In a recent discussion on climate change I mentioned what I call the coming carbon collapse, that point at which human generated carbon emissions go to zero or even negative. If you wondered what I was talking about, here is just one of the technologies roaring down the tracks at us in 2010, brought to you courtesy of the Hero of the Capitalist Revolution who beat the socialist Human Genome Project to completion.
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The TSA is such a useless organization, they have to ‘beat up on’ bloggers with kids! Is there not some adage about the sort of men who beat their wives? That they do so because they are trying to cover up their feelings of inadequacy by showing off their ‘power’? Why do we not just disband this worthless organization and admit it never has been nor will be of any use whatever? January 1st, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I have waited awhile to chuck my tuppence into the ‘Climategate’ ring as I am not a true believer and have preferred to see how things played out over time. I personally favour the hypothesis that humans are causing some climatic effects but I do not believe the evidence is sufficient to prove my opinion correct. I have an open mind towards those who are weakly opposed, which is to say those who are waiting on data to prove me wrong. If one were to place my opinions on a dartboard, I would fall pretty close to the one labeled Bjorn Lomborg. I am far more worried about the collateral damage the CRU researchers have caused. Their machinations, exposed by these ‘Pentagon Papers’ of the oughties, is damning and damaging to public trust in science. It opens the door to all sorts of pseudo-science by making their expositors appear superficially to be as trustworthy as the real thing. This is bad. This is very bad. ‘Climategate’ is not the first case of serious scientific fraud in recent years but may be the most damaging and far reaching one. Other well known cases included South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk who falsified his work on cloning and Bell Labs Physicist Jan Hendrik Schön who faked results in numerous papers. Schön used the same fake graph, with modified labels, in three totally different papers. That was just a starter. His massive misdeeds caused a gravity wave ripple through the Physics world as every paper citing his work had to be reconsidered. Since all CRU citations must now be treated as problematic, the potential of ‘Climategate’ is not a ripple but a terrible and destructive tsunami. The researchers responsible for this have set their field back by years and should be disciplined by their peers accordingly. Cleaning primate cages is too good for them. A second facet of ‘Climategate’ is the reported shortcomings in the model code base. Part of the document release included source code. In a discussion with Rand Simberg over breakfast in LA earlier this month I heard that some very knowledgeable open source programmers are having a go at it. If half of what he told me turns out to be true, the models used by IPCC are worse than useless. I have several times in my career translated serious numerical modeling code from Fortran to modern languages and thus had to deal with the issues of validating the results. In the real world mistakes cost money and sometimes lives. Most recently I translated some aerodynamics code for a New Space company. I spent weeks doing nothing but validating and checking to be sure the output was reasonably trustworthy for questions within the realm of interest. When Rand told me the CRU model code did not even handle numeric overflows I was speechless. Let me explain. Computers represent numbers in binary. Any signed representation (ie one that handles plus and minus) will use some formatting trick to differentiate the two. The problem is, if a positive number gets incremented to be one bit too big… it may suddenly become a negative number. Regardless of what does happen, any calculation using the value after an overflow might as well be a random number generator. The results are totally, utterly worthless. There is not a chance in hell that the output will be meaningful. There are ways of dealing with this sort of thing but I will not go into that sort of techno-detail here. My goal is simply to point out that if the statements I heard are true, I must cease to believe the validity of any output from CRU and CRU related models. There is really only one acceptable way for the field to recover credibility and reinvigorate trust. The code for models must all be made open source. It must be released into the public domain where experts in numerical programming can openly argue about the validity of the code, the mathematical techniques and the mathematical and physical simplifications and assumptions it contains. I will no longer believe results which lack this corroboration. If an author refuses, I am going to assume they have misdeeds to hide. Early in this article I said I lean towards pro on the hypothesis of human caused climate change. I should expound upon that a bit more. It is my belief that we are causing some change at present and if things went on as they are now there might be some serious, but not civilization threatening results. However, things are not going to stay the same. A collapse in carbon output is going to occur and the reasons for it have nothing to do with cap and trade or Copenhagen or any other State or NGO foisted crisis plan. By the middle of this century liquid fuels such as gasoline will be generated using the Fischer-Tropsch process in some updated form. It will be carbon neutral because part of the feedstock will be free for the taking: atmospheric CO2. It