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| Tue Jul 8 23:31:32 2008 Moon Shot |
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| Tue Jul 1 23:00:35 2008 Near Miss |
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| Mon Jun 30 23:18:26 2008 Seizing up again |
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| Tue Jul 8 23:31:32 2008 Moon Shot How not to run a space program. |
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| Today's announcement about
retiring the shuttle fleet reminded me of the poor US space strategy in general.
I'm a big fan of basic science research, and of space exploration. But the current proposal to put a man on the moon by 2020 is bad science, and bad economics. It reminds me of the Onion article titled "NASA Announces Plan to Launch $700 Million into Space". Of course, the Onion was thinking too small. The moonshot proposal will cost over $100 billion. And that's before the inevitable cost overruns. What are the benefits of sending men back to the moon? Not many, really. While it is easier to launch from the Moon than the Earth, it is even cheaper to launch from orbit. So a moon base isn't useful just as a launch pad to go further. The moon mission is generally opposed by scientists. The main objections are that it isn't a good way to train for Mars (landing on an asteroid would be far better), and the cost would mean basic science research would be drastically cut. What are the chief problems that we are facing in human space exploration?
What are the chief aims of further space exploration?
If you look, you'll see that we could meet most of the chief scientific aims without manned spaceflight! Manned spaceflight increases costs by 10x or more, and doesn't provide any better data. In fact, given current technologies, it isn't clear that manned spaceflight is worth pursuing at all! [Aside: it was hard to find good data on the costs of manned vs. unmanned space flights. But based on costs for recent shuttle launches and Mars probes, it appears that 10x is a safe estimate, and it could even be 20x or more. Think about that: if we cut a few shuttle flights out, we could launch dozens more robotic missions into the solar system!] Instead, NASA should focus on cheaper, robotic missions to meet scientific aims, and also work on parallel tracks on the chief obstacles to human missions: getting into space cheaply (propulsion out of Earth's gravity well), and surviving in a self-contained environment. I suspect some of the reasons for the moon plan are strategic and military. But having a range of flexible and reliable space technologies will probably be of more strategic use in the future than an expensive (and probably abandoned) moon plan. Comments |
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| Tue Jul 1 23:00:35 2008 Near Miss The one that almost got us... |
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| I was just reading through the 26 June edition of
Nature. There are usually a few interesting tidbits in every issue. This issue
focused on "Cosmic Cataclysms": particularly impacts.
There was a good story on the Tunguska blast of 1908. I had recently read that Lake Cheko could be the remnants of the impact crater. Soundings had indicated a curious impact-shaped dimple at the bottom of the lake, and a follow-on visit was planned to look for meteorite debris at the bottom. However, the Nature article didn't think highly of the Lake Cheko theory. Another article, "The Burger Bar that Saved the World," was excellent. It talked to a group of long-time asteroid hunters that had started searching for near-Earth asteroids in the 70's, and they had a 30+ year perspective on how asteroid hunting had changed. Certainly the technology has changed a lot! And the idea that impacts were common on Earth was new. Many of the scientists claim that it was Alvarez's theory about the impact that killed the dinosaurs that really woke people up: here was proof that a rather small impact had decimated life on Earth. The article was a good read. It interspersed comments from several scientists to give an overview of how the field had evovled. But I was shocked by comments by Clark Chapman about a near-miss in 2004. He writes: In 2004, an object was discovered ... and the nominal calculated orbit had the asteroid hitting the Earth the next day. ... [JPL] concluded that there was something on the order of a 30% chance that this object would hit the Earth during the next three days. He noted that the European and North American observatories were desperately trying to observe the object to get better data, but weather was bad over both continents, and no one could see it. So we were debating late into the night, at what point should we go public with this? Wow. As it turns out, later observations revealed that the object was larger than originally thought, but also farther away. And so the collision chances dropped to around zero. But regardless, there was a period of a day or so when the world's leading experts thought there was a 30% probability that an asteroid would hit the Earth. Rusty Schweickart has since started the B612 Foundation (named after the asteroid in Saint Exupery's The Little Prince) which is attempting to establish protocols for engaging the United Nations and other bodies when an impact is deemed imminent. So sleep soundly, but not too soundly. Comments |
Related: science Unrelated: books economics energy environment geopolitics lists mathematics predictions |
| Mon Jun 30 23:18:26 2008 Seizing up again The Fed confirms what I already said... |
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| Friday there was a
Yahoo story about the
Federal Reserve's moves to shore up Bear Stearns.
If you read Seizing Up Explained then you already know the story: the Fed felt it had to move because the entire investment banking industry was on the verge of collapse. The article was based on recently-released documents "providing insights into its private deliberations." The documents pull no punches, saying they feared an "immediate failure" of Bear Stearns, and such an event would cause an "expected contagion." I thought the "documents" were minutes of the meeting. They weren't, at least not verbatim. The Yahoo story didn't reference them, but I found the minutes on the Federal Reserve website. I was hoping (naively) for transcripts of the discussions. Instead, these are just bullet summaries, written after the fact (the documents reference other events that happened on April 1, for instance). So the "minutes" had the benefit of being written with considerable hindsight. My take on these? They are intended to support the Federal Reserve's decision to bail out Bear Stearns, and don't provide much insight into the decision making at the time. I don't think the Federal Reserve's documents are propaganda, but they have to be questioned. On the one hand, you can see that Reserve members were worried about a general collapse. On the other hand, a cynic could wonder if they were going out of their way to help a few investment banks that didn't deserve to be saved, and they are still trying to defend that decision. It is very clear that the entire banking system was not primed to collapse. There were a number of investment banks who were vulnerable, but any banks in that position deserved to fail. If a general "contagion" really developed, the worst that could happen is that investment banks would have a run on their funds. Don't get me wrong, that's pretty bad, but it would remind those who invested money there that those banks are not guaranteed. Of course, it is possible that by allowing commercial and investment banks to merge, the US has created a situation where instabilities in (poorly regulated) investment banks can jeopardize our (taxpayer-guaranteed) commercial banks. If that is true, then the solution is to force commercial and investment banks to stay separate, not to guarantee investment banks. If we've leared anything from the subprime mortgage mess, it's that investment banks are fraught with risk. After all, that's the path to higher returns. The solution is to make sure investors understand the risks, rather than pretend we can control them. Comments |
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