Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space Science

The Latest Lunar Bombardment

11 Comments

LCROSS will hit the moon in the middle of the night in this time zone, so I’m not sure whether I’ll get up for it. There was a lot of idiotic commentary (in comments) over here the other day. I wonder if the president will apologize for this unprovoked attack before, or after the event? Or does he only apologize for things that his predecessors did?

[Update a few minutes later]

It really is amazing to see the number of commenters sincerely worried that we’re going to knock the moon out of its orbit, or break it in half.

[Late evening update]

Frank J. was way ahead of NASA:

Now the world will be pretty convinced that America is frick’n nuts and just looking for a fight, but we need to really ingrain it into everyone’s conscious so that no one will ever even contemplate crossing us. This requires making good use of our nukes. I know, nukes can kill millions of people, but they sure aren’t doing anyone any good just sitting around. I mean, how many years has it been since we last dropped a bomb on someone? No one even thinks we’ll actually use one now. Of course, using nukes shouldn’t be done haphazardly; all uses have to be well planned out because the explosions are so cool looking that we’ll want to give the press plenty of notice so they can get pictures of the mushroom cloud from all sorts of different angles. But what to nuke? Well, usually the idea is populated cities, but, by the beliefs of my morally superior religion, killing is wrong. So why can’t we be more creative than nuking people. My idea is to nuke the moon; just say we thought we saw moon people or something. There is no one actually there to kill (unless we time it poorly) and everyone in the world could see the results. And all the other countries would exclaim, “Holy @$#%! They are nuking the moon! America has gone insane! I better go eat at McDonald’s before they think I don’t like them.”

Of course, Frank’s always been way ahead of the curve.

Business, Space

The Masten Success

5 Comments

Alan Boyle has the story of yesterday’s flight. This is a key point:

Graham said that if Masten and his team could maintain the kind of accuracy they achieved today during their upcoming Level 2 flight, “they’ll beat Armadillo” for the million dollars. The best thing about today’s outing was that it proved there’s more than one prizeworthy competitor out there.

Armadillo hasn’t won first place for Level II yet, or even (for that matter) second place. If two other teams fly a better profile, they could still be shut out. Which would be tough for the Carmack team, but great for the industry.

[Update a few minutes later]

Clark Lindsey wishes that there were more prizes than just first and second:

Shame there are no 3rd prize purses for either Level. Quite possible that one or two of the four teams will complete their flights successfully and still go away with no money.

They may, or may not. I think that anyone who succeeds has established their credentials for getting contracts, private or government, in related technologies, so it’s worth competing even if you don’t come away with a purse. Not to mention the psychic income. I’m sure the Masten people must be stoked, even without the money, and if Paul Breed succeeds, he’ll have something in which he can justifiably take great pride.

[Noon update, Pacific time]

A lot of congratulations over at the Arocket list, including this comment from John Carmack on the issue of third prizes:

This puts Paul in a very tough situation — it will be hard to beat Masten’s landing accuracy for level 1, but level 2 is a lot harder to complete successfully. I argued for a split-the-purse-among-the-qualifiers approach instead of determination based on accuracy, which I thought would have been more encouraging of successful flights.

That might be good, but an even better refinement would be a split purse with the proportion based on accuracy (e.g., if there were three competitors, and one was one inch, one was two inches, and one was three, you might divide it by six, give half to the closest, a third to the second closest, and the remaining sixth to the third. That would give everyone something, but still encourage accuracy.

In general, I was struck by the collegiality on the list from the competitors:

Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 12:11:23 -0700
From: David Masten
Subject: [AR] We Qualified!
To: Arocket List
Message-ID: <0A422403-F735-4657-8389-97EDDEF49526@masten-space.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed; delsp=yes

Looks like 15 cm average accuracy. Good luck to Unreasonable and Bon Nova.

From: “Brian Feeney”
Subject: [AR] Congratulations to the Masten Team!
To: “‘David Masten'”
Cc: ‘Arocket List’
Message-ID: <879E1B28642C41B08062C785D136BA7F@UNA>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”us-ascii”

Congratulations to the Masten Team – proof once again that hard work and persistence (lots of developmental testing) pays off!

Best of luck on the Level 2.

Cheers,
Brian Feeney
DreamSpace Group

This industry knows that it’s still at a stage at which it has to hang together, or surely they will hang separately.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

From Guns To Butter

3 Comments

How a gun-control case can lead to economic liberty. I hope that the DC gun-rights advocates make this argument — it would be harder for the court to ignore if they do.

And it reminds me that much of the “progressive” agenda is rooted in its racism. One of, if not the key, arguments in favor of the minimum wage when it was first passed was that it would protect the jobs of white men against blacks. And the purpose of gun control for much of its history (as Sullum points out) was to keep guns out of their hands, lest they protect themselves from Klansmen carrying out “justice.” And of course, the irony is that now, in DC, blacks are being murdered by other blacks on a daily basis because they are denied the legal right to defend themselves.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!