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The Real Star War

Asteroid defense

Something useful for America’s underemployed space agency to do

The Economist | From the print edition | Feb 23rd 2013

GEOGRAPHY matters. In 1908 a rock the size of a city block hit the Earth’s atmosphere at 15km (9 miles) a second. The explosion flattened an area the size of London. But the land in question was in Siberia, so few people noticed and those who did had little influence. Suppose, though, it had devastated a city in Europe or North America. The history of the 20th century would have been different, as the best scientific and engineering brains were brought to bear on the question of how to stop it happening again. 

Well, it has happened again, albeit less spectacularly. By chance, Siberia bore the brunt once more, when a meteor crashed in the Urals on February 15th, injuring more than 1,000 people. It could just as easily have hit Germany or Guangdong. Moreover, on the same day another, larger rock called 2012 DA14 passed within 27,000km of Earth. By astronomical standards, that is a hair’s breadth. It is time to think seriously about stopping such incidents by building a system that can detect space rocks with sufficient warning, and then either blast them or push them out of the way. It would be costly, of course, and would require the development of new technology. But, as luck would have it, there is a tool lying around that has both the money and the nous to do it, and which is currently underemployed and in need of a new mission.

Zap!

NASA, America’s space agency, has become a curious hybrid. Part of it is one of the world’s leading scientific research organisations. This NASA sends robot probes to the planets, runs space telescopes and has already sponsored projects devoted to looking for large asteroids—the ones that would blow humanity to kingdom come if their orbits ever intersected that of the Earth. If such a large, “planet-killing” asteroid were discovered, though, the chances are that earthlings would have decades, or centuries, to act; a small nudge, judiciously applied by rocket motor or nuclear explosion (see article), would be enough to send it off course.

The real problem is “city-killers”—things too small for existing surveys to see, but large enough to do serious damage. And it is here that the other NASA might be brought into play. The non-scientific bit of the agency, the bit that brought you the Apollo project, has been looking for a proper job since 1972, when Apollo was cancelled. It thought it had found it in the Space Shuttle, but building a cheap, reliable orbital truck proved impossible. It thought it had found it in the International Space Station, but that has turned into a scientifically useless tin can in the sky. The latest wheeze is to build a rocket that might one day, many administrations hence, go to Mars.

In a well-ordered world, this bit of NASA would have been closed down years ago. That it has not been is due, in large measure, to the lobbying power of aerospace companies which see the agency as a way to divert money from taxpayers’ pockets into those of their shareholders. This pocket-picking would be less irksome if something useful came of it. Why not, therefore, change this part of NASA’s remit to protecting the planet from external attack, not by evil aliens but by an uncaring universe?

Two things would be needed. One is a bigger system of telescopes, either on the ground or in orbit, to give notice of a threat. The other is a way to counter the threat. That might be done with lasers, or with controlled explosions that would shift the incoming object’s orbit sufficiently to make it miss altogether, or (if that is not possible) hit an unpopulated area.

Developing all this would be a technological challenge worthy of NASA’s engineers. It would keep the agency’s bureaucrats in their jobs. It would keep the money flowing to the aerospace companies. It would probably cost no more than the space station (about $100 billion). And, if it worked, it would provide something that benefited not just America, but the world—precisely the sort of thing a rich country which often claims the moral high ground ought to be doing.

When Apollo 11 took off from the Moon on July 21st 1969, its crew left behind a plaque that read, “They came in peace, for all mankind”. What an opportunity both America and NASA now have to prove that they meant it.

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In The News

Previous Issue

How can a wife be either a man or a woman in a civil society?

Magistrate judge officially sworn in to federal bench

By Denny Walsh

. . . Those who know and have worked with Allison Claire describe her as "super smart," a hard worker and compassionate, and they harbor no doubt it will be an effortless transition for her.

Claire was officially sworn in Friday as Sacramento's seventh U.S. magistrate judge at an installation in the federal courthouse's ceremonial courtroom.

Afterward, her wife and their teenage triplets – two daughters and a son – slipped the black robe on her. . .

