Friends (Romans, Countrymen, Dragon otherkin!) I’ve found Antro the Lifegiver by John Degan, but I haven’t finished it.
Partly it’s going slow because of my not seeing as well as I did in the eighties, and having trouble reading the teeny print of a 60s paperback. (I have new glasses on order. They haven’t arrived yet. And my astigmatism is way off.) I prefer books on the kindle, because they allow me to lie to myself about being older than dirt, I guess. I can put the print at six or seven and never tell anyone (except you guys now.) I mean, eventually it will be at nine and I’ll get a word per page. Maybe they’ll make massive kindles then. Or maybe there will be robotic eyes or something.
Anyway, there might also be the slight thing of the new Dresden files having dropped today, and — um… — anyway, so….
One thing that has occurred to me while reading the beginning is that the science fiction of the mid century is almost all infused with a heavy military subtext. Even when they are not strictly military — like Star Trek — the structure is military and there is a bearing and a behavior to the people that are more military than not.
What do I mean they’re not military in Star Trek? Well, it’s not Starship Troopers style mil sf.
Like most mid-century sf, it’s exploration, but the exploration corps has a military structure.
In that sense, it’s actually pretty interesting, because the earliest, pre or just after WWI sf pulp is the individual genius or group of them, or the lone scientist having a breakthrough. But by the mid century is exploration groups in military format, with ranks…
And there’s something about the way people interact that bespeak military experience.
Oh, I don’t mean there aren’t exceptions. Of course there are. But the basic, most generic, pulp sf is people in vaguely military arrangements.
And it occurred to me this made perfect sense. Most of the authors writing in the fifties and sixties were in fact veterans and likely WWII veterans.
But even those who hadn’t fought for whatever reason, had probably grown up watching World War II movies. As did I, btw, and reading WWII biographies and analysis.
This is because — even though to me at the time it seemed like ancient history, since most of the movies were from when the world was in black and white — I was born less than twenty years after the end of World War Two. This, of course, affected the generation before me.
Not just the various analysis of the war and the embrace or repulsion of war as a method, but the discipline, structure and experience of the war itself.
So the default, low effort writing had military or quasi-military groups.
Equally logically, that is no longer true, unless you’re specifically writing mil sf.
What do I mean by this?
Well, I was thinking there are many things a generation — or two, or three — think it’s “natural” but it’s not. It’s the result of when the genre took off. Or of what was happening in the world at the time.
Now that we live more than say four to five decades, at least a substantial portion of us, and the cultural influence of generations is taking way longer to clear from the culture, it’s important to remember this. It’s important to remember that the circumstances of our childhood are not necessarily more “real” or better than today’s.
We were born in a particular place in history. And it came freighted with baggage of — for it — recent events.
Very different, yes, but then our generation was very different in upbringing from the previous.
It’s important to step back and look at things with a curious eye. Not all difference is wrong. And things change with time. Right now it seems very likely that whoever lands on Mars will be a civilian employee of a privately held corporation. And heaven only knows who the first colonists will be.
None of that matters. Those are details. It’s the will to go, to reach ever farther, to take humanity out of the one single place where we exist and to the stars, so we won’t go extinct by accident or due to the vagaries of climate and circumstance that matters.
Whatever form that pushing forward takes.
Jeff Greason once told he always wondered if the form the expeditions to Mars took was the result of German influence on the space program. And that’s likely true. But it was also a quintessential midcentury project. “If we can defeat the Nazis, we can put a man on the moon.” — Note this was later weaponized into “if we put a man on the moon we can defeat poverty.” None of which made sense. — and the idea that big government and its projection of force were the way to accomplish big things.
In a way this was also the result of the concentration of industry and news and… well, everything that reached its apex mid century.
We live in different times now. In fact so different it’s shocking how far we came in such a relatively short time.
And it doesn’t matter. In the end what matters is getting off this rock. By any means necessary.
According To Hoyt 
Sarah, I think at least some of that is because the closest real world analog to space travel is an ocean voyage. This automatically imposes a structure that carried over from merchant ships into warships and vice versa.
This is why there’s almost always a “navy” feel, and why I think “Space Force” will sooner or later become “SpaceFleet”.
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My husband — Navy and Marine family, so very against interest– has a pretty good argument that “SpaceFleet” will show up as a completely separate service.
I’m still annoyed they went Air Force foundation for space right now, but… it is aimed at basically a home base that you go back to every single time you do a mission, and I kinda got to hope they put the same kind of human services on the Space Force bases.
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The closest historical analog I can come up with for the current U.S. Space Force is if in the interwar years the U.S. split off a separate service for coastal defense, absorbing Army coastal artillery units, Navy zeppelins, and some of the USAAC B-17 units they thought would be taking on enemy battlecruisers doing coastal raids.
The whole “adopt the customs and structure of the U.S.A.F.” thing, which made sense mostly due to the U.S.S.F. absorbing the Air Force satellite operations folks, really won’t make any sense at all when we need a deep space service on large crewed ships, from the basic “how things need to work away from instantaneous comms” to day to day vehicle manning concepts underway. Independent deep space ops are really really far away from how you need to run a U.S.A.F air base, and are probably closest to how the USN or RN subs operate.
I imagine the current service will end up being surpassed by yet another deep space service when the time comes.
