Personally, I’d be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons.
– Instapundit showing why it is wrong to call him right wing
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I just ran across this quote of Burt Rutan from this afternoon on Space Flight Now:
Yes, I do believe the pigs had their noses so deep in the trough they never saw the hatchet coming. If any of them did look up they just grunted at the idea anyone could possibly ever displace them, not realizing they were not being so much displaced as bypassed and made redundant to requirements. I love the smell of bacon in the morning. It smells of… liberty. October 4th, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Conservative Party main financial spokesman, Shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin, is a bright man, as I can attest – as well as being a very pleasant fellow – so he presumably has a valid reason for not spelling out what taxes he would like to cut or scrap, as reported in the Daily Telegraph. But a Tory administration must surely want to cut taxes at some point. Why else vote for them? I trust and hope that Letwin’s coyness on the issue is not caused by the daft idea that any discussion of tax cuts is supposed to conjour up images of little old grannies left to sleep in the snow, no “schoolsanhospitals” and suchlike. Letwin needs to remember the old rule of not allowing political opponents dictate the terms of the debate. The Tories must break the false idea that tax cuts = End of Civilisation As We Know It. A little boldness can win dividends. October 4th, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am sure the Scaled Composites team is busy with their last minute checkouts now. I will be following this event as closely as one can from a third of a planetary circumference away. Obviously I will not be as immediate as those on the edge of the runway, but perhaps I can supply knowledgeable commentary on the next few hours. So, time to get the Anseri X-Prize out of the way and move on to the Bigelow et al Prize! Time to up-ship! Hot jets, good luck and Godspeed Mike! UPDATE: The pilot for this flight has been announced and will be Brian Binnie. UPDATE 1257 UTC: Weather at Mojave is reported looking good. Which is not unusual for Mojave! White Knight/SpaceShipOne takeoff is scheduled for 1400 UTC, so I would imagine they are outside the hanger and doing the the Pre-Flight about now. Burt Rutan has reportedly stated they are shooting for the alitutude record today, 354,200 feet reached by Joe Walker in the X-15 on August 23, 1963. UPDATE 1317 UTC: As Rand Simberg points out, today is the 47th Anniversary of the first satellite launch. UPDATE 1339 UTC: WK/SS1 is reported to be on the taxiway. I imagine the crowds are waving flags and going wild about now. Not much longer before the takeoff… then we wait an hour for the drop and burn. UPDATE 1356 UTC: WK/SSI is in the air. For the next hour everyone gets a sore neck watching them circle ever higher towards the 47.000 foot drop altitude. It gets a bit easier to follow them when they pass about 20,000 feet and contrails begin to show… of course that depends on the conditions at altitude and is not a given. Then they will fly to the East of the airport so they will be nearer Edward AFB for radar tracking. This means everyone gets absolutely blinded looking into the sun to watch the initial climbout after the drop an hour from now. UPDATE 1425 UTC: If you were watching Black Sky on Discovery last night (obviously I did not, sitting here outside Belfast) and liked the simulations of the SS1 flight, you can buy the software at X-Plane. Tell Austin I sent you. UPDATE 1431 UTC: I expect WK/SS1 is passing through 40,000 feet about now. I notice that an old friend of mine, Greg Maryniak, is the commentator for the X-Prize Foundation. Not that surprising since Greg and Peter Diamandes, who I’ve known since he and the late Tod Hawley were MIT college kids, run the place. Greg was the Exec at the Space Studies Institute in Princeton all through the 1980’s and into the early 1990’s. UPDATE 1445 UTC: By the time you read this I expect SS1 will have dropped and fired the hybrid rocket motor. Yeehah!!! UPDATE 1452 UTC: Drop and burn happened on time… burnout and SS1 is coasting upwards, hopefully to break the X15 record as well as cop the $10,000,000 Anseri X-Prize! UPDATE 1455 UTC: Unofficial apogee at around 368,000 feet. They may have the record. X-15 max was 354,200 feet. Sounds like a safe margin to me! UPDATE 1515 UTC: Verily as I was on the phone trading notes with Rand, it touched down. The X-Prize has been won! The X-15 altitude record has been bettered! Now, on to commercial Virgin Galactic flights, on to the Bigelow prize for an orbital flight by 2008… and not to mention we can expect the da Vinci project to carry out their balloon drop flight within a few months and Armadillo Aerospace should fly sometime next year too. Oh what a wonderful year this is! UPDATE 1619 UTC: It seems the altitude is official and Burt is claiming the altitude record. In an article I wrote last year, I suggested Rutan has a shot at ‘the Triple Crown’ of aviation records. Voyager flew around the world non-stop for the distance record; SS1 has now copped the altitude record. The only gem missing from the Scaled Composites front office is speed. As many have pointed out, SS1 is probably not capable of surviving a low angle speed run. But that does not mean some near future Rutan vehicle will not do it. I think he will go for it at some point. UPDATE 1654 UTC: I note that Leonard David has been the journalist blogging for space.com from Mojave. Len is another one of our little crowd of space illuminati. He started off with the Project Harvest Moon attempt to buy the last Saturn V’s back in 1976 or so; he founded a space organization of his own at university and later became the magazine editor for for Von Braun’s NSI, and later for Ad Astra of NSS, the merged L5 and NSI organization. He also plays a mean autoharp. Yep. We all know each other. October 4th, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
