… But we can approach this the other way too, looking at capitalism rather than engineering. As Adam Smith didn’t quite say (but as I do, often) capitalists are lazy, stupid and greedy. Finding that new way to make money is really difficult. So, very few try. Once someone does try and find then all the lazy — and greedy, did I mention that? — capitalist bastards copy what is being done. This hauls vast amounts of capital into that area, competition erodes the profits being made by the pioneer and the end result is that it’s consumers who make out like bandits. The result (here) is that the entrepreneur makes 3% or so of the money and the consumers near all the rest. This is the very thing that makes this capitalist and free market thing work.
Tim Worstall, “Folks Are Copying SpaceX – That’s How Capitalism Works”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-09-16.
December 17, 2024
QotD: Capitalism is a combination of laziness, stupidity, and greed
December 2, 2024
Mars? Yes, Mars.
At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses the pros and cons of colonizing Mars:
… we’re on the good timeline now.
Not everyone appreciates the good timeline. A persistent current of discourse holds that we shouldn’t go to Mars, that it is a misbegotten ambition, unrealistic, unprofitable, and even counterproductive. “Antarctica would be easier”, they say, “We should start there if we start anywhere”. Mars is too difficult; the technology doesn’t exist; it’s fantastically expensive, with no conceivable profit to be derived from a frigid desert littered with dead rocks, where the clouds themselves are made of red dust, where the air is too thin and toxic to breathe, where nothing can possibly grow. Therefore, they pronounce, we shouldn’t go. We shouldn’t even try to go. We should use our limited resources to solve our pressing problems down here on Earth – climate change, poverty, racism, the gender pay gap, the refusal of the chuds to use the correct pronouns.
Leave aside that if Europeans had waited to solve Europe’s problems, they never would have left.
Leave aside that “we” aren’t doing anything. Some people will use their resources to try this audacious thing; others will use their resources to do other things. The oft-heard phrasing of “we” presupposes that “our” resources are a collective property, their usage to be decided on the basis of utilitarian calculations carried out, presumably, by panels of self-selected technocratic experts. That collective ownership and central planning has been calamitous every time it has been applied in earnest is no barrier to the appeal of the idea over a great many minds.
Leave aside also the economic case for Martian settlement. That case has been made, and made well, by Devon Eriksen in his essay “The Trillionaires of Mars“.
Briefly, Mars is valuable because its shallow gravity well and proximity to the asteroid belt provides an ideal planetary surface on which to build the industrial infrastructure necessary to refine asteroids into useful metals and finished manufactured products, which can then be sent back to the terrestrial market (or shipped elsewhere in the solar system). As to the comparisons to Antarctica, planetary scientist Peter Hague
has addressed this in detail.As Hague points out, Antarctica’s geography means that it receives a vanishingly small amount of solar radiation (and during the winter, none at all). In contrast, while Mars’ greater distance from the Sun (an average of 1.5 Astronomical Units) means that it only gets about 44% of Earth’s irradiance, this is still a lot more than Antarctica. Growing crops is a lot easier on Mars than it is on Antarctica, where it can only be done hydroponically. Setting up shop on Mars means that we can use this solar energy not only to generate electricity, but also for agriculture. On Mars, in principle, one merely mixes human waste with the regolith (after removing the perchlorates) to turn it into topsoil, puts it in a transparent dome, fills the dome with air, and plants the potatoes.
Mars is certainly the easiest extraterrestrial body in the solar system to settle, occupying a sweet spot with its combination of proximity to the Earth, low gravity, an atmosphere, and abundant local resources. It therefore makes perfect sense that it would be prioritized for colonization. It’s Level 1 in the game of becoming multiplanetary. Other bodies may offer much richer prizes in the long run, but they’re also far more challenging.
Still, pace Devon, it’s unlikely that Mars will be profitable in the short run. Even asteroid mining will, at least initially, be far more useful for in situ space manufacturing than it will be for the terrestrial market. As Eriksen points out, correctly, if you strip-mine a quadrillion-dollar asteroid of nickel, iron, and platinum group metals and ship them back to Earth all at once, you’ll just crash the value of those metals. Supply and demand 101. Then again, as Eriksen also points out, raw materials aren’t just numbers on a commodity exchange: they’re actual, physical stuff that you can use to build things, and when society has more of it, society is wealthier in real terms … something that we often forget in our hypothecated financial economy. This is a point I’ve made myself, in the context of a wider discussion about why we should fix our gaze upon the heavens, and ignore those who demand that we wallow perpetually in the mud.
