The Sun shines
The birds sing
Heralding Earth, stirring from its slumber
But all is despair
For The Walking Dead is over
And I am sad.
After Midnight
If your blood pressure’s not high enough today, then head on over to American Spectator to read about the “Two Midnight Rule.”
This is precisely the kind of NHS-style bureaucratic nightmare we all worried about, and it came to pass even sooner than anyone imagined: a family’s beloved father is dead because of a turn of phrase in a law that nobody read, including the “man” who signed it. There are no words to describe how infuriating this is — it’s impossible to comprehend how this man’s family must feel.
Read the whole thing, if you can stand it. If not, here’s the key takeaway:
The “two midnight rule” became a death sentence for Frank Alfisi. An Obamacare Catch-22.
Simply put: Frank Alfisi could not be admitted to the hospital because he needed dialysis. Dialysis does not require a “two midnight” stay in the hospital. So, therefore, Frank would not be admitted as an in-patient and given dialysis. And since the lack of dialysis — which was deliberate per the Obamacare directive to the CMS — had now made Frank so sick that it resulted in two seizures and unconsciousness, a need for oxygen and a wheelchair, Frank certainly was no longer qualified to be an outpatient at DaVita.
This wasn’t even in the law, it was part of a 1500-page regulation as a result of the law. If you or a loved one rely on Medicare, this is your future.
In some measure this can be chalked up to unintended consequences: pass a 3000-page bill that nobody had time to read before voting on it, and that’s what happens. Which is, of course, why I can’t think these consequences are “unintended.” In the long run this clause will save the government money by causing old people to die off sooner. The bastards knew exactly what they were doing and didn’t give a damn about who it might hurt, because Greater Good or whatever.
God save us from politicians hawking good intentions, because their intentions are rarely good. First, last, and always, they are about control. So what if a few eggs got broken; just look at that tasty omelet!
I’ve been ruminating about this for a long time, as it’s increasingly obvious that very few people in politics are actually working in our best interests. Washington is a company town, and the local industry is politics. Its products are laws and regulations, and so it becomes everyone’s interest to craft them in a way to bring in as much profit as possible.
Economics, in other words. But this isn’t private industry operating in a free market, and so the profiteers aren’t labor and management. They’re politicians and their various hangers-on, including the parasitic lobbyist class.
There are precious few national-level politicians whom I believe are honestly working for our interests — and even they have their own agendas. Which is fine, so long as it aligns with the nation’s and adheres to the Constitution. And that’s what it really comes down to: do you, or do you not, believe that our government must perform within the limits defined by our Constitution?
If you don’t, then we have no common ground for compromise. You must therefore be defeated at every opportunity, because your beliefs will ultimately end this nation. And we are getting dangerously close to that tipping point.
Strangling the Baby
Why are the Feds so afraid to let humanity out of its crib?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370895/pilot-shortage-made-congress-jillian-kay-melchior
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/02/07/nield-moritorium-regulations-2015/
The above links are not entirely unrelated. While the flight crew experience minimums came down from on high (or wherever it is Congress resides), the sudden reversal on regulating spaceflight perfectly illustrates how our government looks at us lately. The FAA is just the branch I have the most personal experience with and they’ve been getting decidedly too big for their britches lately: Weight & Balance rules that will grind airline ops to a screeching halt, directing AMEs to assume anyone over a certain BMI needs a CPAP machine, classifying off-the-shelf R/C models fitted with GoPro cameras as “drones” to be regulated.
Deciding it’s time to regulate in-development spacecraft and orbital operations tells me the Feds have decided that literally nothing is beyond their reach. Pardon me, Mr. Nield, but you have not the slightest damned idea what you’re talking about. Assuming the past 50 years of NASA-centric spaceflight experience puts you in a position to dictate standards to companies who’ve set out to break that mold is the worst kind of hidebound bureaucratic “thinking.”
Over the last fifty years, how much demonstrable progress has been made on reusable launchers? If your answer is “space shuttle” then you’re missing my point. Each orbiter had to go through the rough equivalent of an airline heavy-check every single time they flew. If we did that, we’d be out of business just as surely as if we threw away our airplanes after each trip.
Did anyone anticipate SpaceX would be able to create a reusable first stage that lands on its tail like something from a 1950’s sci-fi movie? Or XCOR’s runway-to-suborbit spaceplane? How would either of those fit into standards that by Nield’s logic should be based on NASA legacy systems?
Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t even manage that, regulate.
