Slashdot Mirror

Jerry Pournelle commented on Roswell recently: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail473.html#Ro swell. Pournelle says that because he was involved with the USAF Project 75 technology survey, he would have had access to any information that could have helped with defense planning. He originally suspected that the USAF had dropped a nuke that didn't exploded ("laid an egg" as he puts it) near Roswell.

others have posted that you probably can't spot wrecks in deep water in visible light. however, cosmic ray backscattering (similar to muon radiography) can evidently spot submarines and whales, even from orbit

Not sure what you want me to say. It's no great secret that Niven hosted, and I chaired, the meetings in Tarzana that drafted the space defense policy transition team papers, and that we continued to submit papers through the National Security Advisor that were taken directly to President Reagan. The SDI policies were jointly developed by a number of organizations. The late General Dan Graham was in DC and developed much of the political support both grass roots and working with the services and the White House. My Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy argued for strategic defense in line with the "Assured Survival" chapter of The Strategy of Technology by Stefan Possony and Jerry Pournelle (1970). Strategy of Technology was used as a textbook in service academies, and had some influence over cadets who later became senior officers.

We later developed and advocated the DC/X as part of a technology for making America a Space-faring Nation again (a goal advocated by the Council). Some of the DC/X story including a picture of me, General Graham, and Max Hunter presenting the DC/X pitch to the Chairman of the National Space Council (VP Dan Quayle), and some discussion can be found here.

I probably should update the space papers section of this web site, but it's one more thing to do and I don't have anyone to do it but me. The best summary I have managed is found here.

The story of the Council and how Niven and I "brought down the Soviet Union" has been told in a number of places including a BBC special filmed here and at Niven's house that at one time got considerable exposure, but I suspect it is no longer available; I certainly don't know where it is. That, of course, is an overstatement. SDI was certainly crucial; Gorbachev has often said so. If one had to name a single individual as the most important in getting SDI adopted as a national policy, it would have to be General Dan Graham, who stayed in Washington and coordinated political, military, and scientific efforts into a single policy; and kept those policy recommendations at the forefront of discussion. This was particularly important after the first National Security Advisors (Dick Allen and Judge Clarke) left the White House. SDI would not have been adopted without General Graham.

Dan has said he couldn't have done it without me, and immodestly I have to agree; but I couldn't have done any of this without many others. Niven's role was as host and providing an atmosphere in which a meeting of 70 influential and often temperamental people could spend weekends working on policy; the atmosphere of a high tech California millionaire's home was crucial in keeping people polite and allowing me to chair the meetings. Mrs. Marilyn Niven and a number of volunteers provided gourmet meals for this crowd in the early meetings. Later meetings were held in my home and Mrs. Roberta Pournelle was hostess and provided the meals and atmosphere. DC/X was designed and the briefing that brought it to life was written in those meetings at my home with Roberta as hostess.

And do note that I was chairman, not dictator; the SDI papers were drafted by over 70 people including Buzz Aldrin, Phil Chapman, Lowell Wood, John McCarthy, Danny Hillis, the invaluable Stefan Possony, George Merrick, Dr. Gould, the late Max Hunter, Greg Benford, the late Harry Stine, and many others, some now famous and some not. The reports were effective in large part because we had Robert Heinlein, Poul Ande

Not sure what you want me to say. It's no great secret that Niven hosted, and I chaired, the meetings in Tarzana that drafted the space defense policy transition team papers, and that we continued to submit papers through the National Security Advisor that were taken directly to President Reagan. The SDI policies were jointly developed by a number of organizations. The late General Dan Graham was in DC and developed much of the political support both grass roots and working with the services and the White House. My Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy argued for strategic defense in line with the "Assured Survival" chapter of The Strategy of Technology by Stefan Possony and Jerry Pournelle (1970). Strategy of Technology was used as a textbook in service academies, and had some influence over cadets who later became senior officers.

We later developed and advocated the DC/X as part of a technology for making America a Space-faring Nation again (a goal advocated by the Council). Some of the DC/X story including a picture of me, General Graham, and Max Hunter presenting the DC/X pitch to the Chairman of the National Space Council (VP Dan Quayle), and some discussion can be found here.

I probably should update the space papers section of this web site, but it's one more thing to do and I don't have anyone to do it but me. The best summary I have managed is found here.

