I have a new post up at Air & Space about the current scandal of fake papers being published in scientific journals, the breakdown of the peer review process, poor scholarship among some scientists and “expertise” derived from Google searches. Comment here, if so inclined.
You may have noticed that I haven’t been blogging here much lately. I am busy with the manuscript of my next book, due at the publisher in a couple of months. I’ll be back with more commentary on space policy and programs soon.
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Quietly-NASA-is-reconsidering-the-moon-as-a-6178116.php
I have to compare the problems in academia to the parallel death spiral in journalism. Iris Chang said, in a seemingly casual and obvious comment, “Often, what you see in the media is driven by economic forces.”
Money is the god of this world- it is the magical entity that overpowers science and logic with manipulation and deception. Scientific research is the only field that defies this supernatural order with the study of the natural order- but it is a war with battles won and lost. The lunar related example is in my view the infamous 2010 speech at Kennedy Space Center in Florida where the President said, “I just have to say pretty bluntly here, we’ve been there before.”
I have said it pretty bluntly and repeatedly over the last 4 years that Human Space Flight goals at the space agency have been subverted and public opinion poisoned in pursuit of the NewSpace LEO business plan. And I have been banned or asked to leave every forum where I did so- except this one.
But the truth will out. Just as fake research is eventually exposed, the NewSpace hype is wearing thin. Due to the inescapable fact that every other space capable nation on Earth is headed for the Moon, it looks like NASA is attempting to repair their reputation.
“Gerstenmaier, a widely respected engineer who has overseen NASA’s human spaceflight program since 2005, appears to be steering the agency back toward a program that would more fully utilize the moon.
The influential National Research Council strongly encouraged such a shift last summer in a report on human spaceflight, urging President Obama and NASA to reconsider their lack of interest in the lunar surface.”
Quotes from the article:
– We have seen and done several studies that look at Mars missions as a logistics and resupply problem,” Gerstenmaier said. “These studies show that resources from the moon could be extremely beneficial for Mars missions.
– One of the biggest costs for a Mars mission is launching enough fuel into space to get astronauts to and from the red planet. This is why the moon’s availability as a gas station is so attractive, and NASA is already planning robotic missions to the lunar surface to further assess the availability of ice at the poles.
– With this “evolvable” campaign, which should be publicly released later this year, NASA is moving away from a flags-and-footprints approach used during the Apollo era to a more step-by-step, sustainable path. NASA is considering how to launch assets into space that could be built upon by subsequent missions, and ways of using resources in space that would reduce the burden of launching them from Earth.
– Until now much of NASA’s renewed assessment of the moon has flown under the radar, but engineers familiar with the agency’s work say the lunar option is being kept open for when it’s more politically acceptable.
It is interesting that they are talking about this (even when it might be “more politically acceptable”) now. Maybe our current President really is becoming a lame duck.
Or with the success of COTS and the limited amount of funding it took a more realistic plan for Luna could be shaping up. Where commercial handles a lot more of the grunt work and NASA can better focus limited funding.
Or it could be that since bypassing LEO with SLS and larger vehicles dumps the NewSpace business plan in the trash can, Gwynne Shotwell was right when she said “we are not Moon people.”
Vladislaw,
We and others have repeatedly discussed the “success” of the COTS/CRS program in this forum, so you have been exposed on numerous occasions to the details of the arguments against the existence of such “success”. If you really feel it necessary to revisit that discussion yet again why not save us all the risk of getting meta carpel tunnel syndrome and simply re-read some of the old comments sections.
Billgamesh,
With Gerstenmaier involved the plan is likely to look like an updated version of the LunOx proposal from the 1990’s. The interesting part to me is that he seems to feel free to publicly discuss the Moon/Lunar Resources when it was placed off limits by administration policy with the cancellation of Constellation systems.
