Donald Sensing has an interesting post, that describes how many Islamic countries are exporting their terrorists to Iraq in the hopes that we and the Iraqis will kill them, thus solving their domestic problems. As he points out, it’s a potentially very dangerous game, particularly given our growing weariness with it.
More On Liberaltarians
Ilya Somin has some further thoughts on Brink Lindsey’s proposal. In fact he repeats an argument that I’ve made in the past:
Most of those who argue against a libertarian-conservative coalition focus heavily on the issue of civil libeties. It is indeed the case that even most pro-limited government conservatives differ with libertarians on social issues such as censorship of pornography and gay rights. These differences are not going to go away. As a matter of philosophical principle, these differences are very grave. However, they matter less as a matter of practical politics because the ability of government to seriously constrain these kinds of freedoms in the modern world is quite limited. All the efforts of social conservatives over the last forty years have had little impact on people’s ability to consume pornography, nor have they significantly slowed what I think is the natural and inevitable evolution towards greater social and legal acceptance for homosexuals.
Advantages Of Orbital Refueling
In yesterday’s post on bypassing the moon, a commenter writes:
As long as you’re going somewhere where there are no in-situ resources to produce fuel with, you’ve got no, repeat NO advantage in terms of the amount of mass you have to put into space to get something somewhere.
Orbital refueling is the same whether it takes place next to a space-station or in the middle of nowhere. You still have to launch all your fuel from Earth. Constructing a fuel-factory base on the moon, on the other hand, means that you only have to get the payload in an agreeable orbit for the booster rockets/tanks to be launched to it from the moon.
This isn’t necessarily the case. Not all payloads are created equal. It’s conceivable that propellants could be launched more cheaply than other things (for instance, with catapults, or relatively unreliable but cheap boosters). So fueling in LEO would make sense under those conditions. In addition, you might be able to deliver propellants to GEO or EML1 much more cheaply than other payloads (e.g., by sending them on a slow tanker with a high Isp, with trip times that wouldn’t be tolerable to humans, particularly through the Van Allen belts). So there is potentially a lot of benefit to orbital fueling even in the absence of ISRU.
[Early afternoon update]
I should note that it’s also not true that “you’ve got no, repeat NO advantage in terms of the amount of mass you have to put into space to get something somewhere.”
If you can deliver propellant to a staging point (like EML1) for your return more cheaply than conventional means, you can in fact reduce the total amount of propellant required for the mission, and that must thus be delivered to space. That’s because it takes propellant to move propellant. If you deliver your return propellant as part of the total lunar insertion payload, it costs just as much, in terms of injection propellant requirements, as a pound of anything else. But if you can get it out there using low-thrust systems or (as Jon Goff suggests in comments) by Weak Stability Boundary trajectories, you can get the propellant there with a lot less propellant. There are really huge payoffs to the ability to store and transfer propellants on orbit, regardless of the cost of launch from earth.
Hide The Badge
Bill Roggio says the troops in Iraq don’t have a very high opinion of the press:
While waiting to manifest on the flight to Fallujah, CNN played a news segment of President Bush announcing there would be no
Champions Of Death
Alec Rawls writes about the anti-Norman Borlaugs, Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore.
Liberaltarians?
Brink Lindsey, on a potential alliance between Dems and libertarians.
Brink’s a smart guy, but I don’t think so. There are too many irreconcilable differences–on guns, on the role of the government, etc.–to put together a workable coalition. In addition, I continue to object to calling collectivists liberals. In many ways, they’re the exact opposite. I’m a liberal.
Home, Home On The Missile Range
Here’s an article in the Jackson Hole Star Tribune about Frontier Astronautics, a company that has set up shop in an abandoned Atlas silo outside Chugwater, Wyoming.
One More BCS Thought
I have some updates on my previous post, but I have one more question. Who here really believes that Florida would have jumped Michigan, from number four to number three, if USC had won?
Growing Acceptance
The scientific community is starting to believe in life extension. There’s still a lot of resistance, though, as the discussion about grant titling indicates. There’s an old saying (generated, I believe, in the wake of Kuhn’s Structure Of Scientific Revolutions
Bypassing The Moon?
This is an interesting concept, but I think that it would be a tough sell politically, partially because of the false lessons learned from ISS:
The notional mission design that Farquhar presented is based on what he calls the