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[ 20040130 ]
OK, here's the second paradigm-shifty idea: replace the Hubble, not with one telescope, but with many. We shouldn't be thinking of "space telescope" in the singular any more than we should think that there can be only one "space transportation system," carrying a handful of humans into orbit three or four times a year.
But if that one telescope will cost $1.6 billion, how can we launch "many" -- and within the next three years -- without devouring the entire space science budget (see page 18; warning: 2.4 MB *.pdf) and then some? Recalling the triple constraint, if I'm suggesting holding the line on resources and accelerating schedule, then scope -- that is, requirements -- must be reduced.
The obvious requirement to lower is size. Telescope cost scales roughly as the cube of aperture, meaning that a 1-meter telescope identical to Hubble in all other respects would cost about 7% as much. Another requirement to either greatly relax or eliminate is cryogenically-cooled instrumentation; the Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly known as SIRTF) cost $740 million even though its aperture is only 0.85 m, largely because of a stringent requirement to detect faint sources with its infrared array camera and spectrograph and multi-band imaging photometer.
Even with these constraints, any one of our replacement space telescopes would outperform nearly every telescope on Earth; Hubble was the best telescope humans had ever built before the repair mission. So how expensive would they be?
Disclaimer: this is very much a ROM estimate, meaning that actual costs could be the number I come up with, multiplied or divided by (at least) 3.
Hubble's development costs were around $2 billion -- closer to $4 billion in today's dollars. I recall hearing an astronomy grad student at Chicago in the late '70s grouse about how for the cost of the space telescope, we could have built eight 4-meter ground-based telescopes. Applying the cube-of-aperture rule mentioned above, each 4-meter scope would ordinarily cost nearly 5 times what a 2.4-meter telescope would. The implied cost differential is a factor of nearly 40. Now, browsing this source, we find: "A 0.4 meter telescope produced by a manufacturer of amateur telescopes may cost 1/4 the cost of the same size professional telescope. This difference is partly due to the quantity of telescopes produced, but is largely due to the step up in performance."
I infer that a relatively simple space-based telescope should cost about 150 times as much as a ground-based amateur telescope of the same size. Grazing over to this page, I note -- after wiping the drool off my chin -- a price of $10,749 for a 25" 'scope. Once again applying the cube-of-aperture relationship, then multiplying by 150, I arrive at a figure of only $6.3 million for a 1-meter telescope in space.
Well, er, except for launch costs. And if we're going to figure those in, we'd better have some idea of the size and mass of one of these things. For comparison, the Hubble is 13.2 meters long, 4.2 m in diameter, and masses about 11,000 kg. Our hypothetical 1-meter telescope would be perhaps 5 meters long, 1.5 meters in diameter, and mass about 800 kg. What could launch it, and how much would it cost?
Reviewing various reports available via this page, and looking up payload capacities in Mark Wade's incomparable Encyclopedia Astronautica, I built a table of launchers by asking price, payload to low Earth orbit, and cost per kilogram of payload to LEO:
Dnepr | $8-11M | 4,500kg | $1,800-2,400 |
START | $9M | 632kg | $14,200 |
Rockot | $12-15M | 1,800kg | $6,700-8,300 |
Cosmos | $12M | 1,400 kg | $8,600 |
Pegasus | $14-18M | 443 kg | $32,000-41,000 |
Taurus | $20-30M | 1,380kg | $14,500-21,700 |
Soyuz | $30-50M | 6,220kg | $4,800-8,000 |
Delta 2 | $45-55M | 5,089 kg | $8,800-10,800 |
Proton | $60-85M | 21,000 kg | $2,900-4,000 |
Atlas2 | $65-75M | 7,280kg | $8,900-10,300 |
Atlas3 | $65-75M | 10,718kg | $6,100-7,000 |
Atlas5 | $65-75M | 12,500kg | $5,200-6,000 |
Zenit3SL | $65-85M | 13,740kg | $4,700-6,200 |
H2A | $70-100M | 11,730kg | $6,000-8,500 |
Ariane5 | $125-155M | 16,000kg | $7,800-9,700 |
Notwithstanding that the above are approximate figures -- the asking price is rarely obtained in the current depressed launcher market, booster configurations vary, and performance varies significantly by orbital altitude and the latitude of the launch site -- we may reasonably expect to pay no more than $12 million for the launch. I note that one of the least expensive vehicles, the Dnepr, could launch several such telescopes at once if they could somehow be fit inside its payload fairing.
I conclude that less than $20 million could put us well on the way to launching one or more space telescopes before Hubble ceases operation. Compare perhaps half a billion dollars for the cancelled Hubble-maintenance Shuttle mission.
Now all this project needs is a name. ;)
Jay Manifold [4:04 PM]
So if the Hubble conks out in '07, we get a four-year hiatus before the James Webb Space Telescope comes on line, right? So we'd better save the Hubble, right?
Maybe not. I can think of a couple of better alternatives, and both of them involve a bit of paradigm shifting, which makes them that much more attractive.
Let's take the obvious one first: reading Who Says Astronomy Isn't Practical? (IV), we find that the technology for the JWST is borrowed from existing spy satellites -- that in fact, the JWST will be little more than a civilian version of a present-day spysat.
Fine. So let's point one of them up instead of down.
But wouldn't that show the Bad Guys™ too much about what we can do? -- Not unless we used the very newest one, and even then, it might not matter too much.
How long is a secret worth keeping? Via Virginia, we find the following astonishing recommendations in the Final Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Secrecy, co-authored by Edward Teller, no peacenik:
It is unlikely that classified information will remain secure for periods as long as five years, and it is more reasonable to assume that it will become known to others in periods as short as one year.
The Task Force noted that more might be gained than lost if our nation were to adopt -- unilaterally, if necessary -- a policy of complete openness in all areas of information ...
As a general guideline, one may set a period between one and five years for complete declassification. This time limit should be extended only if clear evidence is presented that changed circumstances make such an extension necessary.
Anybody reading this blog will be all too familiar with Moore's Law, and perhaps also with Ray Kurzweil's double exponential growth model of technological advance. The age is coming, and now is, when a lead of even a year or two is so large that we need not fear revealing our capabilities.
My second idea? See the next post, later today.
Jay Manifold [5:51 AM]
[ 20040129 ]
'Save the Hubble' campaign soars, says the BBC's Dr David Whitehouse, in an article that points to Save The Hubble, a Brazilian website. Meanwhile, Hubble, the Beloved is the amazing headline in the WaPo (registration required), where we read of well-meaning citizens endearingly but ineffectually trying to help:
One common suggestion from the public has been that NASA should take Hubble to the space station for the maintenance, but for a variety of reasons -- including the largely dissimilar orbits Hubble and the station occupy -- that would not be feasible, [Bruce] Margon [associate director for science at the Space Telescope Science Institute] said.
Hubble-lovers also have suggested sending an unmanned robotic mission to perform some of the tasks an astronaut normally would complete manually.
Margon said the institute will be setting up a Web site soon to accept public suggestions for the Hubble.
I draw the following lessons:
- For interested observers: the public, and the electorate, can be constructively fascinated with science, even one of the historical sciences whose central tenets many people refuse to accept -- astronomy. And affective gains precede cognitive gains (see items 33 and 34).
- For policymakers: aesthetics matter, and space science has aesthetics to burn if it's done right. Which leads to ...
- For NASA: require every future space probe to be capable of returning imagery. This need not be from the visual spectrum.
- For spacecraft designers: if it's unmanned, make it serviceable by a robot.
One more quote from the WaPo article:
"It's extremely difficult to think about alternate ways to accomplish these chores," Margon said. "But not impossible."
As another blogger would say: indeed. I'll share some ideas in my next post, so graze on back tomorrow.
Jay Manifold [5:54 PM]
[ 20040125 ]
Fred Kiesche of The Eternal Golden Braid saw the earlier post on this topic and promptly forwarded me a chunk of discussion from the "amastro" Yahoo! group, in which the invaluable Brian Skiff wrote:
Most folks simply declared that Hipparcos was wrong with the Pleiades distance, and although observations such as the one described in this news item are convincing, the real problem has been identifying where the error is in the Hipparcos data. That too has been done recently (see e.g. 2003AJ....126.2408M), and shown to be an engineering glitch in the reductions. I suspect (and hope) that a complete revised Hipparcos catalogue will be forthcoming that will get rid of all the lumps in the parallax error distribution.
