Healthcare: Necessities and Luxuries

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I’ve been mulling this over for a few days, and haven’t come to any conclusions: what part of healthcare (or health care, if you prefer) is necessity, and what part is luxury? Can any part be considered a luxury?

From the standpoint of the patient, if you need some particular medicine or procedure to recover fully, then by definition it would be a necessity.

But I wonder, how much of the price escalation in healthcare is because tests and treatments that once were extraordinary are now commonplace, i.e., once were luxuries but now are considered necessities?

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Once again, I am a Relic

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A few years ago, when they shut down the 55th Mobile Command & Control Squadron at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, I became a relic of the Cold War. Later, when the last Titan rocket launched, I became a relic of the space program.

Now, again, it seems I am a relic: this time of the attempt to keep militarily critical U.S. technology in U.S. hands.

At the Defense Technology Security Administration from 2001-04, I recommended provisos for hundreds of State Department export licenses and agreements, to ensure U.S. companies didn’t reveal design methodologies or other insights into U.S. capabilities. I reviewed reams of technical data to ensure the companies didn’t go beyond the restrictions in their licenses. And I monitored dozens of face-to-face meetings between U.S. and foreign companies to ensure all parties stayed in bounds. It was often fascinating, sometimes frustrating work that was born out of the Cox Commission and the defense authorization that, among other things, had moved export authority for communications satellites from the Commerce Department to the State Department (see below).

Now we find out that, by executive fiat, our President delegated his responsibility for certifying critical space exports to the Commerce Department. It was actually done back on September 29th, via this Presidential Determination.

The responsibility is found in Section 1512 of the 1999 National Defense Authorization Act:

The President shall certify to the Congress at least 15 days in advance of any export to the People’s Republic of China of missile equipment or technology (as defined in section 74 of the
Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2797c)) that —
(1) such export is not detrimental to the United States space launch industry; and
(2) the missile equipment or technology, including any indirect technical benefit that could be derived from such export, will not measurably improve the missile or space launch capabilities of the People’s Republic of China.

So now, rather than the President making such certifications to Congress, the Commerce Department will do so. If I recall, people complained because George W. Bush seemed to delegate things instead of tending to them himself; but according to this Washington Times article, neither he nor Bill Clinton ever delegated this particular responsibility.

Thankfully, the determination did not seem to immediately get around Section 1513 of the 1999 NDAA, which states,

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, all satellites and related items that are on the Commerce Control List of dual use items in the Export Administration Regulations (15 CFR part 730 et seq.) on the date of the enactment of this Act shall be transferred to the United States Munitions List and controlled under section 38 of the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2778).

But how long until that gets changed? There are a lot of rumblings in the aerospace industry about rescinding some of the current export controls, as if the reason U.S. companies have lost market share to foreign satellite makers is that they can’t tell foreign customers why U.S. satellites work so well. It’s not price, it’s not that foreign manufacturers build fine spacecraft, it’s lack of technology transfer? The notion is ridiculous, but the impulse to blame our lack of competitiveness on anything other than internal business practices runs very deep in this country — witness the U.S. auto industry. Disturbingly, this “determination” seems to indicate that the Administration is willing to entertain the idea of sacrificing national security in order to make a quick buck.

I found that attitude among representatives of some of the companies I monitored: the short-sighted notion that it didn’t matter if they transferred technology to another country, as long as the other country paid well. The possibility that a foreign company might end up as their competitor in the future, and take away their customers using adapted U.S. technology, never seemed to occur to them.

Eight months before President Obama was elected, I expressed concerns about his national (in)security rhetoric. I didn’t foresee this potential relaxation of export controls, but I can’t say I’m very surprised.

And I’m still concerned. But I would be: after all, I’m a relic.

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Galileo in Space, Twenty Years Ago

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Twenty years ago today — October 18, 1989 — Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-34. Astronauts Donald E. Williams, Michael J. McCulley, Franklin R. Chang-Diaz, Shannon W. Lucid and Ellen S. Baker launched the Galileo spacecraft shortly after arriving in orbit.

(STS-34 mission patch. Click to enlarge.)

