Posts tagged NASA

Home on Lagrange

21
1 month ago
by dcpetterson in

nasa-2014-budget-4For good or ill, much of the west­ern half of the United States was set­tled by Euro­pean colonists because of incen­tives such as the Cal­i­for­nia Gold Rush and the Okla­homa Land Rush and the Texas Oil Boom.  Eco­nomic inter­ests encour­aged an almost manic tidal wave of migra­tion and city-​​building. Often, such waves of invest­ment and pop­u­la­tion move­ment hap­pen with gov­ern­men­tal assis­tance and encour­age­ment. They always hap­pen because busi­nesses and indi­vid­u­als see an oppor­tu­nity for growth and profit.

Over the next few decades, we will wit­ness another such tidal wave of migra­tion and invest­ment. The seeds are being planted now, and Pres­i­dent Obama’s 2014 bud­get includes a request for a $105 mil­lion down pay­ment on the new land rush.

The amount of real estate avail­able dwarfs any­thing we’ve seen before in our his­tory. Tril­lions of dol­lars’ worth of vital resources await devel­op­ment. We need only the courage and vision to take the nec­es­sary steps.

To get this trea­sure, we’ll be in over our heads. Way over our heads. (more…)

The New World

13
2 months ago
by dcpetterson in

imagesO won­der!

How many goodly crea­tures are there here!

How beau­teous mankind is! O brave new world That has such peo­ple in’t!

—William Shake­speare

We may be on the verge of a rev­o­lu­tion in the way we view our­selves, our world, and our place in the Uni­verse. There may be rad­i­cal change in the air for our pol­i­tics, our reli­gion, and our society.

I don’t think I can over­state this. As momen­tous as the dis­cov­ery of the New World was to Europe (not to men­tion to Native Amer­i­cans), as enor­mous as was the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, as huge a change to soci­ety as was the per­sonal com­puter, even as great as were var­i­ous polit­i­cal and reli­gious events in the Mid­dle East a cou­ple of mil­len­nia ago — all that is mere pre­lude to dis­cov­er­ies on our horizon.

Amaz­ingly, few of us are even aware of what’s been hap­pen­ing. (more…)

Political Science

52
3 months ago
by dcpetterson in
Charles Darwin

Charles Dar­win

The event of Pres­i­dent Obama’s State of the Union address, cou­pled with the Repub­li­can response, served to remind me of the impor­tance of sci­en­tific research. How, you might ask? Well, first because the Pres­i­dent referred to it, but also because of Bobby Jindal’s (in)famous ref­er­ence to “some­thing called vol­cano mon­i­tor­ing” in his response to Pres­i­dent Obama’s first major speech after being inau­gu­rated in 2009.

This is already a big year for sci­ence news. Here are some high­lights and why they are important.

This week saw the 104th anniver­sary of Charles Dar­win’s birth. Set­ting aside evolution’s cen­tral impor­tance to vir­tu­ally all of mod­ern med­i­cine, genet­ics, farm­ing, and biol­ogy, it is worth remem­ber­ing this man’s achieve­ments, lest we allow sci­ence edu­ca­tion in Amer­ica to become lit­tle more than an exer­cise in how far we’ll allow reli­gious inter­ests to con­trol our gov­ern­ment. (more…)

The World in Politics

48
9 months ago
by dcpetterson in
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL - SEPTEMBER 26: A part of th...

A scroll from the Dead Sea

There is so much inter­est­ing news this week, its hard to pick just one thing to write about. Hir­ing is up, the Dow Jones Indus­trial Aver­age is up…but, para­dox­i­cally, so is unem­ploy­ment. Since early 2010, the econ­omy has added over five mil­lion private-​​sector jobs, which have been par­tially off­set by a loss of over 660,000 pub­lic sec­tor jobs, for a net gain of about 4.5 mil­lion. The Fed­eral Reserve is keep­ing inter­est rates low, which is caus­ing some con­ser­v­a­tive econ­o­mists to con­tinue fear­ing infla­tion (for which there is, so far, no evi­dence).

Mitt Rom­ney returned from his whirl­wind tour, which received mixed reviews. He returned in time for ter­ri­ble reac­tions to his tax plan. The non­par­ti­san Tax Pol­icy Cen­ter called it “math­e­mat­i­cally impos­si­ble,” which is really not quite what we expected from a finan­cial genius like Rom­ney. Per­haps this is why he doesn’t want to release his tax returns: maybe he can’t add.

Speak­ing of con­fused sig­nals, The Dark Knight Rises con­tin­ues to do well at the­aters, despite the tragedy in Col­orado. Talk has died down about whether there was any inten­tional con­nec­tion between Bane and Bain.

