Sixty Years

…ago we employed the first nuclear weapon ever used in war on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. A few days later, we dropped another on Nagasaki. Neither we, nor anyone else has done so since. Let’s hope that it remains that way.

A New Heavy Lifter?

Elon Musk seems to be planning an EELV killer. And I’ve added Jon Goff’s Selenian Boondocks to the blogroll, as well as an Air Force procurement officer’s blog (he’s stationed at Kirtland, but reports on Musk’s visit to Wright-Patt recently, where he seems to have been training) from which Jon got the story, and he seems at first glance to be interested in space procurement. In addition to the SpaceX story, Jon has a lot of good reportage of the recent Return to the Moon conference, and some appropriate criticism of NASA’s new lunar return architecture.

A few weeks ago, I solicited suggestions for additions to the space blogroll, and am embarrassed to admit that I never got around to doing the update, so here’s a second call. If you have a partial or fully space blog that you think that Transterrestrial readers will find interesting, point it out in comments (in other words, I’m actually inviting comment spammers to post here, as long as it’s the right flavor), and I’ll try to actually do an update this time, but if nothing else, you’ll get a little PR from the comments section.

A Blast From The Past

“J. Random American” has a bit of fascinating deja vu from Aviation Week about Shuttle tile repair, and some good questions to which I don’t know the answers off the top of my head:

The similarity of the rest of the system to the original tps repair kit makes me curious about the circumstances under which the original tps repair system development was abandoned. Do we have some new 21st century technology that is essential to making it work which just wasn

“I Have Rights”

Jonah Goldberg writes about the hypocrisy of the morons who are trying to kill us (occasionally, sadly, successfully), and how they’re aided and abetted by the victimologists among us:

… idiots are often very useful in illustrating the appeal of fascistic cults. Intellectuals are too good at covering their real psychological motivations with verbiage. It turns out that the famously “homegrown” terrorists of the London bombings were much more like John Walker Lindh or even the Patty Hearst types of the 1960s and ’70s. Radical chic may be as a big a part of the story as radical Islam.

We’ve always understood this was the case to a certain extent. Osama bin Laden’s prattling about the Crusades, for instance, merely shows how poisoned Islamism is by Western Marxism and anti-imperialism. Muslims used to brag about winning the Crusades. It was only after the West started exporting victimology that Islamic and Arab intellectuals started to whine about how poorly they’d been treated.

To a certain extent, radical Islam in Europe has taken the place of third-world Marxism

“I Have Rights”

Jonah Goldberg writes about the hypocrisy of the morons who are trying to kill us (occasionally, sadly, successfully), and how they’re aided and abetted by the victimologists among us:

… idiots are often very useful in illustrating the appeal of fascistic cults. Intellectuals are too good at covering their real psychological motivations with verbiage. It turns out that the famously “homegrown” terrorists of the London bombings were much more like John Walker Lindh or even the Patty Hearst types of the 1960s and ’70s. Radical chic may be as a big a part of the story as radical Islam.

We’ve always understood this was the case to a certain extent. Osama bin Laden’s prattling about the Crusades, for instance, merely shows how poisoned Islamism is by Western Marxism and anti-imperialism. Muslims used to brag about winning the Crusades. It was only after the West started exporting victimology that Islamic and Arab intellectuals started to whine about how poorly they’d been treated.

To a certain extent, radical Islam in Europe has taken the place of third-world Marxism

“I Have Rights”

Jonah Goldberg writes about the hypocrisy of the morons who are trying to kill us (occasionally, sadly, successfully), and how they’re aided and abetted by the victimologists among us:

… idiots are often very useful in illustrating the appeal of fascistic cults. Intellectuals are too good at covering their real psychological motivations with verbiage. It turns out that the famously “homegrown” terrorists of the London bombings were much more like John Walker Lindh or even the Patty Hearst types of the 1960s and ’70s. Radical chic may be as a big a part of the story as radical Islam.

We’ve always understood this was the case to a certain extent. Osama bin Laden’s prattling about the Crusades, for instance, merely shows how poisoned Islamism is by Western Marxism and anti-imperialism. Muslims used to brag about winning the Crusades. It was only after the West started exporting victimology that Islamic and Arab intellectuals started to whine about how poorly they’d been treated.

To a certain extent, radical Islam in Europe has taken the place of third-world Marxism

Blowing Off Steam

I’m working under several deadlines, so posting is likely to remain light for now, but Jonathan Adler points out that Canadian airport security is either more lax, or more rational, than that of TSA:

…if the shoe x-rays were really all that necessary — and I do not believe they are — this would create a security risk. More likely, it’s just another example of TSA irrationality.

Personally, I think that our entire airline security policy is flawed. I’d prefer knowing that my fellow passengers are armed, to ensure that there will never be another successful hijacking, and this would also result in huge productivity increases for travelers by not having our nose-hair trimmers and lighters confiscated. I do worry about bombs, though, so in a sense, Richard Reid did us a favor by being such a moron–if he’d succeeded in lighting his shoes over the Atlantic, there may not have been any evidence of how the aircraft was destroyed. Still, I think that those of us who have to undergo the inconvenience and indignity of padding through the machine in socks or barefoot, should at least have an opportunity to throw darts at a picture of him after we’ve gotten through the gauntlet and reshod ourselves. It could hang just below a picture of Osama.

Whither are flights at $100/lb?

Clark Lindsey touched some nerves at Hobbyspace with his post on flights at $100/lb.

I think we all agree that costs are high now and that in some rosy future with high demand, mass production, high utilization rates, R&D amortized over many units, continuous improvement from families of commercial rockets developed by the same team and other kinds of standard obtanium can get the price down to some single digit multiple of the fuel cost. It probably won’t be 3 like aircraft, but even if it’s 9, that’s only $180/lb at current fuel prices.

The questions are, “How?” and “How soon?” There are a variety of ways to increase utilization. The one economists favor is firms that can’t cover costs going out of business so that the ones that can increase their utilization. For that, we need to get all the governments out of the subsidized rocket business. Another is to really grow demand. I am working on that one.

For “How soon?”, we appear to be a factor of 20 away from $100/lb. If Elon makes $500/lb by 2010 then we will be a factor of 5 away. If improvements continue at that pace, we might see $100/lb in 2015. Others will say we won’t see those prices for 300 years. The latter seems moot to me. At $500/lb, that
is $100,000 to deliver 200lbs to orbit. That looks to me like a price point that would support millions of tourists even if no further improvements in technology are made. Of course, millions of tourists is inconsistent with low utilization and low flight rates that are required to justify high capital costs. (If you throw in ejections seats, non-recyclables and so on, you can still get a week in orbit for much less than the millions that is the current conventional wisdom for the early retail prices).

There is the possibility of a disruptive technology getting us to skip to an interesting future. E.g., a space elevator at $100/lb. would grow demand for rocket propulsion at geo-synch, on the Moon, in LEO, lunar orbit and lots of other places that become accessible for a cheap outgoing trip.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!