I apologize to Dr. Spudis for straying so far off topic:
Joe, I scanned some LunOx material and it was very interesting. I have never been happy with my own conclusions about robot landers being necessary and it is encouraging that scientists and engineers proposed a similar scheme. They did not know about the lunar polar ice back then and I believe the ice makes it far more practical. Especially if there are enough of those volatiles which Dr. Spudis has explained several times.
Locked in the lunar ice are presumably volatile elements useful as catalysts in chemical processes. The importance of these trapped volatiles is simply separating this water ice into hydrogen and oxygen and calling it rocket fuel is not the miracle it might seem. Hydrogen is super cold, “boils off”, and recovering and liquefying this loss is a difficult proposition due to exothermic products generated in the process, space radiation, zero gravity effects, and other complications. For vehicles launched from Earth there can be no substitute for hydrogen upper stages. However the technology to store hydrogen for any length of time in space is a challenge. Due to its properties hydrogen presently cannot be available to a spacecraft for more than a few hours after launch.
The percentage of volatiles mixed into lunar polar ice mean common industrial chemical processes can be utilized to produce methane and oxygen using the ice as feed stock. Though giving a lower Isp than hydrogen, storage and handling is greatly simplified. Liquid methane and liquid oxygen are rocket propellants having similar cryogenic characteristics and can be maintained in spacecraft “zero boil-off” systems for longer duration missions where liquid hydrogen is currently impractical. A family of reusable and multi-use methane-oxygen systems would be very useful in establishing a cislunar infrastructure.
I find it extremely interesting that ULA is developing a piston engine for space craft auxiliary power and this type of installation is well-suited for managing methane-oxygen systems. Though they only specify hydrogen in the advert and actually mention refueling (good luck!), as stated, methane is in my view a much better fit and turns this system into “Moon tech.”
Just an update, NASA appears to already be walking back Gerstenmaier’s comments:
http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-disputes-chronicle-report-that-nasa-is-reassessing-lunar-surface-plans
Too bad, somebody came up with the the adage that in Washington the definition of a gaffe is accidentally telling the truth in public.
Hope Gerstinmair does not have to announce his “voluntary early retirement” to “spend more time with his family”.
The lame duck is Human Space Flight. No bucks means no Buck Rogers and there is no way to make money in space except with satellites. Not without first accomplishing a massive public works project resulting in a cislunar infrastructure. Exactly the Panama canal/Hoover dam type activity that NewSpace screams bloody murder at.
I am curious how a scientist or engineer graduate, competing against so many others for so few slots, has any other option than to do what he sees others succeeding with. Monkey see, monkey do. If churning out papers or pandering to hyperloopy billionaires is all that will pay off the school loan then that is what is going to happen. Thousands of cheap and nasty boxes zooming overhead is obviously a bad idea but not to the people who think they can make a billion with it- and the scientists and engineers can only nod in agreement and get to work- they have bills to pay.
I am not going communist and declaring class warfare- just stating the facts. Obscene wealth trickles down into obscene privileges, behaviors, and policies. That Sarah Brightman will be utilizing a 150 billion dollar quarter century in the making taxpayer “investment” as a vacation destination is another example. Once filthy lucre is a stanchion in any arrangement it becomes exceedingly difficult to remove the longer it remains- and the more money flows away from insuring unprofitable details like scientific and journalist integrity. Regulation prevents abuse and costs money, but those who want to abuse the system and “make a killing” pay for deregulation. It is government vs greed but those who don’t like it call it anything and everything but that.
The idea of going to Mars has generated interest and a few dollars since H.G. Wells despite it being a cold dim worthless rock. This has previously worked against space exploration but if it is going to be used as an excuse to go to the Moon then I should not complain.
[W]e can begin to reinstate the techniques that have served us so well in the past. Journals need to stop accepting and publishing worthless contributions, and the community needs to stop writing them. The current literature should be read carefully and thoroughly.
