Aug 032019
 

A rat is made out of meat. One would think that that would give them *some* economic value. Granted, turning them directly into ratburgers seems a dubious prospect; difficult to process, filthy, likely filled with disease, toxins and parasites, much like your average filthy hippie. But turning them into fertilizer, or food for some other critters? There’s got to be a way to make a buck off a rat. And by extension, there’s gotta be a way to put Baltimore on a paying basis. Take this bit of footage, for example:

Those rats all seemed to run in much the same direction, which means that with a bit of planning they could have all run into traps. A buck or two a rat (or a buck or two per pound of rat, whatever) is probably well in excess of their strict economic value as plant food, but with the vast sums that have been poured into Baltimore – to no recognizable advantage – it seems that a public-private partnership could pay a bit above market value for home and business owners to make a few hundred bucks every few nights gathering up rats which will be processed into fertilizer for the local “organic” growers of trendy green leafy “food” for the consumption of vegans.

 

 

 Posted by at 2:53 pm
Aug 012019
 

It seems that Boeing, prime contractor for the Space Launch System, tried to shut down development of orbital fuel depots and orbital propellant transfer. Because if you can stash a lot of fuel in orbit easily and cheaply, you don’t *need* the bloated irrational monstrosity that is SLS.

The SLS rocket may have curbed development of on-orbit refueling for a decade

What’s interesting; if this story is true, Boeing opposed fuel depots because they threaten SLS. But SpaceX, now working on “Super Heavy” rockets with roughly the same capability as SLS, are *actively* supporting fuel deports. Why the difference? Because SLS was never meant to really do anything. Launch once a year, one extremely expensive mission maybe to the moon, call it good. Pretend to be moving outwards again, but the minimum possible steps taken as slowly as possible. SpaceX wants to lob dozens of people to *Mars* in just the next few years. Same launch capability, but fundamentally different goals.

*IF* this story turns out to be true, someone needs to have their ass handed to ’em. Congressional investigations at least on par with the “Trump is a Russian stooge” investigation, because this one has had clear and obvious impacts on the US: Billions spent on a system nobody wants, years wasted that that the US could have used to conquer the heavens. Hell, just imagine what we could have done with SLS money by way of building breeder reactors.

 Posted by at 10:12 pm
Aug 012019
 

So I was cleaning out some junk when I stumbled across a printout of a circa 2009 version of the “Man Conquers Space” screenplay. At that time the story was in constant motion, with major changes and updates occurring very rapidly. It had, honestly, become damned bloated by that point, encompassing a *lot* of history and events and characters; it would have been a nightmare to actually get made, and probably would have been a mess unless there had been  *lot* of trimming and good editing. Of course, we all know how MCS ended up; it will never be made.

Finding the printout made me go digging through old digital storage, and I found two versions of the screenplay, one from 2008, another from a few months later in 2009. It’s made me wonder what, if anything, should be done with them. They are marked “Copyright” both David Sander and one other fella who may well now wish to remain completely and permanently anonymous.

At some point I plan on reading through them again, just for giggles. I may well also print them out, plug them into a binder and place it on my growing “well, THAT didn’t work” shelf.

I’m left to wonder what else can and should be done with them.

 Posted by at 1:26 am
Jul 312019
 

Guess what we’re supposed to hate now:

Even one of Trump’s favorite foods has a hidden Russia connection

Where the author digs deep to demonstrate that hamburgers are Russian, and that since Trump likes hamburgers… well, I guess it’s obvious: Trump is a Russian stooge.

Now, the story of how pre-war Soviets studied American mass food production techniques and made their own kinda crappy take on the hamburger (instead of a minced meat patty between two buns, they turned it into a minced meat patty infested with breadcrumbs, making it more like meatloaf)would be modestly interesting on its own. But this being Current Year, it’s every loyal mediabots job to try to find every opportunity to imply that Trump is a racist or a traitor. And by extension, anyone who also likes hamburgers is a tool of Putin.

