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.
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.
Blue Origin family portrait. Keep the dildo jokes to yourselves, pervs.
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.
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.
What giving up looks like. Credit: Inspiration Mars
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.
Where’s the unicorn in this picture?
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.
Idiocracy has arrived. Behold your future and weep.
Darwin might argue that we’d all be better off in the long run if douchebags like these WEREN’T insured. Weed ’em out now before it’s too late!
There’s so much WRONG in here it’s hard to decide where to begin, but here’s a helpful hint for all you “bros”: if you have medical bills to pay, you had damn well better be tapping your beer money before you expect the rest of us to pay for it.
American culture is now at the point where satire is no longer possible. “Do you got insurance?” REALLY? Grammar much?
From the halls of Montezuma, to the cesspool of DC…
The Marines who took Iwo Jima were not about to be turned away by a bunch of silly barricades and the asshats who tried to keep them out.
Just when you thought Shutdown Theater couldn’t get any more absurd, President Dronekiller decides that he has the authority to shut down open-air monuments, close off public highways, blockade the open seas, and eject property owners from their homes. Which he’d have if we were say, fighting off an invading enemy. Which this ain’t. This is about intentionally disrupting the lives of private citizens to the maximum extent possible just to show who’s boss. It’s also a pointed lesson in the kind of thuggish behavior that erupts among individuals who harbor those tendencies when their Dear Leader signals his tacit approval.
I am so incandescently pissed off right now I can barely put words to it, and am only mildly shocked at how quickly this situation has morphed from absurdity to menace. So yeah, it’s time to show who’s boss: we are.
Anyone who’s read Perigee can probably tell that Tom Clancy was a major inspiration of mine.
I first discovered him in 1985 while still a cadet at The Citadel. After three years of mediocre-to-piss-poor academic performance, I was finally this close to making the Dean’s List my senior year…and I will forever blame Mr. Clancy for causing me to miss it by that much. All because my roommate handed me this little book called The Hunt for Red October right before final exam week.
Notice how I keep shifting blame there?
So yeah, that happened. The weekend before finals was spent holed up in my room wallowing in every word of that confounded book instead of Shakespeare’s tragedies or Milton’s Paradise Lost. My professors were unimpressed with my sudden infatuation. Some regarded this upstart insurance salesman-cum-author with even more derision than Steven King, which illustrates perhaps one of the biggest problems with literature today: eggheads who emphasize all of the wrong things about writing.*
Telling a good story is all that matters in the end. You can be a master of character study or mood setting or ingenious metaphor, with impeccable grammar and surgically precise sentence structure, but if it’s a lame story you’re only going to impress the literary Cool Kid’s Club. And for some authors, that’s exactly what they aspire to. Or so I’m told — beats me, I sure don’t read them.
Tom Clancy was criticized for a lot of things: too much pedantic detail, too one-dimensional, too right-wing. Whatev. Don’t care. His books rocked. His extreme attention to detail is what made them pop and stand out among other military or spy adventures. And his obvious love and respect for the people who put themselves in harm’s way on our behalf. Jack Ryan was a great character: easy to identify with, never straying too far from his own sense of “I can’t freaking believe this $#!+.” And when the unbelievable happened, he damn well did something about it which is precisely what a good literary hero is supposed to do.
Last year I was fortunate enough to find a used hardback of Hunt for Red October in the original Naval Institute printing. It now occupies an honored place on my writing desk. For all of his improbable, imaginative stories, Red October was the one that really lit a fire in me and it’s burned for a good twenty-five years. The combination of fly-on-the-wall realism, down-to-earth characters, and good old-fashioned intrigue was irresistible. It’s a tone I’ve tried to achieve in my own writing and I’m grateful to live in an age where spaceflight is no longer locked into the realm of sci-fi. He was an early supporter of commercial space ventures and I’d hoped he would dip his toe in those waters for at least one book.
His writing began to lose its edge after Executive Orders and I’d always assumed it was because the Cold War paradigm he thrived in had disappeared. But from what I’ve read recently, it appears that it may have had more to do with chronic health problems which have finally run their course.
Peggy Noonan’s eulogy in the Wall Street Journal spoke of him as a man who opened up to and encouraged new authors. I’ve never been afraid of contacting other established writers, and will forever regret not reaching out to the one who influenced me most.
RIP, Jack Ryan.
*It bears mentioning that only a few notorious Citadel professors were all that uppity about literature, most were in fact quite down-to-earth. One day I’ll have to tell some stories about one irascible old Lieutenant Colonel known as Trash Mouth.
While the rest of us were laying around on our butts watching football, the geeks were busy inheriting the Earth…or rather the sky above us.