I’m not sure it’s possible to go back to way things were. The problem is we’re trying to drink from a fire hose these days. Back in the olden days before they even had Xerox machines, for any given field there were simply a lot fewer researchers, departments and journals. But then you could actually afford to subscribe to several print journals. Your office would be crammed with bulging, sagging shelves of actual print journals. But if you needed to read something, it was easy just to pull it off the shelf.
Then came the age of the copiers. You no longer had to subscribe to a bunch of journals, since you could go to the library and simply copy the articles you wanted. Besides the number of journals was starting to proliferate, and there simply isn’t money nor space for them all. So you’d spend your beer money on $40 copy cards and burn through them in no time, and you’d be lucky not to get carpel tonal syndrome. Now you’d have entire filing cabinets crammed with Xeroxed articles; keeping them organized was a nightmare. But at least you’d have something paper in your hands, and that is conducive to in-depth reading, it’s easy to write in the margins, take it to bed with you.
Now we are in the age of the pdf. Now print journals and indeed libraries are basically obsolete. Here in the middle of nowhere, I have at my fingertips the resources of a major research library. But journals, conference proceedings, articles continue to proliferate at hyperexponential rates. Most new journals don’t even bother with a print version. So instead of filing cabinets, now we have a rat’s nest of pdfs stored on a hard drive or in the cloud. Google may be bad–but it’s also mandatory.
But pdf’s don’t really lend themselves to in depth reading. You do a keyword search to quickly home in on the section you’re interested in, so it’s not even necessary to do a quick scan the rest of the paper. Then the reader itself isn’t the best, the way the pages jump around. Now you can highlight text, but you can’t underline it in three different colors to indicate how many times you’ve looked at it. So if you really want to understand a paper, you’ll probably make a printout, but it likely won’t find it’s way into a filing cabinet.
Then the flip side of the age of the pdf is the existence of paywalls. The most important papers written by the most important researchers tend to get published in the most prestigious journals, and these tend to have paywalls. This wasn’t much of a concern back in the age of the copiers, since the library bore the cost of the articles. Paywalls are particularly a problem for independent scholars. Speaking for myself, if an article’s not free, unless I really, really want it, I’m not going to go to the trouble to obtain something that may not even be relevant. The fact that NASA-funded research can still be buried behind paywalls is an outrage IMHO.
There’s still peer review, to be sure, but the reviewers are confronted with the same deluge of information, and the need to publish or perish has not diminished. Of course the journal editors want rock stars to be their reviewers, and indeed to be a rock star you practically have to be a reviewer, but it’s the rock stars who have the least amount of spare time for this stuff, which is mostly unpaid. Meanwhile, coauthors are of little use, even though you may have ten or fifteen of them. You send them the final draft, and you get an email back saying “I didn’t have time to read through everything thoroughly, but it looks good to me! :-)”
So it’s no surprise that a lot of erroneous information washes through the floodgates of the dam meant to hold back the torrent. If I had one practical suggestion, and though I hate to say it, but the peer review process would probably be improved if at least some of the duties were farmed out to 2nd-tier, even independent but knowledgeable researchers and students who have the time to fully engage the material, and do things, like, you know, check the math?
Meanwhile, unless the French postmodernists are correct, Mother Nature will remain the ultimate peer reviewer, and will finally decide who’s theory is true, and who’s is an illusion. The system is self-correcting, thus a certain amount of looseness in the system is mostly harmless. What we don’t want is a peer review system that is a straitjacket, stifling unorthodox ideas that may prove to be the foundation for a new paradigm shift…
Paywalls are particularly a problem for independent scholars.
Shouldn’t be — you can always contact the lead author for a reprint (or PDF). I’ve never met a scientist who wasn’t happy to share their work with anyone interested enough to ask for a copy.