I should also explain that the earlier post is the sort of thing that happens when I don't take melatonin and therefore am awake in the small hours of the morning. Not bad, but I missed one kinda obvious value-added thing, which is to compare the Pleiades to the Sun. So turning again to this page, which lists the brighter members of the cluster, we find that a simplified version of ranking by apparent luminosity would look like this:
Star | mv |
Alcyone | +2.86 |
Atlas | +3.62 |
Electra | +3.70 |
Maia | +3.86 |
Merope | +4.17 |
Taygeta | +4.29 |
Pleione | +5.09 |
Asterope | +5.31 |
Celaeno | +5.44 |
Now suppose that they are all really about 440 light-years away. Their absolute magnitude is that of their appearance at 10 parsecs, or 32.6 light-years. Since their actual distance is 13.5 times this, applying the inverse-square law, we find that they would look 182 times brighter. Each full unit on the stellar magnitude scale represents a brightness difference of 5√100 @ 2.512. The easy way to figure this on a scientific calculator is to take log10 182 = 2.26, and multiply it by 2.5 (since [5√100]2.5 = 10), yielding a stellar-magnitude difference of 5.65. So the absolute magnitudes of the Pleiades are the above values with 5.65 subtracted. Just for fun, I've created a table comparing them to the apparent (visual) magnitudes of the nine brightest stars in the night sky as seen from Earth:
Star | mv | Mv | Star | mv |
Alcyone | 2.86 | -2.79 | Sirius | -1.46 |
Atlas | 3.62 | -2.03 | Canopus | -0.72 |
Electra | 3.7 | -1.95 | a Centauri | -0.27 |
Maia | 3.86 | -1.79 | Arcturus | -0.04 |
Merope | 4.17 | -1.48 | Vega | +0.03 |
Taygeta | 4.29 | -1.36 | Capella | +0.08 |
Pleione | 5.09 | -0.56 | Rigel | +0.12 |
Asterope | 5.31 | -0.34 | Procyon | +0.38 |
Celaeno | 5.44 | -0.21 | Achernar | +0.46 |
As you can see, were the Pleiades to be relocated to the Solar neighborhood, they would comprise the five brightest stars in the night sky, and 8 of the brightest 10.
Now to compare them with the Sun, whose absolute magnitude is +4.83. Taking the difference between this and the values listed above and raising 5√100 to that power, we find:
Star | mv | Mv | LSun |
Alcyone | 2.86 | -2.79 | 1120 |
Atlas | 3.62 | -2.03 | 555 |
Electra | 3.7 | -1.95 | 515 |
Maia | 3.86 | -1.79 | 445 |
Merope | 4.17 | -1.48 | 334 |
Taygeta | 4.29 | -1.36 | 299 |
Pleione | 5.09 | -0.56 | 143 |
Asterope | 5.31 | -0.34 | 117 |
Celaeno | 5.44 | -0.21 | 104 |
From the above figures and the inverse-square law, we may infer that to receive the same amount of light that Earth does from the Sun, a planet revolving around one of these stars would have to be about Saturn's distance from Celaeno, and about Pluto's distance from Alcyone. But that light would have lots more UV in it, and stars as massive as these must be aren't going to stay on the main sequence for very long. We can figure their masses from the mass-luminosity relationship (page down), simply by raising the luminosity to the 1/3.5 power, yielding:
Star | mv | Mv | LSun | MSun |
Alcyone | 2.86 | -2.79 | 1120 | 7.4 |
Atlas | 3.62 | -2.03 | 555 | 6.1 |
Electra | 3.7 | -1.95 | 515 | 6.0 |
Maia | 3.86 | -1.79 | 445 | 5.7 |
Merope | 4.17 | -1.48 | 334 | 5.3 |
Taygeta | 4.29 | -1.36 | 299 | 5.1 |
Pleione | 5.09 | -0.56 | 143 | 4.1 |
Asterope | 5.31 | -0.34 | 117 | 3.9 |
Celaeno | 5.44 | -0.21 | 104 | 3.8 |
Now let's assume that these stars are using up their fusable isotopes at a rate proportional to their luminosity, that the amount of those isotopes is proportional to their mass, that they're 100 million years old, and that the total lifetime of the Sun (relative to whose luminosity and mass I have expressed the Pleiadeian values in the table) is 10 billion years. Then their remaining lifetimes are:
Star | mv | Mv | LSun | MSun | Years Left |
Alcyone | 2.86 | -2.79 | 1120 | 7.4 | (negative!) |
Atlas | 3.62 | -2.03 | 555 | 6.1 | 10 million |
Electra | 3.7 | -1.95 | 515 | 6.0 | 16 million |
Maia | 3.86 | -1.79 | 445 | 5.7 | 28 million |
Merope | 4.17 | -1.48 | 334 | 5.3 | 57 million |
Taygeta | 4.29 | -1.36 | 299 | 5.1 | 70 million |
Pleione | 5.09 | -0.56 | 143 | 4.1 | 190 million |
Asterope | 5.31 | -0.34 | 117 | 3.9 | 230 million |
Celaeno | 5.44 | -0.21 | 104 | 3.8 | 260 million |
Obviously this doesn't produce an entirely correct result in the case of Alcyone (then again, maybe it's already blown up and going to fry us when the g-rays get here, presumably by 2444 AD, heh). The actual lesson here is that stars that big don't stick around long enough for planets and life to appear. You can read lots more about the Pleiades at this page.
Jay Manifold [1:34 PM]
-- the invasion of Mars, that is; with Opportunity down, an AP story over on ABCNews.com notes that "[a]s of early Sunday, there were a record five spacecraft operating on or around Mars," and reports that the first pictures from Meridiani Planum are "delighting and puzzling scientists." But as Asimov once remarked, delight and puzzlement are the twin heralds of new discoveries.
UPDATE: Color picture of amazing landscape here (hat tip: Fred Kiesche).
Jay Manifold [7:25 AM]
[ 20040124 ]
I arrived just before the scheduled start time of 7 PM. In spite of the impending ice storm, there was a good crowd, and during the business portion of the meeting, the membership secretary reported that we now have 438 voting members in 288 households; this is approximately triple the size of the club 20 years ago and comparable to clubs in much larger cities (like Dallas), indicating a high per capita interest in the hobby. (The Astronomical League office is also located here, in the UMB building at 9201 Ward Parkway.)
On screen in the lecture hall was an orbiter image covering Martian latitudes 1°-3° S and longitudes 352°-356° and labeled "Opportunity Landing Dispersions," with a long, narrow ellipse indicating the landing zone.
Club president David Young announced that he'd obtained a large number of free stick-on Marvin the Martian buttons from Cargo Largo, and that these would be available at the break. More substantial items -- telescopes, including two 8" Newtonians -- may be loaned from the club for free by members. There is now a phone-tree list, maintained by Jackie Beucher, of people who've agreed to be notified at any hour of the night of sudden observing opportunities; Scott Kranz mentioned that an exceptional aurora, bright enough to cast shadows, was visible from the northern US on Thursday night.
As noted on the club website, the next meeting is the 21st rather than the 28th of February to accomodate an appearance by comet discoverer (and PARADE magazine science editor) David Levy. On that same day, ASKC members and guests will be allowed to view rare astronomical manuscripts, including some from Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, at Linda Hall Library, beginning at 2 PM.
Scott then distributed various observing awards, including one I'd never heard of, the 100-asteroid award (to club member Richard Frederick; not coincidentally, the ASKC is the foremost amateur group in the world discovering near-Earth asteroids). KCStar staffer and ICSTARS honcho Vic Winter got a binocular-observing award for finding a large number of deep-sky objects during a Southern Hemisphere trip.
About that time, the projector image on the screen changed to a flat blue rectangle and the words NO SIGNAL, prompting suggestions that it was a "live feed from Spirit."
Powell Observatory director Joe Wright announced that Saturday the 7th will be a work day for anyone who wants to help do some cleaning, repairs, and upgrades. The observatory has a new high-resolution video projector.
The main speaker was Ken Croswell, whose new book is Magnificent Mars. He presented a slide show of maps and photos, mostly from the book. There were several striking images I'd never seen elsewhere, including one of the shadow of Phobos on the planet and an amazing sunset sequence from Pathfinder. There is so much dust in the Martian atmosphere that twilight routinely lasts for two hours.
The northern hemisphere of Mars is distinctly lower in elevation, and has younger surface rocks, than the southern. So the southern hemisphere is far more heavily cratered, and the south pole is four miles higher than the north. He showed a series of maps of the north polar region with hypothetical oceans of 500, 1000, and 1500 meter depths. But no visible shoreline appears even in the sharpest pictures. Several obvious river valleys, however, have been found in various places on the planet.
He also showed a Mars Odyssey ice map (346 kB *.jpg).
Mars has lost 99% of its atmosphere over the history of the Solar System (see this earlier post comparing its atmospheric losses to those of Venus); this is reflected not only in the low surface pressure, but in the isotopic ratios of the remaining gases, especially nitrogen. Nonetheless, enough CO2 remains to raise the surface temperature of the planet by about 10°F. Meteorites from Mars are identified by the distinctive makeup of gas trapped inside them.
During the socializing period after the talk, I found out that I have indeed been assigned to a specific team to help run Powell this year, so instead of just dropping by whenever I feel like it, there will be weeks when I need to be available every night to help with groups that have reserved the facility. Being on a team also entails helping put a program together on a subject of our choosing. The main perk that comes with all this is the ability to open the place up myself and play with the 30" if I'm so inclined. And, you know, I just might. ;)
Jay Manifold [10:10 PM]
A typically nuanced column by the KCStar's Bill Tammeus, Candidates present a difficult choice, is well worth reading. Tammeus is 1) an old-fashioned liberal 2) who lost a nephew on 9/11, giving him a distinctly Jacksonian outlook. As an old-fashioned libertarian, raised by old-fashioned liberals, who felt the scales falling from my eyes on 9/11, I've become rather Jacksonian myself.
(As the Pitch's Tony Ortega reminds me, those who have not registered with the Star may nonetheless use the procedure described here to read its articles.)
Perhaps best of all, Tammeus includes hyperlinks (yes, they appeared in the dead-tree edition, too) to three sources mentioned in the column: the Jeffery Record article, “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism,” which was rather heavily blogged a week or two ago; a CFR website with info on candidates' positions; and Bush's speech to the National Endowment for Democracy back in November.
