Just saw on the news he signed the coronavirus relief bill. Thank God. Maybe that means this is all really going to be over soon. If he would just concede…
“Sine qua non” is an interesting term concerning the military. Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear device. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945. On November 1, 1952, the first fusion device, followed by Castle Bravo, a deliverable version, on March 1, 1954, arguably made war, as it had been known, impossible.
Except for the subsequent delivery systems of bombers, missiles, and submarine missiles, this would seem to make most military forces no longer worth the money spent on them. But instead of only these mutually destructive nuclear weapons the cold war saw uncounted trillions of dollars thrown at a universe of military hardware.
Helicopters were my life for about 14 years. They do things nothing else can but as a warfighting machine the easiest things to shoot down there is. The reason “only” 5000 were shot down in Vietnam was the triple canopy of jungle shielding them much of the time. Likewise the Air Force has been trying to get rid of the A-10 for the simple reason the missiles now in use will shoot them down in droves on the first day of hostilities and they will go nowhere near the enemy after that first day.
With quantum communication links the drone is now the combat aircraft of choice. Even without secure communications they are fairly capable of being sent on strike missions preprogrammed like a cruise missile and do a better job than human pilots. This is the age we live in and much of what the public is told about the military is misinformation used to promote an agenda. Like keeping pilots employed flying F-35’s. Missile defense is one of these multi-billion dollar scams that has generated so much revenue that even though it does not work it goes on and on.
Weaponizing Earth orbit with smallsat constellations is an incredible mistake knowingly made simply in the interest of greed and enabled by corruption. That proliferation is actually what “Space Force” is all about. That is the reality.
Starship is a variation of the Shuttle concept that does not expend a tank. How well this is going to work is not really clear….and it probably will not be the “game-changer” it has been hyped as.
The SLS is a straightforward remake of the Apollo concept and unlike Starship, future iterations with recoverable liquid boosters and engine module (only expending core tankage), could become what the Space Transportation System should have been. This could make sending large payloads direct to the Moon every couple months for decades to come a reality.
For close to a decade the NewSpace fans have demonized the Moon because a certain entrepreneurs rocket was pretty much useless for anything having to do with a lunar return. When evidence for lunar ice was found in 2010 NASA should have immediately focused on the Moon and abandoned the dead end of LEO. Pandering to the NewSpace business plan has set space exploration back a decade and why NewSpace is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. Much of the unhappiness with anything having to do with the Moon is simply a legacy of that NewSpace brainwashing.
Your crystal ball hopefully has a crack in it. It is not just the 42,000 refrigerator-size starlinks; tens of thousands of “micro-sats” in the 200 pound range and other constellations will be going up trying to cash in on beaming cat videos to Eskimos. This whole field of dreams is also connected to the defense industry and a new kind of cold war proliferation these companies are depending on revenue from when everyone finds out there are not enough Eskimos to pay for it. As for this being “good” for anyone, it is actually an unnecessary service that is dangerous and a bad idea in so many ways that it never should have been entertained. The strip-mining of Earth orbit.
“I’ve been in favor for some time now of using a tax-“
The libertarian crazies on this forum, and there are a couple dozen at least, will automatically troll you when they read that sentence. You are about to get a lesson in freedom of speech. That is, “freedom” is a code word for “greed” to Neoliberals, and “liberty” (as in libertarian) is code for “NO TAXES/NO REGULATION.” It is all about absolute greed and money as the god of this world. And you are not even mentioning that.
“-you don’t have much business telling others what’s good enough for their uses-“
You are right…my business is keeping this planet, with me and mine living on it, from self-destructing. 100,000 pieces of space junk is a significant step away from that goal. You might be one of a hundred million that consider money the god of this world and your personal pleasure and convenience all that matters- but I am not.
Yes. The selling point is latency. Otherwise a much less problematic GEO solution would be the obvious better path than tens of thousands of smallsats.
It was a field of dreams created to satisfy the eternal craving for convenience on the cheap. Unfortunately there is no cheap and this is going to end badly.
“The president also opposed provisions in the NDAA to rename military bases that honor Confederate officers and language that restricts his power to use military construction money for other projects.”
His legacy is bases named after traitors, so named due to the political influence of racists, and a rusty wall that keeps nobody from going over, around, or under it. And a military force that risks no members in the field yet enjoys all the privileges and prestige of those who do- his way of spitting on the military he considers suckers and losers.
Unfortunately, more and more things above this world tend to destabilize the fragile state of Mutually Assured Destruction that has existed since the early 60’s.
Things that destabilize and cause catastrophes are always overlooked until after the worst has happened. Not only smallsat constellations but the small cheap rockets used to launch them are…dangerous. No doubt about it. Unless you want to make money…then no such talk is tolerated of course.
“Well, the people in USA can only dream about having an health care system for everyone and other social benefits than the ones Scandinavian people have. And yes, these countries are capitalist countries that care about their population and they are the proof that capitalist economy and protective social system are not two system that mutually excluded each other.