will be split using either grid power, mechanical nanotechnology or genetically modified algae (some of which is purportedly working already). With the addition of energy, CO2 -> CO + O, and the Carbon Monoxide may be fed into the same FT process that was used to fuel the Nazi war machine. Towards the end of World War II this was nearly the only source of fuel available to Germany. Anyone who believes this technology is unproven on an industrial scale is simply historically ignorant. Carbon based grid power is already declining as a relative portion of US energy (30% according to a recent SciAm article). I expect that decline to accelerate as use of ever cheapening and ever improving solar panels really starts to bite. We will also see inputs from Space Based Solar Power growing explosively by 2050. New technology nuclear and perhaps even game changing wild cards like Polywell Fusion will be taking up major roles by then as well. If you toss in the huge impacts nanotechnology will have on all facets of technological civilization and the expected population decline in the second half of the century one begins to wonder exactly what will be the climate change problem of 2100? If human CO2 inputs collapse and population declines what climatic impact will the modeling of that scenario show? There is yet another wildcard to consider. What if we are about to hit a Maunder type solar minimum? There is debate on this issue but it is certainly not closed. Such a decline could cover any human global warming until long after we have transitioned to more modern energy sources. We need Climate Science to cleanse itself of political hacks. Young scientists must learn that Science cannot save Politics… but Politics can certainly ruin Science. Let scientists generate science and leave politicians to deal in the realm of opinion and ‘what people want’. December 28th, 2009 | 72 comments - (Comments are closed)
As I headed back for the very relative warmth of the main tent I was drawn to the life size replica of SpaceShipOne, the vehicle I watched blasting into space above Mojave in the first half of this decade. It now seemed so small, so primitive, a Mercury to SpaceShipTwo’s Apollo. I could not but help imagine what private space will be flying six years from now. Creative destruction has broken free of its chains. The game has changed.  SpaceShipOne: so tiny, so quaint, so… turn of the century. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved The first familiar face I spotted upon my return to the main tent was the hard to miss Gary Barnhard of the National Space Society. He and others were chatting in the middle of the floor. Despite being half frozen, I gladly accepted chilled white wine from a lovely lass who was wandering about with a tray of them. I must admit I would have preferred some of the hot ‘Glue Wine’ concoction I used to imbibe when skiing Seven Springs in Pennsylvania, but… it was antifreeze, it was free… so who was I to complain?  It was not surprising to find Gary in close proximity to wine. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved With wine in hand I started my first photographic round of the party. When I crossed from the main tent to the front balloon tent and glanced out the gap I was taken again by the surreal reality: there is a friggin real space ship out there!  I just saw a spaceship… someone pinch me! Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved As an old hand in the performance arts one of the things which impressed me was the use of light. I have seen no one else mention it so let me be the first to give kudos to the lighting designer! → Continue reading: Mojave Journey: Part 6 December 26th, 2009 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rand Simberg posted the news that XCOR has closed a deal with Yecheon Astro Space Center to provide Lynx II flights. The Lynx I they have been working on will now only be used as a test article to work out design issues before moving on to the fully suborbital Lynx II. Previously their plans were to fly passengers in the Lynx I at a price and altitude somewhat comparable to adventure flights in advanced Russian fighter planes. The income was to have been ploughed into the development of the Lynx II, the true suborbital spaceship. Thus there will be at least two companies flying passengers into space in the near term, Virgin Galactic and XCOR. If you are reading my posts in expectation that I am a neutral observer of this industry rather than a deep insider passing on tidbits of info then you must be a new reader. Lessee… Rand Simberg and I are in business together in Wyoming Aerospace. I know a bunch of the Virgin Galactic High Command and work with them through the National Space Societies ‘Space Ambassadors’ program. As to XCOR… well, not counting that I have known some of them for up to 30 years… I wrote software under contract to them which was used by their aerodynamics guy for the initial rough planform design of the Lynx. So yeah, I have dogs in this race. All of them. And I am damned proud of whatever tiny contribution I have made to the industry over my lifetime and ecstatic that I am actually around to see it all come to fruition. Ad Astra and Merry Christmas to all of my aerospace family. May you reverse the adage about aerospace and fortunes and break the surly bonds of gravity and self-induced poverty. And while we are at it… may a now minuscule Wyoming aerospace company also make a bloody fortune for its owners! December 19th, 2009 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
