Potpourri CVII

Ares I-X is currently scheduled to roll out to Launch Complex 39B Tuesday, October 20, at 12:01 a.m. I will be driving down to work on October 22 and will stay as long as needed. Huzzah! The rollout was delayed by 24 hours due to challenges with a hydraulic accumulator. However, from what I've heard on my end, that work is going well, so we'll just have to see what effect, if any, this has on the October 27 launch date. Looking forward to it! I plan to at least take pictures during the event. Not sure beyond that. Going to have a lot of writing to do, I suspect.

Looking to buy myself a small wine refrigerator. I've heard good things about Sears' Kenmore model. Other suggestions welcome...keep in mind, again, the limited space in my apartment and desire not to go crazy on spending here.

Here are a couple more editorials about the Limbaugh/St. Louis Rams fracas, one by Limbaugh himself, one by someone on the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

Here's an editorial on the Augustine Panel by a group of very smart people.

From Doc, an article on finding and selling old wines in Paris.

From Lin: the Social Security Administration is withholding a cost of living adjustment (COLA) for the first time since 1975. I guess I fibbed to my mom back in 2004. I told her then that I didn't think Social Security would cut off in her lifetime, but most likely wouldn't exist in mine. At the rate our government is spending money, it might get cut off in a decade!

NASA is hosting a lunar excavation robotics competition as part of its Centennial Challenges program. This is a very cool thing because it engages young people in practical work and helps NASA get people outside the agency to help them develop hardware that will be needed for future exploration.

Apparently technical writers have among the least stressful jobs in the country. Who knew?

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has a new map showing our solar system's location in the Milky Way.

An article from The Space Review on the "why" of space exploration. I've been writing a long rant on the dismal state of space advocacy, but I don't think I'll publish it. Why add to the despair?

Potpourri CVI

I got this extended note from the Moon Society, which deserves reading. While Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin might be a little overexposed, he's a very smart man, and his thoughts on space exploration deserve some attention.

Group: The Moon Society
Subject: Moon Society Endorses Aldrin's Proposal for a Lunar Infrastructure Development Corporation
Buzz Aldrin published a proposal for a public/private/international plan to open the Moon for exploration and development in the Huffington Post

http://digg.com/d3176tD

Below are key excerpts:

• “I propose instead America call the world to the Moon. In a new global effort to use the Moon to establish a global space consortium with a lunar surface facility as its epicenter, “
• “... competition, in an Apollo-style race back to the Moon, would be a fruitless exercise in national hubris whose rewards, if we “won”again, would prove fleeting”
• “I am proposing a different way back to the Moon: international collaboration. “
• “... the goal of creating a new public-private partnership todevelop the Moon. I call it the Lunar Infrastructure DevelopmentCorporation (LIDC). The purpose of the LIDC would be to enable thenations of the Earth to join together and return to the Moon as an international cooperative venture. The LIDC will pool the financial,technical and human resources of its member nations to build the lunar communication, navigation and transportation systems needed for human exploration of the Moon. It would be a public/private global partnership to make the Moon accessible to all humanity. The LIDC will build the communication and navigation satellites needed by future lunar travelers, develop fuel depots using lunar LOX – perhaps derived from the recently discovered lunar water-and construct habitats that will shelter space travelers while on the surface. It will enable a sustainable human presence on the Moon that will be accessible to all the nations on Earth."
• “Unlike the International Space Station (ISS), which is governed by complex treaties, the LIDC will have the same flexibility as an NGO in working with different nations and private entities to finance build and operate the facilities and equipment needed for lunar exploration. “
• “To do so [i.e., honoring the astronauts of the Apollo Era Missions] doesn’t require rerunning a long-ago Cold War race in which America plays the role of a space-going Colonial power.

Moon Society Officers and Directors, who collectively make up the Management Committee gave the Moon Society's official endorsement. The email vote was unanimous.

As Ben Nault, Director from Tucson, put it: “Probably the main reason the ISS is still "alive" and supported by Congress is that it is part of a number of international agreements. Backing out of these agreement would have financial, political and diplomatic repercussions on the US. Therefore, having an international component helps large complex programs survive the transition to different administrations and different congressional moods. The international angle gives long-term "sustainability" to the Lunar Infrastructure Development Corporation.

“In asking for Committee member support, we pointed out significant similarities with our own proposal, also strongly endorsed byCommittee members, for an International Lunar Research Park. Bothproposals are for public/private/international collaboration. There are, of course, those who would prefer a NASA-stand alone effort, and those who would prefer a purely private enterprise approach. But a reality check shows that the public/private/international approach will be much more robust, and stand a much greater chance of becoming a permanent beachhead on the Moon. It is also much more likely to lead to the first civilian industrial settlement.And that is precisely the Vision of the Moon Society. The Moon Society urges other pro-space organizations, the public, and the media to support Buzz Aldrin's proposal.