So, the USA could have a very efficient and universal affordable health care system for all its population but greed and egoistic culture is too much there.”
I kind of like you off the bat but your those-who-stay-in-the-cave Ayn Rand Fountainhead rant tells me we will likely not be friends. Too bad.
You know…your hero might be doing what the mysterious forces of fate have allowed him and he thinks, like most over-achievers, he did it all himself. And he believes his way is “the right way.” But sometimes what seems so right, after working so long and so hard to achieve it, turns out to be wrong. And most cannot accept that.
After ten years of watching the Musk Cult badger, bully, and lie…and knowing Elon is surrounded by enablers egging him on to ever greater egoistic heights, I tend to automatically look at the opposite of whatever he is doing.
And it turns out that would be better for everyone much of the time. Really.
Consider it disobedience to the fan club. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnodcLLEZw4
Weaponizing and proliferating in Earth orbit is a huge mistake.
There is no calling it good. You are making the same argument that led to over 69,000 nuclear weapons ready to incinerate civilization at the height of the cold war in 1986. We are now down to less than 18,000. Still enough to crash the global infrastructure which would result in the deaths of billions.
If you think better internet is worth the risk…
The best book I have read to date, and I have read more than a few, explaining the big picture concerning the right in the U.S., is “Democracy in Chains.” The lady tells the story as simply as it can be told and it is complicated but not too hard to understand for most people.
In a nutshell, it is all about greed and lies and connects directly with slavery. That surprised me but it is true. The Neoliberal dream is a world where everything is owned. Proponents will not admit it but this ultimately includes people. This was why “compassionate conservatism” had to go hand in hand with the Bush era “ownership society” at the turn of the century. One was the lie hiding the naked greed of the other. And lying is what they do like the rest of us breathe.
The right is the 1% conning the rest of us into being wage slaves. Nothing more. Redistribution of wealth is the blasphemy the Neoliberals who worship money as the god of this world will not tolerate. Taxes are redistribution of wealth and almost everything, EVERYTHING, we are being fed by the corporate-owned media has something to do with eliminating taxes on the rich. That is why they mention it only enough to emphasize it is not on the table. Truth.
I would add that it is not so much the problem I have with sociopaths like Musk and Bezos as those who worship them. The NewSpace Cult is made up largely of gullible libertarians who are toxic individuals living in a fantasy world of superhero billionaires.
They are not heroes. They might have been decent people before it went to their head, but how they treat their employees (which is really how they became rich), and the minions feeding their egos, have made them a problem for the human race, not a solution. This is not a new problem. The Guillotine was the solution in France and the modern world will fall apart if that happens again.
For close to a decade the NewSpace fans have demonized the Moon because a certain entrepreneurs rocket was pretty much useless for anything having to do with a lunar return. When evidence for lunar ice was found in 2010 NASA should have immediately focused on the Moon and abandoned the dead end of LEO. Pandering to the NewSpace business plan has set space exploration back a decade and why NewSpace is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. Much of the unhappiness with anything having to do with the Moon is simply a legacy of that NewSpace brainwashing.
The “wealth generation” and vast incomprehensible and obscene personal wealth of Musk and Bezos comes from low corporate taxes and low wages paid to their employees. Which makes what you wrote largely meaningless and a distraction. That was then and the Reagan Revolution is what created the present in which the middle class has largely been destroyed.
“If those taxes returned it wouldn’t really effect a company like SpaceX or Tesla-“
You might think that but I doubt your view is accurate at all. Everything is not poured back into the company; It all goes into people pockets. The least of it into the employees. You have a romantic view of your hero. Now I understand. He spends money to get what he wants Vlad; read to the end to see how that works.
But, as I said, it is not so much Musk and Bezos, it is the Cult that surrounds those with incredible wealth. Wealth that at one time was acknowledged by almost everyone, except the robber barons, as the singular greatest danger to democracy. A century of free market voodoo economic mythology has deceived the citizenry.
It is an evil religion and that is the actual fact.
If anyone doubts that all they have to do is look at “Citizens United.”
https://www.brennancenter.o…
“Citizens United allowed big political spenders to exploit the growing lack of transparency in political spending. This has contributed to a surge in secret spending from outside groups in federal elections. Dark money expenditures increased from less than $5 million in 2006 to more than $300 million in the 2012 election cycle and more than $174 million in the 2014 midterms. In the top 10 most competitive 2014 Senate races, more than 71 percent of the outside spending on the winning candidates was dark money. These numbers actually underestimate the impact of dark money on recent elections, because they do not include super PAC spending that may have originated with dark money sources, or spending that happens outside the “electioneering communications window” 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election.
Finally, because they can hide the identities of their donors, dark money groups also provide a way for foreign countries to hide their activity from U.S. voters and law enforcement agencies. This increases the vulnerability of U.S. elections to international interference.”
Ice on the Moon 