Blogs / Bad Astronomy

According to Discovery News, NASA has a "Plan B" program in case something happens with the Constellation program. It’s an alternative way to get back to the Moon, and they made a video for it.

There are some obvious advantages with taking Shuttle parts and using them in a new program. For one, the technology already exists and has been tested in well over 100 launches. For another, the machinery and manpower already exist as well, which would save billions of dollars in new development and training.

But I’m a little nervous seeing things like the same external tank being used that sheds foam on launch (in the video, the hardware mounted on the ET is protected by a fairing, but still, that doesn’t thrill me), and is prone to hydrogen vent leaks, like the leak that has delayed Endeavour’s launch for weeks. Second, the solid rocket boosters as they exist now are not the best tech; they are expensive and cost a lot to refurbish.

Now, it’s easy for me to poopoo this; it’s always easier to cast stones after the fact. Maybe this is a better idea than Constellation, and maybe not. I’ve never liked the Shuttle Orbiters; they are hugely overbuilt and extremely expensive. They are exquisite and amazing and all that, but from a cost/benefit point of view they’re a colossal waste of money. We need cheaper access to space! So not having an Orbiter on this Plan B Moonship is a good start.

I’ll be honest: I have not been able to follow all the intrigue going on with Constellation right now because it’s complex and there are machinations afoot that are complicated. But I find it extremely odd that — with only a handful of Shuttle launches left before an at least four year gap in being able to get people into space — NASA is still presenting plans for a Shuttle substitute. Seriously, NASA: this should’ve been in the bag five years ago. Ten. Then we wouldn’t be facing a lengthy gap where we have to rely on foreign partners to get to space, and domestic companies that, while their futures are very bright, do not have the capacity to launch people into space and won’t for several years.

Still, I’d rather have alternatives discussed now rather than build an expensive and untested rocket that might prove to be another ISS or Shuttle program: bloated and unable to do most of what was initially promised.

And let me say that this very fact ticks me off. I want access to space, and I don’t want a lot of corporate maneuvering and political sideshowing. But with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and a government agency in charge, it’s what we get.

I still support a return to the Moon… if done correctly. But it’s things like this that make me wonder if this whole thing is a good idea on paper, but an impossibility in reality.

I often wonder why people are so gung ho about getting prayer in school. Shouldn’t we be worrying more about edumacating the kids?

Of course, I could write reams about this, but I won’t bother: Saganist nails it.

I remember when I was in high school and there was some talk about putting prayer in the schools. I had an agreement with a friend what we would do if it passed. We would both stand up together during the prayer time, take our left arms and put them over our heads to touch our right ears, stand on one leg, make rapid random movements with our right arms, and scream "Aglaglaglaglaglaglaglaglaglaglaglagla!!" as loudly as we could.

If the teacher tried to stop us, we would say our religion demanded that we do this. I sometimes wish that the anti-Constitutional forces in the area had gotten their way. What fun we would’ve had…

[Update 2: According to Bob Jacobs, NASA Deputy Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs, the Sunday Express article I link to below "is a fiction". Sounds to me like I got duped, and I apologize to everyone for forwarding this story. Hopefully more info will come out soon, and I’ll update as I hear it.]

[Update: folks at CollectSpace are saying this article is a hoax. I have no evidence either way, which is why I wrote this post using the "allegedly" format. Hopefully more evidence one way or another will come out soon.]

On July 20, just weeks from now, it will be the 40th anniversary of the moment a human stepped foot on another world.

You’ve seen the footage: Neil Armstrong in his bulky suit, stepping off the lunar module’s footpad. Ironically, though, for such a momentous occasion, the video looks awful. Noisy, low-res, and washed out. Well, it turns out that’s because this iconic scene, shown millions of times in the ensuing years, is not the original footage. It was actually taken using a 16mm camera aimed at a screen at NASA’s Mission Control room. And the screen was only showing highly compressed data, so the end result is the lousy stuff we’ve grown used to.

ZOMG! I can see right through NASA’s lies! And through Neil Armstrong, too.

But all that may now change. The UK Sunday Express is reporting that the original tapes have been found! This means that we may finally, after four decades, get the high-quality footage of Neil Armstrong’s small step that we’ve always wanted.

The deal is this: the video stream from the Moon was of a decent quality, but far too large too be able to be be sent to TVs around the country and the world. Using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, astronomers recorded the video beamed from the lunar surface in high quality, but what they transmitted to NASA was necessarily compressed. It’s the latter we’ve all seen. The thing is, the high quality tapes were then lost somehow. NASA admitted it a few years ago, and the search was on! According to the article the tapes were finally found recently in a storage facility on Perth.

This is very exciting, and I certainly hope it’s true. I’d love to see this moment once again, but this time with a beautiful clear picture!

And of course, me being who I am, I have to add this part:

Crucially, [the tapes] could once and for all dispel 40 years of wild conspiracy theories.

