The Chiles Files

July 18, 2016July 18, 2016

About Ohio

This week, a lot of attention will be fixed on my adopted home state of Ohio. You might have heard there’s kind of a thing going on up in Cleveland, what with ~~Trump University Pledge Week~~ the Republican National Convention being in town. It promises to be a bigger media circus than normal, as the news outlets are just praying for a Black Lives Matter/White Supremacist throwdown in front of Quicken Loans Arena. There’s more than enough stupid on all sides for a Republican version of the Dem’s riotous 1968 Chicago convention. They’d no doubt love to see it.

Well, screw you guys. Here’s how we do things up here:

We have a lot more in common with the good people of Charleston, who unified in defiance of the out-of-town race-baiters who hoped to tear the city apart after last year’s church massacre. The hard lessons of Reconstruction taught us a thing or two about how to deal with carpetbaggers.

Having said that, I have been a conflicted Ohioan for over twenty years now. “Conflicted” because this means nearly half my life has been spent in a state – nay, an entire region – that is supposed to be anathema to a genteel Southern boy.

In other words, I’m supposed to hate it up here in Yankee Land. But here’s the weird thing: I don’t. In fact, there are a couple of things about it that are actually preferable. Excluding the suicidally dismal months of January and February, it ain’t bad. We’re in the middle of a glorious summer and fall is unfailingly spectacular.

Maybe I’m sentimental because this is where our roots have grown, but it’s been a good place to raise our kids despite not being one of the USA’s more exciting regions (or just maybe it’s because of that). Admittedly, I like that the area we live in has a lot more in common with West Virginia and Kentucky than those poor benighted Yankees up in Toledo and Cleveland. But don’t get me started on our ridiculous taxes; that’s what’ll lead me back down south before anything else. And please don’t ask me about the @#$&! Buckeyes. Ever.

And whereas southerners have a mostly well-deserved reputation for eccentricity, the people here are for the most part polite and level-headed. I married an Ohio country girl and wouldn’t trade her for all of the debutantes in Charleston. Not to say that all midwesterners are corn-fed pragmatists, nor are all southerners high-maintenance hysterics. But after dating far too many of the latter in my youth, my first experience with the former quickly showed which type I prefer.

So this week, the rest of you will get to see what we’re really made of here in boring old Ohio. I’m hoping it remains as good as that video. Let the carnival barkers and sideshow acts stay under the GOP’s circus tent. The rest of us have better things to do.

July 12, 2016

#Brexit…and Beyond!

It’s that time of year for Big Airshows that result in Big News of Big Money being spent in Big Aerospace. This year’s Farnborough Air Show doesn’t disappoint, with some welcome news out of the still-intact-for-now United Kingdom. Via Parabolic Arc:

XCOR’s Lynx demonstrates that cats may indeed have nine lives:

US manned space launch vehicle designer XCOR Aerospace has signed a strategic Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with spaceplane design and operating company Orbital Access Limited and Glasgow Prestwick Spaceport. This partnership is supported by Scottish Enterprise, the Scottish Government’s economic development agency.

The MoU paves the way for the establishment of manned launch services at Prestwick using XCOR’s Lynx spacecraft with support from existing Scottish aerospace organisations.

This is very good news as the Lynx project ignominiously had the rug pulled out from under it just a few weeks ago. XCOR needed to shift focus to the new engines they’re building for ULA’s Vulcan rocket, but it was still disappointing. Lynx has a lot of potential for personal spaceflight, including something that hasn’t been discussed much in popular media: training new pilots. While it’s been touted as a suborbital tourism and research vehicle, I also see it as potentially being a Space Age Stearman.

In other news out of Farnborough, Reaction Engines UK has secured enough money to finally build a demonstrator SABRE rocket-based combined-cycle engine.

The agreements now in place between Reaction Engines, ESA and the UK Space Agency, together with the working partnership with BAE Systems, set the framework for Reaction Engines to deliver the world’s first SABRE ground demonstrator engine by the end of the decade.

skylon_sabre_cutaway_l — Skylon spaceplane with SABRE engine cutaway. (Credit: Reaction Engines Ltd.)

SABRE is exactly the kind of revolutionary propulsion needed to enable the type of point-to-point space travel that I wrote about in Perigee. So yeah, I’d very much like to see this work. God save the Queen!

