A new, visionary video from ULA.
It’s great to see this kind of vision from a major player. Tory Bruno really seems to have shaken the place up. And compare this to the paltry offering from NASA. Also note: Look ma, no SLS!
Trump’s Attacks On Hillary’s War On Women
Four reasons they’re effective.
The Millennials are mostly ignorant of history in general, and certainly of that of the 90s. If Hillary is the nominee, they should get some education.
Writing A Constitution
…for Mars.
They seem to be a little confused about positive versus negative rights. You may have a right to leave, but you can’t demand that someone else pay for it. A “right to oxygen”? Not obvious how to handle that one. The solution to how to overthrow a tyrannical government is, of course, a Second Amendment.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Can a democracy exist on Mars?
…naive, wishful thinking seems to underpin all of the very hard questions about what governance and daily life on Mars might possibly look like. One reason could be the participants: the organizer of these events is an astrobiologist, and they seem to have gotten their insight into politics from writers like Stephen Baxter. This is not a dig against either men — astrobiology is an incredibly interesting subject, and I love Baxter’s books — but they are not experts in governance or nation-building (which is what a colony will be). There is, luckily, an entire field of academic study devoted to these questions: academics who have spent decades understanding how and why regimes can be resisted, how to build new nations, and so on. They don’t seem to have been included in this discussion.
Instead it looks like most other efforts at imagining space colonies: well meaning but ultimately naive technocrats imagining a western technocratic society as the best structure. And just like with Musk’s concept of a Mars colony, the serious economic issues at play here, which are a big deal in designing any society, are ignored. They assume it will be a mostly-deregulated libertarian economic system, again despite the inescapable fact that any space colony will have to concern itself primary with generating enough air and water to keep everyone alive. It is utterly baffling.
As he notes, tech people aren’t necessarily the best people to design a functional society.
SpaceX
They had a successful static fire at Vandenberg, in preparation for the JASON 3 launch on Sunday, with the last existing version 1.1. We may go up to Lompoc this weekend to watch.
Meanwhile, they just released a new edit of the landing video from December.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here‘s the story on the static firing.
The Virgin Galactic Mess
It’s not at all clear to me that it’s in their interest to stir this pot of merde with a lawsuit. I have no trouble believing that they’ve been overhyping safety, because it’s always appeared to be the case to anyone who understands rocketry. For example:
Virgin also advertised the “simplicity and safety” of SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid motor, claiming that the nitrous oxide and rubber used in it were “both benign, stable as well as containing none of the toxins found in solid rocket motors.”
This is a straw man, since few, if any, have ever proposed solids for passenger vehicles (other than NASA).
Basically, Branson made some disastrous business and technical decisions a decade ago, and it’s coming back to haunt him on an ongoing basis.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related: An update on Spaceport America, who (along with the poor taxpayers of the two counties) was also sold a bill of goods by Branson.
David Bowie
RIP, I guess. I never got what was such a big deal about him. “Space Oddity” is the only song of his that I liked, and I never listened to an album. But apparently, according to my Twitter timeline, this is some kind of huge culture loss.
Martian Concrete
They should be using nuclear for power, though, not solar.
The Clinton FBI Probe
…expands to public corruption:
This new investigative track is in addition to the focus on classified material found on Clinton’s personal server.
“The agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department contracts and whether regular processes were followed,” one source said.
One intelligence source told Fox News that FBI agents would be “screaming” if a prosecution is not pursued because “many previous public corruption cases have been made and successfully prosecuted with much less evidence than what is emerging in this investigation.”
Meh. Laws are for the little people.
[Update a while later]
Guy Benson has a roundup of everything she’s being investigated for.
Basically, it starts with the massive mishandling of confidential and classified information, which has resulted in multiple counts of obstruction of justice. And a large part of the reason for all of the obstruction of justice was to hide all of the collusion and corruption between the Clinton Foundation and foreign nations while she was Secretary of State. She planned all this from the very beginning, even before becoming SoS. She just figured she’d get away with it, because she got away with so many felonies in the 90s.
[Update a few more minutes later]
The email scandal goes nuclear:
…the June 8, 2011 Blumenthal report doesn’t read like CIA material at all, in other words human intelligence or HUMINT, but very much like signals intelligence or SIGINT. (For the differences see here). I know what SIGINT reports look like, because I used to write them for the National Security Agency, America’s biggest source of intelligence. SIGINT reports, which I’ve read thousands of, have a very distinct style and flavor to them and Blumenthal’s write-up matches it, right down to the “Source Comments,” which smack very much of NSA reporting and its “house rules.”
But is this an NSA assessment? If so, it would have to be classified at least Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, a handling caveat that applies to most SIGINT, and quite possibly Top Secret/SCI, the highest normal classification we have. In that case, it was about as far from Unclassified as it’s possible for an email to be.
No surprise, NSA is aflutter this weekend over this strange matter. One Agency official expressed to me “at least 90 percent confidence” that Mr. Blumenthal’s June 8 report was derived from NSA reports, and the Agency ought to be investigating the matter right now.
I suspect it is.
Trilobites
Two Questions On Climate Change
Put me in the “Maybe/Yes” camp.