The Readers Digest condensed version. No, really.
Maybe even the president could get through that version, though it would probably still make no sense to him.
Missile History
Here’s what I have for my space safety paper:
ICBMs were never designed to be highly reliable, because to do so would have dramatically increased their costs (many hundreds of them were built), and it wasn’t necessary for their mission. They were designed to be launched in massive numbers, and if a few out of a hundred didn’t make it through, that was all right, because they were often redundant in their targeting (that is, more than one missile would be aimed at a key target). Some estimates at the time of the reliability of the Titan II was only 80% or so (that is, one in five would not deliver its payload to the designated target), based on the fact that eight of its initial thirty-three test launches were failures. The early manned spaceflights were performed on modified versions of them (specifically, the Redstone and Atlas for Mercury and Titan II for Gemini). But what was good enough for a weapon as part of a fusillade of dozens or hundreds wasn’t perceived to be for a single flight carrying a human, particularly with recent memories of nationally televised ignominious failures of rockets on the launch pad. Thus was born the pernicious (and now obsolete) concept of “man rating,” which confuses the space industry and obfuscates policy down to this very day.
Is there anything inaccurate in that?
Dead Voters
The Commercial Space Race
Here’s a pretty good article on what’s going on, but I found this graf amusing:
The Antares rocket has been waiting patiently since last month in its processing facility at MARS.
My emphasis.
Don’t anthropomorphize rockets. They hate when you do that.
ICBM Bleg
Anyone out there familiar with targeting strategy in the fifties and sixties? I’m assuming that multiple missiles were aimed at single targets, for redundancy, at least for critical targets. True or false?
[Evening update]
Folks, I honestly appreciate all of the info in comments, but I should have said that I need citable (i.e., non-classified) sources. They will go into footnotes.
More Thoughts On Mann’s Quixotic Lawsuits
…from James Delingpole:
Mann is going to face similar problems in his legal action against NRO. (Not to mention the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which he is also now threatening to sue). NRO’s defence lawyers are going to demand full disclosure of any number of hitherto private documents which Mann would probably have preferred to remain private. Furthermore, they are going to have the fish-in-a-barrel-style target of Mann’s Hockey Stick which has been so thoroughly rebutted so many times that there is no way on God’s earth Mann will be able to claim, straightfaced, that it retains the merest scintilla of scientific credibility. Ditto the various sham enquiries supposedly clearing the Climategate scientists of wrong-doing: an even half-way decent lawyer is going to make mincemeat of their verdicts.
So why, against all logic and reason, is Mann planning to go ahead with his defamation action?
My bet is that he won’t. But in the unlikely event that he does it will be because:
1. As I argue in Watermelons, the climate alarmist industry is so richly funded that it can easily afford to pursue cases like this.
2. Because this is what happens when you live in a bubble. And the “Climate Science” community is a bubble in much the same way that the Westminster and Washington DC villages are bubbles: these people spend so little time living in the real world that they lose the plot completely. In the weird, weird world of Michael Mann and his fellow climate “scientists”, Climategate was just a case of ordinary decent scientists doing their job, the IPCC remains the gold standard of international climate science, the Hockey Stick is not a standing joke and man-made global warming remains the greatest threat to the planet ever. The facts speak otherwise. But when you’re working in a business as awash with cash as the Climate Change industry, why would you ever let facts get in the way of a good story?
Why indeed? The irony, as always, is that it is the climate scientists, not the skeptics, who are well endowed, financially, and engaged in internal discussions of how to fight their perceived enemies.
The Wages Of Leftism
Thoughts on the reality avoidance of the “elites,” from VDH:
…tokenism is not the only reaction when postmodern liberal dreaming ends up in concrete premodern catastrophe. Escapism is a related response. I don’t think Dream Act supporters in Santa Monica or Atherton wish to live in, or visit much, Parlier or Orange Cove. When CSU presidents retire from Central Valley campuses, they usually frown and head to Palm Springs or Monterey. Doctrinaire liberalism is predicated on the notion of escapism, that one has the means and know-how to ensure that children do not go to the schools whose curriculum and policies follow your own utopian thinking. Or that you make sure your “wind and solar and millions of green jobs” windmills are obstructing someone else’s view. Or that the first high-speed rail link connects Fresno with Charles Manson’s prison in Corcoran rather than cutting a wide swath through Bay Area suburbs.
Medieval exemption is yet another response to liberalism. As I wrote in 2008, I watched with curiosity as tony Palo Alto neighborhoods sprouted bigger Obama campaign signs on their lawns, even though the owners were by definition one-percenter segregationists (East Palo Alto and Redwood City are a mile — and a solar system — away). The mansions of an Al Gore, John Kerry, and John Edwards are expiated by their owners’ always louder liberal outrage. No one really wishes to live in a world governed by the laws of contemporary liberalism. So the architects escape it and justify their flight by finding a suitable token, a convenient scapegoat, a secular priest like Obama to offer them penance for their sins of enjoying elite privilege.
When we talk of tokenism, escapism, or penance, we are still in world of symptoms, not the etiology of the malady. All can understand the very human desire to support a liberal crusader like Barack Obama among those who pay no income tax, belong to the near 50% who receive some sort of government aid, or are part of the one-sixth of the population on food stamps. Self-interest is an understandable motivation. It explains why the public employee and teacher naturally worry more about pay increases than the tax wherewithal to pay for them.
But for the more elite and influential progressive, affluence has allowed liberal orthodoxy to evolve to its theoretical limitations. There is a reason why 90% of professors — life-long tenure, summers off, guaranteed pay raises — are liberal and 70% of small-business people are conservative. The more removed one becomes from the elemental struggle to eat one more day — and never in the history of civilization have so many been so exempt from such existential worries — the more one enjoys the luxury of pondering more cosmic issues such as extending Social Security disability payments to youths suffering from attention deficit disorder or mandating gay history in state public schools or saving the smelt.
California is on its way to becoming Greece.
Hopey Changey
You call this a recovery?
This is what happens when you put people in charge who not only don’t understand how economies work, but think that it’s more important to redistribute wealth than to create it.
Solyndra In Space?
Over at Open Market, I’ve roundly fisked the latest display of ignorance from a supposed conservative on the new space policy. It’s sad that one of Breitbart’s sites would publish such nonsense. The real “Solyndra in Space” is SLS.
[Update a few minutes later]
I see that Thomas James has shredded it as well.
How The Dems Will Deal With The Medicare Issue
They’ll just lie.
It’s actually how they deal with most issues. They don’t have much other choice if they want to win.