The story of the Council and how Niven and I "brought down the Soviet Union" has been told in a number of places including a BBC special filmed here and at Niven's house that at one time got considerable exposure, but I suspect it is no longer available; I certainly don't know where it is. That, of course, is an overstatement. SDI was certainly crucial; Gorbachev has often said so. If one had to name a single individual as the most important in getting SDI adopted as a national policy, it would have to be General Dan Graham, who stayed in Washington and coordinated political, military, and scientific efforts into a single policy; and kept those policy recommendations at the forefront of discussion. This was particularly important after the first National Security Advisors (Dick Allen and Judge Clarke) left the White House. SDI would not have been adopted without General Graham.

Dan has said he couldn't have done it without me, and immodestly I have to agree; but I couldn't have done any of this without many others. Niven's role was as host and providing an atmosphere in which a meeting of 70 influential and often temperamental people could spend weekends working on policy; the atmosphere of a high tech California millionaire's home was crucial in keeping people polite and allowing me to chair the meetings. Mrs. Marilyn Niven and a number of volunteers provided gourmet meals for this crowd in the early meetings. Later meetings were held in my home and Mrs. Roberta Pournelle was hostess and provided the meals and atmosphere. DC/X was designed and the briefing that brought it to life was written in those meetings at my home with Roberta as hostess.

And do note that I was chairman, not dictator; the SDI papers were drafted by over 70 people including Buzz Aldrin, Phil Chapman, Lowell Wood, John McCarthy, Danny Hillis, the invaluable Stefan Possony, George Merrick, Dr. Gould, the late Max Hunter, Greg Benford, the late Harry Stine, and many others, some now famous and some not. The reports were effective in large part because we had Robert Heinlein, Poul Ande

Don't get me wrong, I liked The Mote In God's Eye, but I wish he'd write more SF and less political analysis.

"Good science fiction writers...?"

You must not be familiar with Niven and Pournelle!

As for "a bunch of wild directions" both are grounded in their science. SCIENCE, not wild ideas. Both are adept at looking at on-the-edge break throughs and figuring out the impact it could have on society. For instance, there has been increasing news reports about the sale of the organs of political prisoners in China. Rich people can get whatever they need for a few tens of thousands of dollars. Of course it's all illegal but that is no problem when there are corrupt officials. All of this is no surprise to those of us who read Niven's work in the 1970s. He called them "Organ-leggers."

Oh, and Pournelle has also been a successful computer columnist for many years. His "Chaos Manor" column was one of the best things in Byte magazine. Do check out his Chaos Manor Reviews at http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/ and his Chaos Manor Musings at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/index.html.

Depending on your interpretation of history, it could be argued that this was one of the things that let to the collapse of the Soviet Union as they couldn't compete with the proposed SDI technologies.

Yeah, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that locks on the doors on 9/11 could have been useful, but really some blue sky thinking will do no harm.

Like First Blogger Dr. Jerry Pournelle
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/currentview.htm l
I was opposed to Shrub's Folly.

But, I'm also a Red Crosser, and don't want GI Joes and Janes to have a maximally frackked experience.

A little bit of humanity protects dogfaces from PTSD. It sucketh massively to grow another crop of PTSD'd zombie combat vets like so many of buds who went to 'Nam and left their souls there. I want to protect them, for if they don't turn into stone-faced killers, and stay human, they'll kill less innocent Iraqis, and come home saner.

Let's leave alone the stuff that's above their pay grade, and instead of being fruitlessly political, go ponder how to assure this doesn't happen again, eh?

As Jerry Pournelle (long of Chaos Manor from Byte Magazine in ages past) has noted

The LA Times has a We Hate Gates series. Most of the press seems to have a similar crusade against Apple. One wonders if some press consortium has sold Apple stock short and is working to make it come true?

Because whatever irregularities in the stock option of many years ago, Jobs has taken Apple from a struggling company to a major player, and the stockholders were rewarded with a 1200% stock value increase.

Why regulations designed to protect minority stockholders are now being used to smear Jobs is a story someone with more resources than I have should dig into. I doubt it's really coincidence.

Jerry Pournelle has some data that make it sound feasible.
A mass ratio of 17 (5.9% payload) with RL-10 engines doesn't sound too bad for a start.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy

Jerry Pournelle, as in Chaos Manor?

WinNT did not fail. On a test platform, not an operational ship, running non-release versions of software: A client application accepted incorrect input. A server application accepted this bad data, performed a bad calculation, and corrupted it's database. Client apps that tried to use this database crashed. These events are OS independent, the same thing would have happened under MacOS X or Linux. The publisher of the original article that blamed WinNT later distanced themselves from the article calling it "early speculation".