For more on the Moon Society International Lunar Research Park proposal, see: http://www.moonsociety.org/reports/beyond_nasa.html

Thank you for your support

http://www.moonsociety.org/

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New from Hu:

• The Dow Jones Industrial Average has finally hit 10,000, a number it hasn't reached in a year. That's still not the high it reached during the Bush administration. Still waiting to hear when this becomes "Obama's economy."
• CNN/Money ran a business profile piece on Huntsville, Alabama.
• The Airborne Tactical Laser (ATL) has hit a moving target from the air. Sha-ZAAAAM!!

The Constellation Program has a pretty cool 12-minute video explaining some of the roles flight testing have in making a better space program.

Your useful piece of trivia for today: 62 years ago today, Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager broke the sound barrier--750 miles per hour in level flight over the high desert of California--in the Bell X-1. Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, the book or the movie, is still the best portrayal of the seminal moment in aviation history. Saaaa-lute!

There's a web site out there that depicts every space mission ever sent to other worlds of the solar system. Very cool!

NASA is again looking at technology development for reusable launch vehicles. Good! Actually, a meeting I was in today gave every indication that the Obama administration is interested in spending more money on science and technology development research. About bloody time.

From my AIAA news feed:
Some Astronauts Annoyed At SpaceX's Dragon
The Orlando Sentinel (10/14, Block) reports, "Asked what bugs them most about NASA outsourcing the job of flying crew to the International Space Station, some astronauts roll their eyes and say: 'Dragon,'" the manned capsule being built by SpaceX, because of the fear of being "little more than human cargo" since the ship is fully automated. "SpaceX has hired its own former astronaut, Ken Bowersox, to make Dragon more astronaut-friendly," a move the article describes as a "clear example of how serious it is about leading a new commercial era in American space exploration." The article, positively describing SpaceX's efforts, notes the "biggest concern" of "astronauts, NASA officials and some members of Congress" is that "SpaceX ships are rivals to Ares and Orion, a view SpaceX dismisses." Bowersox describes the ships as "enablers" for NASA to conduct exploration.

From the Wall Street Journal:

• God vs. Science isn’t the issue…
  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704429304574467320574576460.html
• Sudden Change, Big Effect http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574469473830302630.html

From Lin: Sheriff Arpaio, the tough-guy from Arizona, vows to continue sweeps to capture illegal immigrants while the Obama administration would prefer that he not.

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Some late-breaking news from the Drudge Report: Rush Limbaugh has been dropped from a group bidding to purchase the St. Louis Rams. The sole reason for this is his political views, however tactfully or tackily expressed, and the negative publicity they generated. The campaign run against him and the restraint of trade that this campaign has now created sets a very ugly precedent: the NFL has just announced that Limbaugh's cash is good only at the ticket gate or the bar, it won't be accepted in the front office. I wonder what would happen if another conservative ever decided to invest in a football team. Heck, I wonder what would happen if I ever decided to. It will be interesting to see what the fallout is from all this. Limbaugh won't take it lying down: of that I am reasonably certain.

Public Lecture Review: Dr. Roy Spencer, Global Warming Skeptic

Dr. Roy Spencer, a professor of meteorology at the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH), was the guest speaker for HAL5's monthly meeting this week. He is a self-described global warming skeptic, which is a label that is bound to cause him trouble in certain sections of the news media. Spencer has probably earned himself an extra dose of opprobium by being the "official climatologist" of Rush Limbaugh's Excellence in Broadcasting network.

Regardless of his reputation in the media, Dr. Spencer is a serious climate scientist, and seems a rather low-key guy to be associated with Rush. Be that as it may, Spencer is a clear, fine speaker with a good sense of humor and patient, calm demeanor, which he no doubt needs when addressing critics in the media, the classroom, or in Congress.

What, exactly, does it mean to be a global warming skeptic? In the case of Spencer, it means a few things:

• He does not deny that global warming has occurred in the last century. However, he notes that this is part of a general increase that has occurred since the "Little Ice Age," which lasted from around 1300 to 1850. The Little Ice Age, in turn, was preceded by the Medieval Warm Period, when average global temperatures were the same (or higher) than what they are now.
• He does question exactly how much of that warming is the result of human-based activities, such as burning fossil fuels.
• He does focus on the data related to climate change (actual numbers), not just rhetoric. (My big gripe with the global warming hysteria has been that I don't believe people repeating assertions proves that said assertions are true. Related to that gripe is a personal reaction to any mass movement: I don't like to be pushed around. People need to reason with me if they want to get their point across--I'll accept comprehensive data, not selective data, and not anecdote-based scare-mongering. But I digress.)
• He does question some of the assumptions made by the physics-based computer climate models that have been used by James Hansen and others to declare that a global warming crisis is in the making (or already happening).
• He does not believe that the Earth's climate system is hypersensitive to human activities.
• He does believe that the natural processes of our planet have a larger impact on weather (short-term trends) and climate (long-term trends) than human activities.
• He does believe that the climate model-makers have their causes and effects reversed.

