From Streetcars To Spaceships

Shame about all those highway deaths.

Funny, we've got all these studies about our dangerous roads, especially crowded highways, because of texting, alcohol and drugs, fatigue, and so on. I read the articles and they suggest remedies. More laws. More cops. More signage. More checkpoints. Wider highways. Cutting down all the trees to clear the sightlines. Driver training. Sorry, but I look at those and think "what the hell are they doing in cars in the first place?" Mass transit addresses all of these, ya know.

I've taken plenty of forms of mass transit so f*cked up that I could barely see. Tired, drunk, distracted. Never seen any of that affect the safety of the vehicle yet.

All of this, I might add, applies just fine to cabs and jitneys. How many cabs could we subsidize to what degree to keep drunk drivers off the roads and have it cut net costs for a given city?

Do I sound snotty? Yeah, I guess that I do. But as far as I can see, this is yet another case of "normal" Americans who live in a way that results in vast processions of deaths, cripplings, torturous pain, and billions upon billions of dollars of costs but even when confronted with all of this they can talk about it for years and shake their heads disapprovingly and suggest yet more spending and never once even consider that maybe instead of more subsidies and more police state tactics, maybe the rational answer is TO STOP DOING THIS THING THAT KEEPS KILLING PEOPLE.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Old 1920's shorts used to treat it as a given that the drunk guy in the Betty Boop or Keystone Kops or whatever film would then shamble off and get on a trolley. A simple, safe (compared to cars) trolley that would then deliver said drunk person to a location a few blocks from their door. This was just obvious common sense with technology we had by 1915. If you think that we can't cost-effectively do it now well, I don't even know what to say.

Oh, right. Yes, I do.

Go play in traffic.

-Rustin

Antitrust enforcement may finally return from the dead.

There is an article in the New York Times that says that the new antitrust enforcement director at the Justice Department wants to do something new, enforce laws against trusts. This would be amazing if she can pull it off and, frankly, just by trying she is making public the resistance to real reform of far too many people in and around the Obama administration.

I'm not going to reiterate the article. It's quite a good piece. But I do wish that it had handled one crucial point differently. Over and over again it brings up the most common argument that people like General Motors and ConAgra and Microsoft use to justify their positions, that these corporations are "more efficient" at providing good products for good prices than smaller operations.

Oh, you mean like the Hummer? Like Windows Vista? Like an economy where everything but dish towels is made with high fructose corn syrup?

Yeah, sure. Looks really efficient to me.

It would have been nice if just once the article had thought to mention that this "efficiency" argument may be wrong.

Don't believe the hype.

-Rustin

More thoughts on rail rights of way

A while back I wrote a post on how the federal government should buy up the rights of way used by Amtrak and expand them. My feelings about that goal haven't changed. But I thought that a specific point merits qualification. As one of my fellow travelers reminded me when I took Amtrak from New York to Portland last month, this isn't just a matter of money. Companies like Burlington Northern are understandingly unwilling to hand over their rights of way for the simple and understandable reason that they don't trust Amtrak to maintain them. And if they're not maintained, all that revenue from freight transit goes away. This isn't just about the goverment ponying up cash. It's not even about eminent domain issues, though, admittedly, those both merit discussion another time.

Fundamentally, this is about the condition of those rights of way. The condition of the trackbed. The capacity of the switches. The standards that can be counted on in keeping those lines clear and functional.

So let me clarify a bit. I still feel that the federal government should take this time of flux to take over the rights of way used by or suited to use by passenger rail. But I think that it's crucial to point out that any such deal would have to include detailed provisions by the government, with penalty provisions for non-compliance and institution of transparent management procedures, that commit the resulting authority to expand the capacity of the lines and then maintain them at that expanded capacity.

In fact, I increasingly wonder if the smart thing to do might be to contract with the current owners to handle making most of those necessary upgrades before the handoff takes place. And with those terms tied to compliance. We know that, in theory, the freight rail companies want the resulting lines upgraded; we just need to get them to do the work done soon, in ways that suit expanded capacity and passenger rail as well.

And, crucially, the freight rail companies have the typical culture of oligopolists. As I've documented in my Flickr sets, these are not firms that judge success by normal standards of efficiency. So writing the contracts and managing the resulting situation would be, admittedly, seriously non-trival.

To put it another way, this isn't a job for a Robert Moses. It's a job for a Lyndon Johnson. For a savvy and cynical master of back room negotiation with a deep understanding of whose interests are best served how and what will motivate whom to make things better and the brass to get the contracts signed.

Of course, in theory, the above description just about perfectly matches the stereotype of a Chicago politician. Haven't we got one of those as President at the moment?

