand and said:

" ‘Fellow-citizens - It affords me great pleasure to comply with the request of Colonel Crockett. I have always considered him a thoroughly honest man, and I am satisfied that he will faithfully perform all that he has promised you today.'

"He went down, and there went up from that crowd such a shout for Davy Crockett as his name never called forth before.'

"I am not much given to tears, but I was taken with a choking then and felt some big drops rolling down my cheeks. And I tell you now that the remembrance of those few words spoken by such a man, and the honest, hearty shout they produced, is worth more to me than all the honors I have received and all the reputation I have ever made, or ever shall make, as a member of Congress.'

"Now, sir," concluded Crockett, "you know why I made that speech yesterday.

"There is one thing now to which I will call your attention. You remember that I proposed to give a week's pay. There are in that House many very wealthy men - men who think nothing of spending a week's pay, or a dozen of them, for a dinner or a wine party when they have something to accomplish by it. Some of those same men made beautiful speeches upon the great debt of gratitude which the country owed the deceased--a debt which could not be paid by money--and the insignificance and worthlessness of money, particularly so insignificant a sum as $10,000, when weighed against the honor of the nation. Yet not one of them responded to my proposition. Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it."

bye, Fred

2009-12-30T14:01:00.002-07:00

Yesterday sucked. I work for a medium-sized family-owned company in a small community. The owner, Gabby, works there as does his brother Sam. Another brother, Fred, used to work for the company and his house is across the back alley. Yesterday morning Gabby came running in yelling "call 9-1-1!" while making a beeline for the phone himself. I said "Fred?" and he said "yeah" and I ran over to Fred's house. Fred had already had several heart attacks and was in poor health; a few months ago he said that the doctors told him his heart was down to about 18% functionality.

I went inside and saw him laying on the floor on his side, turned him over on his back and tried to find a pulse... nothing. Still warm, no heartbeat, no breathing. I started doing CPR, what I could remember from a St. John's Ambulance course years ago and from a dinner table conversation over Thanksgiving - fifteen pumps on the chest and one breath, repeat.

All the while three of Fred's brothers (Gabby, Sam, and Bill) are standing there praying and crying, with Bill so desperate to help Fred that he was holding Fred's ankle and pumping the leg in an effort to get the blood flowing, or taking over Fred's breathing with such effort that I had to remind him that Fred needed to breathe out, too. I told Gabby that someone needed to stand outside and make sure the ambulance found the place right away, and just kept pumping.

I kept giving him CPR until the paramedics came and then just pumped his chest while they got to work and kept doing that until a second set of paramedics with shock paddles came and took over for me.

Then I went back to work. What else could I do?

A while later the ambulances left with their lights off.

If someone has a heart attack, they need help within about four minutes before other systems start shutting down for good. Maybe we didn't reach him in time. Maybe his heart was so far gone that nothing short of a new heart would save him. Bottom line is, he was a good guy and I tried to save him and I couldn't and he's gone.

On Sunday, he was showing me a picture taken of him in 1981, laughing and joking. Today's they're making plans for his funeral.

You never know when your time is up, people. If you knew that today was your last day, would you hold a grudge? Would you hug someone?

What's the Big Deal?

2009-12-16T22:00:00.002-07:00

From a comment on the previous post:

"The problem with Climate change is; It is real and people discount it to prolong profits unimpeded by research costs, etc. If we are wrong and it is not real, whats the worst thing that can happen? Everyone gets solar panels and doesn't have to pay for electricity? On the other hand if we are right and do nothing because people distract us or mislead us what will all the deniers do to fix their mistake? After society collapses into rich vs poor and disease and hunger spread with the changing climate. I don't think "I told you so" would cut it..."

This comment encompasses so many ideas that are (1) well within the mainstream of center-left ideology and (2) quite mistaken that I simply must respond point by point.

The problem with Climate change is;

So far, we are in agreement. There is indeed a problem here.

It is real

Yes indeed. The climate does indeed change. There are many reasons for the climate to change. First of all, there is a very big bright ball in the sky which is the source of all our energy, which might have something to do with things. Every time there is a big coronal mass ejection we get aurorae and blackouts in the electrical grids - do you think those are the only effects of millions of tons of solar plasma hitting the earth's magnetic field at a million miles an hour?

The Earth's orbit around the sun isn't a perfect, continuously-repeating-exactly-the-same-forever ellipse, either: there are other objects besides the Earth and Sun which tug gravitationally on both objects, such as Jupiter and Saturn, which cause minor orbital variations. And a relativistic effect causes the Earth's orbital precession over a period of roughly 21 thousand years:

In this diagram, the area of each quadrant is proportional to the time, and right now the northern hemisphere's spring and summer are longer than the fall and winter, whereas 2500 years ago the northern hemisphere's summer and winter were about equal length, but spring was much longer than autumn. That has a little something to do with the climate changing, too. There is not a darn thing that humankind can do to affect the Earth's orbit one iota.

Volcanic eruptions can change the climate as well: the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 caused the "Year Without A Summer" in 1816.

I suppose that mankind might be able to cause some sort of nuclear winter if we were so foolish as to have an all-out nuclear war. However, consider this Google Maps image of part of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, with the biggest craters I could find there:

Note the scale at the bottom left of that image. The Nevada test site was one of the most active nuclear test sites in history. Compare that image to this Google Maps satellite image, of an area just a few humdred miles away, at the same scale:

This is Meteor Crater in Arizona. It was formed when a meteor about 50 meters wide moving somewhere around 12-20 km/s collided with the Earth about 50 thousand years ago; about half of the meteor vaporized in the atmosphere and most of the rest vaporized on impact. Or how about this image, again at the same scale:

This is Mount St. Helens, which as you may recall caused some climate havoc. I include these three pictures to show how man's influence is absolutely dwarfed by nature.

And that brings us to the central questions of the whole climate change debate. Does man have an impact on the environment? Unquestionably, yes. But by how much does mankind affect the environment? Is it enough to actually change the climate? And what would the effects of that climate change be? Would such effects be, on the whole, positive or negative? And the answers to all these questions, if we are being honest, is that we don't know.

Getting back to the comment:

and people discount it to prolong profits

There is so much that is staggeringly wrong with this statement that the mind boggles. Is climate change real? Yes. Does mankind have a statistically-significant effect on climate change? We don't know. Is the net effect detrimental or beneficial? We don't know.

That is not discounting anthropoegenic global warming, but it is a million miles away from "the science is settled". And being honest that we don't know is held as some sort of dastardly trick in order to allow something even more heinous: "prolonging profit". Without profit, no business can survive; if the income exactly balances expenditures then the business is on the knife edge of failure, and if the income drops below that level for even a short time the business can go under. What is bad about profit?

unimpeded by research costs, etc

Are you freakin' kidding me. Who do you think pays for the vast majority of research worldwide? How ironic that someone could write that comment on a computer and transmit it over a network of fiber optic cables and satellite links and coaxial cables, completely oblivious to the contributions of Bell Labs or General Electric or a million other businesses' research departments to his ability to make that comment. Is it possible that this person thinks that without the global warming scare there would be no research done by business?

If we are wrong and it is not real, whats the worst thing that can happen?

The person asking this obviously did not ask this of themselves. The short answer is if the world economy is destroyed then billions of people will die of starvation. That's what happens one one third of agricultural land is no longer producing food, but is instead making biofuel - worldwide the price of food has doubled. For people in the first world that might not seem like a big deal, but for the majority of the people on the planet that is a huge problem: there were food riots in over a dozen regions of the world in the last two years.

Everyone gets solar panels and doesn't have to pay for electricity?

Of course! Why didn't I think of that? Oh, that's right, I have a job and bills, and I know that I can't get something for nothing. I have to work to get the things I own. So where are these solar panels for everyone supposed to come from? Should the government buy them for us? And where does the government get the money? Should it be taken out of Social Security, or Medicare, or should the government just print up more money as it needs it, like Zimbabwe?

On the other hand if we are right and do nothing because people distract us or mislead us what will all the deniers do to fix their mistake?

This past Saturday, the official temperature recorded at the airport ten minutes from where I live was minus 47 degrees Celcius, with a wind chill making it seem like minus 56 degrees C (minus 69 Fahrenheit) - for a short time it was the coldest place on the entire planet. I am damn glad of the modern technological conveniences that kept me from freezing to death in the dark. My great-great-grandparents didn't have those conveniences 119 years ago when they pioneered this area, and life was a lot harder for them.

If Al Gore is right (and he isn't and he knows it or he wouldn't have purchased a $4 million condo within walking distance of San Fransisco Bay, but let's just follow the hypothetical anyhow) then in the next century the sea levels will rise by some small value and the global temperature will rise by some other small value. Coincidentally over the next century our level of technology will continue to advance, so long as the economy is not held back by onerous taxation. The same technology that makes my life easier than that of my great-great-grandparents will be even more advanced as and if we encounter problems in the future - as long as we don't cripple our ability to make technological advances.

