Shlazzargh Ars Praetorian
8y
536
I think that the fact that you can point to a specific Falcon 9 rocket and say "This rocket has flown more times than all of the Delta IV Heavy's combined" says quite a bit about how our view on rockets and reusability have changed. The D4H is an amazing rocket that does the job well -- a now it is even easier to see what a shame it was to just throw all that work in the ocean after one time. //

Wickwick
To be a bit more fair, the Delta IV flew 45 (?) times. With side cores on the Heavy variant, that’s a total of 77 total cores. For the pre-SpaceX industry, that was a respectable number. //

melgross Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
21y
9,197
Subscriptor++
stdaro said:
the sad thing, to me, is the lack of vision from the venerable old space enterprises. They had the engineering skill and the resources to scale up space access like spaceX has, but were strip mined for profit by finance bros who just saw an opportunity to demand rent from the government for the accomplishments of their predecessors.

Had the D4H been developed and evolved over time, and especially if rocketdyne had made an attempt to scale up and reduce the cost of the rs-68, we could be seeing it competing with F9H and Atlas now, instead of being abandoned.

Boeing/ULA and rocketdyne had a 40 year head start on SpaceX, but somehow ended up with raptor being the better engine, and starship being the largest launcher to ever reach orbit.
It wasn’t that management stripped them. It was a different time, when NASA and other space agencies hated the very idea of independent companies competing with them. Even the Delta was really done in conjunction with the government. not until someone at NASA, a few years ago, I forget her name, convinced them to give a contract to SpaceX, did things change. //

normally butters Ars Praefectus
17y
4,935
Boeing designed the Decatur rocket factory to produce 50 Delta IV core stages per year. This was an audacious bet on the future of commercial launch demand. Soyuz/R-7 barely achieved those annual late rates at their Soviet-era peak. Now Delta IV is retired after fewer than 50 launches all-time, although over 50 cores were flown due to the triple-core Heavy configuration.

It would take another generation for Falcon 9 to meet and exceed the flight rates that Delta IV was envisioned to support. But when that finally happened in 2022, SpaceX did it with just 4 new F9 boosters. It's the much smaller upper stage that occupies most of the stage manufacturing floor space in Hawthorne.

Ultimately, I think Boeing was looking at the same market potential we see today: LEO comsats from the likes of Orbcomm, Globalstar, and Teledesic. But the business model for those companies collapsed across the board due to high costs and the dot-com bust. They needed launch costs lower than anybody could provide at the time, even ILS Proton, and frankly they probably had cost issues with the production of their satellites as well.

The tandem duo of F9 and Starlink cracked the chicken-and-egg problem, by using vertical integration to bootstrap the new market segment rather than anticipating others putting the remaining pieces in place. //

normally butters Ars Praefectus

I think it's important to understand that RS-68 was a prime example of the kind of vision you're describing. That's what happens when the venerable old space enterprises enthusiastically take on the challenge of developing a less expensive rocket engine. RS-68 was their vision of a highly-simplified replacement for the RS-25, sacrificing performance in pursuit of lower cost. The J-2X engine developed for the Ares rockets was over 70% heavier than than Apollo-era J-2 in pursuit of simpler manufacturing.

There was once a proposal for an RS-68R evolution with a regeneratively-cooled nozzle instead of ablative cooling. But regen isn't something that's easily bolted on to an existing engine, it would have been a dramatic redesign, and the redesign process would have been very expensive. It's difficult to pay Aerojet-Rocketdyne to make their engines cheaper without the amortized cost of the redesign exceeding the unit cost reduction. That's what happened with NASA's decision to fund RS-25E development. The amortized development costs actually made each engine more expensive than the older version.

Also note that when Delta IV was being conceived by McDonnell Douglas in the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia was offering phenomenal world-beating kerolox booster engines for extremely attractive prices, and that's what designs like Delta IV would be up against. Boeing was more interested in their stake in the commercial Sea Launch venture, based on the Russian/Ukrainian Zenit rocket, than their Air Force bid. It seemed foolish to invest in kerolox engine development when it would require billions of dollars and well over a decade to match what they could buy off the shelf for the aerospace equivalent of "dirt cheap."

Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery: The security of the global internet depends on countless obscure pieces of software written and maintained by even more obscure unpaid, distractible, and sometimes vulnerable volunteers. It’s an untenable situation, and one that is being exploited by malicious actors. Yet precious little is being done to remedy it.

Author
Southworth, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte, 1819-1899

Title
Capitola's Peril
A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand'

LILY TANG WILLIAMS: Hi, my name is Lily Tang Williams. Welcome to my live free or die state. Actually, I am a Chinese immigrant who survived communism. And under Mao, you know, 40 million people were starving to death after he sold communism to them. And 20 million people died... murdered during his cultural revolution. So my question to you, David, is that can you guarantee me, a gun owner tonight, that our government in the U.S., in D.C., will never become a tyrannical government? Can you guarantee that to me?

DAVID HOGG: There's no way I can ever guarantee that any government will not be tyrannical.

LILY TANG WILLIAMS: Well then the debate on gun control is over because I will never give up my guns. And you should go to China. Never. Never. And you should go to China to see how gun control works for the dictatorship of the CCP.

Reading those headlines, you would never know that Reed fired and injured an officer before police fired upon him. Instead, the perception being pushed is that an unarmed black man was unjustly shot and killed. For context, the injured officer was black.

The bodies of the stories are no better. For example, The Washington Post's write-up doesn't mention that Reed opened fire first until the 8th paragraph. //

Much is being made about the number of times the officers fired and the fact that Reed no longer had the gun once he exited the vehicle. Both points are incredibly misleading. Once a suspect opens fire and strikes an officer, any expectation that the use of force will be limited goes out the window. At that point, the mission is to neutralize the deadly threat fully. No officer is going to count the number of shots they fire in the heat of the moment to make it look better for the press. Further, there would have been no way to know whether Reed was still armed or not after he exited the vehicle and began to move around it. That is hindsight that has no place in a fair analysis of what occurred. //

This was a justified shooting by every metric, yet one would be forgiven for speculating that members of the press want violence to occur in response to it. Why else would they go so far to cover up what actually happened? //

PetePatriot
4 minutes ago
The classic response to the question of why were so many rounds fired comes from Polk County, FL Sheriff Grady Judd who told reporters:

"'I suspect the only reason 110 rounds was all that was fired was that's all the ammunition they had,' Judd said. 'We were not going to take any chance of him shooting back.'"

On Monday, Donald Trump announced that his stance on abortion is that the states should decide the intricacies of their abortion laws within their respective territories. I found this to be a very solid move for a few reasons, chief among them is that it is the constitutional view, and it makes the abortion fight for pro-abortion groups that much harder to win. //

As I wrote later, the Republican Party could actually use this avenue of handing power to the states to great effect. They could remove a lot of the deciding power about a lot of subjects from the federal government, craft laws for the government that close the doors on these subjects forever, and hand all the deciding power to the states. They could rightfully bill it as giving the power back to the people.

This would have an insane amount of benefits. Not only would the Republican Party become the party of the people, but it would also result in far less chaos around the nation as power becomes more localized. //

I know this is a very solid path to take and that this iron is hot to strike thanks to the people being made well aware of just how bad centralized power can be, compliments of the Biden administration. The Democrats are well aware of the danger of this as well, and they actually reached out to corporate media sources to swiftly have them correct headlines about Trump's stance.

The Court's abortion decision two years ago said it was up to the individual states to restrict or permit the gruesome end-of-pregnancy operation.

Now, Donald Trump has said that is his position, too, that there should not be a one-size-fits-all policy on abortion in the form of a national ban. That is basically the same states-rights position that the Founding Fathers sought so hard to enshrine across the new government at the very beginning of our national history.

And it has also been the Republican Party's position for all these years.

Some pro-lifers want all or nothing. Now, even Trump is signaling a willingness to take the win and move on to other matters.

Satisfying photos for perfectionists - thread

We got what we wanted. And that’s what some members of our party are mad about. They want a federal law controlling abortion. Except that’s not what we promised.