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John Ringo and Travis Taylor thought this through in their Vorpal Blade series. In that series, the US, once it acquired a functioning warp drive (one. Precisely one warp drive, alien tech that’s impossible (so far) to reverse-engineer), chose to mount it on a submarine. Which would then launch underwater, cruise out into the open ocean, point itself straight up, and engage warp drive, launching out of the water and into space.
Ringo and Taylor even wrote an ongoing debate between the officers about whether they should act more like the surface navy or the sub service. As I recall, the way they put it was that the surface navy, when the ship had a problem, headed for port to get it fixed, whereas the submarine service said “Patch it up and keep going, we only go home once we accomplish the mission”. Don’t know how accurate that is to real-life USN culture (for either surface navy or subs), but it sounded good in the book.
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Yeah, but they also had a section where there was an argument whether the USAF or Navy would be the service culture controlling it. They decided on Navy for pretty much the reasons I outlined, THEN they had the discussion on whether they should operate like a sub vs carrier.
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As a singular (severalular?) data point, the bubbleheads I know are philosophically very much in the “pass the duct tape” school of make-it-work-and-keep-going repairs.
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As a concept-of-operations data point, way back in the early post-WWII SAC days they designed the Convair B-36 piston engined intercontinental strategic bomber with passages inside the wings for crew to access the massive engines in flight for mission critical service and repairs. Notably nothing USAF since of any size has instantiated any such concept of in flight maintenance.
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Dear Sarah, if you have to, put a Kindle app up on a 32 inch 4K screen or TV.
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32 inch? Come on, if you’re going to go big, go BIG! My main monitor is a 65″ 4K HDTV. Anything less seems cramped since I got used to that.
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Ah, so your New Year’s resolution is 4k. Mine is, at best, 1920×1080.
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Many years ago, I made a resolution to not make New Years resolutions. That one, I’ve managed to keep. 🤣
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Interesting to note they have just uncovered long term exposure to weightlessness can cause permanent brain damage to astronauts. Real, or Nasa trying to limit private companies from exploration? Don’t say they wouldn’t do something like that, covid ya all. But if true we may need artificial gravity before we get there. I for one can wait to leave all the Liberals on this rock.
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Yes I know Liberal is a word that has been bastardized by the left in an attempt to hide their Marxism. Yes I know that by definition that Conservatives are the real Liberals and Liberals are just godless Marxist slave masters. Note how kenji the demented squirrel used Jim Crow Laws to justify Hawaii’s gun control laws. A black Justice, using anti black laws to justify gun control. You just can’t make this stuff up.
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The Musk will just have to build a constant acceleration propulsion system to generate those Gs and get spaceships to their destinations faster and healthier.
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Starship is a short term answer on how to get to Mars. Ultimately what you want are centi-g or deci-g constant acceleration ships traveling like a cycler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler and legalistically they’re not cyclers because of the constant acceleration). Centi-g gets you 10-14 day average transits, deci-g gets you 2-4 day transits (one way). This makes Mars the same time distance as the US was in the early 20th century from Europe for the Centi-g ship. Not sure if 1/100th g is enough to fix the health issues, even 1/10th g might not be enough. Deci-g makes the trip short enough (similar to the original Moon landings) that the health issues are ngligible. Alternatively you could have a true Aldrin Cycler with a rotating (say 1/3 g) ring at one end and plenty of room on a non rotating structure to attach Starships (or derivative) craft. As the Cycler approaches from Mars, bunches of Starships bearing passengers and cargo for the trip launch to meet and dock with the cycler. There is a flurry of activity to unload the Starships as the Cycler passes “near” earth and the cargo (and perhaps most) of the passenger ships return to earth. 146 days later the reverse process starts unloading passengers (likely with Mars tailored Starships). Anyone going home climbs aboard USCS (United States Cycling Ship, Owned and operated by SpaceX) Buzz as well as any cargo to Earth and they take the much longer trip to Earth. This is probably how the second wave of emigration to Mars goes. First wave is going to be far more like Plymouth/St. Augustine/ Roanoke (preferably without disappearing colonies and near starvation, but don’t bet on it). Big issue is reaction mass, you’ll need a lot and it will be need to be resupplied likely at both ends. Fusion Power would be better but right now you might as well as well talk about antimatter or an alcubierre drive. Fusions been 20 years away since I was six and I’m fast approaching 65.
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14 day transits should address the issue – as far as I have seen this only came up from ISS stays using Earth-Mars zero acceleration Hohmann Transfer Orbit durations, and I have seen nothing indicating they have seen anything like this from Apollo, Skylab, or Space Shuttle missions durations in microgravity.
If they can get to the 2-4 day transfer orbits I am certain the issue is moot.
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I suspect that having a rotating component of any appreciable mass in a spacecraft would produce interesting effects in spacecraft orientation if thrust was applied in any direction except along the axis of rotation. NASA had enough trouble keeping the Apollo SM-CM-LM stack rotating in barbecue mode.
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The most intuitively practical design I have seen for doing centrifugal psuedogravity (obviously untried) involves paying out a (stout) cable with a heavy counterweight component at the other end from the manned component, and spinning the assembly to rotate about the common center of mass somewhere along the cable (possibly not in that order). When it comes time for course correction burns the cable would be reeled back in, the counterweight secured, and the rotation stopped to do the burn.