Let's turn the accusation around. In the 1960's Malaria was nearly wiped out through the widespread use of DDT, with around 50 thousand deaths a year. Then DDT was banned and the deaths skyrocketed to a million a year, for 40 years, until the UNWHO lifted its ban on the use of DDT. Rachel Carson has the blood of 40 million people - mostly children - on her hands, 40 million who died needlessly because of the ban on DDT, and where is she to answer for the carnage she caused? How does she fix her "Silent Spring" mistake?

After society collapses into rich vs poor and disease and hunger spread with the changing climate. I don't think "I told you so" would cut it..."

I will answer this and end with a quote by Robert A. Heinlein:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck."

Climaquiddick

2009-12-10T13:43:00.002-07:00

Tiger Woods has been famous for a decade. Today I did a Google search on his name and got 27.9 million hits. I did another Google Search on Climategate - a word that didn't even exist a month ago - and got 16.1 million hits (interestingly, half as many as a week ago).

I don't see how Tiger Woods's personal life merits as much attention as the Climategate story. It is convenient for the "professional" "news" organizations to misdirect the hoi polloi while the biggest news story so far this century goes on under the radar, as the very reason for the COP15 conference - the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming - is shown to be built on a collapsing house of cards. Jon Stewart scooped CNN:

Disclose.tv Jon Stewart on Climate-Gate Video

And Rex Murphy is apparently the lone voice of reason on the CBC:

Other than that, crickets chirping. Quite literally trillions of dollars at stake over the next... well, forever, in an unbreakable treaty that forces Canadians to freeze to death in the dark. Rand Simberg was right: it isn't Climategate, it's Climaquiddick. The former gatekeepers of information are trying to keep the information secret. Before the internet existed, they would have gotten away with it.

It ain't how science is supposed to work, and it ain't how journalism is supposed to work.

Scientific Prostitution

2009-12-06T23:10:00.002-07:00

If you haven't heard by now, you should. The entire Anthropogenic Global Warming scam has been blown wide open by a probable whistleblower in the East Anglia Climate Research Unit. The CRU is one of the most influential climate research centers in the world, and its results are used by other institutions (like NASA) to calibrate their own measurements. Here is the .zip file containing the "hacked" emails and most importantly the computer code. The HARRY_READ_ME.txt file is particularly interesting.

Right now in Copenhagen there are twety thousand delegates from some 194 countries around the world crafting a "Climate Treaty". They are using the fraudulent data used in the IPCC reports to show a man-made climate change problem that does not exist in the real world, but only exists in the fraud perpetrated upon you and me. How inconvenient is that truth?

The FOI2009.zip file was made available to the BBC a few weeks before it was posted on a Russian server and went überviral. It is the biggest scientific fraud of all time, with delegates in Copenhagen right now divvying up a quarter of the world's total economy in a treaty that would actually override the US Constitution and the Canadian Constitution.

We have to put a stop to this. This was science as prostitute, with a thesis so full of possibility for increased government involvement in your life and increase in the scope of government - in fact, the beginning of a World Government. It's like watching Atlas Shrugged unfold before me at a slightly quicker pace than actually reading the book itself.

Lord Monckton gave a speech in St. Louis in mid-October, a month before these files became public. Here it is. (>90 minutes)

Take that, Al Gore.

still alive and kicking

2009-07-28T16:29:00.002-06:00

I'm still here, really. I've been working 100 hour weeks for the last couple of months, and have hardly spent any time at all on the internet (my email inbox is a nightmare). I'm still writing the AI 101 series - part 3 has been in about 6 rough draft forms, and parts 4,5,and 6 are in various stages of completion. I anticipate that regular posting should resume at the end of August or the beginning of September.

Artificial Intelligence 101 - part 2

2009-03-27T23:22:00.005-06:00

Why AI?

Now that we have established what Artificial Intelligence is, let's look at why we would want to create such a thing. There isn't much point in creating something if we don't know why we would need it at all. We already have natural intelligence - human beings. What sort of advantages do we gain by developing artificial intelligence?

intelligence in nature

To help us answer this question, we first need to know what intelligence is used for in nature. The physical implementation of intelligence in nature is performed by neurons, so it is safe to say that any creature without a nervous system is incapable of intelligence. The simplest animal with a nervous system is Caenorhabditis elegans, which has exactly 959 cells in its body. 302 of those cells are neurons. All the other bodily functions - digestion, respiration, excretion, reproduction, circulation, and locomotion - are handled by the remaining 657 cells. This is an enormous portion of the animal's body being used to sense its environment, make decisions, and trigger actions, more than 31 percent.

Clearly this control system is important to c. elegans survival. Its nervous system is a third of its body, and hence demands a third of its nutritional requirements. So, why is such a large nervous system worth so much to c. elegans? The animal needs to feed on bacteria, which are unlikely to be right in front of its mouth all the time, so it needs to find those nutrients and get to them. To do that, it needs to sense its environment and find and eat its food. It needs to move its body around up, down, left, and right through the soil. It needs to sense damage to its body and move to avoid the source of the damage if possible. And it needs to perform certain automatic functions within its body, such as flushing waste from its system. These behaviors and capabilities allow c. elegans to survive within its simple environment.

C. elegans has a nervous system. Does that mean that it has intelligence? Well, it certainly makes choices (left or right?). The environment provides it with immediate feedback, which then subtly modifies the connections between and firing patterns of neurons (and this makes c. elegans useful for the study of nicotine dependence). Finally, such properties are not inherent in a single neuron, but only emerge when a group of neurons work together. Therefore, according to the definition in part 1, c. elegans has intelligence. Not a lot, and not particularly smart, but it is there. It uses that intelligence to allow basic behaviors such as controlling movement.

If we look at some larger animals with more complex bodies and nervous systems, we start to see animals with brains - a localized cluster of an enormous number of interconnected neurons. At each evolutionary step, much of the structure of the brain is retained (as long as the parts remain useful) and new capabilities are added. These larger animals have more complicated environments than c. elegans, as they operate at a different physical scale. They are forced by evolution to add adaptations like predation and mating calls and so forth, each of which are controlled by new neural structures and combinations of structures in the brain.

Over a long period of time, those structures which enable survival spread as species evolve and diverge. For instance, we all have a portion of our brains which are "reptilian", inherited from a long-ago ancestor, which controls basic functions like rage or fight-or-flight. Human beings have a far more complicated brain structure than any other animal. While we have retained the reptilian brain, a lot more stuff has been added over evolutionary history. With each new addition, a new set of capabilities emerged as the new structure interacted with the preexisting structures.

This is true for all the macroscopic animals. Each has evolved over time, sharing some structures (both within the brain and within the rest of the body) from remote ancestors and sharing others only within their genus or species, or unique to the animal itself. Each new structure, when integrated with the old structures, provides new behaviors, such as flight or echolocation. Each contributes to the intelligence of the animal and hence the capabilities of the animal.

So, we have a partial answer: in nature, animals use intelligence to enable them to make choices and have various capabilities and behaviors which they would be unable to have without intelligence. And, we want to give our machines the ability to make choices and to have various capabilities and complex behaviors.

automation

Next, let's look at the "Artificial" part of AI. Although we could make our AI with any computational device (even Tinkertoys, Legos or Meccano), for simplicity we'll use computers. Whenever we create anything which performs some process in computer software and hardware, we are by definition automating that process. Why would we want to automate intelligence?

To help us answer this question, let's first look at some examples of automation. If we require some task to be done exactly the same way over and over, then it makes sense to build a machine to perform that task automatically. If we want to explore the surface of Mars, and it would be expensive and dangerous to send a manned mission first, then we send a machine to perform that task for us. If we want to control traffic signals, then it is far more efficient to automate the process, rather than having someone manually controlling all of the signals in a city. If we want to decelerate a vehicle on an icy road, then anti lock brakes automate the process of rapidly pressing and releasing the brakes much faster than any human can.

Human labor is expensive compared to automation. While it is possible for a team of people to control all of the traffic lights in a city, people get bored or sick or take vacations, and they need breaks for lunch and cannot work 24/7. A machine that controls the traffic signals can operate continuously, never takes a sick day, and never needs to be paid. Automation makes sense for that task, and indeed traffic lights have been automated everywhere. At first, the control systems were simple timers, but that can lead to problems like cars sitting at red lights for unnecessary lengths of time, poor synchronization between signals causing traffic jams, and so on. Over the years these systems have become more sophisticated, with pressure sensors embedded in the roadway monitoring traffic flow and providing feedback to the control system. Ideally, all of the traffic lights in a city would be operated in such a way to maximize the flow of traffic and minimize delays, saving all commuters time and gasoline. A control system with more intelligence controlling those lights would allow traffic to flow with fewer unnecessary red light delays and with a smoother flow than a simple timer system.

