– OR –

And why aren’t you reading the Planetary Society’s about blog entries about Hayabusa?

Seems to be the best place to learn about it.  I mean, here I am at the ISAS campus, and I’m still reading the blog to find out the latest.

Sadly, I’m leaving on Friday, which is when the sample capsule gets back to ISAS from Australia, where it landed.  So I get to miss most of the fun.

Some of my colleagues were locked out of their offices because there was an open house on Sunday so they went around closing all the office doors.  Which is rare enough that not everyone carries their keys around.  Apparently.

Anyway, congratulations to JAXA for Hayabusa making it back home after lots of terrible trouble.  I sure hope the capsule managed to capture some asteroid material.

Abraca-guardia,
Sully the magic man
Vanished some gooses
Right into the blue.

And as a finale, he
Hudsonofbitchingly
Conjured from nowhere an
Airbus canoe.

Galunggung-Ballunggung,
City of Edinburgh.
Powerless, windowless,
Taking a dive.

But captain and crew instead
Trigonometrically
Crawled up a badger’s arse;
Landed alive!

Well I woke up this mornin’,
My lower back was in pain.
Well I woke up this mornin’,
My lower back was in pain.
I knocked my glasses off the counter,
Lost my contacts down the drain.

(yeah!)

• A quote from Christopher not-even-a-scientist Monckton.
• A link to a conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute
• A link to some guy’s blog with his thoughts about the hacked CRU emails.
• A claim that the word “trick” is nefarious
• A link to an unpublished paper by professional curmudgeon Richard Lindzen, in which he whines for 30 pages about how much better science was in the olden days, but no actual science.
• Two links to blogs claiming the IPCC had admitted exaggerating effects.  (Yep, the 2035 Himalayan glaciers mistake and the not-actually-wrong-after-all 40% Amazon sensitivity.)
• A link to a lawyer’s blog entry about the same two things above.
• A link to a conservative physicist’s blog entry quote-mining John Houghton.
• A link to Monckton being shredded in a debate with an actual atmospheric scientist. (that was funny)
• A link to the standard quote-mine claiming Phil Jones says there has been no global warming since 1995, by yet another person who doesn’t understand the meaning of statistical significance.
• A quote from Phil Jones in which he accuses McIntyre and McKitrick of getting stuff wrong.  As this was later proved to be true, it’s another funny one.
• A claim that it was not up to her to provide actual scientific publications refuting AGW.
• A link to another article about the two one errors in the thousand-page IPCC 4.
• A claim that she had supplied “plenty of info”.
• A claim that the retraction of Siddall et al (2009) actually supports her side
• A link to a blog entry by a materials physicist claiming to falsify Vermeer and Rahmstorf (2009), but not actually published anywhere. And nothing about Pfeffer (2008), which supports Vermeer and Rahmstorf, or the fact that the retraction of Siddall et al was because their sea level rise values were too small.
• A link to a blog discussing the Zorita letter, in which Zorita explicitly says he thinks AGW is real.
• A list of non-climate-scientists who think the APS is too strong in its policy statement on AGW.
• A claim that anything that can be found on realclimate.org is automatically wrong.
• An assertion that I am a wanna-be engineer, and thus not to be believed.
• A second claim that it was not up to her to provide actual scientific publications refuting AGW.
• An assertion that the truth must be in the middle.
• An assertion that I am an alarmist engineer, and thus not to be believed.
• An assertion that I have no science training, and thus am not to be believed.
• An assertion that I am a non-science person, and thus not to be believed.
• A request to Run along now and play with your circuit board. Leave science to scientists.

And, finally, the first link to actual peer-reviewed literature!!

• A list of 500 papers refuting AGW.

I was not impressed by the start, and didn’t have time to look at it much, but here I am trying to stay up late so I can sleep on the plane on my way back to my pitiful miserable little engineering life.  So let’s just see how far through that list I can get.

Course the list isn’t in tabular form or anything, so I have to slog through it one at a time. And no summaries of what each paper says. Almost like they don’t actually want anyone to read the papers, just wave the list around.