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No, you have to stop the spin before reeling in the counterweight. Otherwise conservation of angular momentum will spin your ship up to hundreds of RPM.
Well, I suppose you could counter-thrust while reeling it in to maintain constant RPM.
Spider Robinson had an interesting concept in Stardance — the ‘hammerhead’ mini-hab, with living quarters for up to 4 people on one end of a long boom, life support equipment at the other end, and an airlock at the center of mass.
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“Ready guys? Wheeeeee!!!”
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Bring back Von Braun’s Wheel!
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In almost the only relevant or memorable quote from the Star Wars ‘prequels’
“Try spinning. That’s a good trick!”
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”It’s over Anakin! I have the high ground!”
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I started taking DMSO by mouth (1 Tbsp twice a day in water) for various aches and pains and, to my astonishment, my eyesight markedly improved especially in my distance vision. With your sensitive system I’d be very cautious trying it if you decide to do so, but it has definitely helped my arthritis as well. YMMV.
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Any source you can recommend? What I have (and used externally) is marked “NOT FOR HUMAN USE” (which, yeah, I know, but I do like to take some precautions).
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I get it through Amazon from the DMSO Store because it’s 99.995% pure. I also use 70% DMSO in gel or cream for external issues like aching knees or shoulders.
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Cataracts just went from “watch”, to “it is time, when you are ready.”
OTOH glaucoma is stable, no changes.
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Cataract surgery will lower the Glaucoma pressures for many types of Glaucoma. I had my left eye done because my pressures were spiking and I had a moderate cataract. The cataract is just as effective as the glaucoma surgery and is far less invasive. On top of that left eye went from 20/60 uncorrected to 20/20 uncorrected (though that meant paying for a slightly more expensive lens that insurance didn’t cover due to pretty severe astigmatism).
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Yes.
Eye specialist, when cataracts first detected, stated that there are specific glaucoma specified replacement lens. Doesn’t remove the genetic condition, but it will treat the pressure and prevent further nerve damage better than the drops.
Mom, at 70 (roughly my age, I turn 70 mid-October), went from “needs glasses to put on her makeup, that blind”, that she wore ever since she could remember, to legally could drive without glasses. Needs readers to read. She calls glasses her “face jewelry”. At 70, she’d worn glasses for more than 65 years. Now at 91 she’s worn them for more than 85 years.
Me? I didn’t start wearing glasses until I was 15, required to drive. While I should have been wearing them for classwork, to fully see writing on blackboards and slides, I didn’t. Went to contacts in ’80, but dropped those in ’04. Got where I needed reading glasses to read or computer work. If I didn’t wear the contacts, I didn’t need the reading glasses. Until recently, back to wearing glasses only when driving. Until got tired of trying to read grocery labels taking off my glasses (dang things don’t heel any better than coffee cups do). Now I need glasses for driving and reading, regardless of source. At least reading on the computer and phone, I can increase font sizes. Not to the point of only a few words on the phone. So, yes with cataract removal, and new lens embedded, I will be dropping glasses. They are NOT face jewelry. No, I will not have one for nearsighted, and one farsighted. Tunnel vision would not be my friend. Doubt progressive lens would be any better (tried progressive contacts, lasted all of 5 minutes, at best), despite being able to use progressive glasses.
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That was my experience when I had both eyes done about 10 years ago.
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Wife and I each had both eyes done in early ’23; picked distance single-vision, partly because Medicare covered the whole thing, and partly because I’ve been wearing glasses since sixth grade, wife earlier than that, so needing glasses to read was a nothingburger.
Can drive without glasses; see more sharply with, and can’t actually see the dashboard that well without reading lenses.
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New Dresden Files, yes. Dropped into my Kindle app 2 nights ago, started it then, finished it yesterday, re-reading for different nuance. I’m still running through some of the experience written for Harry, so the situation synchs there. Pretty accurate, in my experience.
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I picked up Twelve Months, and Junkyard Riders, yesterday. Nook. Haven’t started them yet.
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DMSO is an excellent solvent and also a skin penetrating agent. In chem grad school, I didn’t wear gloves because it went through the gloves and then my skin taking the glove plasticizer material with it.
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I saw a comment on X to the effect that Star Trek writers seem to have used James Cook and the Endeavour as a template, and that more recent writers seem to understand the template only superficially.
I’d buy that: TV lately is written by people who don’t know anything about anything, for people who don’t know anything about anything.
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Star Trek Academy. Free to stream, but so bad that people aren’t even hate-watching it.
Written by illiterate p3rverts, for DEI apparatchiks. Who are also illiterate p3rverts. And stupid.
Also the ship’s bridge looks exactly like a strip club in Las Vegas.
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On the one hand, I am tempted to, by spite and contrariness, work out a good way to do a service academy themed sci fi show.
On the other hand, I personally am finding myself massively skeptical of all the schools are mined in the media I consume.
When someone turns a PRC, Korean, or Japanese school into a wizard training program, and especially with some of the plot lines, I sometimes just wonder why.
I’ve never been a school spirit sort of guy, but I have no idea about the training premises for whatever hypothetical scifi service academy.
The gee gaws mean that there are a lot of degrees of freedom for the technical training needed to perform in an organization in science fiction land.
