Update: Russia to ban US from using Space Station over Ukraine sanctions

From Reuters via The Telegraph:

"[Russian Foreign Minister Dmitry Rogozin] suggested Russia could use the station without the United States, saying: 'The Russian segment can exist independently from the American one. The U.S. one cannot.'"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10828964/Russia-to-ban-US-from-using-Space-Station-over-Ukraine-sanctions.html

The known unknown, the unknown known, and the unknown unknown

In April, 1991, I came to work for Jim Sensenbrenner, a Member of Congress from Wisconsin who just so happened to love keeping tabs on NASA.  By that December, my head down learning orbital mechanics and the vulnerabilities of the Space Shuttle, the Soviet Union had completely dissolved.

Surprisingly, nuclear-armed Ukraine was the first of 15 Soviet “Republics” in August, 1991, who voted to secede from the Soviet Union in 1991, followed in alphabetical order by, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia (itself), Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

As sure as Boris Yeltsin stood upon a tank in front of the Russian Federation “White House” across a thoroughfare from the U.S. Embassy compound, the end of Russian feudalism had finally come.

This was the proverbial Donald Rumsfeld “known unknown” scenario: the collapse of the evil empire. We knew it would happen, but nobody knew when it would happen, least of all the CIA.

NASA meanwhile was quietly ogling several inventions of the Soviet space program, in particular the docking system that allowed Soviet space capsules to mate autonomously with their Mir space station.  Early in 1992, NASA discreetly sought the help of Congress to overcome the Bush Administration’s reluctance to letting them “shop” for and eventually buy Soviet space hardware that would advance America’s own cash-strapped space station program.

From February 1994 to June 1998, space shuttles made 11 flights to the Russian space station Mir.

By August, as a reward for seizing upon their own freedom, Congress passed the "Freedom for Russia and Emerging Eurasian Democracies and Open Markets Support Act" and signed by President Bush in October. Besides giving cash to dismantle Soviet nuclear stockpiles and ease the conversion to market-based economics, Title VI of the FREEDOM Support Act made it legal for American companies and NASA to enter into commercial purchases of formerly Soviet space hardware.

A great space partnership with Russia soon unfolded, first with Shuttle docking visits to the Mir space station followed by integrating complete “off the shelf” Russian modules into the U.S.-led space station.  In addition to making Russia an indispensable member of the space station partnership of Europe, Japan and the United States, a variety of commercial sales envisioned by the Act and worth billions to newly-private Russian and (notably) Ukrainian space technology enterprises went forward, too.

Compared to 1992, when choosing the path to freedom quite literally meant not even the sky would be the limit to America’s friendship, Russia is in a severe retrograde orbit today.

Its seizure of the Crimean territory belonging to Ukraine since 1954, deploying masked Russian shock troops to subvert eastern territories of Ukraine that had voted 83-90% in 1991 for independence from Moscow, massing thousands of troops on its border, and President Vladimir Putin’s sudden Czarist talk of “New Russia” have made a mockery of 22 years of American friendship, partnership, investment and trade.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed, the “unknown known” has always been the looming inevitability of a rogue in the Kremlin, like a Putin, who would snatch the bounty of freedom’s prosperity from the people and use it to rebuild the evil empire.  We didn’t know who, when, or how it would reveal itself, but the certainty of a neo-Soviet Russia never went away.

With international sanctions against Russia now approaching the space frontier, it is worth noting the International Space Station is constructed much like Crimea.  Most essential systems for keeping astronauts safe and the space station in a controlled orbit are Russian-made Soviet-era systems.  When NASA first proposed such obtuse reliance upon Russia, it was not lost on Congress that doing so could lead to loss of the program when U.S.-Russian political winds changed.

Sadly, the space station agreement with Russian was negotiated by then Vice President Albert Gore, who set aside Jim Sensenbrenner’s proposals that any essential space station systems be U.S.-made, or failing that for reasons of convenience, be purchased outright from Russia by U.S. companies, thus freeing the space station of geopolitical strings.

Moreover, nobody, not even Putin, could have predicted the “unknown unknown”— that the U.S. would ever ground its Shuttle fleet before fielding a substitute, leaving the U.S. and its allies entirely dependent on Russian capsules for access to the station itself.

When the space station is abandoned to Russia, perhaps in months, we will need to thank Mr. Gore.  Either due to a boycott of resupply missions by Russia in retaliation for sanctions, or more likely by some fanciful Kremlin declaration that says Western sanctions inadvertently make operating it safely impossible, the space station is doomed by an insidious political design flaw that was both foreseen and avoidable.

While Mr. Gore was fighting for Russia’s space sovereignty against the pleas of U.S. lawmakers, one imagines Vladimir Putin quietly sharpening his fingernails in Lubyanka, thinking about the known unknown, the unknown known, and the unknown unknown.