All this reminds me of a (possibly apocryphal) story my father told me about Gene McCarthy, who at one point during his 1968 campaign was asked a softball question about whether he thought he'd make a good President. After a long pause, he answered that he thought he'd make an adequate President. Such responses did not bring him victory, but that story, in turn, brings to mind the line from Screwtape Proposes a Toast -- "Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether 'democratic behaviour' means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same."
Jay Manifold [5:56 PM]
Astronomers Measure Distance To Well-Known Star is the bland headline of a NASA/JPL news release that describes a finding with cascading implications for the distance measurements to all other stellar assemblages, including open clusters, globular clusters, and other galaxies. This affects estimates of their intrinsic luminosity -- which in combination with the known masses of binary stars, derived from the size of their orbits (also determined from distance measurements) and orbital periods, yields models of stars' internal structure, nuclear reactions, and overall evolution.
A single finding can thereby cut a huge swath through generations of work in astronomy, and seven years ago, that seemed to be happening, as NewScientist.com explains:
... in 1997 .... an enormous database of the distances to more than 100,000 stars was published based on data from the European Space Agency's Hipparcos satellite. It calculated the distances using parallax, i.e. observing a target at widely separated points along our orbit around the Sun and measuring the angle between them to a precision of one milliarcsecond.
Astronomers immediately noticed the distances of about a dozen open clusters differed from traditional figures by as much as 20 per cent. Hipparcos's distance to the Pleiades was about 385 light years, 10 per cent lower.
From mid-northern latitudes, the Pleiades are nearly at the zenith at 8 PM local time in late January; they look like a miniature Big Dipper to the unaided eye. They're located about 15° west-northwest of the bright red star Aldebaran, which in turn is at the end of one of the arms of a V-shaped asterism, the Hyades open cluster, which points southwest. Both the Pleiades and the Hyades are spectacular in binoculars.
The NASA/JPL news release explains:
In the January 22 issue of the journal Nature, astronomers from the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in Pasadena, Calif., report the best-ever distance to the double-star Atlas. The star, along with "wife" Pleione and their daughters, the "seven sisters," are the principal stars of the Pleiades that are visible to the unaided eye, although there are actually thousands of stars in the cluster. Atlas, according to the team's decade of careful interferometric measurements, is somewhere between 434 and 446 light-years from Earth.
Atlas, a/k/a 27 Tauri, is labeled on this striking photograph; it's the star at the end of the "handle." If you want to see the nebulosity (which is actually dust) surrounding the stars in the cluster, though, you'll need at least a 12-inch telescope. Counting how many Pleiads you can see without optical aid is a good test of both your vision and observing conditions; most people see 6 or 7. Having a bit more practice than the average person, I usually can pick out about 10 -- but on one unbelievably good night in April of '97 at my old observing site a few miles south of Possum Kingdom State Park, I saw seventeen, and there have been reports of people seeing as many as two dozen.
Anyway, NASA/JPL says that the new finding "settles a controversy that arose when the European satellite Hipparcos provided a much shorter distance measurement to the Pleiades than expected and contradicted theoretical models of the life cycles of stars," but I don't expect this to be resolved until SIM and Gaia are in operation, which is at least five years away.
Jay Manifold [5:42 AM]
[ 20040123 ]
First of all, I'm now syndicated via Atom; see "Site Feed" at left.
And welcome to The SpaceWriter's Ramblings, by C.C. Petersen, now listed under "Science and/or Space Bloggers."
Jay Manifold [6:08 PM]
Spirit Rover Problem Diagnosed
Looks like it may be hard to fix.
Jay Manifold [11:43 AM]
War on Drugs Supports North Korean Regime
Austin Bay on StrategyPage (hat tip: InstaPundit):
Kim Jong-Il is running an extortion racket. His North Korean totalitarian police state is a totalitarian crime state. Various criminal enterprises insure its Communist elites have plenty to eat. In 2003, Australia seized a North Korean freighter packed with heroin. The ship sported expanded fuel tanks for long-distance operations. The bust proved smuggling smack is a North Korean state policy, providing cash for Kim’s caviar.
-- from which we see that in addition to ending a majority of violent crime in the US and keeping al-Qa'eda from getting rich, dumping narcotics Prohibition in the landfill of history could save several million people from starvation and prevent a nuclear war.
Jay Manifold [11:40 AM]
[ 20040122 ]
Contest: What Embarrasses You About Your Cultural Compatriots?
Covington reminds readers that "progressive" ought to imply, oddly enough, "belief in progress," and is properly embarrassed (language warning: uninhibited comments) by stereotypical left-wing opposition to the Bush space initiative. One need not subscribe to the progressive agenda -- I certainly don't -- to sympathize with someone trying to keep a political movement from winning a Darwin award (and winning us all a Darwin award if it takes over).
This leads to a new contest here on Arcturus, with e-mailed entries consisting of the following:
- What subculture in which you participate do you consider the most important?
- What do other members of that subculture say or do that makes you feel like flushing yourself down the nearest toilet rather than admit that you have anything to do with them?
Enter by sending me a suitable diatribe. Prizes consist of the usual intangibles, ie mentions in this blog. Self-referential entries, eg "I'm embarrassed by bloggers who make up stupid contests," will be resolutely ignored. As always, first-time e-mailers will have to batter their way through Spam Arrest.
By way of providing an example, here's one of mine.
Jay Manifold [7:31 PM]
[ 20040121 ]
Is explained over on Chicago Boyz. Enjoy!
Jay Manifold [3:52 PM]
[ 20040119 ]
In another instance of defending someone I don't ordinarily align with, I note that Gwynne Dyer, last seen in this space getting a full-blown Fisking, has written a column in which he breaks away from the pack (emphasis added):
In the short run, a permanent human presence on the moon or even on Mars does little to enhance the survivability of the human race, since such settlements would remain tiny and dependent on support from Earth. But technological advances accumulate, the energy available to modify inhospitable environments increases almost exponentially, and what is unimaginable now may be quite feasible in a hundred years' time.
It really would be a good idea to spread the human race to a few more places (or many more), because keeping all our eggs in the single vulnerable basket called Earth is not a smart long-term survival strategy if we have any alternatives. We don't yet, but it would be a good idea to start working on them.
Dyer's point about exponentiating capabilities is emphasized in David Criswell's work on lunar solar power and cislunar industry in general:
At the [first] Commercial Lunar Base Development Symposium [in Houston in July 1999], I delivered a paper which concluded: “What will cislunar space be like in 2169, the bicentenary of mankind’s first venture onto the lunar surface? In 1983, David R. Criswell of Cis-Lunar, Inc., calculated that even with only modest growth of space industries, the L4 and L5 points of the Earth-Moon system could accommodate 40 trillion people by the mid-22nd century. Only one-millionth of the space in the L4 and L5 volumes would be taken up by the necessary habitats, which would resemble the largest of the O’Neill-type ‘space colonies.’ While it seems unlikely that humanity’s numbers will have increased by four orders of magnitude in less than two centuries, there can be little doubt that our technological prowess will be immense. The projects undertaken by the space industry on and near the Moon in the coming decades will be the first steps in building a civilization which compares to the US today – in population, technology, and physical extent – as we now compare to Anglo-Saxon England at the turn of the last millennium.”
That's the future. And Gwynne Dyer gets it.
Jay Manifold [3:47 PM]
What I said then.
Jay Manifold [11:22 AM]
That would be the "Bush never visited JSC" story, which John F. Dickerson drags out again in TIME:
Though Bush's proposal gives a booster-size lift to NASA, his devotion to the space agency is a recent conversion. He showed no great fascination with the space program while he was Governor of Texas.
He never visited the Johnson Space Center even though it was just around the corner ...
It pains me to have to defend W, having never voted for him. But this is silly. Suppose he never visited JSC while he was Governor because it's a Federal facility? And suppose he visited the most closely-related State facility? What would that do to this argument?
Well, whaddaya know; turns out he did (the month after the Pathfinder/Sojourner landing, in fact). And no, he wasn't especially interested, but someone with great influence in the Administration certainly was. You'll have to read that whole post to find out who.
Incidental data: distance from Austin to JSC, 232 miles; distance from Austin to Ft Davis, 468 miles. Just around the corner. ;)
Jay Manifold [11:17 AM]
[ 20040118 ]
A while back, I wrote: "We may ... expect those with vested interests in regulating human activities or propagating territorial conflicts on Earth's surface to violently resist the creation of a [space-colonizing] civilization."
Just in case you're thinking that's a bit much ... have a look at this Silflay Hraka post.
Jay Manifold [9:40 PM]
CEV Modularity, Fiscal Analysis -- And A Warning
In the unlikely event that anybody grazing in here hasn't already seen it, Bruce Chan, a commenter over on Transterrestrial Musings, has put together a good conceptual illustration of a modular Crewed Exploration Vehicle.
See also Marcus Lindroos' fiscal analysis of the initiative, which indicates that it is quite comparable to Apollo in terms of cost and schedule.
Oh, and I read where commenter Ron writes that
This is what Ron thinks is "virtually nonexistent .... worthless propaganda." I documented an outgrowth of the mentality thus displayed earlier. Make no mistake: any development of a spacefaring civilization will be handicapped by widespread public refusal to accept the historical sciences.
Maybe somebody should write a book -- The Past and its Enemies. Heh.