Claire, 52, is the first member of the federal judiciary in the nation, at any level, to be in a state-sanctioned same-sex marriage. She and her wife were married during the 4 1/2-month window – June 16 to Nov. 5, 2008 – between the California Supreme Court's validation of same-sex marriage and the passage of Proposition 8, an amendment to the state constitution outlawing it. 

Read further: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/23/5210771/magistrate-judge-officially-sworn.html#storylink=cpy

I recently had a patient who had a man follow him into my office. When asked who this man was that followed him into the exam room, the patient answered, “He’s my wife.”

In the first instance the wife is a female, in the second instance, the wife is a male. Why are we in this quagmire of gender confusion? Can either man or woman be a wife? Isn’t wife no longer gender specific? Being a wife or husband or man or woman should not be a Civil Rights Issue. It’s a Civil Society Issue.

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In The News

Past Issue

The Underworked Public Employee

The cliché is true: Government workers do tend to take it easier than their private counterparts.

By ANDREW G. BIGGS AND JASON RICHWINE

WSJ | OPINION | December 4, 2012

With state and local governments struggling to balance budgets in a still sluggish economy, government employment has fallen by 562,000 jobs since September 2008, a decline of 2.6%. In response, the Obama administration has called for more federal aid—on top of the $250 billion doled out in the 2009 Recovery Act—to help keep state and local government payrolls near prerecession levels.

But supporters of more federal aid implicitly assume that the size of the public sector was optimal before the recession. On the contrary, overstaffing is a serious problem in government, and the best evidence is a simple empirical fact: Government employees don't work as much as private employees. If public-sector employees just worked as many hours as their private counterparts, governments at all levels could save more than $100 billion in annual labor costs. 

How do we know that? Are we just dredging up well-worn stereotypes of government employees enjoying shorter work days, prolonged sick leave and extended vacation breaks? In fact, new evidence from a comprehensive and objective data set confirms that the "underworked" government employee is more than a stereotype.

In the past, researchers have measured work time with what are called "contract hours," meaning the time that employers require their employees to work. But many people routinely take work home with them, or skip lunch breaks, or pass up vacation days, or go to the office on weekends. Others may regularly come to the office late and duck out early. Little of this variation is captured by contract hours.

Alternatively, researchers have used surveys that ask individuals how many hours they usually work each week. But answers are susceptible to exaggeration and subjectivity regarding what each respondent defines as "work."

To address these problems, we turned to the American Time Use Survey, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics administers to a large and representative sample of American households each year. Interviewers construct a comprehensive "time diary" for each respondent that describes activities that occurred during the entire 24-hour day before the interview. Survey administrators then place each respondent's raw answers into a detailed set of activity categories, one of which is work for a primary job.

The time-use survey's data on work time are far more comprehensive and objective than any other available data source. The survey doesn't undercount working at home versus working at an office, or working evenings rather than working regular business hours. If, for example, an individual was working at 2 a.m. on the weekend, the American Time Use Survey will account for it.

The data allow us to analyze both the number of hours individuals work during a typical workweek and the total number of hours they work during the year. Thus, we can capture differences in both weekly work hours and the amount of time off that employees enjoy throughout the year.

What we found was that during a typical workweek, private-sector employees work about 41.4 hours. Federal workers, by contrast, put in 38.7 hours, and state and local government employees work 38.1 hours. In a calendar year, private-sector employees work the equivalent of 3.8 more 40-hour workweeks than federal employees and 4.7 more weeks than state and local government workers. Put another way, private employees spend around an extra month working each year compared with public employees. If the public sector worked that additional month, governments could theoretically save around $130 billion in annual labor costs without reducing services. . . .

Based on the most detailed and objective data set available, the private sector really does work more than the public sector. This fact may hold different lessons for different people, but our own take is simple: Before we ask private-sector employees to work more to support government, government itself should work as much as the private sector.

Mr. Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Richwine is a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

A version of this article appeared December 4, 2012, on page A17 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Underworked Public Employee.

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