For what Britons and Canadians pay in taxes for their miserable government health service, they ought to be entitled to three terminal diseases a year. – The incomparable Mark Steyn, being the incomparable Mark Steyn. (Personally, I find the NHS so unspeakable that I try to delay going to the doctor until those times that I visit Australia. But that might be just me). October 3rd, 2004 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
As the British Conservative Party starts its annual conference today, I am sure a lot of party activists and Members of Parliament will wonder how they can deal with the threat posed by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The UKIP pushed the Tories into a miserable fourth place in last week’s parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool, a seat vacated after disgraced former Cabinet Minister, Peter Mandelson, went off to Brussels for a cushy job in the EU (no doubt a place well suited to his talents). UKIP has reversed its policy of not standing in election contests against euro-sceptic Tories. This looks like quite a calculated gamble to me. It means they have gone from being a bunch of slightly eccentric nuisances, as far as the chattering classes are concerned, to something a bit more serious. The Tories to my mind have lost their bearings in the last six months. The decision by leader Michael Howard to flirt with Bush-bashing anti-Americanism, even to the point of letting colleagues work for the wretched John Kerry, looks like an act of supreme folly. But closer to home, the European issue remains the one the Tories have to get right if they want to survive as a serious political force. It is going to be an interesting week for the Tories. And I am also looking forward to how the conference is covered by the blogs. October 3rd, 2004 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
I just received this Burt Rutan statement in my ‘in-basket’. It addresses the much media hyped rolls, which were in reality not a very big deal:
Incidentally… there will be quite an all night party at Mojave Civilian Test Flight Facility (and Spaceport) the night before the second flight. Apogee Books is sponsoring an all night music fest near their tent in the public viewing area. Sadly I will again not be there. Addendum: For the non-pilot readers, KEAS is Knots Equivalent Airspeed. Knots are Nautical Miles per Hour in pilotese. To place this in perspective, my old Cessna 172, (N3892S circa 1981), was quite happy cruising along at 120 KIAS, or 120 Knots Indicated Airspeed. Airspeed is how fast the wind is going past your wings. If you were in a 120 Knot headwind, you could be flying 120 KIAS and sitting over someone’s head like you were the ball on top of a flagpole. Indicated means it is what you read off the dial in the cockpit; Equivalent means that the air over your wings has the equivalent effect after accounting for speed and density of the air. (You can also play with a thing called a Reynolds number which affects basic design of aircraft in various regimes, here if you are interested.) October 3rd, 2004 | Comments are closed
Since no one else here seems to have much to say about the Great Debate, let me chip in with a few meandering thoughts. If you do not like meandering, stop now. Strong meandering warning. I have now read the rest of this, and believe me, it meanders. It nuances hither and thither like some damned diplomat who has been at the drugs. Okay. So far as I am concerned, I thought John Kerry won it. My opinion of him could only improve, and it did. And I have got to admit that not only was I impressed, in the sense of feeling that others would be, by the air of coherence he brought to stating his case. I also think he may actually have an alternative policy that might count for something. The general opinion in our part of the blogosphere/internet is that the idea of the USA ‘forming alliances’ better with the ‘international community’ is a load of old sneer quotes. Lileks said it yesterday. On what planet is Kerry living? Does he really think that the rest of the world will suddenly swing into line behind President John Kerry, and win/settle the War Against Terror? Will it bollocks, says Lileks, although a little more politely than that. But I do not think it quite so unlikely as Lileks does that the rest of the world, by which I mean Europe, actually will swing obediently into line, like an eager little Euro-dog. Even those Moderate Arabs may feel less culturally slighted, and contribute somewhat more than they are contributing now. → Continue reading: Some nuanced reactions to Bush-vs.-Kerry Debate One October 2nd, 2004 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Telegraph reports that an Iraqi-born gunman with a British passport, Mohammed Kasim, talked to an Iraqi translator in Fallujah about the latest video of Mr Bigley where he was shown shackled in a cage. Mr Kasim claimed that this had been staged to “terrify” the British public. There was no way of verifying the claim, particularly in a country awash with rumour and conspiracy theories. The claims that the British hostage was free to roam his kidnappers’ home in Iraq and was “caged” only for terrorist videos coincide with a raid by Dutch intelligence officers of the home of Paul Bigley, Kenneth Bigley’s brother last, who lives in Amsterdam. He is accused of contact with the Tawhid and Jihad group, which yesterday claimed responsibility for Thursday’s killing of at least 35 children in Baghdad. Mr Bigley has been an outspoken critic of the Government’s handling of his brother’s case and has established his own contacts in the Middle East but denies being in direct contact with the kidnappers. From yesterday news, Italy’s adoration of the “two Simonas” (Simona Pari and Simona Torretta), the women aid workers abducted in Iraq, began to sour yesterday, as the extent of their sympathy for the Iraqi fight against the allied occupation became clear.