Nearly six years later, on July 13, 1995, Galileo rendezvous with the planet Jupiter and released its descent probe into the Jovian atmosphere.

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Soviet Firsts in October Space History

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Forty-five years ago today — October 12, 1964 — the Soviet Union placed the first three-man crew in space when cosmonauts Vladimir M. Komarov, Konstantin P. Feoktistov, and Boris B. Yegorov launched aboard Voshkod-1. In addition, Feoktistov was the first civilian in space.

And forty years ago yesterday — October 11, 1969 — the Soviets started a three-day launch series that resulted in the first time that three different spacecraft, with seven cosmonauts total, were in orbit simultaneously. Soyuz-6 was launched on the 11th, carrying cosmonauts Georgi S. Shonin and Valeri N. Kubasov. Soyuz-7 launched 40 years ago today, carrying Anatoliy V. Filipchenko, Vladislav N. Volkov and Viktor V. Gorbatko. And then on the 13th, Vladimir A. Shatalov and Aleksei S.Yeliseyev launched on Soyuz-8. All of these missions launched from Baikonur, in what is now Kazakhstan.

Two thoughts:

1. Considering that the latest crew to depart the International Space Station landed in Kazakhstan over the weekend, and that Soyuz rockets and capsules will soon be the only man-rated system to ferry people to and from the ISS, it’s safe to say that the “workaday” approach of the Soviet space program has proved very robust indeed.

2. Do you think they planned these missions for October in honor of the Bolshevik Revolution?

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When Religions Grow Up

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If part of growing up is realizing that you can’t realistically expect to get everything you want, what happens to religions when they grow up?

Is it a mark of maturity for a religion that it accepts that not everyone will (or will want to) adhere to it?

I think about Jesus and the rich man — sometimes described as a “rich young ruler” — who asked him what he needed to do to gain eternal life (Matthew 19:16-22). The man walked away from the opportunity, and what did Jesus do? Did Jesus chase the man down, berate him for his stubbornness, or threaten to take his life if he didn’t repent and convert? Not at all. Jesus let him go, and used the event as a teachable moment for his disciples.

When Christianity was in its infancy, still an underground movement, it brought in Jews and Gentiles by way of powerful testimonies and the awesome revelation that God had made a way for people to be saved and changed. Coercion never seemed to come into play, for two reasons. One, because the faith (and the nascent Church) was relatively powerless to coerce anyone to join. Second, and to my thinking more interesting, is because the faith was based on traditional Jewish belief and Judaism, being already a venerable religion, was a mature faith and one that valued being set apart, a small island of monotheistic faith in the ocean of pagan humanity.

As the capital-C Church grew into what I consider its adolescent years, and especially as it obtained official status in the Roman Empire under Constantine, it became much more belligerent. Coercion became more acceptable to church leaders, both as a means to convince people to join and as a means to enforce adherence to doctrine. (We may remember that Judaism’s early days — its adolescence, if you will — also had its coercive phase, when the Jews established themselves as a nation through military victory.)

This leads to the question of Islam, which appears to be a religion still in its adolescence. It went through an adolescent phase before, spreading through coercion and conquest and gaining worldly power that it wanted to protect and expand. Faced with mounting opposition, it retreated into relative isolation; in its recent rise to prominence (or notoriety), however, it seems again to be going through adolescent tantrums, only this time with suicide bombers and AK-47s instead of dervishes and scimitars. The question in my mind is whether Islam as a religion will grow up, will grow out of this petulant and demanding phase, and how long it may take. It seems that it will take the Muslim equivalent of Martin Luther, someone who can initiate an Islamic Reformation, in order for Islam as a religion to mature beyond the need to spread itself by intimidation. That would be a wonder to behold; remember what Luther went through, and think what a Muslim reformer would face.

It also raises the question, to me, of whether the Christian Church is growing old gracefully. It’s one thing for us as Christians to eschew violence (Jesus, you may recall from Matthew 5:38-42, didn’t go in for “eye for an eye”) and to accept that some people will hear the Gospel and remain unmoved. But it would be a shame if we became so “mature,” so insular, so content in the old-folks’-homes of our churches, that we stopped caring about and for the world around us. May it never be.