Get out of our way.
I Told Orville and I Told Wilbur…
“…that thing will never fly.”
Behold the Sky Whale:
I’m not sure how this thing found its way onto a “serious” news organization’s website, but apparently CNN is easily fooled. Which we already knew. Just remember this is an artistic concept that would be a better fit for Deviant Art instead of a major news outlet. But io9 is a whole other kettle of fish…frankly I expected more informed commentary from their readers, or at least not trashing of commenters who do in fact know what they’re talking about.
If you haven’t noticed, this is exactly what I was cranked up about in my last post: people with actual expertise offering informed criticism are ignored (if not outright ridiculed) by those who don’t have a freaking clue. Because they’re a bunch of armchair quarterbacks or unimaginative dullards or have been brainwashed by The Man, or something.
But, but–look at the pretty pictures! Clearly, aerodynamicists and engineers aren’t capable of such out-of-the-box concepts because they’re constrained by the shackles of their corporate overlords. Or maybe physics.
I Am So Smart, S-M-R-T…
So I’m chilling in the family room the other day while the house is uncommonly quiet. The writer in me screams “get to work!” while the slacker in me argues “but ‘Idiocracy’ is on Comedy Central!”
Which brings us to the first blog post of the new year (“But it’s the middle of January,” you say? Yeah, well you might have noticed my Christmas theme was still up as of yesterday morning. Hard work may pay off eventually, but procrastination pays off right now).
Yes, I did turn off the movie but not before a few Deep Thoughts bubbled to the surface. Or maybe it was the burrito I had for lunch. Whatev. So I’m watching that scene where the only man left on Earth who knows how plants grow is arguing with a bunch of brain-dead ninnies (the President’s cabinet–so not much different than today) about why you can’t irrigate crops with Gatorade.
I fear that our culture is rapidly heading that way, but you already knew that. It’s not like I’m the only one pointing that out. And it brought to mind an essay at The Federalist titled The Death of Expertise:
Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy…
Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge. It assuredly does not mean that “everyone’s opinion about anything is as good as anyone else’s.” And yet, this is now enshrined as the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense…
I fear we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.
Just so you know I’m not spending all of my time cruising the ‘net, I’ve come across a similar sentiment whilst doing background research for that long-awaited Perigee sequel:
Irate SF fans will sometimes attempt to refute scientific theories they find inconvenient. While this is permitted for SF writers (as long as they don’t make a habit of it and wash their hands afterwards) it is more worrisome with fans who think they can prove the Starship Enterprise’s warp drive is possible in the real world. Their self-confidence is good, but they have about the same chance of success as a child in a soapbox derby car winning the Indy 500. It ain’t gonna happen, and for the same reason. A dilettante with home-made gear cannot hope to compete with trained professionals with precision equipment.
That’s from the fantastic Atomic Rockets, your one-stop-shopping for understanding the physical realities of spaceflight. I particularly loved this bit:
So you know, university Physics is essentially three years of this discussion among like-minded enthusiasts. Done with supercomputers, access to the textbook collections of five continents and thirty languages.
On four hours sleep a night.
With no sex.
You’re not going to find the loophole these guys missed.
For the record, I’m just impressed that the dude finished in three years.
Ignorance is dangerous when practiced in large numbers, and I turn a special kind of angry when herds of muttonheads whip themselves into foamy froths of stupid. A few juicy examples:
1. The anti-gun movement. “High-magazine clips”, anyone? Never have so few with such little understanding tried to constrain so many with plenty of understanding. When ignorant TV hosts hyperventilate about the unbelievably powerful AR-15 (I’m looking at you, Piers), I have to laugh. Try an M-1A on for size, princess. Or for that matter, Browning’s semiautomatic BAR hunting rifle. Either one of them will send more powerful rounds downrange than a .223 poodle gun (though I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of an AR, either). My point is that everything is an “assault rifle” to these people, even a pump-action shotgun if it’s black with a telescoping stock and pistol grip. Because shut up. It’s for The Children.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the 2nd Amendment is an individual right and therefore membership in a state-sanctioned militia is not necessary to own or carry a firearm. I’m not going to get into what constitutes a “militia” for these purposes, go read the Heller v. DC decision for yourself. Just because some people find guns icky and frightening does not allow them to restrict or deny the rights of those who don’t. The anti-gunners wouldn’t be able to even if they were in the majority for the exact same reason the Westboro Baptists get to behave like assclowns at the funerals of fallen heroes: it’s a right protected by our Constitution. If you want to remove that right, you’ll have to repeal the 2nd Amendment. Period.