After the speeches finished I headed up to the stage to take a photo or two. We were supposed to wait for the speakers and the press to go outside first so I intended to put my wait to good use. To my surprise, I was nearly run down by the group of very very important persons and had to squish back against the edge of the stage as Arnold hurried past inches away. Once they were all outside I joined the rest of the merely VIP filing out onto the tarmac at the side door . It was cold outside, at least down into the twenties. That would not have been so bad except for the rather brisk wind coming down the runway into our faces.  There were a lot of media folk freezing their tuckus off in the Press Stand. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved There was music and a deep percussive bang as each of the huge images on the left of the runway flashed to on, starting from the direction in which we could hear the sound of distant engines. Then a white line became visible in the distance, the wing of WhiteKnightTwo. It lengthened as the singing jets grew louder… and then I could see it: the underslung SpaceShipTwo.  It came from out of the dark of a Western night… the first commercial Space Ship. Am I really here? Is it really here? Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  Is it just love in the eyes of the beholder or is she just plain gorgeous? Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  Ship and mothership came to a stop in front of us. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved A group of four persons went up to the ship for the Christening and the Governors simultaneously smashed bottles of champagne. I had expected the woman with Richard, his daughter, to do this as it seems more in line with centuries of British and American naval tradition.  Left to Right: Holly Branson; Sir Richard Branson on the mike; Governor Richardson; Governor Schwartznegger. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved To my great surprise, we were allowed to move forward right up to the dual vessel. I might say I was almost shocked that in this day of lawyer-induced destruction of our quality of life something as cool and wonderful as this would be allowed. Of course, now that it has been done I am sure they will realize people got to directly experience something amazing and you can not have things like that, now can you?  You would almost imagine this was still a free country: we were allowed to walk right up to her. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  A crowd formed around the nose of SpaceShipTwo. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  It even had sexy nose art like American warbirds of WWII. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved There were too many people at the starboard side of the nose so I started working my way counterclockwise around WhiteKnightTwo. My fingers were numb well before this and when I was taking these photos I could quite literally not feel my finger depressing the shutter button. I could only tell it had happened by watching for the still image to show on the preview screen. It seems that not very many folk did what I did, so there are not a lot of other photos floating around showing the business end of SpaceShipTwo.  Portside of SS2 nose. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  Like any old spacehand, I went around the other side to look at the most important part of any spaceship. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  Two ships and four vertical stabilizers. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  As I had hoped, the crowd had mostly headed for the relative warmth of the tents and Absolut vodka by the time I got back to the nose. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  I framed one last shot of the huge ship as I left the tarmac. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved In part six our crowd of future space travelers party on until dire storm warnings force an emergency evacuation. The previous section of this tale may be found here December 19th, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you intentionally invented a mechanism to damage the future of the american Aerospace industry you could not do better than this. The State is NOT your friend. December 14th, 2009 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The period of speeches and such is an unavoidable but necessary part of the game and the team present for this event was quite high powered. First in the batters box was Will Whitehorn, the President of Virgin Galactic. I first met Will when he joined in a small circle of New Space entrepreneurs late at night after a Gala at the Udvar-Hazy Center. The group of us were trading hanger tales of the space age and doing our best to empty the hospitality suite bathtub. All I can say is, how could you not like a beer drinking kilted-Scot who flies commercial jets and can hold his own in such circles?  Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic, did the introductions. Besides being a quite nice bloke to share a drink with, he has been known to show up in formal kilt. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved There were many speakers but I think Burt Rutan was the one most of us were ready to really cheer for. Burt is the one who created SpaceShipOne and now SpaceShipOne. Few would disagree that he is the most creative aircraft designer alive today. On top of that his views on many topics would fit right in here at Samizdata. He misses no opportunity to point out how he has created a manned space program totally in the private sector and done it for a small fraction of what the government programs cost.  Burt Rutan, Hero of the Revolution.. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved The most important people on the stage this day was the team that actually designed and built the world’s first commercial spaceship. They are the ones who took up tools and laid out the design.  