Yes, there are more papers published these days, but the amount of quality work is pretty static, if not declining. We live in a time of superb data, both in quality and quantity. I have data for the Moon now that I couldn’t even dream of when I was a graduate student. What’s declined (precipitously) is the quality of scientific imagination — the ability to make connections, see relationships, and draw insightful conclusions. Papers now tend to be rote data recitation or (even worse) computer modeling. There is a qualitative decline to accompany the quantitative increase.
“-the quality of scientific imagination — the ability to make connections, see relationships, and draw insightful conclusions.”
People like me who are not trained in the scientific method immediately mistake your language for being emotive. I think this is a big problem in that the public, except for the segment that I belong to which are “fans”, constantly misinterpret what is said by real scientists and engineers while being taken advantage of by marketing techniques which misrepresent and misinform. Even popular science fans often get it wrong.
A bizarre and scathing commentary on this is Stephen Colbert’s address at the White House correspondents dinner in 2006. The comedian commented on his stage persona not being one of the “nerd patrol” or a “factinista.” He then quoted some “science” comparing nerve endings in the gut to those in the brain. The public is constantly and easily manipulated because the media knows how to do it and is allowed to without anyone calling it what it is. It is time to start complaining about all the spin and work on making issues crystal clear instead of accepting the cesspool of arcane exercises in sophistry public discourse has become.
You can always contact the lead author for a reprint (or PDF).
Or better yet, post copies on one’s personal website (as you do Paul)! But I hope you agree that government funded research at least should be made freely available to the taxpaying public. The NIH already requires this–though they allow a 12 month embargo before the manuscript has to go on PubMed Central. NASA should do the same thing IMO: it should just be part of the grant proposal. I think a journal like Icarus charges something like $3,000 to make an article open access; that should simply be a line item in the grant proposal, and NASA should willingly pay for it. IMHO YMMV
What’s declined (precipitously) is the quality of scientific imagination — the ability to make connections, see relationships, and draw insightful conclusions.
The result of overspecialization IMO. In the old days, scientists were more or less equal parts geologists, physicists, chemists, biologists, philosophers. A paleogeographer could talk to a modern-day meteorologist and both could understand each other and as a result make genuine progress in both fields. Nowadays, students are afraid to take a class outside of their chosen specialty because they might get a B that would lower their GPA.
academic puppy mills
I think you hit the nail on the head there. From philosophy to physics, they are graduating way more PhDs than there are jobs for them. I read a physics blog a few years back where the professor said he had seen more people ruin their lives because of a PhD in physics than because of getting hooked on drugs. One might think that a sort of Darwinian selection process would allow the cream to rise to the surface, but in reality, the opposite occurs: a sense of desperation happens as one worries about putting food on the table; one must pad one’s CV at all costs; people even get tempted to try SCIgen!; the ability to play a game of toted up impact factors counts more than a genuine ability to make connections, see relationships, and draw insightful conclusions….
“The system is self-correcting, thus a certain amount of looseness in the system is mostly harmless.”
There are no real “self-correcting” systems. All errors or faults have a cumulative effect and eventually lead to degradation and ultimately failure. This kind of reasoning is more like economics and “the market will correct itself” voodoo. There are no “straightjackets” that are “stifling unorthodox ideas.” Science is based on mathematics, not descriptive wording.
Checking the math is all that matters. Witch doctors who demonize someone in the next village (for a fee) are not part of the scientific method. Unfortunately, many “scientific papers” are all about that. As an example I give you the pesticide industry funding research resulting in papers repeatedly exonerating their products from causing harmful effects to the Bee population.
http://newsdaily.com/2015/04/u-s-to-halt-expanded-use-of-some-insecticides-amid-honey-bee-decline/
There are no real “self-correcting” systems. All errors or faults have a cumulative effect and eventually lead to degradation and ultimately failure. This kind of reasoning is more like economics and “the market will correct itself” voodoo. There are no “straightjackets” [sic] that are “stifling unorthodox ideas.” Science is based on mathematics, not descriptive wording.
