A Canadian company has gotten funding to move forward on a molten-salt reactor. I think a lot of sensible people are realizing that if carbon really is a problem, nuclear is the solution, despite the insanity of people like Naomi Oreskes.
But my question is: Would this be a useful tech for space, either for electric power generation or propulsion? The company could do a spin off called Extraterrestrial Energy.
Could this end his campaign? He played soccer in high school.
A recognition by NASA that the vehicle has no missions. Too bad Congress doesn’t understand that.
This is what happens when you come up with Design Reference Missions to match a design, instead of the right way around.
@NASASpaceflight Look up the phrase "solution looking for a problem," and you'll see a picture of SLS.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) January 12, 2016
[Update Wednesday morning]
More from Loren Grush over at The Verge:
But the SLS is expensive, and NASA’s budget is at the lowest it has been in decades, even with the new budget allotment of $19.3 billion for the 2016 fiscal year. The cost of developing the SLS through 2017 is expected to total $18 billion. And once the rocket is built, each launch is going to cost somewhere between $500 and $700 million, which makes it unlikely that the rocket will carry astronauts more than once a year.
If they’re only flying once a year, there’s no way the launch cost is that low. It’s at least two billion. I don’t know where that $500-$700M number comes from, but it’s probably marginal cost, which is a meaningless number for a vehicle with such a low flight rate.
[Bumped]
Stand by for a collision:
When the problem was largely confined to Middle Eastern women it is easy to understand why it was ignored. Now that taharrush has come to Europe it is easier still. Events are being covered up because it runs counter to the Narrative peddled by the Western left. The Narrative is the source of their moral authority, the justification for their special graft.
What makes the pathological denial so catastrophic is that a vast, almost unstoppable torrent of refugees is already on the way to Germany, the fragments of collapsing Islamic countries. Cologne is but a skirmish with the vanguard. The main host is still on its way.
In belated mea culpa former senior adviser to president Obama Dennis Ross at last took his boss to task in an article titled: “How Obama Created a Mideast Vacuum”. It’s too late Dennis. What “too late” means was driven home years ago when one of the volunteer members of the Philippine Airlines cadaver recovery team described an accident which took the lives of 5 members of a university mountaineering club. The party was trekking along a dry riverbed on the lower slope of an 8,000 foot volcano in Mindoro. The weather was fine and the mountaineers were doomed. Unknown to them a squall had dumped a slug of rain on the peak high above them. The first warning they had of oncoming tons of water was a rumbling sound round the corner of the gorge. Then the flood came and only those fast enough to clamber up the riverbanks survived.
In the same way the present calm in Europe can be deceiving. Even if its leaders were somehow to reconstitute its borders, a gigantic flood from that vacuum upstream of the old continent is already rushing with irresistible force upon it. The UNHCR says refugee numbers are expected to increase in 2016. Some estimates say as many as 10 million more are on the way. From the beaches of North Africa to the overcrowded camps in Jordan and Lebanon; from every nook and cranny in MENA — they are on the way. One way or the other a terrible smash is now in train.
Europe as we know it may already be lost. Martel weeps.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The European media and the sexual assaults:
Scally’s bizarre use of “groping” is close to the worst imaginable example of PC disinformation from Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. “Groping” is a word better reserved for the awkward and/or unwanted advances of an adolescent teenager in regard to someone roughly his or her own age. Here, instead, we have (if Scally’s sources are to be believed) 30 adult men who organized a premeditated attack on a child—not a “young woman” as Scally mischaracterizes her—a child—a person under 18. (18 is the age of majority in most of Europe, including Germany.) This child was not “groped”—I had fingers at every orifice—she was the victim of sexual assault, rape, and attempted rape by multiple perpetrators. Again, groping generally refers to wanted or unwanted touching or fondling. The victim here did not describe “groping;” she described something far more serious: sexual assault and rape.
It’s almost as thought they’re trying to minimize the crimes for political reasons.
A roundup of thoughts, by Judith Curry, with some of her own.
Four reasons they’re effective.
The Millennials are mostly ignorant of history in general, and certainly of that of the 90s. If Hillary is the nominee, they should get some education.
…for Mars.
They seem to be a little confused about positive versus negative rights. You may have a right to leave, but you can’t demand that someone else pay for it. A “right to oxygen”? Not obvious how to handle that one. The solution to how to overthrow a tyrannical government is, of course, a Second Amendment.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Can a democracy exist on Mars?
…naive, wishful thinking seems to underpin all of the very hard questions about what governance and daily life on Mars might possibly look like. One reason could be the participants: the organizer of these events is an astrobiologist, and they seem to have gotten their insight into politics from writers like Stephen Baxter. This is not a dig against either men — astrobiology is an incredibly interesting subject, and I love Baxter’s books — but they are not experts in governance or nation-building (which is what a colony will be). There is, luckily, an entire field of academic study devoted to these questions: academics who have spent decades understanding how and why regimes can be resisted, how to build new nations, and so on. They don’t seem to have been included in this discussion.
Instead it looks like most other efforts at imagining space colonies: well meaning but ultimately naive technocrats imagining a western technocratic society as the best structure. And just like with Musk’s concept of a Mars colony, the serious economic issues at play here, which are a big deal in designing any society, are ignored. They assume it will be a mostly-deregulated libertarian economic system, again despite the inescapable fact that any space colony will have to concern itself primary with generating enough air and water to keep everyone alive. It is utterly baffling.
As he notes, tech people aren’t necessarily the best people to design a functional society.
RIP, I guess. I never got what was such a big deal about him. “Space Oddity” is the only song of his that I liked, and I never listened to an album. But apparently, according to my Twitter timeline, this is some kind of huge culture loss.
…expands to public corruption:
This new investigative track is in addition to the focus on classified material found on Clinton’s personal server.
“The agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department contracts and whether regular processes were followed,” one source said.
One intelligence source told Fox News that FBI agents would be “screaming” if a prosecution is not pursued because “many previous public corruption cases have been made and successfully prosecuted with much less evidence than what is emerging in this investigation.”
Meh. Laws are for the little people.
[Update a while later]
Guy Benson has a roundup of everything she’s being investigated for.
Basically, it starts with the massive mishandling of confidential and classified information, which has resulted in multiple counts of obstruction of justice. And a large part of the reason for all of the obstruction of justice was to hide all of the collusion and corruption between the Clinton Foundation and foreign nations while she was Secretary of State. She planned all this from the very beginning, even before becoming SoS. She just figured she’d get away with it, because she got away with so many felonies in the 90s.
[Update a few more minutes later]
The email scandal goes nuclear:
…the June 8, 2011 Blumenthal report doesn’t read like CIA material at all, in other words human intelligence or HUMINT, but very much like signals intelligence or SIGINT. (For the differences see here). I know what SIGINT reports look like, because I used to write them for the National Security Agency, America’s biggest source of intelligence. SIGINT reports, which I’ve read thousands of, have a very distinct style and flavor to them and Blumenthal’s write-up matches it, right down to the “Source Comments,” which smack very much of NSA reporting and its “house rules.”
But is this an NSA assessment? If so, it would have to be classified at least Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, a handling caveat that applies to most SIGINT, and quite possibly Top Secret/SCI, the highest normal classification we have. In that case, it was about as far from Unclassified as it’s possible for an email to be.
No surprise, NSA is aflutter this weekend over this strange matter. One Agency official expressed to me “at least 90 percent confidence” that Mr. Blumenthal’s June 8 report was derived from NSA reports, and the Agency ought to be investigating the matter right now.
I suspect it is.
Put me in the “Maybe/Yes” camp.