Yes my friend, I am a space farmer. I grow zero-gravity crystals, harvest helium-3 from the moon's surface, and extract drinking water from asteroids, all for the benefit of mankind. I am a space farmer.
The International Space Station: it can capture pictures of a shooting star if one of the mission specialists is looking that way (and has a camera ready). The capture is reminiscent of the ‘thousand monkeys typing for a thousand years will produce War and Peace’ idea. Interesting, but looks photoshopped anyway, doesn’t it?
image: NASA/Ron Garan
How can you tell when someone is serious about something? When they have a conference.
So space elevators must be serious as well because they have a conference. Conference sponsors include Unobtanium (motto: your presumed access to space) and Vaporware (copy mark: don’t dream it, be it).
Let’s just say the space elevator remains an interesting, and at this point, magical, idea.
Carbon nanotubes? How about graphene instead?
(image: NASA)
Make work has such a nice ring to it, as does alien invasion. Watch this video and decide if you should laugh or cry.
By analogy we should have the government borrow in order to employ a great number of people build satellites and rockets. Then, we can borrow even more to employ a second team of people who blow them up. Brilliant!
The man who wrote the Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, has said we need to get rid of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He said it for a reason: talking heads who toss the economic chicken bones around have demonstrated they lack both credibility and predictive power.
First, China’s state-owned space industry launches a satellite for Pakistan. That sort of thing happens because “Pakistan-China relations are deeper than oceans and higher than mountains,” especially when China makes an offer too generous to refuse. Does China do this out of the goodness of their heart? Probably not.
Pakistan gets a satellite (and makes some hay with the populace vis a vis India). China buys some influence with an anti-Indian nation and is able to aim its army of scientists and engineers towards viable employment. Who is left pondering the outcome? India, of course, and the United States. India might be expecting this, the U.S. not so much.
Beyond the normal financial recoupment expected by China on the arrangement, is there some other sort of payback for this act of kindness and friendship? It would appear there is.
Word is that Pakistan shared information of the stealth helicopter from the bin Laden op with the Chinese. Pretty cool if you’re China; not cool at all if you’re the U.S., especially for the CIA who had (as opposed to Hu had) explicitly asked Pakistan not to do so.
These events should be viewed as a cost of doing business with (or better said, in) Pakistan.