As machines become more complex, direct human control is possible only in the broadest sense. The driver of a car can steer, press the accelerator or brake pedal, operate the gear shift, and control the lights and signals to other drivers. The driver cannot directly control such things as the timing of the firing of the spark plugs, the fuel to air ratio, the angle of the steering wheels, how much power to apply to each wheel, and how much force to apply to each brake pad. On older cars, that was all handled by indirect mechanical means, which meant such things as skidding on icy roads or losing control in corners. On modern vehicles, those indirect controls are handled through the car's computer. Besides the control signals from the driver, these vehicles have additional sensors throughout the car, which monitor the car's environment and use that feedback to directly control the vehicle's wheels, steering and brakes. This layer of automation between driver and vehicle allows such things as anti lock brakes, traction control, and other features like airbags. Each of these systems improves the safety and efficiency of the vehicle, but requires simultaneous control of multiple systems many times per second. That is too much information to process, too many repetitive decision to be made, and too many things to control at once for a human driver, so the process has to be automated. The smarter the vehicle can be made, the greater the improvements in safety and efficiency - at least theoretically, assuming people don't make bad choices while driving.

What can we learn from these examples? Generally speaking, it is desirable to automate some function if it is too expensive, repetitive, tedious, complicated, or dangerous for humans to perform directly.

so, why AI?

A machine must be controlled in order to be useful, and without control a machine is dangerous - imagine an uncontrolled semi during rush hour. Some machines are simple, and simple software can be used to control them. Other machines, like the aforementioned semi, are more complicated and operate in a complex environment, and so (for now) they require human control.

Everything that is automated already has a control system. These range from simple mechanical controls (like a thermostat with a Mercury switch) to highly sophisticated electronic hardware and computer software. In nature, there is obviously a range of intelligence between species and within a species. It isn't a simple linear scale, as each new capability in effect provides another axis along which to measure intelligence - if a new application of intelligence isn't different in degree, then it is different in kind. And with automation there is obviously a range of intelligence required to operate our machines, with simple machines needing very little or no intelligence and more sophisticated and complicated machines requiring more complex control.

However, even the simplest of control systems can be improved with the application of artificial intelligence. Let's take the thermostat in your house as an example. In older thermostats, the furnace blower would come on if the temperature fell below a certain value and would turn off again above some other value. These values were determined by a set point on the dial; if it was a few degrees colder than the set point (moving the Mercury switch one way) then the furnace blower came on, and if it was a few degrees warmer than the set point (which would move the Mercury switch the other way), the furnace would shut off.

That isn't a particularly efficient way of operating the furnace, but it works. This can be improved, though, with some simple electronics and software. The problem being solved by the control system is well-understood and easily simulated. Causal relationships and the interrelationships between variables are well-understood and precise mathematical relationships can be derived and programmed into the control system software in the factory, long before actual use of the control system. Indeed, the vast majority of non-mechanical control systems do not use artificial intelligence, as much simpler PID controls will suffice. The Proportional/Integral/Derivative control system would allow for more precise adherence to the set point while using less energy to do so than the mechanical switch; indeed, PID controls are useful in an enormous range of applications and are ubiquitous.

In contrast, a fuzzy logic (this will be covered in AI101 part 5) control system on a thermostat allows for much smoother control of the furnace, turning the furnace blower on and off in a very slightly more efficient manner than PID. The gain in efficiency in use of the furnace can lower the heating bill by a significant amount. Of course, for trivial applications using an AI control system could be considered overkill. Most thermostats work just fine with a strictly mechanical control or PID control. If the cost of the AI control system is more than the savings due to the efficiency of using AI, then it doesn't make sense to use AI at all.

But what if the system being controlled changes over time? In that case, a mechanical or preprogrammed control system may not work properly and may act inappropriately. In such cases, the control system would need to recognize that its model of the system is in error and adapt its model by changing various constants it uses in its calculations - which brings us right back to the feedback part of the definition of artificial intelligence.

The thermostat has only two variables to deal with, the temperature and the set point. What if the system being controlled is not so well understood or easily simulated? What if there are a large number of variables whose interrelationships are nonlinear or otherwise unclear? It may not be possible to preprogram a control system in that case, and instead such a system needs artificial intelligence in order to learn those interrelationships.

And what if direct, real time human control is not possible? A robot can be sent to the bottom of the ocean, but seawater absorbs radio waves and so the robot must be tethered to the surface, and the robot cannot explore very far - and on its own, not at all. Robots have been sent to Mars, but the light-speed time delay forces ground controllers to guide the robots in small, incremental movements, and then wait three quarters of an hour for feedback - and those robots spend the vast majority of their working lives waiting through these light-speed communication delays. If instead the robot was equipped with an artificial intelligence that would allow it to safely maneuver about and do science on its own, then the ground controllers could give much more infrequent, general commands and spend most of their time downloading data.

bringing it all together

We want to control our machines so that they perform certain complex behaviors and possess certain capabilities, and for many applications simple control systems work just fine. However, if there are changes to the machine over time, if efficiency is at a premium, if the system is extremely complex or otherwise poorly understood, or if the environment is complex and changing over time, then we need artificial intelligence to get the desired behaviors from those machines.

In part three of AI101, we will look at some of the history of AI, from Golems to Dartmouth. Then in parts four, five, and six we'll look at some of the more promising strategies for developing artificial intelligence: neural networks, fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms.

Artificial Intelligence 101

2009-03-04T13:50:00.008-07:00

Update, October 2011: For a different take on the subject, Stanford University is offering an online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class; the first video is available here.

part 1: what is intelligence?

When building an artificial something, it helps to know what the natural version of that something is. For example, when building a prosthetic leg, having an idea of what a natural leg is, what it is used for, how it interfaces with the rest of the body and so on is critical; without that information, the artificial version of a leg might have wheels or a knee that bends in all directions or so much mass that walking becomes impossible. There are details which are important to our purposes (such as the placement of the big toe, which is essential for balance), and details that are unimportant (like the exact number and placement of hairs on the leg) - and we need to figure out which of those details are important, to incorporate them into our artificial device.

However, "intelligence" is an abstract concept, not a concrete object like a leg. It cannot be weighed or measured with a ruler or touched. Instead we need to describe what we know about intelligence and how it is used. Moreover, we need to be able to evaluate our attempts at creating artificial intelligence, so that we can compare approaches, make improvements, and ultimately decide whether what we have made is indeed "intelligent".

Dictionary.com defines intelligence as

capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc...the faculty of understanding.

That's pretty broad, and it requires knowing what we mean by such words as learning, understanding, meaning, consciousness and so on - concepts that themselves are all interlinked with what we mean by intelligence in the first place. Marvin Minsky wrote in The Society of Mind that

it isn't wise to treat an old, vague word like "intelligence" as though it must define any definite thing. Instead of trying to say what such a word "means", it is better simply to try to explain how we use it.
Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems we consider difficult. "Intelligence" is our name for whichever of those processes we don't yet understand.

Neither of these definitions really helps us to decide if whatever artificial intelligence we make is actually "intelligent".

Each of us is conscious of our own intelligence, and we infer intelligence in other people based on our observations of their behavior and our past interactions. And it isn't only in other people that we observe intelligence; we see it in animals, too. Dogs can certainly exhibit intelligence, as any dog owner will tell you. Chimpanzees can learn to communicate with sign language. Dolphins are pretty darn smart. If animals can exhibit intelligence and some degree of consciousness, then this implies that there is nothing mysterious or magical about thought, consciousness, emotion, creativity, learning, empathy, or any of the qualities of the brain that we call "intelligence". Indeed, intelligence is rather common, in various forms and degrees - and there is nothing magical required to reproduce that in a machine.

So what would be a useful definition of intelligence, something we can use as a working model of thought for a machine?

It is probably counterproductive to define intelligence too narrowly. As early as 1958 is was predicted that "within ten years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion" - and on May 11, 1997, Deep Blue beat the reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. Today, Kasparov is deeply involved in Russian politics, and Deep Blue ... can play chess.

Alan Turing proposed a test in which

a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen.

Anyone who has been fooled by a chatterbot, however briefly, would probably concede that Turing's test has likely been passed on numerous occasions - and dismissed as "not really artificial intelligence".

The challenges of playing chess at a world-class level or chatting over the internet do require intelligence in human beings, but defining such tests as indicative of intelligence in and of themselves is too narrow of a definition, and solving only those narrow problems doesn't tell us anything about the nature of intelligence in general. Within their very limited domains, they work fine - but take Deep Blue out of the 64-square universe of chess and it is lost.

In the late 1980s, researchers began to put forth the idea that in order to show true intelligence, the machine needed to have a body, to interact and deal with the real world. As Rodney Brooks said, Elephants don't play chess. It is the real world that presents the challenges for survival to an animal, and a choice made by that animal can mean the difference between reproducing and being something else's lunch. And if an artificial intelligence has a body and must deal with the real world, controlling itself and avoiding obstacles and so forth in real time, then its control system must be a more robust version of AI than is required to deal with any simulation.

In the real world, intelligence is a quality of the animal mind that allows it to make choices and perform actions that enable it in the short term to consume food and acquire the other necessities of life while avoiding lethal situations, and in the long term to survive enough short-term needs that it can live long enough to reproduce.

OK, so that definition is still pretty broad, but it's a good starting point: intelligence is the ability to make choices that enable survival.