October 15, 2024
QotD: The Mandela Effect
Your memories may be different from mine, but not as different as Fiona Broome’s. I remember watching the live TV footage of Nelson Mandela walking to freedom after 27 years in captivity, while Broome, an author and paranormal researcher, remembers Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s.
When Broome discovered that she was not the only person to remember an alternative version of events, she started a website about what she dubbed “the Mandela Effect”. On it, she collected shared memories that seemed to contradict the historical record. (The site is no longer online but, never fear, Broome has published a 15-volume anthology of these curious recollections.)
Mandela, of course, did not die in prison. On a recent trip to South Africa, I visited Robben Island, where he and many others were incarcerated in harsh conditions, to speak to former prisoners and former prison guards, and to wander around a city emblazoned with images of the smiling, genial, elderly statesman. How could it be that anyone remembers differently?
The truth is that our memories are less reliable than we tend to think. The cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser vividly remembered where he was when he heard that the Japanese had launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. He was listening to a baseball game on the radio when the broadcast was interrupted by the breaking news, and he rushed upstairs to tell his mother. Only later did Neisser realise that his memory, no matter how vivid, must be wrong. There are no radio broadcasts of baseball in December.
On January 28 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after launch; a spectacular and highly memorable tragedy. The morning after, Neisser and his colleague Nicole Harsch asked a group of students to write down an account of how they learnt the news. A few years later, Neisser and Harsch went back to the same people and made the same requests. The memories were complete, vivid and, for a substantial minority of people, completely different from what they had written down a few hours after the event.
What’s stunning about these results is not that we forget. It’s that we remember, clearly, in detail and with great confidence, things that simply did not happen.
Tim Harford, “The detours on memory lane”, Tim Harford, 2024-06-20.
September 18, 2024
Canucks. In. Space – “racist, exploitative, elitist, and environmentally destructive”
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper‘s First Reading on a recently commissioned report for the Canadian Armed Forces on space exploration from an intersectional feminist viewpoint:
As Canada prepares to send an astronaut on the first manned moon mission in more than 50 years, its own military has commissioned a $32,250 report on how space exploration may actually be “racist, exploitative, elitist, and environmentally destructive”.
The 48-page report, entitled Hidden Harms: Human (In)security in Outer Space, concludes that human usage of space is currently “masculine, militarized and state-based”.
The authors also bemoan a space exploration field that is beholden to colonial concepts such as “technospeak” and “expertise”, and which doesn’t give appropriate weight to “spirituality, astrology, and cosmology, the last of which views celestial bodies in space as animated beings and not mere objects”.
As such, the report concludes that space will continue to be a realm of “hidden violence” against the world’s marginalized until “gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality” can be put at “the centre” of how decisions are made in the cosmos.
“Leadership is needed to normalize inclusion of different perspectives,” reads a conclusion.
The report has very little positive to say about the current state of human space exploration or space technology.
The whole endeavour is criticized as “technology-biased” because it fails to consider “gendered effects”. It’s “geography-biased”, because it doesn’t include equal participation from poorer countries.
It “normalize(s) violence and exploitation” by using language that depicts “outer space as a hostile and desolate environment that is unpeopled/inhuman and controlled so that it can provide an extractable resource”.
The construction of launch pads, satellite receivers and other ground infrastructure causes “disproportionate harm to Indigenous communities by severing their connection to ancestral lands”.
The report is also deeply critical of the fact that space is disproportionately inhabited by able-bodied males from wealthy countries. “Existing approaches are ahistorical and thus invisibilize diverse stakeholders and voices,” it reads.
Hidden Harms contains little to no discussion of the technical aspects of space exploration or technology. The word “rocket”, for instance, appears only once in a footnote in relation to how a falling rocket stage could hurt Inuit people. The word “orbit” appears in the text just once, when referencing how states could impose extraterrestrial harm by “permanently damaging objects on orbit”.
Nevertheless, the report is clear that all of these technical considerations should become secondary to “intersectional, decolonial, and humanitarian perspectives”.
“We must make space for the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable,” it reads.