It’s hard to understand how one justifies dishonesty as a political strategy. That’s what this is. They are asking that we conduct a bait and switch. We promised that every state would decide for itself, and now it’s, “No, now we’re going to decide for you.” How do you expect people to react to that? We overturned Roe with the understanding that some states would be awesome and largely ban the barbarian practice and that other states, like my own California, would declare open season on fetuses. And that’s what has happened. But you know what? Thousands and thousands of lives have been saved. In the butchery states? No, abortion continues there. But we’ve made progress. We’ve saved lives.

We have to stop making the good the enemy of the perfect and start understanding that progress is made incrementally. The left imposed Roe v. Wade, which made a huge, horrifying leap in one fell swoop. And look what happened. It got overturned in one fell swoop.

The battle against abortion is not going to end by passing a law at the federal level. It just isn’t. First of all, it’s not clear Congress even could enact one. You know, we just threw out a ruling that said the federal government could make abortion laws. //

The Democrats have been beating us around the head with abortion. What they’ll do is call us liars if we try and pass an abortion law, and they have the advantage of truth because we didn’t promise this. We promised the opposite. It’s electoral poison, and there’s a lot more at stake than abortion – free speech, economic prosperity, and peace, to name just a few. But as for abortion itself, if the Democrats get the power, they’ll legalize it up to the moment that a kid gets his driver’s license. If you want to kill more kids, push for a federal abortion ban because that is a certain way of killing more kids.

The way to change abortion is to change hearts and minds one state at a time. I wish we could wave a magic wand and make this barbaric practice disappear. But I’m not a child. I understand that even things I believe in deeply are not going to just happen through the sheer power of rightness. We’ve got a lot of work to do. We can’t just wish the practice away because we accurately assess it as horribly wrong.

Is Donald Trump immoral for feeling the way he does about abortion? There are lots of pro-life people who are ticked off at him, but these people need to understand that Donald Trump, first of all, represents most Americans’ position and, second, that he was the most successful pro-life president in American history. This man has saved thousands upon thousands of lives through his judicial appointments who tossed out Roe. Trump hasn’t betrayed anybody. He just disagrees at the margins.

Trump is looking at things realistically and, yes, politically. And he damn well better look at things politically because there’s a lot more at stake here than abortion in 2024. A lot more.

You're driving along, minding your own business, and happen to turn into a bunch of Black Lives Matter rioters who think you're trying to disrupt their "mostly peaceful" protest, so they surround your car and try to drag you out and beat you to death. This law would make it so you wouldn't have to surrender to the mob and get yourself killed.

Sounds awesome.

Smirnov reached out to Grassley in 2022 to inform him about the FD-1023 document, which detailed the alleged bribery scheme.

The FD-1023 document includes Smirnov’s claims that Burisma executives paid $5 million to Joe Biden and $5 million to Hunter Biden, while Joe Biden was still in office as vice president. Smirnov also claims that the Bidens were paid so that Joe Biden could help to quash criminal investigation into Burisma being conducted by then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

The letter notes that the indictment “leaves many questions unanswered,” which includes, 

“how the Justice Department and FBI could use this Confidential Human Source for approximately 14 years, pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars, use this information in investigations and prosecutions, and the ultimately determine he’s a liar.”

I'm happy to inform you that NPR has told NPR that NPR is doing just fine. That includes a doubling down on the DEI regiment that has led the network to reduced viewership and a cratering of its credibility.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment. 

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

Without realizing it, Chapin has just admitted the primary problem with forcing "inclusion" by way of racially-based diversity quotas. Doing so does not lead to an increased range of viewpoints. Instead, because DEI is exclusively a left-wing pursuit, it leads to an overabundance of the same viewpoints in the newsroom. Far from being "critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world," it has led to NPR having no nuance in its reporting, instead parroting whatever its far-left staffers agree on.

One of Berliner's colleagues provided a heated response on the matter. 

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

Again, the problem is demonstrated by the misplaced priorities being displayed. The goal of NPR's newsroom shouldn't be for this person to walk in and see people "who look like me." It should be to report the news honestly and fairly, without the bias that left-wing groupthink creates. 