A rock rolling down a mountainside cannot make choices - it simply moves where its own momentum, friction, and gravity dictate. A plant slowly twisting to track the sun isn't making any choices - it only points towards the strongest light as it is forced to by its own structure and the laws of Physics, and it would follow a more intense artificial light if one was present. When you burn your hand on a stove and your reflexes cause your arm to jerk away from the heat, you're not making a choice either - a direct connection in your neural wiring leads from your pain receptors to the spinal cord and back to the muscles of your arm, and the laws of Physics force the movement of your arm.

In the above examples, the action taken in response to a stimulus is completely dictated by the laws of Physics. Does that mean that the ability to make choices somehow exists outside of those physical laws? Do we need to invoke something supernatural in order to explain consciousness or intelligence or free will?

No, we don't. Everything that happens in this universe happens according to the laws of Physics, without exception, whether we realize it or not. Everything we do, every thought that we have, every choice we make, is dictated by the laws of Physics just like a falling rock's path.

So what is the qualitative difference between a falling rock and, for instance, me choosing which word to type next? From the perspective of the laws of Physics, there is no difference.

Layers of Abstraction and Emergent Properties

A proton is a proton is a proton. Every proton in the universe is exactly the same as all the others. The behavior of every proton is exactly the same as every other one. If a proton is removed from the nucleus of an atom, and immediately replaced with another proton, then the atom is exactly the same as it was before. There is no difference.

Likewise, every neutron is exactly the same as every other neutron, and every electron is exactly the same as every other electron. Each always follows the laws of Physics, in particular the conservation laws of mass/energy, momentum, angular momentum, and charge.

However, protons and neutrons and electrons do not exist in isolation. Each contributes to the electromagnetic field and gravitational field, each occupies some region of spacetime and each interacts with all the others.

When protons, neutrons, and electrons are proximal, then they combine with each other to form atoms - a positively charged nucleus containing protons and neutrons, and a negatively charged cloud of electrons bound to the nucleus through electromagnetism. The interaction of the electrons with each other gives certain regions of the atom that can combine with similar regions of other atoms, sharing electrons between the two atoms and forming a chemical bond. This allows molecules to form, and the interactions of molecules with each other gives us all of Chemistry. Specific patterns of molecules give us things like RNA and DNA and adenosine triphosphate and hemoglobin and ribosomes and all the other compounds necessary for life.

That falling rock is made of the same protons and neutrons and electrons as exist in your left hand. There is no difference whatsoever between a proton in that rock and a proton in a molecule of your hemoglobin, and those two protons could be exchanged without there being any difference to either the rock or your blood.

The building blocks are the same. The rules are the same. If there is no difference, then how come that rock and your left hand look different, behave differently, and have different capabilities?

The difference lies in the way that those fundamental building blocks are arranged. At a basic level, they are merely identical protons and neutrons and electrons, but go up a couple of levels of abstraction and they are arranged into different molecules with different behaviors. Each of those molecules still follows the laws of Physics exactly, but because of the way that the atoms are arranged in each, new properties of the molecule begin to appear.

A property like viscosity or temperature does not exist for an isolated atom, but go up one level of abstraction, where the fundamental building blocks combine to form molecules, and those properties emerge. Go up another level of abstraction, where the molecules form cells, and you get new properties emerging such as cell division. At still higher levels of abstraction, as cells combine and specialize to form a multicellular organism, we see still further properties emerging, like respiration and excretion. Go up another level of abstraction and still more properties emerge, such as the flight of a bumblebee. At a higher level of abstraction we see still more properties emerging, such as the density waves that occur in rush-hour traffic.

Likewise, a bit is a bit is a bit - to a computer, it doesn't matter whether that bit is stored within RAM or on a hard drive or a CD or is transmitted over the internet. It is either a logical 1 or a logical 0. By itself, a 1 or a 0 isn't particularly interesting. It is logically equivalent to a light switch on your wall - when it is a 0 the light is off and when it is a 1 the light is on. However, those ones and zeros can be combined, and new behaviors can emerge when we take them to a higher level of abstraction. For instance, two such bits can be combined in a digital logic gate, like a NAND gate. In a NAND gate, the output depends on the state of the two inputs: if both inputs are a one then the output will be a zero, and if either input is a zero then the output is a one.

This NAND gate might not seem particularly useful, by itself. However, by linking together NAND gates in a network we can create any digital circuit. These arrangements of NAND gates represent a new level of abstraction, and as such new properties emerge. Depending on the way that these gates are linked together, they can act as a group to form a frequency generator, or a flip-flop, or a binary adder, or a shift register, or a comparator, or a latch. These circuits can be optimized - they don't need to be made from NAND gates, although they could - and themselves combined in a new level of abstraction into such things as microprocessors and RAM and peripheral interface circuits. These have new capabilities which emerge, such as running a machine-language computer program.

The individual machine language that works for a particular microprocessor will not work for another microprocessor whose circuits are arranged differently. So, a higher level of abstraction is needed, where programs can be written in a common, higher-level language like C++, and then compiled into the appropriate lower level machine-language program. And once again, at this higher level of abstraction new capabilities emerge: operating systems, web browsers, games, spreadsheets, databases, file sharing, websites, search engines, blogs, and so forth.

One particular computer program can illustrate this point further. In 1970, John Conway proposed a game he called Life. In this game, a display grid is made up of pixels, each of which can be either ON or OFF. Each pixel has eight neighbors: above, below, left, right, and four diagonal neighbors. The rules are simple - if a pixel has fewer than two or more than three neighbors in the ON state, it goes OFF at the next clock cycle. If it has exactly three neighbors ON, then the next clock cycle it goes ON. And if it has exactly two neighbors ON, then it is unchanged on the next clock cycle. The behavior of the system is entirely dictated by the initial states of the pixels in the grid and by those simple rules.

Now, we take it up one level of abstraction, and observe the behavior of a group of pixels over many clock cycles. When the pixels are interacting with each other as a group, each affecting all its neighbors, we begin to see patterns emerge. One group of five ON pixels arranged in a particular way acts as a "glider", which re-forms the original five-pixel pattern four clock states later, shifted one pixel diagonally from the original position. Over time this glider acts like a photon, moving in a straight line at the "speed of light" for the simulated universe of the game, one diagonal pixel every four clock cycles. Other structures also become apparent, such as the Glider Gun (which produces gliders one after the other) or a Breeder (which creates a series of glider guns). Starting with a "universe" and applying simple rules at the lowest level of abstraction, we see higher-order behaviors and structures emerge as we observe higher levels of abstraction.

In all these examples, each time we look at a higher and higher level of abstraction, we find new properties emerging - each still following the laws of Physics, each property dependent upon the properties of lower levels of abstraction, and each property emerging only as those building blocks at lower levels combine to form a new structure with properties not possible at the lower level of abstraction.

And so it is with intelligence. The components that make up our brains, from the fundamental building blocks to the atoms and molecules and the neurons themselves, each follows simple rules ultimately dictated by the laws of Physics, but each exhibiting emergent behaviors as they are linked together in higher and higher levels of abstraction. The individual neuron by itself is not intelligent, but combine neurons together and they start to form functional groups. Each group is capable of performing some specific computational task, and each is, by itself, unintelligent. However, if we go up another level of abstraction, these functional groups combine and interact with each other and new properties emerge, such as controlling your heartbeat. And as we continue to increase the level of abstraction and combine less-capable structures together in different ways, still more new properties begin to emerge, like the fight or flight response.

So we can now say this about intelligence in general: functional groups of neurons, each unintelligent by itself, combine with each other to introduce new capabilities at a higher level of abstraction - and taken as a group, these emergent properties are what we call intelligence:

Intelligence is an emergent property of the combination of unintelligent functional groups.

This doesn't mean that we can create these functional groups and simply stir them together in a pot and pow intelligence appears like magic. There are an infinite number of possible functional groups, and an infinite number of ways to combine these lower-level functions into higher levels of abstraction, and we don't have enough time to try them all.

Fortunately, we don't have to try them all. No animal has to try every possible combination of neurons in its brain in order to exhibit intelligence - the physical structure of the animal's body, with its inherent capabilities and long-term stability, forces the formation of long-term structures of neurons specific to its body. The connections between these structures are themselves other neural structures, which can be used in the same way as the lower-level structures but which perform higher order tasks. The structures are not randomly connected in all their infinite number of possible combinations; those which are useful are retained, and those which are not useful are not retained.

feedback

So, back to the development of our definition: how do we go from combination of simple unintelligent structures into higher levels of abstraction, to the ability to make choices?

The decisions an animal makes have immediate consequences. Imagine a pack of wolves hunting a deer. As the deer runs, the pursuing pack limits the options of the deer's movement, and so does the terrain in front of the deer. Suppose the deer sees a tree directly ahead. It has a number of options available: turn to the left, turn to the right, stop, or slam into the tree. Whatever option the deer chooses, the consequences are immediate - the deer either manages to escape for a few more seconds or it is caught and killed by the wolves. If the deer makes enough correct decisions, then it may survive long enough for the wolves to catch another deer and lose interest in our deer.

