Throughput: Oydsseus Edition
Photo by NASA Marshall Space Flight Center / Intuitive Machines, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
[ThTh1] Having completed a journey that would make its namesake quaver, a small space probe has gotten to its destination:
After a nail-biting descent and a tense silence from the lunar surface, the United States is back on the moon.
Odysseus, a robotic lander built by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, touched down near the lunar south pole this evening (Feb. 22).
It was a landmark moment for space exploration: No private spacecraft had ever soft-landed on the moon before, and an American vehicle hadn’t hit the gray dirt softly since NASA’s crewed Apollo 17 lander did so in December 1972.
For reference, I was six months old the last time an American spacecraft soft-landed on a moon. And I’m getting a routine colonoscopy next month.
This is the first of three missions IM is planning to land on the moon over the next year, all using SpaceX rockets. The purpose is to do some preliminary investigation of the south polar region in preparation for Artemis. It is thought that the region may still have water ice, which would make establishing a future colony much easier.
The achievements of the private space industry in recent years have been nothing short of remarkable. It has brought us to the brink of a new golden age of space exploration. Now to follow through on the promise.
[ThTh2] Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled this week that frozen embryos are children under the law. The case stemmed from an incident in which someone handled and destroyed a tray of frozen embryos. The families sued for wrongful death. A lower court denied the claim, saying that embryos were not people and their destruction did not qualify as a wrongful death. The Supreme Court overturned this, with one judge invoking scripture to justify his decision.
The result has been chaos in the IVF industry. The IVF process necessarily involves creating and destroying embryos. Several clinics have now suspended IVF because they have no idea where they stand legally. While this is happy news to people who oppose IVF on religious grounds, it is compounding the misery of infertile couples seeking help.
Full disclosure here: when my wife and I were having trouble getting a second kid, we did two cycle of IVF in Maryland. The process is involved, expensive and emotionally and physically draining. The last thing we would have wanted was politicians and judges looking over our shoulders. We did not get a child through IVF. However, the failure led our doctor to investigate further and determine the underlying problem, which was high levels of homocysteine. A change in diet and some medication and our son came about the old-fashioned way.
Alabama lawmakers are now scrambling to protect IVF. From a scientific perspective, I will only say that frozen embryos are not people under any scientific standard. They are not conscious. They can be frozen for indefinite periods of time. Most embryos will fail to implant or perish soon after implanting. IF you want to go to religion, Exodus 21:22 makes it clear that the Bible does not regard even a fetus as the equivalent of a human life1
I feel bad for the people who lost their embryos this way and they should be compensated in some fashion. But I think the Court went too far in this case.
[ThTh3] A new ebola vaccine cuts death rates in half.
[ThTh4] In this week’s video Throughput, I talk about Starship Troopers
[ThTh5] Florida is having outbreaks of measles due to declining vaccination rates. Measles is incredibly infectious and so if the vaccination rate drops below 95%, you can get outbreaks. As I feared, the lies about the COVID vaccine have propagated backward into more traditional vaccines. And so, here we are, in the Year of Lord 2024, dealing with the outbreaks of a disease that should be extinct.
One of the aggravating factors here is vaccine skeptic, pathological liar and … uh, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado. In response to the outbreaks, he is refusing to tighten vaccination requirements, refusing to even encourage vaccination and telling parents of sick kids to go ahead and send them to school rather than quarantining them.
Here it is in visual form, what happens when you get measles with 20% hospitalized vs the minimal risk of the MMR Vaccine. I did this with @billmarshnyt https://t.co/QTFSMapiKk pic.twitter.com/LI717FzEdn
— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) February 15, 2024
It is stunning that in a moment when our civilization is reaching new heights in its technological power, we have a heavily-moneyed movement to push us back into an epidemiological dark age. Ron DeSantis is no longer running for President so there’s no need to pander to the pro-COVID crowd any longer. He should fire Lapado immediately for gross dereliction of duty.
[ThTh6] We may be closer to solving the mystery of fast radio bursts.
[ThTh7] What has JWST been up to lately? Maybe discovering the shriveled husk of a stellar explosion seen during the Reagan Administration.
“From a scientific perspective, I will only say that frozen embryos are not people under any scientific standard. They are not conscious. They can be frozen for indefinite periods of time.”
This is buying into the pro-life message.Report
Why would they be against it then?Report
Pournelle used to say something like “I lived to see the first man on the moon. I worry that I lived to see the last one.” Let’s hope we can go back.
As for vaccines… I resent that the mRNA vaccines were politicized. I resent that they were oversold and I *REALLY* resent that they underdelivered. I resent that definitions of “vaccination” were changed on the fly. And now here we are. Science needs to re-learn how to take a deep breath and explain it again.