That is so wonderfully naive! First, conspiracy theories about the Moon landings aren’t based on facts. If they were, the hoax idea would have dried up and blown away 30 years ago. They have no facts. All they have is a zealous fervor and a gross misunderstanding of reality. Finding the tapes won’t help; you could fly a conspiracy theorist to the Moon and show them the equipment lying on the desolate surface, and they’d accuse you of drugging them. My advice: if you try this, leave that goofball on the Moon. That’ll give him plenty of time to think over his ideas.

Second, the use of the word "crucial" made me laugh. I’ve talked with dozens of people at NASA about the Hoax theory, and it’s hardly something that’s critical to them. They all regard it as an irritant, like a tiny pebble in your shoe or a pesky fold in your underwear you can only feel when you sit a certain way. Ignorable, but irksome when you’re reminded about it. And though they’d never admit it, I bet every single person at NASA loves how Buzz handled it.

And third, what the article author forgets is that, to a conspiracy nut, everything in the whole Universe is part of the conspiracy. So the fact that the tapes were missing is evidence of a coverup, and NASA finding the tapes is due to the massive pressure of the hoax community, and if the tapes aren’t exactly as promised that’s because NASA has doctored them, and if they are pristine and perfect then you can look just there and see the wires holding up the astroNOTS, and you still can’t see stars in the footage, and and and.

So, a few weeks before the 40th anniversary of this incredible moment in history, here’s what I think about the Moon Hoaxers: screw them. Let them gripe and moan and try to pee in the punch bowl of NASA. In reality, that punch bowl is way, way over their heads. I can see the magnificent achievement of Apollo for what it was, and I think the vast majority of people out there do as well.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Fark.

Last week I wrote about how the British Association of Chiropractors put out a laughable press release about their law suit against Simon Singh, who had the audacity to point out that some of the claims made by the BCA were "bogus".

As dictated by the Streisand Effect — making a stink about something trivial will itself turn it into big news — people all over the world are now talking about "alternative medicine" and its unhealthy dose of quackery.

That includes my dear friends the skeptics in Australia, who have been relentlessly and heroically pounding the altmed movement Down Under. The latest shot is against the very thing the BCA is talking about: chiropractors inflating their credentials and making claims not at all based on solid evidence. Check out that link, poke around the website, and show Dr. Rachie (a real doctor, folks) your love.

There’s more: you may have heard of Daniel Hauser, a young boy who has Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His parents don’t "believe" in real medicine and were treating him with nonsense therapies like using herbs and vitamins.

Here’s a hint, people: you don’t get to choose to not believe in medicine, just like you don’t get to choose to not believe in gravity. You can not believe in either all you want, but when the time comes, your belief may kill you.

A judge agrees: he issued a court order to the family to make them have Daniel undergo chemotherapy. And guess what? His tumor is shrinking.

Now, if you’re familiar with the zealot-like belief system some people have in altmed, the next bit won’t surprise you at all: his family claims that it’s not the chemotherapy shrinking the tumor, it’s their altmed supplements. Yes, even though for months their "treatment" did no good at all, and after a few sessions of chemo the tumor shrank, of course it was the vitamins that did the trick.

Sigh.

You know what? It would make me sad, but if, as an adult, and after doing due diligence to research a problem, you decide to take vitamins to cure a fatal disease, that’s your choice. But when it comes to your kids things are different. You can choose to dress them funny, or give them terrible haircuts, and even choose what religion they will be and how they will be educated. But you don’t get to choose to kill them. And when there is evidence — rock-solid and with thousands of examples — that your idea of medicine is quackery, and that withholding of real medicine will let your child die, your rights as a parent have been abrogated.

As a parent, that’s a hard thing for me to write. You may say, what if the government wants to take your kid away for what you feel is a capricious reason? The difference here, the critical difference, is that this isn’t capricious. It’s based on solid evidence.

If you decide to sacrifice your child upon an altar to Zeus, or tie them to railroad tracks to cleanse their chi, or set your little girl on fire to purify her of demons, then guess what? The State has a right to step in to protect that child.

The right to swing your beliefs ends at a child’s nose. The problem is, far, far too many people think their beliefs are untouchable rights. They’re not. And those of us in the reality-based community will continue to pursue this as long as people who aren’t based there continue to hurt their kids.

The British Chiropractic Association may need to hire a chiropractor to work on themselves: they’re shoveling so hard they’re likely to hurt their backs.

Fifteen month ago, the BCA sued journalist Simon Singh for libel after he called some of their claims "bogus". Mind you, they didn’t say, "He’s wrong and here’s the stack of scientific tests that have been performed to show just how chiropractic works". They simply sued. In the UK, libel laws are such that defending yourself against them is time-consuming and very costly, a fact the BCA could not help but understand when they sued Singh. One might almost call this action "spineless".

After an uproar on the internet as well as in the media — with some predictable results — the BCA is now, over a year later, suddenly claiming there is evidence to back them up, and issued a press release about it. I read it with some amusement, as even to my non-medical eye I could see that many of the references were totally ridiculous. A study of colic in children with no control cases? Colic tends to go away after time on its own, so without a control group how do you know manipulating their spines is what did it? Why did the BCA reference its own code of practice as evidence chiropractic works? And why did so many of the references talk about osteopathy, which is different than chiropractic (though laden with its own share of dubious claims)?

