Thoughts on Starship going forward

 

Spacex has rolled out the newest of their Starship prototypes. There has been some commentary elsewhere on the web about this. I have a few thoughts of my own.

This blog has had many a post about what should be done in outer space. But this post won't go that direction, but instead, try to grasp what it is that Elon Musk is trying to do.

Overall, it looks like he wants to make it a profitable enterprise. The way he is doing it is by reducing costs, but he also needs to find markets for his space services. This is what Starlink does. He also has plans to use Starship to transport cargo and people across the globe.

It is not clear how he will make the colonization of Mars profitable. There can be no market if there are no people there. He has to get people there somehow. Making a ship that can get people there is only part of the problem that has to be solved. There are many other problems to solve before he can make those trips.

At present, it looks like the Earthly enterprises will have to subsidize the Martian ones. Eventually, the Martian enterprises will have to start producing something of their own. If there might be an intermediary step, it could help. Let's say if there were a Lunar enterprise. But that doesn't really seem to be in the plans right now.

I've written about Moonbases on this blog before. The advantage to a lunar outpost is the much shallower gravity well. You could make plenty of rocket fuel there. If not methane, then plenty of oxygen is there. The moon isn't made of cheese, but there's oxygen all over the place, which is locked in the rocks.

This may be straying a bit from my opening paragraphs, but it would seem to me that Musk should consider going to the Moon before going to Mars. I don't think his plans include the Moon, though.

Economies of scale will get you to cheaper rockets and cheaper operation of those rockets. But the funding of his plans for a Martian colony is an enormous undertaking which will require enormous sums of money. Best to keep with the program and find a way to make the whole thing profitable from end-to-end, rather than just to count on efficient operations from the Earth.

An anti–global warming hysteria book is driving Norwegian warming hysterics nuts

Check out this Article from AmericanThinker https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/an_antiglobal_warming_hysteria_book_is_driving_norwegian_warming_hysterics_nuts.html 

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Short trip.

One more vid

not necessarily the last

Not giving up

Can't make fun of Biden?

 Some comedienne claims she can't make jokes about Biden.   Hah.  This guy reminds me the 60's sitcom Get Smart.

Don Adams played the agent who'd tell a whopper, and when someone doubted him, he'd say "would you believe?"

The Big Lie

 

There was a song I heard recently that bugged me a bit. A guy gets caught red-handed cheating on his girl, and his friend says to tell her it "wasn't me".

The folks commenting upon it thought the song was "funny". What the hell is funny about the destruction of civic cohesion? For lying insistently as that can do nothing else but to destroy trust in each other. Where is society without trust?

Without trust, we enter the realm of anarchy. Is that what people really want?

I noted today that the media keep quoting Boehner about the "bloody insurrection" of January 6th. What are they trying to accomplish with this obvious falsehood? The former speaker says that it was a "bloody insurrection" and the rest of us somehow MUST agree?

When something is very obviously false, and the lying about it continues, it is a lot like the words in that song. It's like the Big Lie. In fact, it IS the Big Lie.

How do you fight the Big Lie? At the heart of it is coercion. It is likely to be followed by violence.

An example is the most recent statement of a BLM activist who threatened violence if Derek Chauvin is not found guilty. Never mind if there was a fair trial, and the evidence didn't support conviction. Never mind the truth, this activist seems to be saying.

Another example is that CBS is doubling down on their recently debunked claims about the Florida governor.

One more thing along that line. A group of companies are uniting in their oppostion to the new Georgia election law. So are we supposed to be in awe of their numbers?

If you defy their threats and refuse their demands, and they still cannot make you submit, then their power is finished. It only works if you are afraid of them.

Democrat Palm Beach County Mayor Calls 60 Minutes Segment on Governor DeSantis "Intentionally False"

Democrat Palm Beach County Mayor Calls 60 Minutes Segment on Governor DeSantis "Intentionally False"

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The Shroud of Turin

The first I heard of it was way back in the early eighties, if memory serves. There was a guy today on the internet who was claiming the Shroud is a fake.

One could argue the point, I suppose. If I were to argue, it would be along the lines that nobody knows how such an object could have come into being. You can claim it is a fraud based upon certain tests, but how do you explain its very existence?

The technology to reproduce the relic still doesn't exist, if I am not mistaken. Once that is figured out, maybe there would be a cause for claiming fraud. Or there wouldn't be. The next question is if you reproduce it today, how did somebody in the middle ages fake this, and why?

Find an answer for that one.