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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In case anyone was watching, a couple of our inimitable readers were to be seen on “Future Flight” earlier tonight. The show, on ITV Channel 5, spent fifteen minutes out of an hour program showing the EZRocket in flight and on the ground. Jeff Greason showed up as a talking head, as did Aleta Jackson. I think I saw Dave Jones also but I’m uncertain. Maybe he’ll confirm to us if he was in camera range.
Erratum: Doug Jones. Sorry Doug! Insufficient caffeine. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
I’ve just read an article in Fox News which has left me both speechless and in a fury:
A 14-year-old New Jersey schoolboy — whose dad and stepdad are in the military — was suspended for five days because he drew a “patriotic” stick figure of a U.S Marine blowing away a Taliban fighter, officials said yesterday.
It further notes:
Scott Switzer, of Colts Neck, was sent home last week from Tinton Falls Middle School after a teacher saw the image on a computer and described it to the principal.
Scott, who turned 14 Tuesday and was headed back to school Wednesday, said he was unjustly disciplined for his sketch of “a war scene.”
This sort of treatment of a young lad for simply being a young lad is incredibly destructive. You can’t repress the natural expression of, well, being a boy. Boys like imaginary wars and fighting battles in the back yard, climbing trees, hiding under porches, jumping off porch roofs and playing ‘paratrooper’ by swinging as high as they can before letting go. You can’t stop them from going bang-bang at passing cars – transmogrified by imagination into Russian or Nazi or Jap or Iraqi tanks, depending on the generation.
If you were to succeed, you would destroy them as thoroughly as if you’d taken them in a backroom and buggered their wee bottoms. Worse, actually. One can recover from mere physical abuse… rape of the soul is forever.
I used to draw all sorts of battle scenes when I was 14. Lots of aircraft diving and strafing, even an imaginary Nazi Spaceship after reading Robert Heinlein’s “Rocketship Galileo”. I’m sure these morons would have loved me.
At one point we had a long running series of water gun ‘assassinations’ in the halls of Coraopolis Senior High School. One group of us were the “Nazi’s” and another were “Codename Jericho” and “Operation Bluelight” from the TV series of the time. This included secret coded messages being passed around and sometimes captured and passed on to me as the senior Herr codebreaker. I’d just gotten my first book on Codes and Ciphers through the Scholastic Book Service. Since both ‘sides’ were working from the same book, it was fairly easy to crack them!
We finally caught a ‘double agent’ and surrounded him in the basketball court bleachers during some ceremony in which a Pennsylvania State official presented our school a State flag. When it ended, our target tried to run for it, but we surrounded him. The ‘we’ being all of us zombies who’d already been watergunned over the last few weeks. The rules were that those already ‘dead’ weren’t allowed to take out anyone else.
Our designated assassin then emptied the watergun on him.
These politically correct fruitcakes in New Jersey would simply have adored us. They would probably have sent me and the others in for Indoctrination and Re-education.
I just had a long series of crackles on my speakers in time to the flickering of the overhead lights. One of the others in the flat noticed problems with his radio this morning. These all could be signs of the incoming solar storm. It is one of the three largest since records have been kept on such things. The last really big one, in 1989, took down a big chunk of the Canadian power grid.
If it hits us just right, there could be spectacular aurorae tonight. It is worth going outside tonight and looking up, just in case. There may be nothing or there may be one of the more spectacular heavenly sights you have ever seen. There is just no telling.
At the moment my upward view is rather grey and the outdoors is cold, damp and rather miserable. I doubt I will have the pleasure of seeing this natural lightshow unless the weather changes drastically.
Everyone knows the Fisher Space Pen was a valuable spin-off from the early space program. NASA funded them to invent a pressurized ink source so Astronauts could write while hanging about ‘upside-down’ in microgravity. It has become well known folklore. The trouble is, like much other folklore, it isn’t true. ESA’s Pedro Duque took a normal pen with him on his space station visit and tried it:
Duque has discovered that “ordinary” pens work just fine in space and that the famous American versions that use a pressurized ink source may be a little overkill. In commenting on the ball point pen, he (unintentionally?) makes an interesting observation about the U.S. space program:
“Sometimes being too cautious keeps you from trying, and therefore things are built more complex than necessary,” Duque writes.
You will not find many naysayers to this observation in the space community. NASA is synonymous with gold-plated and overbuilt. They have long had a philosophy to never use a 10 cent screw from the local hardware store when they can let a research project for a million dollars into a key congressional district.
The State is not your friend. NASA will never get you and I off this planet.
You can read some of his daily diary entries here.
Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne was dropped from the mothership at 46000 feet for its fourth glide flight on October 17th, after undergoing minor aerodynamic alterations to correct problems discovered during the third flight on September 23rd. The turn around was faster than I’d expected. As they are now testing the preliminaries to engine ignition, I expect the first in-air engine startup will happen within the next few flights.
