Author: Pat Chiles

An expatriate Southerner in the Midwest, writing about writing and whatever dadgum else interests him. Author of the science fiction thrillers FROZEN ORBIT, FRONTIER, and ESCAPE ORBIT, published by Baen Books.
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Layovers

This whole “Inspiration Mars” free-return mission is getting a lot of well-deserved attention, and one analysis I stumbled into today is worth pointing out.

A recent piece by Dennis Wingo at SpaceRef offers what may look like some convoluted routes to Mars, except that the peculiarities of orbital mechanics actually reduce the trip time in some cases. Sixteen months in a flying RV would really be worth it if you could also fly by the Moon and Venus on your way around Mars. Seems to me if you’re going to go to all that trouble anyway, you might as well tailor the orbit to do just that.

So it’s not exactly like the airline’s around-your-@$$-to-reach-your-elbow routes. Cleveland to LA via New Jersey, for example, isn’t quite the same thing as Earth-Moon-Venus-Mars-Earth.

A human Grand Tour of the inner Solar System, paid for with private funds: this is the age I’ve been waiting for.

The downside is they’d have to be prepared to leave in 2017, not 2018. But if outfits like SpaceX can keep this up, they might just make it:

I don’t know who said it first, but I first saw this quote at Rand Simberg’s place: “It shouldn’t be NASA’s job to send men to Mars. It should be their job to make it possible for the National Geographic Society to send men to Mars.”

As they say, Nature abhors a vacuum. If NASA wasn’t going to do it, somebody was eventually going to step up.

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Good Riddance

Totalitarian Socialist Hugo Chavez has assumed room temperature. Maybe, just maybe, Venezuela now has a chance at actual prosperity. Wish I could get my hopes up, as any prosperous nation in our hemisphere is a good thing for everyone, but the history of that region doesn’t bear much faith in a good outcome.

I hadn’t planned on devoting any time to this until stumbling into a tweet that absolutely infuriated me. Behold the staggering idiocy of an actual U.S. Representative. Once more, the mask slips. It’ll be instructive to see how many more Lefties fully out themselves in the next few days in their fervor to mourn a man whom the world is better off without.

Commies stink. Especially when they hold elected office.

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Sequester Track

Since flight delays are one of the most over-hyped metrics of Sequestrageddon (no doubt to be followed next year by Sequestrageddon II: This Time, it’s Personal), let’s use a little modern technology to follow the decline of American civilization in real time:

Remember, flight delays have already started. Trust us. And ignore that man behind the curtain!

Wow. Just look at the path of fiscal destruction wrought upon our national airspace system! One cringes in horror. It must be falling into chaos ’cause DHS says so. And their fingers are on the collective pulse of the nation…right?

Ahem…

U.S. airports, including Los Angeles International and O’Hare International in Chicago, are already experiencing delays in waiting lines as a result of automatic federal spending cuts, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Monday.

Their fingers are probing a collective something, alright, but it ain’t our pulse.

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Pack the Air Freshener

“I told you to go before we left!” Credit: SpaceX/NASA

In case you’re thinking about signing up for that Inspiration Mars trip, there’s a little something you should know…

Radiation is a substantial risk to humans once they’re beyond the protection of Earth’s magnetic field. There are lots of ideas for mitigating this, most of which involve some form of just rearranging the stuff they’d already have to bring with them. Food and water immediately come to mind, especially water. Since any water supplies on such a long-duration flight would have to continually recycled, we’d be talking about a fairly constant volume. But there is one other “value-added” radiation shield that would build up during the trip.

Can you think of what that might be? Anyone?

Hint: monkeys fling it.

 

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Vacation Plans

If anyone (and their significant other) is looking for a once-in-a-lifetime trip in a few years, then bazillionaire Dennis Tito has just the deal for you:

The Crazy Plan to Fly Two Humans to Mars

“Crazy” is PopMech’s choice of words, not mine. This seems eminently doable, though not without significant risk. We know how to make rockets work. We know how to make manned spacecraft work. We even know how to make inflatable spacecraft work (just ask Bigelow Aerospace). What we don’t know is how to keep all of it working for nearly a year and a half with no chance for shipping spare parts. No doubt they’ll bring spare parts for the stuff they figure won’t last, but if something critical goes hard down they could be really screwed.

Even though it’s a simple flyby, that’s how big things get started. Prove the concept, find what works, fix what doesn’t. If Inspiration Mars pulls this off, “historic” might not be big enough of a word.

But enough of my bloviating. You’re better off reading from people who really know what they’re talking about.