So, I didn’t make it through many of the 500, but one would hope they’d put their strongest arguments first. So far we’re 0 for 9. I’ll update this if I’m bored again someday. First update puts it at -1 for 9, since Tsonis turns out to be an own goal.

Second update finds McIntyre going totally off the deep end.  I predict the “submitted to” paper above is never approved for publication, at least not in a top-tier journal.

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The concept here is a very common longing for the good ol’ days of NASA, when failure was not an option, and we could get to the moon instead of just going round and round in Low Earth Orbit.  I hear this a lot.

So.

I have worked on both manned missions and unmanned science missions.  I was old enough to watch and understand as Neil Armstrong stepped off the LM pad, and I find that moment to be the high point of humanity.

So, can we do that again?  No.  Not now anyway.  And it’s not about vision, it’s not about taking chances, it’s not about boldness.

It’s about money.

The Apollo program, at its peak, took 4% of GDP.  Think about that.  1 out of every 25 dollars spent in the US was spent on getting people to the moon, at least for a couple years.  The current US GDP is 14 trillion dollars, so a similar level of effort would be $500 billion per year.  That’s more than 25 times NASA’s current budget.

Getting people (safely) into space and back is bloody expensive.  Take Apollo 13.  Yes, it was great dedication and knowledge and cleverness that got them back alive and safe.  But it was also the existence of high-fidelity simulators, a massive infrastructure, and a huge team of ground personnel that made it possible to bring the astronauts back.  That kind of backup costs a lot of money. And most of it is salaries, which means it costs the same in real terms now as it did in 1965.

I won’t argue that today’s NASA isn’t overly risk-averse, and yes, the effect of this risk aversion has been to add layers of review and bureaucracy rather than to really work at improving reliability.  But to actually return to the glory days of Apollo would require not just the mental commitment but the financial commitment of the Apollo days.

The shuttle was over-hyped, but was it actually badly designed?  Well, if it really were so far from optimal, there would be a better solution by now.  Many very large companies with vast resources have been building rockets for decades, with lots of non-NASA customers, and while there have been minor improvements, things really haven’t changed much.  Getting into space is just hard, and expensive.  Doing it with the reliability we expect if there are people on board is that much more costly.  It’s easy to long for the good ol’ days of Apollo, but until we are ready put our moneys where our mouths is, it ain’t gonna happen.

But there’s [title of show] playing at Signature, in the smaller (ARK) space, and it’s another one of those that keeps me going back there even though the large space has become home to mega-spectaculars (and Broadway-bound bombs like Glory Days).

Plus hey, Sam Ludwig!  When was it I saw him in Pippin?  Google says 2006.  Google knows everything!  (And Google is wrong; it has to be 2005.)  Yeah, and none of the girls wanted to kiss him in the orgy scene when they found out he was still in high school.  He was so clearly the standout that Jenna and I knew he was destined for stardom right there.  When he showed up to auditions for Assassins at KAT we were all, “Craig, you have to cast him!  Plus he can play guitar!”  He shoulda been the balladeer, but we had nobody who could play Hinckley, and Hinckley does have that whole play-guitary moment at the beginning of Unworthy of Your Love.  And Sam rocked it.

I’m pretty sure Jenna got him his first paying gig, playing the Stoker in Titanic at Toby’s Dinner Theatre in Columbia.  Not like it wouldn’ta happened without her but still, it’s nice to help.

So now he’s right off playing Tobias in Signature’s Sweeney Todd (which was excellent), and rockin’ it Equity flavor in [title of show].  The show is a musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical.  And yes, that’s like breaking the ninth wall, but sure if I didn’t get a strong whiff of Commentary! The Musical during the opening number (titled Untitled Opening Number).  Course this predates Dr. Horrible by several years, so strike that last sentence; reverse it.

