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.

The DIRT ROCKET

ToughSF pointed Thursday the 27th to 2007's DOI 10.1063/1.2722266. No link b/c X. 50V for 50-100 I_sp.

I'd consider it for docking a smol robot with some regolith of low G (like you-know-where), then moving on. Meh. Hope it's cheap anyway.

Really we should be making colonies from the dust on this rubble. The colonies refine the dust into oxygen, and into something that can react with oxygen. That offers a lot more impulse and, also, thrust. They say this might work even on our Moon. As for Bennu et al. I'd just scoop it all and move it somewhere less dangerous.

Warp drive roundup

Poring through a random month of this 'ere blog, I ran across Erik Lentz then Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire. Most of this got trashed by Santiago, Schuster, and Visser (SSV) the following year. So, five years on - last May - Caroline Delbert ran a pulse-check. Seems there's been some activity in what has become, uggh, a "community".

We are here interested primarily in the warp-bubble, where the prospective colonists don't age as the colony ship travels at a sedate subrelativistic pace. Interstellar space operatics may refer to José Rodal last year for Alcubierre's negative-energy (see below). The bubble remains attractive if only because relativistic risks all what we saw in Passengers (this went by red giant Arcturus 33.78 ly, which implies something like .76C). Such theories also claim not to require negative energy.

Last February, Hamed Barzegar, Thomas Buchert, and Quentin Vigneron got on all warp cases (BBV). SSV had a few errors, but not such as vindicated the warp core Doors.

The BBV classification under which Bobrick-Martire falls is the R-Warp model, definition III.3. These satisfy the "restrictions" R1+R2+R3b+R4(+R6); developing Barzegar and Buchert last year. R4 is new here: asymptotic flatness. The Natário metric is a subset; here to assure a globally hyperbolic spacetime. That had been an assumption of Alcubierre 1994; so a rule had to be thought up where this could be assured, done in Choquet-Bruhat–Cotsakis 2002 BBV's "theorem IV.3". BBV have their own theorem IV.7 such that superluminal R-warp models can never be hyperbolic.

But hey. I remind my readers I wasn't asking for tachyon beams. We just wanted a bubble that got to Arcturus in however-many-external-decades without the hibernation-poddery. José Natário has been saying all year his bubble - hyperbolic - is subluminal. (The BBV paper reports he was arguing differently in earlier years, but maybe those weren't R-Warp.)

Nah. SSV's big stinkbomb to the R-Warp, even the slow one, was that it violates the null energy condition. BBV can only affirm SSV here, as "theorem IV.34". As asymptotically flat (R4), theorem IV.20 says they violate the dominant energy condition too; that is, that the energy can't be negative.

BBV point out that some of these R's in the R-Warp models may be lifted, as long as we are in Gedankenexperimentland; but engineers, not such Landsers, will find difficult to explain how they can. Same problem has afflicted Alcubierre when he said "just use negative energy bro".

An T. Le follows up, providing the service of explaining the four energy conditions, not just "null" and "dominant". These are pointwise inequalities on the stress-energy tensor contracted with timelike or null vectors. Any vio represents an exotic fuel (or, per BBV - "fantastical") like the negative energy - which we don't have. He also submits the WARPAX, eigenvalue tests on the various tensors. Sure, per SSV the fuels all suck; but how bad do they suck? Oddly Rodal's drive seems to suck least, considering it remains superluminal. But that might be because Rodal was willing to clarify his model to Le, in personal communications.

Since May, An Le has gone on to evaluate several fuels' "source consistency"; all subluminal [and] positive-energy. They all suck in newly found ways, not so much interior as on the boundary with our nonfantastical universe.

Maybe call it "the Lewinsky Drive".

Barnard's Rossby

Barnard's classical habitable-zone estimation relies, I think, on this 2013 paper. But a couple years ago, we were looking into Alfvén systems. This is before we even had planets around Barnard's star, Gliese's #699. It turns out this star - as "GJ 699" - had convection calculations in 2018. For its colour V − Kₛ ≈ 4.99 (thank you copilot), logτ=2.07. Convective turnover should be 124 days based just on their own calc of 130.4/1.05.

We do have to correct the Rossby, given rotation period has since 2018 been updated from 130 to 140 days. That pushes Rossby to 1.13.

Plugging into Equation 5, 17.46 * (1.13^0.41) = 18.36 Sol radius maximum; 17.46 * (1.13^0.03) = 17.5 Sol radius minimum. In terms of semimajor, 0.08-0.085 AU. Barnard e - outer, 0.0382 AU - rolls well inside the minimum.

Like Barnard's inner worlds didn't have enough problems. A ten-day "HZ" planet would still be fried. 22.6-to-42-day on the other hand standeth a chance out to 0.13 AU.

Barnard's inclination

Copilot is telling me we don't have Barnard's inclination. It rotates too slowly and it doesn't offer sunspots. What we do have are constraints on the inner four planets. They are resonant and seem to have been there for - well, ever, as far as Earthlings can tell. This suggests they formed there.

From Table 3 in that paper I see minimum sini≈0.4 across the board. That is 0.4115 rad; or 23.6° up to not quite 90 (90 is edge-on which means transits as we don't see).

Going to the Basant paper which confirmed the four, the Msini limit on a HZ (then-calc'ed 10-42 days) planet is a paltry 0.57 M_⊕. But. sini of 0.4 would allow up to 1.425 M_⊕ out there.

We cannot yet rule out an Earthlike in the HZ. Well, as earthlike as an airless tidally-locked rock can be.

Skyhooks of silica

I suspect these two goofs felt comfy with CNTs only because they already knew all this stuff was (literally) not going to fly in the 2000s. In these the 2020s, Jensen instead has figured upon anhydrous silica with no "Griffith flaws" (per Copilot). This is a cable we should be able to spin from Lunar regolith and ship up to space for cheaper. Let's see what this buys us.

Jensen was targeting 13.8 GPa of pure laboratory SiO₂ so ρ = 2.2. The deltaV equation √(13.8*2/2.2) = 3.54 km/s. That'll get you to Hohmann for any porkchop of Mars - or for Venus (2.8 km/s); but the next-good Byrnes-Longuski cycler to Mars is "6S9" which is terrible.

If we could stationkeep a tether-hook at STL1, this would work for a faster cycler to/from Venus: the 2L4. Venus herself could not use a 13.8 GPa cable. Both of us can however run the 3-0-2-9 cycler - in the 3.4+ km/s range on either side - and then we can keep both tethers in high-orbit.

The Nuclear-Inertial skyhook

On topic of ideas from the Shuttle era, ToughSF links the Nuclear Inertial rotational-tether. doi 10.2514/6.2000-3611 by Allan Goff and (Dr.) Joel Siegel. I don't think many picked up on this as opposed to other tether plans.

What disassociates this from the others: the counterweight is a moving crawler that also doubles an an electric thruster for reboosting the tether, all kept powered by a nuclear reactor.

They recommended it for yeeting cargo to... Mars. No seriously. From here the bestcase (Hohmann) injection burn requires 2.95 km/s; another 2.65 km/s is required to push from Hohmann to match Mars'. To take the strain, they moot *sigh* Carbon Naynoe Toobz of 20 gigapascals ("GP") breaking-stress over that ρ = 1.3 g/cm. Equation #6 told them up to 5.5 km/s of deltaV out of this setup, on the Earth side. 8.8 GPa for 50 GPa.

That's a lot to play with. Say we have already injected something into the 100 Mm orbit. We have a chart for several cycler orbits in Longuski-Byrnes 2002 (remember that?), with their outgoing v_∞. For Aldrin's 6.54 km/s, which is a Martian flyby to return our chassis, Copilot recommends 5.2 km/s. The bespoke "S1L1" is also in reach.

The mission profile at the end, even for the Earth side, relies on a relay of two skyhooks: Earth supplies the lower 'hook from a "spaceplane" (in 2000, considered more workable than a reusable rocket), which LEO hook flings cargo up to the HEO 'hook. We'll wholly ignore the Mars side for now (likely forever).

They thought the cargo could go up to 100 "tons" at a time, implicitly metric. Equations #9-11 say more tonnes means increasing the thickness (in cm₂) of the cable whatever-it-is, which tapers.

