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Someone tweeting under the name of “Lyndon Baines Johnson”, a supporter of Kamala Harris, explains how he would like a Harris administration to deal with technological innovators:
Lyndon Baines Johnson
@lyndonbajohnson
If Harris wins, fairly high on the agenda should be finding new federal contractors so that SpaceX and Starlink are shown the door. -OS
8:05 PM · Nov 3, 2024
For all his grievous faults, the actual LBJ would have known how to describe that proposal in a few choice words. He wanted the Apollo program to succeed.
As you might have guessed, the rocket concerned is small enough to almost spin out of control because of the weight of a slice of packaged cheese strapped to one of its legs. So perhaps Elon Musk need not lose sleep over his rivals, a group of students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, just yet – however the headline from Interesting Engineering describing this as “Europe’s most important rocket test” was more justifiable than one might think at first sight.
They ate the cheese after its flight. It was “slightly warm, but still quite tasty.”
I only really cemented in my head which of those Billionaires Having Something To Do With the Internet Elon Musk was in February 2018, when he sent his Tesla Roadster into space. I loved him for that, but fell out of love a few months later over Musk’s behaviour towards Vernon Unsworth. Since then, my regard for Mr Musk has crept up again. It’s nice having freedom of speech on the internet back. I now – and I do know how sad this is – follow him on Xitter or whatever it’s called these days.
This is c. 7 years old, but it is quite marvellous and a tribute to the great tradition of engineering in Sweden. A video done by a Swedish chap who built himself a pulse-jet powered sledge or ‘ice boat’ to run around on frozen lakes. It is basically a V1 doodlebug-type engine on a frame, with some seats and steering. What strikes me is the need for some form of suspension.
I have set the video where it has its first ‘ice road test’.
Humans boldly going into space should echo the guiding principle of Captain Kirk’s Star Trek crew by resisting the urge to interfere, researchers have said, stressing a need to end a colonial approach to exploration.
As a Trekkie (watched The Tholian Web again last night), a libertarian, and a convinced anti-speciesist, I would gladly join with these brave scientists to demand an end to the colonial oppression of our fellow sapient beings… but before we end it, is there not a small logical barrier that we need to cross first?
Nasa has made no secret of its desire to mine the moon for metals, with China also keen to extract lunar resources – a situation that has been called a new space race.
But Dr Pamela Conrad of the Carnegie Institution of Science said the focus should shift away from seeking to exploit discoveries.
Indeed it should. What about the intelligent aliens bleeping piteously for release from the human yoke?
Oh.
OK, then, alien animals. Tell me how they are oppressed so I can send them thoughts of solidarity across the light years…
“Regardless of who or what is out there, that attitude of exploration being almost synonymous with exploitation gives one a different perspective as you approach to the task,” she said.
Regardless? FFS, lady, give me something to work with here. This is the Guardian, it doesn’t have to be much. I’d have been satisfied with some oppressed alien fungi, but “regardless”, as in “regardless of whether there is any victim whatsoever”, does not hack it.
“Biotech firms, pharmaceutical manufacturers, the makers of semiconductors and other advanced materials – companies from across the entire industrials sector – will invent and produce their next breakthrough products that will benefit life on Earth in the microgravity factories of space.”
– Tom Vice – Sierra Space CEO, talking about the prospects of orbital manufacturing and R&D.
The article itself will add nothing to your understanding of how the space shuttle came to break apart soon after launch. I might give the Netflix documentary a chance, despite the Guardian‘s description of it as “a timely meditation on the perils of exceptionalism”. It seems harsh to condemn anything on the basis of what the Guardian says about it, especially since the Guardian article in question contained incoherent sentences like the second one in this quote:
In a US news report about the space programme, a TV host says, with amazement, that the newest Nasa recruits include, “two blacks, an oriental, and six women”. (One of them, Sally Ride, is shown being asked by a journalist whether, when she tells a man she’s an astronaut, he believes her.)
Got that? Sally Ride told a male journalist that she was an astronaut. Then he (the journalist) asked her (the astronaut) whether he believed her.
[Edit: Correction to the above! And apology to Ms Brockes, in the unlikely event that she ever reads this. Commenter “Jim” pointed out that the sentence I quoted makes perfect sense if you see the final “he” as not referring to the male journalist but to the general category of men who Sally Ride might tell that she is an astronaut.
Edit to the Edit: Niall Kilmartin made the same point as Jim did but in such a gentlemanly fashion that I did not quite get it. I would happily delete this entire section in embarrassment, but my rule for blogging is that the very things you want to stealth-edit most are those you should not touch.]
