Tag Archives: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Staggering hypocrisy from Google

Google press release:

We recognize the impact that our operations have on the Earth’s climate, and are taking steps to ensure that we are carbon neutral by the end of 2007.

Solving climate change won’t be simple, and there won’t be a single solution that addresses the entire problem at once. We all need to act together to meet the challenge – from the largest corporations and governments to individual households.

Meanwhile in the New York Times:

In the annals of perks enjoyed by America’s corporate executives, the founders of Google may have set a new standard: an uncrowded, federally managed runway for their private jet that is only a few minutes’ drive from their offices.

The Google founders, according to one of their own Google maps, will spend just 7 minutes to get from their offices to the NASA airport where their jet is parked. As the crow flies, the airfield is only 1.7 miles away.

For $1.3 million a year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin get to park their customized wide-body Boeing 767-200, as well as two other jets used by top Google executives, on Moffett Field, an airport run by NASA that is generally closed to private aircraft.

We all need to act together to meet the challenge, eh?

What’s the betting that Google don’t include Larry and Sergey’s burning 5 tons of jet fuel per hour in their “carbon neutral” calculations?

New Orleans [updated]

Let’s enjoy a few compassionate thoughts from the right-wing libertarians. First, Becky Akers, columnist for Lew Rockwell of the Center for Libertarian Studies:

The day after the hurricane, Louisiana’s Governor Kathleen Blanco ordered New Orleans evacuated—again. Yep, folks facing a flood several fathoms deep without electricity, potable water, or food are too stupid to leave on their own. Good thing the Nanny Kate tells them what to do. [...]

Nanny’s sending buses, boats and helicopters after all the silly little citizens who didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. Whatever happened to bunking in with friends and families? I’ve experienced several hurricanes; on hearing that an especially dangerous one was heading my way, my first thought would be: “Time to visit Dad.”

Oh yes, those silly poor people. Why didn’t they just hop in the SUV and spend the weekend with daddy in the Hamptons?

General Ralph Lupin of the National Guard whined, “We’re doing everything we can to keep these people comfortable. We’re doing our best. It’s not getting any better, but we’re trying not to let it get any worse.” Alas, running hotels and restaurants isn’t easy, though entrepreneurs make it look that way every day. Their skills provide clean beds and rooms, private baths, delicious meals ? all the miracles that Leviathan desperately longs to reproduce. And can’t. Nor ever will.

Yes, those silly poor people. They should have just checked in to one of New Orleans’ many fine hotels, all of which are still open through the miracle of private enterprise.

Over to Justin Darr at Alan Keyes’ RenewAmerica site:

The reality is that the poor residents of the New Orleans could have evacuated the flood zone on a public bus before the hurricane for about the cost of a bottle of water. The total disabled population of New Orleans who might not have been able to evacuate is estimated at around 55,000 residents. So, the question must be asked why up to half a million people did not evacuate the city. The sad answer is that many of these residents remained because they where waiting for the government to aid them.

Check out NASA’s before and after photos and note the scale of the destruction. The flooded areas are a good 40-50km across. I guess that seems plausibly like a $2 bus ride if you’re a wealthy white libertarian who’s never ridden the bus in his damn life.

In a culture where all the comforts of life have been provided to people as entitlements, their sudden absence has unleashed a violent backlash against the society these people feel has let them down. In other words, if some people do not get what they feel they are entitled to get, then something unfair must have happened, so now they have the right to go out and take it.

Yes, damn those looters for not obeying the god-given laws of the free market. Don’t they know that price gouging is good and that nobody deserves food or shelter unless they can pay for it at the prevailing rate?

Meanwhile at the Mises Institute, no theory is too crackpot for institute president Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr:

After evacuations, the looting began and created a despicable sight of criminal gangs stealing everything in sight as the police looked on (when they weren’t joining in). Now, this scene offers its own lessons. Why doesn’t looting and rampant criminality occur every day? The police are always there and so are the hoodlums and the criminals. What was missing that made the looting rampage possible was the bourgeoisie, that had either left by choice or had been kicked out. It is they who keep the peace. And had any stayed around to protect their property, we don’t even have to speculate what the police would have done: Arrest them!