It is the deer's interaction with the real world that forces it to make decisions, over and over and over again. The deer's mind has functional structures, some preprogrammed by genetics and others learned over the deer's lifetime, and the interaction of these structures - in our example, the structures responsible for sight, smell, heart rate, respiration, and muscular control - which allow the deer to recognize the pursuing pack as a threat, the tree as an obstacle to be avoided, and so on. Good decisions lead to the temporary survival of the animal, and a poor decision leads to the animal's death.

In other words, the real world provides immediate feedback about the effectiveness of decisions. If a decision doesn't kill an animal - suppose it instead receives a minor injury - then that feedback allows the animal to evaluate its decision and make modifications to the connections between functional groups or to the functional groups themselves so that same decision is less likely to be made in the future. Positive feedback - anything that gives the animal pleasure, such as a full belly - also modifies the connections between functional groups in such a way that the structures that led to the decision are reinforced, so that a good decision can be repeated in the future.

Over the animal's lifetime, with the millions of decisions it makes over and over again, and with the real-time feedback provided by the animal's environment evaluating those decisions, the functional structures within its brain and the connections between those structures are constantly modified.

bringing it all together

Let's summarize what we know about intelligence:

1) Intelligence requires the ability to make choices
2) Intelligence is an emergent property of the combination of simpler, unintelligent functional structures
3) the real world provides immediate feedback to evaluate choices; that feedback then changes the unintelligent functional structures and the connections between them

That's it; that's all we need for a working definition of intelligence. With whatever AI we create, we can ask ourselves: is it making choices? are properties emerging from our simpler building blocks? are those choices evaluated and modified by interaction with and feedback from the real world?

In the next installment of Artificial Intelligence 101, we'll look at why we want to create artificial intelligence, and examine past attempts at doing so.

Update July 21, 2011:

The part about choices needs some expansion. Inherent in the ability to make choices is the ability to produce those choices as a synthesis of memory and sensation, and the ability to make predictions about those choices. In the video appended below Jeff Hawkins makes the convincing case that even the sensations themselves are being predicted by the mammalian part of the brain.

The options available to the deer in the example above are being constantly produced and their results predicted; the best prediction becomes the choice, over and over again. Part of the deer's mind is predicting where its foot will make contact with the ground, and if the prediction and reality don't quite match up - say there's a dip in the ground - then new predictions need to be made to match sensation. Prediction is at the foundation of choice and shapes the sensation of reality.

just giving it all away

2009-02-26T13:06:00.005-07:00

From about 1990 to about 2003 I spent most of my spare time working on artificial intelligence research. The last few years I have gotten away from that to work on some other interests, but lately I have been looking through and re-reading some of the thousands of pages of notes and tens of thousands of lines of code I wrote back then. And, I've been thinking, it would be a real shame if all of this work were to simply be lost, if I were to not work on it anymore and nobody else knew about it.

So, I've been giving serious consideration to simply publishing all that work right here on this blog, and letting others have a look, critique, and take whatever they find useful for their own work.

This raises some serious questions for me. Is it dangerous to let just anyone have access to something with the potential to be used as a terrible weapon? Is it even ethical to do so? Would I have spent over ten thousand hours working on what amounts to my masterpiece, only to have nothing to show for my efforts except a series of blog posts and a stack of notebooks?

Well, after a lot of thought on the matter, I have decided that the ethical questions are irrelevant - what I have created is merely a tool, and whether others use the tool for good or ill is up to them. And as for personal reward, well, while I was doing it the work was reward in and of itself, and if the ideas I came up with spread to the right minds then it is possible that everyone's life will benefit. Hey, it could happen.

So, I'm going to do it. I'm going to just give all my AI research away on my blog.

Since most of my readers would have no idea what I'm talking about if I just dove into the middle of it, I'll start over the next few weeks with some of the history and basic concepts of artificial intelligence. After that, I'll start putting forth my own work.

When is a recession not a recession?

2009-02-18T12:33:00.004-07:00

For several months now, I have heard plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the supposed recession. But is it really happing?

First of all, let's start with the definition of a recession: two consecutive quarters of negative growth in the economy. When Prime Minister Stephen Harper conceeded that Canada could be "technically" in a recession, he was absolutely right - that could indeed be the case. He could have said the same thing two years ago and still been right, even though the economy was booming at the time. When you are in the middle of a recession, there is no way to know for certain if you are or not - it is only by looking back at the previous two quarters that one can say with certainty that a recession has occurred.

So without that data, how come the press has been screaming "recession!" for several years?

Yes, the housing market took a beating over the last six months or so, but the housing market is not the entire economy. Anyone paying any attention to the housing market over the last few years would have seen that the housing prices were well above the actual value of the homes, and would put off buying until the housing bubble popped. Yes, GM and Ford are treading water and slowly sinking, but does that have anything at all to do with today's economic conditions?

Sixty percent of the economy is consumer spending - everything from home furnishings to beer to bubble gum. Housing and cars and other big-ticket items are not part of that. So, if enough people finally start to believe that there is in fact a recession, then their spending will drop and you will indeed get your recession. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, as long as the press screams recession! long enough and loudly enough.

So is there really a recession going on? For the answer, we'll have to wait at least until the end of the quarter. But, until then, I think that one needs to look at the "canaries in the coal mine" of the economy.

If there is a recession then the ones who will go bankrupt first are the ones who live the closest to the edge of bankruptcy all the time - farmers. Go for a ride in the countryside and look for the "For Sale" signs. How many do you see? I have driven thousands of kilometers around the countryside in my area over the last few months, and I have seen a grand total of two for sale signs.

Another canary to look for is trains. Count the number of cars in the next train you see. Compare that to the number of cars that trains were hauling two years ago. See any difference? See any difference from 1981? I sure do - back in '81, there were a lot fewer cars being hauled at any one time, and there were fewer trains. The last train I saw a few nights ago was pulling over a hundred cars. Can a railway afford to do that unless there is demand to move that amount of goods? Does that sound like a recession to you?

One more canary is the Help Wanted ads. Here in the Edmonton Alberta area, there are so many jobs available - good jobs - that many companies have taken ads out on the radio advertising positions. Not just oil companies either, but all sectors of the economy. Is that a recession?

What are the canaries like in your area?

Evening update: I am betting that you are seeing the same things that I am - very few farms for sale, lots of cars on the trains, plenty of jobs available. That doesn't look anything like a recession to me. It certainly doesn't look like the recession of '81, when over half of the farms in this area were for sale, trains were pulling 40 cars, and there were no jobs available.

So, why has the press been screaming recession! for years? Who benefits from frightening consumers? Who benefits from ramming an $800 billion "stimulus" package through Congress and the Senate, and similar bailout packages in Canada and other G7 countries?

Well, it certainly isn't average people. That stimulus package is costing every man, woman and child in the USA $2600 apiece. There goes a big chunk of your kids' college fund, poof gone. And where is it going? To prop up GM workers making overpriced union wages and benefits, which will sink the company in a few years anyhow? To expanding the power of government over your life, in the amount they will increase your taxes and regulations controlling your life, to adding to the debt load the baby boomers are leaving their great great great grandchildren?

The people of the USA (and by extension the people of every country with economic ties to the USA, in particular Canada) are being frightened and swindled and glibly accepting the most massive intrusion into their finances in history - all based on a supposed recession for which there is no evidence until the end of the quarter. Who benefits? Who has a vested interest in frightening average people and forcing through this huge increase in government spending with little debate?

Look for yourself, check out the canaries in your area. Has the press been telling the truth about the economy? Or have they been telling you deliberate falsehoods in order to benefit their friends in the unions and Leftist political parties?

I'm back

2009-02-11T12:41:00.002-07:00

I've kept pretty silent over the course of the US and Canadian federal elections. Often I've thought of something that would make a great blog post, but just didn't sit down to do it for one reason or another. Time has been a factor, of course, but so has my frustration - I didn't want to sit down and write anything about the American election in particular, for it was obvious what was going to happen, and no amount of reason or logic would change the result.

At any rate, I'm back now and will be posting regularly again.

the Retroencabulator

2008-06-17T06:32:00.000-06:00

Engineers have a sense of humour, too.

Related: the MSDS datasheet for dihydrogen monoxide.

barrelling down the slippery slope and gaining steam

2008-06-10T22:51:00.004-06:00

The Human Rights Commissions in Canada are under the microscope right now due to the Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant ~~trials~~ (to call them trials, even though they take place in buildings with the word "court" written on the door, is preposterous) proceedings. And while public attention is focused on those two, there are still other proceedings going on all the time. The latest ruling, in the Rev. Stephen Boissoin case, states in part that

Mr. Boissoin and [his organization] The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc. shall cease publishing in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the Internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals. Further they shall not and are prohibited from making disparaging remarks in the future about Dr. Lund [the complainant] or Dr. Lund's witnesses relating to their involvement in this complaint. Further all disparaging remarks versus homosexuals are directed to be removed from current websites and publications of Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc.

The ruling goes on; it is fascinating reading, if one is fascinated by venality.