The chief engineer on the ship at the time, and the developer of the application software, seem to say that the problem was not with WinNT:

http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198techbus2.h tml

"Others insist that NT was not the culprit. According to Lieutenant Commander Roderick Fraser, who was the chief engineer on board the ship at the time of the incident, the fault was with certain applications that were developed by CAE Electronics in Leesburg, Va. As Harvey McKelvey, former director of navy programs for CAE, admits, "If you want to put a stick in anybody's eye, it should be in ours." But McKelvey adds that the crash would not have happened if the navy had been using a production version of the CAE software, which he asserts has safeguards to prevent the type of failure that occurred."

The captain at the time does further debunking:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/yorkt own.html#Schwartz1

In a letter to the "Comment and Discussion" department, published in the Aug 98 _Naval_Institute_Proceedings_, page 22, Captain Richard T. Rushton, then-CO of _Yorktown_, categorically states, "The _Yorktown_ was never towed as a result of any Smart Ship initiative. During my command, we lost propulsion power twice while using the new technology. Each time, we knew what caused the interrupt and were underway again in about 30 minutes. The September 1997 incident was caused by incorrect data insertion by a well-trained crewman. The _Yorktown_ returned to port using two FFG-7 emergency control units that specifically had been requested by me, and supported by other commands as a risk reducer. We knew there were some risks in the engineering development model propulsion-control system installed under a rapid prototyping development effort. The bottom line: The data field safeguards found in production-level systems were not installed yet in the _Yorktown_ by intention, until complete wring-out was accomplished."

TESTS If anyone does have a candidate device for producing reactionless acceleration -- that is, linear acceleration without throwing mass overboard and without reacting with a medium such as air or water -- the first test is to suspend it on two wires attached so that the plane of the two wires is normal to the direction of thrust-- that is, make a swing and put your gadget on it facing in the normal direction of travel of the swing. Now turn it on. If it will hang non-vertically, get interested. Now cover it with a plastic garbage bag and see if it will still hang non-vertically. If it will still do so, turn it off, and if it settles to a vertical angle, and you can do this repeatedly, and it hasn't lost any mass during the experiments, call your local physics professor. Or call me. I'll take care of notifying the Swedish Academy. But until it will do that, I don't need to look at it...

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2m ail/mail381.html#tractatus

None other than "the" John Carmack has an enlightening rebuttal to the Register article. This is the John Carmack that has "a bit" of experience in turning easy to acquire checmicals into rocket fuels.

The link is here: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail428.html#Ca rmack

Oh, and this should remind people that the register cannot even be taken seriously as a source for IT news.. much less anything important. When will people learn?

And maybe he knows something of the chemistry and application of high energy compounds from his rocket work:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view427.html#Ca rmack

Microsoft Chrome predates it. 3D web pages in a browser, stacked around the surface of a cube - http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/peter_g/melt down.html

Microsoft Chrome predates it. 3D web pages in a browser, stacked around the surface of a cube - http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/peter_g/melt down.html

The 26 hour turnaround was for the DC-X.

And people forget that the DC-X was a concept vehicle, to prove that the technology existed and could be adapted to VTOL rockets. It was Pete Conrad's dream to take the DC-X and expand it, and make it a viable competitor for space commerce, a dream he saw dashed when the DC-X crashed during a test in July 1995.

--------
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/topics/gettospace.ht ml#prizes

Jerry Pournelle Wrote:

"I can solve the space access problem with a few sentences.

Be it enacted by the Congress of the United States:

The Treasurer of the United States is directed to pay to the first American owned company (if corporate at least 60% of the shares must be held by American citizens) the following sums for the following accomplishments. No monies shall be paid until the goals specified are accomplished and certified by suitable experts from the National Science Foundation or the National Academy of Science:

1. The sum of $2 billion to be paid for construction of 3 operational spacecraft which have achieved low earth orbit, returned to earth, and flown to orbit again three times in a period of three weeks.

2. The sum of $5 billion to be paid for construction and maintenance of a space station which has been continuously in orbit with at least 5 Americans aboard for a period of not less than three years and one day. The crew need not be the same persons for the entire time, but at no time shall the station be unoccupied.

3. The sum of $12 billion to be paid for construction and maintenance of a Lunar base in which no fewer than 31 Americans have continuously resided for a period of not less than four years and one day.