Yes, when the wealthy white people lived in the city, everything was good. After they left, there was rioting and disorder. Therefore post hoc ergo propter hoc it’s the wealthy white people who actually preserve law and order in society, not the police. OK, there was that weather thing, but no, that couldn’t be anything to do with it, could it?

Over at The “Intellectual” Activist, Robert Tracinski spews out the familiar “blame the victims and rescuers” spin:

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling.

Oh, what a surprise, they get their information from FOX News.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape?

[...]

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit?but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep?on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

Yes, anyone who has to fall back on welfare is a vicious wolf just waiting for the chance to descend into raping and pillaging.

The welfare state?and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages?is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans.

So, what explains the moral ugliness of all these right-wing libertarians?

Katrina and the waves

So it’s a total disaster in New Orleans. Three levees are breached, one of them has a hole over 150 meters across. 80% of the city is under water up to 6 meters deep. The entire city is without electrical power or water supply. It’s estimated that it will be 9–12 weeks before they can even get rid of the water, much less get the city habitable. Interstate 10 is broken chunks of floating concrete; there’s no route into the city for trucks and other major vehicles. Mississippi reports at least 110 dead; Louisiana hasn’t even begun counting—but there are bodies floating in the water-and-sewage filled streets. It’s estimated that up to 100,000 people were unable or unwilling to leave the city. The death toll could be in the tens of thousands by the time it’s all over. The official message is simple: everyone must leave New Orleans.

The Red Cross has around 40,000 people in emergency shelters. Another 25,000 are going to be sleeping in the Houston Astrodome. They won’t be going home any time soon, as once the water is drained from the streets every building will have to be checked for structural soundness and shored up; every sewer line will need to be inspected. Then, of course, there will be the electrical infrastructure to replace, and the leaking gas lines to fix. In the mean time, some of the people left alive in the city are looting. Police are finding it hard to stop them, what with meters-high piles of debris that they have to cut through with chainsaws even to be able to patrol on foot.

So the residents of New Orleans who evacuated might get to go home to a ruined shell of a home with no electricity, by Christmas if they’re lucky. But right now, the water’s still rising… the Army engineers who were trying to repair the levees have been forced to abandon the city. The National Guard is facing the problem that most of its members were shipped out to Iraq to make up for low troop numbers, so the city is basically lawless at this point.

The New Orleans aquarium is gone; sealions are wandering the empty space where it used to be. The President’s Casino is missing too. The public library is paper maché. Boats weren’t safe either, with an 8 meter wall of water hitting the coast.

It’s not just New Orleans either. The BBC have a photograph of an oil rig that was smashed into the Cochrane Bridge in Mobile, Alabama. Most of Mobile is apparently without electricity too. Biloxi, Mississippi is without electricity, water and sewerage.

Damage estimates so far are around $25 billion, it’ll probably be the worst hit for the insurance industry ever. Since the worsening storms over the last few years had already brought many insurance companies close to bankruptcy, I imagine a few will collapse this year.

2004′s hurricane season was close to the worst ever. This year’s hurricane season is only half over and has already surpassed it. It appears that the severity of hurricanes may be directly linked to global warming, while the frequency of them is rising with the natural periodic rise in ocean surface temperature. Combine the two and you have a deadly combination. Katrina was more than 300 km across, and meteorologists say things could have been much worse. If you think the Kyoto protocol would harm the US economy, that’s nothing compared to what a decade of steadily-worsening hurricanes will do to it.

Now let’s set the wayback machine to February 2005:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has identified millions of dollars in flood and hurricane protection projects in the New Orleans district.

Chances are, though, most projects will not be funded in the president’s 2006 fiscal year budget to be released today.

In general, funding for construction has been on a downward trend for the past several years, said Marcia Demma, chief of the New Orleans Corps’ programs management branch.