Bill, you just said above that you were never trained in “the” scientific method–as if there were only one. But rest assured, science is NOT based on mathematical navel gazing. That is the delusion that Paul was railing against above–that mathematically based computer simulations are the answer. No, science is ultimately based on this thing that apparently causes phenomena. What that thing really is, is a question for philosophers–science itself cannot really touch that question, though it may inform the philosophical discussion. For science per se, the question is whether a given theory predicts or explains the phenomena. You are correct that errors do sometimes accumulate, leading to a crisis. But there is never a “failure”. A new paradigm emerges that is closer to the truth. That is called self-correction.
“What that thing really is, is a question for philosophers–science itself cannot really touch that question,-”
Wow. Thanks for explaining that Warren. It all makes sense [sic] now.
“Lately, I find many younger scientists to be singularly uninformed about the state of their own fields.”
My question is: “Who is responsible for ensuring that the next generation of scientists has been properly cultivated?”
Put another way, “Who was responsible for ‘minding the shop’ while this was going on?”
Disparaging ‘younger scientists’ is easy. Generation X has been living with it since the 1980s, and are bearing the brunt of the current crapification of things: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-03/no-country-young-workers-only-americans-55-and-older-found-jobs-march
If ‘younger scientists’ are engaging in the kinds of activities you cite, who was incentivizing them to do so? Who are your successors, Paul? Who are the younger Lunar scientists who will be leading the charge back to the Moon, and why have we not heard more from them?
[FWIW, I may sound critical, but I have long regarded Paul as a kind of mentor in my own Lunar studies and Lunar pedagogy efforts. What Paul cites is but a small part of a much, much larger sociocultural problem.]
Unless you get to resentful of the over 40 crowd, their job prospects are not as great as that article would have you believe (at least not in the technical fields).
I have a friend who was laid off in the Constellation systems cancellation. He has a masters degree in Mechanical Engineering, a PHD in Physics and several decades of experience.
Due to his diligent effort he now has two jobs: One as a sales clerk at Sports Authority and the other as the head of the Fish and Game Department at Academy.
“-resentful of the over 40 crowd-”
Ageism is real, I can testify to walking into over a dozen job interviews and seeing that unmistakable look of unhappiness on a early thirties interviewer. Gray hair equals too much trouble to HR people in many fields.
It will get worse. Being at the tail end of the baby boom I am going to see all of it. The Japanese are already experiencing serious problems and one official recently responded with the comment, “hurry up and die.” It is actually spurring innovation in the robot industry for elder care though, so there is always a bright side.
I read somewhere the popularity of the zombie genre is a subconscious response to a world filling up with withered walking cadavers. Pop psychology at it’s finest.
Joe, the linked article points out that those between 40 and 55 have job prospects that are utterly abysmal. Only those over 55 (the Baby Boom generation) have been seeing job gains. To the economist in me that is a terrifying/horrifying detail that bodes seriously ill for the future.
Here’s an interesting exercise. You can look at NASA’s workforce from 1993 to the present at: https://wicn.nssc.nasa.gov/wicn_cubes.html. Look for the Age Distribution of Full-time Permanent employees: FY 1993 and Current link.
Doing a quick analysis, one can see that in 1993 the Baby Boomers represented approximately 49.4% of the NASA workforce. Approximately because the 5-year blocks don’t exactly line up with the demographic. In 2015, that same generation represented approximately 51.8% of the NASA workforce. So while the absolute numbers have come down with the reductions in the overall size of NASA (from 26,146 in 1993 to 17,731 at the start of 2015), that generation is not passing the torch in any meaningful way. And sitting on 20+ years worth of raises too.
For Gen X, the comparable numbers are 19.8% and 31.8%. There seems to be some growth, but the absolute numbers tell a different story, with total workers rising from about 5,175 to 5,630, an increase over 22 years of 8.8%.
For Millennials it’s even worse. They’re now about where the Gen Xers were in 1993, agewise. Those numbers are 2,654 and 15%.
