Soft landings

LANTR seems to stop short of landing a craft upon the Martian surface. As to that L1 Kevlar rope, as it is under construction it might leave a megameter or two over the landing spot. Bouncing cargo onto bare regolith is going to kick up some dust. Launching off again will kick up still more, especially if they use the Al-LOX mix.

A week ago Space Startup News pointed to xARC, on the southwest edge of the Texas Triangle, concerning Lunar mission architecture. They were going to drop off some 'bots to roam the regolith and cook up hexagonal bricks, to ensure dust-free landing pads, roads, other pavements. (Lunar Forge is on that tech.) Also supplied would be berms to keep dust from drifting back in, from all the industry hopefully happening around the site.

Meanwhile in June, Anderson, Saxena, Metzger [ht Toughsf 31 August] came up with another idea. The Solar-System has already built some berms for us, in the form of small craters. Land craft with the fragile cargo in one of those. Schlep cargo over rim with Lunar Terrain Vehicle. Assemble base around crater (some material here could have been dropped less-gently in other missions).

Zubrin has long noted is that bricks are good for pushing down, but not for pushing out. We are here talking about the base camp, even its airless robot-only stage. It might be a trick to find a suitable berm-crater reasonably close to a human-friendly environment, like a lava cave.

LANTR

Whilst we await Firestar's nuclear afterburner, Borowski et al. a decade ago had proposed a chemical one. The subtext, best I gather, was that old solid-core NERVA for all its 900s I_sp wasn't all that great for thrust. Most Mars missions assume NERVAlike NΘP. Or big punches to orbital trajectories, like The Martian to Hohmann.

Borowski's crew was pondering a high-thrust solution as may ignore much I_sp and Earth won't care what is burnt near us. This has a use-case in delta-V punches: a mission to the Lunar poles. I'll bite; even that spaceline only got to equatorial Sinus Medii.

The promise is to achieve liquid-core-temp exhaust whilst still keeping the (fissile) heat-source, solid. That'd be a safer reactor in HEO, might even allow lower-grade fuel. In 2024 the plasma-core was still SDI scy-fy (and in 2026; also none of us knew or know what Howe is doing).

NERVA, it happens, assumes hydrogen for propellant. As the Hindenburg passengers can tell you, it reacts with oxygen. (This blog takes no sides on the cause of that one's initial blowup.) The paper suggests to bring along liquid oxygen - LOX - with that superheated hydrogen. The LOX is introduced after the burn which raises the exhaust velocity. This is thereby an "LANTR". Oxygen is cheap on our moon, maybe the only cheap volatile.

As to why to do this: that is because the N part of NΘP is a nuclear reaction, and not - like Orion - a bomb. As a reaction, it is supposed to run for longer. NERVA hasn't been tested for many hours in, what amounts, a thermos the size of the Universe. Earth might not want a reaction running long in our shared well.

For short bursts of heat one might even swap those nucular roggets for enthalpy. Which segues...

The antiquity of Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum

If you had read (ye) "Old(e) Testament Pseudepigrapha": one of the texts herein was a pseud' on Philo. Of course Philo had nothing to do with the Antiquitatum Biblicarum. Western Christians, who copied and have edited this work, have rated it a "Pharisaic" document: close to Josephus' halakha against, say, Judith's (or anything else of the pre-Revolt Diaspora). Zeev Safrai posted an essay on "LAB" in 2018. Safrai puts this in the Jamnia / Javneh era after 70 CE, when the priests didn't matter.

As far as I know a post-Qumran date wouldn't have ruffled feathers at any point since the late 19th century relieved it from Philo. LAB was composed in Hebrew but Qumran shows no awareness of it (we'd be looking to Jubilees, which relation is reversed). It hasn't been picked up by Septuagintal literature the way Judith, say, was picked up in the Greek Esther. As noted Philo didn't know it. It is antiSamaritan, inasmuch as the old shrines at Gerizim / Shechem are condemned. The mutual relationships with 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra / 2 Esdras are famous.

Safrai dates LAB rather after Bar Kochba. It seems of interest LAB sides with Shammai on whether children should fast, where the Mishnah gives to Hillel the last word against Shammai. LAB also retains Jubilees' interest in maintaining the names of Israel's matriarchs, although I cannot call that "feminist" (this reflects a tradition of matrilinealism). These intra-Jewish disputes seem early to me. So far I admit this is a matter of taste.

I don't see where Safrai's essay has raised skub in the past eight years. So... I'll do it:

Within the earlier decades, came the Judaeans' Tumult in Cyrene, Cyprus, and Alexandria. Vridar, when he was poasting, deemed this revolt an important event. LAB - as Safrai knows - argues for the general eretz-Israel as holy and under G-d's protection. Perhaps this nods to a time when Jews were persecuted everywhere but in the Judaea proper, where peace maintained. I don't think that Jews could honestly say this after Bar Kochba and Hadrian.

Broken cross

A couple years ago David Woods (not this D.W.) submitted On the Origin of the Seventh-Century Solidi with Mutilated Crosses Conventionally Attributed to the Caliphate. Woods thinks it happened "639" (AG 950), Heraclius' years of ash.

