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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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With all the attention being on new private initiatives in space travel hogging the headlines, it is worth noting that there is the real prospect of a new space race taking place between China and the United States, with China planning an eventual lunar landing as a prelude to a mission to Mars.
There would be plenty of people who would welcome such a development, but I am not one of them. As I see it, there is a legitimate role for government funded space programs, but there must be a sensible trade-off between costs and benefits. The Voyager Space probes were sensible investments that produced wonderful results; the Apollo Program, for all the hype, was not something that was worth the immense cost.
I say this because the way that technology is developing, private ventures are expanding in their capabilities quite quickly, and they are much more suitable enterprises to carry the torch of humanity into space. The original space race between the USA and the USSR carried awfully nationalistic and ideological connotations, and a future race between China and the USA is certainly going to have a stench of nationalism about it. Private enterprise ventures have a much greater capacity to bring in international participation.
It cannot be denied, of course, that government ventures are capable of achieving far more, and far quicker, then private ones; having the power of the state to extract wealth from its citizenry, and a powerful will, can cause amazing things to happen. The Apollo Program is a case in point, and so was the Manhattan Project. That does not mean that they are justifiable.
China’s space program is still at a relatively modest stage; they only succeeded in putting an astronaut into orbit in 2003. But if they invested enough money in it, they could progress quite quickly. It is simply a matter of how high that they consider it in their list of priorities. If they give it a high priority they could certainly reach their goals, especially given that Chinese taxpayers are not in a position to object.
How long is it going to take private explorers to get to do serious space travel? That point is no longer moot. From 2004 the progress of private ventures has been impressive, and if this momentum can be continued, it might well be that the first private entrepreneur on the moon might not be that far behind the Chinese and American astronauts. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the first explorer on Mars represented a private consortium?
The Foresight Institute released its Nanotechnology Roadmap today. According to the Press Release:
“For the first time, progress across all key nanoscale disciplines has been brought together into R&D pathways leading to atomically-precise manufacturing, with revolutionary applications to medicine, smart materials, and energy,” said Jim Von Ehr, Founder and chief executive officer of Zyvex Labs, Foresight Board of Directors member, and Roadmap Steering Committee member. “We look forward to hearing from technologists in industry, academia, and government on their thoughts about this roadmap, and their suggestions for improvement in the next version.”
You can find all of this and more here.
Sometimes campaigns seem to be a battle of the celebrities, a matter of who has the best known Stars behind the podium. Ron Paul received endorsements from Barry Goldwater Jr and the Governor of Arizona within the last few weeks, but they are politico’s and that is just not the same. He finally has a real celebrity: Arlo Guthrie of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ fame. You simply could not find a nicer guy to endorse you. Arlo says:
“I love this guy. Dr. Paul is the only candidate I know of who would have signed the Constitution of The United States had he been there. I’m with him, because he seems to be the only candidate who actually believes it has as much relevance today as it did a couple of hundred years ago. I look forward to the day when we can work out the differences we have with the same revolutionary vision and enthusiasm that is our American legacy.”
Back in the eighties when I lived in my native Pittsburgh I regularly worked the local music venue’s as did my room mate. I vividly remember him telling me about the night he opened for Arlo at one of our regular gig locations. Unlike many stars Arlo backstage did not do the Star thing in either attitude or drug ingestion. In fact, he sat down on the back stairs with my room mate for a long time after the show. They swapped stories of the life, chords and songs and had a merry old time sitting there on the group W… er the Grafitti’s back stairs.
I just love the idea of Arlo playing an inauguration ceremony… Now that is cool!
Correction: the Governor in question is the former Governor of New Mexico, not Arizona. My mistake. More here
American readers will no doubt be familiar with the long standing trade of the bail bond companies. Non-American readers may not be so familiar with the system, in which private companies post bail for defendants in return for a fee. It is a process which is not allowed in most other countries, but it seems that it is a highly effective system in ensuring that defendants appear for their trials.
