Category Archives: English

Fundamental Change At NASA

The recent announcements by the White House and the NASA administration were no surprise to insiders. The Ares/Constellation program is dead!

Size comparison between Saturn V, Space Shuttle, Ares I, IV and V

Privately, I’ve been contending this for many months: the solid fuel design based on Space Shuttle booster technology is rife with engineering problems, which is why the program was running late. NASA has been tight lipped about the scale of these problems, which is understandable. But enough has been leaked to call the technical and financial feasibility into question.

The other Ares-problems were weight issues, cost overruns, uncertain long-term funding and perhaps most importantly — given the allocated funds, everything was taking way too long.

So what does the end of Constellation mean?

First, without a man-rated heavy lift launcher (Ares V), NASA’s half-baked plans to return astronauts on the moon are suspended. Secondly, without a man-rated lifter in the arsenal (Ares I), NASA has no way to transport astronauts to the ISS after the Space Shuttle is finally retired. (The Shuttle’s retirement has been projected for this year).

If Congress confirms this course change, we are looking at the end of an era. From the beginnings of the space program, all major U.S. space transport system have been developed by either NASA or by the military. Specific tasks were farmed out to contractors, but everything was managed from the top. On the military side, independent contractors began to take on an increasingly autonomous and commercial role. This development was not mirrored on the civilian side, where the complex Space Shuttle system, which continues to cost half of NASA’s budget just to operate for a few flights per year, prevented any fundamental restructuring. Too many people had vested interests in keeping the Shuttle program going for 30 years.

It looks as though finally, the time has now come to get NASA out of building and managing launch systems. In the future, this may be left entirely to competing commercial contractors. Several players are ready to go, and they can possibly do what NASA’s bureaucracy could not achieve: faster, better, cheaper.

Even the military, which certainly cannot claim to have achieved efficient cost control when it comes to managing such huge and expensive programs, has done a better job encouraging lower launch costs than NASA has. And this point is crucial, because the most important and most expensive part of space missions has never been the actual operating costs in space, but the cost of development and launch.

We may be looking at a new beginning!

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59th Journalist Killed In Mexico

The bloody corpse of radio journalist Jose Louis Romero was found last Saturday on a highway near Los Mochis in Sinaloa, Mexico. His body had been shoved into a plastic bag, the hands bound and broken. One bullet was lodged in the shoulder and two in the head. Romero had been reporting on drug trafficking.

A few hours later, gunmen killed the chief police investigator who had started to investigate the murder.

According to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, this was the 59th murder of a Mexican journalist since 2000.

Last week, the body of regional newspaper reporter Valentin Valdes was found with a threatening message. Valdes had been reporting on the arrests of suspected drug traffickers. His newspaper has announced that in view of the threat, all reporting on drug violence may have to be suspended.

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After Five Years, A New Layout

When I started this blog five years ago, it was just an experiment. I didn’t think it would attract any attention but considered it a good exercise and playground. To my surprise, readership has grown steadily and now reaches several thousand per month.

When I began, I was not happy with any of templates and blogging platforms in existence at the time. I didn’t like the clutter of permalinks and sidebars and didn’t want to bother with categorized posts. I didn’t want to click buttons or pull down menus. I simply wanted to write. I just wanted a simple string of text, divided into paragraphs and segments – similar to what you might find in a printed magazine.

So I decided to write everything in simple HTML, which allowed me to do it all by myself. Additionally, a simple file structure without self-hosted scripts and databases allowed me to keep a mental overview of where the various files were located.

But now, technology has moved on, and I feel the time has come for a change. Particularly the rise of social networking applications has changed the way content is shared. Unfortunately, this now requires a more standardized and structured way of doing things. Automating certain tasks and relying on templates and hosted scripts has become a necessity.

After giving this some thought (and because I had to study it for clients anyway), I have decided to migrate to a dedicated blogging platform. Among all the options, I decided for a self-hosted WordPress platform.

As time permits, I will be fine tuning various elements, so please be patient while I make these adjustments.

