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.
Yeah, the blog was pretty quiet yesterday. I wasn’t in much of a writing mood.
So things didn’t turn out like I’d hoped, but it did for the majority of my countrymen. We’ll see how it works out. Until such time, here’s a useful quote from Heinlein that is often cited at Professor Reynolds’ place:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
In the meantime, the New Black Panthers are at it again and busy stalking polling places in Philly. Of course they would be, since the Justice Department let them off the hook for brazen voter intimidation in 2008. If anything, that has emboldened them to expand their footprint into Ohio (which is generally what happens when bullies aren’t punished – go figure).
Not to fear, citizens, the cavalry is literally on its way. Specifically, “SEAL TEAM NOV.6“:
Brink claims to have over a hundred former Army Rangers, Navy Seal, Delta Force, Green Berets and others who have volunteered for duty. The idea of Navy Seals and Black Panthers getting into it at a Philly polling site gives a whole new incentive for casting a ballot. “Our guys aren’t easily intimidated,” adds Brink.
While the enemy may be inside the wire, we have the SEALS. And Delta. And Rangers. While the Panthers have…what? Punks with nightsticks and bad attitudes?
The mission, according to the Captain, is to observe and report, not to engage. “We are going to watch for intimidation, videotape it, if possible, and report it to the proper authorities.”
Which is often what special forces does in many cases: deep reconnaisance in the bad guy’s territory. They don’t always go looking for conflict, but when conflict finds them…well, stand by.
The Panthers might have the run of things in the ‘hood, but the tables have just been turned on them by real men who know exactly what they’re doing.
This is how you do it, ya’ll. Don’t let Marxist thugs push you around just because DOJ lets them off the leash. We have the force of Right and the force of, well, force on our side. I would dearly love to see one of these hotheaded little pencil-necks mix it up with former SOF operators.
If you haven’t voted yet, get out there and do it. Your nation’s veterans have your back. Semper Fi, gentlemen.
Last night I took our oldest son to our first-ever political rally. You can guess which side by our choice of meal on the way in:
Here’s the crowd just starting to fill in. This is a large airplane hangar here at Port Columbus airport, and it was chock full by the time things kicked off around 6pm. Apparently there were plenty of others left outside.
Entertainment provided by the Marshall Tucker Band, from the great state of SOUTH-by-God-Carolina:
Gov. Kasich, working the crowd:
And that’s right about when my phone’s battery died. I’ll have closeups of the Romneys as soon as my son gets his iPod synched.
That’s it for now. Time to get the kids to school and hit the polls.
Wired recently interviewed Elon Musk about why he founded SpaceX and his long-term goal of settling Mars:
Anderson: And Dragon, the spacecraft you berthed with the ISS in May, has features that might eventually prepare it for a manned Mars mission.
Musk: Eventually, yes. The thrusters on Dragon are sized so they’ll be able to do launch escape—which means being able to move away from the rocket at a force of approximately 6 g’s. That same thrust level happens to be kind of a good number for supersonic retro-propulsion for landing on Mars.
There’s also a lot of myth debunking and bubble-bursting contained within, particularly in regards to the conventional wisdom on rocket construction and launch economics. But wait, there’s more!
Musk: Version two of Dragon, which should be ready in three years, should be able to do it. But really, if humanity is to become multi-planetary, the fundamental breakthrough that needs to occur in rocketry is a rapidly and completely reusable rocket. In the absence of that, space transportation will remain two orders of magnitude more expensive than it should be…
…I’d like to emphasize this is an aspiration for SpaceX—I’m not saying that we will do it. But I believe it can be done. And I believe that achieving it would be on a par with what the Wright brothers did. It’s the fundamental thing that’s necessary for humanity to become a space-faring civilization. America would never have been colonized if ships weren’t reusable.
Just stumbled into this one, being otherwise distracted by Sandy the SuperStormofDeath…
Disney bought Lucasfilm yesterday, since I guess they had $4 billion just laying around with nothing better to do. Star Wars, Episode VII: George Lucas’ Retirement Portfolio Strikes Back will be coming our way in 2015. Supposedly they’re also taking a hard look at the Indiana Jones franchise (which we probably should’ve seen coming when that insipid motormouth Shia LeBouffant showed up in Kingdom of the WhateverTheHellitWas).
