The American Revolution, as reported by modern reporters

To better understand how the teaching of American history is being distorted by modern leftist historians, one need only read this description of the beginnings of the American Revolution, written as it almost certainly would be by today’s ignorant and leftwing anti-American journalists:

Boston – National Guard units seeking to confiscate a cache of recently banned assault weapons were ambushed by elements of a Para-military extremist faction. Military and law enforcement sources estimate that 72 were killed and more than 200 injured before government forces were compelled to withdraw.

Speaking after the clash, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage declared that the extremist faction, which was made up of local citizens, has links to the radical right-wing tax protest movement.

Read it all. It will sound sadly very familiar.

The Declaration of Independence

It behooves every American to read at least once a year the document that outlined the principles and reasons why the American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. These words remain its most profound statement:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It seems that the Fourth of July seems the most appropriate day for that reading.

The story of the writing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic

Some more Civil War history on this July fourth.

The Battle Hymn of the Republic became one of the most popular songs in the North during the Civil War, and was also an important rally song used during the 1950s/1960s civil rights movement. And its central theme is stated by its last stanza:

In the beauty of the lilies
Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom
That transfigures you and me;
As He died to make men holy,
Let us die to make men free;
While God is marching on.

That stanza in many ways encompasses much of American history, since many of the original colonies were formed by deeply religious Christians who had made their religion and its moral rules central to their lives. That faith ended up being seeped in much of American culture for the next four hundred years, and guided the country’s actions both in domestic and foreign policy.

Sierra Nevada signs deal with UN

The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada has signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations, creating the framework for UN member nations to use its Dream Chaser cargo vehicle for science research.

Under the agreement, [Sierra Nevada] committed to dedicating one or more Dream Chaser missions that will host payloads from member countries. The cooperation will focus on developing an interface control document and payload hosting guide to allow payloads developed by participating countries, especially non-space-faring ones, to be flown into orbit.

What this means is that American space technology, developed and owned privately rather than built by NASA, is beginning to grab business wherever it can find it. These UN space missions eventually flown on Dream Chaser might be foreign built, but it will be the American spacecraft that gets them to space..Sierra Nevada will not only make money doing so, it will position itself financially to develop even better space products that it can sell worldwide. Nor will Sierra Nevada be alone in this. The result will be the increasing prosperity of the American aerospace industry as it gains a larger share in the settlement of the solar system.

Blue Origin breaks ground on rocket factory

The competition heats up: Blue Origin has broken ground on a Florida factory for building its orbital rockets.

At 750,000 square feet, the new custom-built facility is designed to be large enough to accommodate manufacturing, processing, integration, and testing of orbital rockets. To put that size in perspective, SpaceX’s rocket facility in Hawthorne, California is nearly one million square feet. Bezos stated that the entire rocket would be manufactured in this facility with the exception of the rocket engines themselves.

What this means is that Bezos is satisfied with the results of the test flights of his suborbital New Shepard spacecraft, and is now ready to upscale to a orbital rocket that would compete with SpaceX and everyone else in the increasingly competitive launch market.

Virgin Galactic gets another launch contract

The competition heats up: Virgin Galactic has signed a launch contract with new communications satellite company Sky and Space Global to use LauncherOne to put 200 nanosats into orbit in 2018.

This contract suggests that Virgin Galactic might be making good progress on LauncherOne. Or it might mean that Sky and Space has some commitments that forced it to pick Virgin Galactic over other smallsat launch companies that appear to be farther along in development. Either way, the stock market looked at this deal and, as noted in the article above, sold off enough Sky and Space stock for its value to drop.

Science elites move to block UK exit from EU

A statement today from the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society, reacting to yesterday’s vote to leave the European Union, calls for the government to do whatever it can to nullify that exit.

Professor John Zarnecki, the President of the Royal Astronomical Society, commented: “We must remember that whatever happens, science has no boundaries. It is vital that we do not give the message, particularly to our younger colleagues, in the UK and beyond that our country is not a good place in which to do scientific research, however uncertain the economic and political environment is.

“I have been privileged during my career to have worked in a research environment in Europe which has had few borders for either people or ideas. We must strive to make sure that these rights are not taken away – this would be enormously to the detriment of UK society.”

The statement includes a laundry list of benefits that membership in the EU brings scientists, including lots of funding to pay the salaries of these scientists. The statement also insists that all these benefits must be maintained, despite the will of the electorate.