According to Scaled Composites, the flight objectives were:
Fourth glide flight of SpaceShipOne. Primary purpose was to examine the effects of horizontal tail modifications at both forward and mid-range CG locations (obtained by dumping water from an aft ballast tank between test points). The tail modifications included a fixed strake bonded to the tail boom in front of the stabilator and a span-wise flow fence mounted on the leading edge of each stab at mid-span. (See the write up under the SPACESHIPONE GROUND TEST section that describes our Ford-250 wind tunnel which was used to help derive the current flight configuration). Other test objectives included a functional check of the rocket motor controller, ARM, FIRE and safing switches as well as the oxidizer dump valve. Additional planned maneuvers included full rudder pedal sideslips and more aggressive nose pointing while in the feathered configuration.
The results were quite good:
Launch conditions were 46,200 feet and 115 knots and produced a clean separation. The tail performance was examined by flying “longitudinal stability” points between stall and 130 knots and showed considerable improvement of the airfoil’s lift coefficient as well as its post stall characteristics. No vehicle pitch up tendency was noted as the main wing now stalls first. Real time video of the tufted tails fed back down to mission control helped considerably in assessing the performance of these aerodynamic improvements. More aggressive maneuvering in the feather made it evident that the pilot could readily point the vehicle’s nose where desired and all rocket motor functionality tests were satisfactory.
I expect a drop test and powered flight to occur by the Wright Brothers first flight anniversary date in mid-December. A full suborbital attempt is possible but would be pushing the envelope rather hard. How hard is impossible for anyone on the outside to estimate.
It would be a lovely Christmas present for all of us spacers though…
One of the many hats and t-shirts I wear is that of the National Space Society (NSS). We need a cultural component to our spaceward movement. It is not just to bind the ‘oldtimers’ together. We must spread the ‘frontier meme’ where it is extinct and nurture it where it still lives. It takes more than talk to do this. It takes art.
Prometheus Music in conjunction with NSS will soon release To Touch The Stars. It is now available for pre-release order.
Ivelina Konstantinova has made the transition from native of a small city in Bulgaria to US citizen and USAF Airman serving in the Middle East:
“I wanted to serve my country, continue my education, and travel,” said Senior Airman Konstantinova, a recreation services specialist assigned to the 379th Expeditionary Services Squadron here. “The military opened doors. And even though I may not be a natural citizen, I feel proud to serve America.”
With people like her out there, keep those “…huddled masses yearning to breathe free” coming!
I am about to install some bot-killing software, so if comments happen to break for awhile or the site rolls over with its itty bitty paws flailing in the air, you will know why…
Update: Samizdata.net comments will now require you to enter a security code that you copy off a graphic that will appear in the comment pop-up window. This should prevent spam-bots from auto-posting their garbage all over the blog.
Also, we have updated some code to stop spammers harvesting the e-mail addresses of commenters as well.
 
I’ve just killed off another comment spamming attack against Samizdata. It was clearly automated so I expect many of the rest of you are getting hit as well. The methodology is an attempt at subtlety… but it ignores the fact that a blog is actively monitored.
I suggest you all immediately ban the ip if you haven’t done so already: 80.58.11.45.
The attacker hits comments sections of old articles; the comment itself is trivial and innocuous. “nice website” “interesting post” and the like. They payload is the URL field.
This looks like a google-bash for hire scheme to me.
There is an excellent round up of the current nuclear threat in today’s Opinion Journal.
According to another government study, Pyongyang has also been at work on two very large “electrical generating” stations that, upon completion, will produce sufficient spent nuclear fuel to yield 200 kilograms of plutonium, enough to manufacture approximately 30 nuclear weapons a year.
It is a long article but well worth the time it takes to read it.
I’ve lately been following the writing of the new kid on the Baghdad block.
Good stuff, well worth a regular read.
Here is an interesting bit of development work being let by the DOD which I found while reading through a list of contracts:
United Technology Corp., West Palm Beach, Fla., is being awarded a $49,405,000 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for research and development for the Robust Scramjet. The Air Force will issue delivery orders totaling up to the maximum amount indicated above, though actual requirements may necessitate less than this amount. At this time, $220,000 of the funds has been obligated. Further funds will be obligated as individual delivery orders are issued. This work will be complete by September 2010. Solicitation began April 2003, and negotiations were completed September 2003. The Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, is the contracting activity (F33615-03-D-2418).
A SCRAMjet is a Supersonic Combustion Ram jet, an engine which is of use only for hypersonic speeds. It would needed for missiles or near-suborbital warcraft.
PS: For those not familiar with the space community, the Air Force Research Lab at Wright Patterson (AFRL-WPAFB) is where very interesting future-looking propulsion systems work is done. If you want to talk about things like antimatter engine design, these are the lads.
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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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