4. The sum of $10 billion to be paid for construction and maintenance of a solar power satellite system which delivers at least 800 megaWatts of electric power to a receiving station or stations in the United States for a period of at least two years and one day.

5. The payments made shall be exempt from all US taxes.

That would do it. Not one cent to be paid until the goals are accomplished. Not a bit of risk, and if it can't be done for those sums, well, no harm done to the treasury."

------------

The problem is our GOVERNMENT DOESN'T WANT TO DO IT

Jerry Pournelle, the accomplished science fiction and computer author, has similar advice. Read what he has to say on writing in his essay How To Get My Job.

Hmmm it seems Pournelle is still around. I haven't seen a web site like that since 1999!

Even though Byte is dead, their web site continues with Pournelle's column - he even wrote one recently about Boot Camp. Warning, visionary pearls of wisdom inside!

You must be young. This has been going on for as long as I can remember. NASA has done the groundwork for at least seven or eight systems since it became clear the shuttle would never live up to its billing in the early 1980s. They never happen because the shuttle employs 20,000 people, and while the next program, whatever it is, may employ the same number of people, they won't be the same people in the same congressional districts.

Look at CEV. Instead of using cheaper, lower performance (but certainly adequate) boosters, the current plan is to use SSME. Why? So all the current shuttle workers can work on the next project, and the same contractors can stay on the gravy train working under the same NASA project managers. Without that CEV would never happen either.

NASA has become an agency all about self-preservation. It doesn't matter who's in Congress or the White House, the first priority of any established bureaucracy is to grow. Sci-fi writer Jerry Pournelle calls it "Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: Those whose interests are in furthering the organization rather than its goals always get in charge of any bureaucracy."

NASA has done some good work in the past, and until very recently NASA made progress with robotics and even scramjets. But the manned space program is the one that's easiest to sell to the public, so it's become "the monster that ate the budget". Over the next few years manned spaceflight will become the only thing NASA does.

Unfortunately, real progress will have to happen under the USAF as black projects the bureaucrats at NASA don't know about, and thus can't kill.

can be found here
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2m ail/mail359.html#fusion

If you really a fun portrayal of this sort of thing, watch the evade-the-British-captors scene in the 1995 version of Rob Roy [imdb.com],

Or for another quite amusing portrayal, you could read this

Being a dog owner, you might a real kick out of it.

"Thirty years ago the Europeans used to say that Americans got a very good high school education. Of course they had to go to four years of college to get it.

That was true then; it is not true now. Even four years of college doesn't always (perhaps not even frequently; I don't have hard data, but see the survey yesterday) produce as good an education as did Memphis Central High School or Memphis Technical High School in 1950."

From jerrypournelle.com

The slashdot crowd just wants to bully us into working for free

> First, the ship did not need to be towed back into port, though it did sit dead in the water for a bit ..

"The ship had to be towed into the Naval base at Norfolk, Va., because a database overflow caused its propulsion system to fail, according to Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk."

"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio said

Curiously enough DiGiorgio later wrote a retraction and 'resigned` from the Navy as did Vice Adm. Henry Giffin.

"DiGiorgio denies reported statements"

"I did not say that the Yorktown was towed into Norfolk"

http://www.gcn.com/17_20/news/33292-1.html

"Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office, said there have been numerous software failures associated with NT aboard the Yorktown."

"Refining that is an ongoing process," Redman said. "Unix is a better system for control of equipment and machinery, whereas NT is a better system for the transfer of information and data. NT has never been fully refined and there are times when we have had shutdowns that resulted from NT."

"The Yorktown has been towed into port several times because of the systems failures" [Ron Redman - Aegis]

"This is the only time this casualty has occurred and the only propulsion casualty involved with the control system since May 2, 1997, when software configuration was frozen," Vice Adm. Henry Giffin

> Second, the problem was in the software running on top of Windows

But the software made a call to Windows to divide by zero and Windows made a call to the fpu which did just that.

http://www.slothmud.org/~hayward/mic_humor/nt_navy .html

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/yorkt own.html

Widely accepted by concpiracy kooks it seems. From what I've read, most modern submariners and even recent military surface navymen have shot holes through the Shkval/Kursk theory.

My favorite was this one at the bottom:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/kursk .html

I used to love reading Steve Ciarcia's "Circuit Cellar". I first started reading his article in the print edition of "Byte magazine" before he started his own magazine. Along the same lines I also liked to read Jerry Pournelle's "Chaos Manor" in the same magazine.