So yes, the Baby Boomers have taken the brunt of the decline in the overall NASA numbers (aside from the Silent Gen riding off into the sunset. Sort of; they’re still 1.5% of the NASA workforce), going from about 12,917 in 1993 to 9.184 in 2015. Much of that is likely attributable to the Shuttle retirement. Still, as with the broader economy, NASA is also no place for young men and women. Something I pointed out to the SEDS students when I spoke at the Spacevision conference in Buffalo in 2012, and probably why I haven’t been invited back…
And I was serious when I asked Paul who the young up-and-coming Lunar scientists are, as I’d like to know whose work to follow to keep my Moon presentations up to date. You see, I’m currently reading through this book “Proceedings of the Conference on The Lunar Highlands Crust” from 1979, and I keep seeing references to this young, up-and-coming guy by the name of Paul Spudis. (I needed some good hard science after finally slogging through Jack Schmitt’s “Return to the Moon”)
Hmmm, Academy and Sports Authority… I should send them my resume…
“Only those over 55 (the Baby Boom generation) have been seeing job gains.”
Maybe I will get a decent job this year.
Hi Ken,
This will be my last post on this topic, not because it isn’t interesting, but it is off topic and may be taking advantage of our host’s indulgence.
Three points:
– The NASA analysis you linked appears to be of civil servants only. While good information it is only part of the story. It would be informative to see a similar analysis of contractors (who made up a larger percentage of the workforce). I can tell you based on anecdotal evidence that the older (and therefore usually higher paid) workers were laid off first. The deciding factor seemed to be salary not age. The HR departments were simply meeting their new EP requirements for the least money possible.
– The guy I referred to is probably 55 to 60, so he fits the age range of the privileged bay boomers to which you were referring.
– The whole subject of jobs is skewed by the way the statistics are reported. As I have had to listen to my acquaintance rant on more than one occasion he lost his one good job in one year. Then gained his two (29.5 hours/week, minimum wage, no benefits) jobs the next year. Yet all those (the way the book keeping is done) are simply counted as jobs. That means he is counted as two new jobs created. He is supposedly part of the great economic recovery and one of those 55 and over types who had such an easy time finding a job.
The bottom line is that it is still not a good jobs market and that situation is markedly worse (for everybody) in the Aerospace area. That makes for tense times and it is easy to start pitting one group off against the other. The only ones who benefit from that are the same politicians who made the situation in the first place.
“- it is easy to start pitting one group off against the other.”
Exactly how they play the game while the citizens who can vote them right out of office refuse to understand this. The human race may be too stupid to survive.
Excerpt from an article by Australian writer Chris Zappone article mainly about space exploration and risk aversion which says something about aerospace:
The triumph of free-market fundamentalism on society’s collective imagination has a role, too. Anthropologist David Graeber describes a “marketising bureaucracy” that set in, leading organisations and leaders to conclude that the most important activity was for everyone to “spend most of their time selling things to each other”.
This has redirected the energies of the businesses, schools and governments that would have once been able to focus on major projects.
The trend of “marketising bureaucracy” has been helped by one of the most significant inventions of the past thirty years: the internet. It has sped the advance of globalised corporations.
Rather than creating new Jetsons’-inspired labour-saving technologies, difficult and dirty jobs were shifted to the so-called developing world, where they could be done at a lower cost, and their products shipped back to Western societies.
Left behind in the developed world was increasingly lots of low-paid work and debt-saddled consumers. Graeber documents the phenomenon that has led to low-paying, low-satisfaction jobs in the developed world in a new book, tellingly titled The Utopia of Rules.
My question is: “Who is responsible for ensuring that the next generation of scientists has been properly cultivated?” Put another way, “Who was responsible for ‘minding the shop’ while this was going on?”
