NASA at Oshkosh (saving our planet with plastic bags)

From nasa.gov:

The NASA pavilion at EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) 2024:

(These are the plastic bags that are good for the environment?)

What else was going on? NASA arranged to have a Boeing Starliner parked in front:

The NISAR mission was featured. This was supposed to be launched in January 2022 and will supposedly be able to measure displacements of parts of Earth’s surface as small as 3.5 mm. I’m not sure if this includes vertical displacement, e.g., to see whether sea levels are indeed rising to the point that owners of multi-$billion lower Manhattan and Boston real estate portfolios need to be bailed out by taxpayers in the Midwest. The satellite will supposedly be able to watch glaciers and ice sheets moving. I don’t think that it can measure sea level directly because the Science Users’ Handbook says “Provide observations of relative sea level rise from melting land ice and land subsidence.” How many migrants could have been housed for the cost of this mission? “NISAR launch slips to 2025” (July 29, 2024) says “with NASA alone spending more than $1 billion in formulation and development of the mission”. Taxpayers spend about $200,000 per year per migrant family welcomed in New York ($140k/year for food and housing and then let’s assume another $60,000/year for health care and other benefits). So if we hadn’t spent money on NISAR we could have supported 1,000 additional migrant families for five years.

NASA was also featuring the X-66, a collaboration with Boeing on an airliner that could possibly cut fuel burn by 30 percent, mostly via high aspect ratio wings (as you might see on a glider). We’re in a “climate crisis” according to our ablest minds, e.g., Kamala Harris, and “communities of color are often the hardest hit”. When will communities of color see some relief from the X-66? NASA says that if everything goes perfect the X-66 might get into the air as soon as 2028 and then, in the year 2050, we’ll be in a net-zero phase for aviation. The United Nations forecasts that world population will grow to approximately 10 billion by 2050. So we’ll have more people taking more trips, mostly in planes that were built to current designs, and the result will be much less environmental impact.