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After hanging out in the SSI office for awhile, Rand and I headed over to the XCOR hanger, the next after the Scaled Composites one shown here. I am sure caffeine was flowing like water inside as Scaled staff got everything ready to roll.
You could almost feel the coming buzz from the Scaled Composites hanger.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
We were let into XCOR through the front reception and found yet another crowd of which we knew practically everyone. It is not a big industry so practically everyone knows everyone else. Rand and I were there for business as well as saying hello. You know, just making sure people remember us when they suddenly have money and need someone to help spend it!
California does not yet require listing Rocket Scientists and Hanger Cats as potentially Hazardous Materials.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
XCOR was the host of the local get together. The crowd there traded thoughts on rocket engine design, control systems, who currently has money and who does not… all of the important things in life. Well, some of them at least. See how many people you can name from this crowd.
XCOR and Masten folk talking about rockets
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
XCOR and Masten folk talking about rockets
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
I had a long chat and traded stories with Aleta Jackson who besides being one of the leading lights of XCOR is also someone I have known for…. well perhaps I should not say how long, but the light had definitely been separated from the dark by then.
Aleta has lots of good stories.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
There are bits and bobs of rocket planes, rocket engines and test gear all about the hanger the XCOR folk have called home for much of this decade, but the real eye-catchers are these beauties:
The Rocket Racer looks fast just sitting there.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
And they have two of them sitting there!
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Aleta saw me drooling and smitten at the cockpit door and demanded I sit in it. On the serious side, the controls of this baby are pretty much what you would find in any General Aviation aircraft, although I suspect the glass cockpit part of it has a few other twists. At Alamogordo two years ago I heard they are to have a Heads Up Display to superimpose an image of the racing ‘gates’ on the external view.
In any case, I got a brief ground stint in the left hand seat and held its throttle in my hand.
I will remember to ask Aleta for the keys next time.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Part 1 of this series is here. The next article will show our intrepid rocket renegades making their tortuous way to the most historic party of the decade.
My good friend Rob Fisher recently wrote the following on his own blog.
I listen to Radio One in the morning. Chris Moyles and a bunch of other celebrities walked up Kilamanjaro to raise money for charity. Now Moyles has just got back from a trip to Uganda to give out malaria nets with the money raised.
He said that two things surprised him about Uganda. It’s very green and lush; and everyone has mobile phones.
I think part of the reason everyone thinks Africa is brown and dry is Live Aid. “Where nothing ever grows; no rain or rivers flow.” Never mind forced relocation. Looking around on loc.alize.us, Uganda is a bit greener than Ethiopia.
Yes, but Bob Geldof and Midge Ure wrote those lyrics, and they had this British preconception already. Another factor might be that the places in Africa that British people are most likely to visit are Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and South Africa: the Sahara, and the arid south. There is plenty of fertile land in the middle. A tragedy is that some of the most fertile parts of Africa tend to be some of the most troubled: the vast Congo basin is prime land, essentially, and yet its history has been unspeakable, at least since the arrival of King Leopold’s privateers in 1877. As Chris Moyles discovered, Uganda is green and fertile, but its history is not the happiest either.
People who attempt to raise awareness of malaria in Africa and elsewhere, and to raise money for its prevention deserve praise, of course, but what I am struck by is that the story about mobile phones becoming ubiquitous in poor countries has only just reached these people. This story is at least five years old now in the sense that most people have access to one and probably closer to ten in the sense that mobile phones existed in these countries and networks have been quite comprehensive, in many cases as comprehensive or more so than in rich countries.
A related story: about three years ago I was walking along the Thames path on a Sunday afternoon. and I passed City Hall. Outside the building was some kind of “Here is how bad things are in the third world and why we should fell guilty” kind of exhibition provided for us by Ken Livingstone’s lackeys using our money. Amongst the factoids of information in this display was the statement that “90% of the world’s population have never made a phone call”.
The “x% of the world’s population have never made a phone call” meme has been around for a while. 90% is obviously ridiculous and shows intense innumeracy from whoever made it up. (About 15% of the world’s population lives in rich countries, and if you add “rich parts of middle income countries, you can increase this number to 20 or 25%). The meme seems to usually be stated as “50% of the world’s population have never made a phone call”. Clay Shirky attempted to investigate where the meme came from, and the first recorded statement of it appears to be from engineer Greg LeVert of telephone company MCI in 1994. However, he said it in the context of “.. but oh boy is this going to change with all the great new technology that’s in the pipeline”. Nobody knows where he got the factoid from though: he may have just made it up. However, the Al Gores and Michael Moores and Kofi Annans and the like (and even people like Melinda Gates and Carly Fiorina who should know better) have repeated it endlessly since – or at least were doing so until only a few years ago.