What’s even more ominous is that as a people we have an alarmingly superficial understanding of the contents and principles of our founding document. Just because something seems like the “right thing to do” doesn’t necessarily make it constitutional. These are the guardrails that protect our liberties by constraining our government from just making crap up as they go along (at least until recently).
When people who should know better prattle on about how we can’t divine the intentions of the Framers, they’re either willfully ignorant or intentionally misleading. Ever heard of the Federalist Papers? How about the Anti-Federalists? You can thank the latter for our Bill of Rights, because they wouldn’t vote to ratify the Constitution without a promise that the new Congress’ first order of business would be to vote on those amendments. Amazingly, the Federalists kept their word. Can you imagine such a thing happening in today’s Congress? The anti-Feds would’ve been rolled like a cheap cigar. This was back when men had honor and used words for something other than running cons.
2. Young-Earth Creationists. I can already hear my inbox filling up with hate-mail over this one, but hear me out: I want to agree with you. But I can’t, based on the available evidence. I believe that our universe has a divine Creator and that Man is His most cherished creation. The Bible is God’s inspired word but that doesn’t necessarily mean I want my kid using it to study for his Chemistry class. And I suspect God is okay with that.
Our translations of the Bible are just that: translations. I’m not suggesting they’re in error, but there are some words from ancient Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek that simply don’t translate well in modern English at all. In ancient Hebrew, Adam and Eve simply meant Man and Woman. And their word for “day” was commonly used to describe an “age”, such as we’d use to label, say, the Industrial Age. So let’s keep that in mind when someone tries to determine the age of the universe with nothing but a Bible and a calculator. Also keep in mind that we believe the Lord dictated Genesis to Moses six thousand years ago, how do you think He’d describe a complex matter such as the creation of the freaking universe? Think it’d involve subatomic particles, singularities and inflationary states? Me neither. It’s a big-picture view of the creation and fall of man written so that anyone can get the picture. Can’t we just leave it at that?
Here’s the deal, people: if you want to argue against something then you’d better make sure you understand what you’re arguing against. We may be uncomfortable with the theological implications of random selection, but you’re not going to change minds by bleating about “gaps in the theory.” I have faith that my God is bigger than all of this and that some things may remain beyond our understanding, but just because we may encounter something that’s beyond our current ability to explain does not mean it can never be explained.
And for that matter, stop with the “evolution is just a theory” nonsense. Everything in science is a theory, but that word has been tossed around so casually for so long that most people now conflate it with its first cousins, Hypothesis and Conjecture…
A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation. Scientists create scientific theories from hypotheses that have been corroborated through the scientific method, then gather evidence to test their accuracy. As with all forms of scientific knowledge, scientific theories are inductive in nature and aim for predictive and explanatory force.
Got that? Here’s a few more for you: gravity, relativity, and electromagnetism are all theories…anyone care to dispute them? Very few make it to the exalted level of “Law” and even those are extremely specific (such as Newton’s Laws of Motion or the Laws of Thermodynamics). Ever hear of the Germ Theory of Disease? Even though it’s “just a theory” it’s still a pretty reliable predictor of why people get sick. And if it weren’t for our understanding of certain aspects of evolution, we wouldn’t have a lot of the medicine we take for granted today. Relativity is likewise “just a theory” but your GPS wouldn’t work if all those satellites weren’t compensated for Einstein’s theories of time dilation.
Science is not inherently anti-God just because some scientists use it as a crutch to defy Him. Unfortunately they tend to be the most vocal, but that just means we have to be willing to understand their arguments and confront them head-on. And whenever one gets caught falsifying evidence to keep his grant money flowing (or to make inconvenient people shut up), make an example of them. But for all our sakes, know what you’re talking about when you do so, because all of the desperate “alternate theories” of creation that I’m familiar with are just plain embarrassing. There’s a reason they don’t show Flintstones reruns on the Science Channel, so try not to represent it as such. God did not call us to make fools of ourselves.
Science cannot prove or disprove the nature of God because He is supernatural. He cannot be directly observed or tested, which points to the fundamental weakness of Intelligent Design (a concept I agree with philosphically but fail to see how it could ever be considered “science”).
3. Global Warming. Good grief, where to start? This may be the single biggest source of the problem that originally got me on this rant. Let’s just postulate that real science is never “settled” and ultimately doesn’t rely on “consensus.”
