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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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The Porkers are out to kill the US space program..
There really is not a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats (with a few nasty exceptions) when you scratch the surface. Almost to a man and woman they are just Socialists with different priorities over what part of the economy and your life should come under State control first. Perhaps the bi-partisanship in the attack on New Space has more to do with the threat that an area once part of the Statist ‘Ummah’ might escape.
If you are an American and not a Socialist, call your congressman and senator and tell them off. Then join your local tea party and work to excise the Republican-Socialists from what once was a slightly (but only slightly) more freedom oriented party.
As the Commies used to say, you have nothing to lose but your chains…
I was driving past Duxford, the airbase near Cambridge, at the weekend and unfortunately, I was so busy with other things that yours truly did not have time to go to the airshow there. They were marking the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Then, as now, the skies were a deadly clear blue – ideal for any bombers looking to find their targets at the time. We curse heavy clouds in Britain, but we should be grateful for them occasionally.
It is perhaps not surprising why this epic battle over the south and southeast of England continues to capture imaginations, even among those usually and rightly wary about military power: there is the fact that the battle was a largely defensive one, pitting a relatively under-strength air force up against a larger, and more battle-hardened, German airforce, although the UK had the great benefit of an integrated radar/fighter dispersal system put in place in the late 1930s and run with magnificent calm by Dowding. If there ever was a case of a relatively clear Good versus Evil sort of conflict, this surely was it. (That should get the peaceniks going, Ed). For us aviation nuts, there is, obviously, the aesthetic as well as emotional appeal of one of the most beautiful aircraft ever built. And whatever some revisionists might claim, there is little doubt in my mind that Britain’s decision to resist invasion in that year rather than agree some sort of grubby and easily-broken deal with Hitler was the right one.
Many of those who fought in the skies are no longer with us; soon, this conflict will be captured not in first-hand memories, but in books, films and TV documentaries. Here is a review of three books of that conflict.
The headline on this blog entry was taken from one of my favourite war films, The Battle of Britain. It was uttered by the great Ralph Richardson. The film does have some great one-liners. I must run that DVD again some time.
Boeing has no intentions of being left behind in the commercial race for space. I have been hearing for some time about their CST100 capsule. They are doing this on their own dime. I always knew the Boeing guys would eventually get on the commercial bandwagon and the contract to launch and support the Bigelow Aerospace space station seems a key turning point.
Once Elon Musk gets his divorce all worked out so that ownership is clear, I am pretty sure we will be hearing about an IPO at SpaceX.
Take the success of SpaceX, Boeing entering the commercial manned space market and the pending IPO and the expectation I have of a flood of investment money following a big run up in the value of the placement and you have the recipe for a commercial explosion into LEO.
First LEO, then the Moon, Mars… and beyond. Privately.
Now that the Falcon 9 has flown, the Falcon 9 Heavy is looking a lot closer.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the success of SpaceX is that they have designed and orbited multiple clean-sheet design engines; the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launch vehicles; and a test article for a cargo/manned space capsule for about $500M. That’s comparable to the fully burdened (Not the incremental) cost of one shuttle flight. I believe it is less than the escape system development cost on the dead-on-arrival Ares I project.
Bob Bigelow, the operator of two inflatable test habitats in orbit, fired one back at the idiots who claim to be all for free-markets, capitalism and liberty… until their own socialist-space ox gets gored:
“… I don’t understand the critics who say ‘commercial’ entities can’t safely build a capsule. Why is it that Boeing, the company that constructed the ISS itself, can’t safely build a capsule that would go to their own space station? These are the sorts of questions and issues that we will be posing in Washington as a member of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.”
SpaceX has signed a $500M deal to launch the next generation Iridium satellite system.
The mammals are now getting big enough to go for the dinosaurian jugular vein.
Webcast starts in a few minutes. Launch windows runs from 11:00 US East coast until about 15:00 today and the same tomorrow.
You can watch here
1150 EDT: Hold is due to low signal on a Flight Termination System (FTS) antenna because of the hardback being in the way. If that is the problem, it will go away at launch. I expect they are studying the issue and will see if the USAF RSO (Range Safety Officer)will waiver them.
1200 EDT: I have heard a rumor that the issue might be with a transmitter belonging to the ETR (Eastern Test Range).
1226 EDT: A fishing boat with engine trouble is crossing the exclusion zone; They have tested the FTS problem by raising and lowering the hardback. No solid word on when they will continue from the hold or scrub.
1243 EDT: They tested the signal propagation by raising and lowering the hardback; the Reel Insanity fishing boat has been convinced to stay out of the exclusion zone. Waiting to hear if the clock is going to start running again.