The ones who made it so. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Sir Richard was another member of the cast of on stage characters who helped make it all real. He is the one with money, guts and vision and I suspect shares ‘the dream’ with as much intensity as any of us. He is also a fairly approachable person in the right circumstances, but that is another story.  Richard Branson: the man who sold the suborbit . Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Oh, I almost forgot… there were a couple politicians there also, and I discovered that the California politicians are somewhat jealous that New Mexico is building Spaceport America near Las Cruces. It will be the initial home port for Virgin Galactic’s fleet of WhiteKnightTwo’s and SpaceShipTwo’s.  Arnold Schwartznegger, Governor of California. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved In the next episode our adventurers stand in freezing high winds to watch the new spaceship taxi out of the gloom and stop close by. The previous episode is here. December 14th, 2009 | Comments are closed
I had planned on visiting the Masten Aerospace hanger as well, but as we ran into Dave at XCOR I got business out of the way and did not really have an excuse to sandwich that much desired visit into our schedule. Time had slipped by far too rapidly and Rand was due at the Mariah Hotel to get his Press credentials. Since I was also doing articles and had not yet had any guarantee of getting into the event as I was still just wait listed, I chanced showing up at the press desk, egged on by some Press friends. It did not work and in fact a woman named Jackie looked like she was about to turf me out of the building on my ear and thereafter seemed to glare at me every time she saw me. My main chance at getting in was more official and as it turned out, it was successful. After Rand left on the press bus I tried the VIP desk. They were much more helpful and after showing a key email and talking with a few people in Virgin Galactic I was presented with one of the last of the stainless steel VIP badges and told to hurry on board the last bus.  The VIP registration desk. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved The busses were the only way onto the field and even they were held up waiting for obeisance to red tape. All the buses, whether from LA or the hotel, were held in a queue and all were released to the taxiway at once. The party site was at the end of the runway, hard up against the exhaust deflector and far from the hanger area. There were large signs which I correctly took to be part of the night time light show and a grouping of tents, one very large clear plastic covered structure and  The main tent. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved two smaller inflated balloon structures. It was all very 21st Century. 
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Inside of the tents was the sort of environment you would expect from a party held by Richard Branson for a few hundred friends. The first tent held the coat and bag check and was the point at which we were given our very nice Puma ‘VirginGalactic’ jackets and ski caps.  OCST Director George Nield deep in a conversation inside the first balloon tent. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved The interiors of the two balloon tents were quite nice looking  Interior of second balloon tent. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  The second balloon tent exits at the jet exhaust deflector. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Outside the second tent I found a sculptress still at work carving a space-suited figure out of a block of ice. As it turned out one of the sponsors was Absolut and carved ice played a big part in the night’s festivities. I do suspect at the planning stage they did not think it would be so cold that there would be no melting to worry about.  It was in no danger of melting. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved There was another bar inside the main tent and then the main auditorium area. People were collecting there as the speeches were due to start soon. There were little knots of conversation as people made contacts of opportunity or met with old friends.  Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  The fellow in orange is Dick Rutan, the man who along with Jeanna Yeager flew the first non-stop flight around the world. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  The global media were out in force. Note Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize Foundation in the lower right. He is the man responsible for this explosion in commercial manned space flight. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  Brett Silcox from NSS was busy chatting with targets of opportunity.. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved I walked around the tent to get a feel for the territory.  This is the tarmac area where I expected we would see SpaceShipTwo after dark. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  The media were everywhere and interviewing everyone. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved There was a full scale replica of SpaceShipOne, the craft whose first flight I live blogged from here some five years ago.  The X-Prize Foundation arranged for the creation of replicas of SpaceShipOne. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  The main stage was ready for occupation and speechifying. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Tomorrow I will cover the speeches. This is the third in a series of articles. The previous one is here A few of my photos also appear in Rand Simberg’s Popular Mechanics article. December 12th, 2009 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