Jay Manifold [10:08 AM]
[ 20040117 ]
Partnerships and Infrastructural Elements in Bush Plan
The final part of the Sietzen/Cowing series, Beyond the Moon: Inside Bush's space plan, is now up over on UPI. Excerpt:
... the issue of how to leverage commercial space entrepreneurs or companies -- even universities -- into a new attempt at moon landings was taken seriously.
Potential private partners could contribute in various ways. A Global Positioning System or GPS satellite system in lunar orbit could guide all incoming craft to precision lunar landings. If operational, such a system could allow smaller space vehicles with crews to land near cargos previously dropped down from orbit nearby. In that way, mission planners could simplify the complexity of the moon lander's electronics, keeping costs down.
The navigational approach would allow somewhat smaller ships to be built, because more accurate positioning cuts down on fuel requirements and hence size. Smaller spacecraft need smaller rockets -- and existing space launchers could be procured from existing launch companies in place of the massive, Saturn-type rockets used during the Apollo landings of the 1960s and '70s.
The lunar GPS idea also could be applied to Mars exploration. Indeed, NASA's current plans for missions to the red planet include the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter. Scheduled for launch in 2009, the MTO will act as the telecommunications center for missions to the red planet for years to come. It would seem an ideal candidate for navigational data relays as well.
As details emerge, the initiative appears considerably more creative than the first announcement made it sound. Which does not make the considerable project-management risks go away, or alter the depressing picture of a two-digit number of people in space 60 years after the beginning of the Space Age. But there has been some out-of-the-box thinking going on.
Jay Manifold [8:43 PM]
Annoying registration is unfortunately required to read Space plan leaves many questions, the KCStar's editorial on the Administration proposal, which I am proud to say impressed me as among the most nuanced commentaries I've seen to date. Excerpts:
How much is it going to cost, and can we afford it? How does space exploration compare with other vital areas of science that need federal backing? What are the prospects for developing a new spacecraft that can safely and reliably send humans, in Bush's words, “forward into the universe”? And has NASA reformed itself enough to handle the job?
NASA's history of underestimating costs should encourage Congress to insist on more careful and realistic cost estimates than the agency has often provided.
In 1984, for instance, the cost estimate for the International Space Station was $8 billion. But Congress already has appropriated $32 billion for it.
Jay Manifold [4:27 PM]
-- is up over on Redwood Dragon; an offstage catastrophe, beautifully rendered.
Jay Manifold [10:14 AM]
Drake's Drum points out, correctly, that I wrote a low-level critique of a high-level proposal in my post below. "Sir Francis" thereby earns a permalink, as does Christopher Luebcke of Freedom, Peace and Chaos, in spite of being a Packers fan. ;)
And I finally got around to permalinking The Laughing Wolf (I know there are others to whom I owe reciprocity -- I'm slowly catching up).
UPDATE: Further reinforcing Drake's point, I find (via Rand Simberg) a more detailed account of the proposal, which includes these heartening passages:
The CEV is to be designed as a modular system where components could be mixed and matched to return crews from the ISS, as well as transport people on lunar and deep-space voyages. The plan is to first develop the vehicle to resupply and bring crews from the station, then to build ships that could fly a moon landing as early as 2015.
NASA's new moon ships ... would carry a series of modules, propulsion stages and small cargo units that could be mixed and matched depending on the flight planned. One of the biggest drawbacks of the space shuttles has been their lack of flexibility. Designed for hauling large payloads and modules into space in their cavernous bays, they could not be reconfigured to bring up just a small amount of equipment. NASA has a space trucking fleet which new only one type of cargo: big.
The new plan calls for an evolutionary mode of development, with each step moving astronauts further away from Earth and closer to the moon -- a fleet of modular capsules and interchangeable units. In the trucking fleet analogy, these would be NASA's tankers, small pickup trucks, delivery vans, SUVs and campers.
This tells me that Federal planners have learned at least some lessons from the disastrous "requirement herding" that preceded the development of the Shuttle three decades ago.
Jay Manifold [10:14 AM]
[ 20040116 ]
For Fans of the "Powers of Ten" Movie
Currently tied for #11 on Blogdex, A Sense of Scale: A Visual Comparison of Various Distances.
Jay Manifold [10:15 AM]
This is just to mention a few items you might have missed; anybody grazing in here will have already read through the more prominent blogs.
Christopher Genovese, a statistician, has a good summary of the difficulties, in a post entitled Moonbase Alpha, over on Signal + Noise.
Those of you who were intrigued by my mention of Paul Davies' one-way Mars trip (in point #5 of the post immediately below) may wish to check out new spaceblogger Patrick Banks, who comments on Davies' proposal over on Martian Sermon.
I've permalinked both these blogs, as well as Covington, in the Science/Space section of the blogroll.
Oh, and read The Long View (link will eventually be here) while you're at it, if only for his insight into what life after nanotech may really be like: "... more and more people can lead a sanitized version of the neolithic life."
Jay Manifold [7:31 AM]
[ 20040115 ]
Print Media Reaction to Moon/Mars Proposal
So, OK, I did a LexisNexis™ search on "Mars AND editorial" among US newspapers from Sunday until today, and got 168 hits. I read through the first 100, and found the following types of reactions:
- Rarely, support for the status quo. Not the Administration's proposal, but what NASA is (sort of) doing right now: "We must get our shuttles flying again and make the Alpha space station a platform for human study and travel." -- Yankton Press & Dakotan
- A sizeable minority expressed unqualified support for the proposal. I'm not sure how the Telegraph (London, UK) snuck into the search results, but its editorialists provided by far the best turn of phrase, with: "Americans, thank Heaven, do not always think in strictly practical terms .... To walk on another world, or even to make the attempt, would ennoble every member of the human race."
- The majority expressed significantly qualified support, with concerns of cost, prioritization, and schedule (but only the New Orleans Times-Picayune mentioned local jobs, in their case at the Michoud Assembly Facility). The usual message boiled down to, nice idea, but not yet. Writing in Newsday, James Pinkerton pointed out: "Bush, who will be out of office no later than 2009, has set target dates many years after his own presidency is over. And his proposal to increase funding by an additional $1 billion over five years is tokenism, compared to the true cost of going back to the moon and then on to Mars."
- A few explicitly raised project-management concerns, without entirely opposing the program. The Washington Post said: "[A] directive to return to the moon and ultimately use it as a 'launching point for missions beyond' seems more likely to result in yet another ambitious but unfocused and underfinanced goal for NASA." The Orlando Sentinel also noted: "[T]he president, Congress and NASA will need to set clear priorities and stick with them to make this bold vision possible."
- Several writers peed outside the box. The Harrisburg Patriot-News wants the program to "be, from the beginning, an international quest." Apollo 17 moonwalker Harrison Schmitt wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times touting the role of private business, especially for recovering helium-3 from the Moon. Writing in USA Today, space journalist and author James Oberg sensibly suggested: "Instead of going to the moon or Mars, there could be a human mission to an asteroid passing near Earth." Perhaps the boldest of all was an op-ed by physicist Paul Davies in the New York Times: "There is ... an obvious way to slash the costs and bring Mars within reach of early manned exploration. The answer lies with a one-way mission."
- A few, including Tom Teepen in the Dayton Daily News and Mike Thomas in the Orlando Sentinel, flatly opposed the initiative (or, depending on how you look at it, predicted its failure) on the basis of its cost.
- In general, editorials were less friendly to the initiative than op-ed pieces, which were often written by specialists with longstanding involvement in space exploration.
- Finally, the tone of calls and letters to the editor was overwhelmingly negative. I didn't count, but my impression is that 80-90% were opposed, with a majority citing social safety net concerns.
Just another reminder that the rest of the country is not very much like the blogosphere.
Jay Manifold [5:18 PM]
Regular correspondent Bill Roule now forwards Holman W. Jenkins, Jr's Mars: Longevity Insurance For Humankind (once again, the link will work for just another few days, as it's for subscribers only), in which Jenkins correctly notes the project risks:
While economically and technologically within reach, getting to Mars poses an improbable high-wire act for project managers dependent on congressional appropriations. As former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine put it recently, "Any mission that takes 20 years to accomplish will require the uninterrupted support of five consecutive administrations, 10 consecutive Congresses, and 20 consecutive budgets."
-- and makes a glancing allusion to Heinlein (see final quote on page):
our eggs remain in one basket, the earth, within a bigger basket, the solar system. Nature creates probabilities that, given enough time, are certainties: Someday something will bump into the earth, perhaps fatally.
I note that this gives "secure the blessings of liberty to ... our posterity" a rather larger meaning. Think of it as the ultimate Constitutional penumbra.
Jay Manifold [10:20 AM]
No, but that's the way this story will get spun:
The bill, which Republican Rep. Wayne Cooper of Camdenton said was brought to him by individuals in the St. Louis area, also would require school science curriculums to define evolution as a theory resting on a historical hypothesis that has not, and cannot, be proved.
There are similarities, in that the bill was drafted by an off-stage and unidentified creationist group, and ultimately rests on unbelief in the historical sciences -- but the Kansas Board of Education never directed what should be taught, merely specifying types of questions to be left off of state assessment tests. (Constitutionally, their decision was sound; three-eighths of Kansans with children at home agreed with it. We should not hesitate to avoid abusing a near-majority of the population by taking their money and using it to force their children to regurgitate material they find religiously offensive.)
Missourian Rep. Cooper is quite a bit more ... ambitious:
The seven-page bill defines scientific terms and how they should be applied to the teaching of evolution and intelligent design. It would require equal treatment of both theories, in the amount of textbook space and the time spent in classroom instruction.