There have been reports of a $1 million ransom… No matter, the girls are well versed in international law:
They have obviously become experts on the local situation – upon their return they gave their backing to insurgents opposing the allied forces. Alas, they did not seem to know about other hostages:
October 2nd, 2004 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have a number of times mentioned that some members of the Democratic Party have been dishonestly spreading rumours about a pending draft. They imply it is being planned behind the scenes in the current administration and will be unveiled after the election if Bush wins. In fact, the only activity behind the noise is a Bill backed by a handful of extremist Democrats and introduced by Democratic Party slavery advocate Charles Rangel. I have been reading quotes from DOD briefings for almost four years now. Every time the issue comes up, DOD officials diplomatically state it is a bad idea and they do not want it. I believe the continuing appearance of this outright lie all across America is beginning to wear bureaucratic diplomacy thin. Here is a portion of the transcript of Donald Rumsfeld with Albuquerque’s KKOB-AM Radio host Jim Villanucci:
The next time someone tells you the current administration is going to re-instate the draft… tell them their source is an intentional, blatant and provable liar. October 2nd, 2004 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Legal experts, property developers and lovers of liberty ought to be eagerly waiting for the outcome of a key US court ruling on what is known as the law of eminent domain. The ruling could kill off the practice in which property developers, in alliance with local politicians and bureaucrats, can push property owners from their possessions, seize the land and re-develop it, usually in the hope of grabbing higher tax revenues than was the case before. I am not an expert on the fine print of this law as it applies in the United States, and readers ought to look at works such as the excellent book by Richard Epstein on the subject. What is clear, however, is that for years Americans, like Britons, Frenchmen, Germans and others, have been living in a world increasingly resembling the law of the jungle rather that of a liberal civil order when it comes to the treatment of property. I honestly do not know how the ruling will turn out. Essentially, contestants in the case are arguing against the idea that eminent domain can be exercised on commercial grounds. Hard-line defenders of property will, of course, argue that eminent domain does not exist even if the supposed use of property is for something required for ‘public use’, such as a port, military airfield or highway. Here is a thought – this ought to be a classic ‘left-wing’ sort of issue. It is actually a good issue for libertarians to try to use to convince socialist types that property rights, understood in their fullest sense, are a protection for the weak and vulnerable, not the other way round. The old man in his shabby cottage who refuses to sell up to Big Gleaming Corp. is as much a hero of the free market order as any Ayn Rand character or 19th Century industrialist in a frock coat. Side observation: I would be interested to know if the hugely loss-making Channel Tunnel link could have been built without compulsory purchase. Somehow I very much doubt it. Thanks to the excellent Anger Management blog for the pointer. October 1st, 2004 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Catching up with Croziervision, the other day, as you do, I came across this posting, which contained a kind reference to something I had said, which on further investigation proved to be an essay by me, attached as a comment to something Patrick himself had written earlier. There is nothing like the blogosphere for prodding you into writing, roughly and readily but as best you can, That Thing You Are Always Talking About. Patrick did this to me by himself sketching out the Hockey Stick Theory thus:
Or to put it another way, the state does this:  And, thus prodded, I then amplified, in the manner that follows. At the end, I even said that I ought to copy and paste this stuff into a Samizdata posting, but then I forgot about that. Now here it is. What follows is basically what I originally put in that comment, but I have changed a few things and added another hockey stick, so no italics. → Continue reading: How hockey sticks explain the relative attractions of statism and of free markets October 1st, 2004 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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