Congratulations to the Messenger team for putting our first probe in orbit around Mercury

I had the privilege of attending the public viewing at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (thanks Kate!) and learned a lot about Messenger as it moved into the next phase of its mission. The design featured a range of ingenious bits of engineering to overcome weight limits, conserve fuel to push it into orbit, and to generally keep costs down due to competition from other NASA programs.

I'm a bit envious, as my field is international relations and for all the gee whiz tech that goes into defense I spend more time reading about cost overruns and projects that try to do too much and fail. Of course the bigger issue is that for anything political, the level of challenge Messenger achieved is just unthinkable. The metaphor they gave tonight was having to shoot an arrow from Miami to Seattle with a margin of error of less than the width of the arrow shaft. In politics, my rule of thumb is that any solution must be robust versus being implemented with some notable flaw;, if your idea requires hitting a bulls-eye at 20 paces, you should probably find a way to expand your target.

That said, tonight the international relations field has an important success and a failure of sorts that may save many lives. More on those after the cut.

The success was the G7 quickly moving to help the Japanese government deal with a currency spike. That sort of solidarity even in times of ongoing economic crisis is heartening. The failure is the widening war in Libya. I am not an intervention skeptic in this instance like many liberals I'll try to address later. I believe that the support of the Arab League combined with the support of the UN Security Council makes this operation consistent with a rules-based international order. I wish I knew more about the rebels but Col. Gadhafi is clearly violating his responsibility to protect his people by bombing them with his air force and artillery. Moreover, I think the Security Council edict sounds robust but still has a check against inappropriate escalation, targeting artillery or armored vehicles to protect civilians is an option but ground troops are clearly forbidden.

So if I'm supportive, why is the widening war a failure? Because war is an incredibly inefficient means to secure human rights. In most cases it does just the opposite. Similarly, we seem to neglecting other crises like in Bahrain, where the situation is getting worse in part due to actions by U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia. Prevention and disaster recovery, like the G7 action, is the closest we can come to ingenious efficient success like the Messenger mission is achieving. In engineering terms, the intervention in Libya is a kludge, but it's a kludge that's being done with others taking the lead and with international legitimacy, which is probably the best we can get at this point.