Thank you. The quote is from Dr. Pournelle. I've heard him say it a numuber of times and taken to using it myself.

Gerry Pournelle wants a billion dollars and three years to put this all back on track. Personally, I think he'd do better than the bureaucrats. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view372.html#NA SA

The argument works both ways.

There are active examples of human eugenics. This isn't a flame or a troll. I wanted to preface it before I continued. Nor is this a bigoted statement.

Ashkenazi Jews are often considered to select for intelligence when breeding. They have the highest IQs for humans on average.

This is what they deal with as a consequence of this selection for intelligence:

http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displa ystory/story_id/26134/edition_id/505/format/html/d isplaystory.html/

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/cochran/over clocking.html

Also, I have friends who work in insurance. The Askenazis have high cancer rates and are essentially discriminated against in the insurance world because they tend to be very sickly.

Cheetahs overspecialize and are near extinction.

My favorite quote for this instance is from Ghost in the Shell: "Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness."

The film CUBE also touched on this a little bit, but suggested that the ideal form for future life was not human at all, but machine. Great fucking movie.

Human are conditioned to seek out these extremes and superlatives, when evolution suggests that the most succesful human form is possibly the most populous.

The article you refer to was written by a /.er with the handle of Rei who is the most mindless pro-NASA whore I have ever seen. At one point she claimed that crystals grown on shuttle missions had been used to invent certain forms of insulin. Of course the fact that these forms of insulin (Lente and NPH) which had actually been on the market for decades before the first Shuttle launch.

The big advantage of Scaled Composites and the other rocket shops is that they aren't big, stupid, brutally inefficient, Soviet style bureaucracies like the NASA manned space flight program is. Jerry Pournelle has some good ideas on how to fix NASA and get us back into space without spending much more money than we do now. Unfortunately implementing his ideas would cost lots of NASA employees their cushy jobs and would break up the monopoly cartel that Boeing and LockMart have on launch vehicles, which is something that Congress, which gets lots of money from Boeing LockMart, isn't going to allow.

The problem is that the calculations are too close to show whether you could put a useful payload into orbit. You wouldn't be able to tell until you built and flew something.

Of course those calculations are with off the shelf technology. You need a proper X program (not a high-tech jobs program like X-33 *gag*) to resolve whether the concept works, or at least to resolve what technologies need to be improved to make it work.

Remember, for a long time it was authoritatively believed to be impossible to fly faster than the speed of sound. And even after that was accomplished, for a while the only payload was the pilot.

Another article on the subject from Jerry Pournelle, who is hardly in the administration camp. End of story I'd say.

Note that she was in the CIA even with the twins, no way she was undercover after she got married basically.

The blog with the highest signal/noise ratio I've ever seen is Jerry Pournelle's site. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/, with daily updates on his "current mail" and "current view" pages. No fancy bling on his pages, just the well thought out views of a former presidential advisor on space and military technology, a global traveller, BYTE magazine columnist, and a popular science fiction writer.

Fuel isn't the cost driver for this kind of venture. VTOL is a great way to save on operational costs, since you can pick your exact landing spot instead of landing wherever the wind takes you. The technical challenges of vertical landing aren't insurmountable, as they've been overcome by at least three groups I can think of (Armadillo, JSA, and USAF).

The real problem with vertical landing isn't cost, it's weight. You have to carry all the fuel you plan to use in you landing throughout every stage of the flight. For a sub-orbital shot that's no big deal, but building a VTOL orbital rocket that has any sort of reasonable payload is quite a technical challenge. This is the best discussion of the topic I'm familiar with.

Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor has carried a page about Cochran's work for the last three years. And Jerry is no stranger to slashdotters.

Ahhhh, only if they still printed "Byte magazine". As far as I'm concerned it was the best computer magazine. I especially loved Jerry Pournelle's "Chaos Manor" and Steve Ciarcia's "Circuit Cellar".

Rei, Jerry Pournelle is most decidedly not an idiot. He's been at this space stuff a long time, and not just in SF. If you're interested in a practical (operational) strategy for CATS, read Getting To Space and The SSX Concept. You may not agree with everything, but I've read enough of your posts to believe you'll agree with most of it, or at least acknowledge the possibilities.

Orbital Sciences Corp would get 2 billion dollars just for strapping a heat shield to one of their Pegasus rockets instead of a payload - congrats we just wasted 1/3 of a CEV's development cost to accomplish nothing. Or did you not already know that private companies, using private funds, have already launched orbital rockets? It's not a very profitable business - that's why there aren't too many companies doing it.