There are a lot of bullies in this movement, a lot of manipulated data, falsified stories, and outright character assassination. Too many to recount here, in fact, and I’ve just about run out of steam. So check out Watts Up With That?, Climate Depot, and Dr. Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. blog for some contrarian points of view from people who know what they’re talking about.
In short this all comes down to one principle: we’re all entitled to our own opinions. We are not entitled to our own facts. For the good of our nation, our culture, and ourselves, it’s up to each of us to understand the difference.
Merry Christmas!
How the West was Hosed
Pictures being worth a thousand words, I give you the American President and British Prime Minister through history. Let’s start with 1945:
1985 (ish):
And then there’s last week:
OK, so FDR and Reagan weren’t being tempted by hot Danish blondes. But something tells me that wouldn’t have mattered.
Time to Jarhead Up (Ranger, Frogman…whatever your preference), because when the Visigoths finally come over the hills to crash the gates of Rome these clowns sure won’t be there to defend us.
Out of the Blue
Infamously close-mouthed Blue Origin (the Jeff Bezos company that’s not named Amazon) announced a successful full-mission-profile test of their BE3 rocket engine:
Blue Origin, the commercial space company bankrolled by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, plans to begin unmanned orbital flight tests of its biconic-shape human capsule in 2018. Ultimately, the company will use an orbital launch vehicle powered at least in part by a clean-sheet cryogenic engine it now has demonstrated can support suborbital human spaceflight.
But wait! There’s more:
The characteristically secretive Kent, Wash.-based startup unveiled new details about the BE-3 Dec. 3 in a rare and unusually informative question-and-answer session with Rob Meyerson, president and program manager…
In the test, the engine ran for 145 sec. at full throttle, then shut down for 4.5 min. to simulate the coasting phase that will take New Shepard out of the atmosphere. This was followed by a restart and throttle-down to the 25,000-lb.-thrust level it will need to bring the reusable booster back to Earth for a tail-down landing while the capsule parachutes home…
Work building up to the full-cycle BE-3 test in November was conducted over nine months and included 160 starts and 9,100 sec. of engine operation. “That equates to a test every two days, and sometimes actually three or four tests per day,” says Meyerson.
So yeah, they’ve been kinda busy. Can’t say I blame them for keeping a tight lid on things because it certainly makes announcements like this a little more attention-grabbing.
NewSpace is a great example of the good that comes from free markets: men who’ve already made substantial fortunes through internet innovations then plow those profits into the things they’re most passionate about. In turn, they will create entire new industries and expand our economy into the solar system. This is a multi-decade process with an entirely unknown end state, but I believe it’s key to preserving our Republic (not to mention a national intervention to rehab our crack-addled Uncle Sam).
Not because space exploration is inspiring, adventurous, unique, or dangerous (though it is all of those). It’s because the only thing humans can create from nothing is wealth. The ugly truth is we need the money, because that $17,000,000,000,000+ debt is an enormous overhang on our economy. And it isn’t going away anytime soon.
You know who got rich off of the gold rush? Certainly not the prospectors who gave up everything to pan for precious metals in the mountain West. Nope, it was all of the store owners and hoteliers and railroad men who showed up to provide all the stuff they needed. Infrastructure follows development, not the other way around.
Free people making their way in a previously untapped frontier will lead to all sorts of unexpected opportunities. Just watch and learn from these baby steps.
Stuff Rich People Do
In sharp (and welcome) contrast to my last post, witness the power of this fully armed and operational free market:
Today, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) successfully completed its first geostationary transfer mission, delivering the SES-8 satellite to its targeted 295 x 80,000 km orbit. Falcon 9 executed a picture-perfect flight, meeting 100% of mission objectives.
Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at 5:41 PM Eastern Time. Approximately 185 seconds into flight, Falcon 9’s second stage’s single Merlin vacuum engine ignited to begin a five minute, 20 second burn that delivered the SES-8 satellite into its parking orbit. Eighteen minutes after injection into the parking orbit, the second stage engine relit for just over one minute to carry the SES-8 satellite to its final geostationary transfer orbit. The restart of the Falcon 9 second stage is a requirement for all geostationary transfer missions.
As one might expect, the Wall Street Journal had a bit more coverage of the business angle. Here’s the (literal) money bit:
Before the mission, SpaceX said by 2015 it planned to double rocket production to about 24 annually.
