Only outlaws will have porch couches. And the terrorists will have won.
Ann Arbor without porch couches is like…well, OK, I’m lousy at similes, but it’s sure not like Ann Arbor. The house across the Blakely Court from us had one.
Obama’s Radical Past
Stanley Kurtz has some highlights from his new book
Stanford McCarthyism Follow Up
Powerline has the story. The letters to the editor in the Stanford Daily are blistering. It’s time to put these campus fascists on notice.
Pedagogy
An amusing XKCD.
That was the question I always had when people explained how wings worked and the Bernoulli Effect. The answer, of course, is that there are lots of ways to get lift, but that this is the most efficient one with the least drag. You can get lift from a barn door. Stick your hand out the window in a fast car, and you can get lift by just increasing the angle of attack, but the L/D is terrible. So when aerobatic planes are upside down, they have to keep nose up (down, from the pilot’s perspective) and up the thrust quite a bit to maintain altitude.
Jewtopia
I have an opportunity to see it this weekend. Any reviews from non-leftists (i.e., not the typical play reviewer)?
The Power Of Self Delusion
Guevara was a vicious, megalomaniacal sociopath who wanted to be the next Stalin or Mao. (Indeed, Stalin in his younger days was a figure very much like Guevara.) He overtly and clearly stated his desire to destroy America and to exterminate millions of Americans in the process.
Yet today he is considered to be a figure worthy of admiration by the far (20% most) left in America. Go to any college campus and you will see admiring posters and t-shirts. Even Robert Redford, one of the few leftists who actually spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money on charitable causes, made a hagiographic movie about Guevera.
The vast majority of leftists, however, know nothing about the real Guevera. All they know is the hagiography that came straight out the Cold War-era Soviet propaganda mill. Worse, they don’t even bother to question the hagiography at all. If you try to confront them about their mindless adoration, they will reflexively change the subject to some real or imagined evil of non-leftists somewhere in the world’s history. They are emotionally incapable of thinking about Guevera in anything but positive terms.
Gee, I think we’ve seen some of that recently, on this very blog.
NASA Is Authorized
The president signed the bill today. As Jeff Foust notes, the main thing this does is to start the clock ticking on some reporting requirements for the agency. I assume that they’ve already been working on the analyses. I hope that they’re done and released more transparently than ESAS was.
The Future Of Human Evolution
What will it look like when we can really take control?
I have no profound thoughts, except that I suspect that we’ll be surprised.
Hopes For Export-Control Reform
…fading? It’s going to be pretty tough to do anything with the new Congress in this regard. It just requires too much education.
Not Waiting For A Heavy Lifter
Some common sense from the Europeans:
“We need the courage of starting a new era,” Europe’s director of human spaceflight, Simonetta Di Pippo, told BBC News.
“The idea is to ascend to the space station the various elements of the mission, and then try to assemble the spacecraft at the ISS, and go from the orbit of the space station to the Moon. We need the courage of starting a new era.”
“What we are thinking about right now – but again we need more technical work to address this – [is] it should be a small spacecraft that goes around the Moon.”
…Learning how to assemble exploration vehicles at the ISS would also be part of this new vision.
If humans ever do go to asteroids or Mars, the scale of the infrastructure needed to complete a safe round trip could not possibly be launched on a single rocket from Earth. It will have to be sent up on multiple flights and joined together in orbit.
Gee, what a concept.
Doing this assembly at the ISS means it can be overseen by astronauts with ready access to tools if needed.
And if the crew assigned to man the deep-space mission travels up separately to the station, it would also mean all the elements for their long-duration flight could be launched without the complications of ultra-safe abort systems that complicate manned rockets.
The crew could instead ride to orbit in a simple, tried and tested rocket, such as a Soyuz, and then transfer across to their deep-space vehicle already waiting for them at the ISS.
The only problem with this is that it doesn’t address the issue of how to get back to the ISS orbit from deep space. As I said at Space Access in April, I view this as one of the fundamental problems of decoupling earth-LEO from pure space transportation. The solution will lie in either aerobraking, or cheap propellant, or some combination of the two.
But it’s nice to see people starting to think about how to make progress without waiting for a heavy lifter that will never arrive. It’s not the lack of heavy lift that has trapped us in LEO for decades. It’s the false perception that we need it.
[Update a while later]
A question in comments:
Would shifting the ISS orbit higher (now that it doesn’t need to be shuttle-reachable) be of any use here?
Not much, unless it’s a lot higher. L-1 or L-2 are much better portals to the rest of the solar system. Here’s a question — how big a launcher would it take for a direct inject of a capsule (Dragon or CST class) to L-1? The idea here would be to have a propellant depot in LEO that could deliver the propellant to L-1 by a slow ship, with a crew system to get people to/from L-1 quickly. Eventually, perhaps, the propellant could come from the moon. An alternative would be to depart to L-1 from the ISS, but not return to it from there, instead going directly back to earth. That way, you’d have a good staging area that was also relatively easy to get back to, and allow multiple expeditions without having to enter the atmosphere.