Ice on the Moon

Opinion by Chauncey DeVega writing for Salon (Abridged):

As documented by historian Nancy MacLean in her book “Democracy in Chains,” the leaders of today’s “conservative” movement have utter disdain for democracy, the Constitution, human rights, human freedom, the common good and the rule of law. This anti-democracy movement also wants to impose a type of Christian fascist regime on the American people.

In a recent essay for ScheerPost and Salon, Chris Hedges argues that the “Christian fascists are clear about the society they intend to create”:

“In their ideal America, our “secular humanist” society based on science and reason will be destroyed. The Ten Commandments will form the basis of the legal system. Creationism or “Intelligent Design” will be taught in public schools, many of which will be overtly “Christian.” Those branded as social deviants, including the LGBTQ community, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals and those dismissed as “nominal Christians” — meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible — will be silenced, imprisoned or killed. The role of the federal government will be reduced to protecting property rights, “homeland” security and waging war. Most government assistance programs and federal departments, including education, will be terminated. Church organizations will be funded and empowered to run social welfare agencies and schools. The poor, condemned for sloth, indolence and sinfulness, will be denied help. The death penalty will be expanded to include “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be treated as murder. Women, denied contraception, access to abortion and equality under the law, will be subordinate to men. Those who practice other faiths will become, at best, second-class citizens. The wars waged by the American empire will be defined as religious crusades. Victims of police violence and those in prison will have no redress. There will be no separation of church and state. The only legitimate voices in public discourse and the media will be “Christian.” America will be sacralized as an agent of God. Those who defy the “Christian” authorities, at home and abroad, will be condemned as agents of Satan.”

The world imagined by today’s Republican Party and the larger neofascist movement is a world of rules and hierarchies. White people rule over Black and brown people. Right-wing Christians will rule over other religious groups and non-believers. Men will rule over women. The rich and moneyed classes will have total power over the poor, the working class and the middle class, most likely all of those outside the top 5 percent.

 The “rights” of property, corporations and guns will fully supersede those of human beings, the natural world and the commons. “Democracy” will exist in name only, and in practice will be what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism” or perhaps even an outright authoritarian state adapted to fit the mold of American exceptionalism.

Too many Americans — especially leading Democrats and mainstream liberals, along with the guardians of approved public discourse in the national media — have continued to tell themselves comforting lies. Republicans are “exaggerating” or being “hyperbolic” because “we are all Americans” who have “the same fundamental values”. Those comforting lies were always cowardly, now they are just contemptible. In fact, the Republican-fascists and their allies told us clearly who and what they were from the beginning. The question now becomes whether it is too late for the majority of Americans to take them at their word, and use the precious time remaining to defend, preserve and rebuild our democracy.

So much in the news today, so much culture war craziness; Jordan Petersen and Elon, talk about the shooting being about women not dating him…. etc. etc.

Elon did pull the curtain aside a little when he tweeted about taxes. THAT is what almost everything is about, but nobody seems to see it. Ending taxes and regulation on the rich.

Mammon will murder us all in the end.

 

Back in 2013 Chomsky talked about jobs being the critical issue to the population yet ignored by powers that be. Plenty of work to be done but not enough profit to make it worth the while of the ultra-rich. We are kept “atomized” to keep us from interfering.

99 out of 100 have never heard of the Knights of Labor. Security forces destroyed them in the 1890’s. And Jews were among the most prominent leaders. There were German immigrant and Italian immigrant anarchist movements, but they had been mostly crushed by the late 1920’s. Europeans were appalled at the way America treated labor activists. The civil war never really ended as race and immigrant antagonisms were used to keep labor from organizing.

“People may accept obedience and deference and following orders but not very far below the surface; they don’t like it. And when people can express themselves, you see it.”

“So, (they) have to block democracy, that’s a real threat.”

“In the United States, for example, we are a very free country by comparative standards, roughly seventy percent of the population has no influence on policy at all.”