I myself had no idea about the bail bond industry until I read this article about it in the New York Times. The American Bar Association hates the practice, it seems, and given the grip of lawyers in other legal systems, it is very unlikely that the practice will be emulated elsewhere. Which is a pity; some of these American innovations have a lot going for them.
A most interesting document has come into our possession – and quite coincidentally, we understand, into the possession of several other well-known blogs. It is a scan of the internal document of the Identity and Passport Service outlining the new implementation strategy for the UK’s identity card scheme, liberally annotated by the experts at NO2ID.
We think it tends to disprove the denials only just issued by HM Government in relation to the scheme, as well as some half-lies and full lies they have been telling all along. (It may also show up the feeble grip of Gordon Brown’s paper Stalinism. “In government, but not in power,” ministers will rubber-stamp anything – just as long as it doesn’t look like a retreat.) But judge for yourself: (pdf 1.17Mb)
Via the glorious Devil’s Kitchen blog – it’s not for the squeamish or easily offended – I cam across this collection of comments made in the weekend press by various supposedly eminent people on how they would improve Britain. Some are quite good. But our Devil reserves his sulphur for Rory Bremner, an impressionist whom I used to rather like (his impersonation of Tony Blair is brilliant), but who has become boring. Bremner’s pet idea is to force teenagers to serve in “community projects”, a sort of civilian version of an army. Whenever the issue of youth delinquency comes up, as it has recently due to the problems of youth crime in our major cities, you can always count on parts of the right and left to join ideological hands over the idea of making youth “serve” their nation in some way. The objections to this are, however, considerable:
Young people are not the property of the state. This may come as a shocking revelation to anyone straying on to this blog for the first time in their lives, but there it is. You own your own life, and no-one else. The idea that after having been forced, on pain of legal penalty, to endure education until the age of 18, that one should continue to be forced to devote X hours of your time to “serving” the nation in some ill-defined way is monstrous. The issue is about inculcating the virtue of self-responsibility; state-run schemes are not exactly famed for doing that.
It is unlikely to provide a solution to things like crime. It might encourage some kids to become mildly less unruly than before, but the substance of the problem is that far too many youngsters are borne to single-parent families with no male role models. (Yes I am aware of the many children in these circumstances that turn out fine, but the general trend cannot be denied). I am not sure that coercing people into some form of state-run scheme is really going to reverse any problems, although I suppose some people might enjoy it, like the bureaucrats who will be employed to run whatever schemes get thought up.
It says something about the quality of TV “satire” that an advocate of collectively forcing the “nation’s youth” into some form of national service scheme can be voiced by a man who no doubt thinks he is a radical lefty. But then it is not really so strange at all, when you think about it.
The perception of Islamic science, perhaps properly called natural philosophy, has been shaped by Bernard Lewis and his strong programme of senescence instead of renaissance. The development of scientific knowledge follows a pre-ordained path to scientific revolution and those cultures that failed to ignite need to be explained. Is not exceptionalism the oddity? A review in the Times Literary Supplement adds to our understanding:
After all, the scientific and industrial revolutions did not occur anywhere in the world except in Europe, and therefore one needs to explain the peculiarity of European history, rather than adduce some kind of Islamic brake or blinker.
→ Continue reading: Islam’s long siesta
Perry de Havilland of this parish just loves these creatures. Here’s a great story to brighten up a rather dull, grey day in London.
I really must go on safari one day.
Patrick Crozier and various others, of whom I am one, continue to put stuff up at Transport Blog from time to time (although my contributions are not always very profound). One of the more interesting Transport Blog items of recent weeks has been this recorded conversation in which Samizdata’s own Michael Jennings talks with Patrick Crozier about low cost airlines. Says Patrick: “Here‘s my favourite bit.”