I'm not sure you read the prize specification as intended. By "spacecraft" he's not talking about a missile, but rather a manned ship. Also, assuming you weren't talking about manned craft, if you attached a heat shield to Pegasus you're still a long way from having a spaceship you can land and reuse in two weeks. I don't think two billion dollars is out of line for a manned, reusable, orbital spacecraft. We don't have the capability, and given the past history of NASA projects, you're making quite an assumption to say 2 billion is 1/3 of CEV's development. It'll probably end up being more like 1/20th. The great thing about a prize-type contract is it doesn't cost anything if they don't deliver, and it never goes over budget.

Number 3 would never be done without subsidy. The costs are way off. I can do a breakdown if you'd like on what construction and supply costs would be during that period.

Well then, it wouldn't cost anything to put the prize out there, would it? Even if you and I can't see a way to do it, perhaps it could still be done. I'm not convinced it's impossible if the emphasis was on operational costs.

Number 4 makes no sense - why offer a prize for a *specific* clean power technology? The numbers are also way off on this one. Here, do the math: 1,367 W/m^2 (optimal), 35% conversion efficiency (very good), 5% beaming efficiency (far better than currently available). 800MW = 334 million square meters. Assuming 0.1 kg per square meter (light for high efficiency cells), that's 34 million kilograms (ignoring support eq., such as heliostats, orbit correction, transmission, etc). At a launch price of 7,000$/kg (cheap), that's 233 billion dollars.

The reason for having a specific technology is the power generating capability is only half the goal. The other half is to develop an infrastructure for cheap access to space. There's no reason to assume launch costs of $7000/kg. Yes, that's cheap today because every mission is a one-off. Think about this, though: If the prizes were done in order, you would conceivably have a reusable spacecraft before you went to tackle this one. There's no reason I can see you couldn't build an SSTO craft which could be flown often enough that the major component of the operational cost was fuel.

It's possible you could only get the cost down to $6999/kg, in which case you're right, the numbers won't work. The reality is we just don't know what could be done because nobody's tried it. Fuel is you're only absolute operational cost - the others could conceivably be attacked with great success under the right conditions.

Also, the prize doesn't specify the power station would have to be turned over to the government. So as a potential investor it wouldn't be out of line to consider the post-prize profit from power generation.

p.s. What the hell is a "duelist of Dios?"

Rei, Jerry Pournelle is most decidedly not an idiot. He's been at this space stuff a long time, and not just in SF. If you're interested in a practical (operational) strategy for CATS, read Getting To Space and The SSX Concept. You may not agree with everything, but I've read enough of your posts to believe you'll agree with most of it, or at least acknowledge the possibilities.

Orbital Sciences Corp would get 2 billion dollars just for strapping a heat shield to one of their Pegasus rockets instead of a payload - congrats we just wasted 1/3 of a CEV's development cost to accomplish nothing. Or did you not already know that private companies, using private funds, have already launched orbital rockets? It's not a very profitable business - that's why there aren't too many companies doing it.

I'm not sure you read the prize specification as intended. By "spacecraft" he's not talking about a missile, but rather a manned ship. Also, assuming you weren't talking about manned craft, if you attached a heat shield to Pegasus you're still a long way from having a spaceship you can land and reuse in two weeks. I don't think two billion dollars is out of line for a manned, reusable, orbital spacecraft. We don't have the capability, and given the past history of NASA projects, you're making quite an assumption to say 2 billion is 1/3 of CEV's development. It'll probably end up being more like 1/20th. The great thing about a prize-type contract is it doesn't cost anything if they don't deliver, and it never goes over budget.

Number 3 would never be done without subsidy. The costs are way off. I can do a breakdown if you'd like on what construction and supply costs would be during that period.

Well then, it wouldn't cost anything to put the prize out there, would it? Even if you and I can't see a way to do it, perhaps it could still be done. I'm not convinced it's impossible if the emphasis was on operational costs.

Number 4 makes no sense - why offer a prize for a *specific* clean power technology? The numbers are also way off on this one. Here, do the math: 1,367 W/m^2 (optimal), 35% conversion efficiency (very good), 5% beaming efficiency (far better than currently available). 800MW = 334 million square meters. Assuming 0.1 kg per square meter (light for high efficiency cells), that's 34 million kilograms (ignoring support eq., such as heliostats, orbit correction, transmission, etc). At a launch price of 7,000$/kg (cheap), that's 233 billion dollars.