“You take a look at popular opinion; the public thinks the deficit is not a major problem. The major problem is jobs.”

“But that’s not what the financial institutions want, that’s not what the wealthy want, so therefore it doesn’t enter into political discussion.”

“It’s a business-run flawed democracy.”

“Functioning democracy, would mean, for example, that stakeholders, workforce, and community, take over enterprises and run them themselves. They say it is impossible.”

“Impossible is their term, reality is what we want to construct.”

Projected Increase in Space Travel May Damage Ozone Layer

The propellant mix that produces water; hydrogen and oxygen, is most hated by NewSpace. The automatic demonization of hydrogen whenever mentioned goes back to the hobby rocket fanatics of a decade ago who insisted the falcon 9 could do everything and anything else was from satan.

The only likely path to expanding humankind off-world, Space Solar Power by way of lunar resources as envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill, is most hated by NewSpace. That rocket jesus declared Space Solar Power “a stupid idea” is absolutely about his inability to completely own such a massive undertaking- only the resources of the state, and international pooling of resources, can enable powering civilization from space.

The ideology most likely to result in a fascist takeover of America, Neoliberalism, is most loved by NewSpace. Consider hydrogen hatred and Space Solar Power as stupid and it is clear Neoliberalism is the common factor.

While it was stupidity that made the dinosaurs extinct, it is simple greed that may end our species.

MagellanTV Original Documentary “Killer Asteroid: Defending Earth” to Make Impact Thursday, June 30 on the Global Streaming Service

The only comment so far on the killer asteroid article is a spacex fanboy promoting the idea of asteroid mining with several idiotic upvotes. An affirmation, an “Amen!”, to the ideology that holds Mammon as the lord of their world. Even possible extinction takes second place to profit. Unbelievable.

While it can be argued this blog is in itself an opinion column, I have been contacting some websites soliciting an opinion column about Human Space Flight. Considering the intense harassment and criticism I get when simply trying to comment on forums it might just catch on.

Anthea Butler: “They cannot come to grips with the fact that the Christianity of America is just like any other fundamentalist religion that gets weaponized in order to hold on to power. Therefore, they have to continue to tell themselves that everything that happened on Jan. 6 was an aberration and not something religious in nature. Those people are not “Christians” like us.

As a matter of public policy, Christian nationalists, dominionists and other Christian fascists are trying to impose their End Times eschatological fantasies onto secular America in opposition to the Constitution and the separation of church and state. These are fantasies of death and destruction. These white right-wing Christians literally seem to be seeking out death.

They do in fact appear to be seeking out death. They have this huge desire to live the way they want to live without restraint. At some point it is death for you, but it is not death for them.

What is the role of white privilege in explaining why so many white Americans are able to deny the serious dangers embodied by white Christian fascist violence?

White privilege convinces many white people that they will not personally have to deal with the violence. They believe that, unlike other people, they will just be able to melt away into the background when the violence happens and nobody is going to shoot people who look like them.

White privilege has convinced them that nobody’s going to take their home away from them. Nobody’s going to kill their kids. Nobody’s going to march them out as an example and shoot them. White privilege has convinced them that they can take some type of loyalty oath or pledge and they will be safe.”

It has become clear to any of us with any critical thinking ability that the elections are going to be a nightmare. The Christians who have not been corrupted better be ready to fight for survival. Nobody will admit that what is almost certain to happen is mass violence.

Rocket jesus is firing people and whining about the economy.

Could be a sign his house of cards is collapsing, and the Enron of space is about to crash and burn.

Real space enthusiasts can only hope and pray the ten-year NewSpace nightmare is about to end.

We also have “Klan gone Hiel HItler” commenting and resident sociopath se jones and full-tilt psychopath TomDPerkins down the page. Along with a long list of second-string trolls.

This is the story of NewSpace: a bunch of fascist freaks that have harassed those really interested in space and chased them away from these forums for over a decade.

