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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Rand and I arrived at the Mojave Civilian Test Flight Facility about an hour ago and I have had time to run about and snap some candid photos of the crowd at the XCOR hanger. Dr. Pournelle is here, Elon Musk is around somewhere as are others in the commercial space flight field.
I got Jeff Greason’s attention just after an interview and have my network connection sorted from inside the office. Now I must go and be sociable… and Rand is pushing for me to unload the airbed and other stuff from his car. I will try to post more later.
Yes, there will be photos, but not until after I get my film developed on return to Redondo Beach.
‘The Space Show’ will be supplying a live audio show during the SpaceShipOne flight:
The Space Show is pleased to announce that it will carry live (audio only) the Space Ship One historical launch scheduled for 6:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time (weather permitting) on Monday, June 21, 2004 in Mojave, California. Events unfolding at the Mojave Airport up to and including the launch, plus special interviews and much more, will be reported live to listeners of The Space Show by our special reporter on the scene, well-known space advocate and leader, John Carter McKnight Mr. McKnight is a regularly appearing guest on The Space Show and is also a space analyst and commentator whose work has appeared in Space News, SpaceDaily.com, SpaceRef, Space Times and numerous other industry publications.
Further:
The live broadcast can be heard on the internet at [link]. In addition, an additional streaming site has been provided Space Show listeners by Jeff Birk at Pioneer Radio in the UK. The tentative URL for this additional site is http://usa.rolo.net:8008/listen.pls.
It will be the next best thing to being there.
I’ve spent a great deal of 2004 either on the road or preparing to be on the road. That is why my postings have been a bit scarce these last six months. I hope to be a bit more visible the next few days. This trip is not as business intensive as most have been. Yes, I am transacting and meeting with people, but for one day I will be an on the scene reporter for one of the most important historical events since Kittyhawk.
I arrived in Redondo Beach yesterday afternoon after two days of travel. My luggage finally caught up with me this morning: socks will be buried shortly. It was a very, very long journey.
Due to severe financial constraints I cut corners on this trip every which way. I left my flat in Belfast on Thursday afternoon, dragging a luggage trolley behind me. It was great fun getting the luggage onto a bus heading into the City Centre. After a brief stop at the bank where I turned my meager balance into dollars, I pulled the luggage through town and along the Laganside… where I promptly took the wrong side street shortcut to the train station. So… train to Dublin Connolly, and then a Dublin bus with an even narrower aisle.
My overnight stop in Dublin was at the house of a close friend and a meal cooked by her guitarist Graham Dunne. He cooks as well as he plays and that is saying something! Another trad musician was visiting and so we drank wine and talked until at least 1am… and I had to be up at 5am. Niamh Parsons, kind and wonderful soul that she is, got up and drove me to the airport at that ungodly hour.
The next leg was from Dublin to Paris. No, I am not kidding. The cheapest flight I could get on short notice was an Air France flight. I had a very tight window in Charles De Gaulle (CDG) Airport to find my gate for the international flight, but this went smoothly. A literal walk on.
CDG is big. We took so long from landing to parking I thought the pilot was taxiing us directly into the Paris City Centre. The airport is also very unfinished. Airplanes stop at places where there are probably going to be terminals some day. For now, you get a lift on a bus. (Advice: hang on for dear life.)
The food on the Paris to LA flight was good. I expected no less from Air France and they lived up to my expectations in spades. I managed to keep myself busy on this long flight over Greenland, Hudson Bay and down the West Coast. I brought a lot of reading material of the sort you would expect of someone who blogs. A case document on the Kennewick Man case; a Physics Today article on Hafnium explosives; a report to Congress on the state of China’s defense… things like that. It kept me busy except when it helped me to nap…
I was not feeling all that bad when I deplaned in LAX. Good thing too. First came the INS. Not really a problem… but the form for Customs has lines which must be filled in telling them where you are staying. However I did not have Rand Simberg’s street address (I did not think they would accept his URL). Every time I have been to Rand’s house he has picked me up. I never needed to know the address and had not thought of bringing it. The guy at Immigration insisted that something must be written on the still blank line… not because he wanted it but because Customs would send me back to him. Finally, in exasperation (and he didn’t want to wait while I tracked Rand down on mobile) he suggested I was actually staying at a nearby hotel. I filled that in on the offending line and voila, problem solved. He told me he is getting out after many years with INS because he is fed up with the way things are going.