It is, of course, just not true. It is extraordinary that people should repeat out of context a ten year old view of what the poor world is like, as if the ten years between 1995 and 2005 were static in the development of telecommunications.
At the time I encountered that exhibition outside City Hall, there were around 3 billion active mobile phones in the world: so therefore, although 90% of the world’s population had never made a phone call, about 50% of the world’s population owned a mobile phone. (They were all big texters, apparently). Since then, the number of mobiles in the world has increased by a further 50% to around 4.5 billion. The number of people with multiple phones per person or separate voice and data accounts and such has now reached the point where you cannot go directly from this to “4.5 billion people have mobile phones”, but the number of people who do is clearly greater than 50% of the world’s population. Given phones shared between families and friends, and the interesting third world concept of the cellular payphone, the percentage of the world’s population that is old enough to have made a phone call and has never done so must be in the low single figures.
The use of this meme by the internationally prominent seems to have finally died over the last couple of years: even someone as dim as Al Gore can figure out from his occasional views out of windows of five star hotels or between the gaps between members of his entourage on his occasional trips to the third world that something has changed, I suspect. Finance and business folk get this completely and got it long ago: fortunes have already been made selling mobile phones to people in poor countries.
But the well intentioned who seldom leave rich cities other than to visit Mediterranean beaches still don’t generally get it. At best, people who see Africa as a problem to be addressed through benevolence, charity and aid have made small differences in a few places. The capitalists who have built mobile phone networks have transformed the continent utterly. The logistical networks that go with them have facilitated all kinds of other changes, too, in terms of logistics and markets. All kinds of consumer goods are available that were not before. (Many people cannot afford them on an everyday basis, but they are there, and this matters). Just as in the west, food is better, and there is more variety. There are lots of under the radar small businesses that were not there before either. Access to information and to the outside world is much greater.
As it happens, my first trip to Africa was to Kenya and Tanzania, and a main aim of that trip was to climb Kilimanjaro, too. → Continue reading: Mobile phones are only part of the story in Africa
A number of governments – the UK and German – have used information stolen from a Liechtenstein bank in a bid to hunt after alleged tax evaders. And now, there is a story that data has been stolen from HSBC Private Bank (Suisse), divulging data on scores of French clients. The French government, you will not be surprised to learn, gentle reader, is probably not all that shy of using stolen material. It will be interesting to see what happens to such data. Here is another news report.
As I keep saying in my defence of tax havens, bank secrecy is not really about allowing dodgy folk to squirrel away ill-gotten gains, which is the usual image presented these days. (That is not to say that such secrecy has not been abused in the past). In past ages, groups fleeing persecution – such as Jews from Nazi-controlled Europe – availed themselves of banking secrecy in order to protect what was left of that wealth. We should not be so naive as to imagine that even without a repeat of such horrors, there is not a need for client privacy to be rigorously enforced. It is monstrous that governments should use stolen material in this fashion, but then, as the founding editor of this site likes to remind us, the state is not your friend.
Here is a witty description of the way the Climategate story is unfolding, from someone called David Solway:
Witnessing the spectacle of climate warmists scampering hither and thither in the face of predatory evidence that they and their pet theories may be doomed, I’m put in mind of the behavior of hamsters who suddenly find themselves trapped in a cage with a hungry snake. The ensuing drama is instructive.
First the hamsters freeze as if in a state of petrifaction induced by utter disbelief. When it dawns on them that they have what looks like an insoluble problem on their tiny paws, they begin to shake and fidget, and soon they are darting feverishly from one side of the cage to the other, endlessly back and forth, seeking an escape hatch which simply isn’t there. It occurs to them that they are cornered, there is no way out, and they start digging furiously into the sand floor, emitting plaintive squeals of fear and despair as the snake slowly uncoils from its torpor and begins its relentless approach.
Like David Solway, and like our own Johnathan Pearce, I am optimistic about how the Climategate story is unfolding. It will, hamster like, run and run. How many other climate scientists cooked their data, and how outrageously? Which politicians, and which journalists, took the lead in swallowing this story? Who has been paying all these climate scientists to find AGW by fair means or foul and then to recommend global statism? The questions are endless, the answers will be fascinating, and the dextrosphere won’t let go of this now.
But what I want to know is: how does David Solway know all this, about how hamsters behave when set upon in a cage by a snake? His description is suspiciously vivid. Has he actually done this experiment? Has he seen hamsters in a cage being attacked by a big snake, on account of him having just put them there? If so, and if he then did nothing to rescue the poor hamsters, because science is more important than being nice to hamsters, then: what a complete bastard. The Climategate scientists put themselves into their cage, but this cage is only metaphorical and nor are their critics literally going to eat them, however much some of them might deserve such a fate. But David Solway’s actual hamsters did nothing to deserve such torment.
He adds:
One feels for the caged hamsters.
Oh, one feels for them, does one? But not enough, it would seem, for one actually to try to rescue them.