Most likely, due to time constraints I will not move all the posts of the previous five years into the new platform, but they are still accessible in the old HTML files. (Please note that the search box in the sidebar will not work for these files).

Thank you for reading!

BACK TO 2009

BACK TO 2008

BACK TO 2007

BACK TO 2006

BACK TO 2005

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R.I.P. Johnny Lee Jett :.

For the fourth time in the course of the last few months, I had to bid final farewell to someone close to me.

John was an extraordinarily kind hearted man who always had a warm smile and handshake to offer. He was the sort of person whom one could wake up in the middle of the night when in trouble, and I never doubted that he would lend a helping hand — no matter what. John was a man for whom honor and integrity were sacred. Not only did he possesses these virtues, but he embodied them.

John was an American patriot, but he loved traveling and exploring the world. Forever curious and deeply interested in history, languages and world cultures, John traveled to over 20 countries on almost every continent. He climbed the pyramids of Egypt and on the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the Great Wall of China. His last travel adventure lead him to visit war memorials in Washington D.C., Pusan, Korea, Nagasaki, Japan and finally, Vietnam. On most of his journeys, John was accompanied by his wife Marie.

John was born on November 1, 1935 in Masonville, Arkansas. He died, as a result of cancer on December 27, 2009. We interred his body at Inglewood Park Cemetery in California.

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Recovered Scream

I’m excited. Reuters just reported that one of my favorite paintings has been recovered: “The Scream” by Edvard Munch (1893).

OSLO, Norway – Norwegian police recovered “The Scream” and another stolen masterpiece by Edvard Munch on Thursday, two years after the works were seized from a museum by gunmen. “We are 100 percent certain they are the originals,” police chief Iver Stensrud told a news conference. “The damage was much less than feared. (Reuters)

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Pluto: No Planet After All

Several friends were perplexed by all the recent fuss about Pluto. Unfortunately, most of the media coverage was quite misleading. It focused on Pluto, when in reality the root of the question before the International Astronomical Union was a very fundamental one: How do we define a “planet”?

Although it seems strange, astronomers have so far called objects “planets” without ever clearly defining what a planet is. It’s an object that revolves around a star alright, but how does a planet differ from a comet or an asteroid?

Pluto has been called a planet ever since it was discovered in 1930, even though it is a very odd fellow. Compared to the other planets of our solar system, Pluto’s orbit has a different angle. And although it was often called the sun’s outermost planet, Pluto’s strongly elliptical orbit takes it closer to the sun than Neptune during a part of the plutonian year. It gets stranger: Pluto’s moon Charon is so large that it does not really orbit around Pluto. In fact, the two bodies orbit around a common center of gravity, a point in space. That would make Pluto and Charon double-planets, just like there are double-stars.

Because Pluto is so dissimilar to the other eight planets, some scientists have theorized that Pluto did not form out of the primordial solar system’s gas and dust cloud. Instead, it might have formed in interstellar space and was later captured in the Sun’s gravitational field. A “space orphan”?

A dilemma arose when better instruments discovered several other “oddball” objects outside of Neptune’s orbit. So far, we have found over 1,000 of them. We don’t know how many more there are. And there are more than 100,000 known asteroids. Which of these should we classify as planets? Clearly, a precise definition was needed.

So what the IAU’s debate was really about was the definition of “planet”. And then it turned out that if the agreed upon rules are applied, Pluto just didn’t make the cut. Neither did the newly found objects 2003 UB313 (“Xena”), 2005 FY 9, 2003 EL61, Sedna and Quaoar.

Science measures things in nature and then applies the observed measurements to a system of classification. Sometimes there are errors and misclassifications which need to be corrected in order to maintain consistency.

Thus, tomatoes are not really vegetables, but fruit. Bananas are not really fruit, but berries. And although it may be nuts to some: peanuts are really no nuts, but legumes. Cashews aren’t nuts either — they are seeds. And Pluto? Well, it’s not really a planet.