The ruling admits that "...there is no specific individual who can be compensated as there is no direct victim who has come forward seeking redress", and yet Boissoin must pay Dr. Lund $5000 because "Dr. Lund, although not a direct victim, did expend considerable time and energy and suffered ridicule and harrassment as a result of his complaint." [emphasis mine] Boissoin is also on the hook for up to $2000 of the complainant's witness's expenses.

Boissoin said some nasty things in his letter, but did not incite violence; he did not shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater where no fire was present; he did not write that homosexuals ought to be killed; he did not do anything but express his opinion in a letter to the editor of a small-city newspaper. And for that, he is not only out of pocket for up to seven grand to someone who was not harmed in any way by his words, but he is forever prohibited from exercising his right to free political speech. If the text of the ruling is followed to the letter, then if Boissoin even says in private email correspondence that "Lund is an asshole", Boissoin will go to jail for contempt of court!

These Human Rights [sic] Commissions are an abomination in a liberal democracy. In these hearings there is no presumption of innocence; truth is not a defence; fair comment is not a defence; freedom of speech as guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not a defence; all costs for a legal defence are borne by the defendant but the costs for prosecution are borne by the government; no harm must be demonstrated in order for a conviction and subsequent financial compensation to the complainant; no rules of evidence apply; the cases may be tried in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously (Mark Steyn was exposed to of all things triple jeopardy, being tried in Ontario, BC, and soon in the Federal HRC); the complainant need not reside in the jurisdiction where the proceedings take place, nor even show up for the proceedings;"expert" witnesses do not need to have expertise in the field in which they testify, nor must their testimony actually be relevant; and the tribunal "judges" need not have any legal training at all, nor apparently any familiarity with the rule of law or the operation of a courtroom; there is no such thing as a speedy proceeding (Ezra Levant's case has been ongoing for over 800 days; Boissoin lost his case in November and the ruling came out on May 30). These HRCs are nothing short of kangaroo courts.

At one time, the HRCs were charged with redressing discrimination in things like housing and employment, but like a cancer they have spread to suppressing free political speech: Steyn's, Levant's, Boissoin's, and potentially even my own (I published the Danish Mohammed cartoons, like Levant, as well as an image of the Piss Christ "artwork"). Once, just once, I would like to have the slippery slope argument proven wrong. I won't hold my breath.

Taking the long view for conservatism in America

2008-05-28T02:24:00.005-06:00

In discussing the upcoming US elections, Rachel Lucas exhibits some short-term thinking:

I do not believe you’re going to teach anyone a “lesson” by sitting this one out or writing in Fred Thompson or Sunny Lucas. I believe that way too many people are ignoring the forest for the trees and that in doing so, they’re going to have a hand in electing Obama. Some say that’s fine because if the country’s going to be “ruined”, better that it’s ruined by a Democrat, and somehow magically we’ll come up with a fantastic, “real” conservative in 4 years even though there is no one like that on the horizon and everyone knows it. Like I said, I think that’s a super-crappy plan.

This is perfectly reasonable, but only if one is operating from a certain set of axioms:

1) there are now and will only ever be two viable political parties in the USA, the Republicans and the Democrats

2) given the choice between a greater evil and a lesser evil, it is better to choose the lesser evil (or at least to try to prevent victory for the greater evil)

Joining the argument is Francis Porretto:

Shouldn't we act to preserve as much freedom as we possibly can, even if it means voting for Republicans who've collaborated in the expansion of the Omnipotent State?

In a word, no. The tipping point is upon us; further support of the GOP in its present configuration will produce net damage to what remains of our traditional rights. The idea that supporting the lesser of two evils is somehow morally obligatory has never enjoyed less logical or historical support.

...If conservatives want to compel the GOP and its candidates to conform to conservative principle, they must defeat the party's strategy. That means defeating the party overall [Porretto's emphasis], not merely any one candidate. Nothing else will get the party's kingpins to question their strategic decisions.

In response to those conservatives who are considering sitting this election out, and letting Obama (or God forbid, Hi!!ary) win the presidency, there are those who point out short term possible losses, such as a precipitous pullout from Iraq or immigration amnesty or the signing of Kyoto (by the way, the latter is extremely unlikely, as the Senate unanimously(!) voted against that during Clinton's last term in office) should the Democrats win this election. They also point out medium-term possible losses such as the appointment of left-leaning judges to the Supreme Court.

Those fears are valid, but shortsighted. America has been a slowly-boiling frog for the better part of a century, and one election is not going to reverse the bad decisions of the past century; certainly none of the major Presidential candidates inspires hope for a change of direction away from disaster. As far as I can tell, each of them will merely heat up the water a little more.

Instead, take the long view: if you have young children, what sort of America will there be by the time their children start voting? If Americans continue this gradual slide into larger "entitlement" programs, more intrusive governmental control over their daily lives, more artificial impediments on the economy, more porkbarrel spending, higher and higher taxes, more and more assaults on Constitutionally-protected rights - then their great-grandchildren will inherit a bankrupt country where freedom is something that their senile great-grandparents kind of remember but of which they cannot even fathom.

Continuing to reward the major political parties for their ever-leftward tilt, by continuing to elect them to office as the lesser of two evils, does nothing to prevent the nightmare scenario for your grandchildren. In fact, it assures that outcome.

Also, a merely symbolic abstention from voting on the part of a small but significant percentage of conservatives in this election isn't going to change the calculus. In four more years, after whatever havoc that either of the Democrat candidates may wreak, the Republican conservative base will find itself right back where it is today, with a choice between one or another set of crooks. Porretto's idea of shaking up the Republican Party by handing them an electoral defeat isn't enough in and of itself - they've suffered electoral losses before. So has the Democrat Party, including some huge losses, and they're still around.

However, all is not lost, at least not yet. The axioms that I inferred above from my interpretation of Rachel's point of view are not immutable laws carved in stone. Francis Porretto has a point about the invalidity of the second axiom; and indeed, if that first axiom is demolished then the second one has no validity at all - the choice would no longer be between the lesser of two evils.

So, to invalidate that first axiom, let's look at a little history. In the mid-1800s the Whig Party (whose members included Daniel Webster and a young Abraham Lincoln) candidate became president on two occasions, in 1840 with William Henry Harrison and in 1848 with Zachary Taylor. Obviously they were a major political party, capable of attaining the Presidency - and the Whigs are gone. The Republican party rose out of its ashes - two years before the Whigs were wiped out.

More recent history provides another example: let's look at what happened in Canada from the late 1980's to the present. The Progressive Conservative (how's that for an oxymoron) party had been sliding further and further left for decades, and was becoming indistinguishable from the Liberals. In the West, a new party - the Reform Party - was established as a grass-roots effort to restore true conservative principles to federal politics.

Reform's first MP was elected in a byelection in 1989, and support continued to grow as the party outlined and stuck to its conservative principles. By 1993, Canadians had had enough of the Progressive Conservatives, and obliterated the party at the polls - it dropped from 151 seats in the House of Commons down to 2 seats. Reform went from 1 seat to 52, nearly all in the West, and vote splitting between the PCs and Reform in Ontario handed control of the government to the Liberals. It took 13 more years, and some coalition building with the remnant rump of the PC party (which involved the merger of the two parties into the Canadian Alliance Party, and later into the Conservative Party), but in 2006 the Conservatives won a minority in the federal election.

In all it has taken nearly 20 years for the process, from a leftward-lurching-and-gaining-speed "conservative" party in power to a more rightward-leaning (and thankfully much friendlier to the USA) party in minority power; it is entirely possible that there will be a Conservative majority Parliament after the next election.

Of course, the analogy isn't perfect; the existing Conservative party is still to the left of the Democrat party - which should tell you just how far left the old PCs had swung. However, it can be done. It takes a lot of hard work to do it, and there are growing pains which involve weeding out some really extreme fringe elements that tend to latch on to new political movements.

But, it can't be done by a half-hearted effort, which is where I think that first axiom has tripped up Porretto - it isn't enough to defeat the Republicans to make them change their ways, you have to defeat them utterly and also have a conservative alternative waiting to take over the Republican base - you can't wipe them out and "fix" them, expecting a long term change, you have to wipe them out completely and be ready to start over before they are wiped out. If the conservative base in the Republican party actually wants to have a conservative representation in Washington, then they will have to form a conservative party and drain the lifeblood out of the Republican party. It is too late to do that before this election. However, if they start their grass-roots movement now, then by 2012 they will make serious inroads into the base of the Republican party.

The hardest part is convincing people that the nominally conservative party has truly abandoned its conservative base, and that a fresh start is needed. After that, you have to keep people's attention long enough, and consistently apply conservative principles along the way, to build your new conservative party up into a party that stands a chance of electing a President and/or a majority of seats in Congress and the Senate. If the USA follows Canada's example, that could take twenty years or more. Even if it takes two generations, the results for your grandchildren will be worth the effort.

