How Disconnected With Reality Is Barack Obama?

This disconnected: he actually believes (or at least claims to) that the press is biased against him:

…overall, this president still benefits far more than most of his predecessors from a press that generally likes him, agrees with his policies on most key issues, and deeply hopes that he will be re-elected in November. Few incumbents have ever had this kind of support from the Fourth Estate; few challengers have ever had such a hard time getting a break from the media as Governor Romney.

Moreover, some of President Obama’s complaints are unsettling. As he sees it, the liberal narrative is “the truth”, competing narratives are “factually incorrect”, and the press has a duty not to treat truth on an equal basis with falsehood. By this standard, any article that doesn’t heap scorn and disdain on those who disagree with him is biased; “balance” is an illusion when it comes to subjects about which liberals are passionately convinced that they are right.

It just isn’t that simple. Political disagreements are often about values and context—about which facts are important and should move policy rather than about whether side A or side B is right about some specific point. There’s a totalitarian impulse and a deep hostility to the concept of public debate lurking not far below the surface here, and it’s a little unsettling that President Obama seems to think there are a lot of public policy issues on which the liberal viewpoint is True and the conservative viewpoint is Dumb.

As he notes, Leftists are the descendants of the Puritans. It’s just a different religion. And it’s frightening to have a commander-in-chief this deep in delusion.

The Lies Of The Left

We shouldn’t be surprised at the latest vile ad:

…we’re dealing with something in the Obama campaign that we haven’t seen much at the top of American life, except in the worst moments of the Clinton era. We’re dealing with a president who is entirely without any sense of ethics, honor or morals. He has lived a lie for most if not all of his life, hiding his true political convictions in gauzy language that makes him appear reasonable and moderate. Having lived a lie, what’s one more lie, in the service of keeping himself in power? What’s one more lie if, in Obama’s mind, it accomplishes the “good” of keeping Romney out of power?

The danger for the Obama camp is that they risk going over a tipping point. There is a point at which the negativity becomes absurd, and instead of depressing the opponent’s vote, angers the opponent’s supporters and draws the undecided over to the opponent’s side. No one can really put a finger on where that point is, but it’s real and we saw the effect of reaching that point in the Texas Senate run-off last week. The Dewhurst campaign went too far into negative territory, no one really believed their last-minute attacks, and the backlash ended up ensuring that Cruz would win running away. Obama risks the same dynamic hitting him.

I hope so. I’d like to think that there are limits to the tolerance of the American people for politicians who blatantly and obviously lie to them, but my faith in that was shaken by the Clinton administration.

[Update a few minutes later]

Obama and damage done:

What many of our youth, and foreigners, think they know about America and American history, comes from movies and TV shows. Hollywood bombards us with the viewpoint that rich evil conservative white men (RECWM) are behind all of our troubles, and those of the world. Our heroes should be the brave lawyers who sue corporations; the brave journalists who expose the nefarious plots of the RECWM conspiracy; the brave activists who stand up to the “violent” gun nuts of the Tea Party; the gutsy abortion clinic workers who live in fear of their lives; the brave public servants, e.g., cops and perky assistant district attorneys, who protect us from the RECWM who, of course, are what all of us fear to encounter when we are in a dark parking lot. We should stand in awe of people with PhDs regardless of whether what they say corresponds to the reality we see, because they know what’s good for us. They are the “experts.”

Obama has captured this movement and its view, and represents and promotes it better than anybody else in living memory. Unlike Carter, Obama is not incompetent in promoting his hatred for America’s traditional values and in embedding it into our institutions, e.g., the ruinous Obamacare, the rapid expansion of the federal dole, the insistence on apologizing for our successes, the disastrous “stimulus” spending, the glorification of the “victim” culture, promotion of envy and cynicism, and denigration of individual effort and success (“You didn’t build that!”) That is the real threat posed by what Obama represents. Overcoming that threat will take years of sustained effort. It begins, of course, with voting Obama out of the White House next November, but does not end there.

You know a president is bad when he makes you nostalgic for Jimmy Carter.

My Mars Spreadsheet

As a response to popular request (actually, no one asked except Jon Goff), I’ve cleaned up and uploaded my spreadsheet.

Other than the astonishing results themselves, the only thing that makes me suspicious is that the total delta V required for the mission with the stop for gas is less than that required for the direct trip (about seven km/s for the latter and about six for the former). But I’ve looked at it multiple times, and don’t see anything wrong with what I did. I’m guessing that, if this is right, it has something to do with the oddities of patched conics. But it would be nice to get some more eyes looking at the problem.

[Update a few minutes later]

Don’t waste too much time looking at that. I just noticed some problems. I’ll update when I’ve fixed.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I’ve uploaded a new version. The good news is that I found the problem, and the total delta V is now more for the trip with the gas stop than without (which it seemed it should have been). It’s now about four and a half kilometers per second for the direct case, and about six for the gas stop. The bad news is that the advantage has dropped significantly. The propellant ratio, rather than ten and more than twenty for the EML1 and LEO cases without refueling, is now more like three and five. Still, it’s a significant improvement.