But, presumeably a service academy has a trade between trying to identify and select stubborn people, and trying to do so with bureaucratically compliant people. (I am basically guessing from first principles.)
There’s room for creativity in terms of classroom and field trip exercises, but some inventions simply will not work for a reasonably thoughtful or a reasonably informed audience.
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John Ringo did such a good job with this “service academy” notion in the Troy Rising series. He had two tracks, the military track and the construction track. Military handled all the shuttles and spacecraft stuff, the trades -built- everything.
The trade track was interesting, in that he handled it like an oil rig deal. On the rigs there are no officers, there are New Guys and Old Guys. The New Guys do all the grunt work and the Old Guys do the stuff that requires finesse.
He has a great scene where the Old Guy is trying to teach the New Guys how to use a plasma cutter that has a cut-depth of ten yards or more. They’re carving tunnels in an iron asteroid.
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Current speculation, which makes sense, is that the new Paramount ownership, being stuck with the prior ownerships disadvantageous contract with Alex Kurtzman and the resulting 20 episodes across two prepaid seasons of steaming bantha poodoo that is Starfleet Academy, the penultimate “Kurtzman Trek”, put the first episode up for free on YT with the comments enabled and open to all as a clever plan to publicize the disaster and at last collect enough to let them break the contract and fire him.
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One of the comments (said comments left enabled on purpose for the free-to-watch first ep on YT to embarrass Kurtzman) asked why the ships bridge looked like a Dave & Busters.
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Comment from someone in the industry that big franchises are also becoming jobs programs for favored groups, said in the context of the new ST: Starfleet Academy show.
From the limited number of PR stills it’s pretty obvious it fits Iowahawk’s definition of leftism: the writers have killed the original and are wearing the skin as a garment.
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Would that they would have the dignity to wear the skin as a garment.
One truly wonders what demographic they were after. Not the Trekker/Trekkie demographic they/we seem to revile it universally. 20-40 something woke women (The Kathleen Kennedy favored demographic), it seems to be at best meh to them. The 2026 equivalent of the 90210 demographic? Not likely they don’t tend to watch hour shows and not scifi in particular. It is not clear what this rumored $100 million dollar onanistic excess is intended to do other than provide income to 2nd rate special effects bureaus and third rate actors. Damn it Dorothy I’m an ex software engineer not a TV producer. Though perhaps I’d be a better producer than they are.
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Their theoretical tagetr audience is Trekkies. They just seem to think everyone’s tastes and obsessions are like their own.
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they have no theory of other minds.
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I think they have a theory of other minds.
They hates them. Hates them, my precioussss.
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sigh. Yes. the eternal Id hating anything not themselves.
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Chasing the modern audience youth is apparently an explanation for the horrid sets, cinematography and lighting, as the lens flare, dim backgrounds, and blinding dark-and-light shots draw more attention when watched on a phone screen than a properly lit set.
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Ouch. That makes too much sense.
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Since they keep trying to ape such elements from that show of the snappy modern vernacular dialog and young hip irreverent casts, and also cannot restrain themselves from stapling in only-works-the-first-time things like the musical episode, these writers rooms are obviously trying for todays equivalent of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer demographic.
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Interesting concept. I don’t know why the sight of Holly Hunter curling up in the captain’s chair of the Athena like a cat grinds my gears so much but it does. Starfleet is military or at least paramilitary…and the captain of a ship or the commandant of an academy is going to, IN FRONT OF THE STUDENTS, sit like they’re at home reading Fifty Shades of Spock?
The box-checking, the complete disregard for prior lore, and the clearly astroturfed social media campaign to try and get people to accept it…ugh. Gowron was right, burn it all down. Qapla’.
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Hoch yImeQmoH.
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I don’t care so much that she’s fat, or that she’s supposedly half-Klingon and half-Jem Hadar while being female. A good actress could make those things seem irrelevant, if her acting and charisma skills were good enough.
No, I hate the second in command chick for her girly shrieking. Being a non-soprano does not make it better. It makes her sound more psychotic when she shrieks girlishly, especially since she’s a middle-aged actress who should know better.
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There’s also absolutely no concept of why one gets shouted at during training. They have seen excerpted scenes from Straight Metal Jacket on YT and this know there’s supposed to be yelling, so they wrote in that time the student director in theater school shouted at them for showing up to rehearsal intoxicated and late.
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“Fifty Shades Of Spock”
[Choke]
[Chortle]
[Horselaugh] 🤣
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It’s a khesterex thath, less fun than klin zha against a Pakled. :-)
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It’s mental rishathra. Perhaps without the intelligence of the humanoids.
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Also why is the bridge lit up like the lobby bar of an Embassy Suites in New Haven? Are they making up for the $2.98 they spent on overhead lighting in all of Picard S3?
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Picard season 3 was a guerilla op by Terry Matalas accomplished on a shoestring while Kurtzman was busy elsewhere on another project!which is why it sucked less. It still had issues, but was so vastly better than Picard 1&2 and the rest of Kurtzman Trek that the clear fan-favored spinoff of the new Enterpise G captained by Seven of Nine was ruthlessly murdered by Kurtzman in a reenactment of the death of Julius Caesar.