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Neighborhood Watch

Last night I had cobbled together a lot of interesting stuff about today’s cosmic near-miss with asteroid 2012 DA14 (a pretty innocuous – even boring – name for something that had the potential to do so much damage). I know the professional astronomers have to catalog this stuff in ways that make sense to them, but something passing inside the orbits of our own weather satellites that’s big enough to flatten a large city should have a more impressive calling card. Like Zul the Destroyer. Or Hoss.

So yes, there was already a good deal of material ready to go but things just got a lot more interesting overnight: Hundreds Injured in Russian Meteorite Event.

Just passin’ through…

Continue reading “Neighborhood Watch”

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And So It Begins

Don’t you feel safer already?

I encourage everyone, regardless of your political leanings, to read this and draw your own conclusions.

As multiple vehicles close off the street and announce over a loudspeaker for all your neighbors to remain indoors (and are prohibited from leaving), the lead agent calls your house and directs your wife to come out of the house – and sit in the front seat. She does. Then the Homeland Security Special Tactical Unit, and the county sheriff Swat Team arrive, and drive two armored cars over the curb onto the lawn, as the “Jack Booted Thugs” with machine guns, helmets, boots, camo, etc. enter and search your house.

You see a Homeland Security Helocopter (sic) circling overhead. You are asked if you have any explosives (well, several cans of black powder….) and are there any booby traps in the house. They offer to let you read the search warrant, but your hands are cuffed behind your back. The agent in your car reads it very quickly.

…

You examine your house. Your computers are gone along with every extra & old hard drive, all data cds, floppies, thumb drives, compact flash drives, and other SD drives for your camera. But most shocking, is that your entire gun collection, which you spent a lifetime building, is gone.

Antique guns, airguns, non-guns. Virtually everything. One antique shotgun lies broken on the floor. Papers are strewn everywhere. Once they looked at it, and didn’t want it, they just tossed it aside. Piles of paper. The house is trashed – every room. Your clothing has been ransacked. Your wife’s clothing and underwear. You don’t even know what is missing. You look around, feel sick, lock up the house and go to the motel.

This tale comes from a very popular pro-firearms website that does *not* drink the NRA kool-aid or worship at Ted Nugent’s feet. It is possible to be a Bill of Rights (and thus 2nd Amendment) absolutist without being a libertarian crank (though I admit it helps).

While we should always be wary of relying on one side of the story, that’s the only side we’re getting for now. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

 

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I Only Read The Articles

One of my coworkers picked this up at a garage sale. Just when you think you’ve seen everything…

Columbus-20130207-00165

Inside it’s all white pages, filled with – you guessed it – braille text. This is right up there with caffeine-free coffee and non-alcoholic beer in the “what’s the point?” department.

Kind of like the first time I noticed braille keyboards at a drive-thru ATM.

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End of the World Update, Part Infinity

In case you’re not feeling gloomy enough, then check out these two not-entirely-unrelated stories from Zero Hedge:

Argentina orders a two-month supermarket price freeze. Because the velocity of money always responds to government dictates.

The Argentinians who suffered through the Peron collapse – at least the ones who understand the how & why of it – are preparing for the inevitable:

What consumers will certainly do is scramble into local stores to take advantage of artificially-controlled prices knowing very well they have two short months to stock up on perishable goods at today’s prices, before the country’s inflation comes soaring back, only this time many of the local stores will not be around as their profit margins implode and as owners, especially of foreign-based chains, make the prudent decision to get out of Dodge while the getting’s good and before the next steps, including such measures as nationalization, in the escalation into a full out hyperinflationary collapse…

Meanwhile, back here in the good old USA, if this guy’s right then get ready for a wild ride in the stock market:

I have written before about the grotesque – in my view – and persistent misallocation of capital (in financial markets) being caused by the mispricing of capital/money by central banks; by their ongoing “promises? to misbehave – seemingly forever – such that anyone with good common sense will eventually be battered and beaten into submission and be forced into the misallocation game; and by the – again, in my view – irresponsible behaviour of fiscal policymakers too. Collectively, we have a huge global game of kicking the can down the road driven by excessive and wasteful government largesse, funded by explosive growth in central bank balance sheets.

Put simply, the Fed’s Everlasting Gobstopper money-printing operation is pretty much the only thing propping up equities. They’re flooding the world with cheap money, creating an investment bubble that will eventually pop just like the housing bubble.

Lord help us but the Commie thug Khrushchev may have been right after all: Capitalists would sell us the rope we’d hang ourselves with.

I say that as a proud gun-totin’ free-marketeer, but would note that there is a distinction between a free market and whatever it is we’ve been experiencing for the past several years.

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