Berkeley election news: Maudelle Shirek, who’s 93 and one of the oldest elected officials in the United States (maybe the oldest in the post-Strom Thurmond era), intended to run again for the Berkeley City Council this year. But the San Franicsco Chronicle her chief aide de camp neglected to gather the required signatures on a nominating petition, and now Maudelle’s elective career is apparently history. (I’m not really shedding any tears: She doesn’t represent our district, and the rumors around town were that she was no longer up to the job and it was time for her to hang it up).
X Prize News 08.09.04
By way of my editor at Wired News, Marty Cortinas, this link to a story about an launch failure in Washington state on Sunday involving Space Transport Corp.‘s Rubicon I rocket. What’s impressive is that they’ve gotten to the point where they can bring something to the launch pad and say, hey, we’re gonna go supersonic with this thing and get up to 20,000. What’s sobering is the result.
Not — repeat, not — to compare Space Transport’s effort with the da Vinci Project in any way, this is the kind of episode that shows the unpredictability and vulnerability of new launch systems. And it’s the kind of thing that makes some fairly knowledgeable observers (MSNBC’s Alan Boyle points to one) wonder why da Vinci is so willing to go into space without a complete test of its system.
Flag-Cons and the Big Empty
By way of my brother John: New York magazine has a great conversation between Norman Mailer and his son John Buffalo Mailer (I wonder if my kids would have liked to be called Buffalo?). The main topic is how the expected massive protests at the Republican National Convention will play out now and over the long term. But there’s plenty more about where we’re headed in our history and our world:
“A good many people of the right, not flag conservatives but true conservatives, can feel in accord with men and women on the left concerning one deep feeling. It is that the corporations are stifling our lives. Not only economically, where corporations can claim, arguably, that they bring prosperity (and frankly, I’m certainly not schooled enough in economics to argue that point pro or con), but I can say the corporation is bad for us aesthetically speaking, culturally speaking, spiritually speaking. Just contemplate their massive empty architecture, their massive emphasis on TV commercials, which are a seedbed for interrupting one’s conversation, and their massive complacency about their virtues. They tend to flatten everything. They are the Big Empty.”
Keyes Watch
The Trib cites “Republican sources” as saying Marylander Alan Keyes has agreed to run for the U.S. Senate in far-off Illinois (state fact for the Keyes campaign: It’s called the “Land of Lincoln” on the license plates, but some people call it “the Prairie State,” too, so remember to sprinkle that into your speeches).
Support from GOP heavyweights has no doubt swayed Keyes to jump into the race. The Trib quotes two enthusiastic backers:
“No comment,” former Gov. Jim Edgar, a moderate, said of the offer to Keyes, a line that may speak volumes considering Edgar’s role as chairman of an already uphill battle to win Illinois for President Bush’s re-election.
Former Gov. James Thompson said he had “no idea” whether he was going to endorse Keyes. “I’ll wait and see what he has to say.”
That’s lusty stuff, right up there with Eisenhower’s 1960 comment on the big contributions Nixon made to his administration: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”
X Prize News: Will It Fly?
The thing about the da Vinci Project is … people are skeptical it will work. Just after my story was published Thursday about how the volunteer X Prize team had found an angel sponsor and will do its balloon-and-rocket-to-space launch in October, I got an email from a reader: “$20 bucks says the guy torches on re-entry, … assuming the airborne launch even works.”
Is that just a Nascar crash fantasy at work? Or a well-informed doubt?
People following the X Prize have seen Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne craft fly, know that it has a deliberate testing history, and that it comes from a team guided by a very smart, capable guy and funded by a very rich one (Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen). When it comes to da Vinci and its Wild Fire spacecraft, there’s none of that history and consequently none of the confidence that at least it’s not a crazy stunt.