If SpaceX achieves its goals, it will vindicate a host of satellite manufacturers, operators and space agencies that have revised business plans based on the availability of the Falcon 9. In some cases, SpaceX foresees competing head-to-head with Europe’s Arianespace, which often launches dual satellites aboard its heavy-lift Ariane 5 ECA rocket.
SpaceX emphasizes that it developed the original Falcon 9 for under $300 million—or roughly half of the Pentagon’s overall cost to launch a single spy satellite on the heavy-lift version of the Delta IV rocket initially developed by Boeing.
Industry officials estimate SES got a discount from the roughly $60 million SpaceX officials have talked about as the typical price tag for such a launch. Many industry officials, though, predict SpaceX’s prices eventually will climb to about $100 million per launch.
Keep in mind these “industry officials” are almost certainly just spouting the company line while hoping it comes true, particularly if SpaceX pulls off a successful recovery and reuse of a Falcon 9 first stage next year. If that happens, that crashing sound you hear will be the Borg Collective Boeing/LockMart/USAF/NASA launch business model collapsing.
No power in the ‘verse can stop it.
Uninspiring
After getting our hopes up last February, Dennis Tito’s Inspiration Mars project has finally released the results of their mission architecture study. Apparently they ran head-on into Grissom’s Law: No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
There’s really no other way to interpret this in my unprofessional opinion. Their presentation to Congress last week feels like a “Hail Mary” play that is less about available technology than it is available funding.
My guess is Inspiration Mars determined that a commercial approach was the most feasible. Given the current state of vehicle development, we’re much more likely to see actual working hardware from SpaceX than we are NASA. Going through their presentation, it’s clear they went to great pains to avoid throwing any hints in the direction of the former.
This is particularly telling:
Inspiration Mars’s chief technology officer Taber McCallum says the group made an exhaustive effort not to involve NASA, but ultimately failed. “Our bias really was, we’re going to do this commercially. That’s what we tried like hell to do.”
The issue is the sheer amount of gear required for a human mission. The crew will need a module that will keep them alive for the duration of the trip, including all their food, radiation shielding, and a separate pod to protect them during the high-speed re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Launching all this along with the crew is impossible with existing spacecraft, the report found.
Even if you break the mission into several separate launches, getting all the gear into space would take at least three launches with planned commercial vehicles, such as the privately built SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, which has yet to fly.
Gotta love that last bit. Falcon Heavy’s development is well under way and the first flight is planned for late 2014-early 2015. Given SpaceX’s record of actually doing what they intend to do, why all the skepticism? Does anyone really think SLS will be as far along before then, or that NASA could bring such a project in for under a billion?
Not to mention a stretched Cygnus module, closed-loop life support which doesn’t yet exist, and reentry in an Orion capsule variant that hasn’t even been discussed yet. As a wise man recently pointed out, our government used to launch men to the moon. Now they can’t even launch a website.
Meanwhile, Dragon was designed from the outset to be capable of typical Mars-return reentry velocities. While IM’s 14km/sec entry is beyond even that high bar, it’s a safe bet that Musk & Co. are much more likely to come up with a capable heat shield than the current government arrangement.
While an all-commercial approach would’ve been the most likely path to success, that comes with a price – literally. This would have been entirely on IM’s shoulders, meaning real money needed to be spent to guarantee the hardware would be available in time for the 2018 launch window. Apparently the money wasn’t there, and wasn’t going to be there anytime soon.
I can see engineers advising Mr. Tito that a couple of Falcon Heavy launches with a Dragon capsule and some kind of Bigelow hab module would be just the ticket. Then the accountants stepped in and made it clear they couldn’t afford that ticket and no amount of frequent-flier miles would make up the difference.
So they dropped back to punt (yes I’m mixing up football metaphors but just run with me here), settling on a NASA-centric architecture in the hopes that they could gin up enough support, with the understanding that Congress and NASA are flailing about to find a purpose for SLS. If they’re hellbent on building it anyway, maybe this would give them better cover than just recreating Apollo 8. And a hard deadline certainly wouldn’t hurt.
Shrewd and desperate. But mostly desperate. At least it didn’t take long for NASA to see right through this and call BS on the whole deal.
Given SpaceX’s goals of reaching Mars, I was always curious as to why they weren’t the obvious partner for such a project even if it meant waiting until the 2021 window. That extra few years could make an enormous difference in capabilities while adding a manned Venus flyby to their intinerary. I’d be happy to throw a billion at that if my last name were Gates or Buffet.
A very disappointing development.
The Chiles Files 