Shuttle shenanigans

Sierra Space, a subset of Sierra Nevada not based in that actual sierra, wants to land reusable craft upon a runway.

Anyway this Son Of Space Shuttle is the "Dream Chaser".

The Ozmens have this window because Boeing has failed (UPDATE 1/6/2022: and let's don't talk about Spaceport America). SpaceX is looking great but, I suppose, NASA don't want all their eggs in that one basket, which basket could well be filled with UAE, Japan, Israel and others.

Why a runway? - A runway means it can land back where it started without blasting so much blast in the area. The Falcon 9, by contrast, must land on some remote area (preferably a calm one, like a barge in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico) and be carted back home.

No, really. WHY?! They say: to access research flown down from the space station immediately. But can't they do that already? by beaming data down here at megabytes / second? For anything else, what's wrong with waiting a few hours to collect the lander from Elon's floaty platforms or some care-package in the Australian desert? Shenanigans. Shenanigans, I say.

I can imagine a medical emergency in space such that they need a quick dump back down here, to a full hospital. That's best next to the 'way, not just the limited equipment on the boat or the amber lamps. Well why not SAY so. Oh well. UPDATE 2/2/22: And other ships are, like, using the ocean. Coastal rocketry has Exclusion Zones: reasonable for test-flights, no longer reasonable for Falcon 9.

I am unsure about staging takeoff and landing at two land bases in the desert, alternating between; that might have been Spaceport America's pitch.

As for the station in question, they're looking to the private ones currently in development. Orbital Reef is noted; StarLab is another one. They don't mention Axiom so I'll do it.

Of the various ideas I like the LIFE pod the best, where I is for Inflatable. Yes yes, we can just toss Starship shells up there but as any apartment-dweller knows, you can't have too much living-space.

Various Martian landers

I am considering such Earth-to-Mars missions as don't have biotics, just cargo. Much the following applies to our own dear Moon or maybe Ceres, Callisto et al..

Among the first unmanned Starship landers (as opposed to the guinea pig flyby) is to build a propellant-plant, with robots. By "propellant", in a mid 2020s matrix, that means Raptor 2 propellant, which means oxygen and methane (which on any of these airless worlds can be chilled easily, underground). As byproducts of the process that's potable water and oxygen, with (for Mars) an argon / nitrogen mix to pressurise it all. In short, "propellant" is life-support.

The cargo is packed tightly, and sent over in micro-gravity. For raw material who cares about life-support en route. Who even wants reactive oxygen, or heat. Will need some radiation-shielding but, just enough to keep the flares and/or cosmicrays from the electronics.

When will these landers need that special armor? I wonder if the vessels will ever get back home; the plan is to use the (ex-)Starships as additional pressure-protected habitats. Wonder what happened to those glass domes; must've been reading Handmer.

And where the main chassis can be dragged down into a lava-tube they'll never need a shield on the surface either. Down there they should be able to inflate a series of tents until they can seal it all up with a Total Recall style series of thick metal airlocks which, I guess, those old Starships can serve as gates. Only such landers as bring humans to the surface need leave the surface for Earth again.

Or not for Earth... and maybe not from it. For the future, the Martians / Loonies / &c. will be building their own lower-key "Starships".

For Mars, based on The Martian; they can be shuttles up to Deimos with weak (plastic?) outer shells possibly depressurised. Such need rise only so far as the Phobos/Deimos tether system, until they get rid of Phobos and can just take the Deimos lift. Deimos should be the stage of Mars' commerce with the rest of the system, beyond merely refueling "in space".

Pigs in space

Teslarati lays it out: the first visitors to Mars will be using the Starship lander as a habitat (pdf). Before they even get there, Elon is to send many loads of cargo.

The Starship itself isn't, er, quite done yet; although the hard part seems mostly complete over this very year. Teslarati cites massive, ceramic, non-ablative heat shield technology (and a robot-built propellant-factory). I expect that shield is for landing . . . meaning, back here on Earth. The rockets won't need it for the Moon and I am unsure about Mars. However. The Martians (and loonies) need that tech if they're ever to stand on a 9.8 m/s² surface again which - yeah, the voters will want that.