All scholarship has put this mint before 'Abd al-Malik's Standing Caliph, itself preceding the aniconics. Woods agrees. It's just that most of that scholarship has put the un-cross coinage with Mu'awiya. Woods finds this evidence wanting.

Mu'âwiya preferred images of John's head, as I recall, ruling Damascus as he did; sometimes references to "Zion" in the Jerusalem area. Out east, we still see imitations of Sasanian tropes. These don't overlap the sceptre-on-steps.

Woods instead credits provincial Christian mints hurriedly minting something as won't offend a cross hater. He points to John Cataeus of Edessa, "Osrhoëne" as the Romans were naming that province. Also maybe the hapless Cyrus in Alexandria.

If Catholics are not for Catholicism

The Catholic Biblical Association of America is now headed up by a Levine. I'd not have said anything but Davila is congratulating this appointment. As Ron Unz might congratulate Yad Veshem if they'd hired David Irving . . .

Look. I've no objection to the CBA(A) calling in observant Jews to 'splain to us (can I still say "us"?) the language or mindset of Biblical-era Jews, perhaps before they were "Jews". Nor would I complain if Levine were delivering modern Jewish readings of those texts, up to Christian texts. I've been relaying TheTorah commentary on this 'ere Catholic (if perhaps cryptoNestorian) blog for years.

But President? Really?

Hey. Maybe the Catholic canon is imperfect. This is also a discussion being entertained 'ere. RETVRN to the old Greek for Jeremiah? Chuck Tobit back into the Dead Sea whence it came? Let's go! - but either way, these are Catholic decisions to be held by Catholics in a Catholic forum. These are not decisions for the levides, unless and until they've done RCIA.

Catholics need to have the fortitude to defend a Catholic reading of the Bible. If a Catholic organization cannot do this, that organisation needs to disband.

UPDATE 9/1: And this groomer apologetic is what he links, out of all posted at TheTorah last week on the theme. Predic'able.

A canon is not a law

A few days ago (h/t Jihadwatch), Todd Aglialoro 'splained how canon law is not shari'a. He's right.

Jews own a religious law, some say (or joke) several; Christianity claimed to have overthrown this. Some modern scholars (Patheos*koff*) argue that Luke's project went toward an anarcho-syndicalist set of Christian communes. That might run at odds with Luke's overall structure of the Spirit exiting Jerusalem and settling upon Rome, not (then) Christian in any way. Much as this particular blog might look askance at Luke's work - and at his interpreters; we are addressing Aglialoro who inherits Luke's Christendom. This post follows them to address the Roman church; not that in the Greek or Slavic worlds and certainly not in Syriac.

Here Christendom and Romanitas had fused sufficiently in the fourth century AD that Theodosius, and over a century later (and more-so) Justinian, were able to create Roman laws which were also Christian laws. Full circle - right?

Well, no. Justinian may be a saint for some (I understand he remains popular in Russia) but out here West, he's considered a tyrant. Because he was. This before we get to Rabbûla or to Shenûte. (Leaving Donatus aside.) Rome has always refused Byzantium's claim to be a "new Rome". We never lost our own Rome.

Also, in the west, and more so among the eastern Syrian "Nestorians": we have Dyotheletism. Religious law does not exist. We have religious canon. That is an old word - Akkadian, I hear - which means "standard". A canon defines what is a Christian and how the Church is to conduct itself. A nation may embrace Christianity and govern according to its ethic. That nation would form its own laws - in accordance. Not in extrapolation.

Future Failed Senatorial Candidate El-Sayed gets one cheer (as an Egyptian, he might even know Shenoute, although I'd be surprised if he knew Rabboula) for reminding us that Christians - at times - have imposed [monastic] canons as laws upon dubiously-willing citizens. Thing is, Catholics don't do this. "Muh Inquisition". No, dude; that was a state, and the Church tried to temper those excesses.

Where is the Dyotheletism in the Egyptian Sunni tradition? - more to the point, where is the notion that law exists outside the clerisy?

The bilateral log

Following sex - and predation; Kimberella (a mollusc) evolved bilateralism 558 Mya, also we hear of tubeworm Calyptrina. That is when different organs handle food intake and postfood exhaust. Petrov is on it, relating Julien Kimmig and Russell Bicknell.

(Some actual crap is involved in Kimmig-Bicknell being behind a paywall.)

The first Vendian/Ediacaran bilaterals did not drop deuces as the fossilisation process has (yet) preserved. These deuces get to the record in the Cambrian 538.8 Mya: microscopic at first, then growing to make the log. As it were.

Turns out that smaller animals produce smaller doodoo, such that these nutrients simply got BACTERIA'D. As noted I cannot read K-B but Petrov would imply that the first bilaterals weren't so different from the anemonai on this much. A mat of slime was laid down, by all. This didn't sequester all that much carbon, so the seas were still CO₂-rich and poor in oxygen.

Over the Cambrian, a feedback loop kicked in whereby larger animals dropped deuces that sequestered more carbon at a time. Oxygen increased, allowing for larger animals with their longer guts. The elder mats were meanwhile churned up by bottom feeders like the trilobites.

So far this just looks like more evidence for the Cambrian Explosion as explosion. We can still use that old just-so story Blink of an Eye to explain how certain animals suddenly were able to feast, and for their descendents to grow. To predationmaxx, said the book.