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Budgeting Radiation on Space Shuttle CHALLENGER

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Twenty-five years ago today — October 5, 1984 — space shuttle mission STS-41G launched from the Kennedy Space Center.

(STS-41G mission patch. NASA image. Click to enlarge.)

Space Shuttle Challenger carried U.S. astronauts Robert L. Crippen, Jon A. McBride, Kathryn D. Sullivan, Sally K. Ride, David C. Leestma, and Paul D. Scully-Power, and Canadian astronaut Marc Garneau. This was the first space flight to include two women, and Kathryn Sullivan became the first female U.S. astronaut to perform a spacewalk. Garneau was the first Canadian payload specialist to fly in space, and Scully-Power was the first oceanographer in space.

The crew deployed the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite early in the flight; the ERBS was part of a larger Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) comparing the energy absorbed by the earth with what the planet emits into space.


(ERBE longwave radiation data. NASA image.)

The crew spent the rest of their eight days in orbit performing various experiments. In one, they demonstrated the possibility of refueling satellites in orbit.

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First Images of the Far Side

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Fifty years ago today — October 4, 1959 — the first probe to return pictures of the far side (not the “dark side”) of the moon was launched. The Luna-3 flyby mission launched on a Vostok rocket from what is now the Baikonur Cosmodrome.


(Luna-3’s first image of the far side of the moon. From the National Space Science Data Center.)

On the same day, the U.S. launched “Little Joe 6,” from Wallops Island, Virginia, to test the Mercury space capsule’s integrity and aerodynamics. The capsule reached 37 miles altitude and flew 79 miles downrange, and the mission was listed as “partially successful.”

The space race was on, a half century ago. Thinking about it makes me wonder if we have the national will to start running a space race again, with the Chinese and the Indians in the mix.

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In the Old Days, Everyone Was a Rocket Scientist

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Our first space history item is interesting, but not the main event: On October 1, 1949 — 60 years ago today — the Long Range Proving Ground was activated at Cape Canaveral, Florida. It became the Florida Missile Test Range, and eventually Patrick Air Force Base and the Kennedy Space Center.

But the event that elicited this post’s subject line happened 40 years ago today, in 1969, when the European satellite “ESRO-1B” was launched from Vandenberg AFB by a Scout rocket. The NASA press release for the launch is very interesting: it includes pages of background information that must have fed the interest and imagination of every would-be “steely-eyed missile man” in the general public.

I had to grab the press release from the Google cache because the NASA link was broken, and I’ll only copy a few paragraphs here:

September 28, 1969
RELEASE NO: 69-138
FOURTH ESRO SATELLITE TO BE LAUNCHED

A 176-pound satellite carrying eight experiments to study the polar ionosphere, the Northern Lights and related phenomena, is scheduled to be launched by a four-stage Scout rocket from the Western Test Range, Calif., no earlier than Oct. 1, 1969. Called ESRO-1B, the European designed and built satellite is the fourth in a cooperative program between the European Space Research Organization (ESRO) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The program is carried out under terms of an agreement signed by the two organizations in December 1966, relating to providing ESRO with launching and associated services.

ESRO-1B is a duplicate or backup version of ESRO 1-Aurorae, a cooperative ESRO/NASA project, which was successfully launched into a highly elliptical near polar orbit by NASA on October 3, 1968, and is still operating. The same complement of eight experiments–a series of high-latitude particle detectors, auroral photometers, and Langrnuir probes–is being carried on board ESRO-1B. The experiments were provided by the Technical University of Denmark; Kiruna Geophysical Observatory, Sweden; the Radio and Space Research Station, Slough, England; the University of Oslo, Norway; the University of Bergen, Norway; the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment; and the University College, London, England.

The orbit planned for ESRO-1B is near-polar, inclined 86 degrees to the Equator, with an apogee of 435 kilometers (about 270 statute miles) and a perigee of 400 kilometers (about 248 statute miles). Orbit period will be 92 minutes. Scientific measurements made by the ESRO-1B will be concentrated over Northern Europe to enable correlation between ground-based polar ionosphere observations and measurements made simultaneously with sounding rockets launched from the ESRO launch site at Kiruna, Sweden.

