?

John Lanchester provides some fascinating facts about space travel in a very entertaining and informative piece in September’s London Review of Books. For example, while trying to get across the level of risk involved in travelling to the moon he says: “Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins – the latter being the man who orbited the moon in the command module while the other two members of Apollo 11 walked on the surface – both estimated the probability that the moon-walkers would return alive at about 50 per cent; a fact each of them kept to himself until afterwards”. No wonder that the next trip to the moon is not scheduled until 2020, a half a century after the last one in 1972.

It’s also considerable in terms of achievement when you acknowledge the computer power available at the time. Says Lanchester: “If two or three people near you have a mobile phone, you’re currently in possession of more computing power than those famous, much-photographed banks of Nasa hardware”.

But Lanchester makes a very forceful and funny point about the failure that is the Space Shuttle. The fact that the Space Shuttle looks like an aeroplane is very deceptive. In fact, it’s just a can with people in it attached to a big stick of dynamite, he says. Or ‘Spam in a can’ according to Chuck Yeager. Unlike the adaptable speeds of an aeroplane “the solid-fuel launch rocket [of the Shuttle] can’t be switched off or throttled back once it has been ignited. So basically, the shuttle astronauts are sitting attached to a fucking great bomb”.

An aeroplane has a glide ratio of 15 to 1. That means that if the engines cut out at 35,000 feet it will continue to travel 15 meters forward for every meter it falls, giving the pilot about 100 miles to land it.

However, as Lanchester puts it: “the shuttle on its unpowered descent – bear in mind that it isn’t flying – has a glide ratio of 4 to 1. That means it is dropping out of the sky, and those soothing images of it coasting in to land are highly deceptive: that thing is falling out of the sky with the aerodynamic panache of a giant can of baked beans”.

The starting point for all this is the news that Nasa have awarded a consortium headed by Lockheed Martin, those dashing princes of the military-industrial matrix, the contract to build the ‘next generation of human-manned space rocket’. Despite the fact that everything to do with the Space Shuttle is considered out of date it’s a little disappointing to find out that the new Orion design ‘is a return to the old model of a space rocket, with a capsule on the end of a giant stack of boosters.

Read the whole thing here.

In other space related news:

Iranian/US Telecoms entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari today became the first female space tourist, paying up to $20 Million for the privilege.

(0)

(0)

How much a story about the overweening power of the US Administration in world affairs gains traction seems to depend not on how new the information is, or how damning perhaps, but how much it seems to go against conventional wisdom. If what I suggest is true then the news about a new study that shows how US aid to countries that have recently won a two year membership of the UN Security Council increases suddenly at the beginning of their tenure should simply move around the periphery of the Internet, filling a number of political blogs with ‘chatter’ and then die out pretty rapidly.

So what I’m suggesting is that conventional wisdom would have it that its not at all surprising that ‘when a country takes over one of the rotating seats on the UN Security Council, U.S. foreign aid jumps by almost 60%’ (to quote Stephen D. Levitt, Freakonomics author who comments on the paper here).

The paper, written by by Ilyana Kuziemko (a former research assistant of Levitts) and Eric Werker, and soon to be published in the Journal of Political Economy, finds ‘that a country’s U.S. aid increases by 59 percent and its U.N. aid by 8 percent when it rotates onto the council. This effect increases during years in which key diplomatic events take place (when members’ votes should be especially valuable) and the timing of the effect closely tracks a country’s election to, and exit from, the council. Finally, the U.N. results appear to be driven by UNICEF, an organization over which the United States has historically exerted great control‘ (from the Abstract).

The authors manage to rule out all explanations other than bribery. However, the Internet has just chucked up this nice summary about an earlier version (from Marginal Revolution):

“The United Nation's Security Council has 5 permanent members and 10 non-permanent members, the latter are elected from regional groups and serve two year terms. Yesterday Eric Werker presented a fun paper at GMU showing that US foreign aid increases dramatically to countries elected to the Security Council.