There are armed, untouchable criminals at the US Border and we pay their wages. December 11th, 2009 | 66 comments - (Comments are closed)
After hanging out in the SSI office for awhile, Rand and I headed over to the XCOR hanger, the next after the Scaled Composites one shown here. I am sure caffeine was flowing like water inside as Scaled staff got everything ready to roll.  You could almost feel the coming buzz from the Scaled Composites hanger. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved We were let into XCOR through the front reception and found yet another crowd of which we knew practically everyone. It is not a big industry so practically everyone knows everyone else. Rand and I were there for business as well as saying hello. You know, just making sure people remember us when they suddenly have money and need someone to help spend it!  California does not yet require listing Rocket Scientists and Hanger Cats as potentially Hazardous Materials. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved XCOR was the host of the local get together. The crowd there traded thoughts on rocket engine design, control systems, who currently has money and who does not… all of the important things in life. Well, some of them at least. See how many people you can name from this crowd.  XCOR and Masten folk talking about rockets Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  XCOR and Masten folk talking about rockets Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved I had a long chat and traded stories with Aleta Jackson who besides being one of the leading lights of XCOR is also someone I have known for…. well perhaps I should not say how long, but the light had definitely been separated from the dark by then.  Aleta has lots of good stories. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved There are bits and bobs of rocket planes, rocket engines and test gear all about the hanger the XCOR folk have called home for much of this decade, but the real eye-catchers are these beauties:  The Rocket Racer looks fast just sitting there. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved  And they have two of them sitting there! Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Aleta saw me drooling and smitten at the cockpit door and demanded I sit in it. On the serious side, the controls of this baby are pretty much what you would find in any General Aviation aircraft, although I suspect the glass cockpit part of it has a few other twists. At Alamogordo two years ago I heard they are to have a Heads Up Display to superimpose an image of the racing ‘gates’ on the external view. In any case, I got a brief ground stint in the left hand seat and held its throttle in my hand.  I will remember to ask Aleta for the keys next time. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Part 1 of this series is here. The next article will show our intrepid rocket renegades making their tortuous way to the most historic party of the decade. December 10th, 2009 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rand Simberg and I left his house in LA at a time he predicted would be optimal from a traffic standpoint, and as he used to commute to work at Rotary Rocket several times a week in the Nineties, he ought to know. We were in rain and overcast until one set of hills before Mojave when the Native American gods blessed the undertaking with a full rainbow bridge. Since photo ops of this sort are not easily scheduled with higher authorities, Rand pulled over. 
Rand Simberg peers intently into the distance in hopes of spotting the pot of gold we need for our Wyoming Aerospace venture I have not been up to Mojave for a few years and some things have changed. The gate guardian Phantom is now at the airport entry, and it has been joined by a rather rare 1960’s vintage Convair airliner. Most striking to me was Roton standing proud not far from the main building. The first time I saw it was inside the Rotary Rocket High Bay back in 1999 and at that time I was only allowed to record it in my memory. 
Roton is the first commercial space Gate Guardian that I am aware of Those who have been around the space scene for awhile will remember the Space Studies Institute. It was once a major player but seemed to fade out over the last 15 years and some thought it had died completely. Not so! Lee Valentine and Robin Snelson have moved it from Princeton to an office inside the terminal just behind Rand. 
Obligatory tourist style photo of Rand. As if he has not been here a few thousand times before… First stop was the Voyager restaurant, an amenity that is fairly recent. Lunch used to require a trip into town. The first thing I noticed coming in the door was that I knew a large fraction of the people there; the second thing I noticed was the private jet parked just outside with a G-number and a Virgin logo. I wonder who that might belong to? 
Familiar faces in the lunch crowd at the Voyager. 
Care to hazard a guess at the owner? After chatting awhile in the lounge we found that someone was over in the SSI office and we could connect to the net or work from there if we wished. As it turned out, we mostly just talked and looked over the large collection of commercial and space industrialization books lining the walls. 
Just hangin at the SSI office. In the next installment I will cover the visit with our old friends and colleagues at XCOR. You can find an intro article here. December 9th, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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