If the measure becomes law, teachers who do not follow its requirements could lose their jobs.
Grazing through the bill as introduced, we find lengthy passages defiantly denying the existence of either theistic evolution or any speciation whatsoever; the telling phrase "original species" occurs six times. But let's cut to the chase:
As used in this section, the following terms mean:
(6) "Equal treatment", the approximate equal teaching of each specified viewpoint for a single course of instruction in course textbooks and teacher-directed activities as follows:
(b) Teacher-directed activities teach each viewpoint approximately equal. Teacher directed activities include lecture time, visual aids, reading assignments, homework, experiments, speakers, test material, and other activities directed by the teacher, with freedom to lengthen, shorten, or substitute activities to provide an approximately equal teaching of each viewpoint for a specific course of instruction;
(c) In the absence of course textbooks which provide equal treatment, written interim material may provide alternate viewpoints, with interim textbook material developed pursuant to subsection 5 of this section allowed to be used for a period not to exceed the compliance date specified in subsection 4 of this section;
4. New textbooks purchased after January 1, 2006, for use in Missouri public elementary and secondary schools shall meet the requirements of this section. All textbooks used after January 1, 2016, in Missouri public elementary and secondary schools shall meet the requirements of this section.
5. The state commissioner of education shall appoint a temporary committee of no fewer than five individuals who are knowledgeable of science and supportive of intelligent design to serve without compensation. The committee shall develop supplemental textbook material for interim use by schools for the teaching of standard science and biological intelligent design by September 1, 2005. Interim textbook material shall be accessible for copying on the department of elementary and secondary education Internet web site without cost or restriction.
Things are going to get pretty lively around here if this makes it out of committee.
Jay Manifold [10:16 AM]
[ 20040114 ]
Yeah, I know my next post was going to be about how I'd do a space program (Real Soon Now, promise). Instead, this time, I'm channeling Andy Cline, and not doing a particularly good job of it; but a big part of this story is how it gets reported, and TV cannot be ignored by anyone trying to understand the public's reaction. So, anyway, CNN Headline News' reporting of the initiative at 8 PM CST consisted of Rudi Bakhtiar attempting to interview Dennis E. Powell, who struggled to explain the rationale behind returning to the Moon, making fragmentary mention of new energy sources, and predicted that it will take 40 years (!) to put a man on Mars. Bakhtiar quoted the $86 billion figure from this story, implying that NASA gets that much every year -- that's actually the next 5 fiscal years combined -- and asked whether an additional $1 billion, which is only one year's increase -- could make enough difference. Powell, having stumbled through his earlier answers and thereby run out the clock, was, in effect, cut off after saying "yes."
Sigh. Anybody getting their news from TV is likely to come away with the entirely inadvertently correct impression that the proposal isn't well thought-out; such an impression will be based on the suspicion that the Administration is trying to be inspirational on the cheap. But as I attempt to explain below, conflicting and missed requirements represent a far greater hazard than inadequate budgets.
I intend to do a Lexis-Nexis search sometime in the next few days to review and categorize editorial reactions to the Administration's proposal, but I suspect that the public's actual response, based much more on TV than newspapers, will not be reflected well in print. Except, perhaps, in letters to the editor, so I'll keep an eye on the local ones.
Jay Manifold [8:48 PM]
Examining the proposal from the perspective of the post immediately below, I find the following risks:
- Resuming ISS/Shuttle activity draws down available budget by $~6 billion/year, threatening schedule risk to other activities for minimal marginal gain in medical understanding. Per the CAIB report, Shuttle operation cannot be routinized, due to poor optimization and conflicting requirements; catastrophic failure risk will remain at ~2% per flight.
- Crew Exploration Vehicle is required to function as a crew-transport vehicle from Earth's surface to low Earth orbit, from LEO to the surface of the Moon, as a crew habitat on the Moon, and possibly as transport from the lunar surface to Mars. These are barely compatible requirements at best and introduce cost, schedule, and quality risks nearly as bad as those of the Shuttle.
- Specifying that the next destination after the Moon is Mars omits obvious intermediaries, namely the L1 and L2 points of the Earth-Moon and Sun-Earth systems, respectively; low- Dv near-Earth asteroids; and possibly Phobos and Deimos as well, though it may be inferring too much to assume that they have been precluded as destinations. This introduces quality/technical risks into the Mars mission by skipping several ideal test environments, and cost risks by launching the Mars mission from the lunar surface rather than, say, L1.
- Oversight by NASA and new Commission is diluted by election cycles -- 9 Congressional elections and 5 Presidential elections between now and the end of 2020 -- and various imponderables of a dangerous world; substantial cost and schedule risks are all but unavoidable.
- The proposal projects a 4-year gap in availability of an American manned space transport capability (2010-2014), incurring various schedule and quality risks associated with procuring transport from other nations. It does not mention private alternatives.
Next: How I'd do it.
Jay Manifold [4:32 PM]
Project Management "Triple Constraint" Summary of Bush Space Proposal
I have reformatted the information at Fact Sheet: a Renewed Spirit of Discovery, rearranging its contents in terms of the triple constraint in project management. Remember: cheap, fast, good; pick two. ;)
Scope
- "The United States will launch a re-focused research effort on board the International Space Station to better understand and overcome the effects of human space flight on astronaut health, increasing the safety of future space missions. To accomplish this goal, NASA will return the Space Shuttle to flight consistent with safety concerns and the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board."
- "[T]he United States will begin developing a new manned exploration vehicle to explore beyond our orbit to other worlds -- the first of its kind since the Apollo Command Module."
- "The Crew Exploration Vehicle will also be capable of transporting astronauts and scientists to the International Space Station after the Shuttle is retired."
- "The extended human presence on the Moon will enable astronauts to develop new technologies and harness the Moon's abundant resources to allow manned exploration of more challenging environments. An extended human presence on the Moon could reduce the costs of further exploration, since lunar-based spacecraft could escape the Moon's lower gravity using less energy at less cost than Earth-based vehicles. The experience and knowledge gained on the Moon will serve as a foundation for human missions beyond the Moon, beginning with Mars."
- "NASA will increase the use of robotic exploration to maximize our understanding of the solar system and pave the way for more ambitious manned missions. Probes, landers, and similar unmanned vehicles will serve as trailblazers and send vast amounts of knowledge back to scientists on Earth."
- "To ensure that NASA maintains a sense of focus and direction toward accomplishing this new mission, the President has directed NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe to review all current space flight and exploration and direct them toward the President's goals. The President also formed a Commission on the Implementation of U.S. Space Exploration Policy to advise NASA on the long-term implementation of the President's vision."
Schedule
- "America will complete its work on the International Space Station by 2010."
- "The Shuttle's chief purpose over the next several years will be to help finish assembly of the Station, and the Shuttle will be retired by the end of this decade after nearly 30 years of service."
- "The new spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, will be developed and tested by 2008 and will conduct its first manned mission no later than 2014."
- "America will return to the Moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020 and use it as a stepping stone for more ambitious missions. A series of robotic missions to the Moon, similar to the Spirit Rover that is sending remarkable images back to Earth from Mars, will explore the lunar surface beginning no later than 2008 to research and prepare for future human exploration. Using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, humans will conduct extended lunar missions as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods."
Resources
- "NASA spends, and will continue to spend, less than 1 percent of the Federal budget."
- "The funding added for exploration will total $12 billion over the next five years. Most of this added funding for new exploration will come from reallocation of $11 billion that is currently within the five-year total NASA budget of $86 billion."
- "In the Fiscal Year (FY) 2005 budget, the President will request an additional $1 billion to NASA's existing five-year plan, or an average of $200 million per year."
- "From 1992 to 2000, NASA's budget decreased by a total of 5 percent. Since the year 2000, NASA's budget has increased by approximately 3 percent per year."
- "From the current 2004 level of $15.4 billion, the President's proposal will increase NASA's budget by an average of 5 percent per year over the next three years, and at approximately 1 percent or less per year for the two years after those."
I'll have reactions to specific items later today.
Jay Manifold [2:24 PM]
[ 20040113 ]
"We are all in the gutter ..."
"... but some of us are looking at the stars." -- Oscar Wilde
(UPDATE: Sean O'Hara of Gibberish in Neutral informs me that Conason is now saying it's all a joke. Since I'm not here to tear people down, the following has become somewhat optional reading.)
Joe Conason, unfortunately, is just in the gutter, period. The esteemed Derek Lowe sent an e-mail to Rand Simberg and myself, pointing to the latest excrudescence over on Salon (to add insult to injury, you'll have to watch a brief ad unless you're a subscriber). Conason thoughtfully explains that the Bush Mars mission proposal is all about oil Halliburton.
I am not making this up. It'd be really scary if Conason were on the level, but he also recycles the already-debunked "scandal" about the "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" document. So the column is reassuringly inaccurate throughout.
Conason writes: "Dreams about drilling on Mars date back several years at least. In 1998, a handful of top firms, including Halliburton, Shell and Schlumberger, showed up for a NASA 'workshop' at Los Alamos, N.M., to discuss the prospects." This may be the first-ever instance of a journalist using scare quotes when referring to a NASA workshop. Yeah, we know all about those NASA "workshops" -- they're just fronts for Big Bad Corporations!