1312 EDT: Coast guard is apparently chasing a sail boat away. Word is that it is a lovely Friday and lots of rank amateur boaters are out and not even listening or turning on their marine radios. This is about the 3rd one in a couple hours. I think a few Exocet’s would do, ‘pour encourager les autres’…
1318 EDT: They will be launching soon, going back into terminal count.
1325 EDT: 6 minutes to liftoff. Godspeed SPACEX!
1331 EDT: Terminal count abort. Waitting for word on whether there will be a recycle today. They have done this often on Falcon 1’s, even to the point of detanking and refueling on the pad.
1354 EDT: Still no word on a recycle. There is still time in the current launch window and they have the clock reset and frozen at t-15 minutes.
1357 EDT: They are going to recycle. Waiting for notification of when the count will restart. It was an out of limits event at the terminal count down checks that can be worked with. No word yet on precisely what it was, but I will guess it had to do with engine ignition timing being too tight. All engines are supposed to fire at the same time. Just my guess. There did not appear to be an ignition so it would be something to do with pre-ignition events obviously. Pressures, valve timings, etc.
1427 EDT: count is to resume at 1430 and launch at 1445 if all goes well.
1432 EDT: terminal count has resumed.
1456 EDT: Falcon 9 has had a flawless launch to orbit on the very first test flight. It has carried with it the aerodynamic test article for the first commercial crew capsule. I did not in my wildest dreams expect the first try to go this smoothly. I was here with the Executive Director of NSS and we were both screaming like mad men as each major risk area got ticked off. I’m just limp.
We are in a new age folks.
1540 EDT: An initial congrats is out from NSS
1546 EDT: And SFF
Incoming from Michael Jennings, alerting me to this:
UK survey calls iPhone ‘more important than space travel’
The headline could equally well have said: UK survey calls Sky+ ‘more important than Post-it Notes’, but the iPhone and space travel were what they zeroed in on. Fair enough.
I agree about the relative triviality of space travel, except insofar as it makes things like iPhones work better. I mean, you couldn’t have those maps on your iPhone telling you where you are and where you’re going were it not for GPS, as in S for Satellite, now could you? So, space rockets of some sort are needed for iPhones. But space travel? How significant is that? The bigger point, made by all those surveyees but then contested by the headline writer, is that space travel is now rather oversold, compared to how things are – insofar as they are – hurtling forwards here on Earth. Which, I think, it is.
The people who are for space travel keep going on about how Man Needs to Explore the Universe, and no doubt Man does. But is Man anywhere near ready to make a serious go of that yet? The trouble is that there is so little out there, in the immediate vicinity, accessible to actual men, easily and cheaply, now.
I suspect that the problem is that people, especially political people when composing political speeches, automatically assume an equivalance between the expansion of Europe circa 1500, and the expansion of Earth circa now. But the rest of the world in 1500 was full of stuff, much of it really very near to Europe, and much of it right next to Europe. There was continuous positive reinforcement available to any explorer brave enough to give it a go and lucky enough to hit some kind of paydirt. Now? Communications satellites? Weapons? Tourism? Astronomy? All we can yet really do in space is make various very Earthly enterprises work that little bit better. Which is not a trivial thing, and I’m certainly not saying we should give up even on that. All hail Virgin Galactic! Go SpaceX. But for many decades, most of the important space action will be in geo-stationary orbit rather than anywhere beyond.
And as for that constant libertarian refrain you hear about how Earth is becoming a tyranny and we must all migrate to space, to rediscover freedom, etc. … Please. People found freedom in America because there was this great big place to feed themselves with. America. Settlements in America were, pretty soon, potentially if not actually, self-supporting. Our technology has a long way to go before a colony on some god-forsaken wasteland like the Moon or Mars, without even breathable air, could ever be self supporting, in the event of Mission Control back on Earth getting shut down by something like an Earth war of some kind. Profitable, maybe, eventually. But able to stay alive without continuous contact with Earthly back-up of various kinds? That will take far longer. The reality is that for the foreseeable future, any humans who set up camp on the Moon or Mars or wherever will be far more dependent upon the continuing and sustained goodwill of powerful people back on Earth than the average Earthling is. There is no America out there, or China, or Australia or Africa. Those early European pioneers found a world full of land and resources, to say nothing of semi-friendly aliens whom we Europeans could trade with. But now? Just a few little rocks and gas blobs bobbing about in a vast sea of utter emptiness, emptiness that is an order of magnitude emptier than our actual sea, which is a cornucopia by comparison. And apart from that, for decades, nothing seriously big that isn’t literally light years away. It’s an entirely different state of affairs to Europe in 1500.
I wrote all of the above with my own personal blog in mind, but now realise that Samizdata is the place for it, if only because of all the enlightening and perhaps contradictory comments that may become attached. And since this is liable to be picked to pieces by people most of whom are far more technologically savvy than I am, it behoves me to rephrase it all as a question. Which can basically be summarised as: Is that right? Am I missing something here?
