Faster Cars and Smellier Air

The “current” issue of Scientific American has a terrific series of articles on the future of our planet and the challenges our population faces.

(I anticipate that most of it will be available free online here during September. Despite the reversal of a nutty price hike, unfiltered electronic access to the magazine remains more expensive than print susbcriptions.)

The editors, following the lead of their friends at the National Geographic Society, and no doubt acquiesing to the repeated pleas for “less speculative cosmology” that I scrawl on my subscription renewal cards, have put together some very interesting and at times surprisingly upbeat analyses. Many of the pieces question the conventional wisdom that the interests of business and ecology inherently conflict.

1.1 billion people get by (or fail to get by) on less than one dollar a day. In an recap of his recent book, Jeffrey Sachs asserts that an additional $80 billion annular investment could ultimately eliminate that level of extreme poverty. Certainly this is audacious, and has generated rancorous argument (if you like that sort of thing, see the Washington Post Book World’s nasty review, a review of that review in a blog I follow, and the author’s response.)

What’s clear to me is that we have to do more, because the magnitude of this human suffering is outrageous and unacceptable. I hope we can avoid globalizing the traditional Left/Right arguments. We need to find areas of consensus and act, quickly. As governments and as individuals.

Like any endeavor, some things we try won’t work. But others will. Asia has already begun to turn things around.

Now that Discovery is happily back safe and sound, it’s hard not to be dissapointed about another ginormous chunk of foam detaching from its external fuel tank after everyone worked so hard to prevent it.

There were some successes here. Notably, the repair process worked well. The centerpiece of this success was Canadarm, the newly-extended remote manipulator arm contributed by our friends to the north.

I agree with astronaut Scott J. Horowitz and others that the design of the shuttle is simply too complicated. If you amortize the total cost of the program, each launch burns about a billion dollars, and human resources account for much of it.

There is really no effective way to test the shuttle. Other manned rocket systems are launched dozens of times without people in them before they are considered safe. Only the pieces of the shuttle can be tested. As Richard Feynman pointed out in the Challenger investigation chapter of his excellent book, when you assemble 100 components that each are 99% reliable, you should expect the resulting machine to be less than 36.6% (0.99 ^ 100) reliable. The only ways around this problem are to use fewer components, or to rigorously test the finished assembly.

When considered against the initial goal of routine access to space, one has to conclude that the space shuttle program has not been a success. In the near future, a return to more conventional rocket technology is appropriate. However, we can’t drop the ball developing the promising scramjet technology. If we ever have spaceships like the kind they have in Firefly, they’re going to use scramjets. We should take all the money we save by scrapping the next generation space shuttle and invest heavily in non-military scramjet research. And, of course, continue the highly successful unmanned exploration programs to Mars and the outer solar system.

Let’s review some recent prioritizations we appear to have made as a society.

Are we losing the ability to prioritize? Or did we ever have it?

Matt tells the charming story of how he once was given a long list of tasks to complete at work. He asked his boss to rank the tasks in terms of importance so that he could prioritize the work. His boss proceeded to write “high” next to every task.