OK, so the Googlebombing campaign didn’t work yet, but the Yahoo bombing seems to have. We’re number one!
Too Much Credibility
IBD has some questions about the fLying imams, and their defenders:
Their actions undermine any good will and trust Muslim leaders have built since 9/11. And they call into question what we really know about these supposedly virtuous men we invite to the White House and other halls of power in gestures of tolerance.
Are they really moderate? Do they really mean it when they renounce terrorism? Do they really have America’s best interests at heart?
In many cases, the answer would appear to be, sadly, no.
Earth-Moon L1 Considerations
This is a paper that I wrote a couple years ago, and that I never really found a place to publish. But then, I remembered that I’m a bloggist, and have a place to publish things that no one else wants to publish. It seems like it’s a useful discussion right now, given that NASA has announced their lunar architecture plans, and things seem to be somewhat in ferment.
Backing Off From ESAS
Jon Goff has some very good suggestions for getting NASA on the right track.
The State Of NewSpace
Jeez. I have to find out via Clark Lindsey that my latest take on NewSpace in The New Atlantis is now on line.
Outsourcing Anti-Terrorism
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.