November 8, 2016 Batchelor/McCotter/Rose/Zimmerman podcast
Embedded below the fold. This was my appearance on Batchelor last night after it appeared pretty clear that Trump was going to win.
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Year: 2016
Clinton supporters issue death threats and riot
The hate is real: In response to Donald Trump’s victory, Clinton supporters in California and Oregon rioted, with others issuing death threats on social media.
I could also list several dozen stories detailing the horror and disbelief of the intellectual community, in Washington, in the major cities, and across academia. They will not accept this election, and are right this second starting to plan their resistance to any policy Trump or the Republicans may put forth.
The moderate Democrat wins
It appears that Donald Trump has won what I have been calling the November Democratic primary, and will take the office of President of the United States this coming January.
Will this make much difference? I am very guardedly optimistic. Trump remains at heart a moderate Democrat with mixed leanings. His experience during this campaign however has also clearly pushed him rightward, as he suddenly found himself the target of liberal hate. Moreover, the people he has been listing as possible cabinet and administration appointees during his term in office suggest a slightly right-of-center rule.
At the same time, the entrenched and corrupt culture that rules Washington and intellectual society will not accept a Trump administration meekly. They will fight any effort by him or his supporters to change that culture, or to wrest any power from it. This will be the ultimate test of Trump’s beliefs. If he truly has shifted rightward, he will fight back, and “drain the swamp” as he promised during the campaign. If however he allows his past moderate Democrat roots to take over he will back off and do what the Republican leadership has been doing for the past two decades: retreat in the face of the slightest opposition.
What makes me most hopeful that Trump will actually “drain the swamp” is that he will enter office with a solid Republican congress, made up of more true conservatives then we have ever seen. This more than anything will help keep him from wavering from his promises.
One other thought for the moment: The closeness of this election is still disturbing. Trump was not a great candidate, but Clinton was a truly corrupt one. That so many Americans were willing to look the other way even after almost three decades of documented dishonesty and lying and still give her their votes does not speak well of them. Until that basic fact changes, the American system of government remains very fragile and exposed to destruction from within.
The Star-Spangled Banner
An evening pause: During the 2015 Kentucky Music Educators convention in Louisville, the 500 high students in attendance would gather each night just before curfew on the balconies of the Hyatt Regency’s vast interior lobby and sing the national anthem.
I think it fitting to show this tonight, on election day. The United States will always hold the honor of being the first nation on Earth to attempt the great experiment of self-government, established by conscious choice with the creation of founding documents. For this, we will forever I think be remembered in human history, a fact for which Americans should always be proud.
Hat tip Peter Fenstermacher.
Using the X-37B as a space ambulance?
Researchers have proposed using the Air Force’s X-37B as an ambulance in space.
Halberg said that an effective astronaut taxi should, among other things, be able to stay at the ISS for two years or more at a stretch; be capable of getting people back to Earth rapidly, within three hours or so; impose minimal G-loads on occupants; have the ability to land close to a hospital; and allow patients to lie in a supine position. These requirements all point to a space plane rather than a capsule, Halberg said — meaning SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and Boeing’s CST-100 capsule, which are scheduled to start flying NASA astronauts to and from the ISS within the next year or two, wouldn’t make the grade as ambulances.
Another private crew-carrying vehicle that’s currently in development, Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Dream Chaser space plane, is an intriguing option that bears further investigation, Robinson and Halberg said. But their initial concept study focused on the robotic X-37B, chiefly because the 29-foot-long (8.8 meters) military space plane has already racked up millions of miles in orbit, while Dream Chaser has yet to launch.
Makes sense, though once Dream Chaser is flying it will have the potential to provide the same service with far greater capabilities.
Orion faces more delays
Faced with looming schedule problems for Europe’s effort to build the service module for the Orion capsule, NASA has created a working group to attack the problem.
The European Service Module (ESM) element of Orion has been classed as a major schedule driver for the program for some time. The Service Module for Orion was originally going to be an all-American system, under the control of Lockheed Martin. However, a deal back in 2012 resulted in an alliance with the European Space Agency (ESA) to utilize hardware associated with its Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV).