As to the trainschedule the assumption thus far is that nonhuman cargo can take the literal long (Hohmann: 259 days porkchops willing) way around. Humans would rather arrive sooner but with this much mass all at once, NERVA (let alone neutron-directed fusion) won't be ready by the middle 2020s. Even if we could trim off a few weeks, the journey will still take that many weeks more.

Such "Starships" as land from space to Earth-surface can be habitats also from Earth-space to Mars-space. Artificial gravity at a reasonably Venerean 8.5 m/s² can be provided by spinning them around a central axle, at a reasonable distance to minimise Coriolis.

I recommend that one unmanned "Mars" mission, if it doesn't have to land, actually be a pigged mission: send literal guinea-pigs on an Earth-Mars-Earth trajectory. This vessel then returns to Earth, hopefully with live and healthy rodents at the end of it.

It is flyby (so doesn't care about vinf at Mars) and also isn't going BACK to Mars (so doesn't care about the turn-angle down here). As free-return it isn't Hohmann.

Ideal would be the selfsame 1L1 / 1-0-1-6 cycler which Aldrin plotted out. 146 days to Mars; with the foreknowledge that it's a much longer trip past Mars to aphelion and back. Elon doesn't like it for humans. But if just for rodents Elon would get his ship back, and maybe his rodents back too. Our squeakies will have to take that hit on vinf to reïnject to Earth's orbit: 6.54 km/s. (PS. I have small hopes for Martin Shoemaker's shipbuilding. We humans were better taking the McConaghy.) Anything's better than Robert Zubrin's $2.15 billion cuckshed.

Docking with an Earth-orbit space-station might be enough for this mission's purpose. Does it even need to be a full semipermanent station or just another Starship? Either way the Starship which tests this longterm flight need not be the same physical Starship that lands back on Earth.

The Chol plan

The classical "Maya" of the Chol-speaking citystate Sak T'zi' had a plan - at least, so say Moldbug's teachers and colleagues. LIDAR says Sak T'zi' agriculture went beyond what the burghers needed to feed themselves. Same with Yo'k'ib' the holy kingdom, hegemon of the region; called petri-nigri by its excavators.

LIDAR tells: surplus. The surplus will be preserved for future days with limited agriculture. Except - this is the Guatemala highland border we're talking about, Land Of Eternal Spring. So given a smallish population, it can feed that population indefinitely. The plan, then, is for a future population that's no longer smallish. Or to support a nonagricultural population right now, like the segment thereof building those terraces who are not currently farming.

I suppose there's Burma's historical solution (per Judith Richell), to malnourish the infants by choice and "custom". Or Japan's historical solution of infanticide. Or what we got here in the US, to encourage castration of the poors (stuck in public schools) by "transgender" ideology. We got abortion as well, which is also infanticide; but that's become unpopular. But anyway. Planning for the future by increasing supply such as first to improve nutrition presents to us the anti-Burma.

How... unAmerican! (Yes yes, "they duh reel murrkins" but, er... not Parians. Maya no Aztlan.)

That surplus could be redirected to elites, as well, as the press-release notes. Someone had to do the planning and, as we see, the planners did earn their pay. Sak T'zi' also had to defend herself from the Blackstone jihad.

What to expect in space 2022

To continue the Starship revolution, Handmer has a followup. But first, let's look in on Elon. Super Heavy (the booster) is to attach to the Starship next January.

Elon raises the FAA as the bottleneck but he's not done working on the project. So nobody can blame the FAA... yet . . . unless the FAA slips the timeline past January. Just like we couldn't blame Bezos' stupid lawsuit, although we may assuredly enjoy a good laugh at Bezos' expense (UPDATE 8 PM: like the judge just did). More serious is, of course, the "civil-rights" grift and, down the line, the company has micronesian NIMBY to look forward to.

I'd be unsurprised if Elon packs up and heads back to his native continent - Africa. Nairobi has oft been presented as a spaceport. Hey, maybe NASA's "Muslim outreach" will finally bear fruit; it does seem that Western Christendom is in its "moral science" phase, like Islam in the later Middle Ages.