Why Twitter's IPO is still a bargain

Sure there's nothing at all wrong with composing 140 character "micro blog" posts to share with your friends and followers, and the market today gave it's IPO verdict: "That's pretty dang cool."

Embedded in the market valuation is the considered realization that Twitter provides connective tissue to the social network, best-epitomized by Facebook and numerous lesser rivals.  With tweeting to connect Facebook posts and status updates widely to busy friends and followers, Twitter likewise provides critical infrastructure to mobile photo and video sharing utilities like Instagram, Pinterest and Vine, just to name a few.  Twitter's potential will likely just increase as more mobile apps and social utilities develop and proliferate, most piggy-backing on Twitter networks for broadcast and re-tweet to wider networks of like-minded followers, perhaps adding thousands of hash-tagged ad-hock audiences each month eager for fresh content no matter how silly it may be.

When Twitter first appeared in my life in 2009, it reminded me immediately of an early global microsatellite application called Orbcomm, which was birthed in the early 1990s by commercial space pioneer Orbital Sciences Corporation.  Orbcomm introduced me to the amazing capacity of short message "packets" to convey commercially-valuable information in short bursts of fewer than 160 characters.  Using the Orbcomm global network, trucks could relay their GPS location and condition of the cargo they were carrying in microbursts of numeric information via satellite without hogging radio spectrum or expensive bandwidth.

Fast forward ten years to the explosion in cell phone SMS (Short Message Service) texting, which, it turned out, came built-in with every cell phone in existence because every phone call it transmitted required a short data instruction to direct it across the network.  Once carriers discovered it could sell text messages to customers at zero additional cost to them, it did not foresee that texting would replace trillions of voice phone calls with short text messages.  Text messaging taught generations of traditional phone users that talk isn't always cheap, less is more, and short is sweet.

Sometime later, in 2006, the Twitterverse threw open its doors, and through them flew throngs of 140 character thoughts that attracted people to follow them.  The rest is history, they could say after today's 77% bump above the New York Stock Exchange's "TWTR" open.  But I say it's barely the beginning.

The difference between SMS and Twitter is simply that instead of sending a text message from one person to another, you broadcast (or narrowcast) the message to groups of people called "followers."  Now imagine what is possible when networks of tweeters and followers not teenagers or news hounds, but machines and devices that can communicate data compute autonomously with each other.  Twitter is the infrastructure for all forms of transparent data exchanges and transparent real-time massively distributed computation that could lead the way to brain-like function on a global scale.

The best thing is I don't even know what it is I am talking about yet in terms of practical uses that the Twitter infrastructure could enable, but these could include instantaneous "sensory" feedback networks that exceed supercomputer-scale data processing.  The simplest precursor example might be what humans' tweeting does to create "flash mobs," where hundreds of people show up in one place at one time.  What if certain tweets could summon millions of coded status messages from millions of nodes around the world, or by "re-tweeting" the most important or nearest information to form clouds and clusters of activity that can be seen on a map?

The big caveat on my predictions of autonomous tweeting applications is they do not fall neatly into the current Twitter business model which is to generate profits by pushing advertising into Twitter user's phones.  Today's IPO was largely based on predictions of a vastly growing number of users who can be fed short, clever, and non-intrusive advertisements that are tailored to the user's transparent preferences and interests.  If machines follow other machines on the Twitter network as I've suggested, advertisers would well wonder, "what's in it for me."  Humans buy things.  Machines don't.

At least that's how it is-- for now.

Why did I ever leave you in the first place?

It's sad realizing that my last post here was Christmas Eve, December 2012, oh some 10 months ago.

Whatever possessed me to stop writing (and ranting) here can best be described as a total solar eclipse that I forgot to wear protective glasses for.  Not that I have a huge blog following, but my sitting to compose my thoughts and share them is a wonderfully therapeutic exercise that I was a fool to give up.

Think what we've missed.  No, don't do that.  In my last missive before going on hiatus from this space, I talked about appreciating and doing smaller things that have impact, versus grandiose plays that have led to disaster in 2012.  So what of those "smaller" things?

In February, I followed my own advice and moved to work for the Chamber of Commerce in Bowling Green, Kentucky.  Bowling Green is a dynamic small city that feels like a boom town on the Western Frontier.  The banking community here never fell for the sub-prime mortgage craze, so it never had to roll-up bad loans and sell them off to some fools (who, it turned out, meant the rest of us) as hedged derivatives or toxic assets.  Instead, Bowling Green grew rapidly by making wise investments in economic development infrastructure like an ambitious downtown development district and acquiring land in industrial parks that it can effectively give away to high-wage manufacturing concerns.

Living here is definitely slower-paced, but far from backward.  There's a growing tech sector that may soon find its footing someplace between medical devices and IT for streamlining healthcare payment systems, or perhaps in materials science.  Though Kentucky is best-known for bourbon and racehorses, Bowling Green is best-known for Big Red (the mascot of Western Kentucky University) and General Motors' Corvette Assembly plant.  Between these two institutions, a growing university and a wildly popular sports car, there's a keen appreciation for making things happen.