Of course, anybody bothering to read the summary of that very workshop would find a list of the purposes of drilling on Mars, and requirements therefor. Note that core samples are a must; this diagram depicts all related activities, most of which are clearly direct analogs of subsurface prospecting on Earth. And who does that sort of thing for a living?
Well, whaddaya know, people like Baker Hughes, which does the same sort of work as Halliburton; at this page, we find: "Since summer 2001 the Johnson Space Center and the Baker Hughes Company have been developing an autonomous Mars drill .... [t]he drill is intended to bore holes from meters to kilometers in depth .... creating a core which is then broken off and extracted to the surface by cable."
On my planet, Earth, the best technology is developed by people whose livelihood depends on it. The economic system that translates such incentives into new capabilities has made this country immensely wealthy, enabling it to simultaneously explore other planets and support socially parasitic "journalists."
But I have a larger point to inflict on my readership.
There is a mentality we're already seeing on display in many of the reactions to the leaked details of the Administration's new space proposal, and which will burst out into the open after tomorrow's announcement. It's an awe-free worldview, where every trace of wonder has been removed and replaced by suspicion. Its holders see no beauty in the Universe, only scheming businesspeople fleecing the commonweal -- or, perhaps, political operatives who will stop at nothing to re-elect the President.
This is not to be confused with criticism of the proposal by people who want to see space exploration done better, or space opened up to greater public participation and enjoyment. I'm talking about commentators whose first (if not only) priority is the calculation of political advantage and imputation of evil motives. Abstractions like improvement and enjoyment do not enter their thoughts. They lie in the gutter, and do not look upward.
Here is what it was like to look upward, at the first Texas Star Party I attended, fourteen years ago, a few months after relocating to D/FW:
The final night (Sat 26 May 90) was the best for naked-eye and binocular observation I have ever experienced. I started by looking at the crescent Moon, then at Saturn, with my own 'scope, then walked up to the upper field to hang out with some KC people (the Machins, Nederman, Vic Winter, etc.) I'd found earlier in the week. I spent some considerable time just looking at the Milky Way and sweeping it with binoculars; the detail seemed inexhaustible. Vic and another guy decided to go after Pluto [his telescope was a 12½" f/5.6 Newtonian]; I offered to help. The subsequent effort took an hour and a half, but we found it. I looked through Vertigo-1 [a 25" f/4.5 on a Dobsonian mount, so called because of the height of the ladder required to reach the eyepiece] at M51, the Whirlpool, and it looked just like the pictures.
Back down the hill to my 'scope [13.1" f/4.5, also a Dobsonian]. I found Uranus and Neptune, both in Sagittarius, spotting Neptune's moon Triton for the first time. Then I got adventurous and started hunting for Barnard's Star, a very faint red dwarf that is the second-closest star to the Sun, after the alpha Centauri system. I never would have picked it out of the starfield, but it's a deep red color, so I could tell which one it was.
Jupiter was up by then, so I was able to see for myself that the Great Red Spot had reappeared, and the South Equatorial Belt, normally one of the most obvious features, had disappeared, as reported by numerous observers. (In the six months since, it has come back; no one yet knows what caused all those clouds to change color or dissipate.) At this point, wiped out, I crawled into the van and went to sleep.
I awoke at 6:15. The sky was already turning blue. I climbed out of the van, uncovered the 'scope, and took a quick peek at Mars, directly overhead, and Venus, brilliant in the southeast. In one night I've seen every planet in the Solar System except Mercury.
I still remember walking down the hill at probably one in the morning, after helping find Pluto, and thinking, this is what it means to be human.
Keep looking up, whatever tomorrow's news may bring.
UPDATE: Instalanche in progress! I have two requests for my visitors: if you live within, say, a 3-hour drive of KC, consider attending one or more of the events described here; and no matter where you live, poke around a bit (see especially the posts under "Important Stuff" in the left sidebar).
FURTHER UPDATE: Nuanced commentary over on Byzantium's Shores.
Jay Manifold [7:15 PM]
I've been helping put this together, so I'm going to plug it in my blog. Register for the events described in this news release here.
Virginia Postrel, author of The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, will be visiting the Kansas City area in early February to deliver several talks on the economic, cultural, social, personal, and political implications of the growing importance of aesthetics in business and society.
"Virginia Postrel is plenty smart, she understands how design works, and in The Substance of Style she connects a million seemingly disparate dots into a fresh, clear-eyed, persuasive picture of our culture circa 2003," says Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century. "But the most amazing and delightful thing about this book -- this serious, footnoted work of social analysis -- is that it's driven by a celebration of pleasure."
Postrel will address the Kansas City chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts at 6:30 PM on Thursday, February 5th in the Epperson Auditorium of the Kansas City Art Institute, 44th & Oak streets.
During the afternoon of Friday, February 6th, she will visit the Kansas City Remodeling Show and the Metropolitan Lawn & Garden Show at the American Royal Center.
On Saturday, February 7th, at 7 PM, Postrel will be the featured speaker at a dinner, co-sponsored by the Eudoxa Think Tank and the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy, at the Four Points by Sheraton Hotel, 45th & Main streets.
Jay Manifold [11:28 AM]
[ 20040112 ]
Europeans and Japanese Pay Russians to Fly Americans in Space
That's the de facto policy about to be proposed by the Administration:
With the U.S. shuttle fleet grounded, NASA has been forced to rely on Soyuz spacecraft to carry humans to and from the space station.
Russia is technically in violation of the Iran Non-Proliferation Act of 2000. The U.S. government cannot purchase Russian goods or services until Russia changes its policy toward Iran to comply with nuclear non-proliferation requirements.
The situation could require NASA to rely on the other countries participating in the station program to provide funding to Russia for Soyuz flights so Americans can continue to live and work aboard the station.
In fact, the U.S. government has been undertaking this indirect strategy for some time.
I suppose it'll work, but it sure won't look good.
Jay Manifold [2:22 PM]
Via Technorati, an article in the SFChronicle that points to this vital piece of legislation (23 kB *.pdf), which I think should be read aloud, slowly, on C-SPAN.
In a related item from the Ft Worth Star-Telegram that I spotted on Blogdex over the weekend, Dave Lieber reports that a local school district employee thinks that her job includes enforcing this:
Students should not be of the opinion that it is acceptable to abuse the privileges that are afforded them by the taxpayers. If they are allowed to experiment and do things on the computers that the teachers have not specifically given them permission to do, we would never get any computer education accomplished.
-- related in the sense that the promulgators are both control freaks. And, of course, technologically inept. (A nice follow-up to the second item is here.)
Jay Manifold [2:21 PM]
[ 20040110 ]
-- is the title of my latest guest post over on Chicago Boyz. Enjoy!
Jay Manifold [12:47 PM]
[ 20040109 ]
Regular correspondent (and onetime fellow student at Chicago) Bill Roule sends Raising the Mars Bar, a WSJ column by William E. Burrows, "the director of NYU's graduate Science and Environmental Reporting Program." It's for subscribers only, but the link should work for a few days. Excerpts:
The irony of NASA's scoring a 300-million-mile hole-in-one by landing the Spirit rover in the Gusev crater on Mars -- while, barely 200 miles from home, an occupied but uncompleted International Space Station circles forlornly above grounded space shuttles -- is practically Shakespearean.
Seven exceptional human beings disintegrated in a $1.8 billion spacecraft whose mission was to carry ants, spiders, bees, scummy Central Park pond water, urine, a magnetized New York City MetroCard and other things to orbit for "science experiments" by American and foreign school children. One experiment was purportedly designed to find out whether spiders would spin different kinds of webs in near-zero gravity. Another was intended to see whether ordinarily short-tempered bees became even more so in space. The urine, euphemistically called "space water," was to be mixed with paint to see if it could be used instead of precious real water to color abodes on the Moon.
The purpose is not abstract adventure. That's compelling in comic books, not on Capitol Hill. The reason for populating space is to help assure the survival of civilization, both against its own murderous proclivities and in a dangerous universe, by spreading its seed. The Moon is the best place to begin that process because it is close and has the mineral and other constituents necessary to support life. And a settlement would be a very good place to keep a continuously updated archive of our civilization's record as a hedge against a human-created or natural catastrophe on the home planet.
That -- protecting Earth and the civilization that dwells on it -- is the one vital reason to have a space program involving humans. It is so important nothing else comes close.
Bravo!
Jay Manifold [5:36 PM]
The latest news has us taking ten years to put unmanned spacecraft on the Moon and in lunar orbit, considerably longer than it took the first time around:
... the first missions to the moon under the new Bush initiative -- tentatively scheduled for 2013 -- would use robotic probes and orbiting spacecraft.
The orbiters could be derivatives of the current fleet of reconnaissance satellites now used around Mars. The surface vehicles could be advanced versions of the Mars Exploration Rovers ...
Then there's this: "Sources also said private enterprise could play an important role in designing and building the moon craft involved in the early stages of the lunar exploration program." Private enterprise built all the Apollo hardware -- under government contract, which is exactly what would occur under this proposal. This sounds like a lame attempt to buy off supporters of commercial space.
But the biggest whopper deserves to be set off by itself:
"This should end the tired old argument between manned and unmanned space flight," a source predicted.
That argument keeps going because it's the furthest thing from tired. A single manned flight of a few days' duration costs as much as a multi-year unmanned planetary mission. The cost differential is nearly two orders of magnitude. Eliminating one year of Shuttle/ISS activity would pay for tens of robotic probes and enable the exploration of every planet in the Solar System.