The scientists of my generation, of course. But also the scientific program managers who, through their funding decisions over the years, have supported the academic puppy mills that churn out the legions of the marching mediocre.
“– One of the biggest costs for a Mars mission is launching enough fuel into space to get astronauts to and from the red planet. This is why the moon’s availability as a gas station is so attractive, and NASA is already planning robotic missions to the lunar surface to further assess the availability of ice at the poles.”
Dr. Spudis talks about works being misquoted or misinterpreted but what I don’t get is when questionable assumptions are presented to the public as “attractive.” There is nothing attractive about using chemical propulsion for a Mars mission. Nuclear energy, which is a thorny subject politically and not to be discussed, is what makes interplanetary travel practical. Actually, the entire reasoning behind Mars as the “Horizon Goal” is highly questionable. Mars is a terrible place to try and colonize. In my view Mars is a P.R. tool being used to garner public support.
Why can’t NASA just be honest and explain the situation with space exploration?
The U.S. went from 10 years to landing on the Moon to 25 years taking the backward step into LEO to complete a largely useless space station. That is the red flag that should be examined.
A narrative, a true story, needs to be told to the public so they can understand the reasons and resources required for a real space program. NASA needs to spend some money on getting this story out to the public so there is support for a Moon return.
My version of that story starts with the canceling of Apollo and the desperate measures taken by NASA to maintain a Human Space Flight program and preserve the heavy lift infrastructure. This resulted by a Byzantine process in the Space Shuttle Program and subsequent ISS. The main lessons of the story being there is no cheap and LEO is a dead end.
The ice on the Moon means there is a now a reason to go there and should be the central focus of the entire Human Space Flight community. The first project this ice enables is replacing the GEO satellite junkyard with shielded human-crewed space stations and capturing the over 100 billion dollar a year revenues of that industry.
The way to do this is to send Super Heavy Lift Vehicle wet workshop upper stages with robot landers into lunar frozen polar orbits. The landers bring up water derived from lunar ice deposits to the workshops to provide radiation shielding. Everything follows that.
I am beginning to wonder if peer reviewers invest even a few minutes checking the work of their colleagues. Warren Platts has caught glaring math errors on two prominent papers. One of them was the 600 million tonnes of lunar ice paper. The other (if I remember right) was an analysis of LCROSS ejecta and mercury content.
The best policy is Richard Feynman’s advice: take *everything* you read with a huge grain of salt. That was well before the current decline in academic standards.
Warren Platts has caught glaring math errors on two prominent papers. One of them was the 600 million tonnes of lunar ice paper. The other (if I remember right) was an analysis of LCROSS ejecta and mercury content.
Care to elaborate on the nature of these “errors”?
The NewSpace mob has been put on alert and are organizing their infomercials. Stand by for all space forums to be completely flooded with propaganda and misinformation in reaction to the Eric Berger article.
I would be very interested in the answer to that question as well.
Since hopdavid “credits” revelations of “glaring math errors ” in that work to a Warren Platts and there is someone posting in this particular series of comments under the name Warren Platts perhaps hopdavid or Mr. Platts could details the errors and where Mr. Platts expose of the “glaring errors” was reviewed and published.
That would be on topic for the original purpose of this article.
Um, well, uh, I was going to send an email, but uh since people are asking and I guess it is kind of apropos, um here goes:
I had asked Paul about how the 600 million metric tonnes of the relatively pure ice (that has become a virtual meme within the internet echo chamber) we believe to exist in the anomalous craters of the northern polar region, and he pointed me to slide 24 in the following presentation:
http://spudislunarresources.nss.org/Papers/Spudis_VSE%20mission.pdf
At first when I looked at the spreadsheet, my eyes in typical internet fashion glazed over and simply focused on the bottom line: an estimate of 608,000,000 metric tonnes.
Then about a year later, I revisited it, and something didn’t quite add up this time. So I decided to reverse engineer the spreadsheet, which I was able to do.
