It’s been something of a hot minute since I’ve done one of these posts – the downside of having to live with depression is that, sometimes, something you want to be a regular occurrence tends to be not so – but the past month has had a few interesting things in it, and naturally, I have thoughts on them. We’re covering the gamut from the personal to the cosmic so let’s get right into it, shall we?
I’m on Bluesky! With Elon Musk continuing to make Twitter – now known as X – a bad place for everyone but himself, I’ve decided to pull up stakes and move elsewhere. A fellow member of the Rambo Academy had an invite to Bluesky which they were happy to provide and so I’ve set up over there. While it will be a while before I’ve truly settled in, if you’re curious, you can see what I’m up to here.
Bluesky is still, as of this writing, in beta so people outside won’t be able to do more than just look until and unless they can get an invitation. Hopefully that will change and Bluesky will open up to the public soon, since Xwitter (as people are now calling Musk’s hellsite) is clearly in a death spiral at this point.
Saint John’s Electric Buses – So Far So Good! This CBC Article recently went over some of the early results of a pilot project in the city of Saint John, New Brunswick to bring in an on-demand electric bus service. The thing that struck me as interesting was the data on what it costs to keep their electric buses charged vs keeping a bus fueled: For a distance of 220 km, the electric needed only $4 worth of electricity, while diesel buses needed $225 to cover the same distance.
A fifty-fold decrease in costs is nothing to sneeze at; especially with the current inflation mess. Combined with both the lower cost of the bus itself, and greater efficiency with which the bus is used, this is a net good for the city and for its people. I expect that, as the full implications of this pilot program become known, and as the program expands, we will see that cities will be able to offer greener, better, public transit for less cost than before.
Provided, of course, that the cities are wise enough to make the transition. I don’t live in Saint John, but in Fredericton, the provincial capital, and this city’s big push to greener transit was… to buy diesel-electric buses. I hope the mayor and the city council are paying attention to what’s happening in Saint John and adjust their plans accordingly.
India Reaches the Moon… and Russia doesn’t. Last Wednesday, ISRO’s moon lander Chandrayaan-3 touched down near the Moon’s South Pole. This was just four days after Russia’s Luna 25 lander – their first mission to the Moon in almost fifty years – malfunctioned and crashed, and four years after India’s previous lander had also crashed.
There is a lot of focus on the Moon’s South Pole in recent years and for good reason. The craters there are in permanent shadow, and in that shade is ice. If we are to ever to colonize the Moon, water will be a precious resource, and having a local supply will be crucial. Previous orbital missions (including ISRO’s Chandrayaan-1) have shown that there is water present, and the current spate of missions are focussed on finding out how much water there is and if we can get at it relatively easily. Thanks to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, no nation can claim the Moon or any part of it for themselves, so whatever is found will be available to any future mission that lands there.
India’s rise in space does correspond with its rise as an economic and political power in the world, but Russia’s growing failures in space should serve as a warning. Almost every nation that has entered space has done so for nationalistic reasons. “Look what we can do! We are the greatest nation on Earth!” But nations that remain nationalistic – or have returned to nationalism as Russia has done recently – cannot maintain a space presence or industry for long. Exploring space is hard and expensive, and other ventures, warfare especially, will kill it.
America learned this lesson very painfully in the 1970s and 1980s, as first the Vietnam War and later lesser military ventures bled NASA of vital funds. As a result, their push to the Moon died almost as soon as they succeeded, the space shuttle was forced to labour on for decades after it should have been replaced with a better spacecraft, and the space station simply failed to launch. It was only when America embraced international cooperation that they returned to space in a big way, and now stand ready to return to the Moon, this time to stay.
Russia’s space industry was kept alive in the post-Soviet years through cooperation with the US and with others like ESA, but they never built on that cooperation. As a result, even Russia’s expertise in building space stations has waned, and they can no longer maintain their launch vehicles or facilities. Their current ruler has all but insured that Russia’s time in space is coming to a close, and I suspect nothing will save them this time.
I hope that India is paying close attention to these examples. If it wants to go from strength to strength, then it will need to move beyond the current nationalism and cooperate with other nations in space. Its current venture shows it can do so as an equal.