Orbital Science’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, making it the second commercial launch provider to do so:
Cygnus berthing at the ISS
Meanwhile, the first commercial operator to reach the ISS flew their upgraded Falcon 9R launcher out of Vandenberg AFB in California. This was a number of firsts for SpaceX: first flight of the 9R, first all-commercial payload, and first relight of a booster in a controlled re-entry:
Falcon 9R
That last bit is by far the most significant — it’s the key to SpaceX’s plans for reusable rockets, which is the key to lower launch costs, which is the key to the rest of us being able to afford a trip to orbit (or even farther) some day.
The goal is to eventually return the first stage of an operational Falcon 9 (and later, when it flies, the three cores of the Falcon Heavy) to the launch site, and reuse them.
Sunday’s flight test on an ostensibly operational mission was less ambitious. The goals were to see if 1) they could get the vehicle back into the atmosphere in one piece with the first burn (all previous Falcon 9 uncontrolled first-stage entries have been destructive) and 2) if they could gently drop it into the ocean with the thrust of a single engine, and recover it. The company has emphasized repeatedly over the past several months that this was not part of the primary mission goal, and that they didn’t have high expectations of success.
As it turned out, they seem to have succeeded at their first test goal, but failed the second…
Despite the recovery failure, company founder and CEO Elon Musk seemed very optimistic about the results.
The above is clipped from Rand Simberg’s authoritative roundup at PJ Media. Interestingly, DARPA and McDonnell Douglas made some significant advancements along these lines 20 years ago with the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X). Made on the cheap with a good deal of off-the-shelf parts, they managed several successful flights until the project was transferred whole-hog to NASA:
DC-X, first hover landing
NASA agreed to take on the program after the last DC-X flight in 1995. In contrast to the original concept of the DC-X demonstrator, NASA applied a series of major upgrades to test new technologies…
The upgraded vehicle was called the DC-XA, renamed the Clipper Advanced/Clipper Graham, and resumed flight in 1996.
…Its next flight, on 7 July, proved to be its last. During testing, one of the LOX tanks had been cracked. When a landing strut failed to extend due to a disconnected hydraulic line, the DC-XA fell over and the tank leaked. Normally the structural damage from such a fall would constitute only a setback, but the LOX from the leaking tank fed a fire which severely burned the DC-XA, causing such extensive damage that repairs were impractical.
In a post-accident report, NASA’s Brand Commission blamed the accident on a burnt-out field crew who had been operating under on-again/off-again funding and constant threats of outright cancellation. The crew, many of them originally from the SDIO program, were also highly critical of NASA’s “chilling” effect on the program, and the masses of paperwork NASA demanded as part of the testing regimen.
NASA had taken on the project grudgingly after having been “shamed” by its very public success under the direction of the SDIO.
Read the whole entry at Wikipedia for a case study of what happens when a willingness to take risks is swallowed up by ass-covering bureaucratic inertia. Surprising? Sadly, no…but at least the commercial camel’s nose is now all the way up in NASA’s government tent and sniffing at their junk.
Landscaping in Colorado, paid for by the other 49 states.
Now, I have nothing against high earners and fancy homes. I aspire to it. But this is what happens when Uncle Sam takes it upon himself to start spreading the wealth around. That is, it gets wasted on all sorts of stupid crap — such as landscaping for people who can afford it on their own. And it attracts parasitic cronies who are busily figuring out ways to skim it for their own benefit.
Not paid for with other people’s money.
See this? It’s the entrance to our little neighborhood in small-town Ohio, USA. Know who paid for it? WE DID through our homeowners association (which, BTW, charges way too much for the services they allegedly provide but we haven’t been able to throw them out until all the lots were built). Nobody else’s hard-earned tax money bankrolled it.
Just one example of many. They’re not too hard to find, so expect this post to become the first in a series.
To weed out the infidels, according to news reports, the terrorists asked people for the name of Muhammad’s mother or to recite a verse from the Quran.
And that wasn’t even the worst terrorist attack of the weekend.
The Washington Post reported that one British mother and her young children survived when captors who shot her allowed her to leave on the condition she immediately convert to Islam. The siege of the mall, which included the taking of hostages, lasted four days. Three floors of the mall collapsed and bodies were buried in the rubble.
And that wasn’t even the worst terrorist attack of the weekend.
Read the whole thing, but here’s another snippet to keep things in perspective:
We’re talking about Christian persecution by Muslims because of a particularly macabre issue: Jews have already largely been driven out of many Muslim countries.
Lela Gilbert, a journalist who writes about Jewish and Christian persecution, tells of encountering jihadi graffiti in Jerusalem that read “First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday.” She didn’t get the meaning at first. A friend explained that it referred to Jews worshiping on Saturday and Christians on Sunday and, more subtly, about the order that non-Muslims would be targeted.
The Chiles Files 