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Picard S3 was what happens when you literally build an entire season of an entire show around nothing but fanservice. Getting all the TNG/DS9/VOY folks out of the retirement home (including the Enterprise D) for one last ride was a substitute for plot and development. But with TNG being so beloved, and the cast still being solid actors that had good chemistry, it worked.
Nothing about these new walking checkboxes with prosthetic makeup and CGI is ever going to be a thousandth as beloved or memorable, or have a fraction of the chemistry, of any of those series’ crews. Holly Hunter, while a very accomplished actor with a lot of good roles behind her, has a character with none of the gravitas of Picard, the rage and presence of Sisko, or the steel and determination of Janeway. She’s literally a suburban DC cat lady.
To me the last decent season of Trek was, oddly enough, Discovery season 1. Before Michael Burnham turned into Mary Sue Spock-Burnham, when Jason Isaacs grounded the cast as the badass captain, and when Starfleet was dealing with a war that they weren’t prepared for from a foe they barely understood (many of the same elements, btw, that made the Dominion War arc in DS9 the best Trek ever IMO). After that Discovery went off the rails completely.
If SFA wasn’t called Star Trek, I’d…still hate it but I’d be marginally less offended.
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Sure Picard S3 was fan service, the story was stretched out so much that it destroyed the pacing, and some of the stuff was pure crap (the argument between Riker and Picard where Picard gets thrown off the bridge was clearly written for the Shaw character and then shoehorned onto Riker when they swapped story beats around so that Shaw was injured earlier than this fight), and the whole “all the ships are networked now” thing along with the “transporters made the kids into Borg” was just dumb, but compared to everything else it was a shining beacon of Trek canon. And if Worf was previously captain of the Enterprise-E, why was he wearing yellow and not red on his cool leather jacket? That said, it landed the jump, and actually did do a fine setup for a potential Captain Seven of Nine show.
And I will respectfully need to disagree with you on DISCO S1: The characters were cardboard, bopping around doing whatever the script said to do with no conceivable character justification; the transporters worked whenever and however they wanted them to work, sometimes while the ship was still in warp lightyears away for the point to which they were beaming (this is pre-ST:TOS, recall); the writers clearly had no concept of how one got to be XO of a Federation starship (Burnham was basically delivered to take up the XO position under Captain Georgia by Sarek straight out of Vulcan Hogwarts still wearing her Vulcan school uniform, and she has a speech in S1 with approximately “why I decided to take the job of first officer when I joined Starfleet” as if it was a tech startup hire), nor did they have any concept of why everyone arguing back and forth about every order was a bad thing – and that is setting aside the whole “Spock’s sister” retcon, the massive previously unmentioned Klingon-Federation war ++ and the Spock character overall, having fistfights to get out of Federation jail while Burnham can do the nerve pinch – and do NOT get me started on their “Klingons”, either in action or appearance.
When I watched DISCO S1 I kept saying “If they wanted to make a different space show with all this different stuff, they should have made their own show, not hijack Trek IP and paste it over their crap. This is not Star Trek.”
In case it was not clear, I did not like DISCO at all.
___
++ Enterprise has this problem as well with their canon-breaking Xindi War, when they had the Earth-Romulan War right there in that time period. And then there’s the Temporal Cold War. Berman has indicated this stuff was forced on him by the studio, which I believe. All that said I quite liked Enterprise, save the stupid ending ep.
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–
I have zero military experience. I despise boats. But I do know that on a boat, or star ship in space, there is ONE person in charge of the boat or star ship. If a large group needed to run said ship (water or spaces), there is still only ONE person in charge over all, but there is ONE person in charge of each critical section (Engineering, Life Support, Medical, etc.). On cruise ships, as in airplane, even charters or private jet, it ain’t the passenger. Screech all you want, makes cringing embarrassing video, but you ain’t in charge.
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The influence of the _Horatio Hornblower_ novels on Roddenberry’s _Star Trek_ are obvious and were acknowledged by Roddenberry. Many of the things which make James T. Kirk so memorable are traits shared with Hornblower. The loneliness of command, the simultaneous chafing at the demands of the service with acknowledgement that its the best place for him to be.
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Yeah, likely.
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Scripts by commitee by theater kids for theater kids, with the caveat that any straight caucasian male theater kids were excluded for inclusions sake.
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“Excluded for inclusions sake.”
I may steal that. I usually remark their inclusiveness is strangely exclusive, but that one is shorter and will fit on Twitter better. ;-)
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👍
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“If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we….”
Because the moonshot was an ENGINEERING PROBLEM. A reasonably solvable thing. The social stuff? That’s a whole ‘nother kettle of worms! Humans is complexicated, they is!
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A variant on this is, “We’re the richest country in the world. We ought to have (universal decent housing/other progressive social goal)!”
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We had cows jumping over the moon long before we put a man on that heavenly body.
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It’s been said an engineer is someone who can do for a penny something any fool can do for a dollar. By that standard, unclear that Apollo was foremost an engineering problem as opposed to an organizational one.
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It is notable that the Apollo program fails to satisfy any of the modern era NASA human spaceflight safety requirements in pretty much every phase of a flight.
The margins were so paper thin that it’s a miracle there were only the Apollo 1 fatalities.
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Genetically, space travel is a gambit with either annihilation of those that travel into space, or modifications of the human species to where it probably wouldn’t be recognized on Earth. Maybe that’s already happened, but unless unquestioning evidence is presented, we’ll never know. It is something writers will theorize about, and the good writers will entertain with their stories.