While many of these benefits (easy travel between nations) are beneficial and a reason to have a European Union, the electorate understood that the benefits have been increasingly outweighed by the heavy regulatory burden imposed by the EU, with no democratic recourse allowed.

Articles in the science journals Science and Nature, here, here, and here, also note the distress and opposition by scientists to yesterday’s vote.

This unwillingness of the elite community to accept the will of the public is part and parcel to the same bubble I found in Washington when I attended the CNAS conference. Unfortunately, I see no evidence of a willingness in the elite community to bend at all to the will of the general public, meaning that we can only expect the conflict between the top and the bottom to intensify in the coming years. The question will be whether our institutions of democracy will be able to withstand that battle, especially when those in power continue to find their power being attacked from below.

UK votes to leave EU

The revolt continues: The voters of the United Kingdom tonight chose to leave the European Union.

The EU was a great idea, unfortunately spoiled in the past few decades by a crushing regulatory bureaucracy unaccountable to anyone, which is why every single time the question has been put to the voters in recent years the voters have chosen to quit the EU.

The unrest among American voters, fueling the success of outsiders and the defeat of incumbents in recent elections, is based on similar issues and dissatisfactions. I thus expect similar surprises here come November. This essay expresses these circumstances here in the states quite nicely:

This is not about ideology. If people trusted elites and institutions they defend to look out for them, in a non-ideological sense, the breakdown of our systems would have been mitigated or confined. The fact that it is so sweeping is due to a generation of elites who didn’t do their jobs well, or pretended things weren’t their job for too long.

We have breakdown, chaos, and upheaval in our politics today not because the people are “insane”, as Rauch writes, but because they are sane. They know the leadership class which held power for the past generation has not looked out for them. Don’t blame a people for turning on elites who thought they knew better but proved over and over that they didn’t. It is thoroughly rational to want something else instead. Even if that something else turns out not to deliver either, at least you know it’s not the same as what’s failed. [emphasis mine]

Remember, the definition of insanity is doing the same failed thing over and over again, even though it is proven to never work. This what our elites have been doing for the past three decades. The voters, however, are increasingly showing that they are not insane, that they want to try new things. Kudos to them!

SpaceX’s first stage teaches them how to land on Mars

The competition heats up: This update on the status of SpaceX’s manned Dragon capsule also provides this interesting detail about the engineering knowledge gained from the company’s effort to vertically land its Falcon 9 first stages:

The company is also using the propulsive landings as a way to practically and physically test landing systems in a near-Mars atmospheric environment. “Earth’s upper atmosphere is also a really good analogue for Mars’ atmosphere,” noted [Garrett Reisman, Director of Space Operations]. “When you get up high enough, the density and consistency of the atmosphere is very similar to what you face during Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) on Mars. So every time we land, we take one of these rockets and we perform hypersonic retrograde propulsion, the data from which we’re sharing with JPL because it’s the first time this has ever been demonstrated on a major scale.”

To this end, Reisman pointed out that the Falcon 9 first stage landings are really serving as test beds for the EDL systems of eventual Mars missions. “Every time you see one of those rockets coming back, not only is it enabling a whole new paradigm for launching things into space, but it’s also bringing us one step closer to Mars.

As for Dragon, it now appears the company wants to do a full unmanned demo flight to and from ISS before it performs its launch abort test. They will then follow this with a manned demo mission to ISS. All three flights are planned for 2017.

Sierra Nevada prepares for Dream Chaser glide tests

The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada now expects to deliver its refurbished engineering test prototype of Dream Chaser to NASA for new glide tests in August.

“Our version of the shuttle Enterprise is about to be finished for its next phase of flight tests,” [said Mark Sirangelo, corporate vice president.] “Somewhere in the August time frame, it’s going to be shipped off to California, to the Armstrong [Flight Research] Center and to Edwards to be in Phase 2 of flight testing, which is going to be really fun and exciting.”

Sirangelo said lessons learned from the atmospheric flight tests will be applied to the development of the orbital test vehicle, which is now being outfitted in Colorado. That test vehicle, in turn, will blaze the trail for the spacecraft that will carry cargo for NASA under the CRS-2 contract. “We are looking to be launching on time, which is about three years from now, in the second half of 2019,” Sirangelo said.

They get this cargo version flying successfully, and they will certainly get a contract to build a manned version.

Damaged Falcon 9 first stage returns to port

The remains of the damaged Falcon 9 first stage that tipped over during its barge landing last week returned to port this past weekend.