Maybe David Solway just saw this on You-Tube. Or maybe he, or some equally nasty friend of his, set all this up personally, but then later, in the nick of time, he (or they) did rescue the hamsters (in which case David Solway is still a bastard but not as much of one). Either way, I think he should have said.
He ends his piece thus:
Unless, of course, a miracle should occur, the cage door open, and an indulgent hand reach inside to rescue the hamsters from their plight, ensuring that the snake starves to death while the hamsters frolic in relief and gratitude. This, too, could happen. As we know all too well, there is more than one indulgent hand ready to perform an act of tender, self-interested, and hamster-friendly mercy.
It’s almost as if a friend of David Solway’s read everything above this ending, and said what I just said, isn’t it?
As a description of Climategate this final reversal contradicts everything before it. “This too could happen.” How? An “indulgent hand”? What hand?
The idea of such pieces is to raise the morale of David Solway’s side and mine in the Climategate argument. Keep it up lads, we’re winning. And then he goes and ends by saying, for no reason: but then again, maybe we’re not winning.
Why do writers do this? Something to do with ending intriguingly and amusingly, perhaps, with a final and surprising U-turn that you did not see coming? Or maybe it’s a doomed attempt to mollify the unmollifiable opposition, an attempt to turn them into neutrals by being nice to them, an attempt to be inclusive, a friendly nod to all the people who aren’t reading in the first place.
Or maybe David Solway just wasn’t sure that his piece is actually right, in which case I think his doubts would have been better handled by appearing at the start alongside his hypothesis, on a this-may-not-be-right-but-here’s-a-thought basis.
Or, in this case, did he simply want to look less like a hamster-torturing bastard but forget that his way of trying to do this contradicts his entire argument?
What I want to know is, were those actual hamsters actually rescued?
Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian displays the jarring sensibilities that comes inevitability from holding the sort of fuzzy authoritarian statist views that prevail these days. On the subject of the Swiss ban on new minaret construction…
That is to put the clock of religious toleration back 300 years, to a time when even protestants in Catholic France could not worship in public. Of course, planning regulations and the local townscape must be respected. Architectural tact and syncretic innovation are desirable, as brilliantly exemplified in the new buildings of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies or Boston’s Islamic Cultural Centre. But this vote was not about urban planning.
Actually it is about ‘urban planning’, just not for the sort of reasons the writer approves of.
But what makes me laugh is that Ash has no problem whatsoever using the force of the state to make people build in ways he approves of. It is clearly axiomatic to him that the state gets to have planning regulations over what you can build on your own private property, even over mere aesthetic issues (i.e. he likes the fact the political trumps the social completely when it comes to your property). He just wants what people like him thinks is ‘desirable’ to be allowed.
Yet somehow when that political process he accepts as axiomatic produces something he does not think is ‘desirable’ to his Guardianista sensibilities, I doubt it occur to him that maybe it is his acceptance of people exerting force backed political power over others in pretty much every aspect of life where the problem lies.
Muslims in Switzerland wishing to build minarets on buildings dedicated to praising the words of their mass murdering Dark Ages warlord only have the problem they now face because people like Timothy Garton Ash think it is perfectly alright that the state to be allowed to ‘plan’ what people can do on their own property.
Rand Simberg and I left his house in LA at a time he predicted would be optimal from a traffic standpoint, and as he used to commute to work at Rotary Rocket several times a week in the Nineties, he ought to know. We were in rain and overcast until one set of hills before Mojave when the Native American gods blessed the undertaking with a full rainbow bridge. Since photo ops of this sort are not easily scheduled with higher authorities, Rand pulled over.
Rand Simberg peers intently into the distance in hopes of spotting the pot of gold we need for our Wyoming Aerospace venture
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
I have not been up to Mojave for a few years and some things have changed. The gate guardian Phantom is now at the airport entry, and it has been joined by a rather rare 1960’s vintage Convair airliner. Most striking to me was Roton standing proud not far from the main building. The first time I saw it was inside the Rotary Rocket High Bay back in 1999 and at that time I was only allowed to record it in my memory.
Roton is the first commercial space Gate Guardian that I am aware of
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Those who have been around the space scene for awhile will remember the Space Studies Institute. It was once a major player but seemed to fade out over the last 15 years and some thought it had died completely. Not so! Lee Valentine and Robin Snelson have moved it from Princeton to an office inside the terminal just behind Rand.
Obligatory tourist style photo of Rand. As if he has not been here a few thousand times before…
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
First stop was the Voyager restaurant, an amenity that is fairly recent. Lunch used to require a trip into town. The first thing I noticed coming in the door was that I knew a large fraction of the people there; the second thing I noticed was the private jet parked just outside with a G-number and a Virgin logo. I wonder who that might belong to?
