NASA says the Artemis 1 mission, first launch of an SLS, will be no earlier than August 29. We shall see…
How weird is it that NASA is about to launch a man-rated rocket flinging a man-capable spacecraft around the moon for the first time in half a century and the general response is “meh”?
A little over a year ago I posted about a group of whackos, led by a particularly whacko whacko, planning on building a utopian ethnostate in the mountains. I suggested that they would turn out to be an endless source of entertainment; instead, they failed far too quickly for actual entertainment value. Never even got to the Donner Party stage. Sigh. But they managed to get themselves back into the news. This video lays it out, and boy howdy they seem like fun. The story, however, seems to be finally over.
Not high level Los Alamos simulations, but interesting nonetheless:
If one of the worst of these happens to us, it’ll be our own damn fault.
… that America’s politicians aren’t *uniquely* stupid.
Without even clicking on the video to watch it, you know *exactly* how the story is going to play out based just on the thumbnail image.
Woo! Just passed 100% of the new requirement of 2,000 units.
Had it made it to the original 5,000, I wonder if they might have gone on to do the Refit or a D-7. As it is, though, I rather doubt it… at least until the economy turns around.
This should prove interesting:
The jacket is estimated at one to two million dollars. One could hope it’ll go to someplace like the NASM. One could backup-hope that if it looks like it’ll go to a foreign bajillionaire, someone like Musk or Bezos will step up to make sure it stays in the US.
The link to the auction:
There are 69 items, a number of which are items that flew with him to the lunar surface on Apollo 11. It would be *fantastic* if they all ended up in the same collection… preferably NASM.
Sotheby’s is auctioning off the most expensive pen in the world, estimating it at at least $1 million.
It’s the Duro Felt Tip pen that Buzz Aldrin used to stick in the circuit breaker that allowed the lunar module to take off from the moon after a switch broke off. pic.twitter.com/a25kWGBijp
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) July 18, 2022
… for getting robbed, vandalized, destroyed.
San Francisco restaurant owner says he has to clean off graffiti every day only to find his business covered in graffiti again the next day. The city then fines him for having graffiti.
Welcome to California. pic.twitter.com/JcMJLPT0LO
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 21, 2022
Black teens destroy white man's store after he asked them if they need help. They assumed that he wanted to check on them if they were stealing.
The social backlash eventually, is going to be legendary. pic.twitter.com/siDPBvHqPE
— iamyesyouareno (@iamyesyouareno) July 19, 2022
Just another typical day in San Francisco pic.twitter.com/ac4dynZOQq
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 17, 2022
And while not directly related, the cognitive dissonance on display here is *astounding,* and says a lot about the current state of society.
UNREAL. A dad says he’s gonna read from graphic books available to children in school and gets shut down by @oneclayschools board before he even starts because it might be against the law to read from these books in front of children.
These books are in school libraries. pic.twitter.com/PCJSMCttq5
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 12, 2022
Article concerns a theoretical weapon the Chinese have written a paper about. A torpedo that can be launched from a normal tube, equipped with a reactor of rather inefficient performance but adequate to drive it across the ocean to San Francisco at 30 knots. There it would drop the reactor which would supposedly safely deactivate and sink into the sand; the torpedo would then guide itself to the target under conventional power.
On the one hand: archives are filled with design studies that went nowhere. One the other hand, it would be unwise to assume that the Chinese *aren’t* developing this. And given their recent history of aggression and technical incompetence, I’d fully expect a large fraction of the reactors to melt down en route, some to deactivate then reactivate, some of the torpedoes to wander off and blow up Easter Island or Fiji, or just bob around in the ocean until rammed by a fishing vessel or a deafened whale. Still, it’s interesting to note that the Commies are threatening San Francisco. Gotta wonder how the commies of San Fran and Berkeley would react to the sudden appearance of a radioactive tsunami a few meters high washing into town. I imagine the radiation wards will be filled with plaintive cries of “Trump’s fault!” and “white privilege!”
Tomy’s 1/350 die cast USS Enterprise looked pretty likely to fail… till they dropped the number needed again. Originally 5,000 units, then 2,500, now 2,000. With three days to go, they’re now at more than 94%.
With fewer units sold, these things should become that much more valuable in the future. Imagine the barter value for guzoline or with the bullet farmer! You might be able to trade one of these for an oxen with only moderate radiation sickness. I have doubts that Lord Humongous will have much interest in them, but I bet Master Blaster will.
Woo.
This may well be pure BS. If it’s not, though… ruh-roh, Russian tankies…
US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall told a journalist who inquired about the possibility of transferring aircraft data.
Thus the US Air Force will be able to write off obsolete military aircraft in order to focus on modern programs. #Ukraine #UkraineRussianWar #Ukrainian
— 🇺🇦Ukraine News Live🇺🇦 (@UkraineNewsLive) July 21, 2022
The A-10 is, let’s face it, obsolete. As absolutely badass as the plane is, drones have kinda taken over the role… sure, they’re far more easily destroyed than the A-10, but who cares? They’re cheap and disposable and ain’t nobody on board. The modern battlefield is an unsafe place for something slow and targetable like the A-10. Buuuuuuuut…. the Russians, rather stupidly, have failed to gain absolute air dominance over all of Ukraine. This is the sort of environment that the A-10, properly employed and properly flown, can shine in. Swamp the Russian air defenses with cheap rocks and cheap drones, and then the A-10 comes striding in ten feet tall and lays waste with precision, determination and brutality. *Imagine* those long trains of resupply trucks, miles long, looking up and seeing a few A-10s drawing down on them. Whoopsie.
Of course, there are lots of problems with this idea. The A-10 is not in production, nor, I expect, are most of the spare parts needed to maintain the fleet. A Ukrainian A-10 gets damaged, repairing it might be quite problematic. Ukrainian pilots have, to my knowledge, zero training time on the A-10. Russian air defense has been kind of a joke; this might spur them to actually get on the job. And every A-10 sent to Ukraine is an A-10 that can’t be sent to the US Army (the Army should have fixed wing ground attack/support aircraft: fight me). The USAF has wanted to rid itself of the A-10 for decades, and, honestly, I guess I’d rather see them lost in combat shooting their way to Valhalla than in a scrap yard getting turned into nails and pop cans. At this point, losing airframes over enemy territory no longer holds the fear of “oh no, they’ll learn our secrets from examining the wreckage” that it might have 40 years ago.
A-10’s appear in the skies of Ukraine, the Russians will make taking them out a priority. That will certainly make for an interesting clash. And if the American plane and Ukrainian pilot put up a good showing of survivability… the Russians will probably bend themselves over backwards to take them out. The A-10s could thus be useful simply as a way to throw the Russian war effort into chaos, devoting effort and funds to some new goal, while now getting stingier on other more practical goals.