I currently perceive this proposal as a huge helping of pork for every major space constituency -- the planetary scientists, the back-to-the-Moon supporters, the Mars Society, and commercial space -- simultaneously unfocused and overcentralized. And if this article is any indication, the Administration will try to divert attention to the whiz-bang vaporhardware being bandied about: lunar RVs, robotic cranes, etc.
We've seen this kind of political decisionmaking and (to coin a phrase) requirements-herding before. It's what happened 30 years ago in order to get the Shuttle accepted by DoD and through Congress. The result was a spacecraft which was so poorly optimized that it could not be operated reliably.
I don't, of course, expect a single vehicle to come out of this -- that's too stupid even for the government -- but I do expect an unmistakeable one-size-fits-all approach, resulting in gross inefficiencies. And a tiny number of humans actually in space at any given time.
Jay Manifold [4:16 PM]
Amazing New Pictures from Mars
Well, sorta; see this week's Photoshop Phriday. Language warning. Taste warning. General luridity (luridness?) warning. Don't say I didn't warn you. And definitely don't be drinking coffee while grazing through those images.
Jay Manifold [11:44 AM]
Ordovician Extinction Caused by GRB?
Thanks to regular contributor Mike Daley for forwarding Theory: Mass Extinction by Our Own Sun, by the AP's Paul Recer, which has a local angle: Adrian Melott has delivered several talks to the ASKC.
[Melott] said a gamma ray beam striking the Earth would break up molecules in the stratosphere, causing the formation of nitrous oxide and other chemicals that would destroy the ozone layer and shroud the planet in a brown smog.
"The sky would get brown, but there would be intense ultraviolet radiation from the Sun striking the surface," he said. The radiation would be at least 50 times above normal, powerful enough to kill exposed life.
In a second effect, the brown smog would cause the Earth to cool, triggering an ice age, Melott said.
Over on USS Clueless, Steven den Beste suggests that h Carinae presents a similar danger. I note, however, that its declination of nearly -60° means that no point on Earth above 30° N latitude would experience any g-ray flux from such an event, and there would be relatively little radiation anywhere north of the Equator -- On The Beach in reverse, as it were. h Carinae's distance of nearly 10,000 light-years is another protective factor, as is the fact that the g-rays from GRBs are emitted in beams, rather than omnidirectionally, so we'd have to get fairly unlucky to be zapped by one.
Melott's mechanisms, however, may not be the only ways that a relatively nearby supernova could cause a mass extinction on Earth; see this post from May 2002, and its predecessor, for details.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Steven den Beste for referring readers to this post.
Jay Manifold [10:20 AM]
[ 20040108 ]
I have very mixed emotions about this. On the one hand, it gets rid of the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, which are hideously expensive and unproductive. On the other hand, it seems contrived, not to say cobbled together; it does absolutely nothing to get large numbers of ordinary Americans into space (graze over to Transterrestrial Musings for an earful on this); and portions of it are, as described, just bizarre ("the early moon missions would use existing rockets," but no existing rocket has anything like the lift capability of a Saturn V; "[t]he first manned Mars expeditions would attempt to orbit the red planet in advance of landings -- much as Apollo 8 and 10 orbited the moon but did not land" -- but the launch windows would keep them stuck in Mars orbit for a year and a half!).
I'm frankly more interested in the phenomena of 1) who in the Bush Administration is really fascinated with space and 2) the reaction from (non-mathematical) academic elites and journalists, who I expect will be flummoxed by the whole idea of anybody doing anything in space -- this notorious example has been getting a lot of linkage this week. There will be many, many more such opinion pieces in the days ahead, not arguing for a better approach to space, but questioning, in a profoundly ignorant manner, the relevance of, well, the rest of the Universe.
Jay Manifold [9:40 PM]
(Ref this earlier post.) This is by way of welcoming Blog o'RAM, home of the justifiably famous NoBody Count, to the blogroll; Blog o'RAM has Did someone say "bad omens"?, which points to Meteorite hits Iran.
Not much info available on this, but the report is intriguing, mentioning "minor damage to residential units" and saying that "the impact was felt up to one kilometre away." This alone would be enough to make it the most energetic meteorite to physically strike a populated area in modern times.
Now, bumping this Richter Scale up against this comparison of Richter magnitude with Mercalli intensity, I suggest a very approximate energy-equivalent of ~200 kg of TNT, or ~800 MJ. Solving the kinetic-energy equation for mass yields the following range of values by velocity:
v (km/sec) | m (kg) |
40 | 1 |
30 | 2 |
20 | 4 |
10 | 16 |
5 | 64 |
1 | 1600 |
I suspect a relatively low-velocity, high-mass value -- a few kilometers per second, and tens of kilograms. I'm trying to find out more about this and will post a follow-up if I'm successful.
UPDATE: Looking at a map, we find that Babol is about 170 km NE of Tehran and only about 20 km south of the shoreline of the Caspian Sea. Its population is probably around 175,000 by now; more info here.
Jay Manifold [8:58 PM]
[ 20040107 ]
Astronomers Find Sun's Twin, says Space.com; it's 18 Scorpii, about which much more info is available at SolStation.com.
This is perhaps the best candidate star within 100 light-years of the Sun for possession of an "Earthlike" planet, which is to say one with liquid water at the surface, bacterial life, and free oxygen in its atmosphere; see Rare Earth for why that's about the best we can hope for, ever. I have previously noted that the definition of "Earthlike" is, for purposes of public funding, even less rigorous.
Optimistically assuming that 18 Scorpii harbors such a world, this would work out to exactly 2 Earthlike planets (the first being Earth itself) in a volume V = (4pr3)/3 = 4.2 million cubic light-years. Taking the spiral arms of the Milky Way to be a very flat cylinder, 3,000 light-years thick and 100,000 light-years across, with a 20,000-light-year-wide hole in the center, the total volume of the reasonably habitable part of the Galaxy works out to around 2.3 × 1013 ly3. Divide that by a couple of million, and there could be on the close order of ten million candidate stars like 18 Scorpii out there, spaced an average of 130 light-years apart or so.
18 Scorpii shines at only magnitude +5.5, so you'll need to be well away from city lights to see it. Its coordinates are given here; I dug out my Tirion and found it on Chart 15. The only moderately bright stars within several degrees of it are d, e, and z Ophiuchi and x Scorpii. If you go after it (it'll be in the evening sky in late Spring), take a good star map and a pair of binoculars.
Jay Manifold [9:23 PM]
[ 20040105 ]
-- in which I attempt to infer the trajectory of an incoming meteor, and what might have been. Police hunt meteorite fragments, says The Australian:
Police were concentrating their search for the fragments around Leon and Palencia in central Spain, the area above which the meteorite is believed to have disintegrated falling over as many as seven regions in an arc running from the northwest to the south east of central Spain.
Jose Angel Docobo, director of Spain's astronomy observatory in the western city of Santiago de Compostela, said the debris could have come from a meteorite weighing from 50 to 100 tonnes before disintegration.
Docobo believes the largest of the fragments, thought to be strewn over a radius of 100km, fell near the town of Molina de Aragon, near Guadalajara, 54km north of Madrid.
Meanwhile, Reuters gives more location and timing info:
The bright flashes were spotted at around 6:00 pm (1700 GMT) in a swathe across the northern half of Spain, from the eastern city of Valencia to the northwestern pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostela.
Looking at a map (128 kB *.gif), we find that the bolide was visible over a length of 800 km (Santiago de Compostela is halfway between La Coruña and Vigo, north of Portugal), with the main debris field a 100-km wide circle in the middle of this area. Incoming azimuth about 310°, angle of attack about 7° from the horizontal.
Now, turning to Your Sky, let's bring up a star map for the proper date and time (1700 UT Sun 4 Jan 04), assumed location latitude 40° N, longitude 0° (this is just north of Valencia, on the Mediterranean coastline near Castellón de la Plana).
Looks like it was coming at us out of the keystone of Hercules; if I had to narrow it down, I'd say from the lower-right-hand area, near z Herculis, around a = 17h, d = +30°.
Now we graze over to Solar System Live for a look at where Earth was yesterday. The trick is to remember that the vernal equinox (a = 0h, d = 0°) is a line (not shown) extending from the Sun directly to the right edge of the diagram. The meteoroid came in from about the 6:30 position and at a very steep angle, 80° or so, to the plane of Earth's orbit.
Of course, we can't reconstruct an orbit from one observation. But the geometry of approach suggests that the meteoroid's velocity relative to the Sun was comparable to that of Earth, roughly 30 km sec-1. Arriving nearly perpendicular to Earth's own motion and at the same speed, the combined relative velocity would be √2 times this, or ~40 km sec-1.
If Sr Docobo's mass estimate of 50-100 tonnes is correct, applying KE = ½mv2 yields something in the range of 40-80 trillion joules, which in turn equates to 10-20 kilotons TNT equivalent. Fortunately, thanks to the small angle of attack, all we got was a pretty sky show and maybe a few little pieces on the ground.
Jay Manifold [6:07 PM]
Via Boker Tov, Boulder!, we find this article about the imposition of Sharia by the Palestinian Authority, and the attendant persecution and expulsion of Palestinian Christians. The creation of the PA State Constitution was financed by the US Agency for International Development.