It’s hardly surprising that an “intersectional feminist” view of space exploration would be harshly negative — what is surprising is that the Canadian Armed Forces paid to have this intellectual drivel written. A bit over $30k isn’t even a rounding error for the federal government, but as an indicator of just how federal bureaucrats are spending their departmental budgets it does seem to indicate that there’s a lot of fat in those budget numbers.
August 9, 2024
A crisis of competence
Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds on one of the biggest yet least recognized issues of most modern nations — our overall declining institutional competence:
Almost everywhere you look, we are in a crisis of institutional competence.
The Secret Service, whose failures in securing Trump’s Butler, PA speech are legendary and frankly hard to believe at this point, is one example. (Nor is the Butler event the Secret Service’s first embarrassment.)
The Navy, whose ships keep colliding and catching fire.
Major software vendor Crowdstrike, whose botched update shut down major computer systems around the world.
The United States government, which built entire floating harbors to support the D-Day invasion in Europe, but couldn’t build a workable floating pier in Gaza.
And of course, Boeing, whose Starliner spacecraft is stuck, apparently indefinitely, at the International Space Station. (Its crew’s six-day mission, now extended perhaps into 2025, is giving off real Gilligan’s Island energy.) At present, Starliner is clogging up a necessary docking point at the ISS, and they can’t even send Starliner back to Earth on its own because it lacks the necessary software to operate unmanned – even though an earlier build of Starliner did just that.
Then there are all the problems with Boeing’s airliners, literally too numerous to list here.
Roads and bridges take forever to be built or repaired, new airports are nearly unknown, and the Covid response was extraordinary for its combination of arrogant self-assurance and evident ineptitude.
These are not the only examples, of course, and readers can no doubt provide more (feel free to do so in the comments) but the question is, Why? Why are our institutions suffering from such widespread incompetence? Americans used to be known for “know how,” for a “can-do spirit”, for “Yankee ingenuity” and the like. Now? Not so much.
Americans in the old days were hardly perfect, of course. Once the Transcontinental Railroad was finished and the golden spike driven in Promontory, Utah, large parts of it had to be reconstructed for poor grading, defective track, etc. Transport planes full of American paratroopers were shot down during the invasion of Sicily by American ships, whose gunners somehow confused them for German bombers. But those were failures along the way to big successes, which is not so much the case today.
But if our ancestors mostly did better, it’s probably because they operated closer to the bone. One characteristic of most of our recent failures is that nobody gets fired. (Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle did resign, eventually, but nobody fired her, and I think heads should have rolled on down the line).
August 5, 2024
What the First Astronauts Ate – Food in Space
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Apr 23, 2024Smooth, sweet, and sour Tang pie in a graham cracker crust
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1960sContrary to popular belief, NASA did not invent Tang, but the company that did, General Foods, used the association in a lot of their marketing. They even developed this recipe for Tang pie, also called astronaut pie.
The texture of the pie is smooth and very nice, but it had too much of a sour zip in it, or “tang” if you will, for me. If you like sour notes like in lemon meringue or key lime pies, or if you just like Tang, then I think you’ll like this. You can use a ready-made graham cracker crust to make this pie even easier to put together.
Tang Pie. It’s the pie of the future. Here it goes space boys and girls:
TANG Pie
1 can sweetened condensed milk
3/4 C. Tang® powder drink mix
1/2 C. sour cream
1 (9 oz.) tub Cool Whip®
1 graham cracker pie crust.
Mix condensed milk and Tang. Add in sour cream until well blended. Then fold in tub of Cool Whip. Pour into pie crust and refrigerate for 4 hours or until set and cold.
May 25, 2024
Fathers of Light and Darkness – Rockets and Explosives – Sabaton History 126 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published Feb 7, 2024There are many inventors whose creations have been turned into weapons of war. A couple that really stand out are Alfred Nobel and Wernher von Braun. Today we’ll take a deep dive into their stories and the paradox of using destructive weapons for good, or creative weapons for destruction.
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January 1, 2024
The largest telescope that will ever be built*
Tom Scott
Published 2 Oct 2023The asterisk is important.
■ More on the ELT: @ESOobservatory https://eso.orgThe Extremely Large Telescope, in Paranal, Chile, is probably going to be the largest optical telescope that will ever be constructed. I was invited out there by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and the European Southern Observatory, and I wasn’t going to turn down a chance like that.
