Where No One Has Profited Before

Conditions: Moist, not cold

Game Changer

With the first private industry spacecraft docking with space station alpha, this looks to unleash a new era of space faring.

Private industry has been interwoven with space exploration since the first missions left the launch pad more than half a century ago, but the SpaceX mission changes how space is done.

Before, Nasa designed rockets and paid companies to build them, at almost any cost, and paid a hefty profit on top. SpaceX and other private companies do not have this luxury.

The job of running routine flights to low Earth orbit, to resupply the Space Station, and ultimately to ferry astronauts back and forth, is steadily being handed over to industry, which must innovate, design and test their products in a competitive marketplace.
[...]

Nasa has so far paid $381m to SpaceX, but the contract for at least a dozen resupply missions could be worth $1.6bn to the firm. In return, SpaceX claims it can reduce today's market rate per launch from around $150m to just $55m.

SpaceX has made history in docking with the Space Station, but other companies, including Virginia-based Orbital Sciences expect to launch their own resupply missions within six months.

- guardian.co.uk/science

Is competitive industry the right element to be operating in the realm of space craft? No, it is not. Because the point of competitive industry is to make a profit. The point of a government agency is to get a particular job done. So the government agency is less likely to squeeze safety margins in order to please the stock holders. However, that attitude leads to massive unsustainable budgets, which is why we've ended up with competitive industry taking over. So exactly how long is it going to be before we get an unsafe situation caused by profit concerns?



Film Review: Man On A Ledge

A good thriller movie is hard. Especially in this day and age. You gotta have a really solid twisty plot, that you don't give away in the trailer, and have a really solid cast that you can empathize with as they fall deeper into the maze, and a director who can properly craft a movie that obscures the plot so that the audience is "thrilled". Sadly, Man on a Ledge falls short on these terms. It's not really all that thrilling. You really don't have any empathy for the characters. And you can really see the plot twists coming from a mile away.

Sam Worthington is the lead here, playing a cop who is convicted of stealing a diamond and sentenced to 25 years in the hoosegow. Of course we all know that he's innocent, and so it's no real surprise to watch him escaping custody and setting up a heist where he distracts the police by pretending to want to jump off a building, while his team break into the next door vault of the guy who's got the diamond (Ed Harris - looking very scarily old). Basically, it's just up to us to figure out which two cops are the corrupt ones, sadly not a particularly difficult challenge.

This movie just doesn't really spark. It rolls along pleasantly, the heist itself is mostly fun to watch, the shots of New York from above are nice, there's some OK scenes between Worthington and Elizabeth Banks (playing the lead police negotiator). But where's the actual tension? Where's the uncertainty? Where are the twists and turns? Somehow they're just not there. We know Sam's not going to jump off the building. We know Ed still has the diamond. We know there's a couple of corrupt cops in the mix. We even know that when you cast Bill Sadler as a hotel clerk, he's not actually just a hotel clerk. So we're really just waiting for the movie to get to the end, where the important bits will get wrapped up. Two sensors out of five.


- Peace out