So much for the article. However the readers’ comments (the Graun made the mistake of allowing them) are rather good. The most recommended comment is by “chunkychips”:
This is a bizarre article. We’re supposed to believe that a NASA cockup and some dude who approved the launch of the space shuttle 30 odd years ago based on the data available to him at the time is an example of American exceptionalism?? What?
I’m afraid I’m just left with the image of a bitter writer watching the documentary and a little light goes off in her head “oooh, I could make a massive and ludicrous leap into condemning a country of 300 odd million people for ever daring to try”.
I’m so sick of the drip drip of articles that condemn western countries for not being as good as they think they are. They never stop to think of the undeniable fact that the western world is still the best place to live in human history regardless of who you are and what you believe or think. So yes, pretty damn exceptional actually and worth protecting and preserving.
The second most recommended comment is by “YorkieBrummy”:
Contrast with the impeccable safety records of China and Russia.
In mid-July, the agency in charge of the network of 26 satellites, the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency (EGSA), warned of a “service degradation” but assured everyone that it would quickly be resolved.
It wasn’t resolved however, and six days later the system was not only still down but getting increasingly inaccurate, with satellites reporting that they were in completely different positions in orbit than they were supposed to be – a big problem for a system whose entire purpose is to provide state-of-the-art positional accuracy to within 20 centimeters.
Billions of organizations, individuals, phones, apps and so on from across the globe simply stopped listening to Galileo. It’s hard to imagine a bigger mess, aside from the satellites crashing down to Earth.
The article concludes,
In the meantime, a dangerous amount of political maneuvering means all the engineers are keeping their heads down. Which is a shame because by all accounts, there is a lot of good work going on, not helped by organizational silos.
In short, Galileo is a classic European venture: a great idea with talented people that has turned into a bureaucratic mess in which no one wants to take the blame for problems caused by unnecessary organizational complexity.
This may not look impressive to an untrained eye. After all, SpaceX has been landing rockets like this for a while. However, bear in mind what you are watching. This is a vehicle the size of a large townhouse (it’s 20m tall) being balanced at a single point at its base, and it isn’t so much as wobbling. (That’s much like keeping a water bottle balanced with your index finger.) Said house-sized object is then seamlessly translated upwards and over, and rotated at the same time, before landing perfectly. It’s propelled by the world’s first full flow staged combustion engine to actually fly — an engine burning methane, a relatively new fuel for rockets that has never before been used for real flights either.
Yes, SpaceX makes it look like getting a rocket to hover is easy. However, it isn’t even remotely easy.
This test makes it ever more likely that prototypes of Starship/Superheavy are going to be in flight tests of their own within the next couple of years. That, in turn, makes the era of affordable spaceflight ever closer. Recall that a fully reusable spacecraft means at least a two order of magnitude reduction in launch costs.
So, this minute long flight is a critical step towards the day where humans live permanently off the Earth. We at the Miskatonic University Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics will continue to monitor and report as future Starship test flights occur.
Some time in the next week or two, pending only FAA aproval, SpaceX is planning to flyStarhopper, a test device for their next generation Starship launch system. Starhopper looks like a water tower with an attached rocket engine, mostly because it is indeed a water tower with an attached rocket engine. Starhopper is planned to rise to 200 metres into the air and then land, testing control systems and engine technology. This is a follow-up to a previous 5 metre test flight.
Starhopper flight successful. Water towers *can* fly haha!!
The engine is a brand new design called Raptor, which has a high specific impulse, meaning it is unusually efficient. Eventually, Starship will use up to 41 Raptor engines.
The test flight will be an exciting moment. The reason space travel is so expensive is that conventional rockets get thrown away after only a single use. (Imagine how unaffordable a flight from London to Berlin would be if the aircraft were thrown out at the end of the trip.) While a Saturn V would cost roughly $1bn today, the fuel would only cost about $1m. The bulk of current spaceflight cost is thus the cost of expending an extremely expensive piece of capital equipment instead of reusing it.
So, there is an opportunity to reduce the marginal cost of getting objects into orbit by orders of magnitude. SpaceX have already achieved some re-usability with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. However, Starship will be both much bigger (it will lift 100T or more into low earth orbit compared to Falcon Heavy’s 65T) and is the first ever fully reusable orbital launch vehicle (Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy do not recover the second stage). It may even cost less to fly 100T into orbit than it currently does to launch a very small rocket like Rocket Lab’s Electron that lifts only 250kg to orbit at a price of about $7m.
Because it will be able to be refueled in orbit, it will also be able take that 100T to the moon or even Mars (albeit at additional cost because of the need for flights to loft the fuel.)
In other words, we are witnessing a revolution in space travel.
And with that stainless steel design, which can be transpiration cooled to avoid the use of heat shield tiles, it looks just like space travel was supposed to look back in the 50s.
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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