The reason for having a specific technology is the power generating capability is only half the goal. The other half is to develop an infrastructure for cheap access to space. There's no reason to assume launch costs of $7000/kg. Yes, that's cheap today because every mission is a one-off. Think about this, though: If the prizes were done in order, you would conceivably have a reusable spacecraft before you went to tackle this one. There's no reason I can see you couldn't build an SSTO craft which could be flown often enough that the major component of the operational cost was fuel.

It's possible you could only get the cost down to $6999/kg, in which case you're right, the numbers won't work. The reality is we just don't know what could be done because nobody's tried it. Fuel is you're only absolute operational cost - the others could conceivably be attacked with great success under the right conditions.

Also, the prize doesn't specify the power station would have to be turned over to the government. So as a potential investor it wouldn't be out of line to consider the post-prize profit from power generation.

p.s. What the hell is a "duelist of Dios?"

Jerry Pournelle is way ahead of you.

"I can solve the space access problem with a few sentences.

"Be it enacted by the Congress of the United States:

"The Treasurer of the United States is directed to pay to the first American owned company (if corporate at least 60% of the shares must be held by American citizens) the following sums for the following accomplishments. No monies shall be paid until the goals specified are accomplished and certified by suitable experts from the National Science Foundation or the National Academy of Science:

"1. The sum of $2 billion to be paid for construction of 3 operational spacecraft which have achieved low earth orbit, returned to earth, and flown to orbit again three times in a period of three weeks.

"2. The sum of $5 billion to be paid for construction and maintenance of a space station which has been continuously in orbit with at least 5 Americans aboard for a period of not less than three years and one day. The crew need not be the same persons for the entire time, but at no time shall the station be unoccupied.

"3. The sum of $12 billion to be paid for construction and maintenance of a Lunar base in which no fewer than 31 Americans have continuously resided for a period of not less than four years and one day.

"4. The sum of $10 billion to be paid for construction and maintenance of a solar power satellite system which delivers at least 800 megaWatts of electric power to a receiving station or stations in the United States for a period of at least two years and one day.

"5. The payments made shall be exempt from all US taxes.

"That would do it. Not one cent to be paid until the goals are accomplished. Not a bit of risk, and if it can't be done for those sums, well, no harm done to the treasury.

"Henry Vanderbilt points out that having a prize, say $1 billion, for the second firm to achieve point (1) above will get more into the competition, and produce better results. I agree.

[The Shuttle] is extremely risky for the crews who fly it because, while its mission reliability is no worse than other launch vehicles, there is seldom any possibility of crew escape in the event of an anomaly.

In a letter to the "Comment and Discussion" department, published in the Aug 98 _Naval_Institute_Proceedings_, page 22, Captain Richard T. Rushton, then-CO of _Yorktown_, categorically states, "The _Yorktown_ was never towed as a result of any Smart Ship initiative. During my command, we lost propulsion power twice while using the new technology. Each time, we knew what caused the interrupt and were underway again in about 30 minutes. The September 1997 incident was caused by incorrect data insertion by a well-trained crewman. The _Yorktown_ returned to port using two FFG-7 emergency control units that specifically had been requested by me, and supported by other commands as a risk reducer. We knew there were some risks in the engineering development model propulsion-control system installed under a rapid prototyping development effort. The bottom line: The data field safeguards found in production-level systems were not installed yet in the _Yorktown_ by intention, until complete wring-out was accomplished."

Further:
"The _Yorktown_ never missed an operational commitment, nor did she suffer a mission-degrading casualty during the Smart Ship assessment period. During that time she certified to deploy under the normal fleet training and assessment process. ... She went on to execute a five-month Caribbean deployment that included extensive Smart Ship assessments by the Operational Test and Evaluation Force and Navy Manpower Analysis Center. Both organizations evaluated the _Yorktown_ as fully capable in meeting the required operational capabilities in a projected operating environment. ..."

Err... no. The program was cancelled because scramjets are useless for launching cargo into orbit. The problem is, as you pointed out earlier in your post, the majority of the energy you need to get to orbit is in the "horizontal" direction. Most orbital flight profiles expend only 10% of energy getting into space and 90% gathering enough speed for orbit.

What that means, in practical terms, is you lose too much energy to drag friction to make accelerating in the atmosphere worthwhile. You're better off just bringing the oxidizer with you.