In 2001, the New Orleans district spent $147 million on construction projects. When fiscal year 2005 wraps up Sept. 30, the Corps expects to have spent $82 million, a 44.2 percent reduction from 2001 expenditures.

Of course, all the levee construction in the world wouldn’t have saved New Orleans from this disaster—but it might have reduced the death toll and damage a bit. But hey, at least we all got our wartime tax cuts, right?

Will this tragedy be enough to silence the people who say that everything is OK, that global warming is a myth, that it’s a good idea to send the National Guard to Iraq, that we should keep cutting spending on infrastructure and emergency planning so we can finance a war and still have tax cuts?

I’m betting it won’t. They’ll keep shrieking their denails, and ultimately they’ll get away with it because their beliefs are so much more palatable than the unpleasant reality. I predict that the Climate Change Science Program and NASA’s studies of climate change will still get their budget cut next year. Why even study whether global warming might be causing these disasters, when you can just choose to believe it isn’t?

And remember, this is not a partisan issue. Democrats supported the major budget cuts for the US Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans, and the cancellation of a study into what would happen if a hurricane hit the city. Democrats voted for the war in Iraq. When the Senate voted 95-0 against the Kyoto protocol on the grounds that it would result in economic harm to US industry and would exclude some nations (Senate Resolution 98 in 1997), those voting included John Kerry and Ted Kennedy.

New Orleans in particular is a problem people have known about for a long time. It was just waiting to happen, like the big earthquake in San Francisco, or Mount Rainier showering Seattle with ash and red hot debris. The big question in my mind is whether people will learn, or whether they’ll carry on as before and build a New New Orleans right where the last one was. Either way, I never got to see New Orleans, and now I never will.

Keep ya Aeron

As my dad observed repeatedly during my teenage and college years, I really do spend an inordinate amount of time sitting on my ass. Since I was setting up a home office space which would likely be lasting me for the next decade or so, I decided it was time to make a serious investment in an office chair.

The archetypal web developer office chair is the Aeron by Herman Miller. It became a symbol of .com excess, a museum exhibit, and is now available in shoddy quality $150 knock-offs from Office Depot. I’ve sat in a real Aeron chair, and I have to say it’s really not very comfortable. It’s better than a $90 task chair from Staples, but it’s not $800 worth of better. In fact, the hard unyielding surfaces are pretty damn uncomfortable.

The ultimate in office chairs is apparently the range made by Bodybilt in Navasota, Texas. NASA uses ‘em, and there are many reports that measure blood pressure, perceived comfort and so on, and prove that Bodybilt is the best chair available. At over $1,000 each, and with a bewildering variety of options available, I wasn’t quite ready for that, especially since there was apparently nowhere I could go to actually sit in one.

Stepping back a little in price, there’s the Humanscale Freedom chair. It’s the first of a new breed of chairs which takes a new approach to chair ergonomics, by recognizing that what really kills your back isn’t so much the subtleties of the chair shape—rather, it’s the fact that even a perfectly shaped chair will keep your back in the same position all day. On plane flights, I have to keep switching between “back pillow” and “no back pillow” to get some variety. The Freedom chair is designed to need no adjustment; it uses your body weight to lever the chair back into place, allowing you to recline to any angle just by leaning back.

I’ve sat in a Freedom chair, and it’s really cool. It works, you can pick a reclinement angle and the chair just magically supports you at that angle. There are a couple of issues, though. I’ve read some reviews from people who found that they would gradually recline further and further back, until they realized they were slumped back; since there’s no way to lock the back, I was a bit concerned about this. Another problem was the price, at around $900. The third problem was that it would take 6-8 weeks to actually get one of the damn things.

So, I scaled back my chair lust a little further, and ordered a Steelcase Leap chair. Like the Freedom, it allows your back position to move as you go about the work day. In fact, the entire chair back flexes and curves with adjustable levels of springiness; stretch your arms above your head and lean back, and the lumbar part of the chair back bends in to support your lower back. It’s also available for about 30% less than a Freedom chair, is almost entirely recyclable, and has better adjustment on the arms. It’s not the best chair I’ve ever sat in, but it’s pretty neat.