July 12, 2016

Our Pain, Your Gain

After the success of last month’s Fathers Day sale, it appears my publisher has elected to keep Perigee and Farside at the discounted price of $3.99 for an indefinite time. Even better, today is Amazon Prime Day which kinda makes it like shopping at WalMart – you go in for one or two things and come out with a cart full stuff you just had to have.

The key word here is indefinite. All good things must come to an end, but I have no idea when that might be. So if you’re filling up that shopping cart anyway then you might as well pick up a couple of great books cheap.

July 5, 2016July 5, 2016

Good to be a Gangsta

Leave the blog alone for a while, and all hell breaks loose…

To absolutely no one’s surprise, the FBI officially let Hillary Clinton off the hook.

Let that sink in a minute, then consider what it means for something we used to call the “rule of law.” What incentive is there for the rest of us to follow the law when it’s now painfully clear that it isn’t equally applied? There are real people doing real time in Federal Pound-You-In-The-@$$ Prison for lesser crimes. The irreplaceable Kurt Schlichter predicted where it’s all headed in his Independence Day essay at Town Hall:

The Romans had principles for a while. Then they got tempted to abandon principle for – wait for it – short term political gain. Then they got Caesar. Then the emperors. Then the barbarians. And then the Dark Ages. But hey, we’re much smarter and more sophisticated than the Romans, who were so dumb they didn’t even know that gender is a matter of choice. Our civilization is permanent and indestructible – it’s not like we are threatened by barbarians who want to come massacre us.

…

There used to be a social contract requiring that our government treat us all equally within the scope of the Constitution and defend us, and in return we would recognize the legitimacy of its laws and defend it when in need. But that contract has been breached. We are not all equal before the law. Our constitutional rights are not being upheld. We are not being defended – hell, we normals get blamed every time some Seventh Century savage goes on a kill spree. Yet we’re still supposed to keep going along as if everything is cool, obeying the law, subsidizing the elite with our taxes, taking their abuse. We’ve been evicted by the landlord but he still wants us to pay him rent.

We are skating on very thin ice. Meanwhile, this old Cruz ad becomes ever more relevant:

June 14, 2016June 15, 2016

Real Men Read Books…So Hurry And Get These On Sale For Dad!

My publisher (the wonderful Baen Books) is running a sale this week, just in time for Father’s Day. Starting Wednesday, Farside and Perigee will be available through all your favorite ebook outlets for the obscenely low price of 99 cents. (Hint: Read Perigee first. It’s a SERIES.) This is a limited-time, don’t-miss chance to get Dad a couple of kick-ass hard Sci-Fi adventure novels to load up that new Kindle or iPad he so richly deserves.
Does Dad like to read the old-fashioned way? Amazon or Barnes & Noble can also get you the paperback version in just a few days.
So you heard it here first, kiddies. Go on, do it – it’ll change your life. Or his. Either way everybody’s happy, including my publisher. Seriously y’all, there’s some real crap out there so here’s your chance for something that’s, well, not crap.*
And don’t wait too long, the sale ends Monday, June 20th.

*Exhibit A of why I didn’t go into advertising: “buy our stuff – it’s not crap!”

Here’s some handy links:

Finally, some kind words from a dear friend: “The story is an intriguing rollercoaster ride of twists and turns, and features characters that are real enough to invite to your next barbeque.”

I’ll take that. And barbeque always sounds good.

April 28, 2016

Blazing Trails

21236738100_64d6af28c6_k-980x551 — It’s lonely out in space… *Credit: SpaceX*

I’d like to think someone at SpaceX or NASA is reading my blog and took the last post to heart, though I could with equal validity claim to be a fire engine or the Easter Bunny.

SpaceX’s big announcement yesterday that they will be sending a Dragon capsule to Mars in (hopefully) two years clearly has been in the works for some time. They didn’t just cook that idea up last weekend over some takeout pizza and a twelve-pack of Red Bull (though from what they say about the work environment at Hawthorne, who knows?). From Aviation Week:

SpaceX and NASA wrapped up 16 months of behind-the-scenes negotiations Tuesday with an unfunded Space Act agreement to cooperate on sending an unmanned Dragon crew capsule to the surface of Mars as early as 2018.

Smart. 2018 is the next window of opportunity for a Hohmann transfer to Mars, and ought to be enough time to pull this off given SpaceX’s current state of development. They’re getting the propulsive-landing thing down pretty well and Mars access has been an intended use of Dragon 2 all along. If this works, the repercussions will be tremendous.