And there are three more practical problems to deal with. The first is all the extra complexity you need to get up to speed. A scramjet doesn't work until the craft is already moving reasonably fast (OK, that's weaseling, but "reasonably" depends on the design). So you'll need some kind of rocket booster to get it going even if you're at altitude. No big deal, right? Well, it turns out separating from a booster in the atmosphere is a big deal (I believe that's what caused the first scramjet test failure). This would be a major source of complexity (and thus cost).

The second problem is materials. All that drag is gonna create a lot of heat, and your craft had better be able to deal with it. On top of that can you imagine going through an air pressure differential at mach 20? So your ship has to be able to withstand plasma temperatures and it has to be incredably tough.

Also, the intake configuration of your scramjet is heavily dependent on air density. So it only works in a very narrow range altitude range. Too high and you don't have enough oxygen for combustion, too low and you burn up from the air friction.

As near as I can figure, scramjets have only one application: long range, high altitude air-to-air missiles.

And the point here is what? To build a smaller rocket. Why not just build a bigger rocket? The price of the fuel is just a tiny fraction of your launch cost, so just use more of it. The cost driver for rockets is complexity, not materials.

The best solution would be a reusable VTOL rocket (not rebuildable, like the shuttle) It would require a very large rocket, since the ratio of fuel to cargo is large. But that would allow you to use the same rocket over and over without rebuilding it, since landing is virtually stress-free (from an engineering perspective) compared to the shuttle. See here for details.

The DC-X project was our best hope for cheap access to space. The project had demonstrated the technology involved with vertical landing, and would have evolved into a vehicle you could use over and over with only minor inspections between flights (as opposed to tearing it all apart, inspecting everything, and putting it back together).

But NASA killed it because they couldn't fund both it and the shuttle, and the shuttle was already proven technology in the sense you could already fly it to orbit and land it, while DC-X would have required a few iterations to make it work properly.

It's no coincidence Carmack chose the design he did, and he could probably get to orbit reasonably soon if he wasn't trying to fund the whole thing out-of-pocket.

Crichton raises some very valid points about how consensus science has historically been bunk. It's a pity you are shooting the messenger instead of addressing his points. Of course, this is not new, as Jerry Pournelle found out -- most global-warming adherents (like the one linked above) have very little appetite for having their beliefs questioned. (Either that, or they are lousy explainers and so prefer instead to appeal to people's innate 'green' instincts for a clean environment to peddle their theories) This is what primarily makes me wary.

About Realclimate.org, I've been following that site for some time and frankly am not impressed by their rather simplistic cause and effect theories. Simply put: we do not know everything about earth's climate patterns. We've barely scratched the surface about aperiodic phenomena like El Nino/La Nina (and these are geologically speaking short-term -- longer term phenomena are still unknown) and are not doing enough research about how solar activity interacts with Earth's weather systems (the usual argument being that there is not enough data so it's too early to comment on solar activity's role).

Realclimate's answer to all of this, of course, is that -- forget about the things we don't know about, forget the fact that the earth has been on a warming trend since the last ice age, Big Bad Industry(tm) will Kill The Planet(tm), let's tie 'em down in Kyoto-brand bureaucratic red-tape so that ... the unencumbered industries in China and India gets lots more work to do.

Please note that none of this makes me anti-environment per se. Like most people, I too would like a good balance of environment and lifestyle. Emissions reduction is a worthy goal in and of itself-- it makes the air cleaner and improves the quality of life for communities.

But making clean air a bureaucratic _requirement_ is expensive and time-consuming and really hurts up-and-comers while aiding the big guys who have funds to divert to meeting new regulations. In short, systems like Kyoto are really a prescription for stasis and has no place in an economy that develops bottom-up (like the US does).

Until a model can take past data and accurately come up with conditions we have today, it's worthless other than as an interesting exercise in "what if?". More on this here.

Now climate prediction is complex and difficult, and I understand that you have to start somewhere, and that government-funded climatologists need something to do. But sensationalist media's penchant for crying "THE SKY IS FALLING!" and reporting these simulations as gospels of truth is not to be taken seriously.

Another link, to one of his first site entries:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives/archivesvie w/view1.html

The date is June 4 1998. This is not the day of the first content on his site, and he had already been creating content for BYTE magazine for many years before this, but it's a sample of his archive.

He also has reader mail from back then.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/ancient/mail1.htm