Please, please, will someone stop this wanton destruction of my childhood memories?
One can only wonder what the merger of two entertainment titans could have in store for us. Disney’s penchant for pre-fab, corporate focus-grouped teen “stars” doesn’t leave me hopeful. My kids will surely notice if Clone Wars disappears from Cartoon Network only to get stuffed into the Disney Channel’s Bland-o-Matic formulaic meatgrinder to emerge as, I don’t know, Hannah Montana Meets the Ewoks.
Then again, the prequels were an all-you-can-eat feast of suckitude. Considering the damage Lucas has already done to his own creation, how much worse can it get?
Okay, now that’s pretty bad.
In the meantime, if DisneyLucas is looking for original stories that would make great movies, then allow me to make a suggestion.
Margaret Thatcher observed this about socialism’s fundamental weakness: eventually, you run out of other people’s money.
Well folks, we are rapidly approaching that point here in the good ol’ USA. No amount of tax increases will fill the chasm of our national debt; the Fed’s unbridled money-printing certainly won’t. Our only choice is to expand the economy with sane tax & regulatory policies while putting the brakes on printing new money.
The first will allow the economy to expand, ideally to a level that actually provides value to that money we’ve already printed. And those printing presses will have to be shut off for a while, causing interest rates to go up. But this must happen, otherwise our dollars will become worthless sooner rather than later.
Think of this in terms of personal finances – if you make 50,000 a year but spend 75,000, you’re in the hole for 25 grand. Sometimes it’s for legit reasons, sometimes not. Either way, most people would handle that deficit with credit cards or bank loans.
But here’s a twist: let’s say that instead of getting paid, you’re trusted with a magic money-printing machine, and its capacity is normally pegged to the value of your salary. You should be able to print 50 grand a year no problem. If you want to print more than that, someone else has to guarantee its value since you can’t. You can do this because lenders know you’ve always been good for it.
At some point, you get a case of the “I wants” and just start printing money to spend on who knows what. Lenders might tolerate this for a short time, particularly if everybody else in the neighborhood is having even worse trouble. They’ve either been spending way more than they earn (Greece), or cosigning too many loans for less well-off neighbors (the EU), or even flat-out lying about their salaries (China). Either way, you’re pretty much it for the time being so you don’t change any bad habits.
Eventually, some of your neighbors get their act together and are now doing pretty well. Individually, they might even make less than you, but they’ve all managed to save a little and have kept their debts low. Pretty soon, lenders aren’t interested in you because they’re starting to worry that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. And now they have options. So the loans you counted on for all those goodies are starting to dry up – but you’re still left with the same amount of expenses.
Now what? You can either file bankruptcy (bad, bad move – nobody would trust anything from your magic money printer for a long time) or find a higher paying job. Maybe even a second job.
In other words, make mo’ money. Buckle down, limit your spending, and increase your income until your debt is back to a manageable level. Then start steadily paying it off while vowing to never, ever, get yourself into such an awful position again.
The alternative, bankruptcy, leaves you at the mercy of the people with money. And as we see with the EU, this can have undesirable consequences like loss of self-rule.
This Aviation Week story describes a “Deep Space Habitat” engineering mock-up built from old Space Station components before it meanders off into another eye-glazing discussion of Space Launch System, J2X engines, advanced solid boosters, and other pieces of flight hardware that will likely never make it to the launch pad. Oh, and unicorns. With rainbows.
Yes, I’m venting. This concept (the vehicle, not the venting) isn’t entirely new, so at least NASA gets credit for putting some hardware together to actively study the concept instead of consigning it to PowerPoint Purgatory. And the flight-ready items already exist as ISS modules that never made it to their intended destination. Far as I know, they’re still taking up space in Houston.