But for me, per­haps the most impor­tant of cur­rent events is about to hap­pen late tonight. NASA’s lat­est Mars rover, named Curios­ity, is sched­uled to land on the Red Planet about 1:30 AM Mon­day morn­ing, East­ern time. (more…)

Not Why We Do It

35
10 months ago
by dcpetterson in

Richard Feyn­n­man

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some prac­ti­cal results, but that’s not why we do it.

― Richard P. Feynman

Feyn­man could have been say­ing that about any of the sciences.

I have a per­sonal obses­sion to study sci­ence in gen­eral, and space sci­ence in par­tic­u­lar. This mad­ness has been with me for as long as I can remem­ber. I already felt it on Sep­tem­ber 12th, 1962, when, at the age of six, I saw Pres­i­dent Kennedy on tele­vi­sion, speak­ing as if directly to me. That was the day he com­mit­ted Amer­ica to lit­er­ally reach for the Moon. I’ve never been the same. Nei­ther has the rest of the world.

Log­a­rchism is a polit­i­cal blog. What has my obses­sion with space to do with pol­i­tics? I’ve writ­ten about this before. Pol­i­tics, like sci­ence, some­times gives prac­ti­cal results, but that’s not why we do it. Sure, prac­ti­cal­ity is the rea­son we give our­selves. Hon­estly though, how much of the rhetoric asso­ci­ated with pol­i­tics, how much of the game play­ing and the issues that drive peo­ple to the polls, has actual prac­ti­cal value? Some, yes, but birth cer­tifi­cates? See­ing Rus­sia? Really?

Many of these things serve other pur­poses. The real value of space sci­ence is not prac­ti­cal, unless learn­ing about your­self, about real­ity, about how the uni­verse actu­ally works, is prac­ti­cal. (more…)

Worlds Enough, and Time

6
11 months ago
by dcpetterson in
An Orion III, Pan Am's first Space Clipper, fe...

An Orion III, Pan Am’s first Space Clip­per, fea­tured in the science-​​fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Write down this date. The human adven­ture off the Earth has begun in earnest.

In a tri­umph of free enter­prise, a pri­vate cor­po­ra­tion has suc­cess­fully sent a sup­ply ship to the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion.

We knew this day would come. In his 1968 motion pic­ture, 2001: A Space Odyssey, vision­ary film­maker Stan­ley Kubrick showed us a Pan-​​Am flight to an orbital space sta­tion. For those too young to remem­ber, back in the 1960s, Pan Amer­i­can Air­ways was a major com­mer­cial air line. Pan-​​Am ceased oper­a­tions in 1991. But before that, fol­low­ing the release of Kubrick’s movie, they had been accept­ing reser­va­tions for flights to the Moon.

The real­ity so far is much less grand, but the longest jour­neys begin with a sin­gle step. Since 2009, newly-​​appointed NASA direc­tor Charles F. Bolden Jr. has advo­cated encour­ag­ing com­mer­cial enter­prise to replace the can­celed U.S. space shut­tle pro­gram. With­out a shut­tle, Amer­ica and the world are depen­dent upon Russ­ian Soyuz space­craft to carry per­son­nel to the space sta­tion, and uncrewed Progress rock­ets for sup­plies. Rus­sia had an exclu­sive lock on flights to ISS. No more. On May 25, 2012, at 12:02 p.m. East­ern Time, a pri­vate space­craft funded by Pay­Pal bil­lion­aire Elon Musk docked with the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion, car­ry­ing a ship­ment of sup­plies. The new Dragon space­ship from SpaceX can now sup­ple­ment Progress sup­ply flights, and, within three or four years, is expected to carry up to seven crewmem­bers at a time.

This is not the first com­mer­cial space­flight. On Octo­ber 4, 2004, the 47th anniver­sary of the first Sput­nik launch, the Ansari X Prize was won by a privately-​​designed and con­structed manned space­ship. The X Prize offered ten mil­lion dol­lars to the first non-​​governmental orga­ni­za­tion that could send a manned reuse­able craft to the edge of space, defined as an alti­tude of 100 kilo­me­ters or 60 miles — and then do it again, within the space of a few days. The win­ning craft, Space­ShipOne, was designed by leg­endary air­craft devel­oper Burt Rutan, and funded by eccen­tric bil­lion­aire Richard Bran­son, founder of the Vir­gin Group. Bran­son and Rutan have gone on to cre­ate Vir­gin Galac­tic, a com­pany that will soon be pro­vid­ing joyrides into space for a mere $100,000 or so per ticket.

We are about to step off the shores of our lit­tle world into an enor­mous ocean. Are we ready for it? (more…)

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