Liveblogging Mars Phoenix landing

2008-05-25T17:33:00.014-06:00

4:35 pm PST: The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has started the software that will allow it to track the Phoenix during Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL)

4:37 PST: expecting the MRO to start receiving data in 2 minutes 30 seconds

4:38 PST: why the hell is Mike Griffin at the JPL mission control, wearing a blue t-shirt and looking like he's doing something?

4:39 PST: cruise stage separation, a UHF signal has been received by ~~MRO~~ Mars Odyssey.

4:43 PST: MRO now has signal as well. Atmospheric entry in 1 minute 35 seconds

4:45 PST: by the way, all these times and signals received are about 20 minutes late due to light speed delay. If the Phoenix landed safely, then it already happened and we just won't know until 20 minutes after the fact. all those folks in JPL aren't actually doing anything right now, they're just watching

4:48 PST: peak heating, and yet we are still seeing a signal from Phoenix via Odyssey, even through the plasma generated by the ablation of the heat shield

4:50 PST: parachute deployment. The next big thing is separation of Phoenix from the parachute and ignition of its landing rockets

4:53 PST: it's plummeting

4:54 PST: touchdown signal detected. The numbers being called out by the guy at mission control suggested that it was falling much faster than it should have been, but so far it looks like it didn't lithobrake.

selling space, part 1

2008-04-23T22:03:00.006-06:00

It's funny how conversations can migrate from blog to blog. Over at Space Politics five days ago, Jeff Foust got the ball rolling by noting "that space ranks pretty low on the list of priorities of the general public (and, thus, fairly high on the list of government programs they would be willing to cut)". In the comments for that post, commentor James summarized why this is so:

Those who support the current lunar program often forget the opportunity costs. There are better ways to spend the same money on developing space. I’m 24 - with the current Constellation program plan, I’ll be in my mid 30s by the time we get back to the moon. If we operate the system for a decade or two after that, as is likely, all I can expect in my career is to see 4 people land on the moon twice a year. That is not exciting - nor is it worth the money. Maybe by the time I retire we’ll be looking at another "next generation system".

What’s the point of any of this for someone my age?

Then Jon Goff of Selenian Boondocks picked up on this point and expanded upon it further:

If our current approach to space development was actually putting in place the technology and infrastructure needed to make our civilization a spacefaring one, I’d be a lot more willing to support it. Wise investments in the future are a good thing, but NASA’s current approach is not a wise investment in the future. It’s aging hipsters trying to relive the glory days of their youth at my generation’s expense.

Patience is only a virtue when you’re headed in the right direction and doing the right thing. If Constellation was truly (as Marburger put it) making future operations cheaper, safer, and more capable, then I’d be all for patiently seeing it out.

While Constellation might possibly put some people on the moon, it won’t actually put us any closer to routine, affordable, and sustainable exploration and development. I have no problem with a long hard road, just so long as its the right one.

Now the conversation shifts to SpaceRef, where yesterday Dennis Wingo argued that NASA has done a terrible job at selling space to the American people for forty years:

There is a principle in the entrepreneurial world that if you present a business plan to an investor that does not meet their criterion for funding, you dont get funded. The same principle applies to government spending with the congress, executive branch and the people fulfilling the role of the investor. Our national space agency has been trying to sell a business plan to the American people for almost forty years that they have continually decided not to fund. The investor has continually given feedback to the NASA entrepreneur with little or no indication that NASA has listened.

...It is quite clear to those of us who have been involved with NASA since the beginning of the SEI era that its successor, the VSE is in trouble. The fact is that NASA ignored both the president and the executive branch organization (OSTP), that helped to come up with the VSE in the first place. The problem is not the rocket, it is the plan of what we do when we get to the Moon. While there are many who would strenuously argue that the transportation architecture represented by the ESAS study as implemented with billions of dollars of taxpayer money is the wrong one, in the end, this argument misses the greater point.

The point is that there is virtually no plan at all to carry out the truly remarkable plan to use resources derived from the Moon for further exploration. The epitome of the divergence from the vision as laid out by the president is the statement by the NASA administrator that all we need is a good map, to get back to the Moon. There are statements that encapsulate all the problems of a plan, and this statement is the one that made it clear that NASA has no interest in carrying out the VSE as envisioned by our elected leadership and why in the competition for federal resources, NASA is losing.

And this brings us to a piece written earlier today by Mark Whittington:

The main problem with Wingo's critique of the way VSE is being pursued is that it fails to understand the proper role of government in opening the space frontier. It is not the role of NASA to build the infrastructure that would take him, you, and me to the Moon and beyond, no more than it was the job of Lewis and [Clark] to build a transcontinental railroad. Government agencies are not very good at building transportation infrastructures. The history of the space shuttle should give pause, if nothing else, to those who think otherwise.

Instead it is one role of NASA to help to enable that infrastructure. How does VSE do that? The answer lays in a NASA program that Wingo fails to mention: the Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems (COTS) program. For a modest [sum], COTS seems on the verge of leveraging the ISS to enable the establishment of a true commercial Earth to Low Earth Orbit transportation industry. Companies like SpaceX, Orbital, and even Lockheed Martin are actually building space craft that will take cargo and people to and from LEO. Even the sub orbital barnstorming efforts (i.e. Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, etc) are bending metal and testing actual hardware.

So, using the COTS model, it would seem very reasonable to suggest that ten or fifteen years later, someone would suggest a similar proposal for NASA's lunar base. If private industry by that time already has years of experience going to and from LEO, it would not be much of a stretch to suggest that we could shortly see private flights to and from the Moon.

Of course, with this kind of conversation going on I cannot help but to throw in my two cents.

First of all, I have to take exception to some of what Mark wrote. "Government agencies are not very good at building transportation infrastructures." The existence of the interstate highway system and the multitude of airports and shipyards across America and the streets and subways within cities, nearly all government-built, suggests that Mark is dead wrong on this. In Canada and many other countries the railroads were government-built, too. Transportation infrastructure construction and maintenance is one of the primary functions of governments at all levels throughout the world. This is done because such infrastructure is an economic necessity: without that infrastructure in place, the transportation of goods and people becomes prohibitively expensive and the economy simply cannot support itself. No transportation infrastructure means no economy which in turn means no tax base to operate the government in the first place. As much as I have railed against governments in the past, and as much as I would like to see an absolute minimum of government in any form, the existence of government-built transportation infrastructure is a fact which cannot be ignored, nor dismissed as Whittington has.

Secondly, I find Whittington's example of COTS to be disingenuous. SpaceX is taking advantage of COTS because the money is available to offset their development costs, however they were going to do what they are doing anyhow, regardless of COTS. They saw that there was a potential for a market in space transportation irrespective of NASA's plans. And when one really gets down to brass tacks, the existence of SpaceX is due to Elon Musk's personal dream of going to Mars. There's something in it for him personally.

And then to bring Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, who have nothing whatsoever to do with COTS or anything else that NASA is doing, into the mix is rubbish. Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos are not developing suborbital spaceflight because of something of NASA is doing; they are doing it because they think that a market exists, of people who have spent most of their lives watching NASA and the Russians thoroughly explore low earth orbit while their own personal experience in space keeps getting pushed further off into future generations. Bezos and Branson and a lot of others have recognized that people want to go into space, even if only for a period of a few minutes, and they are looking to get in on that market. They have recognized that they can make viable businesses taking people to space - in short they can make money by providing a service that people want. For Bezos and Branson and Carmack and lots of others, there is something in it for them, and they are willing to gamble their personal fortunes based on that potential.

And this brings us back to the point raised by James in the comments at Space Politics. In all of the grand plans that NASA is putting forth, in their desire to maintain the huge Shuttle workforce by developing brand new rockets when adequate commercial alternatives already exist, in their plans to send a handful of people to the moon fifteen (or twenty? thirty? the schedule keeps slipping) years from now, whose goal would be apparently to merely to have repeated history but "on steroids", what is in it for the rest of us?

What compelling reason is there to even justify the continued existence of NASA beyond the fulfillment of the commitment to the international partners in the ISS? Why should American tax dollars go to pay for anything that NASA does? What can justify the opportunity costs if - after the completion of the ESAS implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration - we are no closer to being a spacefaring society than we were in 1972?

If NASA wants to receive yearly increases in their budget, even if only to keep pace with inflation, then what exactly are the advantages to the American taxpayer that NASA's plans provide? How does the expenditure over the next few decades improve anything for American society, in a way that an alternative expenditure of those same funds could not?

Of course, it is not enough for me to simply complain that NASA is doing it all wrong. There are things that NASA could be doing differently, to make themselves relevant and to show the American taxpayers that there is a benefit to the agency's expenditures that greatly exceed the opportunity costs, to show average people that there's something in it for us. However, this post is already excessively long, and so my solutions are going to have to wait for another blog post.

credibility shredding

2008-04-22T18:53:00.005-06:00

There was an uproar in the blogosphere last last week over the senior art project of one Aliza Shvarts at Yale university. She claimed that the art project was the result of nine months of repeated artificial insemination followed by self-induced miscarriage. Apparently her thesis advisor saw nothing wrong with this as an art project, nor did the School of Art director of undergraduate studies.