Familiar faces in the lunch crowd at the Voyager.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Care to hazard a guess at the owner?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
After chatting awhile in the lounge we found that someone was over in the SSI office and we could connect to the net or work from there if we wished. As it turned out, we mostly just talked and looked over the large collection of commercial and space industrialization books lining the walls.
Just hangin at the SSI office.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
In the next installment I will cover the visit with our old friends and colleagues at XCOR.
You can find an intro article here.
As we await the UK government’s financial statement known as the Pre-Budget Report, expected to be full of stuff designed to appease Labour’s so-called “base” of banker haters, I have been re-reading Ludwig von Mises’ classic explanation of why there has been so much hatred for markets and business down the years from the likes of intellectuals and their media outlets. Some of the names and examples will be a little dated – who now remembers such old monsters like Harold Laski? – but the message is as pertinent as ever.
In an earlier posting today, I expressed the fear that this Copenhagen nonsense would lead to quite a few more stupid laws. But the news right now seems to be rather better than that:
The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations.
If this shindig can be a total fiasco I really do not care why (for his own idiot reasons this guy agrees). Sadly, I fear that this leak may just be negotiation as usual. The bodge that results will still probably be pretty terrible.
On the other hand, maybe the rich countries do not actually want a deal. Reading that Guardian report, you can almost hear the rich country negotiators muttering amongst themselves that they would prefer to stay rich. But maybe that is a step too far towards being sensible, and too much to hope for.
Fingers crossed.
This evening I am doing a recorded conversation with Bishop Hill, and by way of preparation have been rootling around in his archives. And I just came across this, which the Bishop posted on November 19th 2006:
In this connexion the thing to be remarked is that the Whigs proceeded by the negative method of repealing existing laws, not by the positive method of making new ones. They combed the Statute-book, and when they found a statute which bore against “the liberty of the subject” they simply repealed it and left the page blank. This purgation ran up into the thousands. In 1873 the secretary of the Law Society estimated that out of the 18,110 Acts which had been passed since the reign of Henry III, four-fifths had been wholly or partially repealed.
Excellent, apart from the odd spelling of “connection”.
That’s not by Bishop Hill himself. It was recycled from somewhere called “Outside Story”, the link to which no longer works. But there’s no reason to doubt theis particular story, which should now inspire us all. For too long we have been ruled by politicians who measured their success by how many laws they could pass. Because of these fools, we now need politicians who measure their success by how many laws they can unpass.
Bishop Hill’s latest posting, as I write this, is to this. Well worth reading. Climategate is not nearly over. It is just getting into its stride. At Copenhagen, lots of laws, seemingly unshiftable from then on, will be made, maybe not as many as would have happened without Climategate, but still, most of us here surely fear, a lot. But the point is: laws can be unmade. There can be, and there must soon be, another great purgation.
George Monbiot, who the other day voiced anger at the misbehaviour of so-called scientists at the University of East Anglia’s climate resarch unit, has reverted to his original mode of George Moonbat by attacking AGW skeptics as deniers who want to dupe the public in the service of Big Oil. It does not occur to this man that he, and others like him, also have made a very nice living out the AGW story. After all, research grants and academic careers have been built on it. Where’s there is muck, there is brass, as they say.
There is a whiff of desperation in the air from these guys, who resemble nothing so much as a bully confronted by those whom he or she has tormented. Opinion polls like this one show high levels of skepticism among the public about the claims made by alarmists, and the fact that the climate has not, on average, warmed up at all since 1998, is not quite helping their cause.
Monbiot and others like him need to drop the hysteria, the smugness, the bullying and the rest of it. They need to grasp the fact that their predictions are debatable and that the CRU leaks are intensely damaging to their agenda.
Even a BBC Breakfast TV presenter, who normally has all the interviewing manner of a soft cuddly toy, asked a guy on the show yesterday about “whether the UEA leaks are undermining the Copenhagen process”. This story is not going away.
The world’s first commercial spaceship was unveiled and christened today at Mojave. I will post more when I have slept and caught my flight home, but here is just one photo of the very full day of activities. I did not have as much time as Rand Simberg to get articles out due the large number of hats I was wearing today. I was also not official press although I could have slipped in as most of the annointed press knew me and would have said nothing
In any case, I will have more to say and I have hundreds of photos. Here is just one.
Christening of the VSS Enterprise.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
According to Peter Hitchens:
The Atheists must reject Christianity as well as Islam. Alas, for them, Islam responds to their rejection by ignoring them, whereas Christianity tends to retreat before them. And a weakened church laces a vacuum into which Islam can move. Result? The growing power of Islam in our society, our culture, our government, our political parties and our schools, so that an essentially Atheist state pays increasing obeisance to Islam. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the new Atheists, by attacking Christianity, are simply clearing a space for Islam to establish itself in the space they have swept and garnished.
Discuss.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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