Month: September 2011

$18 billion for one test launch

2:23 pm

NASA thinks it will cost $18 billion to complete and launch in 2017 one test flight of the Congressionally-designed Space Launch System, the program-formerly-called-Constellation.

This is madness. One flight, unmanned, in seven years? No sane customer would ever buy such a product, especially when there are now a number of cheaper competitors who will likely be flying manned in less time.

Note also that even if NASA’s figures are exaggerated, which I am sure some Senators and Congressmen will claim, I would bet that they are not that far off, based on the space agency’s fixed labor costs and past history.

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A day to express the value of justice

6:00 am

Updated and bumped: I wrote the following last year on September 11. Sadly, nothing has changed since then. President Obama is still trying to sell the idea that this day should be used as a day of service, something that misses the point so completely as to almost be despicable.

So, I think it is worth repeating what I wrote on September 11, 2010:

The President has asked us to consider today “a national day of service and remembrance”. Though the sentiment seems reasonable, I must respectively disagree.

September 11 should not be turned into a day to celebrate volunteerism or service or American charity. Though these values are profound, important, and an expression of much of what makes our nation great, they are not why we remember September 11.

We remember the evil acts commited on September 11, 2001 in order to remind us that there is evil in the world.

We remember these evil acts so that we will have the strength to fight that evil, with every fiber of our being.

We remember those who died in order to prevent future attacks and further deaths.

We remember so that no one can ever try to make believe these events did not happen.

We remember so that no one can spread the lie that the perpetrators were something other than what they were: Men who had decided to kill in the name of Islam, based on what they believed their religion taught them.

And finally, and most important, we remember the horrible events of September 11, 2001 so that those innocent murdered souls — whose only crime that day was going to work — will not have died in vain.

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SpaceX Acknowledges Falcon 9 Engine Anomaly

11:30 pm

This is not good if true: SpaceX has admitted that in its December 2010 test flight of Falcon 9 there was a problem with its first stage.

During the August meeting, held at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, SpaceX told to the two advisory bodies that there had been an engine anomaly during the most recent Falcon 9 launch, according Charles Daniel, a shuttle and space station safety expert at Herndon, Va.-based Valador Inc., and a member of the ISS Advisory Committee. “There was no explanation or root cause analysis or corrective action for this particular anomaly,” Daniel said Sept. 9 during the public meeting. “This is a relatively troublesome statement not to recognize that a premature engine shutdown was a significant event.”

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Senate approves a flat budget for the Department of Energy

5:10 pm

The Senate has approved a flat budget for the Department of Energy.

On Wednesday the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $4.843 billion for DOE’s Office of Science in 2012. That’s the same level as this year, and a slight bump over the $4.8 billion approved in July on a largely partisan vote by the House of Representatives covering the entire department. Although the funding is a far cry from the $5.416 billion that the Obama Administration had requested in February for the next fiscal year, which begins on 1 October, officials at the Office of Science’s 10 national labs say they’re not complaining. “Even staying flat when a lot of other programs are getting cut is relatively good news,” says Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. In budgets, “flat is the new good,” quips Eric Isaacs, director of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. [emphasis mine]

That a government official is now happy that the budget is flat is a good sign that we might finally be making some cultural progress in terms of bringing the federal budget under some control. In the past the very thought of no increase would have sent these people into spasms of outrage. Now they realize how pointless such a tantrum would be, and might actually do their budget negotiations harm.

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Unknown objects in space

12:57 pm

Fermi list of object types

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope today released an updated catalog of the last two years of its survey of the sky at high energy emissions. All told, there are 1873 objects in the catalog, more than half of which are supermassive black holes at the center of distant galaxies. You can see this all-sky map below the fold.

Many of the objects are quite familiar, such as the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova that exploded a little less than a thousand years ago.

For decades, most astronomers regarded the Crab Nebula as the steadiest beacon at X-ray energies. But data from several orbiting instruments — including Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor — now show unexpected variations. Astronomers have shown that since 2008, the nebula has faded by 7 percent at high energies, a reduction likely tied to the environment around its central neutron star.

Since 2007, Fermi and the Italian Space Agency’s AGILE satellite have detected several short-lived gamma-ray flares at energies hundreds of times higher than the nebula’s observed X-ray variations. In April, the satellites detected two of the most powerful yet recorded. To account for these “superflares,” scientists say that electrons near the pulsar must be accelerated to energies a thousand trillion times greater than that of visible light — and far beyond what can be achieved by the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, now the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth.

What I, and many astronomers, find even most interesting about this catalog, however, is the large number of completely mysterious objects scattered across the sky, objects that emit powerful gamma rays but are not visible in any other wavelengths. All told, these unidentified objects comprise almost one third of the entire catalog.
» Read more

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