This favourite bit is worth quoting in full:
Jennings: There was an airline named ValuJet which flew a plane into the Everglades and everybody on that plane was killed. Now this sort of put a damper on the discount airlines of the US, because ValuJet was the second largest discount airline in the US at that point after South West, and it got out … once there was an investigation into this crash, it turned out that ValuJet had cut costs in all kinds of places, and in particular they’d simply neglected safety. And because the fact that this one discount airline in the US had done terribly bad things with respect to maintenance, discount airlines in the US didn’t grow as fast after that as they probably would have if this crash had not happened.
Crozier: It’s interesting that that does sort of put a kibosh on the profits-before-safety argument. If you try to put profits you lose the safety, and if you lose the safety you lose the profits.
Jennings: The interesting thing which came out of that was that discount airlines in other parts of the world really, really learned a lesson from that. Discount airlines in Europe, in particular RyanAir, which is … one of the most ferocious cost-cutting companies I’ve ever seen of any kind … it doesn’t skimp on maintenance. The lesson was learned that whatever you do, you do your maintenance properly, because if you do skimp on maintenance and a plane crashes that will be the end of you, basically.
One of Patrick Crozier’s relentless Transport Blog memes is that safety and profit are not alternatives; they go hand in hand. As he says here in connection with railways, where exactly the same equation applies:
… crashes are expensive. You lose the train, you lose passenger revenue through delays and cancellations and you probably have to rebuild the track. As a rail executive once said: “Even a minor derailment or a collision can cost a fortune. I mean millions.”
No wonder Patrick was glad to hear Michael saying a similar thing not just about airlines, but in particular about cheap airlines.
My favourite bit is where, reflecting on the impact on low cost aviation of the Second World, Michael says:
There are probably more airstrips in East Anglia than there are in all of China.
It’s not so much that I never knew that as that it had never occurred to me to even think about it.
There are lots of posters on the Tube and other places about this exhibition of Russian-owned art at London’s Royal Academy. Henry Matisse’s “The Dancers” is shown in the adverts; I am not a massive Matisse fan, but the sheer variety and quality of the work on show is tempting.
A problem I have, however, is that these works were stolen from their original buyers back in the Russian Revolution or in the 1920s (ironically, Stalin wanted to destroy some of this stuff because he considered it to be “decadent”). I am not really comfortable in looking at something that has been stolen from a private owner; I feel slightly the same way about taking tours around ancient buildings that are no longer owned by their original owners because they have been forced to sell up due to massive death duties, now transferred to such bodies as the National Trust. One might argue, of course, that aristocrats who own massive stately piles are not worth too much sympathy since their families may have come into these lands as a result of earlier hand-outs.
Oh well, I fear my curiosity will overcome my squeamishness. It pays to book early: this exhibition looks to be a sell-out. Thanks to regular Samizdata commenter Julian Taylor for suggesting that I write about this topic.
We’d all play like that… if we could.
– John Coltrane, no mean saxophone player, talking about arguably the greatest of them all, Stan Getz. His cool, silk-like style is the perfect cure for a stressful day at the office.
A number of persons placed comments about my recent article on SpaceShipTwo which showed they did not have a great deal of knowledge about the revolution in space affairs now taking place. Rather than write a long survey article I have decided to simply give you a reading list. The following is not complete by any means. These are just the names which came easily and immediately to mind on a Sunday afternoon and all are building serious hardware or providing services:
SpaceX
Blue Origin
Virgin Galactic
XCOR Aerospace
Armadillo Aerospace
Bigelow Aerospace
Masten Space
TGV Rockets
Rocketplane and Rocketplane-Kistler
Scaled Composites
Space Adventures
Orbital Outfitters
tSpace
Zero G
Starchaser Industries
Orion Propulsion
Spacedev
HMX
X-Prize
Videos about settling the Moon
National Space Society
Frontier Aerospace
Wyoming Space and Information Systems
Enjoy!
Ed: I may add more over the course of the day if the urge strikes. I know I have left out entire categories like spaceports and should probably fill in that gap if I have the time.
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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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