I'll focus on the last point, since that was the focus of Spencer's talk. I'll have to use English-major terms here, since I'm not a scientist. He began by explaining that the Earth's atmosphere tends toward equilibrium, with the amount of heat absorbed from sunlight equalling the amount of infrared radiation (heat) radiated into space. The basic premise of global warming and the "greenhouse effect" is that excessive carbon dioxide created by human activities is disturbing this equilibrium. This is happening because carbon dioxide (CO2) is creating more clouds, preventing heat from escaping into space.

If I understand Spencer correctly, though, he believes that cloud changes affect temperatures more than temperatures affect cloud changes. At some point, he explained, scientists noticed that temperatures worldwide had increased, on average, and that carbon dioxide had increased as well. Scientists interpreted this coincidence of activity as a definite correlation--that is, A caused B. However, Spencer asserted (and this is the first time I'd heard this) that carbon dioxide increases occurred after the temperature increases. If true, this means that the temperature increases are due to something else.

Here's how Spencer explained the Earth's climate changes in response to increases in heat (wherever they come from):

• More heat is pumped into the system.
• More heat produces more water vapor.
• More water vapor means more clouds are created.
• More clouds in the Earth's atmosphere increases the planet's albedo (reflectivity), causing more sunlight to be reflected into space rather than reaching the surface. In this way, equilibrium is maintained.

So what's causing the temperature increases and ice ages? Here are some possibilities Spencer mentioned:

• The tilt of the Earth.
• The eccentricity of Earth's orbit.
• Changes in solar radiation. On this point, Spencer indicated that the amount of light put out by the sun was not enough to account for climate change unless the climate was exceptionally sensitive to such changes--a position he opposes.
• Natural fluctuations in heat circulation between the oceans and the atmosphere.

Spencer did show a lot of graphs and charts reflecting his models and the more traditional models being used by the global warming theorists. However, I must confess that I didn't "get" them. The numbers and the patterns of the lines on the charts (temperature on the X axis, changes in radiant energy lost on the Y axis) didn't tell a story I fully understood. I'd probably have to spend some more time with the equations and the data to understand the implications of what his model is showing.

However, Spencer's political comments were perfectly clear. He echoed the global warming believers' comments, mostly for laughs (this is, after all, Red State America):

• "Everything's going to get worse."
• "It's all George Bush's fault."
• "How could they be wrong? They spent hundreds of millions of dollars!"

His own responses to some of the alarmist talk in the climate change community offer the patient listener food for thought:

• "Most of the model makers were trained in physics, not meteorology. They're used to dealing with equations. The Earth's weather is biological in its complexity. It's really functioning according to chaos theory."
• "Any time you replace vegetation with man-made structures, heating increases."
• "Any time air is sinking in some places (the Sahara, parts of the Pacific), it's because air was forced to rise in other places."
• "Why do we allow trees to change the environment, but not humanity?"
• "It's not like I'm for pollution. Humans pollute just by existing. It's a matter of what you're willing to put up with."
• "It's only the wealthy economies that can afford to develop the technologies to find the solutions [to global warming]."
• "I"m probably being cynical, but I believe politicians and scientists who want to be politicians view this as an opportunity to control people by controlling their energy use."

It is this last statement that most likely wins over Limbaugh, though John Coleman (a former Chicago weather man--WLS-TV--and founder of The Weather Channel) has also taken issue with global warming alarmism. And Spencer's global average temperature chart, which I've seen in other places, does show a temperature drop for the last two years, coming down off a recent high in 2005. As Spencer put it in his low-key way, "It will be interesting to see if this trend continues over the next few years." The maximum temperature increase Spencer is predicting by 2100 is less than 1 degree Celsius, as compared to the 2.5 to 5 degrees predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Which numbers do you think is more likely to get governmental attention and action?

I asked Spencer what he thought about solar power satellites, a favorite technology of mine and others in the pro-space community. I wanted to know, specifically, if he thought that the microwave power beams being transmitted to the Earth's surface would add considerably to the Earth's heat load. His response? "It sounds sexy, but it's just going to be excessively expensive compared to the amount of energy [production] you'll get."

Spencer is using cloud cover data gathered by NASA's Aqua satellite (and others). He is not making things up, nor is he exceptionally partisan. He is not shrill or screaming or pounding the table or denouncing global warming theorists as corrupt, evil, or part of some vast global conspiracy (governments are another matter entirely). What he is doing is asking these people to question their assumptions and their models, as good scientists should. He even admits, rather humbly, that "I could be wrong." It's unfortunate that the folks he's questioning do not have similar humility--that attitude used to be a cornerstone of the scientific method.