Last week, Rutan asked Brian Feeney at the X Prize press conference in Santa Monica whether da Vinci would do any “envelope expansion” flights before launching for space. In other words, would there be a program of deliberate testing before committing to a full-on launch? Feeney’s answer to me when I asked a similar question at the end of June was that there is no way of really doing a full system test because of the balloon-launch element. He seemed to suggest it was too complex practically to do a complete test. Thursday when I interviewed him he told me the team wouldn’t disclose details of any upcoming tests for competitive reasons.
Here was his exchange with Rutan:
Rutan: Do you mind if I ask a question? Or do I have to go down there [with the media attending the conference]? Are you going to fly a spaceflight on your first flight, or are you going to do envelope expansion?
Feeney: Yeah, Burt, actually you asked me that question about two months ago here when were out to dinner. The X Prize got together a group of twelve competitors a couple of months ago and we talked about all our various efforts. But the second night we were at the Cafe Del Rey and I happened to be sitting opposite Burt, and over fine wine and dinner for about four hours we kept bantering back and forth about rockets, and I think we asked each other 12 different ways and gave each other 12 different answers about when and how we were gonna fly. Um, now we, uh, it’s generally our intent to go to space on our first flight. We have a ballistic rocket. It’s not a — I’ll call SpaceShipOne a space plane — it does not have wings. We’re launching at such a high altitude, 80,000 feet, that we’re well on our way. We do not have — it’s a a standing start, so things like wind shear that are, maybe have complicated the past SpaceShipOne flights, are not a factor for us. We’ve got 1.2 million pound seconds of total impulse on board, which doesn’t mean much to most of you but it’s one hell of a lot of energy, and that’s going to take us out there. So yeah, we’ll … we’ll … short of something else that occurs in the meantime, we’ll go for it.
To be fair, Rutan asked a simple enough question, and Feeney answered it. But the question was loaded, too: Are you doing testing to prove what your ship can do? And if not, why not? The assumption underlying the spoken and unspoken question is one all of us who grew up in the space age are familiar with: If you’re going to do something crazy like light off some explosives and shoot yourself into space, it makes sense to be very, very sure you know what you’re doing. Go a step at a time. Expand the envelope. Push to discover unexpected problems and resolve them. Especially if you’re going to put someone’s life on the line.
In his reply, Feeney addressed the loaded part of Rutan’s query. But look at what he said. Is there really a straight answer there? The first Wild Fire shot will be to space. Because the ship will be launching from so high up. Because it has such a powerful rocket motor. Because Wild Fire should be easier to fly than SpaceShipOne. Those are all factors that Feeney is counting on to get him to space, and computer modeling probably shows him that it’s all going to work out fine. But none of that adds up to a reason for foregoing a full test of how all the pieces of the da Vinci Project’s system work when they’re integrated and used under the stress of real-world conditions.
Outsiders can only guess why Feeney has chosen not to do more extensive testing and to report it publicly. It probably comes down to a simple matter of not enough money on one hand and not enough time to test and still have a shot at the X Prize.
That sense that something is going off half-cocked is what leads to the feeling expressed by the Wired News reader that Feeney’s headed for a disaster. I’m not going to take that bet. I’d hate to see that happen, even if promoters of the new space race (and the experience of the old one) show that disasters are just part of reaching for the stars.
X Prize News 08.05.04
Well, Toronto’s da Vinci Project just announced it will launch October 2, three days after Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne. But the most amazing part of the story to me — setting aside the fact there’s a guy who’s going to climb onto a largely untested launch system and try to go to space — is the sponsorship: GoldenPalace.com, an online casino which operates from an Indian reservation near Montreal, pumped in several hundred thousand dollars to make this thing happen. Their angle: They get to be the first casino in space. In fact, they’re going to give da Vinci Project astronaut Brian Feeney a laptop so he can gamble online while he’s up there. More details later.
Update: Wired News posted my story (which was filed before I wrote the message above, by the way) by noon PDT, which actually made it competitive with Space.com, MSNBC, and other outlets. Yay.
