We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Last year I traveled continuously from mid-May to early November, not to mention a couple other months on the road earlier that year. One of the trips was to Wyoming in July and while there Jim Bennett and I visited Frontier Astronautics rather unique home office.
Jim and I drove for a long time.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
We found their sign miles down a back road off a County road.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
After a ‘short’ drive up their private road we arrived at the main gate where Jim rang the door bell.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Two engineers came out and led us on the trek to the bunker doors. They are large enough to pass an Atlas missile on a truck.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Back in perhaps 1962 the bunker center section held a liquid fueled Atlas ICBM. This is the flame trench that would be underneath the ICBM. The sections of the bunker to the left and right contained the fuel and oxidizer tanks used to fuel it. The center section is now (probably) the world’s only indoor engine test stand. Interior walls are 30 inch thick reinforced concrete: this allows the engineers and their monitoring gear to sit mere feet away from a firing engine.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The office also has a sun roof… These many, many ton reinforced concrete doors were built to slide to either side so the Atlas could be raised into firing position.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Speaking of the engineers, here are the two who gave us the grand tour.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
This is the tunnel to what was once a control room. The consoles are long gone and it now contains a modern flat where the owner, a former Titan IV engineer, and his wife live.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
It is without a doubt the only family home with an indoor rocket engine test stand.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
I was rather surprised to discover that Oklahoma, of all places, is using State power not to just silence critics, but to send them to prison for up to ten years!
I simply never expected this sort of political repression to take hold in America. The Oklahoma government should simply be ashamed of the way they are sullying the American ideal.
I would suggest to Oklahoman’s that they fight fire with fire. The outside agitators who are being shipped in and paid should be investigated and the leaders named and shamed. A private sting operation should work nicely: place a Ballot initiative canvasser somewhere where it is certain the roving gangs will find them. You should have a few photographers assigned to take photos of the individuals who start causing the trouble; then have a few others ready to slip in with ‘wires’ and pretend to be part of the group
Once you have the evidence, put it all in a blog or a web page… and send us the link!
The Foresight Institute released its Nanotechnology Roadmap today. According to the Press Release:
“For the first time, progress across all key nanoscale disciplines has been brought together into R&D pathways leading to atomically-precise manufacturing, with revolutionary applications to medicine, smart materials, and energy,” said Jim Von Ehr, Founder and chief executive officer of Zyvex Labs, Foresight Board of Directors member, and Roadmap Steering Committee member. “We look forward to hearing from technologists in industry, academia, and government on their thoughts about this roadmap, and their suggestions for improvement in the next version.”
You can find all of this and more here.
Sometimes campaigns seem to be a battle of the celebrities, a matter of who has the best known Stars behind the podium. Ron Paul received endorsements from Barry Goldwater Jr and the Governor of Arizona within the last few weeks, but they are politico’s and that is just not the same. He finally has a real celebrity: Arlo Guthrie of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ fame. You simply could not find a nicer guy to endorse you. Arlo says:
“I love this guy. Dr. Paul is the only candidate I know of who would have signed the Constitution of The United States had he been there. I’m with him, because he seems to be the only candidate who actually believes it has as much relevance today as it did a couple of hundred years ago. I look forward to the day when we can work out the differences we have with the same revolutionary vision and enthusiasm that is our American legacy.”
Back in the eighties when I lived in my native Pittsburgh I regularly worked the local music venue’s as did my room mate. I vividly remember him telling me about the night he opened for Arlo at one of our regular gig locations. Unlike many stars Arlo backstage did not do the Star thing in either attitude or drug ingestion. In fact, he sat down on the back stairs with my room mate for a long time after the show. They swapped stories of the life, chords and songs and had a merry old time sitting there on the group W… er the Grafitti’s back stairs.
I just love the idea of Arlo playing an inauguration ceremony… Now that is cool!
