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.
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Rand Simberg has a nice article at Pajamas Media today on a topic which he and I and others have been harping on for many months: Republican socialists. The Utah delegation is one of the worst in this regard. To them, NASA is simply a State Jobs Program. It keeps the re-election funds coming in and whether they actually make anything useful or not does not really matter.
A NASA official once privately corrected me when I insisted I they would be forced to build a heavy lift vehicle (HLV), “We’ll spend money on it…”
There lies the problem. There is arguably no real point in an HLV at this time. There is most certainly no need for one with ATK multi-segment rocket boosters (SRB’s) of the sort which accomplished the self-disassembly of the space shuttle Challenger in January 1986. I admit, that is a cheap shot, but I think it is an accurate one. Yes, SRB’s give a lot of thrust at start up. Yes they are stable for long term storage. Yes they are a great way to deliver munitions to faraway places. And NO, they are not a good way to build affordable access to space.
The only player in the commercial space game that is using anything like a solid rocket is Virgin Galactic, and their engine is a hybrid, not the same thing at all. Hybrids have solid fuel but use a liquid oxidizer. This allows throttling in real time. More importantly, if necessary, they can be turned OFF. The big ATK SRB engines can only be shut down by blowing off the end caps, and that has rather extreme aerodynamic braking effects.
The Utah delegation wants a new generation of white elephant built at the tax payers expense. They are not at all pleased with the idea that a new generation of commercially minded people are building spaceships which will bring their party to an end.
PS: If you have questions, I will meet you in the comment room as time allows and may well invite a few of my rocket designer friends if needed.
An American friend of mine, Andrew Ian Dodge – known to several folks around here – has recently undergone a deeply unpleasant encounter with airport security types in the US, thanks to those lovely folk from the TSA. A few years back, Andrew had surgery for cancer treatment, and bears the scars of that. It seems that he suffered a lot of discomfort when a TSA character tried to pat him down, as they say. What the TSA goons may not have realised, since Andrew is not your regular stiff in a suit as he dresses more like a rocker clad in plenty of leather, is that he has some pretty weighty political connections, and will use them. There will be consequences.
I am not an expert on the pros and cons of scanner technologies, or whether they flood the body with dangerous radiation, and so on. What I do know is that this sort of outrage will always happen when certain persons, such as TSA officials, have that moment of supreme power over anyone else, as in a queue for security at a busy airport. What I suspect is different, however, between the USA and the UK is that the former country, as demonstrated by the recent successes of the Tea Party movement, has not yet entirely decided to kowtow to the conventional wisdom. So there is a decent chance, I think, that Congressmen and women might try and smack the TSA down, and hard. We can only hope. Back in the UK, there seems to be scant chance of this occurring. Our sheeplike habits are now too ingrained.
There is a good article in the Wall Street Journal on the same issue. And NickM, of Counting Cats, has an absolute blinder of a post on the subject. As he says, whatever excitements may once have attended air travel – at least the nice kind of excitements – are dead. The only people who can enjoy such travel these days are the mega-rich and politicians. As for the rest of us, we get the dubious pleasure of being felt up by the state’s functionaries.
I ran across this item in a Jane’s Newsletter this morning:
US, Japan agree to diversify rare earth minerals. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara agreed on 28 October that diversifying sources of rare earth minerals was a priority in the wake of China’s freeze on exports to Japan. These minerals are indispensible to modern defence systems and see commercial use in mobile phones, wind turbines, televisions and hybrid electric drives
Rare earth elements, with names like Yttrium, Scandium, Lanthanum and Praeseodymium, are critical to a modern industrial society. They appear in lasers, high tech alloys, superconductors, and much else. China is applying Mercantilist practices to corner a larger share of the global market in high end electronics. They are the largest producer of the strategic REE’s and see this as an advantage in a geopolitical sense as well.
It will not work however. They may well be the current largest producer, but these elements exist all over the world. In the short term they will gain an advantage. Over the medium to longer term they will accomplish the same thing ITAR regulations accomplished for the United States. They will create a thriving industry elsewhere and it will eventually ‘eat their lunch’.
To paraphrase an old saw: “You can’t fool Mother Market.”
As I noted yesterday, Scaled Composities carried out the SpaceShipTwo drop test. Rand Simberg linked to their video.
She really looks lovely in flight and the pilot really did grease it in. I can tell from the closeup of the touchdown that the pilot had a bit of crosswind component and it did not cause any problems at all.
I have received notice that SpaceX will be running an engine test firing on the pad pretty soon. The second test flight of the Falcon 9 includes a full up Dragon capsule and they will be attempting their first test of the re-entry and recovery of the cargo (and later on passenger) capsule.
I suspect the political situation may have caused them to wait awhile on this, although the time since the first test flight is not overly long ago, only a matter of a few months. I am assuming that Elon would not want to risk a test flight failure during the time when the porkers in Congress were in a frenzy looking for any ammunition they could find to keep all funds flowing to the Ministries of Aviation rather than purchasing services from commercial space providers.
Since the House voted by a very wide margin to accept the Senate bill (which did not cut private space usage nearly as deeply), SpaceX can now risk a second flight.
I give the second flight about 90% chance of attaining orbit like the first flight and 50% chance of a successful re-entry and recovery of the Dragon capsule.
I will keep you informed as I hear more…. oh, and by the way. there was a successful drop test of SpaceShipTwo today.
I have been seeing a great deal of these folks lately.
6 km/sec aluminum slugs fired by a railgun built by a small company. Is that cool or what?
I just read the details on the SpaceX Dragon capsule drop test which occurred earlier this month.
Rand Simberg pointed out this article. The level of incompetence shown by ‘professional journalist’ Peter Fenn is simply breathtaking to those who know the subject matter.
When I read something like this, it lowers my already sub-basement level of trust in professional media. If they are this bad on things where I know what is going on, what might they be feeding me in areas where I lack such inside knowledge?
It is really quite scary.
Business partner Rand Simberg has this to say about the attempts of Congress to design pork propelled rockets. The only practical idea in the lot is the BFR from SpaceX, and that (in my opinion) only if a market of 500 Metric Tons or so a year materializes.
I have expected this to come along as it seemed an obvious market step for SpaceX. They have announced their plans to enter the Heavy Lift arena.
If you are familiar with the politics in DC right now, this really puts the cat amongst the pigeons.
Rand Simberg attended the Boeing press conference and has supplied some notes on their CST-100 plans.
I am glad to see there will be competition in the LEO cargo and business passenger field. As much as I like Elon and what he has accomplished, there is nothing like real competition to grow the market.
According to a Janes newsletter:
US Navy successfully tests laser with close-in weapon. The US Navy has for the first time in a maritime environment successfully destroyed four unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) targets with a laser, essentially proving the basic premise of adding a directed-energy weapon to Raytheon’s Phalanx close-in weapon system. The trial was sponsored by the US Naval Sea Systems Command’s (NAVSEA’s) PMS 405 Directed Energy Weapons programme office and used the navy’s own Laser Weapon System (LaWS) equipment, developed in conjunction with the Dahlgren Naval Surface Warfare .Center Dahlgren Division, combined with a Phalanx weapon mount.
The era of the ray cannon has arrived.
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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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