For this poast we'll leave aside the CNT hardcore. We assume such GPa as can do Mars' or Venus' Hohmann - only; like Jensen's SiO₂. Which is itself a reach.

Here we'll talk about those nuclear reactors. Per 'hook, such is to transfer momentum between payload and tether. HEO as in, past GEO: maybe; LEO, I doubt. Nuclear is chosen over solar for a few (good) reasons: brute force, and infrequency of resupply. The paper assures that that each pull to another orbit is minor. This may allow some enthalpic solution as doesn't have to stay in LEO for long. But that would have to be supplied.

Barnard's necropolis

So last year, and the year before that, we were talking Proxima Ophiuchi aka Barnard. It has four planets, all with minimum masses double-to-triple Mars'. Xander Byrne and crew are pondering What It All Means.

Besides irradiated Marslikes. We already knew their sunsides were too baked. Also the UV on any of them would be too low for "abiogenesis" even for inner "d" which is the most-roasted. The latter doesn't account for seeding from any other systems this ancient star had passed-through; but if I'm a spore-shooting alien fungus, I'd not bother with Barnard.

The star is ancient, so doesn't flare much, which helps in telling that these planets were for real in the first place (this had been a problem). It is enriched in magnesium by contrast with silicon and thorium. Byrne's paper extrapolates that the planets should be ferropericlase. I don't frankly know what that mineral is, but Petrov says that this doesn't hold water well.

The four are resonant like Trappist-1... and the Jovian system. The inner planets d,b,c might be in a 4:3 MMR chain but since we have less data than what we have for - say - Trappist-1; the paper whiffs on this one.

The paper is able to use the resonance to impose upper mass limits - which is great. Even if the planets aren't great; they're all subEarths. Given the resonance they likely formed about where we see 'em. That is (well) within the soot line let alone the snow line.

So these are all low-mass. And: with more space than Jupiter's moons have. So they don't pull on each other as much. Add to that, their internal radioactive elements (which are halflived well beyond Earth's): they are internally "cool". And the outermost planet e is tidally locked which people aren't anymore saying about Trappist-1.

Knock-on effects are that the planets won't have seeped out volatiles after initial formation. Barnard is quiet... now; but these stars - M dwarf - tend to be flare stars when younger.

The paper also brings "gap complexity". Barnard's four are simple, 0.131. The paper argues that this implies no giant outer planets, but we must counterargue that our system has a lower 0.126 inward of 1.5 AU and... we have four giant outers. Of course we've been looking at this one since van de Kamp so... yea, we ain't seen nuffin'.

It is not Elon's content

People subscribe to X because they want to support X. X doesn't have a great user-interface if you're not on that system, so alternatives xcancel and nitter.net have provided that service for us. I tend to get my information from those sidechannels. At least those two sidechannels are now down due to ceaseanddesist orders.

When linking from here, I do strip out those URLs and for "x.com". In the event that the site has some other form of monetisation.

I'll say this much: without the sidechannels, X is useless to me. I'll route around it. I'll not use it. This blog here has never been an income stream; I don't know if I want it to be.

I think the C&D is a bad move. I doubt X is Elon Musk's primary income stream. Much of Musk's income comes from doing launches and that depends on goodwill from Musk's allies, especially the ally in charge of the US military. In that light X.com is an advertising channel. The sidechannels have been helping Musk present himself as a free speech advocate. Without the sidechannels, X.com is just another Facebook; and Musk is just another Zuckerberg.

Ezekiel with the rabbis

Ezekiel was a proponent of the Babylonian approach to Temple; opposed in his life to the Levi family, the latter more Egyptian. At some point the "Zadoq" faction within Levi injected themselves as an exception to Ezekiel's rules, such that the book got readily spread around the Jews. Daniel and 11QT the Temple Scroll adopt it; New Jerusalem tries to work with it.

Despite Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones, which could support Daniel, rabbis seem to have appreciated the base text a good deal less. Tova Ganzel summarises the Rabbinic (prose) tradition. I find most-dramatic how Ganzel n. 6 raises the mishnaic ruling Megillah 4:10 against bringing his content into the haftorah. I suspect that the Babylonian Prophet rarely found much welcome in the tents of meeting.

A major issue giving to the rabbis headache was, indeed, that Ezekiel did not come from the same place as the mainline Bible had come. As mutually-aware rivals, contradictions between Bavli and Masri halakha were the whole point, of both. With both in the canon, people would have to reconcile their rivalry. The Zadokites had done this, sort of, but their attempts (like 11QT, New Jerusalem, Damascus Document et al.) went out with the Temple, any Temple.

Ezekiel's imagery proved too popular for the poets to ignore. Elʿazar's anti-Roman piyyuṭ notes the throne-chariot in all her shining glory, and Copilot tells me others bring up Ezekiel 37's dry bones. If I am reading this right, Elʿazar found a dodge around Mishnah: do it in piyyuṭ.

As to the core of how Ezekiel was nonetheless allowed to be widely read even if Jews couldn't directly utter from it at the services, this surrounds Hananiah ben Hezeqiah. He was a man of the Tannaim (up to 220 CE) who did the Mishnah. Hananiah stood forth as the one rabbi who wanted to keep Ezekiel "in circulation". The question wasn't if Ezekiel would remain canon, nor booted to join Daniel in the third-rate scribblings. Much of the tradition believes that Ezekiel owned real power - in fact, so much power it was dangerous, like Raiders of the Lost Ark dangerous. Ezekiel would instead have been locked in some secure chest like the Zohar. Christians have parallel experience with the Gnostics. Ganzel must warn that these traditions are not in Mishnah nor even Tosefta; they appear first with the Amoraim = the Talmud era, mostly complete by 540 CE. Which leads to Elʿazar's era.

A deflated idea

0II∞ has a website.

Over the late 2000s they sneered at "the odd billionaire", along with governments, having a monopoly on spaaace. Their plan was to raise a balloon and launch roggets thence. A successful test was had in 2017.

Balloon-to-orbit is the only way to retrieve a crew from Venus' 55 km altitude off that hellpit back into orbit and home. So this poast comes a little late in this blog's career. Sadly it remains ahead of any real implementations here over Earth.

0II∞'s Bloostar aimed for 70-100 kg payloads launched with methalox, like what the Raptor drinks. I'd mooted maybe something like spinlaunch for such dumb cargo although spinlaunch is a lot of overhead to "bloon" up to the strato'. A strato-runway might work for jet-to-orbit. To get real counterweight in 22 km, they'd likely need rotors wired to a modular reactor; but that's a problem for later.

It seems they shifted to tourism. For odd millionaires.

Maybe the issue was that they dreamt all this up back when the Merlin engines looked sooty and unworkable. They had quite a few high-atmo-to-orbit schemes back-when. The Merlin remains sooty, but the Falcon 9 works. Cargo-to-orbit is now a lot cheaper than was then envisioned. And the Starship is coming.

Loonybins

Paul Johnson was the great Tory historian of that great reactionary decade 1980s. Everyone read Intellectuals and Modern Times. Private Eye, which was not a Left mag, read through his work and honoured him with a nickname: Loonybins.

Johnson has now been factchecked, by Claude AI. h/t Richard Hanania; Bryan Caplan relays this, against interest he'd asked after it in 2010. (If I may, this speaks well of Caplan's humility.)

Some reviewers had already hit it for instance in this review which is floated in Caplan's old comments.

Looking over the list, several of these mistakes look like typoes (like a misplaced decimal) or like an error brought over from Johnson's own sources (the 135k toll at Dresden was all over the place, I think I saw it first in Vonnegut). But there are others and they all go in Johnson's direction. It is also a pity that Loonybins did not take the time in 1991 to correct these.

Looking around, historians of the early American era don't like Loonybins either.

But hey. The selenical binface helped win the Cold War, right? Like how PizzaGate, Vox Day, and other fakenews helped push Trump in 2016! Unfortunately Johnson left behind a time-bomb. Since he's discredited, and not in the way Cofnas and Murray be "discredited" - but on his actual ethics - all nonLeft historians have to scramble that they're not like Johnson.

The great equatorial glacier

The boring-billion ended 825-765 Mya when pancontinental Rodinia split. One daughter-craton, we call "Laurentia". North America now.