The deal made sense. NASA’s goal of international collaboration is deemed to be an essential formula for spreading the costs and increasing the viability of NASA’s exploration goals, building on the success of the partnerships that built the International Space Station. Also, the ATV is proven technology, having already proved its worth via a string of successful resupply missions to the orbital outpost.
However, the challenge of combining the technology into what is essentially an American vehicle has resulted in schedule pressures.
Let me once again point out that Orion was first proposed by President George Bush in 2004. Its first official flight, with service module, is now scheduled for 2018. That means it took NASA 14 years to build and launch a unmanned single complete capsule, assuming they can get the service module built in time. That it took that long to build this is shameful. That there is even the slightest possibility that 14 years won’t be enough time to build the service module is downright disgusting, and is another illustration of the complete failure of the federal government.
Note that the previous unmanned Orion test flight in 2014 really doesn’t count. That capsule was a engineering test capsule, designed to test the capsule’s heat shield, even though NASA had already decided before the flight to abandon that heat shield design. In other words, it was a complete waste of money.
The Script – Superheroes
<An evening pause: I like the words he uses to introduce the song, “You might wonder why superheroes are born, but I gotta tell ya, sometimes they’re not born, they’re made.”
Hat tip Andrew_W.
Decline in sunspots continues
Late Sunday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for October. As I do every month, I am posting it here with annotations to give it context.
The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.
The sunspot decline continued in October, dropping the sunspot number for the month to below the 2007 low prediction. Though the decline continues to track that low prediction, the sunspot count for November has been even lower, suggesting that the ramp down to solar minimum will continue to under perform that prediction and will arrive at minimum sooner than expected. As I noted last month, this fast decline will also mean that the ending solar cycle will be a both a weak and a short cycle, two phenomenon that in the past never went together. In the past, a short cycle meant the maximum was strong, while a long cycle would correspond with a weak maximum.
The Sun continues to behave in a manner that is unprecedented, and suggests the possibility that a Grand Minimum might be coming.
November 4, 2016 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold. Commercial space review.
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Matt Monro – Born free
An evening pause: From the 1966 film of the same name.
Born free
And life is worth living
but only worth living
‘Cause you’re born free.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Musk predicts mid-December return to flight
In a cable news interview today, Elon Musk reiterated recent reports that SpaceX expects to resume launches by the middle of December.
That the head of Inmarsat, one of SpaceX’s satellite customers, has confirmed this plan and appears to have no problem with it, suggests to me that SpaceX is on solid ground and that they have pinpointed a solution to the launchpad explosion that will not require any major re-engineering.
Jury rules against Rolling Stone in gang rape story
A jury today declared Rolling Stone magazine guilty of defamation in its retracted and debunked University of Virginia gang rape story.
The 10 member jury concluded that the Rolling Stone reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was responsible for defamation, with actual malice, in the case brought by Nicole Eramo, a U-Va. administrator who oversaw sexual violence cases at the time of the article’s publication. The jury also found the magazine and its publisher responsible for defaming Eramo.
The $7.5 million lawsuit centered on Erdely’s 9,000-word article titled “A Rape on Campus.” The article appeared online in late Nov. 2014 and on newsstands in the magazine’s December 2014 issue. The story opened with a graphic depiction of a fraternity gang rape that went viral online and sent shock waves across the U-Va. campus community. But within days of the article’s publication, key elements of the account fell apart under scrutiny. The magazine eventually retracted the story in April 2015.
The magazine and the reporter had a leftwing feminist agenda, centered on confirming the false leftwing narrative that rapes were rampant on college campuses and that oppressive anti-female male-dominated administrations were doing nothing about it. This narrative is entirely false, a lie created to provide a platform for the left to gain power. The magazine though bought into it, publishing a vicious story that was a complete lie and that defamed a lot of innocent people. As a result it now faces the strong possibility that this decision will bring about its bankruptcy, a bankruptcy well deserved.