160427-falcon1-630x535 — Falcon Heavy. *Credit: SpaceX*

Falcon Heavy is probably the long pole in the tent because Red Dragon isn’t going very far if they can’t put enough weight up there to get the job done (that is, a kick stage to put Dragon on a transfer orbit). If this year’s test is successful, there are a couple more Heavy launches on next year’s manifest that would go a long way towards building confidence in their capability.

Note that NASA isn’t throwing money at them (directly at least) so this is all on Elon’s dime. But the “in kind” support they’re providing is significant, as Aviation Week reports:

…“deep space communications and telemetry; deep space navigation and trajectory design; entry, descent and landing system analysis and engineering support; Mars entry aerodynamic/aerothermal database development; general interplanetary mission and hardware consultation and advice, and planetary protection consultation and advice.”

These are subjects in which NASA has lots of expertise that SpaceX likely doesn’t have (yet). Their focus has been on the foundational work: vehicle development and operating experience, whereas this is precisely what a government space organization should be doing: figuring out the really hard, expensive stuff in an R&D role and then letting private industry run with it. It’s worth remembering that most of the airfoil designs still in use today by Boeing and others were developed by NASA’s precursor (NACA) in the 40’s and 50’s.

And if this works, there’s still time to build a hab module for that 2021 window…

April 22, 2016April 25, 2016

Halfway to Nowhere

sls_70t-launch-from-top — SLS: going somewhere, doing something. ‘Merica. Credit: NASA

The great Robert Heinlein famously postulated that Low Earth Orbit is “halfway to anywhere,” meaning that it takes almost as much energy to send a spacecraft to its final destination (say, Mars) as it did to put that spacecraft into Earth orbit in the first place. In some cases it actually requires less energy.

After years of development and who knows how many billions spent, NASA’s Congressionally-mandated Space Launch System is nowhere closer to having a clear mission than it is to actually launching. Literally, a “rocket to nowhere.”

So we have a massive booster launching a stupidly expensive spacecraft with no clear destination. There’s talk about a circumlunar flight, maybe a jaunt out to EML-2 or a near-Earth asteroid – they’ll figure that out later since the first manned flight won’t happen until at least 2020. NASA expects they can only afford to do that once a year. Maybe two. Again, later. Because reasons. Continue reading “Halfway to Nowhere”

April 21, 2016April 25, 2016

Like a Virgin

“Lock S-foils in hype position!” Credit: Virgin Galactic

I’d started noodling on this a couple of months ago, then things happened fast: Blue Origin made a third suborbital flight of New Shepard and lifted the curtains at their Kent, WA headquarters, while SpaceX finally landed a Falcon first stage on a barge at sea and plans to seriously step up their ops tempo.

And Virgin Galactic continues to, well…I’m not sure what they’re doing. I used to be a lot more enthusiastic about their potential, but ten years’ worth of empty hype tends to take the shine off things. That, and the body count. Continue reading “Like a Virgin”

April 20, 2016April 21, 2016

Trump Card

trumpzilla_poster_2_0-r2e5a5579883d404a91d6f42032c4d3fa_wvc_8byvr_512 So The Donald won New York’s Republican primary. In related news, I left something closely resembling Donald Trump in the toilet this morning.

My point? Both are equally undeserving of attention. But here we are.

There’s a story that Trump had been considering a Presidential run for some time and was finally convinced to throw his ~~combover~~ hat in the ring after a phone call from his good buddy Bill Clinton. For those of you who don’t recall the 90’s, here’s the Cliff Notes version: Bill Clinton is a reptilian pervert who doesn’t do anything for anyone unless it somehow redounds to his and/or Hillary’s benefit. And if he can stick it to the Republicans at the same time, it’s bonus points.

For any Republican, conservative or otherwise, that should’ve rung alarm bells at decibel levels loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage. Could no one see the train wreck this guy was setting us up for from day one? Continue reading “Trump Card”

April 18, 2016

Big News

I’m now publishing with Baen. They’ve picked up Perigee and Farside, which are being republished under their imprint this week. More news to follow as I work on future titles with them. You might have noticed the blog has been on life support the last few months, needless to say I’ve been rather distracted and it hasn’t all been publishing deals. If y’all keep coming back for updates on the new titles, I’ll promise to start putting up actual content again.