Thomas M. Gernon and five coauthors argue that the split caused a rift. Rifting might dip a deep valley below but it also raises a highland escarpment at the rim. They have inherited the term Cordillerian, for a rim of (later) sedimentary fallout in the Ediacaran era. That forms the northern rim of the escarpment, which escarpment they propose bent south at its western edge following the then-new continent.

Between 765 Mya and the Ediacaran, at 717 Mya came a Snowball Earth episode: the Sturtian event of "Cryogenian". The paper says the escarpment had by then risen eight kilometers. Maybe this occidental himalaya averaged "only" seven above present sealevel but that still would be a great place to collect ocean moisture (tides were higher then too). This water froze up there, glaciating just about all Laurentia and lowering the ocean. Most the uplifted rock got scoured down to the "Vishnu Supercyst" laid down long before 1.6 Gya; although some intervening rock survives in gaps. New sediment won't be laid down to stay, until the narrow Cordillerian; the Grand Canyon region must wait longer, for the "Tonto" known to Brits as Cambrian. Thus, the Unconformity. (We're not missing much, we're assured.)

For those pondering if glaciers might end up halting their flow and ceasing erosion, allow me to supplement: the Sturtian was never a uniform freeze and it formally melted 660 Mya. The paper doesn't name the Sturtian but it does know the Marinoan when the glaciers returned 650-635 Mya. These climate shifts might not have mattered in higher latitudes but they assuredly mattered near the equator.

The ghost of this super-escarpment seems to have held. The Old Rocky Mountains perhaps guarded our flank in the Permian, although we don't get a map. We do get a map of postapocalyptic 65 Mya. By that point everything here is rotated and, of course, wholly northern. Here the then-new Rocky Mountains butt up against that once-north-now-west boundary, and the Mexican Peninsula's altiplano from the now-south. (Central America, then, was an archipelago, like the Greater Antilles; both also-then-new.)

The king of Ebion

I am still on the case of the piyyuṭ genre. The Cairo Genizah unearthed hundreds of these, among them works by one Elʿazar, called haQallir or son-of-Qallir. Penguin's book of Hebrew verse translates one of them, in the form perhaps of a call-and-response.

By tradition this one contrasts the king Elyon who is, you know, G-d; with Melek Ebyon. On its face that's the poor king. But the Ebioni kings whom the poem mocks seem to fear Elyon's judgement. That could be the Persian shah - were it not for the insistence on the Semitic. Here I must note that several Gospels consider their audience to be "the poor". This title - in Hebrew - drifted over to the Ebionite sect.

In the Greek-speaking side, the official Church deemed Ebionites as a heresy or close-enough. Among the Semites however I wonder. They had a few petty despots who took the title mlk - in Aramaic or Arabic, not Hebrew - generally bowing either to the emperor or to the shah. Heraclius called himself basileus though, and how better to mock any post-476-CE emperor than to tag him as a petty rex.

Eleazar could easily have contrasted his Lord to sulṭans or Commanders (amir?) but, here, did not. Overall our man seems not to have used much Arabic. In reverse, sura 5 might react to Elʿazar elsewhere. As a result his works tend to be dated before the Arab conquests which we know as "Islam". Maybe this is why the poem gets dated to an admittedly-wide band around 600 CE (wider, if like me you view this sura as postMuhammadan). "AG 900", for postSeleucid Syrians.

So far, so the present limits of my knowledge of piyyuṭ, which as I've warned you is less than a week old. Google's AI is pointing to more-direct satires of Christian rule although I lack direct access to much of that (I'm pointed to Yosef Yahalom and Ezra Fleischer). It seems Elʿazar appreciated Obadiah 1:15 as you have done, it shall be done to you. Obadiah then intended Edom; but as we all know as of 600 CE this tagged Christendom.

A brutal retaliation was coming upon Palaestinian Christians, once the shah seized Jerusalem. In Elʿazar's life, I suspect this had not happened yet.

A song for Noah without Enoch

I've lately learnt about a genre of ancient Jewish poetry: the piyyuṭim. These are cantillated historical poems, like certain memrë in Syriac, and so haQallir and Yanni would compose for contemporary Byzantine-/Sasanian-era Jews. One subset of piyyuṭim, Jews have designated for the High Holy Days. Last week I fell in the deep waters, Vered Noam arguing for its deepest layer: these behave as a Levitic Heilsgeschichte better fit for their family-owned Temple than for the Moses-centred synagogue or even for the Hasmonaean temple.

To this Levitic basement-stratum, Noam went on that the figure of Enoch himself must belong. In my opinion this proposal is one that Noam needs to argue.

Noam already knows Ethiopic "1 Enoch" is a composite, so is only entertaining chapters 1-36 the "Watchers". "Watchers" might be composite even at the Qumran level. I think most scholars today, for 1E 1-16, allow - deeper - for an ancient Genesis 6 / 1E 6-11 reading as did without even Enoch. The only hero you need here is Noah, who lives to tell it.

Such scholars must admit if the piyyuṭ poems started early enough, some might never have noted Enoch in the first place. They would have vied with Ben Sira and 5Q13 in the Kippur rituals. On the other extreme we have Enoch as redeemer...

Suppose Judges was late

A few weeks ago I noted that the book of Judges remained subject to interpolation into the LXX / Qumran period. Yesterday morn, scrolling through the University of Arizona's "The Bible and Interpretation" blog, I ran across Niels Lemche.

Lemche is, I reckon, the thinking-man's Gmirkin. The Baghistan has had more interest in Yonatan Adler. We'll take some time to evaluate Lemche, today.

Lemche has marshalled parallels between the Abimelech and Jephthah stories, and events in Greek history and myth (respectively). Myth of course has no copyright, as witness the vast Etruscan and then Roman takings from those Greeks. But myth can be written, and when it is written it takes on a standard.

Take Jephthah. There were many stories of the reluctant sacrifice of the king's own child. For Greeks, the story with the most pathos was that of Iphigenia which they're still telling. Lemche points out that Jephthah is not such a telling; Judges here tracks closer, instead, the Cretan story of Idomeneus (except that here the sacrifice was his son).

Lemche further thinks Samson is simply Heracles, like Milton thought. The killstroke in Lemche's eyes is that Abimelech ended his career in a streetfight just like Pyrrhus was killed, brained by some woman hurling tiles from a rooftop. (Even if Pyrrhus was wearing a helmet, by then he was very old, so this might have been one concussion too many.)

Lemche's approach is similar to the approach other scholars take toward "Judith". "Judith" seems versed in Seleucid military concepts, its heroine follows Hasmonaean-era halakha (and political-theory), and the narrative may even track Eupolemus. Given that "Judith" doesn't know Thing One about Rome and that the Greek Additions to Esther borrow from Greek Judith, "Judith" in its original (now lost) Hebrew is unanimously dated ~100 BC.

In favour of Lemche's thesis, Judges does not much get cited in later stories. Judges famously concentrates on the northern tribes, in between introducing that cypher Othniel and generally trashing Benjamin in its latter movements. So let's look north: Jezebel knows enough of her adopted people to throw the case of Zimri at usurping Jehu. The prophets and CBH-to-LBH psalms are always referring to patriarchs Ephraim and Jacob, and sometimes villains Sihon or Og. I don't see where opponents to the various kings - we'll start with northern prophets Amos and Hosea - refer to the Bible's most cromulent example of a Man Who Would Be King. Judges doesn't even get cited much in the Samaritan Chronicle which has much lore on Joshua then Eli, but little in between. If the piyyuṭ genre be early, this seems not to have got around to Judges' heroes until ha-Qallir and Yanni in late-antiquity.

Against Lemche: the dialect of the prosaic portions of Judges, which the Samaritans (and Noth) would extend to 1 Reigns/Samuel 12, is CBH. Even some of the glosses therein look like they might better match Zionist use of Psalm 78, or precede it. By "Zionist" I mean the Joachim court's reaction to Jeremiah. Further, if Judith can be an observant Jew, and if 1 Maccabees and Esther (neither terribly religious) can talk about ancestral laws; how come none of the several villains of Judges are messing with the laws of Israel? The Hellenistic era was full of this ferment. It doesn't happen before the Persians, which - for most of us - points to a prePersian milieu for Judges. (Less-so Joshua perhaps.)

