It’s not really a review, per se, but the book is featured at Ricochet today.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
A Chinese-Russian Alliance?
Sanctions may make it happen:
…we may undo the work of the Cold War era and stand godfather to a new Sino-Russian alliance. This without doubt would be the stupidest move in the history of American foreign policy. Russia’s economy is weak, but Russia has considerable latent resources in military technology. Russia has a limitless market for natural resources in China and a prospective partner in military technology. If we continue to dismantle our defense capacity while Russia and China nourish theirs, we will be in deep trouble.
The best response to Putin’s challenge would be a massive increase in defense R&D, with a view to neutralizing Russia’s perceived areas of strength in missile and air defense technology (remember how SDI cowed Gorbachev in the 1980s?). That would command China’s respect and reduce Russia’s attractiveness as a prospective partner. The Crimea was, is, and will be Russian, and it’s pointless to cry over milk that was spilled in 1783. We need to think several moves ahead on the chessboard. Otherwise, Chancellor Merkel is quite right: sanctions are pointless.
That would include innovations in Milspace, something that apparently only DARPA is capable of.
Rocketman
It’s the end of a Bleat era. Lileks reviews the concluding episode.
[Update a couple minutes later]
In which he has a brief conversation with a building that’s going to be demolished.
The Physics Of Roller Coasters
This article appears to have the physics right, but the spelling isn’t so great. No, the car doesn’t “loose” speed.
Norman Borlaug
He probably saved more lives than anyone in history. And he understood how anti-human and anti-poor modern environmentalism is.
Microlaunchers
Charle Pooley and Ed LeBoutillier have a new book
Reusable Falcons
Jeff Foust mined Gwynne Shotwell’s Space Show interview for some interesting nuggets. Here’s what I found interesting:
Despite concerns about US access to the ISS given current tensions with Russia and NASA’s current reliance on Soyuz, Shotwell said she didn’t think it was feasible to greatly accelerate the development of a crewed Dragon. “We proposed a pretty forward-leaning program” for commercial crew, she said. “I don’t want to say that we couldn’t speed things up: we probably could, but it would have to be in lockstep with NASA.” She added that SpaceX current believes it can have a crewed Dragon ready “a little bit faster” than current NASA plans for flights in late 2016 or early 2017. [Emphasis added]
I’m pretty sure that if NASA went to her and Elon and said, “we want to fly this year, and we’re willing to do it without the abort system,” they’d be able to do it.
The Climate Debate
…is about to change to one of resilience and mitigation.
It badly needs to. We can afford a lot of resilience and mitigation if we stop impeding economic growth with insane anti-carbon policies.
A New Japanese Launcher
A “flagship” LOX/Hydrogen system with solids (sounds like cross between an Atlas V and Delta IV), to be operational in 2020. This seems more like a national pride thing than a practical launcher, unless they can resolve their site and calendar restrictions out of Tanegashima.
A Win-Win Sanction
Josh Galernter agrees with me that it’s time to end our dependency on the Russians for space. He doesn’t point out, though that we could probably start flying on Dragon any time we want. We just have to decide that it’s important.