Once injected into orbit, the ESRO-1B will be despun by means of a yo-yo system to about 1 RPM. Final stabilization will occur about 10 days after launch when the spacecraft locks onto the Earth’s magnetic field. This stabilization is achieved by means of a pair of magnets inside the satellite. To minimize oscillations, slender magnetic rods are also mounted inside the satellite.

And so on. On page 10 of the news release:

ESRO-IB FACT SHEET

Launch Window: 30-minute window which changes only slightly from day to day. The window opens at 3:29 p.m., (PDT), October 1, 1969.
Launch Site: Western Test Range, Lompoc, California, Pad SLC-5.
Launch Vehicle: Four-stage solid fuel Scout rocket.

Orbit:
Apogee: 435 km (about 270 statute miles)
Perigee: 400 km (about 248 statute miles)
Period: 92 minutes
Inclination: 86 degrees
Stabilization: Spacecraft is spin stabilized at about 148 rpm initially. Despun to one rpm by yo-yo mechanism and further despun by magnetic system which interacts with Earth’s magnetic field. Stabilization thereafter will be provided by a passive system consisting of two permanent magnets.

I find the inclusion of all the detail fascinating. But maybe that’s understandable, since I still am a would-be rocket scientist.

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Space Radar Mission, 1994

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Fifteen years ago today — September 30, 1994 — astronauts Michael A. Baker, Terrence W. Wilcutt, Thomas D. Jones, Steven L. Smith, Daniel W. Bursch, and Peter J. K. Wisoff launched from the Kennedy Space Center aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour on mission STS-68.


(STS-68 mission patch. NASA image.)

The mission carried the Space Radar Laboratory on its second flight, and imaged some of the same areas the SRL had imaged before.

Flying SRL during different seasons allowed comparison of changes between first and second flights. SRL-2 was activated on flight day one, and around-the-clock observations conducted by astronauts split into two teams. Besides repeating data takes over same locations as on first flight, unusual events also imaged, including erupting volcano in Russia and islands of Japan after earthquake there. Also tested was ability of SRL-2 imaging radars, Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C (SIR-C) and X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (X-SAR), to discern difference between such human-induced phenomena as an oil spill in the ocean and naturally occurring film.

[BREAK, BREAK … BONUS SPACE HISTORY ITEM]

Normally I’d wait until next year to include this item, since I usually deal only in 5-year-multiple anniversaries, but this one is work-related.

I’ve been putting together aerospace history pages that focus on North Carolinians or people with connections to the state. It just so happens that four years ago today — September 30, 2005 — North Carolina astronaut William “Bill” McArthur launched on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, en route to taking command of International Space Station Expedition 12.

If you know any North Carolina teachers, direct them to the NC Aerospace Initiative’s Aerospace Education section, where we will link information on NC aerospace history that they can use in their classes.

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Water on the Moon, Slush on the Desk

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I was very excited to see the news about the latest results from lunar survey missions about the presence of water on the moon.

(Moon Mineralogy Mapper composite image. Click to enlarge. Left: Sunlight reflected off the near side of the moon. Right: Infrared image showing water and hydroxl molecule signatures near the poles. “The blue arrow indicates Goldschmidt crater, a large feldspar-rich region with a higher water and hydroxyl signature.” NASA image.)

The full story is here, but here are the highlights:

The observations were made by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3 (“M-cubed”), aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and NASA’s Epoxi spacecraft have confirmed the find….

“When we say ‘water on the Moon,’ we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles,” explained Carle Pieters, M3’s principal investigator from Brown University, Providence, R.I. “Water on the Moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the Moon’s surface.

I have a personal reason for being excited about this finding, and since so few people look at this blog I assume all of you already know what that reason is. So let’s move on to the slush on my desk.

Literary slush — unsolicited manuscripts, proposals, and queries — moves on and off my desk in waves. Reading it can be mind-numbing, but it can also be interesting and sometimes even entertaining. It’s not often a source of inspiration, but my writing friend Jim Hines wrote an ode to the slush pile entitled “Slush Reading, Seuss Style” that is absolutely fantastic. Check it out!

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