Lemche might counter that Joachim's court should have cited the Judges stories but did not. But then we don't really have this court's own words, like we have Nahum's own words and Isaiah 1-33 around Hezeqiah's court. In Jeremiah's book, we just have what scribe Baruch deigned tell us about that last independent court.

AI movie roundup

Over 2024 we got some competent AI-generated music. In 2025 we got hype, promises, and teasers done in various AI - we hear of "Sora" - for fullblown movies. I thought the trailer for the Narn i Hin Húrin was a standout, although in need of better editing. We are now in middle 2026.

Last Saturday I caught Oneiric, by Malik at Higgsfield. Up to then I suspect most of us were writing him off as a peddler of... hype, promises, and teasers. Oneiric, I concede, was advertised under a "goonbait" thumbnail; in 2016 we'd call it "malegaze". The actual video turns out to be legit. Watch it.

Interastrae is another author whose earlier stuff looked gooney. And his Alaran starts with the trope of the interstellar rogue crashlanding onto a jungle planet (jungle part of the planet anyway) with an athletic alien wench. Here too: it gets better. The second episode gets excellent.

Dark Fables is running Book of Shadows. We may or may not get to keep this one; it is set in Faerûn, like the Dungeons & Dragons movie a few years ago. Unlike Alaran, these episodes run shorter. But there are a lot of them by now.

My main suggestion is for improvements in the dialog, which can then be voiced by human actors. AI actors don't always rise to the occasion.

Apart from that, I get turned off of watching a scene when the characters blink from place to place on a set. Or, if the AI is smart enough not to do that: the camera doesn't need to be blinking around that set, because when it does it makes the audience think the characters aren't in continuity. A game author would say that this breaks mimesis. The videos I've linked keep that to a minimum.

Shadowing the poles

Among orbital nerdery ToughSF directs to Marco Bassetto and Alessandro Quarta, Solar Sail-Based Mars-Synchronous Displaced Orbits for Remote Sensing Applications. The notion is to orbit the Sun to shadow a planet, on the unstable positions of always-over-the-pole. Which means orthogonal to the ecliptic and all five its Lagrange points: "displaced nonKeplerian".

This is accomplished by solar-sails. The authors believe that Mars' 1/10 Earth mass and 1/3 surface-gravity allow a reasonably low-altitude as can map the poles. Of course Mars also gets less than half the Solar irradiance but space is cheap out there. Just unfurl twice the sail bro. If I read figures 11b and 13b correctly, they'd float about 0.01 AU above or below the Martian ecliptic plane which is 1.5 million-kilometers or, probably better, gigameters.

This would constrain a Mars mission not by propellant but by battery life and/or solar panel degradation. Like docking Deimos.

Injection into that orbit, from a base in high Earth orbit, is also handled here. There's a boost of 1 km/s deltaV to kick off to intercept the Martian DNKO. The sail takes it from there to bring the craft to where it needs to be. Minimum 949 days if the sail is mid-performance, 498 if high-performance.

These are functions of the "lightness number" β, the higher the... betta'. The paper knows of 2021-designed sails all β shy of 0.01. Bassetto & Quarta believe these rookie numbers can be improved. Lower perf does get you closer to Mars however.

There seems no plan to park these over Venus' poles. Six years ago I mooted a network of balloons perhaps angled against the vortex, per pole. From data-relays to polar mapping to weather observation, this does everything a gigameter-off sail could do.

Not your panther

A few Februaries ago I posted a couplet of comments about a genre of antiRabbinic satire which the Christian gospels might have ascribed to their hero. The narrative-gospels can use only those stories as serve the narrative, which culminates at the Cross. I found interesting that Rabbinic literature dares name some of these antiRabbinic "trolls": some are in fact "Jesus", some are associated with the "Jesus" name in commentary.

What I hadn't yet done on this blog, and perhaps should have done, was discuss Bar Pantera / Bar Panθera. Peter Schäfer made his name discussing possible references in, especially, the (Babylonian) Talmud. Schäfer figured that the 'Iraq/Χάραξ being ruled by nonAbrahamics would allow complete rein to anyone wanting to get some licks in at the Christians, especially after the whole Roman East became Christian. The notorious Toledot Yashu was so Euphratean a project.

That does not show where Jews took up that ?happy task however. Christopher Zeichmann, who seems like no Jew, last June posted the lack of evidence for any of that. Of all the trolls whose names later rabbis could possibly associate with the Gospel Jesus, none of these names - in the basis stories - seem to be doing anything as has Gospel parallel. Not even with the vignettes in "Thomas", whose living Jesus doesn't pass through the Cross.

If I can say that the Gospel Jesus incorporates a pastiche of antiRabbinic controversy, Zeichmann can say that the Talmudic Jesus-es are also pastiche. Some might be Bar Panthera. Some might be Bar Stada. None of them have to be of the Tiberius / Sejanus / Pilate imperium. Sure, some Jews may have made some connexion. But that seems to be later. It might even be more Celsus - pagan - than any Abrahamic who'd jammed these stories into the Gospel, most.

Lead BVDs

Tom Lehrer's old joke is now reality: the radiation shield bikini. Except it's polyethylene, which at high density marshals more hydrogen than a thin water or ice shield might. Lithium hydride mixes have been mooted for the overall chassis; we got a 2024 state-of-the-question, but presently we'd have to assemble these in actual space, and we're still not there.

NASA limits lifetime-total exposure to 0.6 sieverts. That was based on 1950s assumptions that sieverts to the big toe mattered as much as sieverts to the groin, which even Lehrer wasn't fool enough to believe. The body parts that need the shielding best, in practice, indeed cluster the pelvis. The head doesn't need it as bad, either; this might even be an ancient evolutionary hack.

Geometry is "hexagonal rods", I guess the 9-60mm of that rod being on the Z-axis. So the (unmanned) first Artemis mission successfully tested a 26kg version of this, just by blasting through our Van Allens. Although the results did not make the deadline for the Artemis II followup that just ran.

The plastic /rinkle/ is still, I think, not a solution for a trip to Mars which is further than Tampa. They admit that cosmic rays, as blast through Earth's own magshield, still got through. In a straight shot to our Moon an astronaut can laugh this off. Not in a months-long trip however (and then most want to come home). In our LEO sats we're all tired of running to the shielded part whenever a storm hits.

What this does give to long-term astronauts in orbiting ti[tanio]n cans is the ability to move around an unshielded station under solarflare conditions. Or - better - passing over the south-Pacific anomaly - or in permanent MEO between Van Allens, where I think the belts might shift. Or wandering those prefab corridors although there a magnetic solution could work as well.

Meanwhile they're targeting 16kg.

The Avodah piyyuṭim as Levitic survivals

Vered Noam lately discussed the rabbinic abandonment of the Second Temple mindset. It is not reserved to TEH TALMUD!: the Palaestinian "Yerushalmi" Talmud and the Midrashim share in this (where they sometimes dispute Talmud elsewhere). I understand that Flavius Josephus wasn't much a fan of that Temple neither.

Noam gears up to this with (what I read as) the implicit lament that the rabbis' sourcing isn't what it could be. The rabbinate had imposed a rule to use orality for anything not in Tanakh. Daniel and Esther survive of course but they present themselves as Diaspora-lit. Ben Sira hung around the fringe. Otherwise very little is written. Jews had to beg the Christians for readings of Josephus, until writing their own "Yosippon"; the same holds for the book of Judith. 1 Maccabees was famously rejected until the recent Zionism. Ginsberg's "Legends of the Jews" records stories clearly not written until the Middle Ages (including a Judith). This may incidentally explain why Jewish records of the early Islamic era are so poor by comparison with Syriac-literate Christians.

I'll here raise an aside on one contemporary source: Judith. MS Copilot is telling me that Judith had been composed in Hebrew by the style of the Chronicler (with the DtrH behind him, especially Judges). It was translated into Greek using the וַיְהִי > kai egeneto trope, sometimes treating this as a conjunction which וַיְהִי is not. Copilot is raising several arguments for Judith's subsequent exclusion in any language.

Those two digressions done wit', Noam would add that Judith's book assumes Second Temple halakha. Maybe not as egregious as the Aramaic Levi / Tobit cluster on account Judith was, in fact, in Hebrew suggesting more alignment with Jubilees than with 1Q20 the Genesis Apocryphon. I'd say theologically Judith would side more with the latter given how sectarian is the former (we're not here to argue those two).

