by jackokie » Wed Jan 26, 2022 7:48 pm
@Brigit (Continued)
6. Starlink and National Security: Having lived through the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, I firmly believe "si vis pacem, para bellum", or shorter "Peace Through Strength". After the USSR fell, more than one high-level official admitted that the Soviets recognized our military strength deterred them from getting too adventurous, especially with the Strategic Defense Initiative underway. Before WW 2 the US was ranked somewhere around 16th as a military power, which was a factor in Japanese calculations for war. These days, as a commenter on Quora put it
Since getting kicked around the Pacific for the first six months or so of WW2 by the Japanese and frustrated at not being able to do much to the Germans for the first year or two of the war, we’ve ever since tried to have a much larger peacetime military. Modern war technology means we can’t bank on six months to a year after the onset of a crisis or the declaration of war in order to recruit a few million new soldiers and start cranking out tanks, ships and planes.
If Starlink can contribute to our security I’m all for it. Teddy Roosevelt had it right: Speak softly and carry a big stick.
7. Walmart has driven countless mom & pop stores out of business. The airlines clobbered travel by train (which I personally prefer over traveling by airline). I have yet to see a credible metric of just how much of the sky Starlink's 42,000 satellites are expected to obscure. If I knew of any astronomers, amateur or professional, who were standing up for considering plasma cosmology / EU I might feel a little concern, but since there are none to speak of I won’t miss their gnome-ology. (For the latest contribution to gnome-ology see my comment to “And the gnomes go on, and the gnomes go on …” in the Electric Universe topics.)
The link below is to Casey Handmer’s blog entry titled “Science Upside for Starship”, which includes the following:
Probably the coolest telescope concept enabled by Starship, though, is the giant segmented telescope to end all giant segmented telescopes. An unmodified Starship can deliver perhaps a dozen 8 m monolithic hexagonal free-flying segments per launch to a target location such as L2, where they self assemble, calibrate, and then focus incoming light. Over a few dozen Starship flights, a truly enormous spherical mirror section perhaps 1000 m in diameter and with a focal length of 1000 km or so can be assembled behind a free-flying sun shade, pointed in a direction of general interest. In principle this mirror could be made almost arbitrarily large with quadratic marginal cost. Dozens of specialty instruments can then be launched to operate at target-specific foci, operating in an off-axis modality by default. Depending on choices about geometry, a single mirror could address O(10 degrees) of the sky at any one time. In the most extreme case a series of mirrors, possibly in a dodecahedral configuration, could enable simultaneous examination of the entire sky limited only by the number of secondary instruments.
I've attached an image of the proposed telescope but I can't confirm it's viewable.
The point Casey is making is that the chief engineer is changing the game, and a lot of people seem to be having problems giving up the old NASA paradigm and getting their minds around the never before available opportunities an industrial size space transportation system offers. From a comment on Casey Handler’s blog:
A year or so ago, I had an email conversation with Carolyn Porco where she became unhinged and ended, in a classy fashion, with the venerable old science lady instructing me to go eff myself. We had actually corresponded for over a decade prior and everything was perfectly civil up until that fateful day.
What made her unhinged? I asked her what she though of Starship and Elon’s Starkicker concept where a stripper-down starship-derived upper stage could be used, with refueling, to send 300 tons to the outer planets.
Apparently, she doesn’t care for the outer planets being opened up to us mere plebeians by Elon and is quite alarmed at the prospect.
She wants to be an outer but her mindset is that of an inner. Some Arthur C. Clarke comment about old scientists and the rate of progress comes to mind here.
Imagine what could be done with 300 tons of payload to the outer planets.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021 ... -starship/
8. “The number one objective of any such mission would be to get every single person back safely to earth.” Perhaps if it were a NASA mission, but SpaceX’s mission is a one-way trip to colonize Mars. My great-grandfather was orphaned by the Civil War, taught school in Missouri at age 18, married one of his 15 year old students, and was an early settler in Oklahoma. He and my great-grandmother lived in a dugout house at first, but later had a farm where they raised their 12 children. And, after the state acquired some civilization, he was elected county treasurer. Pioneering is not glamorous or romantic, but in one form or another it is vital if a society is to remain healthy. The urge to see what’s over the next hill is the spark that ultimately led to civilization. The “safetyism” that has gripped this country over Covid is on the path to becoming afraid when it gets dark under the table; as you indicated in your post about the pandemic, you are already adversely affected by it. People die doing hazardous things; they die in bed. There will be more people wanting to sign up for the chief engineer’s Mars colony – healthy, competent people – than there will be space for them. And yes, people will almost certainly die. If they died while performing some dangerous stunt that would be foolish. If they die in service of the human race surviving an extinction-level event on Earth, their lives will have truly mattered.
Making humanity a multi-planet species has been the chief engineer's driving goal for many years, which is the point of his Mars colony; it is not some stunt on a grand scale. And note that SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Company are all commercially successful in selling technology that will be essential for a viable Mars colony. Most people talk; the chief engineer
acts. I'm willing to put up with a whole lot if humanity can be spared an extinction-level wipeout.