Uranus!

There was a news item on Slashdot about two new moons “about the size of San Francisco” being discovered around Uranus. This prompted a cranky posting from someone saying:

“Seriously though, is it not possible to read an article about Uranus without seeing all those “uranus *lol* *giggle* *pffft!*” posts?”

Well, I just had to reply…

A scholarly look at Uranus

Yes, there’s nothing funny about Uranus. Let’s forget the childish humor and take a serious, scholarly look at Uranus. To many people it’s just a giant cloud of gas where the sun doesn’t shine, but those of us who are enthusiastic about Uranus know that it has many secrets.

Surprising as it may seem, we don’t have all that many photographs of Uranus. Yes, the Pioneers sent back pictures of Uranus, lots of them. But there are very few images that are high enough resolution and quality to show the faint rings around Uranus. Perhaps the excitement around these new moons will give us the excuse we need to take another long, hard look at Uranus.

Even if you have no idea how to find Uranus, you can still appreciate its unusual configuration. Scientists still don’t understand why Uranus is tilted sideways. Also, while we know what’s near the surface, we still aren’t sure of the exact chemical mixture deep inside Uranus. Are the moons stable, or are they spiraling into Uranus?

With so much to learn, we must hope that NASA will probe the depths of Uranus soon. Yes, there are many technical issues that will need to be resolved, and problems to be faced—but we put men on the moon, and I’m sure that given sufficient motivation, NASA’s engineers can lick Uranus too.

Oh, and yes, the size comparisons are silly, but can you think of a more sensible unit of size than San Francisco for an object in the vicinity of Uranus?

OK, I think I’m done now.

Space

I’m not sure I can explain why space travel means so much to me.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting with my grandfather, watching one of the Apollo moon landings on TV. I’m not sure which one, but since the Lunar Rover was involved it must have been one of the later ones. I would watch Sci Fi TV shows with him as well. “UFO”, in particular, and sometimes “Dr Who” if it wasn’t too scary.

Later I began reading SF, starting with Arthur C. Clarke. By then “Space:1999” was on TV, and soon I read the novel of “2001”. I remember working out how old I would be in the year 2000. With some delight, I calculated that I would be the right age to be one of the people working on the moonbase. So that became my plan.

I learnt everything I could about the space program. I collected books about astronomy, and books with diagrams of how rocket engines worked. I learned about relativity, zero gravity, orbits, black holes, red shifts and how zero gravity bathrooms worked, all before I’d got as far as trigonometry at school. I memorized the sequence of vehicle maneuvers for an Apollo moon landing. I studied souvenir brochures from the Kennedy Space Center, with pictures of the Vehicle Assembly Building, Skylab, Soyuz, Gemini, and the Angry Alligator.

Continue reading →

Pluto (not the dog)

In order to save 50¢ per taxpayer, George W. Bush has cut NASA’s budget so that they can’t afford to send an unmanned mission to Pluto.

The problem is, the last viable launch window to get a gravitational slingshot to Pluto is in 2006. If we don’t hit that window, Pluto will move too far away from the sun, and its atmosphere will freeze and precipitate out onto the planet’s surface. In addition, about half the planet will be too dark for any kind of photographic sensors to scan. Which means if we don’t run a mission now, we won’t get to see Pluto until some time after the year 2300.

Speaking as someone who was seriously counting on being able to work on a moonbase by now, this bugs the hell out of me. I don’t expect science to be a high priority with Republicans, but this kind of shortsighted penny-pinching really grates.

There’s a chance Congress and the House will be able to restore the Pluto mission budget. Let’s hope.

LEGO dream

I dreamed of LEGO. That I found an old, discounted LEGO set in a toy store that contained LEGO versions of real NASA space craft, and lots of square bases patterned with craters, roads, landing sites, and other essentials. If you don’t know why that’s an exciting dream, well, you’re not a LEGO connoisseur…