In today’s The Space Review, Stephen Fawkes notes that the space community needs to address carbon pollution. I want to applaud the use of hydrogen in the space shuttle–using about 400,000 gallons or 1/2 of one hundredth of one percent of all hydrogen used in the US each time it launches (one part in 20,000).

I also want to applaud Al Gore and Richard Branson for taking the lead on getting this problem solved for the whole world, not just the space and airline industries.

The gas coming out of a coal furnace is mostly carbon dioxide. Sequestration schemes need not look to capture and concentrate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere until power plant exhaust sources are exhausted. One way to sequester the CO₂ is to send it into the ground via the same kind of pipeline and into the same kind of well they find methane in. Al, Richard, buy defibrillators with the $25 million if you end up awarding your greenhouse prize for this idea.

The problem of 143 tons of kerosene is no big deal. Following a carbon neutral strategy would add about $2,000 to the price of an orbital ticket that is priced in the millions at today’s European carbon abatement price per ton.

Carbon is an opportunity, not a material liability. It is time for the suborbital and orbital space companies to declare that they will be carbon neutral and buy carbon offsets for their customers. Join Space Shot and Virgin and help eclipse Earthbound dangers as we develop space.

I’m going to go line by line to analyze Monday’s article, “Just how full of opportunity is the Moon?” by Donald A. Beattie.

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FT reports that Uranium is trading for $75/pound. That’s almost four times the price two years ago. No worries. On an energy-adjusted basis, that’s still 10,000,000 times cheaper than oil and 500,000 times cheaper than coal.

The Wall Street Journal has a front page story on the X Prize tiff between Benson and Rutan. This was pretty heady in 2004 on October 3 when Discover aired its special and Rutan’s team poised to win the $10 million suborbital prize. It’s probably pretty rare in NASCAR for the engine maker and the team to make dueling announcements on the nights before the race. I got to talk to Benson the night before the X Prize during the commercials while he was watching the Discover special. He had the restaurant at the Mariah Country Inn & Suites decked out with a big-screen TV. Benson’s group was already touting its Dreamchaser vehicle which was designed as an orbital vehicle, but was also being offered as a suborbital vehicle in direct competition with Space Ship Two. Benson was moved by the visuals in the Discover special. This was the culmination of his victory over eAc to win the engine contract.

Alas, Space Ship One did not enter passenger service. Perhaps because of the shudder or the cost of the hybrid motor, Paul Allen decided it was wiser to sell it to the Smithsonian.

WSJ’s lateness is forgivable. The story has never really gotten wide circulation. And Rutan, Benson and others still have not tested their passenger spaceships. On the other hand, mistakenly calling the suborbital fight an orbital fight is 25 times as bad.

New players ziggy and space traveler are working their way up the Free Space Shot tournament and are a couple of wins away from the lead. That makes the free site about 10 times as popular as the pay site was.

In the US, we send up about 6 thousand million metric tons of carbon a year. That’s 20 tons per person. Carbon offsets are trading in Europe right now for about $15/ton. If we put in place a $15/ton carbon tax and a $15/ton carbon sequestration subsidy that would create money flows of $90 billion from the carbon emitting sector (33% more generation cost at most for electricity which costs $280 billion a year) and small but growing flows into forestry, biomass, ethanol and sequestration and long-term storage. If that is not enough to lick carbon, perhaps a $200/ton tax/subsidy would. That would be a $0.60/gallon gas tax but shoot the price of coal up by a factor of 10. The former tax might have a total distortion on the economy of about $15 billion or what we pay for the space program. 0.1% of the economy. The trillion plus money flow needed for the $200/ton tax/subsidy would probably distort the economy on the order of the existing generation industry and perhaps reduce productivity by $280 billion. That’s about a one-off hit of 1/40 of GDP. If the net carbon tax were used to lower the existing tax burden on the non-carbon portions of the economy, the effect might be far less. I think it’s an overly expensive insurance policy at $4000 per person, but at $300 per person it’s no big deal.