Maybe John Oliver will do an expose about how all these forums have been hijacked.

And that obviously hit a nerve.

I was going to post a reply to my cyberstalker, se jones, who had trolled me with “I’ve known Musk for many years, ever since he joined The Mars Society. We disagree about a lot of things, including SPSP. I keep an open mind about it, and follow the tech advancements. But for f-sake, it’s not fing RELIGION, and Elon isn’t some kind of sacred profit or something.”

Oh…but it is a religion. And se jones does not want anyone to know that.

I usually feel bad about being banned, but not this time. I am just so sick of them all…the Musk worshipers, the Trumpists, the Ayn-Rand-in-Space libertarian whackjobs and their endless harassment. Good riddance. I did my duty to expose them for ten years. The SpaceX Review, The SpaceX News, and all the other infomercials completely hijacked by Muskrats, will not be forgotten. Like Fox News and other assorted trash, they will be thrown into that larger trash bin of history, along with the rest of the NewSpace garbage.

But we have other things to worry about as Americans. As Adam Kinzinger said,  “There is violence in the future.”

Peter Weber wrote:

How Jack Welch helped create the America of Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk

The gap between America’s rich and the poor — or really, the rich and everyone else — has stretched into a chasm. That’s fairly indisputable. The current divergence between the wealthiest Americans and the lower 90 percent of earners began in the late 1970s, after a post-World War II era of rising wages and not-outlandish differences in pay between workers and management.

Who was Welch, and why single him out?

Welch joined GE’s plastics division in 1960, just after earning his doctorate in chemical engineering, and he rose quickly through the management chain until he was elevated to chairman and CEO in 1981. 

“GE was an industrial company when he took over — making most of its money selling appliances, light bulbs, power turbines, and jet engines,” Gelles writes in The New York Times. By the time he left, dozens of acquisitions later, it was a hydra-like conglomerate encompassing everything from medical devices to aviation and NBC, buoyed by profits from GE Capital, “which was essentially a giant unregulated bank.”

Soon after becoming CEO, Welch “closed factories and fired employees by the tens of thousands, unleashing a series of mass layoffs that destabilized the American working class,” Gelles writes. “He devised systems like ‘stack ranking,’ which mandated that the bottom 10 percent of workers be fired each year,” and “he embraced offshoring and outsourcing.”

“Up until this point, people who had a job at a company like GE or IBM basically figured that they had a job for life,” Gelles told NPR. “But he explicitly said that this notion was going to be a thing of the past under his watch.”

Welch certainly wasn’t working in a vacuum. By the time he was elevated to CEO, economist Milton Friedman had been arguing for years that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Welch also took the reins at GE just months after President Ronald Reagan, whose devotion to supply-side “trickle-down” economics was in many ways a federal policy analog to Welch’s management revolution. 

“Jack Welch was unquestionably an important and emblematic figure in America’s paradigm shift, but Gelles takes his book title too literally, pushes it too strenuously,” Kurt Andersen writes at The New York Times. “Whenever he refers to the post-1980 economic regime,” for example, “he uses his own word, ‘Welchism,’ instead of libertarianism or neoliberalism or any of the other familiar terms” that might broaden the blame to, say, all the presidents from Reagan on who “bought into libertarian economics.”

Does Gelles have a response to that critique?

Yes. Other figures — Reagan, Friedman, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell — had laid an intellectual and political groundwork for Welch’s corporate revolution, “but it was only when Jack took over GE that we actually saw what that ideology looked like in practice,” Gelles told Just Capital. “He was the one with his singular mix of ambition and a sense of impunity, and control of one of the largest and arguably the most influential company in the country. He was able to not only radically transform and reset norms at GE, which was this standard-bearer, but because of that influence, also bring the rest of the economy along for the ride, essentially setting a new standard by which CEOs and executives were evaluated.”

“This was one of those moments when an exceptional individual at a critical moment really goes on to shape the world,” he told Leonhardt.