📰 DISCLAIMER
While the STFC and ESO invited me and arranged the logistics after arrival into the Antofagasta region, I was not paid for this (not even my travel costs) and I have sole editorial control over the video. This is not an advert.
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September 24, 2023
Architect Breaks Down Why All American Diners Look Like That | Architectural Digest
Architectural Digest
Published 1 Jun 2023Today Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects returns to Architectural Digest to explore the design evolution of American diners. A cornerstone of American dining culture, their distinctive style has been emulated around the world making them a popular salute to the USA. Michael provides an expert look into the history behind their design evolution from the 1920s through to the 1960s and explains why all diners came to look like that.
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September 14, 2023
Scott Alexander reviews the (old) Elon Musk biography
It’s okay, he makes it clear from the start that he’s talking about Ashlee Vance’s earlier work, not the one that just hit the shelves this year:
Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.
This isn’t the new Musk biography everyone’s talking about. This is the 2015 Musk biography by Ashlee Vance. I started reading it in July, before I knew there was a new one. It’s fine: Musk never changes. He’s always been exactly the same person he is now.1
I read the book to try to figure out who that was. Musk is a paradox. He spearheaded the creation of the world’s most advanced rockets, which suggests that he is smart. He’s the richest man on Earth, which suggests that he makes good business decisions. But we constantly see this smart, good-business-decision-making person make seemingly stupid business decisions. He picks unnecessary fights with regulators. Files junk lawsuits he can’t possibly win. Abuses indispensable employees. Renames one of the most recognizable brands ever.
Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time? To reduce the dissonance, people have spawned a whole industry of Musk-bashing, trying to explain away each of his accomplishments: Peter Thiel gets all the credit for PayPal, Martin Eberhard gets all the credit for Tesla, NASA cash keeps SpaceX afloat, something something blood emeralds. Others try to come up with reasons he’s wholly smart – a 4D chessmaster whose apparent drunken stumbles lead inexorably to victory.
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, And The Quest For A Fantastic Future delights in its refusal to resolve the dissonance. Musk has always been exactly the same person he is now, and exactly what he looks like. He is without deception, without subtlety, without unexpected depths.
The main answer to the paradox of “how does he succeed while making so many bad decisions?” is that he’s the most focused person in the world. When he decides to do something, he comes up with an absurdly optimistic timeline for how quickly it can happen if everything goes as well as the laws of physics allow. He – I think the book provides ample evidence for this – genuinely believes this timeline,2 or at least half-believingly wills for it to be true. Then, when things go less quickly than that, it’s like red-hot knives stabbing his brain. He gets obsessed, screams at everyone involved, puts in twenty hour days for months on end trying to try to get the project “back on track”. He comes up with absurd shortcuts nobody else would ever consider, trying to win back a few days or weeks. If a specific person stands in his way, he fires that person (if they are an employee), unleashes nonstop verbal abuse on them3 (if they will listen) or sues them (if they’re anyone else). The end result never quite reaches the original goal, but still happens faster than anyone except Elon thought possible. A Tesla employee described his style as demanding a car go from LA to NYC on a single charge, which is impossible, but he puts in such a strong effort that the car makes it to New Mexico.
This is the Musk Strategy For Business Success; the rest is just commentary.
1. Vance starts with the story of the biography itself. When Musk learned he was being profiled, he called Vance, threatened that he could “make [his] life very difficult”, and demanded the right to include footnotes wherever he wanted telling his side of the story. When Vance said that wasn’t how things worked, Elon invited him to dinner to talk about it. Elon arrived late, and spent the first few courses talking about the risk of artificial superintelligence. When Vance tried to redirect the conversation to the biography, Elon abruptly agreed, gave him unprecedented access to everyone, and won him over so thoroughly that the book ends with a prediction that Musk will succeed at everything and become the richest man in the world (a bold claim back in 2015).
I like this story but find myself dwelling on Musk’s request — why shouldn’t he be allowed to read his own biography before publication and include footnotes giving his side of the story where he disagrees? That sounds like it should be standard practice! If I ever write a post about any of you and you disagree with it, feel free to ask me to add a footnote giving your side of the story (or realistically I’ll put it in an Open Thread).