This is, fittingly enough, where U.S. Senator Rand Paul chose to make his life.  Before the Tea Party boils over from over-reaching the laws of political physics, it's worth noting that "The Land of Rand" is hardly a backwater of ignoramuses, at least no more than New York or San Francisco or any other "trendier" place than Kentucky.  Indeed, Sen. Paul is a perfect reflection of the common sense, smaller-is-better, humility that characterizes Bowling Green and his early career as an ophthalmologist helping people see better.

When I had the chance to meet him, he was talking through the mechanics of how over-regulated health care simply leads to costlier health care.  It was the least-ideological talk I had heard in a long time, striking in that Sen. Paul has been branded as an "ideologue."  Instead of a lot of blustery red-baiting or even questioning the motives behind Obamacare, Sen. Paul stuck to the practical insanity of doubling the number of diagnostic codes providers will need to begin using "to save costs."  "Did you know there are now 12 new diagnostic codes for being struck by a bird, including two just for the macaw?" he asked, armed with dozens of similar anecdotes.  "There are two codes for running into a lamp post-- 'first encounter' and 'second encounter.'"

The Kentucky Senator's clear-headed approach to taking down Obamacare was spot-on long before the HealthCare.Gov web site fiasco gave Americans a taste for Dr. Big Brother.  No matter what (Texas U.S. Senator) Ted Cruz may tell you, the only way to fight the evils of socialized medicine is to vaccinate the public with very facts and experiences they are being infected with by Obamacare.  Just as sometimes vaccines cause death, Obamacare will have many victims.  It will be a more powerful wake up call than its opponents shouting from rooftops.  In this, conservatives should take a cue from the soft-spoken eye doctor from Bowling Green and let the deadly facts of Obamacare speak for themselves.

The end of the year as we know it (and I feel fine!)

2012 did not meet Mayan or Hollywood prophecies of global doom, but it did it's awful best trying.

This month's massacre of 20 children and six school teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, however, was not out of character for a year that saw the murder of at least 20,000 Syrian civilians by its Russian and Iranian-backed president, the murder of a US Ambassador in Libya by terrorists, the Aurora, Colorado theater massacre, and so-on and so-on.  As my years go, 2012 sucked worse than any other I can recall.

2012 began fittingly with the (ahem) Friday the 13th of January Costa Concordia disaster that killed 32 people when the Captain, having ordered a close-by "salute" to locals on Isola Giglio, scraped the giant ship of 4000+ passengers and crew along the rocky shore at full-speed.

The rest of the year went accordingly bad.

I could go on (The great Facebook IPO, Whitney Houston's dying in a hotel bathtub, the CIA Director's affair with his wartime biographer) but I think most would agree, the sooner we get out of 2012 the safer we all will be.

The irony is that while humanity struck so many imponderable new lows in 2012, from the standpoint of science and objective accomplishments, 2012 was (no pun intended) a truly stellar year.  Who can say 2012 was a total loss when we managed to land an SUV loaded with science instruments on Mars, or that discovering the Higgs bosun was ho-hum science?

Source: Hubblesite.org

In May 2012 came the uncelebrated discovery by astronomers that an unavoidable collision of our Milky Way Galaxy with Andromeda four billion years from now will NOT result in the loss of our Sun or the destruction of Earth, proving one more time, how statistically insignificant our solar system is to the Universe at the same time demonstrating our permanence in it and the nobility of human curiosity.

It makes me wonder if it isn't, in fact, our warped sense of perspective that brought about the disasters of 2012.  Other than Hurricane Sandy, the tragedies that marred 2012 were the man-made, the result of a few humans' insanely twisted perception of their own self-importance.  From Bashar al-Assad to Kim Jong-un to Adam Lanza to Captain Schettino-- throughout 2012 we suffered and suffered again from the vapid hubris of leaders, gunmen, dictators, nameless or famous-- including those of us who abet them by living a voyeuristic lifestyle that worships "celebrity" while looking down upon ordinary good deeds.

In this admittedly "too-cosmic" sense, 2013 can only be better than 2012 if we embrace for a change our nano-scale insignificant existence versus clawing for "greatness."  Maybe by thinking "smaller" we can close the sanctuary given in recent years to those "too big to fail."  Maybe by looking more closely at each other, we can stop flipping channels on the "big picture," and instead fix what's in front of us with our own hands.

If you look at what worked in 2012-- take the Mars rover landing or the US Olympic team for examples-- you see grueling and tedious attention to detail, hours upon hours of training and practice, the momentous accumulation of one tiny effort set gently upon another.  So it may point towards a fresh perspective on our assembled human selves, including the many among us who are needy, not for public attention, but just for small doses of caring.

What if instead of harboring fantabulous expectations for the glorious New Year, we just paid better attention to the small things we do (and don't do) instead?  Oh, come on, what little difference could it make?