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That is the premise of The Proxima Chronicles by John Bailey…
(… and 9,000,000 other books…)
Even on Earth, every choice we make changes us slightly.
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“…and the idea that big government and its projection of force were the way to accomplish big things.”
Ever notice that Elon is basically using Tom Swift as a model? And it’s working?
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I always say the worst thing about the Apollo Program is that it succeeded. Big Government spent billions of our dollars creating a gigantic bureaucracy to accomplish what was essentially the biggest publicity stunt in history. Put A Man On The Moon! They actually exceeded their goal, and put 2 men on the moon. Yay.
Then it was been there, done that, nothing more to see here. Nobody has gone more than 400 miles above the Earth’s surface since 1972. The bureaucracy went on doing Space Stuff but Pournelle’s Iron Law has set in with a vengeance. NASA is run by bean counters and pencil pushers. Engineers are considered a necessary evil to get more funding.
And we are left with the notion that Big Government Programs are The Way To Get Things Done. Even though Big Government is the absolute worst way to do anything. Take the Department Of Education as an example. They spent 40 years and $2 TRILLION and are today’s government schools any better than they were back in 1977? No! They’re far worse. But if you point that out, you Hate Education! The only way to fix the Education Crisis! is to give the Ed Dept even more money to waste! Even though they’re the ones that caused the problem.
I hate bad education and maleducation, therefore I hate the Department Of Education with the fire of a billion exploding stars.
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Big government is like a church dedicated to feeding the poor. But when the offering plate gets passed around, even though everybody puts something in, and even though the church parking lot is full of Cadillacs, there’s only nickles and dimes.
And of course the reason is all those people in the congregation with sticky fingers, for when the plate comes by. They put in a nickle and take out the folding money. And all the ones pretending to be poor and collecting ten meals a day, which they then sell to the -actual- poor.
Which is why Tom Swift is working and Karl Marx fails, basically. These days the sticky finger crowd RUNS the church.
Based on what I’m seeing in the news, my feeling based on nothing tangible is that possibly a third of the American government is straight-up graft. So many people with sticky fingers, pilfering. Some steal a little, some steal by the truckload.
The Dept. of Education steals by the train load. That’s what it is for.
Now, I feel I must point out that I am not dumping on the USA. Whatever is going on with you guys, it is as nothing compared to what’s up in Canada.
#CarkMarney’s response to illegal Chinese Communist police stations in Toronto Ontario (and Vancouver, and Montreal, and probably a few more) is not to kick them the f- out of my country (with a thick ear, this is Canada damn it!). No my friends, he’s solving the problem by making them –legal-. Yeah.
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In theory, it is reasonable to respond to our allegations of illegality by making stuff legal.
In practice, it feels like our law faculty are a bunch of autistic tim walzes to understand things so poorly that they seriously propose that any arbitrary thing can be legalized or decriminalized.
It is downstream of presuming that older status quo was arbitrary, and that anything could be admissible.
But still, they come across as a bit cognitively impaired, before one realizes that they are lawyers, and not all of them are technologists, and not all of them are military history buffs.
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“In theory, it is reasonable to respond to our allegations of illegality by making stuff legal.”
But in practice, they’re allowing the apparatchik thugs of a Communist tyranny which keeps slaves to set up shop in Canada, where they will push Canadians around. Starting with oppressing Chinese Canadians, but once the camel’s head is inside, the rest of the camel will shortly follow.
In other news, the Metro Toronto Police Force has announced that they will not be participating in the #Liberal gun confiscation program. Because are they stupid enough to confiscate legally owned guns at the same time the PRC is coming to set up “police” stations? Thank God, it seems not.
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The logical response would be for Canadians to bar the doors to those ‘stations’ while the invaders are inside and then burn them to the ground. Conservatives don’t tend to do that in a timely manner, usually waiting until the camel’s vertebra are scattered all over the parking lot.
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“Conservatives don’t tend to do that in a timely manner…”
Freedom Convoy. Truckers pushed to the wall, nothing left to lose, so they showed up with bouncy castles and road hockey. And so did a lot of the rest of us.
This month there has been a court decision that the government invoked the War Measures Act (aka the “Emergencies” Act but I still use the older, more truthful and scarier name) illegally. Which was of course obvious at the time, and we all called them a bunch of little b1tches, but now there’s precedent set. No, you can’t invoke War Measures and suspend Habeas Corpus for bouncy castles and road hockey. (They will anyway, but now even the Normies know it’s wrong.)
If the Chicoms really do start muscling Canadians right here in Canada, and I think they would very much like to, eventually there will be a new “Freedom Convoy” of some description. Sooner than later, I expect.
But, we shall see.
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Bouncy castles, road hockey and barbecues. Lo-o-o-ts of barbecues. Along with plenty of pork ribs to honk off the Moslems. 😛
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Ah, but the things are already illegal, so they are just making them illegaller. And then no prosecuting unless it did the accumulation of power.
Which is the real problem – the laws are there, but unenforced on protected classes.
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”…unless it ^^aids^^ the accumulation of power.”
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Its -Canada-.
Phhutt! “Sorry.”
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“Possibly a third”? You starry-eyed optimist, you.