First I entered the diameters of the 40 listed anomalous craters into column A. Then I calculated the area (and see that you all used “3.14” rather than the “pi()” function–no big deal). So far so good.
Then I calculated the Volume/Mass of the relatively pure ice (since 1 m^3 of ice is approximately equal to 1 metric tonne, the magnitudes are the same). So there are a million m^2 in one km^2: that gives you the area in m^2. Then multiply by 2 meters to get the volume/mass. Tote them all up, and I got the 608,000,000 metric tonnes–exact same result in the original spreadsheet.
ONLY ONE PROBLEM: the “=___*1,000,000*2” formula references column A–the diameter–rather than column B–the area!
When that is fixed, you get a total mass of 5,834,120,000 mT–about an order of magnitude difference!
Really, it’s not that big of a deal IMHO; it’s an honest mistake; life happens; I myself make such mistakes all the time. Luckily I got my friend Hop to help check my stuff–he’s good at the math.
The good news is that that it turns there’s more like 6 billion tonnes of the relatively pure ice, and since the 2 meter depth is a lower limit, and it could well be the case that the ice could be up to 20 meters deep or more, the true amount is probably somewhere between 6 and 60 billion tonnes.
That raises an interesting scientific question: Are comets and water-bearing asteroid impacts enough to account for this higher number?
The other mistake was in George Reed’s “Don’t Drink the Water” paper first published in 1999. He took a stab at estimating the expected mercury concentration within PSRs. Nothing much happened until the LCROSS/LRO-LAMP results showed that huge Hg spike in the spectrum. Reed’s was duly rediscovered, his original prediction of the Hg concentration was quite close to the LCROSS estimate. Reed’s paper was much praised for “hitting a bullseye” and was repeatedly cited in subsequent papers.
Only one problem: when you redo the math, there was a typo or a confusion of units between cm and m, and the true estimate of the Hg concentration should have been reported as two orders of magnitude lower than the printed result–entailing that the match with the original LCROSS results was much less accurate than first thought.
I since redid a Reedian analysis of the Hg concentration and by changing a few assumptions I was able to obtain a predicted Hg concentration that was again quite close to the LCROSS result. This was published in an AIAA conference proceeding.
Only one problem: my estimate of the area was back calculated from the 600 million m^3, throwing off my own estimate by like a factor of 6!
So you can see how errors get propagated through the literature. But the truth eventually surfaces, and thus science–unlike literary criticism, philosophy, theology–is a truly self-correcting process.
Bottom line: there’s a lot more water up there than we realized! 😉
Warren,
Thanks for explaining your analysis. I’ll confess to a math error on the 600 million tons of ice but I had nothing to do with the Hg measurements or the interpretation of its presence to begin with — that came from LCROSS and LAMP, neither of which I was involved in.
In fact, the original estimate (arithmetic error aside) had to make some additional assumptions, such as pure ice (it probably isn’t; if I had to guess, I would say it’s probably on the order of ~50% water ice, based on CPR enhancement) and zero ice elsewhere (which we know is definitely not correct; the LCROSS impact area (which contains 5-10 wt.% ice) shows no radar enhancement. If all other areas were so endowed, there would be trillions of tons of water ice there).
http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-disputes-chronicle-report-that-nasa-is-reassessing-lunar-surface-plans
Uh-oh. Never looks good for the future of Human Space Flight when the obvious stranglehold NewSpace and the LEO business plan have on NASA is exposed like this.
A Moon return bypasses LEO and dumps the NewSpace business plan in the trashcan. This is in direct conflict with the reality of the ice on the Moon as the critical enabling resource that should be the focus of the entire Human Space Flight community.
http://www.examiner.com/article/back-to-the-moon-report-disputed-by-nasa-spokesperson
This could get ugly. I hope it does. I want it to get so ugly that the hierarchy of NASA two faced double agents installed to carry out the NewSpace LEO business plan have to resign.