Author Archives: billgamesh

Trump thinks he will be overthrowing the government in August. Gaetz says we should exercise our 2nd Amendment rights and Flynn says we should have a military coup. “This has become an actual viable threat to our democracy-.” The Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, The Boogaloo Boys, Qanon, etc. etc. are ready to go toContinue reading “Simple Marine”

But…enough about blogging, on to my futurist agenda. To dive right into that let us go back to a paper written in 1998: http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07jones.pdfBoth of these approaches do away with the intermediary of lasers and particle accelerators, using instead very large electric current pulses generated bypulsed power sources to implode a fusion target. The currentContinue reading “The Clean Bomb”

“It is much more than that-” Today was a big deal. Democracy continues to be in great danger. “The reason our party is growing with minorities and with working men and women is because president Trump appears to be on the side of people working really hard-” Lindsey Graham My coworkers are blue collar andContinue reading “AZ blogger vs Failed FL blogger”

Parabolic Arc, the last forum where I was allowed to comment, has banned me. No criticism of the NewSpace flagship company (or it’s founder) is tolerated on any of the popular space forums. The intense and incessant harassment I have experienced over the last decade anywhere I have attempted to express my views was neverContinue reading “Banned Forever by NewSpace”

“Those guys would happily cut subsidies, then use the decline in ridership as prices increased and services were reduced as evidence the system was failing.” The majority of the fanboys commenting here are Ayn-Rand-in-space libertarians and completely disagree with anything being “publicly funded and/or subsidized.” In fact, what you just described, along with lying, bribery,Continue reading “The Shiny Horror has Landed”

“Until the advent of the reusable Falcon 9,-“ And after the “advent” of plastic milk jugs we started throwing them in the trash instead of reusing glass bottles at great expense. Even Philip Bono, the father of VTVL, understood that only so much reuse was practical and incorporated some expendable tanks in his designs. NotContinue reading “Expendable or Shiny”

I have come to believe Apollo 8 was the real milestone and landing on the Moon anti-climactic. It was the beginning of the space age and the end came with Apollo 17. They are all still alive from the first mission but only Jack Schmitt from the last. SLS and Artemis will begin the secondContinue reading “Jobs, Jobs, on the Moon”

Neoliberalism is best defined as Oligarchs with obscene wealth running the world….and eventually destroying it. It is only a fluke that two such exalted beings, Musk and Bezos, are hobbyists with rockets as their toy of choice. See how that works? While the NewSpace fans think this is working as a path to the future,Continue reading “NewSpace delenda est”

Comments from Parabolic Arc and The Space Review “The reason they’ve had so many failures of the Starship prototypes is that it represents nearly a half-century of development compressed into a short period of time.” Not really the reason at all. It is actually just a space shuttle that takes the external tank into spaceContinue reading “The Shiny Horror”

Stratolaunch Took to Air Two Years Ago Using this monster to get a launch vehicle, and not a very big one, up to around 40,000 feet and 500 miles an hour was never going to pay off. I just do not get how investors get conned into this stuff. The first stage of a launchContinue reading “Every Year 2017”