Based on what I’ve seen, the US government is at least 80% graft and bureaucratic deadwood. All of the ‘NGOs’ leeching off our tax money are conduits for graft and payoffs for cronies. A lot of the state governments are no better, and some of them are worse. (koff) Kalifornia! (koff) New York!
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And County, and City.
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Imaginos1892 said
My aren’t we the starry eyed optimist :-) . I think its closer to 95% in many sectors. I think FDR started us on this path in a vain (and actually ineffectual if not harmful) attempt to dig out from the great depression assuming direct control was better than letting the market choose. In fighting Facisim and later Communism we took on some of their bad habits (government control of private industry) and Government got subverted by Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. I do wonder if what we need isn’t Herbert’s Bureau of Sabotage, but it too would soon find itself consumed by the Iron Law.
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Hey, I said ‘at least’. That covers everything, all the way up to 100%.
[sigh] No, I don’t believe we’d be better off without any government at all. That’s mob rule. Society needs something to maintain civilization, keep the despicable from preying on the innocent and the larcenous from cheating honest folks. Might as well call it a government. Trouble is, ours is full of despicable predators and larcenous liars. It has to be cleaned out, a job that will make the Augean Stables look trivial.
———————————
You can have a civilized society, or you can have mob rule. You can’t have both.
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Saw it this morning, but can’t be bothered to find the link. [holds thumb to nose, twiddles fingers] J.D. Vance was on an interview [somewhere] and noted that for Furrin’ aid sent from the USA, 88% or so got sucked up by the middlemen. Hell of a job, there.
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Actually, the cry against people who criticize the government-controlled U.S. education “system” isn’t “You hate Education!”, it’s “You Hate Children!” I am SOOOO sick of that retort masquerading as an argument.
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Why yes I do hate Children, the barbarians that they are. This is why training/civilizing them is so important, so that I don’t end up hating the adult version.
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I keeps tellin’ y’all, children are savages. Raising them up to mere barbarism takes years of dedicated effort. 😛
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Speaking of which, I noticed that the Vances will have a new addition this summer. How long has it been since there was a young family in the VP’s residence, or White House?
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Apparently there has NEVER been a baby born to the VP family while in office.
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And our Leftist friends are TRIGGERED….
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https://twitchy.com/justmindy/2026/01/21/jamie-bonkiewicz-adminstration-is-announcing-babies-as-a-distraction-n2424199
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“And our Leftist friends are TRIGGERED….”
Ha, I can just hear them. “How DARE they breed like that!!!!”
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One thought about the military “structure” for exploration teams.
If you’re going into a potentially dangerous situation, what type of group do you want to be with; a group of college professors or a group of military personnel?
IMO a group of military personnel is more likely to work as a team when Murphy shows up.
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They do something similar now at the Antarctic stations – there is a clear chain of command and the boss is the boss, but there’s no saluting or standing at attention military monkey business.
Of course they don’t carry guns or need to stay at their posts under fire either.
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Instead of a Kindle, get a full-sized tablet for reading. Not as conveniently portable as a Kindle, but an 8×11-ish screen gives you a lot more options for sizing and viewability.
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I use a thirty two inch TV as a monitor.
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Hubby does too.
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I stay with 24″ for the desktop monitor. Uncorrected, I’m pretty myopic in my right eye, and the left is a mess (macular issues, along with other things). If I sit at the desk, I can read quite well with glasses off. On really rare occasions, I’ll drag out the computer glasses–focus halfway between distance and “reading”. Those are sort of useful when I have to use a laptop as for trips.
Haven’t looked into setting up a tablet with Linux. I know it’s doable, but yikes.
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I had to get a set of computer-distance glasses a couple of years back because I was starting to get headaches and vertigo. The computer is my job. But I managed to surprise the optometrist when I got the new glasses, put the tester on the table at the correct distance, and read the smallest font.
Don’t know why that surprised her, but they dialed that sucker in right.
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Oooo. That’s not going to fit in your pants pocket, unless you were raised on Food of the Gods?
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Are you happy to see me or is that just a monitor in your pocket?
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For some reason this hit me JUST that way, and now you owe me a keyboard, tregonsee!
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Not glad so much as able.
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Same.
I write with an LG 32″, and I have a Samsung 27″ next to it for research, Spotify, whatever I need another screen for.
Sounds spendy but I’ve had them a long time, probably 3-4 generations old by now. I checked the info in settings and the LG says total time powered up is over 15,000 hours. I need to get out more.
Funny how you buy something new, and then like a day later you look up and that new thing you bought is 6 years old…
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I LIKE the e-ink screen.
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2^128 to cataract surgery. I got my 35 yo eyes back! I’m now no correction on the left and minimal on the right. I have non planar optical axes so I need a prism in the lenses to make them coplanar.
I’m a fan of L. Neil Smith’s freebooter exploration stories. Hard core A-Cap writing, but fit well with Sara’s Thieves series. Free association instead of armor plated corporations.
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Something we did when I got my cataract lenses. (It worked for several years, then went pear-shaped. See below.) My right eye (dominant) was optimized for distance, with the left (somewhat astigmatic, partly due to corneal scaring) was for reading. Could actually drive without glasses, thought it’s be right-eye mostly.