On topic of Aramaic, we've seen hints that Yom Kippur might have started as a mere preparation for the older holiday Sukkot. That was done under the Aramaic-speaking Babylonians, providing the month Nisan and its akītu. The Levides deemed Yom Kippur worthy of Aramaic. Second Temple veneration of Enoch, Noah, and Levi couldn't be retained to Aramaic, as we'll note from Jubilees' existence, and Ben Sira will literally sing their paean.

Where the rabbis dismissed the late figures Judith and Tobit, they didn't so alone. Noam notes they went as far as to wave off Levi, Enoch - even Noah (contrast R. Singer here). This goes to explain Ben Sira's eventual failure within Judaism as well.

Noam sees this as a deliberate repudiation of the entire Second Temple apparatus (Ezekiel should be proud). Esther, as a national novel bypassing overt piety, survived pious threshing. As perhaps-byproduct, this threshing undercuts the basis of Christianity which stems from a rival miqveh (Isaiah's translation > Mark+Matthew) and/or from Mary being a Levide (> Luke).

With a vital exception. On the High HolyDays the liturgy exalts these men. Most of them...

Noam notes these same figures had featured in the Qumran liturgi(es) for these Holy Days. He cites Menahem Kister that the 5Q13 fragments 1-2 present a draught of the (now-rabbinic) Avodah piyyuṭim, in which all Creation exists for the Yom Kippur. Ben Sira 42:15-50:24 is similar (NB. Ben Sira is also found in Qumran); 1Q20 in which Noah atones for the world should belong here as well.

If we are talking an era before Torah, or at least before its standard text, I can imagine the "Historical Psalms" as the first piyyuṭim. Those would be 105-6 and 135-6. Perhaps for Pesach, by then coalescing into what we know as "Passover". These wouldn't be for Levi alone however. The Temple needed something for their own holiday, which was Yom Kippur.

This Levitic poetic tradition - say Kister and Noam - has subsequently gotten spliced into a summary of Mishneh Yoma. Unlike the Second Temple, the Mishnaists to their piyyuṭ didn't bring Enoch, and further tried to freeze out the Enoch-associated Nephilim of Senîr. The latter effort didn't wholly succeed.

Another point in the piyyuṭim is how they don't bring anyone to replace Enoch... like, oh, Moses. This reminds of the Haggadah, as opposed to standard rabbinic veneration of Moses The Exagog and Lawgiver which is shared even with gentiles like Trogus. The Qahat / Amram works exist in the Aramaic Levi tradition precisely to bridge this gap; Ben Sira also praises Moses (and glides over anything Nephilish).

To me this supports Noam on extreme antiquity to the piyyuṭ-genre core. PreHasmonaean.

CLEANUP 8/18-19: This was a long one, due to me, uh, only just learning about all this stuff. I'm not much Jewish. Anyway: a followup.

Priestly John, the jester

Olga Fabrikant-Burke asks after Jeremiah's false prophets.

Jeremiah exists in two versions, everyone-else's and the Greeks'. So his Divine word comes to us after much skub already. Even the pure-r Greek is, itself, a product of earlier skub because, if nothing else, not all those translators were on the level. OFB is excavating deep. But let's hear her out.

Jeremiah's foil was one "Hananiah". OFB is looking into "Hananiah's" speeches and finds them to depend on Jeremiah's own words. She believes the easiest solution is that Hananiah exists, only, to be the parody and ape of Jeremiah. Hananiah even acts as (malicious) exegete of the Divine Word. And the easiest solution to that, is that Hananiah never existed in the material plane; that he is a narrative character, of Jeremiah's narrative editor. Traditionally Baruch.

To back her up, somewhat, I propose that a court prophet shouldn't happen. I've noted here that the Zionist court by then owned plenty of homespun pious text: the Deuteronomist, his History up to Josiah, and a royal(ist) Psalter. Jeremiah would have inherited, in such courtly literature: YHWH's Rescue Of Jerusalem under Hezeqiah, and then the great religious restoration under Josiah. Josiah's thus-theocratic court could call upon its priests. The Deuteronomist, as OFB notes, had warned against false prophets. The priests would then call out Jeremiah as being the false prophet here exactly because he claims prophecy, which "we don't need anymore".

If Jeremiah's Hananiah didn't exist, his scribe Baruch has permitted to us critics a similar authorial-liberty. We may imagine our own character - as the court's fool; think Binface, or the Yes Men. Maybe call this one... "John". At least allied to that clumsy author of Psalm 78, if you read this blog.

Jeremiah, living in times of priestcraft, also inherited a prophetic tradition. But then so had the priests. At first Josiah's priests might have trouble with the (vast) antiAssyrian rantings of Amos, Hosea, and of Nahum and Isaiah 1-33 (latter who, might be the same guy). After Josiah though, all those rantings could be repurposed. The Syrians will tell Herodotus how Babylon may as well be Assyria's new capital. Jeremiah could look like he was preaching a gospel alien to that of Nahum, more like the position of weak king Ahaz and of puppet Manasseh (there was yet no "penance of Manasses").

In hindsight Jeremiah was proven right. If John existed, and I allow a clown like him could exist, his japes got reinterpreted in the light of False Prophecy. He got promoted, if you will, from the weapon of the loyal priests, to the mouthpiece of Melkor.

A chud rebuttal

Been a (checks) halfyear since I last checked in on Bulwark contributor and midwit extraordinaire Bret Devereaux. Last month he owned the chuds. He said the only history that we, who aren't signing up as Kristol's cabin-boys, know is Caesar and Alexander. Latter whom, Devereaux pompously styles as Alexander III.

Leave aside the truth of any of this chudbash; for Aurelian, especially, I suspect you could get a fair hearing on /pol/. Let's talk how come nobody is talking Seleucus I Nicator.

Well, yeah. Not everyone knows the full Seleucid story. (This blog has put in a good word for his calendar.) But... do they need to? The Seleucids after the eponymous founder started falling off. Antiochus III was a contender but not a permanent one. If we look further afield, we could drop several more names. But whom are we trying to impress by floating Suppiluliumas I, Trajan, Nabuchadrezzar II, Ashurbanipal, Tuthmosis III... these men although great didn't really leave much behind them.

Personally I wouldn't mind floating some of the beta people. Porcius Cato the Elder, Empress Livia or (maybe more so) Julia Domna, Agrippa, or freakin' queen-mother Olympia. Belisarius and Narses? Theodora? ...anyone?

It's not that the "chuds" can't drop names they got from skimming Wikipedia or Grok. It's that it's a waste of their/our time. We're trying to spread historical knowledge, however onesided as Devereaux might think it be. Devereaux is doing little more than dropping names and waving wingwang.

Which is a very Lincoln Project thing to do. Kinda gay tho'.

How the Internet became AOL

If you own an ancient DVD you may have seen reference, in movie teasers, to "AOL Keyword" in lieu of a website URL. This was Steve Case's bid to create his own private Internet based off his telephone-switchboard in Virginia. 16k bandwidth if you could get through. (Went up to the 50s by 1999 if you bought the bespoke phone modem but by that point, the Dot.Bomb was about to hit err'body. We now measure bandwidth in G.)

So Arctotherium's history dropped a few days back. Outgoing President Obama and his allies, in late 2016, chained the Internet. This made it close to AOL-by-cartel. The first excuse given was Russia. So we had to become Soviet. If people had any further questions they were directed to the Safe Edgy Store of "breadtube".

Arctotherium is an antivaxxer and they cannot help themselves from outing themselves as such. And he runs up against the same problem as other "free speech advocates": he has to allow for the likes of Jack Kerwick (laundered through JJ Sefton). We are now Askin'-Qwesschins about The Virus Assumption. And for 1980s-era televangelism.

There exist some gullible people and these are prone to scams. Scams will become only more profitable as more internet people get up in age, bringing their wealth with them. I am tempted to suggest that these people deserve it, especially boomers given their vast sense of entitlement. Except that wealth - and power - would shift to the scammers who, I dare say, don't deserve to profit. Privatised theft isn't better than government theft.

Given the fury being fanned by these personalities, who by the way have no problem shutting out anyone pushing back upon them, I fear for Anthony Fauci's life.