Sam, as Jeff, is only one of the best things about this production.  James Gardiner is hilarious as Hunter, the procrastibating other writer.  Erin Driscoll (Susan) is the cutest thing since sliced Kewpie dolls, and Jenna Sokolowski (Heidi) nails her part as well.  The orchestra (Gabriel Mangiante at the piano) is perfect as well, especially since he’s called upon to act from time to time.  How often does the music director get laughs in a show?

There’s pretty much every musical trope, and most of them get broken and left in pieces on the stage.  The dream sequence is about flying over NYC, and for some reason is done with English accents.  Except for Jeff, who refuses until finally giving in and doing some kind of horrible Scots-Irish-English conglomeration of a thing.  Which must have been a bitch rehearsing while speaking a perfect English accent every night as Tobias in Sweeney Todd.  Anyway, it made me LOL.  Which I did a lot during the show.

Highly recommended.  It’s on until like July or something, but already almost sold out.

And it was going so well.  Got to the airport in plenty of time, found a decent parking space.  Got through the TSA checkpoint with all my clothes on.  Well, except the belt, which either has more metal than my old belt or they’ve lowered the sensitivity threshold on the magnetometers.  Walked away without it, cause for some reason it came through a long time after the computer and I’m still not used to collecting it.  Guess it’s a really confusing belt in X-rays.  Or maybe it’s because they have that stupid long tunnel the shit has to ride through after it’s done being scanned, and the whole pipeline stops while they look at the next item.  Stupid ass design.

But no wait, I was having a good day.  Because the nice TSA lady called me back to let me know I’d forgotten my belt.  Then I got to ride the shiny new trains at Dulles, instead of the stupid mobile lounges.  No.  Wait.  That was in a dream.  I only got to look at the shiny new not-yet-open-to-the-public trains.  Still adjusting the strength of the MagLev solenoids I suppose.  Cause given how long we’ve been waiting, they’ve gotta be MagLev.  With a load of Pascaline D and a detachment of Alliance soldiers in the next car.

But it was going well, cause there was lots of room in the lounge, and even though I came up 5000 miles short of 1K status last year, you only need Premier Exec and an international boarding pass to get in.  And then, the big win.  Upgraded.  Yeah baby.  Upstairs on the seven-four, with lie-flat seats.

Oh apex of my day, I hardly recognized you at the time.

Not closing the doors.  Not closing the doors.  Not closing the doors.  Uh-oh.  Greasy-smelling maintenance guys walking in and out of the cockpit.  Oh-uh.

“This is your captain.  The first officer’s radar unit is not working, and they can’t fix it here.  We can’t land at Narita without the radar, due to heavy weather there.  We’re looking at flying to Chicago to pick up a replacement there and flying on.”

[time passes]

“This is your purser.  A plane is flying in from Chicago with replacement parts.  They’ll put them in and we’ll take off.”

This is an email from United Airlines.  Your flight is now scheduled to leave at 3:30.

“This is your captain.  As far as I can tell, the plan is to wait for the flight from Narita to arrive, remove the radar unit from that plane and install it on ours, and then we go.  They’ll be arriving about 3:00 or 3:15.  Or maybe that’s not the plan, who knows?  I’m just the fucking captain of the plane, the company never tells me shit.  [He may not have used actual profanity, but otherwise it's accurate.]  So, um, everyone off, and take your stuff.”

Okay fine, back to the lounge.

[time passes]

Back to the plane.  Wait, wait wait.  This can’t be good.

“Flight attendants disarm doors.”

[time passes]

“Flight attendants arm doors for departure.”

[time passes]

“Flight attendants disarm doors.”

[they fight]

“This is your captain.  Guess what, we’re no longer legal, ha ha!  We can maybe fly to Chicago or San Fran and find a new crew to take over from there.”  Hey, when the flight itself is 14 hours, how long can the crew sit around on their asses before they hit the limit, right?

[time passes]

This is an email from United Airlines.  Your flight is now scheduled for 10AM tomorrow.  Enjoy the beltway during rush hour!

So, 10 hours of travel, and I’m back where I started.  Long day, long story, but it’s totally worth it cause there’s a punchline:

How the hell do I enter this on the FedTraveler expense report?