Elon says the payloads will be decoys through 2022 although, if he ask me, I'd recommend he run some real loads: cheap / prototype loads that nobody will miss overmuch should a mishap occur (i.e., not The Webb Telescope), but will be Nice To Have if it all works. Handmer suggested mass-producing Lyra-probes, one-shots to interstellar visitors like 'Oumuamua, or to some 'stroid if the aliens don't visit that year. Seems win/win to me: prototype launches with prototype probes.

If it all works, SpaceX plans on Saul Perlmutter's telescope. Then Artemis, if NASA is even doing that by 2023.

I like this: SpaceX is already thinking about a future propulsion system design beyond Raptor (which is the methane upgrade to that kerosene-burning "Merlin" which nobody remembers, and is in turn being upgraded to a "Raptor 2"). This will be a wholly different design, he says - not a Raptor 3 / Merlin IV. I am unaware of what more is to be found with the chemistry of high-thrust, low-duration explosions short of nuclear which they won't let him do. Maybe he's considering the fluid-dynamical advances of late.

Dustposting, IV

I actually had content this past week or so; so, less time to waste invest on DUST eps. Although I did catch some, like "Recoil" - which I enjoyed. So: more recommendations / animadversions.

Starting with the negative: "Freight" and "Bubble" were nonsensical and bad. "Ripple Effect", meh; "Ender's Game" did anti-Heinlein better.

Worst of maybe all DUST ever is "We Were Not Made For This World" which isn't even a movie; it was a robot wandering around a desert with a voiceover. 3:42 minutes which feel like 3:42 hours.

Moving on, "Space Girls": a wholesome paean to the imagination, tho' unsure if it be "Science Fiction". (Compare Gravity, science fiction at the time... not so much now. Well... we were warned.)

"Asternauts" is good ol' redneck fiction; technically not even DUST, but better than most DUST. "Snow Ball" similar.

"Expo" (cf Moon) and "Ava in the End" were both great. "Hashtag" (starring Gigi from Farscape!) earns its place alongside That Black Mirror Episode. "The Black Hole" belongs in the fantasy section - or so I'd argue but: hilarious (reminded me of this classic). "Orbit Ever After" was okay, given some Newtonfail. "Ctrl-Z" is why we like two savepoints.

"Oblivio" was also good - although the menfolk won't like it. "The Masseuse" was Låt den rätte komma in or maybe Ex Machina if only, if only.

"Indigo" looked like a bummer, might have to try that again. "The Lonely Orbit" might be next on deck, maybe "Seechers" or "Life Support".

I noticed some full length non-DUST hardSF movies: The Last Star Warrior and The Last Scout.

UPDATE 6 PM: "Colony" and - just out now - "Infinity 7"; I am done for the night. Just horrible, both of them. Especially the former. I do recommend the comments to the former if you're up for heckling the white knights.

Mental health

Mental health is important. How it is implemented can be a problem. Let's talk about that.

Richard Hanania, having lost faith in public education where it touches history, also cannot trust how mental health is targeted toward children, adolescents, and young adults. He asserts, “Mental health” is a bigger con than Critical Race Theory, and much more destructive.

Interesting Hanania chose now to say it, in view of Elisa Jácome (pdf; passed by Robet Wiblin through to the HBDChick). Medicaid's mental-health system keeps young men out of prison. To me, that means it "works". As administered through Medicaid, anyway; which is a state-level system.

Hanania's "con" tweet follows in the CRT matrix, however. This implies mental-health as administered through the school system. This is county-driven, not state-. Such mental-health programmes as contribute to the skyrocketing percentages of youth identifying as "LGBT", where we can focus on B and T, are no more or less than grooming programmes. Some parents are brave enough to say as much.

On the other hand: there is much good that a sensitive counselor can do, not least to stop the slide before it hits bottom. Inasmuch as that's his/her job, yeah: no substitute for an actual, you know, friend. But we can consider that the triage stage. Then you get to other options: is this kid really a proto-schizophrenic, or is he having other problems like (foremost) bullies.

To sum up, the solution to most "mental health" is to remove the unhappy children from their county-jails entirely. Although some of it remains real and requires treatment.