Throughput: Interview With A Vampire, Asteroids and the Three-Rex
[ThTh1] It’s been a while since I did one of these so here’s a short video looking at what Interview with The Vampire got wrong about astronomy.
Seriously. I had some fun with this one.
[ThTh2] Speaking of my videos … in my Don’t Look Up video, I talked about how the discovery of a dangerous asteroid would play out in real life. We just got an example of this with Asteroid 2022 AE1. A couple of months ago, a Tunguska-sized asteroid was discovered and the initial orbital projection indicated a possible impact on Earth next year. The information was sent to the community, further observations were made and we now can project that it will miss us by a decent margin.
[ThTh3] Phil Plait does a deep dive into one of the most fascinating and terrifying stars in the sky.
[ThTh4] Is there a black hole on the edge of our Solar System?
Why astrophysicists think there's a black hole in our solar system pic.twitter.com/2C4cBMg0AN
— Tech Insider (@TechInsider) February 27, 2022
Color me dubious. First off, the existence of a large body in the outskirts of the Solar System is contentious, with several astronomers arguing for alternative explanations for the orbital peculiarities. And while primordial black hole are an interesting conjecture — one I’ve been high on for 25 years — they’re still a conjecture.
That having been said, a Neptune-mass black hole in the outer Solar System would not present any danger to use. One of the myths about black holes is that they are giant vacuums, slurping up anything that gets close to them. But they obey the same law of gravity everything else does. As long as you keep your distance, you’re fine. One of the trick questions Astronomy professors like to put on exams is asking students what would happen to the Earth if the Sun turned into a black hole. The answer is … nothing. Well, the Earth would freeze but its orbit wouldn’t change. It would still be responding to the same gravitational mass. But the cultural belief that black holes are giant whirlpools of doom is so strong, many students will still put the wrong answer even when you’ve explained the idea in class.
(H/T: Ed Rotski)
[ThTh5] T-Rex may actually have been three closely-related species. My son has developed an obsession with dinosaurs and one thing I’m learning is that the field has a come long way since I was a little boy obsessed with dinosaurs.
[ThTh6] NASA has announced a new round of projects for crazy futuristic concepts.
[ThTh7] Some more lovely astrophotography for you:
Amazing shot: It looks like Earthrise, but it's actually Venus setting behind a razor-thin crescent Moon. (Technically, it is Venus being occulted by the Moon on June 19, 2020.) Image by Nicolas Lefaudeux pic.twitter.com/Zk9yaJG0Iq
— Corey S. Powell (@coreyspowell) February 22, 2022
ThTh6: NASA’s Inspector General testified this week that the per-launch cost for the Space Launch System plus Orion capsule will be $4B, not the $2B NASA has been advertising. With amortized development costs included, the price tag goes up to $8B per launch. The IG also said it is almost impossible that the first lunar landing mission can fly before 2026, a year later than the (slipped) schedule NASA announced three months ago. SLS was supposed to be the launch vehicle for NASA’s future deep-space missions, but the United Launch Alliance that’s doing the work now says they won’t be able to build enough rockets to handle that job in addition to the manned Project Artemis flights. NASA has started modifying those deep-space missions to accommodate other launch vehicles. The first example of that is the Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter, which will now launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.Report
Any explanation for the cost inflation?Report
Single-source cost-plus contracts, poor project management, and crappy accounting is what were listed. You know how that goes. The designer says something will cost X, but IRL it costs 2X, so you have to wait for next year’s budget and spend money intended for something else to pay for the other half. The scariest thing in the IG’s report is the blunt statement that SLS is simply not sustainable for more than four launches; it eats too much of NASA’s budget.
I have this imagined scene (nightmare?) where Artemis 3, the actual landing mission, gets pushed off a couple more years to 2028, and Elon says, “F*ck that. I’ll just do it all myself.”Report
Gah, sounds like the 787 contracting and project management. Somebody has had to have a done a study as to why & how such big projects go sideways. It’s not just NASA having these kinds of problems.Report
Yeah, the OIG disagreed with NASA about what was part of SLS/Orion and what was not; for example, the OIG decided that $25 billion for post-Artemis III missions needed to be included in the cost estimate even though there’s no indication that any of that stuff will happen in its currently-imagined form (or even happen at all).
The other thing the OIG does a whole lot is complain that contracts were sole-sourced, implying that competition would have produced better hardware for less money. And NASA did do a competition for the Artemis lander, and that was awarded to SpaceX, and then that whole team spent most of 2021 marking time (and spending money) while waiting for the non-awarded companies’ protests to be sorted. So, yeah, they maybe got a proposal that promised to do a better job for less money (although the lander isn’t actually much more than some CAD models and Powerpoint slides yet so nobody has any idea how much it’ll actually cost) but then they spent millions of dollars justifying their choice, versus picking one team and saying “go”.Report
Do civilian space contracts require EARNED VALUE metrics in their program finance reporting? My old company had a serious and continuing problem with 1) engineers scoping something out and then a year later “revisiting” it and issue a revision of 2X or more, major scope creep that t hey hid in ETCs and not mentioning it, and overly optimistic productivity (they got less done then expected), consequently we were always months behind schedule and hundreds of thousands over cost. Once we started using EVMS, a lot of these issues shined like a beacon.Report
Eh. You want an Apollo mission, you gotta pay Apollo dollars. Apollo cost over seven hundred billion dollars and there has never in the history of aerospace activity been a situation where you could spend less money and get the same capability, unless you’re refurbishing a test unit into a flight unit. Even Musk has learned that you can’t do space cheap (Falcon 9 Heavy costs about the same as a Delta IV Heavy, for example).
Also, this isn’t a new report, it was issued by the OIG last November.Report
ThTh1. This is relevant to my cats. From around November through February, they demand that the bedroom curtains be open so that they may lounge on the bed in the sunlight. Starting around March, all of the sunlight is either on the floor or the side of the bed.
They blame us for this.Report
Your beard is filled in very nicely, Professor Siegel!Report
ThTh5
The argument, it seems to me, is about how many different species the currently known fossils of Tyrannosaurus represent, one or three. Either way, there might well have been species that we currently have no record of. Among much more recent extinctions, we first discovered homo floresiensis in 2003 and Denisovans in 2010.Report