Am I, for instance, getting too hung up on mere distance? Yes the Solar System is almost entirely empty. Yes, the Asteroid Belt is a hell of a way away. But, if you are willing to be patient, is it actually quite cheap to send rockets there? Does all that emptiness cancel itself out as a barrier to travel, because of it being so easy (and so much easier than our Earthly sea) to get across?
I actually would quite like to be told that I am wrong about this. In particular, I really really wish that there was somewhere else nearby where the Fight For Liberty blah blah could be restaged, but on better terms to how the same fight seems now to be going here on Earth. But I just , as of now, don’t see that happening any time soon.
Hardly a day seems to go by nowadays without somebody with approximately the same kind of political attitude as me scratching his head, publicly, in writing, about President Obama’s bafflingly sensible space policy, which sticks out like a healthy thumb in an otherwise horribly mutilated hand of policies.
Critics are disturbed by the large and unprecedented role Mr. Obama sees for the private sector in space exploration. For a president who is often accused of being a socialist, he has more faith in the ingenuity of the private sector than his detractors do.
Maybe so. But how could someone so opposed to free market notions here on earth be so keen on them in space? I would like to offer a version of President Obama which maybe makes sense of this puzzle. What follows is sort of a joke. I certainly hope that readers of it will be entertained. But I also think it might be true. → Continue reading: On the unintended consequences of President Obama
I have been rather scarce lately and those who know me well enough probably know some of what I have been up to. Much has been either of little interest to our readership or has had me too busy to even talk about it. However, I have been up to a bit of aeronautical fun the last couple Saturdays which some of you might enjoy hearing about.
For some years I have known about the F4F Wildcat which the Ulster Aviation Society pulled out of the lough where it had rusted in pieces for a half a century. I had no way to get out to the hanger where the restoration work has been going on until last weekend when I finally convinced someone to give me a lift. Once there, others decided they really could use my set of reasonably skilled hands… and the rest is history as they say. Actually all of it is history: this is a genuine British WWII veteran that ditched one winter’s day while out on a patrol from this very airfield.
It has taken them over ten years to get here, but she is beginning to shape up quite nicely.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
My first job was to install a small fitting between the outside and inside of the cockpit, so I had to contort myself into odd positions to ratchet in bolts to re-install a 65 year old part to the restored fuselage skin. I also learned that a 6mm metric wrench does quite nicely on a 1/4 inch bolt…
It is a good thing I got skinny again… I spent a good chunk of the day squeezed in here.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
After accomplishing that small task, the foreman, a retired ATC from Aldergrove (BFS), gave me a slightly bigger job. I was told to pull an aluminum fitting from the cockpit port side where the combination of new and old parts had been pressed in for a fit check, and then to do all the filing, cleaning and priming to ready the part for use.
This will eventually contain some controls near the pilot’s left elbow
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The hanger is itself history. During WWII Shorts built Stirling Bombers here. The Stirling was a big airplane and stood high on its long undercarriage. If you have ever seen a picture of one you will never forget it.
The Wildcat is not the only airframe in this ancient hanger. There is also a Blackburn Buccaneer, a Shorts Tucano, a number of classic helicopters, a Shorts 330, and a few other airframes that are only to be found here. There is even a recently retired RAF Canberra photo recon plane due to arrive any month now.
My second favorite after the Wildcat however is the Suez War veteran Sea Hawk. Even just sitting there it seems to be telling me “I want to fly!!!” The office is quite comfortable but I could not convince them to move all those other aeroplanes out of the way and let me take it for a spin. Well, there is one other problem: someone built a large building in the middle of where the WWII runway used to be. Oh well…
Did you say catapult one or two?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
So is the closure of Europe and Britain’s airspace really needed to ensure safety?
‘We simply checked every single aircraft very carefully after the landing in Frankfurt to see whether there was any damage that could have been caused by volcanic ash,” Weber said. ”Not the slightest scratch was found on any of the 10 planes.”
German air traffic control said Air Berlin and Condor had carried out similar flights.
[…]
Air Berlin Chief Executive Joachim Hunold declared himself ”amazed” that the results of the German airlines’ flights ”did not have any influence whatsoever on the decisions taken by the aviation safety authorities.”
Quelle surprise!
When I was a wee kid growing up on my folks’ farm in East Anglia, it was a common sight, in the 1970s and 80s, to see RAF Jaguar and Tornado jet aircraft practicing very low flying over the flat (ish) fields of that part of the UK. Typically, a Jag could fly no more than 100 ft off the deck, so low in fact that you could see all the markings on the side of the aircraft, what sort of stuff it was carrying, etc. The idea was to get under the opposition’s radar. These aircraft were practicing the sort of flying that would be needed against the-then Warsaw Pact ground forces of the time. (The Jaguar was a very effective strike aircraft).
But nothing, absolutely nothing, compares with flying as low as this. Ye gods!
Here’s another.
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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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