As Berliner noted, his critique was about the lack of viewpoint diversity, not about the number of minorities on staff. It would be conceivable to increase the number of black reporters in the newsroom, for example, without creating a left-wing echo chamber. That would require hiring black reporters who are not died-in-the-wool Democrats, though, and NPR does not have a single Republican on its editorial staff.

The House of Representatives failed to pass legislation renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a controversial provision allowing federal agencies to spy on noncitizens without a warrant.

Amid a strong push to “KILL FISA” from former President Donald Trump, more than a dozen Republican lawmakers voted against the measure, which would have renewed Section 702 for another five years. //

If Congress fails to pass legislation renewing Section 702 by the April 19 deadline, it is poised to sunset. This could signal that the tool might no longer be available for federal agencies to use for surveillance purposes.

Take a trip down memory lane with our video, "20 Things From The 1960s, Kids Today Will Never Understand!" Explore the charming and amusing aspects of 1960s America that are sure to bring a smile to your face. From classic toys to iconic TV shows, join us as we reminisce about a simpler time that kids today may find puzzling yet endearing.

In Federalist 83, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the plan of the Constitution is that the powers granted to Congress

“shall extend to certain enumerated cases. This specification of particulars evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority, because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd as well as useless if a general authority was intended.”

This sounds so good. But it appears that he lied to us.

Perhaps Hamilton meant what he wrote at that time. But, once he became Secretary of the Treasury under President Washington, he did everything in his power to violate his own maxim. His scheme for the Bank of the United States is just one example. Where, o’ where does the Constitution provide Congress with the power to create a bank, or for that matter, any business corporation? Naturally, my question is rhetorical. //

And yet Hamilton, once he tasted power, quickly turned to “loose constructionism.” Indeed, his story is that of nearly every person in history who has exercised significant power. Man turns towards evil, and evil men (and women) love power. Many of us are familiar with Lord Acton’s “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” dictum. However, I think Erick von Kuehnelt-Leddin said it best: “A good man will not be corrupted by power, and a bad man will be corrupted with no power at all.” (Leftism Revisited, 317)

Hamilton’s problem is ours today in spades. Nearly all of us having fallen for the trap of loose constructionism, especially those who exercise power over us. We daily practice it- in the way we read our laws and the way we read things like the Bible. In fact, the proliferation of laws and regulations demands that we become loose constructionists, for if we tried to abide by the 4,000 plus new regulations our federal government promulgates each year, we couldn’t even live life. In this manner, the entire culture has been corrupted.

There are many today who support such things as a Convention of the States to redress the train wreck we are about to witness.

But unless we have a revival of strict constructionism, especially regarding higher law in our Constitutions and Scripture, we will merely change cars on the same doomed train.

NASA. You might think of NASA as the place for “rocket scientists.” A place where really smart people aren’t shackled by DEI hires and “every culture is equal” nonsense. NASA, where steely-eyed missile men went from a John Kennedy speech to building Titan rockets and sending men to the moon in less than a decade. Steely-eyed missile men are so last century. We need equity hires, diversity ambassadors, and indigenous science.

On Monday, during the total eclipse of the sun, America also had a total eclipse by the dumb. //

I dug a little deeper to see what NASA is doing in its search to auger-in the next rocket launch. NASA, under Biden, has pushed hard for DEI, including awarding contracts to “underserved communities” and hiring a diversity ambassador, and is pushing employees to include pronouns in emails. So, it is no shock that NASA is in the fifth year of a 14-year partnership with the Navajo Nation. Why? NASA views the Navajo as particularly “sciency.” //

Cowboysurfpunk
23 minutes ago
... Blinded by the Light... ;)

If you want to run a multiplayer server for Minecraft, start by downloading the Bedrock Dedicated Server for either Windows or Ubuntu (Linux).

If you are interested in modding Bedrock Server, you can find protocol documentation https://github.com/Mojang/bedrock-protocol-docs

I hear a lot about a "uni-party," or the belief that the Republican and Democrat parties are one and the same. While it's not entirely true, it's not necessarily wrong either. While there are definitely Republicans who would be more suited with a "D" next to their name, the Republican Party does have a number of people in it who actually understood their assignment.