Correction: the Governor in question is the former Governor of New Mexico, not Arizona. My mistake. More here
A number of persons placed comments about my recent article on SpaceShipTwo which showed they did not have a great deal of knowledge about the revolution in space affairs now taking place. Rather than write a long survey article I have decided to simply give you a reading list. The following is not complete by any means. These are just the names which came easily and immediately to mind on a Sunday afternoon and all are building serious hardware or providing services:
SpaceX
Blue Origin
Virgin Galactic
XCOR Aerospace
Armadillo Aerospace
Bigelow Aerospace
Masten Space
TGV Rockets
Rocketplane and Rocketplane-Kistler
Scaled Composites
Space Adventures
Orbital Outfitters
tSpace
Zero G
Starchaser Industries
Orion Propulsion
Spacedev
HMX
X-Prize
Videos about settling the Moon
National Space Society
Frontier Aerospace
Wyoming Space and Information Systems
Enjoy!
Ed: I may add more over the course of the day if the urge strikes. I know I have left out entire categories like spaceports and should probably fill in that gap if I have the time.
It had to happen and it has. Both statist parties have found a way around the anti-First Amendment law (MCCAIN-Feingold) of the contemptible John McCain. This is the law whose intent is to prevent protected political free speech from occurring during the late period of the US election.
I read somewhere recently (and cannot find it right now) about a liberal group who are raising money to attack George Bush through the entire campaign season. This seems silly until you realize that he is a proxy for the Republican Party.
The Republican’s have their own breed of professional slime tossers and they have settled on Bill Clinton as a good proxy for Hillary and the Democrats in general.
The bottom line? John McCain is not only a totalitarian: he’s a moron as well.
As I mentioned in an earlier article, Virgin Galactic unveiled the design of SpaceShipTwo in New York on Tuesday. This is the first ever commercial tourist spaceship.
There are two ‘stages’ to this vehicle. A very large mothership, White Knight Two, and a not exactly tiny underslung SpaceShipTwo. The design is similar to that of SpaceShipOne and the White Knight One mothership but much larger. Notice Burt has gone to a dual hull ‘catamaran’ like structure so the space going craft is slung between them instead of underneath a center hull.
Another thing which jumps out at me is the use of four Pratt and Whitney PW308A turbofan engines. These are the sort of engines you would find on a large business jet and they need this sort of power to get SS2 up to the 50,000 foot MSL drop altitude.
White Knight Two test flights are expected to start this summer. If they are indeed going to meet that schedule, I would expect a roll out by late May.
Artists rendering of SpaceShipTwo and the Mothership in flight
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
This is no paper spaceship. Both WK2 and SS2 are under construction. In the photo you can see both hulls and the main plane of WK2 are well advanced.
White Knight Two hulls and main plane on the Scaled Composites shop floor.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
SpaceShipTwo is also well along, as you can see.
SpaceShipTwo under construction
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
SpaceShipTwo is not a tiny cramped little thing either as you can see in this photo with Burt Rutan providing scale. It is definitely more business jet than Mercury capsule.
Burt Rutan sitting on the flight control panel in the nose of the SS2.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
This is not a one off deal. There will be many of these produced and each will be flown as often as possible. That means they will need an ongoing training capability for pilots. So… they have a very nice looking flight simulator for training.
Test pilot Brian Binnie sitting in the SS2 simulator.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
For the technically inclined, here is a cutaway drawing. The real cognoscenti will note SS2 is indeed using the original hybrid propulsion system. Hybrids have been around awhile now: Starstruck and AMROC (Jim Bennett’s old companies) pioneered them in the eighties and others have since developed them further.
Cutaway technical details of SS2.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
I have been reading the Ron Paul Campaign blog on a regular basis and this portion of an interview with Glenn Beck brought a grin to my face:
GLENN: Okay. If you were President of the United States, what would you do?
PAUL: Well, the advice would be return to the market economy. First
we would have to deregulate. We had a crisis a few years ago, at least
a supposed crisis with Enron and they superregulated. So I would
repeal certainly major portions of the Sarbanes-Oxley. So we would
argue for deregulation. Then, of course, there should be major, major
tax reform…
I suspect Editor Perry will also gain a smile from this one. Sarbanes-Oxley has been a disaster to the US economy from the git-go and it is about time a politician got up and admitted it.
Of course the City of London has loved it… all those US IPO’s did not vanish, they just came over here to Merry Olde Englande.