Then the wait for luggage… except mine never arrived. My name was listed along with perhaps a dozen other people on a clipboard held by a very helpful lady agent on duty.
Even the lady in front of the customs desk was nice when I told her why I had no luggage.
An hour later I had as good a picture of the situation as I was likely to get. The connection was so tight they could not get the luggage across in time, so it would come over on the next flight… in late evening. I was given a free courtesy kit with a t-shirt, shampoo, razor and such so I could at least freshen up.
So I only had my carry-on shoulder bag with the laptop, camera and papers. Heavy enough but not like hauling luggage. I lucked out then: Rand was home rather than off at his aerospace customer’s facility. We agreed to meet just outside the airport, so I had one final bus ride to endure. I got packed into the parking lot bus so tightly with a bunch of end of shift TSA employees I had to stand on the steps and hold on for dear life to whatever I could find. I got off at the parking lot, rang Rand to let him know and walked to the street.
It was good to see Rand pull up instants later.
Tomorrow afternoon I am off to Los Angeles… and thence to the Mojave desert to watch SpaceShipOne head for space. I will try to post some more when I get to Rand Simberg’s place in LA.
In the meantime, you can get a copy of the Aldridge Commission Report here. You do not know what it is? Well, then, follow the link! As for me, I am off to bed… there are some rather long days ahead.
As our long time readers know, I spent much of the 1980’s as an academic research scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University. Because of this, I am a member of the academic pension fund organizations called TIAA and CREF. As with any such organization, they have annual elections, proxies and oft-times one or more ‘Participant Proposals’ up for vote. Academia being, well, academia… such proposals are most often of the form “divest of stock in companies doing business with X” or “any business that makes Y”, where X and Y belong to the set of Politically Correct causes.
So imagine my surprise when I found the following:
Resolved: No Funds shall be invested by CREF in any entity brought to its attention that publically advocates firearm control legislation or repeal of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
I voted for it, just for badness. I actually quite agree with the Board of Trustee’s statement that investments should be made on a purely financial basis.
The measure will not pass… but it is the thought that counts.
Vanguard Response Systems, a Canadian company, is now testing equipment for containment and mitigation of the effects of radiological weapons.
This type of weapon, now commonly mis-labeled a ‘dirty bomb’, is a conventional explosive device packed with bits and bobs of medical or other radiological sources in place of bolts and nails. Such bombs would kill few if any persons not killed in the initial blast. They are weapons of mass annoyance rather than destruction and have entered the WMD lexicon due to the modern phobia of all things ‘nuclear’.
Vanguard supplies various sizes of containment ‘tents’ which are placed around the weapon. The tents are then filled with a foam. Should the device explode, the kinetic energy is soaked up by the foam and tent. They claim all of the bomb fragments are thus contained.
There is now an NSS Chapters blog online. It is just in its infancy but could become a very useful source of information for the whole space community.
I had several chats with George Whitesides, the new NSS Executive Director, about the need for such a beast and am pleased to see it happen.
I will be reporting on my six weeks on the airways as soon as I have my film developed.
As old time readers surely know, I am a long time denizen of the L5 Society of yore and the National Space Society formed from its union with the National Space Institute of Werner von Braun. I chair one of the major committees of the society and so state up front I have a rather serious interest in the upcoming ISDC (International Space Development Conference).
With that out of the way… I’d like to invite anyone in the Oklahoma area (or anywhere in the world for that matter) to come along. Programming runs from Thursday this week until Monday (May 27-31). There are one day registrations for those who are too busy to attend the full event.
