Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

Elon’s Mars Plans

67 Comments

He’s going to announce changes from last year’s plans tonight at 21:30 PDT (tomorrow afternoon in Adelaide). It will be streamed.

[Update early afternoon]

The liberating effects of retiring from NASA: Former astronaut Terry Virts is criticizing Deep Space Gateway and SLS/Orion. Combined with Elon’s pending announcement, Marshall (and Shelby) can’t be happy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Chris Bergin:

[Update mid-afternoon]

Bob Zimmerman has some thoughts on Lockheed Martin’s DSG and Mars plans:

All these public relations announcements suggest to me that the Trump administration is getting close to unveiling its own future space policy, and they all suggest that this policy will be to build a space station around the Moon. My guess is that Lockheed Martin and SpaceX are vying for a piece of that pie in their announcements today.

Let me also note that Lockheed Martin’s concept above illustrates nicely what a lie Orion is and has always been. They have been touting it for years as the vehicle that will get Americans to Mars, but now admit that it can only really be a small part of a much larger interplanetary ship, and will be there mostly to be the descent capsule when astronauts want to come home. They also admit in the video at the first link that their proposal for getting to Mars is only a concept. To build it would require many billions of dollars. I wonder will it as much as Orion and SLS ($43 billion plus) and take as long (18 years plus) to build? If so, it is a bad purchase. We can do this faster, and for less.

But there are insufficient opportunities for graft in that.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Lockmart reveals its refuelable reusable lander. Looks like initial plan is to fuel in orbit, though, not on the surface. And of course:

While it is unclear whether NASA’s Deep Space Gateway mission will include landing on the moon, Lockheed Martin said its lander would also be capable of a lunar mission if required.

It’s a dessert topping and a floor wax.

[Update a few minutes later]

Watch the Lockmart presentation live, when it starts in a few minutes.

[Friday-morning update]

OK, so I guess the big news is that he thinks he can pay for it with point-to-point rocket trips. Briefly (for now), I’m skeptical.

[Update a while later]

Here‘s Eric Berger’s take on it. Yes, he’s recognizing that the near-term government market is more likely to be the moon than Mars.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here‘s Jeff Foust’s report from Adelaide.

[Update a while later]

Clark Lindsey has videos.

[Update mid morning]

Ken Chang and Adam Baidawi say that the financials are “murky.” Well, yeah. As is the regulatory situation.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Loren Grush’s take.

[Update a while later]

Scott Manley analyzes it.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Bob Zimmerman, in response to Chris Gebhart’s write up, says that BFR is an affordable version of SLS. Except that it doesn’t satisfy the primary requirement of SLS, which is to keep Huntsville and the Cape rolling in taxpayer dough.

[Monday-morning update]

The non-technical hurdles for Elon’s plans.

[Bumped]

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Puerto Rico Government

7 Comments

…is riddled with corruption and incompetence.

Yes, it is, and has been forever. We spent a lot of time there from ’98 to ’01. It was a mess long before the storms, which simply highlighted how bad it was. But that doesn’t fit the narrative of how it’s all that racist Trump’s fault that brown people are dying.

[Update a few minutes later]

People…OK, not people, partisan morons…were mocking Brock Long yesterday for his interview with Chris Wallace, when he said that this was “the most logistically challenging event the U.S. has ever seen.” Read the responses to this tweet, in which people talk about Apollo, the Berlin Airlift, the war in general…

My responses:

OK, so let’s go to the transcript. Yes, he did say that, but then (as I noted) he clarified, with Wallace’s help.

WALLACE: I want to pick up on something you just said because I have not heard this before. You say this is the most logistically challenging relief effort ever in the history of this country?

LONG: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think people have to take a step back and understand what’s happened over the course of basically the last 40 days. We — you know, FEMA has led the response of the federal government on behalf of governors from Texas to Florida to North Carolina to South Carolina to Georgia to the Virgin Islands, and the bottom line is, is that we’ve registered almost 3 million people for disaster assistance and most likely many of those were uninsured and we’ve been able to get, you know, well over a billion dollars in their hands to support.

It’s not only a logistically complex event, just getting to the islands and being able to support an island that was hit not just by one major hurricane but two within basically a 10-day period. The bottom line is, is you can only shove so much into an island pre-storm because if you pushing too much stuff, the storm may damage it. So, we had to pull back, not only equipment and staff, because we don’t want to soak up vital shelter space, we want to continue to push forward after the fact and move more equipment in.

The ports were damaged. The airports were damaged. This morning, you know, somebody was saying, we’re not seeing flights in San Juan. We are not using San Juan near to the degree we were. Our goal was to open up incident support bases and other airports and we have three of those operating so that commercial flights can come back up in San Juan. [Emphasis added]

Everything he said there was true. And, of course, part of the challenge was in dealing with the local government(s), whose responsibility it should have been to be prepared for this, but was (as was the case in Louisiana with Katrina, and wait for it) incompetent and corrupt. Am I blaming the victims? I guess, to the degree that in a democracy people get the government they deserve. And, as usual…well, OK, as usual when a Republican is in the White House…the federal government (whose responsibility this isn’t) is blamed for local incompetence and corruption. And of course, it didn’t help that the Puerto Ricans threw the Navy out of Roosevelt Roads a few years ago, which would have provided a solid logistics base even in the immediate aftermath of the storm(s).

But let’s unpack the moon landing and war comparisons.

Yes, sending men to the moon was a tremendous logistics challenge, but it was one that was planned years in advance, and on which we expended a significant percentage of a pre-entitlement federal budget for that specific purpose. The Pacific War, the invasion of Italy, the Normandy landing, all took months and years of planning as well. The closest analogy might be the Berlin Airlift, but even there we could see the Soviet blockade coming months in advance, and it was preceded by the little airlift in the spring of ’48. And even then, it took weeks to spool it up.

So, as usual (and as with the Bush administration), the most despicable thing these people do is to force me to defend Trump and his administration, but also as usual, the criticism of the federal government for things that are not its responsibility is ignorant at best, and unfair.

[Update a while later]

Puerto Rico enters the American victim derby.

[Late-morning update]

Glenn Reynolds: Puerto Rico has many problems, but Donald Trump isn’t one of them.

Technology and Society

Puerto Rico

19 Comments

There are a reported million and a half people without drinking water. How about airdropping a million Sawyer Squeezes. I’ll bet the terminal velocity on them would be such that they wouldn’t even need parachutes.

[Update a few minutes later]

I just sent an email to Sawyer to ask how many they have in stock, and how much it would cost per unit.

[Update mid afternoon]

No response from Sawyer yet, but using weight of 3 ounces, area of 3 square inches, coefficient of friction of 1 (WAG), I’m getting about 10 ft/s. That seems safe enough. Anyone want to verify?

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