Video and images of it can be seen at the link, all of which suggest that there is a slight chance the engines might be salvageable. Regardless, SpaceX once again has valuable used space hardware that no one else has ever had which it can study to improve its future rocket designs.

The Think Tank Culture of Washington

On Monday I attended and gave a presentation at the one-day annual conference of the Center for New American Security (CNAS) in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with the space policy paper I am writing for them, Exploring Space in the 21st Century.

CNAS was founded ten years ago by two political Washington insiders, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, with a focus on foreign policy and defense issues and the central goal of encouraging bi-partisan discussion. For this reason their policy papers cover a wide range of foreign policy subjects, written by authors from both political parties. The conference itself probably had about 1,000 attendees from across the political spectrum, most of whom seemed to me to be part of the Washington establishment of policy makers, either working for elected officials, for various executive agencies, or for one of the capital’s many think tanks, including CNAS.

I myself was definitely not a major presenter at this conference, with speakers like Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), and Senator Joe Reed (D-Rhode Island). I was part of a panel during one of the lunch breakout sessions, where approximately one third of the attendees came to have lunch while we spoke about space. I only had ten minutes to speak, and used that time to outline (1) the influence SpaceX is having on the entire launch industry and (2) the vast differences in cost, development time, and results between the Orion/SLS program and commercial space. Not surprisingly, the aerospace people from the big established companies appeared to be somewhat uncomfortable with what I had to say, though the Airbus people liked it when I made it clear I thought that the U.S. should allow foreign companies to compete for American business, including government launches.

Their discomfort was best illustrated by the one question asked of me following my talk, where the questioner said that I was comparing apples to oranges in comparing a manned capsule like Orion, intended to go beyond Earth orbit, with the unmanned cargo capsules like Dragon and Cygnus, that only go to ISS. I countered that though I recognized these differences, I also recognized that the differences were really not as much as the industry likes to imply, as demonstrated for example by SpaceX’s announcement that they plan to send Dragon capsules to Mars beginning in 2018. After all, a capsule is still only a capsule. The differences simply did not explain the gigantic differences in cost and development time.

I added that Orion compares badly with Apollo as well, noting that Apollo took about a third as long to build and actually cost less. I doubt I satisfied this individual’s objections, but in the end I think future policy will be decided based on results, not the desires of any one industry bigwig. And in this area Orion/SLS has some serious problems. I hope when my policy paper is released in August it will have some influence in determining that future policy.

My overall impression of CNAS, the speakers, and the people who attended was somewhat mixed. Having lived in the Washington, D.C. area from 1998 to 2011, when I attended many such conferences, I found that things haven’t changed much in the last five years. Superficially, everyone was dressed in formal business suits (something you see less and less elsewhere), and they also got to eat some fancy food at lunch.

On a deeper level my impressions were also mixed.
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Trump campaign announces Christian advisory board

This is encouraging news: The Trump campaign today announced the formation of an executive board of important evangelical Christians to advise the candidate.

The list of members, shown at the link, is decidedly conservative. They were asked to join the board but were not required to endorse Trump to do so.

As I’ve said repeatedly, the most important way to make sure a Trump presidency follows conservative and constitutional policy is to surround Trump with a lot of conservatives.That the campaign has done this is good news, though I must also add that it is no guarantee that Trump will pay any attention to these people once he is elected. Right now this could merely be a move on his campaign”s part to gain the support of these evangelicals.

Posted from Los Angeles, California, a place so wonderful that my hotel has locked doors and security gates everywhere, making my one night here seem more like a night in jail than an overnight hotel stay. Interestingly, the only time I have ever seen the need for this much security has been when I have visited or lived in major urban cities, run by Democrats. I wonder why that is.

Judge strikes down as illegal Obama fracking regulations

The law is such an inconvenient thing: With strong language a federal judge has bluntly struck down the Obama administrations attempt to regulate the fracking industry.

Judge Scott Skavdahl of the District Court of Wyoming already had put a hold on the regulations last year, and in a decision released late Tuesday, he ruled that Congress did not give Interior the power to regulate hydraulic fracturing, indeed it had expressly withheld that power with some narrow exceptions. “Congress has not delegated to the Department of Interior the authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing,” Judge Skavdahl wrote in deciding a lawsuit brought by industry groups and a number of Western states. The “effort to do so through the Fracking Rule is in excess of its statutory authority and contrary to law.”