2. The book gives several examples of times Musk almost went bankrupt by underestimating how long a project would take, then got saved by an amazing stroke of luck at the last second. When Vance asked him about his original plan to get the Falcon 1 done in a year, he said:
“Reminded about the initial 2003 target date to fly the Falcon 1, Musk acted shocked. ‘Are you serious?’ he said. ‘We said that? Okay, that’s ridiculous. I think I just didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. The only thing I had prior experience in was software, and, yeah, you can write a bunch of software and launch a website in a year. No problem. This isn’t like software. It doesn’t work that way with rockets.”
But also, the employees who Vance interviewed admit that whenever Musk asks how long something will take, they give him a super-optimistic timeline, because otherwise he will yell at them.
3. I wondered whether Elon was self-aware. The answer seems to be yes. Here’s an email he wrote a friend:
“I am by nature obsessive compulsive. In terms of being an asshole or screwing up, I’m personally as guilty of that as anyone, and am somewhat thick-skinned in this regard due to large amounts of scar tissue. What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way. God knows why … it’s probably [rooted] in some very disturbing psychoanalytical black hole or neural short circuit.”
September 11, 2023
The DOJ versus SpaceX
I was a bit boggled when the US Justice Department announced it was going after Elon Musk’s SpaceX for alleged discriminatory hiring practices:
Image from SpaceX website.
The Justice Department recently filed a lawsuit against SpaceX, the California-based spacecraft manufacturer and satellite communications company founded by Elon Musk.
In its lawsuit, the DOJ accused SpaceX of only hiring U.S. citizens and green-card holders, thereby discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring, an alleged violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Musk denied the allegations and accused the government of weaponizing “the DOJ for political purposes”.
“SpaceX was told repeatedly that hiring anyone who was not a permanent resident of the United States would violate international arms trafficking law, which would be a criminal offense,” Musk wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
It’s uncertain if the DOJ is actually targeting SpaceX (more on that in a minute), but George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok quickly found a problem with the DOJ’s allegations.
“Do you know who else advertises that only US citizens can apply for a job?” Tabarrok asked. “The DOJ.”
Tabarrok even brought the receipts: a screenshot of the DOJ job website that explicitly states, “U.S. Citizenship is Required.”
So, if Musk is discriminating against non-U.S. citizens in his hiring practices, so is the DOJ.
This makes the lawsuit prima facie absurd on one level. However, one could also argue that there could be good reasons to discriminate in hiring. And as is usually the case, for better or worse, the government gets to decide when it’s OK to discriminate and when it’s not OK.
And that’s where things get hazy.
Musk and others claim that companies such as SpaceX are legally required to hire U.S. citizens because of International Traffic in Arms Regulations, a federal regulatory framework designed to safeguard military-related technologies.
The DOJ disagrees. So who is right? It’s difficult to say, Tabarrok pointed out.
“The distinction, as I understand it, rests on the difference between US Persons and US Citizens,” he wrote on Marginal Revolution, “but [SpaceX is] 100% correct that the DoD frowns on non-citizens working for military related ventures.”
In other words, SpaceX appears to have been trying to comply with Department of Defense regulations by not using non-citizens in military-related work, and in doing so, it may have run afoul of the DOJ.
June 24, 2023
The Most Reliable and Versatile Sub-orbital Rockets Ever Made; the Black Brant Sounding Rockets
Polyus
Published 31 Aug 2018The Black Brant series of sounding rockets was a great success and a proud contribution to the global race for space. While not as glamorous as an orbital rocket, the Black Brants helped scientists from around the globe research and better understand the Aurora and the Earth’s ionosphere.
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June 21, 2023
Was Starship’s Stage Zero a Bad Pad?
Practical Engineering
Published 20 Jun 2023Launchpads are incredible feats of engineering. Let’s cover some of the basics!
Unlike NASA, which spends years in planning and engineering, SpaceX uses rapid development cycles and full-scale tests to work toward its eventual goals. They push their hardware to the limit to learn as much as possible, and we get to follow along. They’re betting it will pay off to develop fast instead of carefully. This video compares the Stage 0 launch pad to the historic pad 39A.
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June 18, 2023
Don’t Drop your Tools in Space
Real Engineering
Published 11 Mar 2023
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May 28, 2023
This Gun Could Reach Space
Real Engineering
Published 18 Feb 2023
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