Speakers include:
- Oklahoma Lt. Gov. Mary Fallin, Chair of the Aerospace States Assn
- Melchor J. Antunano, M.D., MS, Director FAA Civil Aerospace Medical Institute
- Charles Chafer, CEO, Team Encounter, Humanity’s First Starship™ Solar Sails
- Fred Haise, Apollo 13 Astronaut, Space Shuttle Commander
- Gen. Ken McGill, Board Chairman, Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority
- Dr Kenneth Money, Canadian Astronaut
- Courtney Stadd, Former NASA Chief of Staff
- Dr. Donald A. Thomas, Astronaut, ISS Program Scientist
- Rick Tumlinson, Founder, Space Frontier Foundation
- Prof. Robert Winglee, University of Washington, Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion
- Dr. Robert Zubrin, President, Mars Society
as well as many others. You will have to skim the program to find them… or else just show up and register at the door. All are welcome.
If you do drop in, look for a harried guy in corporate battle armour (ie. a dark suit) running about the place. It will either be me or someone who will point you to me. You are welcome to say hello… but be prepared to do so on the run!
There is some interesting new information about the 155mm Sarin shell on Blaster’s Blog:
Iraq never declared any binary 155mm artillery shells. In fact, they never claimed any filled with sarin at all in the UNSCOM Final report (Find on “Munitions declared by Iraq as remaining”). Not declared as existing at the end of the Gulf War, not having been destroyed in the Gulf War, not having been destroyed unilaterally. The only binary munitions claimed by the Iraqis were aerial bombs and missile warheads. Not in an artillery shell.
I was just thinking about this as I returned from breakfast. One of our commentariat pointed out the missing shells were of a smaller size and were of a type with a fairly short shelf life. Suddenly this single shell becomes even more troubling.
This is a very different story now. Is there a whole class of large binary munitions no one was even aware of?
The good news in space travel just keeps piling higher. An american group has launched a rocket to suborbital altitude.
An amateur unmanned rocket has been launched into space from the Nevada desert – the first time this has been achieved by a privately-built vehicle.
The Civilian Space eXploration Team’s 6.5m (21ft) GoFast rocket is understood to have exceeded an altitude of 100km.
The BBC’s statement may not be entirely accurate. I would have to look into the altitude reached by Space Services Inc. of America’s (SSIA) test rocket in the mid-eighties. It was launched from Matagordo Island on the Texas coast and impacted in the Caribbean.
The GoFast rocket of the Civilian Space eXploration Team rates higher marks in any case. SSIA used the upper stage from a surplus Minuteman Missile, if I remember correctly. In contrast, these folk did it from scratch.
The only other private ‘launch’ into space I am aware of was a BB sized bit of molten metal fired into solar orbit by a shaped charge final stage of a Tripoli Rocket Society rockoon in the sixties.
This is only an appetizer for the year 2004. The main course will be a manned suborbital flight by Scaled Composites. This is almost certain to happen within the next few months. I would not find it at all surprising to see SpaceShipOne ‘passenger’ flights before this year is out.
This is a very good year.
Despite the best efforts of the Negatroid Hordes to convince us otherwise, much in Iraq is going very well.
DEMOCRACY TAKES ROOT: Democracy is spreading – from the ground up, as it should: “In the province of Dhi Qar, about 230 miles southeast of Baghdad and a backwater even by Iraq’s standards, residents voting as families will have elected city councils in 16 of the 20 biggest cities by next month.”
Read the whole article and then ask yourself where the journalists have been. No, not just their heads. We know where those are.
The May 1 issue of New Scientist contains an item ‘Why our fears about fat are misplaced’ written by Paul Campos, a Professor of Law from the University of Colorado. We have often stated our belief fat is the new job frontier for government bureaucracy and Professor Campos seems to agree with us. He states unequivocally that no research directly links fat to shorter lifespans. Sedentery lifestyles and other factors, yes. Fat alone? No. In his own words:
Ultimately the current panic over increasing body mass has little to do with science, and everything to do with cultural and political factors that distort scientific enquiry. Among those factors are greed (consensus panels put together by organizations such as WHO that have declared obesity a major health crisis are often made up entirely of doctors who run diet clinics), and cultural anxieties about social overconsumption in general.
He notes that in one recent study:
It added up to just one extra death per 10,000 “overweight” women per year. The authors still treated the findings as strong evidence of a causal relationship between weight and cancer
Professor Campos also has a book on the subject, The Obesity Myth.
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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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