Which takes us back to what more and more of us are saying more and more frequently. If he's going to get the right things done, Barack Obama needs to spend less time trying to be an elegant statesman and more time channelling some ethical combination of Huey Long and Joe Kennedy.

Maybe we can get him to start drinking with Charlie Rangel.

They're thinking of doing WHAT with the ISS?

Okay, it's late and I'm tired and I'll make this brief. You may have seen that NASA recently announced that they're considering "deorbiting" (read "burning up in the atmosphere") the entire ISS in 2016.

I'll give you a minute to think about that.

Let's review a few facts.

- Russia has announced that they're going to detach their modules for use on a station that they control.

- The centrifuge module, which was possibly the most important part of the ISS being a viable testbed for long term human space living, was never launched and has been given up and turned into a museum exhibit.

- The operating cost of the ISS are insane. Enough just having it continue to operate eats up as much as half of NASA's humans in space budget.

- The Bigelow Aerospace Trans-hab-based test modules have been up and doing just fine for quite a long time now. At this rate they'll be at Genesis 15 before the Orion ever launches. (Oh, snap!)

- The ISS has almost no shielding since it was designed to be kept below the Van Allen belts. On the other hand, as I've written about before, the crew throws away hundreds of kilos of mass at a time on a regular basis. Mass that could be used to provide a good deal of that shielding for at least parts of the station if they were willing to show the ingenuity of a goddamn family of beavers.

- As for the issue of exposure to heat/light by moving into a higher orbit and out of the earth's shadow, see above again.

- Blue Origin, Virgin, and enough other companies to start a baseball league are well on the way to commercializing many aspects of space activity, including launching humans as even parts of NASA acknowledge with their COTS program.

- Station keeping costs a fortune since the orbit is so low that it faces significant air resistance and has to keep burning fuel just to keep from deorbiting all by itself.

- However moon orbits suck, too since the mass of the moon is so irregular that most or all orbits there are "lumpy" and therefore unstable.

- We're now seeing with things like VASIMR that the old "truisms" about how ion engines can't be made more effective are yet more mahooah from folks who can't see beyond what they've already built and tested. (No, really, flows of massively charged particles can be shaped with magnets? Who would have guessed?) (If I were to get into this now I would start with the fascinatingly earthy blog posts from the guys at Armadillo Aerospace about the silver mesh redesign precess they've been through as they've subjected one of the other "classic truths" of establishment lore about engines to the iterative, flexible approach of the modern geek.)

- The ISS has a buttload of power generation capacity.

- Our economy is screwed.

All of this having been said, if I were a relevant decisionmaker at NASA, I would be doing a pretty broad-ranging review of ISS cost-benefit numbers as well. BUT I wouldn't be looking at deorbiting as a backup. As I have written before and more and more people are writing now, we could use the beastie for other things even if it sucks in its current role and would have to be used as largely an annoying set of tubes with power, toilets, and air to be rebuilt as opportunity permits.

Now, I don't have the time, or possibly even access to the data, to give a detailed and credible plan for this, but it seems to me that the best bet would probably be to start thinking now about ways to brace the structures of the ISS and move the whole damn thing to somewhere stable. Maybe a higher earth orbit. Certainly one high enough to not need to burn so much fuel to stay around. My guess is that an eventual very, very slow move to L5 would be the wisest choice. I suspect that we would want to pull off the solar panels for use immediately somewhere closer to earth but maybe that's just me.

Yes, such a move would take at least ten years. Yes, it would put the ISS out of use in the ways we use it now. But from what I've seen, it sucks at most of the things it was intended to do anyway and, frankly, our best bet is to think of it as a whole muckin' bunch of mass and equipment to be reused someday in a few decades when we're up for treating it the way that we now turn old factories into condos. NASA engineers don't tend to think that way but too f*cking bad. As Mike Griffin and Richard Feynman and Mike Mullane and Buzz Aldrin and a long list of others have explained in exhaustive detail, NASA is long overdue for a culture cleanse. I did my time in corporate America. They want me to, I'll be glad to freshen up my workflow consultant muscles and move to Goddard. I'll even wear the tie I bought there when I was in high school.

For now our minds are biased by the vast cost of doing any complex task in space but really, robots really are finally getting better. And so are spacesuits. And space-based telecommunications. And materials. Just because the idea of rebuilding the ISS into something less profligate is impractical now doesn't mean that it always will be.

So let's start making our peace now with the idea that soon it should be put aside for use later when we're better at this kind of thing.  Because we may be getting better but gravity is still a bitch and getting things up the well is going to continue to be brain-shreddingly expensive. Frugal, rational people don't throw away a thing like that just because it would involve some cultural discomfort.

And that, in brief, is what I think.

-Rustin