Good Candidate Hard to Find
So, the Illinois Republicans are so hard up for a candidate in the U.S. Senate race — the GOP’s primary nominee got blown up by a sordid sex bomb that had been hiding in a sealed divorce-case file — that they’re close to naming Alan Keyes of Maryland to run against Democrat Barack Obama. The reasons: He’s black, like Obama; he’s known, like Obama; and unlike Obama, he’s conservative. (And there is another hopeful: Andrea Grubb Barthwell, a doctor who used to be with the Office of National Drug Control Policy. She’s also black, which is suddenly a quality the Republicans seem to value quite highly.)
But back to Keyes: Some of the Party of Lincolners say that the fact he’s a nonresident is a nonissue, pointing to the Bobby Kennedy/Hillary Clinton precedent in New York state. Well, there’s one big difference: Running for the Senate in their newly adopted state was their idea, at least; they didn’t have a lot of desperate party hacks with a ballot vacancy to fill begging them to run, please run.
One fun detail from the Trib’s story on Tuesday’s GOP ballot confab:
Three men who showed up unannounced were allowed to speak to the committee as was a 32-year-old Florida man wearing an 18th Century powdered wig. The only person who said he wanted to speak to the committee but wasn’t allowed to enter was a protester standing on the sidewalk outside the club wearing lederhosen.
Bummer for the lederhosen guy.
And this late update: The candidate-deprived Republicans have asked Keyes to accept the party’s nod — even though I’ll bet he can’t find Kankakee on the map. And Keyes says he’ll think about running and let them know his answer this weekend. The Sun-Times quotes him as saying, “If I do step forward to accept this challenge, I will be laying it all on the line.” Whoa! He’s going to lay it all on the line! Get ready for the fur and family values to start flyin’.
This Land (Revisited)
NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” talked to Arlo Guthrie on Monday about the copyright flap that has arisen over a campaign parody of his dad’s “This Land Is Your Land”:
Neil Conan: Your father was a political musician. What do you think he would have said about people using his music for political purposes?
Arlo: Well, you know, I really can’t speak for him. I can just tell you that when I saw it a few weeks ago, I thought it was one of the funniest commentaries, if not one of the most directly inspired–I mean, I called my sister, I called my friends, I sent everybody a link to the site so that they could go see it and we’ve all been laughing about it since then. I don’t think that was–I think my dad would have absolutely loved the humor in it.
Gulf of … Whatever
Not that we ever learn anything from history, except how to repeat it, but this week is the largely unremarked 40th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” that precipitated the Johnson administration’s escalation of the Vietnam War. NPR had a long audio report from Walter Cronkite on Monday that gave a detailed account of the incident itself and how it played out inside the White House. It’s history, or maybe just journalism, with a real feeling of immediacy and insight. One can’t help but wonder how many years it will take to hear/see something similar on Iraq.
The Commander
A few weeks ago, Kate and I were walking someplace in the neighborhood and she suddenly exclaimed, “Look, there’s the Commander.” Yes: a well-known local character. It’s a wreck of an old RV spruced up with red paint. It patrols the greater North Berkeley flatlands in search of parking places where the neighbors won’t raise a stink. It graced our street and others nearby last December. Then on Christmas Eve I saw the Commander chugging slowly away; I thought it looked kind of sad; but maybe it was off on an Xmas mission, delivering its own Yuletide treat to a soon-to-be-surprised homeowner.
Now, with winter long behind us, the Commander, which apparently hails from a Canadian RV maker, has migrated back to our block. Not all the neighbors are pleased with its reappearance. The police have been called. The Commander has been ticketed and towed. One guy up the street says he had an angry face-off after following the Commander’s commander to try to figure out where he lived (the owner doesn’t live in the RV, apparently, but ventures out from a more conventional domicile and moves his vehicle from place to place). Tensions run high in a place where some people have a deeply proprietary feeling about their native asphalt and others just can’t give up the romance of the open road. (Though now that you ask, no, I wouldn’t be especially thrilled to have this thing dumped in front of my house, either).