Middle Hunter Gatherers

A few days back we primitive European hunter-gatherers got some notes that, alongside the famed Spanish and Italian refugia, we should take seriously the Balkans 'fugium as well. Maybe foremost.

"Cro-Mags" got into Europe in the latter 40sKBC, for good this time, forever ending the Neanders. But then the Others returned and pushed everyone there into those refugia. These papers are talking about what happened when the ice melted.

The Balkan peoples went west, to mix with the Magdalenians in Italy and Spain. That's the Epigravettian replacement noted here. Likewise that Italy proved a poor refuge although some Italian DNA persisted. Here are your WHG, gentlemen.

Bacho Kiro remains none-of-the-above. They're IUP East Eurasians in Europe. They had perhaps brought a little (male?) DNA to the Magdalenians, earlier. Not on this scale.

This Balkan group further spread east, along the steppe. That branch might be the source of the EHG.

Cofnas' most questionable take

Everyone hates Nathan Cofnas. The far Right can't stand that Cofnas read Kevin MacDonald and engaged with his work. High academia calls Nate-Dogg a "racist". Here, perhaps, is the biggest hit on him: he's no biologist, rather a philosopher, so prone to just so stories.

There is an "iron constant" in sociology, involving standard-deviations, usually one-sigma. Suffice that when prior generations wanted, basically, any African American presence in a skilled profession, they set a quota. (Alternatively you can skim the cream from Africa or the Caribbean; but the Caribbean - being an island chain - swiftly runs out of cream. There also exist those Rachel Dolezal types who play off the one-drop rule but these tend not to be the cream of any race.)

Cofnas was impolite-enough to state that this wasn't a mistake; you must do this. John Derbyshire said similar. You're not supposed to say this. You're just supposed to act on this, and babble excuses maybe sometimes citing Jared Diamond. During Obama's second term, Equity started to kick in and everyone had to act on this but turbo.

Cofnas continued, though: that West Africans are jungle / savannah tribes who can't into Neolithic. Uh.

Going back to @Evolving_Moloch and Alexander Gusev, they point out that although jungles and their tribals do exist in West Africa (e.g. that Liberian coast ain't great for permanent structures), such tribals weren't the Africans targeted for the various slave-trades. It was found in the Americas that when a hunter-gatherer was nabbed, he proved a poor worker in the fields, as in the crop-fields. It was found along the western Indian Ocean that sugar needed a force who could swing a machete. The phenomenon may well have been noted in Carthage before them all; Hanno seemed unclear on any differences between a chimp, a "gorilla", and a pygmy. A plantation, in short, needs farmers - Iron-Age farmers at that.

The Zanj was eastern Africa; we've handled that elsewhere. On our side and in our more-recent times: along the Atlantic, the Bantus... Expanded. Farmers, all. In fact a lot of the problems in Africa today are problems between herders, who usually adopted herding after their vast experience in hunting; and farmers, overwhelmingly Bantu or at least generally Niger-Congo. The "Black" peoples now in the Americas are generally Niger-Congo; I suspect Brasil being further south and hooked into likewise-Portuguese Angola, as Bantu-skewed.

Farming happens in the savannah as well because the upper-Niger part of that duo allows for irrigation, like the Nile. These more fed the Saharan trade than the Atlantic. As Gusev notes: that side of Cofnas' argument is simply irrelevant. The Atlantic trade wasn't taking the savannah's herders. If anything the savannah's herders were taking the savannah's farmers and shifting the latter, northward.

Interestingly Jared Diamond himself pondered if hunter-gatherers like he'd seen in New Guinea might be of intelligence superior over ... whites, like him, also the product of farms. But hey.

Personally I think Gusev is at least as big of a prick, to use Gregory Cochran's term; since Gusev sideswipes Cofnas as a sland'rer, where that "slander" is about David Reich's lab blowing off Davide Piffer and generally dabbing on other rivals (like Watson) for specious "racism" despite repro'ing all their results. Reich was a social-climber in 2018 and he remains a social-climber today. Reich doesn't want to suffer Cofnas' career. Cofnas, by contrast, doesn't want to be Reich, with all his ethical compromises. I doubt Cofnas wants to be Gusev, that pick-me, either. Anymore than Cochran wants to associate with anysuch "pricks".

None of this is to confirm or deny the existence of the Iron Constant. Nobody seems brave enough to confront Cofnas on this. (Or Gregory Cochran. Or Charles Murray or Nicholas Wade or...)

I will say Gusev is right on this much: if Cofnas wants to step onto palaeo-sociologic turf, he needs to learn the history of that turf.

The abortion jab (or not)

The COVID-19 jab was an abortion jab, say Ron Johnson and Katie Pavlich. Now Ace of Spades, whose motto may as well be "True If Big".

'Cause it ain't true. It was debunked last year.

The whole reason the Senators are bringing this up now is to distract voters from seeing all the work they're not doing for the SAVE Act, although there's plenty of votes for illegal-amnesties in "farm bills" and for Middle Eastern wars.

MUTANTS 8/11: Cool story, ace. Sport. Champ.

On skipping Phobos

A decade ago Hoppy Price, John Baker, and Firouz Naderi wrote "A Minimal Architecture for Human Journeys to Mars", doi 10.1089/space.2015.0018. On the assumption of SLS, four launches of those could get sufficient cargo to hop to inner (6000 km) moon Phobos. This would - they said - allow for the main prize some years later which is the Martian surface. Some have of-late proposed additionally supplying Phobos from the Belt; supplying Mars from the Belt, too. This blog doesn't endorse Martian surface missions exactly, preferring outer moon Deimos, but we can allow for supplying either moon from outside.

In 2021 Drake, Rucker, and Cianciolo henceforth DRC evaluated the earlier trio (pdf). Deimos - I think - has its own merits, which aren't Martian merits. Phobos on the other hand - they think - is still looking for purpose. Inasmuch as it's being sold as a waystation to Mars, DRC say it's a cuckshed.

DRC nod to Deimos as having similar issues as the inner moon. They don't really consider it however. Perhaps because indeed it is not really a Martian waypoint (I say an interplanetary waypoint).

The issues had in both, which are not shared with Mars, include gravity 3 mm/s² (twice that for Phobos), and yes that is in millimeters. Also they are entirely airless where Mars' atmo may be compressed for CO₂, nitrogen, and argon. On Mars water may, further, be drilled and now you have most of your requirements for feeding plants and housing us animals. More: on these moons regolith cannot be shaken off gloves as it can on Mars or our Moon. So you are going to have to send over two different kinds of life-support: one for whatever moon, and one for Mars' surface. Three if we count the craft getting everything over there (one assumes, a cycler).

The 2015 architecture was proposing just to land humans on that moon and then "teleöperate" robots on the Martian surface. In that case, life-support on Mars is to be built on Mars, by those bots. The 2021 DRC review denies the point of this. Just land everything on Mars all at once, they say. Maybe get into some lavatube tunnel, aerate the place and teleöperate thence.

It is further difficult to catch Phobos from the surface, and likely harder still to catch a tether dangling thence. Here Deimos has the advantage because it's almost in areosync (martistationary at that, it's equatorial).

Overall I must agree that Phobos is the also-ran in the Mars-or-Deimos competition. I still think Deimos deserves consideration as our first port-of-call however. Although here we'll have to be serious. We'll have to build a whole city from that rock.

Tales of Canterbury

Geoffrey Chaucer composed the Tales of Canterbury and it got copied - early. Barbara Bordalejo and Peter Robinson have a URL of that name.

These two believe that their predecessors had overcomplicated the manuscript tradition. Hengwrt and Ellesmere are good MSS, they agree. To these they'd add Christ Church 152 and Bodleian 686... to pretty-much ignore the others. Because they're all dependent on the four noted (or maybe on CC152's original, but CC152 itself is good-enough here).

The title "book of the tales of Canterbury" seems almost to roll off the tongue. Was it "Cantérbury" in Chaucer's time? A few centuries before him it was "Cantwareburh" or "Cair Ceint". I can't see the accent falling on the second syllable of the former... unless we allow for some lost Latinism. But in 13th-century Latin the Normans were using variations of "Dorobern" based off a tradition of Roman "Durovernum Cantiacorum". Chaucer was self-consciously English and no Norman. I think he'd rather say Cánterbury like we say; the "book of -" preface is tacked on, by scribes, because these Tales are poems which people declaimed from memory for sport.