The judge dismissed particularly the claim by the Interior Department and its Bureau of Land Management that it had inherent broad regulatory authority to pursue the public good on federal and Indian lands, the only place the regulations would have applied. “Congress‘ inability or unwillingness to pass a law desired by the executive branch does not default authority to the executive branch to act independently, regardless of whether hydraulic fracturing is good or bad for the environment or the citizens of the United States,” wrote Judge Skavdahl, whom Mr. Obama appointed to the bench in 2011. [emphasis mine]

That a judge whom Obama appointed, who thus is almost certainly a Democrat, was willing to put aside his partisan loyalties to rule so forcefully against the Obama administration gives me great hope. In recent years Democratic judges have almost ceased ruling based on law and have instead been guided almost exclusively by their political leanings. This judge’s ruling here suggests that there remain some principled judges, even on the left.

Posted from fascist Los Angeles, a place where they make you pay $19 for a five minute two mile taxi ride.

Florida demands $15K port fee from SpaceX

Nice first stage you got there, be a shame if something happened to it: The Florida port where SpaceX has been offloading its recovered first stages from its barge has announced that it wants to charge the company $15,000 each time.

“We view their cargo passing over our dock just like any other cargo passing our dock,” Port Canaveral Chief Executive Officer John Murray said. “We’re not looking at this as an adversarial relationship. It’s no different than anything else coming across the dock. You have to pay for use of port facilities. That’s how a port makes its money.”

“The proposed wharfage fee is 14 times higher than what any other business is being charged for using port facilities,” SpaceX spokesman John Taylor said in an email to FLORIDA TODAY. “Port Canaveral is an important partner in our recovery operations. But we expect fees to be fair and reflect our actual use of the port. We’re looking forward to participating in the meeting later this week.”

The port notes that the size and the weight of the first stages cause significant wear and tear to the port, and thus should pay more. They have a point, but this still looks like they have noticed they have a customer with deep pockets that they now are trying to pick.

Posted from Linthicum, Maryland.

Stratolaunch three quarters complete

The competition heats up: Vulcan Aerospace now says that construction of its Stratolaunch airplane, the largest ever to fly, will be completed by the end of this year.

Assembly of the plane is 76 percent complete, with the engines, landing gear and one tail section still to be installed. The plane is expected to be finished before the end of the year. Commercial services are expected to begin before 2020.

They still have not determined the second stage rocket they will use with this mother ship to launch satellites, which leaves me increasingly skeptical about their future. It is very late in the game to still not know this detail.

Backgrounder on June 23 UK vote on EU membership

Link here. The videos at the link are especially informative.

Polls have recently shifted strongly in favor of leaving the union, but that is not a certain result. If it happens, however, I will consider that decision by the public to be another example of a growing revolt by the general public against the intellectual elites who presently rule western society, since most of these elites appear to favor keeping the United Kingdom in the European Union.

Posted from Washington, D.C.

New Shepard successfully completes fourth flight

The competition heats up: Blue Origin today completed the fourth test flight of its New Shepard suborbital spacecraft, successfully landing intact its capsule with only two parachutes.

That’s four flights in about seven months, which for a test program seems a reasonable pace. I would expect them to soon begin testing faster turnaround times for the spacecraft, just to see if they can launch and repeat more quickly.

Russia negotiating with Australian investors to buy SeaLaunch

The competition heats up: Roscosmos revealed today that Russia is negotiating with investors in Australia to buy SeaLaunch.

I’m not sure how seriously we can take this announcement. The sale still has a lot of problems for any investors. Boeing is owed a lot of money by the SeaLaunch partners, specifically Russia, and the SeaLaunch floating launchpad is docked in the U.S. where they can hold it as collateral

GOP congressman defeated in primary because of Obamatrade support

The revolt continues: Republican incumbent Congressman Randy Forbes (R-Virginia) was defeated in Tuesday Virginia Republican primary, despite being supported by the party establishment and outspending his opponent, Scott Taylor, 10-1.

Forbes, who started his pivot from the 4th District to the 2nd with an incumbent’s healthy campaign fund, spent more than $1.3 million in the primary compared with the little more than $142,000 that Taylor reported spending as of late May.

Taylor, a former Navy SEAL, ran against much of Virginia Beach’s GOP establishment, with several local elected officials as well as departing U.S. Rep. Scott Rigell endorsing Forbes’ candidacy. Rigell rented Forbes his former headquarters on First Colonial Road and sold him his email lists of supporters.