The current issue of Newsweek (Sept. 4, 2006) features an excellent cover story on the subject. (Their web site on MSN is terrible and does not run well on a Mac, which is why I’m not including a link here).
PS: On Sept. 7, the Minor Planet Center, which is responsible for collecting data on asteroids and comets, assigned Pluto’s new designation: Asteroid number 134340. There are currently 136,563 asteroid objects recognized by the MPC; 2,224 new objects were added last week. Other notable objects to receive asteroid numbers included 2003 UB313, also known as “Xena,” and the recently discovered Kuiper Belt objects 2003 EL61 and 2005 FY9. Their asteroid numbers are 136199, 136108 and 136472, respectively.

Of course, for practical purposes, Pluto will always be called “Pluto”.

http://nineplanets.org/pluto.html

PS: IAUC 8747 reports that Xena has been given the official name Eris. Its companion satellite provionally dubbed “Gabrielle” has been named Dysnomia (Eris I).

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Returning From The Bay Area

Just returned from Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco. Unfortunately, this trip’s schedule allowed almost no time to stop and smell the roses. I didn’t even get a chance to partake in my usual San Francisco compulsions, among which are Anchor Steam on tap and cable car rides. (Alas, here is a link to the online edition of Of Cables And Grips – The Cable Cars of San Francisco by Robert Callwell and Walter E. Rice).

Attempted to gracefully order dim sum in Oakland’s Chinatown with a minimum of embarrassment to myself and tablemates. (I don’t speak Chinese. The waitress didn’t speak English. The challenging yet comical nature of the situation was enhanced by a menu consisting mostly of things I don’t eat — such as invertebrates and innards).

Attended an exhibition of artwork by Heisuke Kitazawa during a very brief “hit and run” visit to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district.

UC Berkeley was buzzing with newly arrived college freshmen. And freshwomen. (“Freshpeople”?). Moe’s book store on Telegraph Avenue is still there and busy, which is reassuring. (Yes, I left money).

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The Beatles At the Hollywood Bowl

25 years ago, the Beatles performed at the Hollywood Bowl and, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, “escaped with their lives”. The report goes on:

“With 18,700 fans shrieking hysterically, not much of the mop-haired quartet’s singing could be heard”.

“The sight of ticket-takers wearing Army helmets presaged a possible blitz of World War II proportions. When nearly 3,000 girls in all manner of odd attire surged the gates at 5:20 p.m., officials decided to let them in 40 minutes early. Many broke into happy tears. ‘Oh, my God, we’re in, we’re going to see the Beatles,’ they screamed.” (From the L.A. Times).

Apparently, the concert lasted only for 30 minutes — enough to make pop history.

More information is here.

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Dumb And Dumber

I’m highly skeptical of polls and tend to make fun of them. Some of them are fun. Or depressing. Or both. A poll by Zogby International yielded these gems:

60% of Americans were able to correctly name Superman’s fictional home planet (Krypton), but only 37% could name the planet closest to the sun (Mercury).

23% could name the recent winner of the TV show “American Idol” (Taylor Hicks), but only 11% could name the recently named Supreme Court Justice (Samuel Alito).

60% knew that Homer was the father of Bart on “The Simpsons”. But only 20.5% knew that Homer was the ancient Greek author of The Iliad and The Odyssey.

74% knew that Larry, Moe and Curley were the Three Stooges. But only 42% could name the three branches of government (judicial, executive and legislative).

57% could identify J.K. Rowling’s fictitional boy wizard (Harry Potter), but only 50% could name the British prime minister (Tony Blair).

Oh, dear.

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Nine Months Adrift At Sea

In today’s edition, the L.A. Times reports an amazing survival story. A trio of lost fishermen from a Mexican village were rescued 5,000 miles away from home. Their vessel was found intact near Baker Island in the middle of the Pacific. After being blown away from shore in October 2005, they had been adrift for nine months. The men survived on rainwater, raw fish and the occasional seabird, but had to go without food for stretches of up to 15 days. They reported reading the Bible to pass the time, which I suppose they must know pretty well by now.

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