As to the epigones: "Canterbury Tales" is a fair reduction in my opinion, but it remains a reduction. Also some Tales got memorised to the expense of others, which may explain how later editions might be wild compared to the originals. But - say Bordalejo and Robinson - we have good-enough originals. One might compare Homer, whose two main works seem deliberately-composed such that later copies don't deviate as far as, uh, sura 11 from sura 7.

That's a spicy meatball

Lucas Beveridge is talking about something he and Sam Piper did for Atomos Nuclear and Space. Suppose we only shipped one reactor to a HEO. That reactor hands over neutrons to some neutral metal... which then becomes radioactive, including in the gamma spectrum - one per mission. This transfers "enthalpy": energy to tungsten plates. The plate then delivers those joules over time, in kilowatts. I hear beryllium too.

Here's how it was tested; here's what was tested.

At HEO - as in, GEO or higher - is way too high up for Earthlings to care. You can fuel up a lot of space tuggery. Take Tory Bruno's Blue Ring, which needs one tonne of xenon for four of payload. That reactor looks like it would in fact deliver the 5.5 kW needed to propel to Gateway's lunar NRHO. To get a mission rolling "for weeks or months", Beveridge prescribes Scandium-46 with its low 84-hour halflife. Maybe tugs; maybe Venus injection. Sc-46 is allowed to deorbit after three years.

The test used Manganese-56 which decays in 2.6 hours. This can deorbit rather sooner. Maybe use the Mn-56 for high-thrust tugs between HEOs and be done with it. Like if you just want to hit the Spaceline cable at the 80 Mm this blog has promised.

Various enthalphy-rockets have been recommended for station-keeping. Further: with this much power in a small package, we could go up to Martian landers. Solar flybys with Oberth?

For longer missions, he's talking Cobalt-60 at its 5.27 year halflife. We might not want this in Earth orbit... ever. Beveridge is suggesting this for a Uranus orbiter, or series of orbiters. First it has to get there but we can probably do that with a Starship. And/or with a fusion-driven ship launching off Deimos. This one burning constantly might also do without radiators, since this whole setup is the radiator.

The asteroid/Martian economy

Mark Thompson last April relayed a Swiss(?) study by EPFL on how to deliver materiel to Mars (to its well, anyway).

Serena Suriano, Shamil Biktimirov, Dmitry Pritykin, Anton Ivanov seem to be picking up where Zubrin left off; they're not stopping at Deimos (like I'd stop). Except, Zubrin wanted Martians to mine the 'stroids and these three Russians (and one Sicilian) are asking the Belters to do it themselves and sell to the Martians.

To read the article, they want to deliver the goods to a Low Mars Orbit 500 km. Phobos, for reference, is at 6000 km. Why not just send it all to Phobos? Gravity there is higher than Deimos' and this place should be able to dangle a tether to 500 km. Our authors are already aware of the doi-10.1089/space.2015.0018 mission architecture which targets, exactly, Phobos.

On the Earth side, all this assumes a depot at STL2. That's "ST", not "TL". Somehow they have to stationkeep that.

The 'stroids they want are metallic, like 332 Siri. Guess they want the tungsten... or Beryllium. That one sails out 2.7 AU where Mars is, what, 1.6 and Vesta 2.36.

But... isn't Mars literally littered with meteorites of all sorts? If it's volatiles you want, just drill for the ice. And if we're staying at Deimos (or Phobos), it's probably mafic such that there should be a few iron and siderophiles right there. Or anyway sicila fit for anhydrous glass fibre.

NASA's new tungsten mine

There is, today-announced, a vast tungsten reserve in Nevada. Tungsten as you know comes with other essential elements like boron and lithium. Some of the land however overlaps with 17 square miles of NASA. NASA say they need the land.

My suggestion is for NASA to earmark a tax on the land they've inherited. Materials from that part of the land go to NASA as first-choice customer, for NASA's own use.

Meanwhile I guess NASA should calibrate its satellites elsewhere; the Feds can scout around for other parts of its enormous Southwestern lands for anything likely. Southern Cali? Utah?

BAqDAyT 8/7 from Stephen "Vodka" Green.

What was wrong with the Sack of Troy?

One of those prefaces to The Odyssey is The Sack of Troy, summarised here. In antiquity, most agreed that Homer didn't write it. It tended to be attributed to fellow Milesian, Arctinus. Aristotle wasn't complaining about this one particularly when his Poetics lambasted the likes of Cypria for being Just A Bunch Of Stuff That Happened unlike Iliad, which promised a theme and, he thought, held to that theme, this-or-that chapter aside.

But even if Arctinus wasn't Homer (some today doubt Odyssey was Homer)... Hesiod wasn't Homer either. And what Proclus and others claim of The Sack of Troy is that it is in fact restricted to a single episode, after the Horse. So Aristotle shouldn't have minded... right?

Giampiero (or, Jean-Pierre) Scafoglio has an essay, "Two Ways of the Epic Genre in Late Antiquity" discussing the Homer / Aristotle reception in works such as Triphiodorus' epic about the "Capture". This epic, you can read today. And this, wikipedia is saying a lot of authors did read. Latinists of course are aware of Virgil in Aeneid Book II covering the same episode, but self-consciously a preface to the epic of Rome to come.

Triphiodorus clearly didn't think Arctinus got the job done or he'd not have bothered. I do not see where Triphiodorus chose to rewrite a "Wrath of Achilles" or "Tragedy of Hector" (there's talk he redid an Odyssey however). Our man may have been right, given that I cannot link to a full Arctinus. As of this decade the 2020s, it looks like the Sack was no longer even in the late-antique libraries (pdf)... which puts Proclus under suspicion as well.

What we can do, perhaps must do, is to compare Triphiodorus to his peers and middlemen.

Against Virgil, our man chooses Cassandra over the other prophet Laocoön. For the great tragedians, that's Aeschylus over Sophocles. As a narrative choice in a postAristotelian epic, Laocoön doesn't work here and he's also not in the two Homerics. Arctinus did note that the gods chose now to knock him out, but this episode serves mainly to get Aeneas out of the city before all the fun starts.

Triphiodorus and Virgil do seem to agree on Sinon. Also Triphiodorus agrees that Aeneas was at the sack so tacitly sides with Virgil against Arctinus here.

Ultimately, Triphiodorus feels like a writing-exercise. He seems to be showing that he can write a "Sack of Troy" as might meet Aristotle's rules, if not his approval - because personally I doubt that Aristotle liked writing-exercises, of which a lot of those elder-epics smell. Virgil on the other hand wants to bring us into the Trojan side as to see the full iniquity of the Greeks' crimes. Like Nolan this year, Virgil has a point.

Going back to Arctinus: if I was doing a writing-exercise in years B.C., I'd play up the glorious deeds of the Achaeans sacking this city. I'd tick the boxes of the Homeric heroes in Troy meeting their own ends and/or causing appropriate ends to other heroes. As to, why; because Miletus was precariously maintaining its autonomy against the Anatolian barbarians in Lycia, Caria and especially Lydia and, before that, Phrygia.

Yeah, Virgil probably wore it better.

BACKDATE 8/6

SDI's plasma-core rocket

In lieu of Cassenti's microfission-catalysis for fusion rocketry, for interplanetary missions Omira and Mourad suggest "plasma core". Interstellar is another matter (heh). So let's look at plasma-core. This is an idea from 1985 to power NERVA/NΘP.

The core is Uranium Hexafluoride, either U-235 or -233. In theory a Curium-247 hexafluoride also can be made. Anyway, UF₆ is a solid at reasonably-warm temps (<56.5°C). As a plasma the fluorine ions are likely more problematic but we're hoping to make a nuclear blast out of it so noöne cares.

In 1985 they were trying to contain a sphere of this plasma, swimming in a mutually-immiscible noble gas; and why not, in microgravity. They picked argon, probably-obviously. They measured 50km/s exhaust. We divide that latter by Earth 9.8 to make of that a ratio independent of SI or Freedom units, called Specific Impulse; 5.1 kiloseconds. (Although now it seems dependent on Earth being that frame-of-reference.)

