The irony I find here is that this technology will be more useful in space than for a first stage, which wants higher-density fuel. And with low-boiloff propellant depots in orbit, the case for SLS looks even weaker.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Rogue One
…makes white guys the enemy of the future. Of course, it’s coming from people who think they’re the enemy of the past and present. But Christian Toto liked it.
I haven’t seen it yet.
[Sunday-morning update]
I’ve never been a huge Star Wars fan. It’s not really SF, or at least not hard SF. The effects were great for their time, but for my generation, 2001 is the touchstone.
The Battle Of The Bulge
It’s the 72nd anniversary of the beginning. Several years ago, I did a piece on how today’s media would have reported it:
Back in Washington, despite lofty rhetoric from the White House about the “liberation” of Europe, many had always been skeptical about the prospects for defeating Germany. As they correctly point out, the Germans are after all defending their homeland, and no matter how bad the alleged depravations of the Nazi regime, all familiar with the German character know that they can be depended on to fight to the death against any foreign invader, no matter how well intentioned. Many of the German dead or captured for the past few weeks have been adolescents, some only fourteen or fifteen years old, with dead, untrained yet willing hands clinging to their rifles. Seeing such images of dedication to the cause, it’s difficult for many to believe that victory is possible.
As a result, the new setback has renewed rumbling among some that the time has come to seek an accord with the Nazi regime that could allow a withdrawal from Europe with honor, and not lose any more American troops in a hopeless cause, let alone bog them down for an unforeseeable period of time. “It was Japan that attacked us, not Germany,” pointed out a Senate staffer. “We need to focus our resources on the true enemy in the Pacific.”
Some staffers on Capitol Hill implied that the timing itself of the offensive was suspicious. “Hitler wanted Roosevelt to be reelected, so that he could continue to fight a war against a sick, senile incompetent. Had he started this offensive before the election back on November 7th, everyone would have seen what a disaster this president has been on foreign policy, and Hitler would have had to confront a young, vibrant Tom Dewey.”
Those fascists, always interfering with our elections.
Elfwick’s Law
I remember when this happened at the time, a few weeks ago, but don’t remember if I blogged about it. Anyway, it made Psychology Today.
Tucker Versus Kurt
The Loneliness Of A Newly Minted Dietician
I suspect that we’re going to see more stories like this as time goes on.
The Global Warming Movement
Is it on the verge of collapse?
We can only hope so.
[Afternoon update]
The latest climate conspiracy theory. Tough words from Professor Curry:
Get over it, your side lost. Changes of Presidential administrations occur every 4 or 8 years, often with changes in political parties.
Get busy and shore up your scientific arguments; I suspect that argument from consensus won’t sway many minds in the Trump administration.
Overt activism and climate policy advocacy by climate scientists will not help your ’cause’; leave such advocacy to the environmental groups.
Behave like a scientist, and don’t build elaborate conspiracy theories based on conflicting signals from the Trump administration. Stop embarrassing yourselves; wait for the evidence.
Be flexible; if funding priorities change, and you desire federal research funding, work on different problems. The days of needing to sell all research in terms of AGW are arguably over.
I repeat: We can only hope so. But “behave like a scientist” seems to be beyond many of them.
Make NASA Great Again
My thoughts on the passing of John Glenn, over at National Review.
[Update a while later]
Buzz Aldrin remembers his former colleague.
[Update a while later]
Dear President Trump, here’s how to make space great:
This list of goals sounds audacious, perhaps outrageous, but it is entirely within the capability and character of the people who built the Transcontinental Railroad, the Hoover Dam, and conquered a continent. Americans are leaders in every one of these fields. It is only necessary for the new President to unleash America’s potential—once unleashed, American innovators will move these dreams toward reality faster than anyone can imagine.
Asteroid mining, moon mining, propellant depots, solar-power satellites, asteroid deflection? Crazy talk, when instead we could be building a giant rocket.
I had dinner with Coyote in Seattle last June.
[Update early afternoon]
Bill Gates’s and America’s false memory of Apollo:
So whether you agree with Bill Gates and his assessment of Trump or not, it’s important to remember that funding for the Apollo program was opposed by the majority of Americans. Why then does America have this bizarre memory of the program? You can blame the baby boomers like Gates.
The baby boomers were kids during the Apollo space program. And when you’re a kid you don’t have much to worry about in the way of paying the bills or public policy. You certainly don’t have fully formed political ideas about, say, ways that government funds can be better used than blasting people into space.
But that was precisely what happened. Baby boomers, as children of the 1960s, just remember the speeches on TV and watching the moon landing. They don’t remember that the majority of Americans (American adults, as those are the people who get polled) thought that the Apollo space program was a waste of money.
Roger Launius, chief historian at NASA, put it best in a 2005 paper: “While there may be many myths about Apollo and spaceflight, the principal one is the story of a resolute nation moving outward into the unknown beyond Earth.”
This is why, as I wrote a few months ago:
Because they view Apollo as the model for how large space programs should operate, and because they believe that Apollo represented a moment of national unity, they seem to think that we ought to recreate it.
In a sense, however, a critical reason that we cannot do what they want is because we never really did it the first time.
Stop trying to make Apollo happen again.
The Post-Election Democrats
They’ve created a mind palace.
I want them to jump, myself. https://t.co/t4BHwODABR
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) December 14, 2016
[Update early afternoon]
Ed Driscoll has more on the Democrats’ ongoing post-election insanity.
The New Attorney General
This is bad news:
Mr. Sessions has heavily influenced the makeup of the transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, these people said, with many of those appointed favoring greater emphasis on manned exploration missions to the moon and deeper into the solar system.
Candidates for NASA administrator also are being vetted, in part, by Mr. Sessions or his associates, while officials at Boeing Co. and other legacy aerospace giants increasingly believe Mr. Sessions will help temper possible changes inside NASA that would hurt existing, big-ticket projects to ultimately send astronauts to Mars.
Not coincidentally, such exploration would rely heavily on scientists, workers and rocket technology based in Alabama, at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. Mr. Sessions over the years has been a champion of the agency’s proposed heavy-lift rocket, dubbed Space Launch System, or SLS, and helped protect its roughly $2 billion-a-year price tag from cutbacks proposed by the Obama White House.
I like how Pasztor unironically talks about SLS/Orion as part of sending “astronauts to Mars,” when they’re almost completely irrelevant to it. This pork-mongering is part of the tragedy of Apollo.
This is the first time I’ve seen Doug Cooke’s name as a potential NASA administrator. He’d be as bad as, or worse than, a second stint by Mike Griffin.
[Update a while later]
Yes, Trump should focus on the government, not Boeing or Lockmart. They’re just doing what they’re incented to do.
And he should take a look at SLS.