 Posted by at 11:32 pm
Jul 312019
 

The trailer for “The Lighthouse” seemingly gives little away, and is just strange. Is it a dream? Are they dead? Is this madness? Dunno. But it sure seems like it *could* (not *will*) end up fitting into the Mythos.

 

As an aside, Cthulhu is very unlikely to pop up in “Midway.” But the trailer makes it look promising; some of the CGI – and there is a hell of a lot of it – seems kinda dodgy, but who knows if that will still be the case on the big screen. “Pearl Harbor” looked promising as well, and look how that turned out.

 Posted by at 6:41 pm
Jul 312019
 

Before Lunar Orbit rendezvous made it possible for a single Saturn V to launch a complete lunar mission, the expected mission profile included launching a rather large lunar lander to Earth orbit, mating it with n upper stage, and then fueling the whole thing using specialized tanker spacecraft. NASA lucked out with the LOR concept; while some considerable work had been done on the tankers, the fact is that NASA really didn’t know *how* to do zero-gravity propellant transfer. When the word came down to stop working on the tankers, there were undoubtedly quite a number of quiet expressions of relief.

Still: the ability to do major propellant tanking in space will be vital for a real interplanetary economy. SpaceX will need to be able to do that for many of the lunar and Mars missions planned for Starship. So, it seems that on-orbit tanking is back on the menu.

NASA agrees to work with SpaceX on orbital refueling technology

 

 

 Posted by at 4:32 pm
Jul 302019
 

When “First Man,” a biopic about Neil Armstrong, was being developed, I was interested. News broke before the release that it didn’t include the raising of the US flag on the moon; this bothered me slightly, but it was the director and main actors looney political statements that caused my interest in the movie to evaporate.

So it’s on HBO now, and I finally watched it last night. On the one hand, the lack of the flag raising makes perfect sense in the context of the film… it covers years of Armstrongs life, and the lunar landing itself is damn near an afterthought. The time spent showing Armstrong bopping around on the lunar surface is minuscule.

On the other hand: Jibbers Crabst, what a *dismal* slog that movie was. It wasn’t so much that it was dull and often rather hard to see; it was that it was little more than a series of Armstrong’s low points. Let’s see if I can recall the main points:

1) It starts with Armstrong screwing up an X-15 flight, making it look like a hypersonic horror movie.

2) Then he loses his baby girl to cancer.

3) Then he goes up on Gemini 8, the launch of which is another horror movie.

4) And then Gemini 8 goes out of control and he nearly dies.

5) But hey, at least he has a friend, Ed! Who then promptly burns to death in Apollo 1.

6) And then he crashes  the lunar lander simulator.

7) And then he goes to the moon, which is a difficult to see ride devoid of joy.

8) And then he stands on the lunar surface looking into a pitch-black crater and it all comes back to his dead child.

9) And he finally comes home… to  wife who clearly doesn’t like him.

And… that’s about it. The greatest adventure in human history reduced to a series of misery-points.

Now, I’m all in favor of the actual facts of history, warts and all. But far too much of modern western civilization seems to be able to see nothing *but* the warts anymore. The Founding Fathers weren’t great innovative leaders who forged subservient colonies of a distant empire into a proud nation with a history of greatness second to none; they were just slavers to be dumped down the memory hole. Cowboys? Fictional nonsense that didn’t exist. Cops? They’re all corrupt fascists. This fetishizing of self-flagellation has hit the space program hard. Apollo wasn’t the greatest, most inspiring achievement in history; it was “whitey on the moon” (a point driven home explicitly in “First Man”), run by Nazi war criminals. And Armstrong? Not a near-mythic hero to be emulated, but an unpopular man with a crappy family life who underwent fear and terror because he was grieving a dead child.

Bah.

If they’d made “First Man” into some sort of Lovecraftian cosmic horror fantasy… hey, that coulda been kinda neat. *Horror* can be interesting. But *dismal?* Just no.

If you want to destroy a culture, you bomb it into rubble and shoot the survivors. If you want to *ruin* a culture, you take away it’s hopes, dreams, Foundational Myths and Heroes.

 Posted by at 9:23 pm