I should note that this is an excellent example of a need to have a feel for the numbers, and not just trust what comes out of a computer (as I fear too many young people do these days). If you don’t know intuitively proper orders of magnitude, or recognize suspicious results, you’re likely to make a lot of errors when doing complex calculations, particularly if you are operating in an environment of confirmation bias (I really, really liked the first, incorrect results). I’m looking at you, climate modelers…

[Update a few minutes later]

One more update to the spreadsheet. I noticed that in fixing the calculations, my delta Vs had become unbalanced, so I adjusted the gas station orbit slightly to rebalance them. The new orbit is 1.256 AU.

Refueling On The Way To Mars

In my talk on the commercial space panel at the Mars Society Convention on Saturday afternoon, one of the things I said that we needed was “gas stations on the road to Mars.”

I’d never really thought about it much, because I don’t think about Mars much, but I wondered just how advantageous it was, so I decided to take a break from the space safety stuff and play with the idea in a spreadsheet. I haven’t triple checked the numbers yet, but what I found blew me away. For a hundred metric tons of payload delivered to Mars orbit in the vicinity of Phobos, I looked at three mission scenarios: departure from LEO direct to Mars, departure from EML1 direct to Mars, and departure from EML1 with a fuel stop half way. For the latter scenario, you can deliver a ton of payload to Phobos’s orbit for less than a ton of propellant. For the EML1 scenario without refueling, it takes over ten times as much. For the LEO scenario, it takes over twenty times as much. That is, for the refueling scenario, you start with an IMEML1 (Initial Mass in EML1) of about a hundred and fifty tons, two thirds of which is payload bound to Mars (the total mission propellant needed is twice as much as you start with, because you pick up the other half, about 43 tons, on the way). For the non-refueling case in EML1, the IMEML1 is over a million tonskilograms, and for the LEO case, IMLEO is almost two-and-a-half million tonskilograms.

Such is the power of the rocket equation, and refueling.

What’s the catch? There are two. First, of course, it assumes the delivery of the propellants to EML1 and the gas-station orbit. If it were done chemically, the savings would go away, but it could be done electrically. The other catch is that it obviously both complicates and increases the time of the mission. I’d recommend it for cargo only. The gas station orbit I chose was at a distance of 1.25 AU, which turns out to exactly split the delta V between earth departure and Mars arrival, which means that you just refill the tanks at the gas station. That orbit turns out to have a synodic period with earth of about three and a half years, and with Mars of about five and a half years. But with the savings, you could afford to put a dozen stations in that orbit, which would give you an opportunity every month, and then you could take more of the savings and do faster trajectories, so you don’t have to wait for Hohmann line ups.

If anyone wants to check my numbers, I ignored the moon’s gravity, just doing a departure from EML1 starting at EML1 velocity with patched conics (same thing going into Mars orbit to co-orbit with Phobos). I used a stage fraction (ratio of propellant to total stage weight) of 0.85 and an ISP of 460 seconds (lower ISPs would just make the numbers even worse for the non-refueling scenario). I also didn’t do any aerobraking at Mars, so the numbers would work the same in either direction. So if PR wants to sell water, that’s the location for the gas station — 1.25 AU.

[Update a few minutes later]

Just looking at the difference between LEO and EML1, it seems insane to not use propellant depots with electric propulsion.

[Update a while later]

Let me put this another way. This implies that you could deliver a hundred metric tons (that is, 80% of a Saturn V payload) to Mars orbit in four Falcon Heavy launches. Two launches for electric depots (one of which has cryo propulsion, probably RS-68 class if you can start it in space, or a bunch of RL-10s if you don’t mind the gravity loss) and two for the payload. Less than half a billion in transportation costs to LEO. Leaves a lot of money left over for the other stuff.

[Late afternoon update]

OK, I found an error in the spreadsheet. As I note at the new post, the propellant advantage is not as dramatic as I indicate above, but it is still significant.

The Depravity Of Nancy Pelosi

Jonah Goldberg is fed up:

The dishonesty and/or stupidity of all this is really quite breathtaking — and obvious. First of all, you could cut government funding down to 1950 levels and still have money for food safety. But this is what liberals do. They metaphorically lash children to the fenders of government so that the budget cutting blade must slice through them first. Then, after insanely putting them in harm’s way, they proclaim it is the sane budget cutters who seek to harm children. In fairness, sometimes liberals hold the young human shields in reserve and put firehouses, historic monuments, and old-age homes outside the budgetary walls of the fiscal keep. And, again, they declare that the fiscally sane want to get rid of fire fighters and the Washington memorial — and not, say, the Export-Import Bank or agricultural subsidies.

And too many people buy their BS, judging by polls. What’s most infuriating, of course, is that their partners in crime in the media don’t call them on it.

Automatic Transmissions

Don’t be afraid to shift them in motion.

I’ve noticed that most/all of the new cars have shifters on the automatic (some are with thumb paddles on the steering wheel). But unlike a pattern of a stick, they work like a motorcycle, with an upshift or downshift, but you can’t skip gears. In general, absent a clutch, I don’t really see the point, except perhaps for stump pulling or climbing steep hills, and for the latter it still seem like the transmission will know best. As a stick driver, I have trouble knowing what to do with the throttle when I shift them. Supposedly, you’re supposed to just keep the gas on for the shift, which seems very unnatural to me.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!