They got it running for about two minutes. After that, they lost enough uranium that the critical-mass went subcritical. Also there won't be microgravity during the thrust phase. Before anyone could figure out how to make this practical for a space trip, after January 1986 the launch costs per kilogram hit the Challenger wall.

Spacenerd life is better now. But the middle-1980s flights of fancy have been forgotten... mostly.

Hence such fission pulse engines as in Howe two years ago, which promised 5ks specific-impulse which would have compared nicely with 1985. Or last year centrifugal NERVA... 1.8ks. They'd make it up in thrust though; so if they just wanted to push loads to Deimos or Venus rather than all the way to Jupiter, it might work.

Gerald Marsh seems unhappy with Howe and, more so, with that lumbering 1.8ks solution.

Marsh proposes to revive Ronnie Raygun's tech: with magnetic confinement, in a spheromak. Marsh seems an expert in magnets, working on them in 1996. Marsh must however conclude that one (not he) must also find a way to generate the plasma with the field configuration chosen, maintain thermal stability, and find a way to turn the rocket engine off; opining these are non-trivial engineering problems.

I counter that turning the rocket off is the least of this rocket's problems. What you do here is to calculate the cooloff of the rocket and let the spacecraft reduce its acceleration naturally. It all gets tested in the field like SpaceX tests its Starship. If you're asking after an abort sequence then whatever, just separate your craft from the engine and push the still-running engine to the side as it makes its own merry way to the outer AU fringe.

BACKDATE 8/5

A proposal for the House of Representatives

Cambridge University is, presently, a disgrace and one excellent reason for its disgrace is politics. So, sigh, let's listen to Cambridge on politics.

Britain (not part of the EU) runs on the DSA system. It has a Parliament. The majority of Parliament votes for a Prime Minister, even if the people didn't want it. Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister throughout the 1980s. To her, is attributed the comment "we have an elected dictatorship". However you think of Thatcher or, if you're DSA, Burnham: I don't think Thatcher ever cracked 50% of the popular vote and we jolly know Burnham hasn't.

Similar has happened to Denmark. Frederik Ravn Klausen, who sounds like a Scandinavian, nonetheless works out of Cambridge (he should leave); he has teamed with Sebastian Tim Holdum in Copenhagen. They propose instead "geographically ranked guaranteed proportionality". Buroughs / ridings / precincts / parishes still exist. But the election winners are chosen by popular vote. So if your Albertan ridings (screw it, let's be Canadian) voted for the Tory, and everyone north and east of the Lakes voted for the Grit; the Grit votes override most of you. Some of your Tories will get through however. From the truest-blue ridings.

As they note, regionality is here sacrificed. It rather has to be, because someone Federal (or Royal) is going to have to guard the ballots wherever the score stands to be run-up. Historically the cities.

An expressly-regional second chamber would counter this. Americans have such a body: the Senate, wired into State boundaries and once-upon-a-time appointed by State legislatures. This is why Americans deserve to take Klausen-Holdum seriously where, frankly, I would never recommend the above system for any unicameral state. Fer cryin'-out-loud, Denmark is made of islands (and a peninsula).

Drawing up the constituencies is still up to the States I guess. On the plus side, if their constituencies might get overridden by their neighbo(u)rs anyway, gerrymandering might not be as hot an issue.

The issue wot I see as hot is if these States' voters are overridden by other States' voters. They already have to suck it up when Senators from Delaware and North Dakota dab on 'em.

Pekah, Shalish of Israel

Pulu wrested the throne of Ashur in 745 BC, from a "Shalmaneser V" whom Pulu's family then disavowed. Perhaps similar breaks of memory were had in Israel at the time. So: Carl Lederer, and now youtuber "Dig."

The eretz-Israel had been a united land under Jeroboam II, but as all men do he died. His heir Zechariah was ousted in a coup and that coup - under Shallum - collapsed. Menahem and Pekah picked up the pieces. The Bible says Menahem ruled for ten years and Pekah for twenty.

The maths don't add up under scrutiny from Assyria however. Menahem gave tribute to "Pul"; that emperor claimed he'd had it from Pekah as well. Luckily, we have a local report: from Hosea the northern prophet. His sermons made a point of the twin iniquities of his land. Hosea didn't consider Judah in this calculus, despite that it was starting to matter again; Hosea's twinland was Ephraim-and-Israel.

According to Lederer's reading, Pekah had a base in Gilead and simply slipped over there, keeping that base. The face-saving fiction was that Pekah would hold the title "Shalish" and not "king of Israel". In practice, yeah, Pekah was sulṭan across the water, as it were.

I must inject here that per Rendsburg (pdf), Amos especially Amos 6 is also writ in a nonJehudi Hebrew to be considered northern. Amos didn't preach about Israel/Ephraim's twinship for the simple reason he preached under Jeroboam II when that kingdom was one. His kingdom likely included Judah then; maybe then Edom (so I'm not getting into which "Tekoa" here). So for Amos, Jeroboam's court was the court which mattered.

Pekah would eventually switch to being an ally of Damascus and make a bid to take Judah. Ahaz squealed to Assyria who then attacked and got all of it. Israel, from Samaria, would end up a rump and tributary Assyrian vassal, under Hoshea.

More Trappist-1 constraints

On the (excellent) assumption that Trappist-1's planets are all differentiated, Emeline Bolmont, Alex Revol et al. offer "Estimation of the tidal heating in the TRAPPIST-1 planets". They are admittedly constrained by the uncertainty of what these planets' cores actually be, that Love Number we'd noted here once.

Also they don't know the eccentricities of b or c. Frankly I doubt they're Keplerian, so they need some postLaplacian model. Eccentricity tides would bump up their estimates especially inward.

What Revol (especially) thinks he does know, are the obliquity and the libration of each planetary rotation: less than one degree, each. But Revol does not hold these planets as tidally locked: a slow drift of the substellar point, which therefore leads to a day-night cycle.

I find intriguing this space elevator design for e. However Revol argues that the rotations for all planets are slow such that day/night appears retrograde. GEO is, then, high. Where GEO extend past Hill, all space elevators must be floating tether.

Even with low eccentricity it came out that b and c are superheated like Io (if not technically lava); it's elsewhere been noted they've lost everything volatile by now and are airless like Io. Planets d, e, f get more internal heat than Earth; e, they submit, may have a crust and plate tectonics. And we hear e has air. Although I am still not hopeful for photosynthetic life.

Kleisioti et al. move on to f, g, h asking after ice shells, quite reasonable for these cold planets with, further, lower measured density. Planets f and g might have thin Enceladus-tier ice shells; h's would be thick like Europa's. They think possible for us detecting cryovolcanically generated water vapor on f (maybe g) for which we haven't looked. 20 transits should do for seeing it on f.

The patent for a supercloud server

A patent now exists for the heliosync orbit: US-12679564-B2 at ppubs.uspto.gov, for datacentres which I'd written off two years ago as "cockamamie" and indeed ToughSF last month. Various factors as of 2026 are making this less silly. Sophia Space has press-releases, linked at Zim's place.

Heliosync in theory runs 400-1000 km so, LEO. In practice they don't want drag: superfast atmo, which degrades... everything. They also don't want the congestion which reaches further, maybe to 600 km. So they're thinking 800 km. They must beam the data to a comm array anyway, which may as well be SpaceX' constellation of Starlink v2.

Heliosync around Earth gets about 1.361 kW/m² "flux", more than that most the year because of eccentricity. The patent illo assumes they can drive 1 kW/m² from the solar-cells, which they expect η=.3. They leave the material to others; maybe Perovskite. Anyway I read 400 W/m² available to the computer, not 1000. Also here are transmitters, of data.

Some of that flux is reflected (5% here); less is transmitted. Most that heat needs radiating-off, still maybe 1.3 kW/m². The good news, if they insulate the computer: the computer is wide, flat, and narrow. They think that the shaded darkness will allow "passive" radiation through the shade, into space. More good news: most office CPUs seem to run in the 45-65 W range as long as you are not gaming on them. 400 W/m² might make for a respectable server-farm.

The design is simple if they can stow the volume onto a rocket chassis. Direct 800 km looks like a Starship job.

In addition, if the Lunar south pole gets a superstructure, similar architecture might work there too. For a start. (Later we expect coolant-cycles underground.)