This went sour two ways. 1) I was diagnosed with map-dot-fingerprint dystrophy, and the fix was to use a diamond burr to get the corneas smooth again. Unlike the usual expectations, I ended up myopic in the right eye rather than far sighted. The left eye not so much change. However, due to different optics, objects in the left eye are larger than the right. 2) Macular issues, partly epi-retinal membrane, conservatively (ie, partially) fixed in the left eye, thoroughly fixed in the right eye), plus some nerve damage in the left eye make for some interesting, not-quite binocular–vision.
There’s no surgical fix for the remaining epiretinal membrane. I’ve mused about getting a new lens in the left eye to get matching image sizes, but doubt it’s worth the risks involved. Haven’t tried an eyepatch to block out the left eye when driving, but might give it a shot.
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Hubby had an accident involving chain-link fence and child climbing at age 4. Tore the pupal into the left side of the iris of the left eye; 70 years ago. He does not remember not seeing with only one eye (made ’70s aerial photography interesting for him. No stereoscopic vision for him. He did every lab the difficult way, mathematically. He’s good at math.)
About 40 (ish) years ago, there was the ability to finally fix the pupal to close it down to solve glare, bothering the torn eye. He sees shadows, but no shape. There also is (was then too) a device that reflects actual images to the back of that eye, which was undamaged, to see if he actually had any sight. The answer was not now. OTOH determined that it was because the eye and brain had never learned how to see because of the outer damage at age 4 (when child eyesight is still developing). Surgery outcome there determined to be stop glare to maybe gain sight. BUT, 40 years ago, the risk was sympathetic rejection in the one eye he has vision. Not a risk he was willing to take unless he had no choice. Now the risk of the rejection would be much less. OTOH at 74 the reward options are greatly diminished. Odds of sight starting to work are not there anymore.
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Except that we’re also getting longer overhang on that– my mom was in college when Schoolhouse Rock came out, but I grew up with it a decade or two later, and my kids are, now.
So we’re getting culture more… sticky…that way, too.
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Yeah, culturally sticky. Kids preferentially listening to ‘80s rock today, which I have seen with my own two ears, would be the equivalent of me listening to 1920s music when I was in high school. Yeah, that didn’t happen.
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since you mentioned Drrsden (can you believe its been 5 years?) I am 75% of the way and it is wonderful.
Really fixes all the issues my friends had with battleground.
this is the year long major clean up that follows the big disaster movie.
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Battleground really was one big novel with Skin Game, and Peace Talks. Battleground could not cover everything from all the view points needed. Thus, not surprised. It’ll be a few days before I get to reading Twelve Months. Then I want to savor it slowly. Might happen. No spoilers.
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Just saw a Yoo-Toob video about 10 new Kalifornia laws that took effect this month. One of them requires biometric ID to access government services online.
We’ve all seen the frequent reports of various password databases being compromised, requiring people to change their passwords. What are you supposed to do when the biometric ID database gets compromised? Change your fingerprints?
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THIS.
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–
It happens. Nephew’s phone was stolen in Ireland. Snatched out of his hands while he was using it. First thing the thieves did was turn off phone security settings (iOS. Android you need the password/biometric to get into security settings even with phone unlocked, if OS doesn’t lock screen. Seriously, mine does very quickly.) The second thing they did was use his own photo to get the face biometric, to fool app biometric settings getting access to Apple Pay, and banking. Fingerprints wouldn’t have been any harder, given his phone had to be covered in HIS fingerprints. This is why our screens and laptops do not use biometric security settings. Passwords, codes or patterns. None of use biometric on banking apps either (don’t use Android Pay).
Nephew was spending a term in France, for spring term. In UK for 10 days before start of the term (something to do with France student visa and how long he could be in country before term start). The ONLY reason why the stolen phone wasn’t as huge of a financial fraud deal was because his mom (my sister) was tied to his accounts and phone. She got the charge alerts as they hit. Parents were able to shut down the phone, shut down credit cards, fraud alert all the charges, and attempted loan. Beyond the “whack a mole” fraud, the hard parts were figuring out how to get him a new phone. How to insure he had funds to get back to school (someone he was with), buy and get him a new phone (through US embassy), ongoing funds/charge card (mom and dad’s) for rest of the term. All while sister and BIL were on vacation in southern France. Technically, the new phone wasn’t an extra cost, just one earlier than the parents had planned. The stolen phone was a very old iPhone model, which they’d planned on replacing for his 22nd Birthday, in six months.
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Possibly an old OS? My current iphone requires the password to get at the password and face ID settings. And I have NOT set up face ID or any fingerprint stuff on my phone. Fingerprint on my ipad, though.
Within apps that want a password, requires phone password to get at that.
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You got 10 fingers, right? just use the next one.
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They want to CHIP you like a golden retriever. That’s what they really want in all this.
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Wait until THAT database gets hacked….
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And it will. Because government.
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Wait until the biometric ID is keyed to your DNA, and that database gets compromised. Because of course it will — the government is incompetent at everything. We’ve already seen multiple government databases get compromised.
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Wait until your DNA gets hacked – why, they could invent a drug that rewrites chunks of your DNA using messenger RNA, fool you into taking it, and then do whatever the heck they wan…
Oh, wait…
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IIRC they took a fingerprint scan when I got my CA Real-ID.
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