@Brigit (Continued)
6. Starlink and National Security: Having lived through the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, I firmly believe "si vis pacem, para bellum", or shorter "Peace Through Strength". After the USSR fell, more than one high-level official admitted that the Soviets recognized our military strength deterred them from getting too adventurous, especially with the Strategic Defense Initiative underway. Before WW 2 the US was ranked somewhere around 16th as a military power, which was a factor in Japanese calculations for war. These days, as a commenter on Quora put it
[quote]Since getting kicked around the Pacific for the first six months or so of WW2 by the Japanese and frustrated at not being able to do much to the Germans for the first year or two of the war, we’ve ever since tried to have a much larger peacetime military. Modern war technology means we can’t bank on six months to a year after the onset of a crisis or the declaration of war in order to recruit a few million new soldiers and start cranking out tanks, ships and planes.[/quote]
If Starlink can contribute to our security I’m all for it. Teddy Roosevelt had it right: Speak softly and carry a big stick.
7. Walmart has driven countless mom & pop stores out of business. The airlines clobbered travel by train (which I personally prefer over traveling by airline). I have yet to see a credible metric of just how much of the sky Starlink's 42,000 satellites are expected to obscure. If I knew of any astronomers, amateur or professional, who were standing up for considering plasma cosmology / EU I might feel a little concern, but since there are none to speak of I won’t miss their gnome-ology. (For the latest contribution to gnome-ology see my comment to “And the gnomes go on, and the gnomes go on …” in the Electric Universe topics.)
The link below is to Casey Handmer’s blog entry titled “Science Upside for Starship”, which includes the following:
[quote]Probably the coolest telescope concept enabled by Starship, though, is the giant segmented telescope to end all giant segmented telescopes. An unmodified Starship can deliver perhaps a dozen 8 m monolithic hexagonal free-flying segments per launch to a target location such as L2, where they self assemble, calibrate, and then focus incoming light. Over a few dozen Starship flights, a truly enormous spherical mirror section perhaps 1000 m in diameter and with a focal length of 1000 km or so can be assembled behind a free-flying sun shade, pointed in a direction of general interest. In principle this mirror could be made almost arbitrarily large with quadratic marginal cost. Dozens of specialty instruments can then be launched to operate at target-specific foci, operating in an off-axis modality by default. Depending on choices about geometry, a single mirror could address O(10 degrees) of the sky at any one time. In the most extreme case a series of mirrors, possibly in a dodecahedral configuration, could enable simultaneous examination of the entire sky limited only by the number of secondary instruments.[/quote]
I've attached an image of the proposed telescope but I can't confirm it's viewable.
The point Casey is making is that the chief engineer is changing the game, and a lot of people seem to be having problems giving up the old NASA paradigm and getting their minds around the never before available opportunities an industrial size space transportation system offers. From a comment on Casey Handler’s blog:
[quote]A year or so ago, I had an email conversation with Carolyn Porco where she became unhinged and ended, in a classy fashion, with the venerable old science lady instructing me to go eff myself. We had actually corresponded for over a decade prior and everything was perfectly civil up until that fateful day.
What made her unhinged? I asked her what she though of Starship and Elon’s Starkicker concept where a stripper-down starship-derived upper stage could be used, with refueling, to send 300 tons to the outer planets.
Apparently, she doesn’t care for the outer planets being opened up to us mere plebeians by Elon and is quite alarmed at the prospect.
She wants to be an outer but her mindset is that of an inner. Some Arthur C. Clarke comment about old scientists and the rate of progress comes to mind here.[/quote]
Imagine what could be done with 300 tons of payload to the outer planets.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside-for-starship/
8. “The number one objective of any such mission would be to get every single person back safely to earth.” Perhaps if it were a NASA mission, but SpaceX’s mission is a one-way trip to colonize Mars. My great-grandfather was orphaned by the Civil War, taught school in Missouri at age 18, married one of his 15 year old students, and was an early settler in Oklahoma. He and my great-grandmother lived in a dugout house at first, but later had a farm where they raised their 12 children. And, after the state acquired some civilization, he was elected county treasurer. Pioneering is not glamorous or romantic, but in one form or another it is vital if a society is to remain healthy. The urge to see what’s over the next hill is the spark that ultimately led to civilization. The “safetyism” that has gripped this country over Covid is on the path to becoming afraid when it gets dark under the table; as you indicated in your post about the pandemic, you are already adversely affected by it. People die doing hazardous things; they die in bed. There will be more people wanting to sign up for the chief engineer’s Mars colony – healthy, competent people – than there will be space for them. And yes, people will almost certainly die. If they died while performing some dangerous stunt that would be foolish. If they die in service of the human race surviving an extinction-level event on Earth, their lives will have truly mattered.
[b][i]Making humanity a multi-planet species has been the chief engineer's driving goal for many years, which is the point of his Mars colony[/i][/b]; it is not some stunt on a grand scale. And note that SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Company are all commercially successful in selling technology that will be essential for a viable Mars colony. Most people talk; the chief engineer [i][b]acts[/b][/i]. I'm willing to put up with a whole lot if humanity can be spared an extinction-level wipeout.