The result isn't that surprising but Werker did a good job of ruling out explanations other than bribery. Foreign aid, for example, increases just as a country joins the council and drops just at it leaves. Foreign aid also increases especially dramatically in important years, as measured by the number of New York Times stories involving the council. Perhaps most interestingly, although US foreign aid is larger for democracies than for autocracies on average, autocracies get bigger increases in aid when they join the council. The result makes a lot of sense. Autocracts can sell their votes more easily than democratically elected leaders (no domestic constituencies to worry about) and transactions costs are lower - the aid goes directly to the vote seller.”

We’ll have to wait and see.

Original story via Metafilter

(0)

(0)

The Guardian today has an entertaining article about the claim by the Irish company Steorn that they have found a way of developing free energy which flies in the face of the principle of conservation of energy.

The topic has gained much attention from Irish bloggers as thoroughly detailed by Adam McGuire. They display (to the skeptical Guardian journalist Steve Boggan) how the generator works ‘at their modest offices near the Liffey’ and discuss the reaction of utter disbelief and claims that they are ‘a CIA or oil-industry front intended to discredit research into free and clean energy’.

"It's the Pons-Fleischmann factor," says Sean McCarthy, chief executive of Steorn when talking about the extreme reactions they’ve been getting. He and Richard Walshe then ‘look at each other darkly’. Pons-Fleischmann is a reference to the claim made by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989 that they had created a nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature, with an experiment that hasn’t been successfully replicated since. The resulting controversy effectively sunk the careers of the two scientists.

Steve Boggan talks to Martin Fleischmann, now 79 and asks if he thinks it’ll work.

“I do accept that the existing [quantum electro-dynamic] paradigm is not adequate.”, says Fleischmann, “If what these men are saying turns out to be true, that would be proof that the paradigm was inadequate and we would have to come up with some new theory. But I don't think their claims are credible. No, I cannot see how the position of magnetic fields allows one to create energy."

But with a spark in his eye, he wishes them luck.

(0)

(0)

What do Israeli President Moshe Katsav, US Presidents JFK and Bill Clinton and the First President of Ireland Douglas Hyde got in common, apart from the fact that they are or were presidents of their respective countries, of course? Well done, you’re right; it’s got to with having sex with their employees. Wait a minute, Douglas Hyde? That ‘fine and scholarly old gentleman’ - what the hell is going on?

Israel is currently reeling from news that their beloved president Moshe Katsav may be guilty of using his powerful position to have sexual relations with an employee. Katsav denies it, saying, according to Haaretz, that ‘he has never had sexual relations with any employee of the President's Residence’.

Political power and sex are closely associated, of course, as blindingly illustrated by the reported antics of JFK (the notches on his bedpost include Marilyn Monroe, Angie Dickinson, a stripper 'Blaze' Starr and Judith Exner Campbell, who was also the mistress of a Chicago mobster, Sam Giancana. He also cavorted with two of his secretaries in the White House pool, although I’m not sure if it was with both of them at the same time).

The impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton were based on his final admission, in taped grand jury testimony on August 17, 1998, that he had an "improper physical relationship" with the White House intern Monika Lewinsky. There was talk of a ‘semen stained blue dress’ and a cigar, but there is no need to go in to the sordid details here.

But could any of this happen in Ireland? Of course, not. All our presidents act according to the highest standards and rumours to the contrary are never to be heard, although P.Flynn got in to hot water when he suggested, during a Presidential election campaign that Mary Robinson’s family life was not all it claimed to be.

But inevitably the Irish public memory is short. During Douglas Hyde’s term as Ireland’s first president rumours began to circulate that the poor aging President may be becoming senile and starting to develop an eye for the ladies (including his household staff). Though completely untrue (having suffered a stroke he was confined to a wheel chair) rumours reached such a peak that Myles Na Gopaleen penned this witty Limerick:

There once was a man called an t-Uachtaráin
who lived in Áras an Uachtaráin,
He was fond of his nookie,
he had a go at the cookie,
And there is the couch that he f-uchtaráin. (pronounced 'fucked her on.')

If the case against Katsav proves to be untrue he may never be able to get rid of the stain (on his reputation) if there is an Israeli satirist half as good as Myles working against him.

(0)

(0)