Now Yale won't allow her to display this "art" at an exhibition unless she admits it is a work of fiction; she continues to insist that it's the real deal.

Let us set aside for a moment the grotesque idea that a university insists that a student lie about her project. Let us also set aside the obvious health and biohazard issues, and the standard requirement for a Human Subjects Committee review of any study involving the use of human subjects (even oneself) which was obviously not followed. Further, let us also for a moment set aside the abhorrent nature of this supposed "art".

Instead, I want to look at how an incident like this affects Yale. This was completely boneheaded on the part of the thesis advisor. It suggests that there are absolutely no standards for the senior art project, presumably a requirement for the degree. This implies that there are no standards required in order to obtain an art degree at Yale. And if there are no standards required for that degree, then of what intrinsic value is any degree from Yale?

This is only one incident, but at Yale recently there have been other examples of appalling lack of judgement on the part of the faculty. Remember when they admitted the Taliban propaganda chief as a student? Stupid, stupid, stupid. And this sort of idiocy is not limited to Yale, either.

There is a reason that parents are willing to shell out a premium to send their little darlings to top schools; those schools have a reputation for top-quality educations, which translates into higher career earnings. However, a reputation is a fragile thing. In order to maintain a reputation as a top school, the school has to actually consistently deliver a top quality education. If this is the sort of thing that passes for an education at Yale, then their degrees are not worth much at all. They are certainly not worth the two hundred grand that Aliza Shvarts' parents paid.

Put yourself in the position of an employer: "oh, you graduated from Yale? that school with no academic standards? Gee... yeah, we'll call you. Thanks for coming." Really makes you want to send your kids there, doesn't it? And to shell out huge bucks to do so, too, right?

carnival time

2008-04-04T14:33:00.003-06:00

The 48th edition of the Carnival of Space is up at Next Big Future.

i'm still here

2008-03-30T21:32:00.002-06:00

Yeah, I'm still kicking about. I've just been super busy this last month; it's been all I can do to post a space video of the day every day at Space Feeds. Hopefully I'll start blogging regularly again soon.

D and D

2008-03-06T00:27:00.003-07:00

Gary Gygax recently passed away, at the age of 69. He was a true innovator in the world of games, and his Dungeons and Dragons is still played the world over. I haven't played the game in many years, but I still have my dice (3d6, 2d10, d4, d8, d20) around somewhere.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the game was making up a character. If you have about 20 minutes, you can answer this survey and figure out what D&D character you would be if you were transported into the D&D universe. Here are my results:

You Are A:

True Neutral Human Wizard (6th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength- 16
Dexterity- 17
Constitution- 16
Intelligence- 20
Wisdom- 15
Charisma- 13

Alignment:
True Neutral- A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn't feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he's not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Wizards- Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.

...thus proving once again that these silly surveys have no bearing on reality whatsoever. Good thing they're fun.

Life, the universe, everything space-y

2008-02-21T19:08:00.001-07:00

Carnival of space number 42 is up over at Chris Lintott's place.

Wishing Their Problems Away

2008-02-19T02:29:00.004-07:00

This New York Times article inadvertently suggests that some of the top level people in NASA are using hope rather than sound engineering practice when it comes to designing the Ares-1 rocket, which will be the US government's replacement for the Space Shuttle.

Still, Mr. Lyles said there would be no need for a full-scale redesign. Additional analysis has indicated the problem is not as severe as first thought, and the two vibrational frequencies may turn out to be far enough apart, more than 10 percent, that nothing needs to be changed at all.
If fixes are necessary, rocket scientists know what to do. A shock absorber could be added between the first and second stages, or the structure could be modified to change the resonance frequency.

Why is this a problem, you ask? Observe this video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Since 1940 this bridge has been an object lesson to engineers of all stripes. It is inconceivable that the engineers at NASA are not aware of this bridge and the issue of resonant frequency. It is further inconceivable that they would assume that a ten percent difference in the resonant frequencies of the solid rocket booster and the second stage would be enough to save them from the same fate as Galloping Gertie.

It is not trivial to change the Ares rocket to eliminate the resonance caused by the natural operating frequency of the solid rocket booster. The shuttle gets away with it because its 4-stage solid rockets are attached at top and bottom to the side of the external fuel tank, which acts as a strongback for the shuttle stack and dampens the vibrations from the SRBs due both to the strength of the materials of the tank and the dual connection points. On the Ares, the second stage is balanced atop a brand new 5-stage solid rocket booster; there really is only one attachment point, a ring at the top of the solid rocket. To damp out the oscillation "by adding a shock absorber" means adding a lot of mass between the SRB and the second stage or (worse) an even larger mass between the second stage and the Orion crew module.

The Ares-1 is overweight as it is; NASA still has to cut a ton from the mass of Orion in order to get the Ares off the pad, even though most of the weight of the safety systems has already been stripped from the design. In some cases the safety systems are single-string. That's brittle design - a single failure equals disaster.

The other option is to modify the design of the rocket to change the resonant frequency. The problem is that such a resonance is inherent to the design of any solid rocket booster. As the New York Times article points out, an SRB is like a pipe in a pipe organ. As the fuel burns, what remains behind is a hollow tube with a lot of air moving through it. No matter what solid rocket booster design NASA goes with, they still have the same issue of a resonant frequency. If they change the booster significantly (and many engineers would argue that adding a fifth segment to the booster is already a huge change), then they end up with completely different hardware than was used on the space shuttle; in other words, an entirely new, untested rocket, with no commonality to the existing shuttle system.

When Wernher von Braun put astronauts atop the Saturn V rockets, he wasn't guessing that the system would work. Every component and subsystem was thoroughly tested beforehand. With the Ares-1, they have eliminated much of the testing under budget pressure and the assumption that it is all legacy hardware from the shuttle system. Any redesigns to change the resonant frequency of the "Stick" will mean that they basically have to start over with a clean sheet (negating the efforts of the past three years and pushing back the first launch of Ares by that much) and test all components of the system as well as all subsystems (adding more dollars and years to the project). This is the very "full-scale redesign" that Garry Lyles of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center dismisses out of hand.

There are other solutions, of course. For the upcoming moon missions, there will be two launches per mission: one Ares-V to launch the bulk of the hardware and fuel, and one Ares-1 for the crew. If instead the mass of the launches are divided up into two nearly-identical rockets midway in size between Ares-1 and Ares-V, then NASA can avoid the resonance issue by having two SRBs attached top-and-bottom to the sides of the strongback of the rocket and develop one rocket instead of two, using far more legacy (spaceflight tested) hardware. This is the essence of the DIRECT 2.0 proposal.

Another approach is to ensure and even expand the funding for the Commercial Orbital Transportation System teams. In comparison to the vaporware produced so far by NASA on the Ares, SpaceX has actually produced - from a standing start - two new rocket engines, and already started doing test flights. They have spent over the last five years about what NASA spends every eleven days. That's cost effective. Assuming NASA does not choke off COTS, then at the very least SpaceX will beat the Ares to orbit - and they may do so even if NASA kills COTS in the cradle. If that happens, then there will be no need whatsoever for Ares, and NASA will have wasted billions of dollars and years of effort for no actual results at all. And, if NASA assures funding for or even expands COTS, then there will be more than just SpaceX ready to provide rides to orbit for NASA astronauts.

Yet another approach is for NASA to actually do what it is supposed to do as a government agency - develop technologies that are not yet commercially viable but which lead to infrastructure improvements that make space access easier and more economical for everyone. Jon Goff has already written a lot about that, particularly about orbital propellant transfer and other technologies necessary for a spacefaring society.

And finally, NASA can go with existing launch systems like the Delta or Atlas. So what if they are not "man rated"? As Rand Simberg has pointed out many times, that qualification is artificial and not one of the rockets that NASA has ever used to fly men into space has ever met that qualification - "man rating" is simply a cudgel used by NASA as part of the not invented here syndrome.

For NASA, relying on hope that the system will work simply isn't good enough. Wishful thinking is no substitute for good engineering practice.

It is time for NASA to realize that the definition of "hindsight" does not include "inserting one's head in a very uncomfortable place". The Ares-1 "Stick" may be Mike Griffin's pet project, but that doesn't mean that its obvious shortcomings can be ignored any longer.

blood on their hands

2008-02-11T20:20:00.000-07:00

Click on these two images for background information. Is there any substantive difference between these two cases?

Scrolling Blogroll, redux

2008-02-06T20:16:00.000-07:00

A while back I posted the code necessary for the scrolling blogrolls in my sidebar. Recently Rob Singleton had some questions about how to implement these scrolling blogrolls himself. The problem is that he is using different blogging software than I am, and my previous instructions didn't make sense with his type of template. So, I have come up with a simplified version of the scrolling blogroll code, which can be implemented in pretty much any web page at all. To add a scrolling blogroll to your own blog or website, just copy the code in the text area below and paste it into your website or blog template code. In the case of a blog, that would likely be somewhere in your sidebar code, anywhere you like. Then, make changes to the code to customize it for your own site; the comments within the code should help guide you with the necessary changes.