Lightning Strikes.
Speaking Sunday 12 to Bob Zimmerman, author, "Universe in a Mirror," re the delayed launch of the sturdy shuttle bus Endeavor to ISS after astonishing lightning strikes swept the launch pad. Lightning strikes NASA many, many times. Bob Zimmerman writes that the Ares rocket for the CEV Orion is likely shelved permanently, and that Orion itself is shrinking, shrinking, from six crew members to four and then to four without robotic equipment onboard so that only two crew members can descend to the moon surface at a time. The ISS, in low Earth orbit at 225 miles, is now a decade in construction and still troubled by delays and budgeting. Manned space is in a slow down period. China, Japan, India, EU and others can now catch up some, and if and when the US does get back on track for the moon colony, we will be pressed to share the territory. I keep my eye on the moon, because of George Friedman's prophecy that the Japanese coalition will launch a secret missile strike on our battlestars in the year 2050.
Obama and Space Exploration.
The new NASA boss Charles Bolden hearings were routine. There is nothing that can grow the NASA budget for manned space; and the robot budget is already weakened. These are fallow years. If we lose one shuttle, we are not prepared to compensate. What administration will build the battlestars? We will need partners in Europe and Latin America. Delays, delays, obfuscation, misstatements. I fret about this certainty of failure than any other in government policy. Secure the high ground. Fundamental strategic defense.
JB - What was Friedman's reasoning for the attack?
>What was Friedman's reasoning for the attack?
Let me guess. The United States cut off Japan's supply of Lunar helium-3, a nuclear fuel vital to their fight against the Chinese. Afterward, only the conspiracy nuts ever bought into the idea that this was part of a plan devised by neurochemically enhanced game theorists to goad the Japanese into an ill-conceived first strike, and of course nobody who was anybody in the salons and cocktail parties of NeoManhattan cared about what such a scruffy and unfashionable bunch had to say. Not our sort, you know.
Welcome to the incredible shrinking, sinking America! (When is the last time Atlantis has had any say in world affairs?) A country that has voluntarily jettisoned its life rafts, its booster rockets and taken on ballast - stone ignorant of the consequences. No need to study math, the sciences - even language. These all are fluff, hot air - the white man's irrelevancy; his dreaded carbon footprint; his arrogantly destructive stance.
No, John, we've entered a new era, erstwhile known as The Dark Ages; people huddling together in caves and monasteries (complete with ivory towers from which to watch sunsets) built for the sole purpose to renounce worldly ambition and appease Kali (Gaia), the earth goddess and nurture the spark of vintage automobiles.
World leaders must have had some sense of this as they confer with POTUS, leader of the once free world. (Not the princes of the Middle East, of course, who live in their own separate time zones.) They are now left with having to formulate their own strategy to steer clear of the looming disaster; the crashing red, white and blue balloon that now threatens to suck all the air out of everything under the umbrella of climate change (which is really just another phrase for self-loathing).
The Russians know they’ve been given the opportunity to lead the exodus. They’re frightened by it. They still have the acrid taste of failure in their throats. The Chinese too know that these are pivotal times. They too are frightened. Will they be able to avoid the missteps of Mao? - All children, both grieving for and hating a parent who is in the process of committing suicide.
"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum." Arthur C. Clarke
There is no reason for establishing a moon base . Robots will go where no man has gone before.
Frank J. Tippler, in a book entitled, The Physics of Immortality, tried to blunt the pessimism of our age somewhat by likening the earth to a womb within a relatively young universe from which humans would proceed to colonize space and thereby gain time for us to continue doing whatever it is we do beyond the moment when the earth becomes uninhabitable. In support of his theory, Tippler points to the remarkably rapid progress we are making in technology. And even if conditions elsewhere (in space) were not necessarily suited to sustain life as we know it, he argues, that we, by virtue of projected advances in robotics, rocket and computer science, would be sure to find a way to survive just about anywhere as some variation of today's computer chip.
It is on this last point that Tippler's theory is most likely to run into trouble. If, as he states, it were indeed possible to download all human knowledge to be contained within a more durable form, the resulting "chip" could still only be regarded as a tool. And any tool can in fact never exceed the parameters imposed by its function. Unless we agree to re-embrace the now largely discredited, strictly mechanical view of the universe in which man is no more than a cog, the moment the last living organism consigns its existence to something it might have created would surely trigger the Big Bang in reverse.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
In 1961 Kennedy the First announced the bold goal of an American moon landing by the end of the decade. We did so in eight years, with technology much cruder than today's.
In 2005 Bush the Last announced the bold goal of an American moon landing with the aid of our much more advanced technology...in thirteen years.
We need to devise inexpensive methods of reaching orbit, and to build efficient nuclear-electric systems of manned interplanetary travel that will offer us the means to visit any number of interesting destinations in the Solar System, with an eye toward commercial exploitation. Space has got to be made to pay for itself, and that's where the private sector comes in. NASA is, as we say here in the South, as useless as tits on a boar hog.
America needs you, Bert Rutan!