Some of you may have heard of the Google X-Prize for the first private lunar mission. There seem to be quite a number of teams lining up for the prize, including one based on the Isle of Wight.
Sir Richard Branson’s US company had a ‘do’ in New York yesterday at which they were to unveil the design of SpaceShipTwo. This is slated to be the first commercial suborbital tourist spaceship. I asked a friend who works for them to get some photos to me but nothing has shown up so I presume I will have to look for the official photos like everyone else. As they are making this public, one would presume they have finalized the propulsion system and will be using the hybrid engine as originally planned.
Mojave Spaceport’s license may still be up in the air due to the fatal industrial accident at Scaled Composites test rig last summer. I have been hearing flip flops on this for the last several months but despite assurances from Patty Grace Smith at the FAA it appears there is something behind the rumor. Last summer we all thought the accident, in which a pressurized tank blew up and killed three engineers, would be a matter for OSHA and Cal-OSHA only. If FAA enforcement on such accidents is indeed forthcoming, I predict the unintended consequence will be all non-flight related spacecraft development operations move off FAA controlled spaceports.
Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, is due for their third launch attempt some time soon. Not much information is floating around about an exact date. Somewhere between January and April is about the best I can guess. Given the switchover to the much more sophisticated and re-usable regeneratively cooled engine I think they will be moving very deliberately towards the next flight. Pretty much everyone expects them to make orbit this time.
For the last year a venture I am in has been slowly spooling up. I am now under so many Non-Disclosures that I hardly know what I can and cannot talk about in commercial Space so I have been erring on the side of silence as I have been too busy to check.
I have some nice photos from an old Atlas missile complex turned rocket test stand out in the Wyoming outback which I took last summer during a business visit. Someday I will get around to publishing some of them.
The International Space Development Conference is in Washington DC this year and we (at the National Space Society) have another good one lined up. Pretty much anyone who is anyone in the commercial Space industry will be there.
I imagine everyone knows that Messenger did the first flyby of Mercury in 33 years just a few days ago and the photos are still being downloaded to Earth. While not commercial in itself, the imagery will certainly be useful to future mining interests. It’s a great place to get the materials to build the close-in solar power satellites we’ll use to beam energy around the solar system and manufacture anti-matter fuel in the 22nd Century.
Oh, and I believe June this year is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska asteroid explosion in Siberia. For a while many of us thought we would see Mars get pasted this February as part of the anniversary ‘celebration’ but the orbit of that rock is now known well enough to say it is a definite miss.
If you are not watching it right now… ‘Dispatches’ is ripping Ken Livingston a new one as we speak…
The news from Nevada (via the LA Times) is so stunning that, well, I am stunned!
Ron Paul ran second behind Mitt Romney. What can I say? I am a life long Libertarian. I am not used to getting this close to the winners circle!
I am, however, prepared to adjust my expectations, should that become necessary.
The ballot initiative to end the income tax in Massachusetts has survived the challenges of some of the State’s worst tax whores and will be on the ballot this fall. If you live there, brace yourself for a cacophony of awesomely silly claims. You will soon be hearing the schools will close, your children will grow up to be heroin addicts, your pets will die of Ebola and the Atlantic Ocean will rise and smite thy town should you have the temerity to vote ‘yes’ in spite of the warnings of your betters.
Do you think I am kidding? The Governor of that State has already tried to relate tax repeal and Darfur. I kid you not. According to Jeff Jacoby:
So Governor Deval Patrick is cranking up the rhetoric. He told the Associated Press last week that undoing the income tax is “just a dumb idea” that would utterly devastate Massachusetts.
“Patrick said he has lived in places with no taxes, including the time he spent in Darfur 30 years ago,” AP’s Steve LeBlanc reported. “He says there were also no bridges, no good roads, and no public safety there. ‘Civilization costs something,’ he said. ‘If we could have something for nothing, which is the fiction that has been sold by the right for some time now, then we wouldn’t have a $19 billion upkeep backlog for the roads and bridges.’ “
You have loads of time to tell your friends and neighbors about this Initiative. Get out the vote and give the Statists their head on a platter this November.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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