Sounds great. But having said that, what’s the likelihood of DSH becoming a reality? Because in all honesty I’d love to see it. This is exactly the kind of stuff NASA should be doing: pushing boundaries, exploration…and all the R & D work that goes along with it. But why oh why do we insist on them building another Big Dumb Booster to get the crap up there? Why do we insist on throwing that money down a hole instead of using it to build something really useful like DSH? Or for that matter, developing a couple of different propulsion options to push the thing around?
If you wanted to build a new boat, would you also feel the need to design a new flatbed truck from scratch just to get said boat to water? Because that’s pretty close to what we’re talking about here.
Couldn’t these modules be lofted into orbit by a Delta IV or Falcon 9 heavy? Couldn’t Orion, for that matter, if it’s being flight tested on a Delta IV-Heavy anyway?
Perhaps there’s a good reason they can’t but it’s hard to think of. Then again, why not just buy space on a manned Dragon once they’re available?
And while I’m aware it sounds like I’m all rah-rah fanboy over SpaceX, in truth they’re just at the leading edge of a new industry about which I am very enthusiastic. By all means cheer them on, as more are sure to follow (Blue Origin looks particularly interesting).
Maybe these frustrations will solve themselves as the “old model” of space exploration plods along. It’ll inevitably be leapfrogged by the private sector, at which point there will be no choice but to recognize the paradigm has already shifted.
In the meantime, something like this deep-space hab concept will be featured prominently in the sequel to Perigee, wherein stuff’s about to get real…
This explains a lot. Namely, why the voices in my head won’t shut up until I write their incessant babbling down on paper:
When the researchers looked specifically at authors, they found that they are overrepresented among people with schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety syndrome, and substance abuse problems. Authors were also almost twice as likely to commit suicide as the general population.
Well, yeah. Spend years inventing a whole world inside your head, getting it into a readable form, and polishing it until every syllable flows across the pages like a rushing stream. Then you sweat blood whittling all that down into a three-sentence blurb and shotgun it out to agents and publishers, only to have them reject it. Sometimes rudely.
So you revise, edit, and do it all over again. Generally with better results, but still nothing that ends up with a publishing deal. Wash, rinse, repeat. Thank God for the rise of indie publishing, because a couple years of that query/reject/repeat cycle left me in a pretty sorry mental state.
At least now I have some control over the process and am making halfway decent money from my work. It’s still a hard slog, though. So if I don’t post anything for a while, it might be a good idea to send someone over to check on me.
Detonating toilets have become a recent scourge in the American bathroom scene. Although the brand of North’s rogue crapper is unknown, earlier this summer Flushmate issued a massive voluntary recall of pressurized toilets after about 300 people complained of explosions. One poor victim of such a buttock-shaking barrage said that “I required dozens of stitches for an extremely deep wound,” although being “a bigger person, I was able to absorb the brunt of the force.”
I share this only because it’s from my beloved home state of South Carolina. Plus, exploding toilets!
A commenter in the last post on SpaceX’s “MCT” announcement included a link to this graphic:
Thanks Adros47! And…DA-YUM. Those things are monsters.
I dug a little more and found the full article from 2010 at Spaceref here. It includes an embedded link to another piece at Aviation Week, but the link seems to have expired. I’ll keep rooting around the interwebs and will post more if I find it.
And for the record, I’m standing by my “Mars Crew Transport” statement:
Unveiling conceptual plans for a family of Falcon X and XX future heavy-lift vehicles at last week’s AIAA Joint Propulsion conference here, SpaceX McGregor rocket development facility director Tom Markusic said, “Mars is the ultimate goal of SpaceX.”
Yeah, what he said!
UPDATE: Lots of talk about this at NASASpaceflight.com, and not all of it’s nice. Plenty of honest speculation, sprinkled with a healthy dose of carping and pedantic nitpicking. But do check out the back-of-the-envelope specs in a pdf at the linked post.
Also sounds like “MCT” refers to the engine, not the launcher itself. Which might throw cold water on my “Mars Crew Transport” theory. I’m also reminded that they frequently referred to their Saturn V – class ideas as “BFR”. Which I guess means Big Fuzzy Rocket. Or something like that…
Via The Atlantic, an interesting piece of…something:
The Chiles Files 