Redistricting was certainly a factor in the incumbent’s defeat but this article points out something that the newspaper article above as well as all other mainstream articles I’ve read fail to note: Incumbent Forbes had voted to make it almost impossible for Congress to challenge or amend Obama’s the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, also called Obamatrade.

Taylor blasted Forbes for voting to give President Obama fast track authority to ram through Congress the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a sweeping 12-nation international regulatory pact that would merge our economy with some of the poorest and most repressive on earth. This move was especially hypocritical for Forbes, chairman of the House Prayer Caucus. Obamatrade would give special economic privileges to countries that persecute Christians, including Vietnam, Malaysia and the Shariah-law regime of Brunei.

After his disastrous vote for fast track, Forbes tried to tap dance around the Constitution-shredding, religious-liberty-trampling Obamatrade agreement. In a letter to constituents, Forbes recycled the party establishment’s globalist talking points, saying free trade is “crucial to our economy” and to “our future as a country.” Then Forbes said he would support Obamatrade if it were amended, glossing over the fact that his vote for fast track surrendered Congress’ power to amend the agreement. [emphasis mine]

In other words, Forbes had been part of the Republican establishment that has consistently refused to fight any of the Democratic agenda, instead focusing on putting on a show of failure theater, where they act like they are fighting Obama while allowing his legislative goals to pass. The voters saw through this, and kicked him out.

Exploring Space in the 21st Century

For the past two months I have been very focused on writing what I hope will be a somewhat influential space policy paper for the Center for New American Security, comparing the different approaches the federal government has taken in the past fifteen years toward encouraging a robust launch industry in the United States. Essentially the policy paper, Exploring Space in the 21st Century: How the American space effort since 2000, both private and public, is changing the global aerospace industry, compares the big government rocket launch programs like Orion/SLS and the Air Force’s EELV/ULA with the commercial rocket launch contracts that NASA has signed with companies like SpaceX, Orbital ATK, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada to get cargo and crews up and down from ISS.

The comparison is profound, and is devastating to the supporters of big government programs. Commercial space has literally accomplished ten times more in a third the time for a tenth the cost.

That bears repeating: Commercial space ($4 billion) cost one tenth that of Orion/SLS ($43 billion), took one third the time to go from concept to launch (5 years versus 15 years), and accomplished ten times more (22 rockets/capsules versus 2.5 rockets/capsules). In analyzing these numbers, I also took a close look at why the differences are so profound. Surprisingly, the high cost of Orion/SLS has little to do with its engineering challenges, nor is it caused by any significant overcharges by the contractors. The problem is more fundamental.

The paper also reviews the effect the competition introduced by SpaceX has had on the entire launch industry. Launch costs are dropping and innovation is increasing. This, combined with the lessons learned by NASA in commercial space, suggests that the future of getting into space looks quite bright indeed.

This policy paper should be ready for publication sometime in the next two months. On Monday, however, I will be part of a space policy panel at the Center for New American Security’s annual conference in Washington, DC., where I will give a short overview of my findings to a lot of major players in the upper echelons of the Washington elite community. Their response should be quite interesting.

Thus, I will be traveling to DC this weekend, and am not sure if I will be able to post much on Monday, since I very much wish to attend the entire day’s conference and listen to the other speakers, including Vice President Joe Biden. It is my plan to write about what I see once I get back.

Orbital ATK delays Antares launch until August

In the heat of competition: The review of Orbital ATK’s May 31st static fire test of its Antares rocket has caused the company to delay the upgraded rocket’s first launch until August.

Additional information pointed to data on “vibrations” during the Static Fire test that could be deemed as a problem for the vehicle’s avionics. A “fix” was already understood to have been approved.

Orbital ATK, while admitting the launch is slipping from its early July launch date estimate to a date likely to be in the August timeframe, pointed to trajectory evaluations as a specific relation to the launch date deliberations. “Final trajectory shaping work is also currently underway, which is likely to result in an updated launch schedule in the August timeframe,” added Orbital ATK.

They expect to make a decision on launch date in a few weeks.

Another successful Falcon 9 launch

The competition heats up: SpaceX has successfully put two commecial satellites in orbit. The first stage hit the barge, but the landing was unsuccessful. More details to come.

The full video of the entire launch is embedded below the fold. One interesting part includes a view from inside the first stage looking back at the second stage at separate, followed with images from the first stage on its way back to Earth..

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