Jay Manifold [7:19 AM]
[ 20040104 ]
My entry below is decent, but if you really want to keep up, graze on over to Groost Schuur's Martian Soil (which I have now permalinked in the "Science and/or Space Bloggers" section in the left sidebar, along with Fred Kiesche's The Eternal Golden Braid).
Jay Manifold [8:37 PM]
More on Stardust and Comet P/Wild 2
I got to thinking about Stardust Survived! and realized that there were a couple of obvious calculations I didn't perform: what's the fastest that Comet P/Wild 2 can be rotating, given its apparent size and probable surface gravity; and what's the flux of water molecules per unit surface area -- the stuff evaporating off of it to form the tail?
Centripetal acceleration due to rotation, F = w2r, must not exceed acceleration due to gravity at the surface, g µ M/r2, or the comet would fly apart. Since we have already established that g = 0.35 mm sec-2, F is known, and r = 2,500 meters.
The form of the equation we need, then, is w = √(F/r). Plugging the known values in, we find that w = 0.00037 rad sec-1, that is, one rotation every 17,000 seconds. I conclude that Comet P/Wild 2 cannot rotate faster than once every 4 hours and 40 minutes or thereabouts.
(This ignores tensile strength, since the comet is thought to be a loose agglomeration of [mostly] water ice with bulk density only half that of water, and one which is continually expelling material due to evaporation, resulting in the sinkholes visible in photographs.)
The water production of 250 kg sec-1, occurring over a surface area A = 4pr2 = 79 km2, works out to 3.2 mg m-2 sec-1. It is of course higher than this in the active jets, and lower (or zero) elsewhere. A milligram of liquid water occupies one cubic millimeter.
For comparison, the evaporation rate of water at room temperature (and at the bottom of Earth's atmosphere!) is ~40 g m-2 hr-1, which is 11 mg m-2 sec-1, about 3½ times the rate of evaporation from the comet. I note that the fly-by "took place 1.85 AU from the Sun," so the solar flux at Comet P/Wild 2 was just about 3½ times less than it is at Earth. Ignoring atmospheric effects, this is therefore a neatly expected result.
Jay Manifold [12:05 PM]
News release here; images here.
Separately, Fred Kiesche of The Eternal Golden Braid sends Locating Landers on Mars, an extremely cool page about how to get 0.5-meter resolution out of the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC). They've already got pictures of the Mars Pathfinder and Viking 1 landers!
Jay Manifold [7:47 AM]
[ 20040103 ]
What would it take to do a visual (as opposed to radio) search for the (temporarily, we hope) lost Beagle 2? The lander is .66 m across; with solar panels unfolded, it is 1.9 m across. Mars Odyssey, which is in a circular 400-kilometer orbit, can't do the job; its visible-light camera has a minimum resolution of 18 meters, nearly 10 times the size of the target.
How big would a telescope/camera in Mars orbit have to be to see something less than 2 meters across on the surface? The equation for this (source; 15 kB *.pdf) is:
Dqmin = 1.22l / a, where
q is the angle subtended by the spacecraft; for a 2-meter object 400 kilometers away, this is 0.000005 radian;
l is the wavelength of light being used, typically the middle of the visible-light spectrum, around 550 nm; and
a is the diameter of the (circular) aperture of the telescope
What we want is, of course, a, so we rearrange the equation to a = 1.22l / Dqmin and plug the values in. Result: only about 13 cm (5¼").
A bit of Googling finds that Mars Express
will allow increasingly closer looks at the Beagle 2 landing site, which measures 31 kilometres by 5 kilometres.
In this narrowing polar orbit, the orbiter will fly directly over the landing site at an altitude of 315 kilometres on 7 January 2004, at 13:13 CET [6:13 AM CST next Wednesday].
And that its High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC)
will image the entire planet in full colour, 3D and with a resolution of about 10 metres. Selected areas will be imaged at 2-metre resolution.
"The 2-metre resolution channel will allow us to just pick out the Beagle 2 lander on the surface," says Gerhard Neukum, HRSC Principal Investigator from Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
From this, we have q = 6.35 × 10-6 rad; with wavelength as above, and again solving for a, we find that the implied aperture of the HRSC is only 10.6 cm (just over 4").
So the cameras don't have to be huge. But they do have to be pointed at just the right spot. The HRSC's field of view is a few kilometers across at most. It might take several passes to spot Beagle 2, and since it would only occupy a single pixel, I expect that spectroscopy would be required to positively identify it.
Jay Manifold [2:22 PM]
-- and took what's easily the best picture of a comet nucleus to date:
Relative to the comet, the space probe was moving at six kilometers per second.
Over the ensuing hours, Stardust transmitted its data back to Earth, including an image taken from about 500 kilometers away. The image shows the nucleus, about five kilometers across, and unlike other cometary nuclei, it seems to be round. Around its edge, scientists have so far counted five jets of outflowing material. The features that look like craters have the wrong proportions to be impact craters. Imaging scientist Ray Newburn of JPL says they are probably sinkholes caused by the loss of material. No such features appear on images of Comet Halley. "These pictures are really going to open up a new window to understanding how comets work," says principal investigator Don Brownlee of the University of Washington.
Looking at the picture, some of the sinkholes appear to be as much as a kilometer across and 300 meters deep, representing over 200,000 metric tons of (mostly) ice -- Comet P/Wild 2 is thought to have a density of 500 kg m-3. The hypothesized water production given at the same page works out to about 250 kg sec-1, suggesting that one such sinkhole could be produced every couple of weeks. In reality, there appear to be at least "five jets of outflowing material," and that's just the ones appearing on the limb (edge) of the nucleus, so the timescale for any individual sinkhole is probably on the order of months. I note that if the comet's total mass is 15 trillion kg, it would take nearly 2,000 years to sublimate completely at the supposed rate (in fact, its mass may be more than twice that) while hanging around within a couple of AU of the Sun.
Now, turning to A Voyage to Amalthea (III), we find methods of computation for surface gravity and lithostatic stress. Setting R at 2.5 km, noticing that the comet nucleus appears spherical, and holding r as above, we find M = 3.3 × 1013 kg.
Applying g µ M / R2, we get a whopping .000036 g (0.35 mm sec-2) at the surface, about 1/28,000 Earth gravity.
Now setting z at 300 meters, assuming the resulting variance in g to be proportional to the volume of the sphere inside this depth (~68% of the original), and applying sv = rgz, we get 36 newtons (about 8 pounds). On Earth, the corresponding depth of material is only 7 millimeters (~¼"); so a very rough terrestrial analog is the pitting that appears on the surface of heavy, wet snow as it is eroded by wind and sun -- something like this.
UPDATE: Mark Oakley has more info, especially about the aerogel being used to collect a sample of material from the comet's tail, over on Rocket Man Blog.
Jay Manifold [11:30 AM]
Of the biggest, messiest project of all, as provided by flooble.
Jay Manifold [11:30 AM]
[ 20040102 ]
My 2nd blogiversary post, thanks to poor grammar, implied that I would spend my 3rd year of blogging concentrating on five topics: victory, progress, freedom, individual attitudes, and good books. I had no such intent when I wrote that post and was a bit horrified when it was construed in that way by my readers. Thanks to you, now I can't bitch. As much. ;)
So, OK, good books. In one of the earliest posts on this blog, I listed some books that I thought were important, derived largely from this list. Yesterday, an old friend told me she was asking lots of people what their favorite books were, so I metaphorically dusted it off, tweaked it, and sent this:
- THE LORD OF THE RINGS, J.R.R. Tolkien
- A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, Walter M. Miller
- THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, T.H. White
- 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Arthur C. Clarke
- PROTECTOR, Larry Niven
- DUNE, Frank Herbert
- MORE THAN HUMAN, Theodore Sturgeon
- WE, Yevgeny Zamyatin
- FAHRENHEIT 451, Ray Bradbury
- 1984, George Orwell
- THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, Robert Heinlein
- THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, Philip K. Dick
I suppose this represents some kind of glimpse into my personality, but considering what most current-events/sci-tech bloggers are like, it's not a terribly revealing one: of course they're all 20th-century fantasy and science fiction. And of course the list changes gradually with time; it would be more accurate if I lengthened it to 20 or so, in which case the order, rather than the membership, would be mutable. I may be somewhat unique in my insistence that these books form a kind of canon; young people should read them at a rate of one per year, starting at age 11 or so. Start with the easy ones (Bradbury, Heinlein) and save the really long ones (Herbert, Miller, Tolkien, White) for last.
What prompts all this, other than the inevitable opportunity for comparison (first-time e-mailers get to deal with Spam Arrest), is #8 on the list above. The proprietor of one small voice points to his essay on Rand and Zamyatin. He is both more scholarly than I could ever be and more polite about the similarity of We to Anthem, which I consider to be a cheap knock-off (indeed, he says "we can see that there are manifold differences between [them]", heh). Anyway, crank this up and Read The Whole Thing (7,200 words).
UPDATE: But don't act too much like Alex Lifeson while listening to 2112, OK?
Jay Manifold [7:49 PM]
(Not posted yesterday due to unavailability of Blogspot.)
I can think of no better way to start the new year than by pointing to this three-hanky weeper from Omar over on Iraq the Model ( even though Glenn already pointed to it):
2003; the year of freedom.
Before you I was mute, and here goes my tongue praying for the best,
Before you I was hand-cuffed, and here are my hands free to write ...
It's a dispatch from the Field of Cormallen. Read The Whole Thing.
Jay Manifold [7:21 AM]