The reason the "uni-party" label works so well is because the Republican Party might have different goals but ultimately, they think the way to achieve them is to do what Democrats do to achieve their goals, and that's to grow the government. //

If Republicans truly wanted to distance themselves from Democrats, then the solution is actually simple. They need to remember what their core purpose is. It's not to make laws, it's to unmake laws. At some point, Republicans largely lost their appetite for shrinking government and chose instead to grow it for their own purposes. //

The goal is to get power out of the federal government's hands, and not just on this subject. Any decision-making power we can take from Washington, we should. The Republican party's goal is ultimately to decentralize the power in America, not make the federal government bend to its will, which has always been a temporary thing and a losing battle in the long run. //

If Republicans truly want to stop the Democrats from exerting and abusing as much power as they do, the solution is to take that power out of their hands and give it to the people. As our government is constantly in a tug-of-war between two parties, it doesn't make sense to grow the federal government's power, which will only serve to make the abuse of power worse as time goes on.

Republicans should endeavor to shrink the power of the federal government whenever they're in office and the only laws they should write are laws that close the doors on the federal government's power for good. [forever] //

Cafeblue32 Laocoön of Troy
a day ago
Coolidge is more famous for what he didn't say and do than what he did. He was known for saying little, and his response to the recession he faced was to leave it alone and let business right its own ship, which it did in a matter of months, and led to the Roaring 20s. //

Laocoön of Troy Cafeblue32
a day ago edited
The post-WWI Republican Congress rejected the Treaty of Versailles. They passed laws removing US troops from Europe. They dismantled Wilson's endless agencies, commissions, boards, bureaus, and other administrative offices. They ended food rationing, price controls, censorship, the Gestapo-like American Protective League, and released German and other ethnic prisoners Wilson imprisoned for the duration of the war.

In my opinion the post-WWI Republican Congress was far more important. //

anon-js5k
a day ago
Recently, when Larry Elder was asked, if Trump wanted Larry Elder to be a part of his Cabinet, which department would Larry want to be the secretary for. His answer was quick and to the point. He said he would like to head the Department of Education and that his goal as Secretary would be to eliminate the department and subsequently his job as head of that department. That is what a true conservative Republican would do.

When Biden recently passed an order to make it harder to layoff or fire a government employee, Elder's response shows how to circumvent what Biden did. If the Department of Education no longer exist, firing is no longer an issue. The DoE should have never existed in the first place. By extension the national teachers would lose their clout with the federal government, both of which have too much power over local districts, including budgets and policies.

In a historic decision Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled the state must adhere to a 123-year-old penal code provision barring all abortions except in cases when “it is necessary to save” a pregnant person’s life.

The law, which can be traced to as early as 1864, also carried a prison sentence of two to five years for abortion providers.

Last year, Democrats split up the terms “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” in the Minnesota Human Rights Act, and that meant religious organizations still had an exemption for not hiring on the basis of “sexual orientation,” but that exemption no longer applies to “gender identity.”

When these two terms were split in the Minnesota Human Rights Act, we thought the ramifications on religious exemptions were accidental. //

Throughout this year’s committee process, it became very clear that the folks who pushed this change had no intention of extending the exemptions to “gender identity.”

Recently, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard the bill during an evening hearing but waited until 12:30 a.m. to bring the bill up for discussion. Issues of this significance should never be discussed under the cover of darkness. Republicans offered an amendment that would have extended the religious exemption to include to the new “gender identity” term, but Democrats did not support that change. This bill will now be considered for inclusion in the Omnibus Judiciary bill.

This is alarming because in this bill S. F. 4292, it means that religious organizations can now be held legally accountable if they choose to not hire someone of a certain “gender identity,” regardless of their religious beliefs. This is a blatant infringement on constitutional rights. The government cannot prohibit the free exercise of religion according to the 1st Amendment and the U.S. Supreme Court has reaffirmed this throughout our history. That means we are dealing with an unconstitutional law.

Earlier this year a Democrat senator went on record stating that constitutionality shouldn’t matter when legislators are writing their bills. I disagree – it is our duty to know the potential constitutional ramifications that our laws may have. The government cannot compel churches and religious organizations to abandon their deeply held religious beliefs.