Is Welch’s management style still ascendant?

It actually hasn’t aged very well. Welch did grow GE from a $14 billion corporate titan to the most valuable company in the world in 2001, worth $600 billion. And “for a time in the early 2000s, five of the top 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average were run by men who had worked for Mr. Welch,” Gelles writes in the Times. But “the Welch protégés who struck out on their own rarely fared well.” And neither did GE. 

Soon after Welch retired, “GE fell to the point of essential irrelevance in the American economy,” Gelles tells NPR. “In 2018, with all of Welch’s bad decisions catching up with the company, GE was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the bluest of blue-chip indexes and a real bellwether of the American economy.” The company broke itself apart last year.

After decades of corporate belief that “greed, for lack of a better word, was good for the country,” Christiaan Hetzner writes at Fortune, “an increasing number of boardrooms are discovering that being a good corporate citizen can be its own reward,” a movement called stakeholder capitalism. “The move away from the Reagan era of unfettered free markets toward an emphasis on prudent and proportionate regulation has, however, spooked prominent Republicans, who are now retaliating by labeling the shift ‘woke,'” he adds.

They needn’t worry too much: Welch established “a powerful and lasting influence on American business, informing how workers are treated, how shareholders are rewarded, and how CEOs comport themselves in an increasingly divisive age,” Gelles writes in the Times. “When Donald J. Trump is elected president, when Jeff Bezos argues about inflation with the White House, when Elon Musk negotiates his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter by using the poop emoji — this is the world that Jack Welch helped create.”

And now I know who actually wrecked the planet.

NASA has stated that between 2 and 3 RPM are the likely limits for humans to be able to function in an artificial gravity environment. I would go conservative and just call it 1RPM as the best place to start.

Using the easy-to-find “SpinCalc” website we get a tether length of 5868 feet to generate 1G rotating at 1RPM. I believe this over-one-mile tether system is what will eventually be used to generate artificial gravity for astronauts. This seems impractical but actually it is space with all the room needed and tether materials like Spectra are light and strong.

Debilitation is the lesser evil though and the more difficult problem is Dosing. That will, for a small crew with a small living area, require well over 1000 tons of water shielding. And this gives us some idea what a “true” Spaceship will look like: a “Bola” over a mile long spinning at 1 RPM with an over-one-thousand-ton-mass at either end. On the plus side the water shield will facilitate closed-loop life support.

The tether system will likely be several tethers with “elevators” used to transport mass and fine tune and dampen out oscillations. Astronauts would ride these elevators a half a mile to the center of the tether to and from a zero gravity “mast” and docking station.

Starting with a basic mass of 2000 tons, which is about 4 times that of the ISS, add the structures which must take the loads associated with spinning and also the tether system. Everything necessary for Space Station, Lunar Cycler, or Spaceship operation may or may not come in under the 1000-ton mass budget opposite the water shield/crew section.

Start with a basic Space Station and then add propulsion systems for Lunar Cyclers and eventually Nuclear Spaceships. The two options for a Spaceship are some new form of Nuclear Electric or Nuclear Pulse. A Nuclear Pulse system would require reeling in the tether system and configuring the Spaceship for propulsion and then, after the necessary number of pulses, “splitting the ship” and going back to artificial gravity cruise mode.

Mars is a “dead end” for colonization for several reasons. Musk has led humankind away from the path envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill and has done humankind a great disservice. A sci-fi meme and its proximity are the sources of much of the attention, time, and resources directed at Mars. Its gravity well and lack of oceans should cancel this attraction out but does not simply because scientists are not willing to tell the truth. Oceans are where life will be found. Not a radiation blasted desert in a partial vacuum. Icy bodies with oceans have shallow gravity wells and ice resources for conversion into fuel which make them the places to land and send submarines. Mars seems like it can be reached with chemical propulsion but due to the need for radiation shielding this is false and misleading. A deception. Nuclear energy will be required for any Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO). With some form of nuclear propulsion other than nuclear thermal the just-close-enough Mars reasoning disappears. Ceres should be the first human mission destination. Not Mars.