Want a 2048 x 1536 monitor? They sell the medical monitors at eizo.com

Try to drive it with a laptop though. If you have a laptop, it likely has an analog VGA cable. The 17″ Mac has 256 MB vram and a mini DVI. I asked sales at Eizo if they pair up seeing as they drive their monitor with a DVI-2. Dell has the video card, but not the dvi plug. There’s a PCI card and dongle to drive a couple more monitors, but they top out at 1920×1200 per monitor. I saw mention that Lenovo has a DVI on it’s Thinkpad, but I couldn’t confirm it in the specs or in the picture or on their sales support.

I don’t want to go all the way to the 30″ apple monitor. I am thinking there is room for a 16:9 monitor at 3 megapixels. What should the resolution be? We know we can drive 2048×1536 (at analog VGA speeds) on a regular laptop, even the Toshiba Portege. So what 16:9 can we fit in that? 2360×1328 is 3134080 pixels which is less than 3145728 pixels in the 2048×1536. That gives us a near perfect 16:9 to four nines at 1.777 ratio.

Can we do better? Yes. 2368 is divisible by 32 which is true of the long dimensions of our favorite resolutions {640, 800, 1024, 1280, 1440, 1600, 1920, and 2048}. But what about the memory management? They chose 2048*1536 because it is a multiple of 1024*1024. They were trying to get inside 3*2²⁰ or 3 MB which is 3 * 1048576. And if we divide that by 2368, we get 1328 with .43 of a column of pixels to spare. A little wider than 16×9, but what’s so magical about 16:9? The Golden Square is 1.618 anyway if we want to be classical. Let’s optimize instead!

If you want a Golden Square and long dimension divisible by 32 and stay in 3 MB, you have to choose between 2272×1384 (1.641) and 2240×1404 (1.595). They bracket the Golden Square ratio almost in half (divisible by 16 anyone? 2256 x 1394 just like fire wire), but 2240×1404 only leaves over 1/3 of a column of pixels so I prefer that vs. 4/7.

So build me a cinematic display at one of these resolutions, build me a laptop with a 256 MB card to drive it at 75 Hz, a port to get to the monitor and a video driver to drive it.

In 1992, I got so disgusted with my monitor’s native flicker that I installed Linux and wrote my own video driver for it, ultimately settling for 1152×720 (1.6 aspect ratio anticipating by a few years a VESA standard resolution) which was just the right number of pixels so my 386SX20 could refresh at a 72-75 Hz speed so I wouldn’t see the flicker. Without that sensitivity to flicker, I might be much more shy about optimizing and programming projects. I might be more trusting in big corporate technology machinations. 15 years later we are ready for the (almost-)quad version of VESA 361. Lay it on me. $4000 is a smaller share of my income now than the hundreds of dollars to get a 15″ CRT was then. Hit me with it. I will bet you $100 it will be mainstream in 5 years. 1920×1200 is so yesterday’s news–1200 scan lines is part of the 1994 VESA standards to be precise.

Bill Richardson’s actions to attract aerospace jobs to New Mexico and to incubate the personal spaceflight industry put his state in the lead of US states promoting personal spaceflight. The only government that has done more to promote personal spaceflight is Russia’s. We would not make his choices about how to allocate those state dollars, but wise spending can come later after New Mexico reaps the benefits of being one of the leading states if not the leading state in personal spaceflight.

Our endorsement is provisional because we are looking for a national space commercialization and settlement policy from each candidate (and other policies to the extent they affect space commercialization and settlement) before we make a final endorsement. We’ll let you know who is leading throughout 2007 and 2008.

Things were going along swimmingly with my hosting contract until we got to their “process” for contract review upon account closure. I find the so-called process very annoying and time consuming. I recommend not using them unless you:

1. Don’t mind a 20+ email process.
2. Are willing to part with comments like “Received the fax [termination].. I will review with our billing department.. since the contract renewed for a year as you didn’t get the cancellation in by 1/11.”
3. Then when pressed: “I have made no statements regarding any amount of money.”

This is a lot harder than cancelling ISDN service at the phone company, my previous record. AOL in its heyday were ‘potsers’ in comparison. Am I a coiner for web use of this to be a variant of poseur with some potsy and Potsie thrown in? For networks, I note that it also has POTS elements. I found potzer at urban dictionary as a mispelling of patzer. “A person who plays for traps in a game of chess.” Maybe it is Net Actuate / VR Hosted that wins the potser comparison with AOL.