Currently scheduled for 7:27 PM eastern time, SpaceX is planning on launching a Dragon capsule to the ISS with *four* astronauts on board. This will be the first time since the Space Shuttle that more than three at a time have gone up.
UPDATE: thirteen minutes into the flight and first stage has successfully landed, capsule is in orbit and separated from the second stage. It’s dull and repetitive… Which is *exactly* what ya want to see. WoO!
During the campaign, trump events were raucous, well attended celebratory events filled with unafraid people. Biden events, in contrast, were highly controlled, sparsely attended events that might just as well have been done virtually from Bidens basement. So what will the inauguration be like? The article below says that some of the Biden people are afraid that if a normal sort of inauguration is held, there will be far more Trump supporters there than Biden, with the result that it’ll turn into a protest rather than a celebration. I have doubts, though… right wingers in the US will often turn out for a celebration, but much less often for a protest. In any event, there’s nothing saying that a Presidential inauguration needs to be a big public affair, just that a Supreme Court Justice needs to do it. Biden right now might well be planning on being sworn in by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in his garage.
And I thought the worst of it would be screaming brats and horrible parents…
An interesting interview with a sci-fi author who decided to go against the political grain.
I’ve not read his stuff, but he seems like he’s on the right track. He has produced fiction that shocks the modern conscience by being non-woke. Might be worth a look. Conservative and libertarian science fiction is basically what science fiction was in the days of Heinlein and Leinster and Anderson, back when Men Were Real Men and Capable Men saved the day against space emperors and bug-eyed monsters. You know, when science fiction was *good.* To contrast with THIS RUBBISH.
His most recent books on Amazon:
The Amazon description of “Hazardous Imaginings:”
Science fiction is NOT a safe space!
Two short novels and three stories by the author of Fat White Vampire Blues push the boundaries of taboo in science fiction. An English archeologist who yearns for the love of a young Jewish refugee sets out to convince a majority of the world’s population that the Holocaust never happened — hoping to not only wipe it from the annals of history, but also from reality. The Martian colony Bradbury sends an investigator to pursue a gay Uyghur murderer in a future Australian city where members of each ethnic and grievance group are invisible to all those who don’t belong to their tribe. A far-future academic treatise describes a rediscovered Fusionist liturgical text that combines the writings of radical feminist Joanna Russ and female slavery fantasist John Norman. An aggressively therapeutic State of Florida lovingly wraps its bureaucratic tentacles around those it deems unenlightened. A born-again Christian cafeteria worker in a small Texas college town becomes the only friend of an insectoid alien come to evacuate humanity from a doomed Earth. These stories leave no sacred cows unprodded.
This *could* get entertaining:
Spectacular.
Remember how the earlier, *lesser* lockdowns, in cahoots with racists and Marxists sensing an opportunity, led to months of rioting and destruction? Good times.
An architect name of Charles Burton proposed a 1,000 foot tall skyscraper. Nothing newsworthy there, except that the proposal was made in 1851. The idea was to take the iron and glass from the Crystal Palace Exhibition and rebuild it all into what would have been the worlds first skyscraper.
It’s certainly cool and all, but I have serious doubts that Victorian materials and construction technologies could have built a survivable skyscraper a thousand feet tall. It just seems like it would have been an accident waiting to happen. Winds would have caused it to sway; wrought iron already under incredible load doesn’t seem like a good choice here. And the exterior cladding of 1850’s glass seems like it would have come shattering down onto bystanders. And come 1940, the Luftwaffe would have had a hell of a fun time trying to bring it down.
Like the video says, the construction of this thing would have had a major impact on the future of very tall buildings. Had it worked, skyscrapers would have been much more popular far sooner; better structural steels likely would have been invented and commercialized sooner as a result. The world today might be populated with structures that make the Burj Kalifa look like a townhouse. But had it collapsed – perhaps even during construction – it probably would have set back the idea of skyscrapers, so that today cities would have spread out more sideways than upwards. Perhaps vast structures ten stories tall and a mile long would fill the cities instead of fifty and hundred-story towers crammed next to each other.
A single architectural decision could ahve changed the face of the modern world.
A black and white bit of concept art that was sold on ebay a while back showing the Lockheed STAR (Space Transport And Recovery) Clipper space shuttle concept from the late 1960’s. This was a promising concept that used a lifting body orbiter with a wide, flattened rear fuselage that was liberally covered with rocket engines (a large range of engines and layouts were considered, including liner aerospikes). The shuttle was filled with liquid oxygen tanks and some hydrogen tanks; the bulk of the hydrogen was stored in a large V-shaped drop tank. This component would have been larger but reasonably inexpensive, jettisoned after deletion to be destroyed during re-entry or splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The vehicle would have continued on to orbit using the propellant remaining in the internal tanks.
A vast amount of information on the STAR Clipper is available HERE.
The STAR Clipper lasted a lot longer than many contemporary designs and went through a multitude of design revisions. it always seemed like it should have worked reasonably well… and it had the benefit of being aesthetically beautiful.
UPDATE: seems to be back up. Ah, well. Maybe Twitter or Facebook will have a little “accident” next. What a tragedy that would be if those platforms froze up for a few days.
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YouTube is down! Let the conspiracy-ing begin!!!
1: It’s down because pro-Trump forces have begun showing how Biden stole the election, and Big Tech can’t have that.
2: It’s down because Trump wants to shut down the videos showing how there was no fraud.
3: And here’s the really crazy one: something glitched.
The Biden-Harris transition team has announced who is on the NASA agency review team. Here’s the bio for one reviewer, Dave Noble:
For the past two years, he has been consulting with national progressive groups on strategic planning, coalition building, communications, electoral engagement, and leadership development.
Prior to this work, Dave spent eight years in the Obama Administration. He was the Deputy Director and Acting Director of the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), where among other responsibilities he oversaw teams building pipelines of diverse candidates for political appointments and teams creating leadership development programming for all 3500 administration appointees. He also helped the First Lady organize mayors committed to ending food deserts and create safer and accessible places for kids to play as part of her “Let’s Move!” campaign, and was the White House Liaison and Deputy Chief of Staff at NASA, where he led the combined federal campaign to raise charitable donations from NASA HQ employees. He served on President Obama’s campaign in 2008 as the Director of the LGBT Vote and was deployed to Michigan to help spur voter turnout.
Yep. Good hands.