In 2008 the scientific community had an opportunity to join together in solidarity and promote a path for America and allies to pursue in space. The discovery of ice on the Moon should have completely changed the course of NASA in regard to Human Space Flight and made the pure research community beneficiaries of a new focus on space. A certain entrepreneur and a lack of cooperation within the science community squandered that golden moment. If acted upon fourteen years ago we could have been seeing humans landing on the Moon and occupying a permanent base by now. Sidemount was the Super Heavy Lift Vehicle capable of sending payloads to the Moon. NewSpace and “the flexible path” was the end of the dream.

We now have a second opportunity, but the window is closing again. Space Solar Power by way of lunar resources is the solution to the Climate Change Crisis but, like the ice on the Moon, not a single word is being said about it. Nothing. The trillions of dollars of international funding in a Space Solar Power infrastructure would empower the research community and enable them to accomplish missions they cannot even dream of now. Wake up….Human Space Flight is the path to more science missions, not in competition with them.

“I strongly believe that the right to bear arms is an important safeguard against potential tyranny of government. Historically, maintaining their power over the people is why those in power did not allow public ownership of guns,” Musk told CNBC on May 25.

The billionaire then told the outlet that he supports “tight background checks” for all gun sales and limiting sales of assault weapons to people in special circumstances, like gun range owners, or people who live in a “high risk location, like gang warfare.”

A few hours later, Musk reiterated his position with a very clear tweet:

“Assault rifles should at minimum require a special permit, where the recipient is extremely well vetted imo,” he said on Twitter, responding to a question from a user.

First….A flintlock Musket required close to a minute to load and fire one shot. A modern hi-capacity semi-automatic rifle or carbine, modeled after military assault weapons, with a moderate amount of operator proficiency, can kill one hundred people per minute. A hi-capacity semi-automatic pistol is capable of close to the same performance, though requiring more training and proficiency.

Second…”Well-regulated” means restrictions on who could possess firearms. Weapons that can kill one hundred people per minute should not be available for purchase over the counter to 18 year olds.

Third…The idea that personal firearms can somehow keep a modern military from subjugating the population may have had some validity at the end of the 18th century but has zero validity early in the 21st century.

As a systems troubleshooter with a mind conditioned to think critically, I have observed how cognitive dissonance takes over people. I have seen it dozens of times at every level, in my work on aircraft and up the ladder to higher rungs in the chain of command. What is bizarre is that when it is over people conveniently forget they were so stupid and make excuses…and often make the same mistakes in the future. Those involved in space have unfortunately always conflated two very different arenas and continue to do so. There is “Space Flight” and there is “Human Space Flight.” They are, besides the common attribute of space travel, almost completely different fields of endeavor. The Space Shuttle is perhaps the ultimate example of this dissonance, as it combined, against all logic, human and cargo missions. This was probably the best feature of the cancelled Constellation program- the separation of crew and cargo launch vehicles.

A Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity environment (NSLR1G) is the prerequisite.

Birchbark canoes were never going to cross the North Atlantic.

Sending astronauts Beyond Low Earth Orbit has significant risk attached to it due to solar events. Seven Apollo missions carried humans Beyond Earth Orbit and there was a very close call avoiding one solar storm during that less than 4 year space age.

Dosing and debilitation is the elephant in the room NASA will not discuss. There is a “career dose” that once reached means no more space missions. This makes for very short careers for astronauts as without massive shielding humans are not going to live and work in space for twenty or thirty years like they do on Earth. It is likely that a Mars mission cannot be accomplished without exceeding this career dose.

The plan for a lunar return should have been to preposition a shielded habitat and not send astronauts until it was ready. Until that happens there is not going to be a permanent human presence in cislunar space like there has been in LEO.