I didn’t write anything yesterday when this came up because I figured others with more experience would, and would be able to give more details than I could. And that’s just what happened: chiming in are The Ministry of Truth, Zeno’s blog, DC’s Improbable Science, and of course the awesome Jack of Kent.

The BCA is struggling mightily here to make itself look like the victim, but it’s hard to see it any other way than them trying to bully a member of the free press into silence, and creating an atmosphere where other critics would be afraid to speak. Whether they were hoping to silence the media or not, what they’ve really done is let millions of people know just how thin their "supporting evidence" is, and set themselves up for a PR disaster.

I will reiterate my support of Simon, and for the right of journalists to freely investigate claims made by anyone without having to wonder if they are going to be sued frivolously or otherwise. And in this case, the claims are about not just the health of adults but of a questionable practice being applied to babies. I think the least we can do is ask for the usual standard of evidence to support those claims, and in fact they should be held to an even higher standard. The list given by the BCA… well, to be polite it leaves much to be desired.

Simon’s not backing down, nor should he. A lot is riding on this, so we need to keep shining a light on what the BCA is doing. Keep your browsers pointed to Sense About Science to stay on top of the latest news.

A hydrogen vent leak prevented Endeavour from being fueled up last night, so the Shuttle launch had to be delayed. It’s quite a delay, too: the next window is on July 11! This is due to a geometric angle problem; during this time of year the Shuttle and Space Station would be at an angle to the Sun that makes thermal issues a problem. So they have to wait a month to try again.

In the meantime, some real science will get underway with the launch of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter tomorrow, Thursday, June 18. There are three launch opportunities all within 20 minutes of each other, starting at 17:12 Eastern time (21:12 GMT). I’ll be watching, and live-tweeting the event on my BANews Twitter feed.

LRO will take several days to get to the Moon, but once there, and after its shake-down, it’ll return wonderful data of our satellite, including images with details as small as 50 cm (18 inches)! I cannot wait to see those. Wow.

A comment on another post here at BA led me to an interesting paper: "Public Perception of Astronomers: Revered, Reviled and Ridiculed" by Michael West of the European Southern Observatory (a PDF version is available as well). It’s an interesting essay on the changing way astronomers have been depicted and interpreted over time, starting in ancient Greece.

He makes a point on why this is important:

Although we live today in a time of remarkable astronomical discoveries, as many politicians and businesses know the public’s collective memory can be short, and hence astronomers cannot afford to be complacent about our public image.

True. He enumerates these points:

(a) Astronomy is funded by taxpayers or private donors and supported by politicians.

[…]

(b) Society’s perception of astronomers is strongly influenced by the arts, literature, movies and television.

[…]

(c) Astronomers’ ability to educate and inspire the public with new discoveries is affected by the way they are viewed as social creatures.

He gives some details on these, and I could argue some of the fine details, but won’t bother; they aren’t very important to the broader issue (though he does mention "Big Bang Theory", citing a review that really only skims the surface of the show’s characters, which perforce will make them seem two-dimensional; I argue the main roles of Sheldon and Leonard are actually deeper than a first glance might imply).

More interesting are the examples West cites of astronomers throughout history as depicted in literature and arts; from having them mocked in such venues as Walt Whitman’s poem "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer" — Whitman says that a lecture by an astronomer bored him, and then extrapolated to the whole profession, which I find unpoetic indeed — to heroic representations such as in the movie "Contact".

The examples are numerous and fascinating, and there were quite a few about which I was unaware. I’ll have to expand my repertoire, it appears!

As I reached the conclusion, I found my self nodding in agreement with West… and then was quite pleasantly surprised to see this:

To get our message to the public, astronomers must not only adopt new technologies but also find creative new ways to use them. A good example is astronomy popularizer Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy website, which was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 25 best blogs of 2009, citing him as "a voice of reason amidst the nonsense of non-science."

Well! That was awfully cool. And, of course, quite true.

As was his conclusion:

The bottom line is that astronomers must actively define our public image, otherwise it will be defined for us. Although it is impossible to control how astronomers are perceived by society, we do have some power to influence our public image.

I agree. Just like any other group of people, there is a broad and rich range of astronomers out there. Some really are like the characters on "Big Bang Theory" (oh, how many Sheldons have I dealt with over the years?), and some really are like Ellie Arroway from "Contact". We are tall and short, men and women, venal and altruistic, short-sighted and far-thinking, socially awkward and the life of the party.

And also like any group of people, it’s easy to try to categorize us and put us in nice, sequestered little boxes in your mind. But that’s not fair, as it wouldn’t be for any group. If you don’t know any astronomers personally, I suggest you take a look at the ones who blog. They will be self-selected to have a desire to communicate, so there’s a bit of bias there, but still, I bet you’ll get a surprisingly diverse set of opinions. Check out the Carnival of Space when I post a link to it every week. It’s a fantastic place to start.

Go on. Meet an astronomer. Maybe we’ll surprise you.