The Starship Troopers discourse on the twitters was *NUTS*. We used to have media literacy.
Granted, I saw Starship Troopers in the theater and my takeaway was something more like “that was awesome!” instead of something like “what a takedown of conservatives!” (But I did notice “Hey, Dougie is dressed like a Nazi.”)Report
Oh, we can totally go back. And if we spent like we spent for Apollo, we could do it pretty quickly too. But nobody wants to spend eight hundred billion dollars on a moon shot, so, we get what we’re getting.
The thing about “Starship Troopers” discourse is that everyone who saw the movie but didn’t read the book assumes that the book was exactly like the movie only words on paper instead of video on screen, and so they act like they know everything about it because they watched the movie. (or at least they read the TVTropes page and that’s just as good right?)
Although most of the people who did read the book don’t understand it either :\Report
The book was better than the movie, (maybe you have to like Heinlein a lot though) but the movie was good.Report
The movie was an interesting exercise in Why You Can’t Ever Assume The Satire Is Obvious.
The book was a leftist fantasy about What If We Could Invent An Objective Method Of Evaluating Morality.Report
I don’t know that we (fsvo “we”) could go back at this point. I’m pretty sure that, at this point, our hope lies in SpaceX (or similar).Report
No, we could absolutely do it. The technical problems were solved in the 1960s, and what we’ve done since then is mostly add bigger computers that let a lot of the stuff be done onboard as it happens instead of needing to be pre-planned and hardwired in. (The Apollo computers actually had as much capability as the ones we have now, it’s just that 90% of the “computer” was scientists on the ground solving equations and writing the answers into programs for five years before anything flew.)
It’s just like I said — it’s about spending the money. You are right that it’s easier to convince one guy to keep spending the money than 535 members of Congress. But on the other hand sometimes that guy gets convinced it’s not gonna work out.Report
ThTh5: I’m old enough that I predate the vaccines for measles and such. I have trouble with the 1 in 5 kids requiring hospitalization. My recollection from the time is that everyone got measles at some point early in grade school, and no one went to the hospital with it. Is there a difference because the kids getting it now are older than my age cohort were when we got it? Certainly age makes a difference with how serious mumps can be.Report
Once you invent hammers there’s a tendency to see every problem as requiring a nail to fix.Report
I’m seeing less and less reason for manned space exploration.
Given that in any manned mission, the vast majority of the resources are going to be dedicated solely to keeping the human alive, I can’t see any rational benefit to having the human there as opposed to drones and robots.
And the economic calculus doesn’t look like it is going to change in the foreseeable future.Report
I think Sir Edmund Hillary has your reason.Report
Well, right but Sir Edmund Hillary wasn’t asking the his fellow citizens for prodigious gobs of money.
I’m not seeing the vision of space travel as outlined in popular fiction where there are all sorts of economical reasons to go mining in space or living on other planets.
From what I can see, for the foreseeable future, any human space travel will be essentially like the Apollo moon shots, incredibly expensive adventures in national pride.Report
I would think of manned missions to space the way I think of things like monuments: these are symbols of national greatness, achievements, things we do as a demonstration to ourselves of our abilities.
It’s probably not the case that a future mission to, say, Mars, will result in the catalyst of technological innovation that the Apollo Program did. (Although it might!) But we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too. Also if we don’t get a move on, the Russkies will get there first and then we’ll NEVER hear the end of it.Report
We could set up a hundred satellites around the moon, drop down a few rovers, robots, and maybe a 3d printer, for half the cost of sending a human there. It’d cost even more to get him there alive, and I bet people would feel bad if we left him there, so we’d need a return flight too, with the fuel to cover it, and adding the weight of the fuel means we’d need more fuel. See, it’s the “alive and back home” thing, that’s where they get you.Report
LOL yeah I’m pretty sure we’d want our astronaut back alive as opposed to with some alternative health status outcome.Report
Wanted: Potential astronauts with terminal illness for one-way trip to the moon…Report
Work out a deal with Canada.
“The good news: You’ve been approved for M.A.I.D.”Report
Elon is looking for those types for his Mars colony.
Current count is up to, he’s never starting a Mars colony.Report
Notice that the Artemis III landing as currently planned requires SpaceX to make at least a dozen SH/Starship flights, with at least three versions of Starship. A big fuel depot in low Earth orbit, a smaller fuel depot in low lunar orbit, the lander itself. More likely, two dozen flights.
NASA is required by statute to use SLS/Orion to carry the astronauts from Earth to LLO. Almost $30B in development, running expenses to be able to build and operate the system about $2B per year, cost of the completely expendable SLS/Orion pair another $2B per launch. SpaceX is supposed to do the rest for a total of about $4B.
It’s a pretty safe bet that very few, if any, of two dozen SpaceX launches will be carrying people and life support.Report