June 2019
- Zubrin, Robert. The Case for Space. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2019. ISBN 978-1-63388-534-9.
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Fifty years ago, with the successful landing of Apollo 11 on
the Moon, it appeared that the road to the expansion of human
activity from its cradle on Earth into the immensely larger
arena of the solar system was open. The infrastructure built
for Project Apollo, including that in the original 1963
development
plan for the Merritt Island area could support Saturn V
launches every two weeks. Equipped with nuclear-powered upper
stages (under active development by
Project NERVA, and
accommodated in plans for a Nuclear Assembly Building near
the Vehicle Assembly Building), the launchers and support
facilities were more than adequate to support construction of
a large space station in Earth orbit, a permanently-occupied
base on the Moon, exploration of near-Earth asteroids, and
manned landings on Mars in the 1980s.
But this was not to be. Those envisioning this optimistic future
fundamentally misunderstood the motivation for Project Apollo. It
was not about, and never was about, opening the space frontier.
Instead, it was a battle for prestige in the Cold War and, once
won (indeed, well before the Moon landing), the budget necessary to
support such an extravagant program (which threw away skyscraper-sized
rockets with every launch), began to evaporate. NASA was ready to
do the Buck Rogers stuff, but Washington wasn't about to come up
with the bucks to pay for it. In 1965 and 1966, the
NASA budget
peaked at over 4% of all federal government spending. By
calendar year 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, it had
already fallen to 2.31% of the federal budget, and with
relatively small year to year variations, has settled at around
one half of one percent of the federal budget in recent years.
Apart from a small band of space enthusiasts, there is no public
clamour for increasing NASA's budget (which is consistently
over-estimated by the public as a much larger fraction of
federal spending than it actually receives), and there is no
prospect for a political consensus emerging to fund an increase.
Further, there is no evidence that dramatically increasing NASA's
budget would actually accomplish anything toward the goal of
expanding the human presence in space. While NASA has accomplished
great things in its robotic exploration of the solar system and
building space-based astronomical observatories, its human
space flight operations have been sclerotic, risk-averse, loath
to embrace new technologies, and seemingly more oriented toward
spending vast sums of money in the districts and states of powerful
representatives and senators than actually flying missions.
Fortunately, NASA is no longer the only game in town (if it can
even be considered to still be in the human spaceflight game,
having been unable to launch its own astronauts into space
without buying seats from Russia since the retirement of the
Space Shuttle in 2011). In 2009, the
commission
headed by Norman Augustine recommended cancellation of
NASA's
Constellation
Program, which aimed at a crewed Moon landing in 2020, because
they estimated that the heavy-lift booster it envisioned (although
based largely on decades-old Space Shuttle technology) would take
twelve years and US$36 billion to develop under
NASA's business-as-usual policies; Constellation was cancelled in
2010 (although its heavy-lift booster, renamed. de-scoped, re-scoped,
schedule-slipped, and cost-overrun, stumbles along, zombie-like,
in the guise of the
Space
Launch System [SLS] which has, to date, consumed around US$14 billion
in development costs without producing a single flight-ready
rocket, and will probably cost between one and two billion
dollars for each flight, every year or two—this farce
will probably continue as long as Richard Shelby, the Alabama
Senator who seems to believe NASA stands for “North
Alabama Spending Agency”, remains in the World's
Greatest Deliberative Body).
In February 2018, SpaceX launched its
Falcon Heavy
booster, which has a payload capacity to low Earth orbit
comparable to the initial version of the SLS, and was
developed with private funds in half the time at one thirtieth
the cost (so far) of NASA's Big Rocket to Nowhere. Further,
unlike the SLS, which on each flight will consign Space Shuttle
Main Engines and Solid Rocket Boosters (which were designed to
be reusable and re-flown many times on the Space Shuttle) to
a watery grave in the Atlantic, three of the four components of
the Falcon Heavy (excluding only its upper stage, with a single
engine) are reusable and can be re-flown as many as ten times.
Falcon Heavy customers will pay around US$90 million for
a launch on the reusable version of the rocket, less than a tenth
of what NASA estimates for an SLS flight, even after writing off
its enormous development costs.
On the heels of SpaceX, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin is developing
its
New Glenn
orbital launcher, which will have comparable payload capacity and
a fully reusable first stage. With competition on the horizon,
SpaceX is developing the
Super Heavy/Starship
completely-reusable launcher with a payload of around 150 tonnes to
low Earth orbit: more than any past or present rocket. A
fully-reusable launcher with this capacity would also be capable
of delivering cargo or passengers between any two points on
Earth in less than an hour at a price to passengers no more than
a first class ticket on a present-day subsonic airliner. The
emergence of such a market could increase the demand for rocket
flights from its current hundred or so per year to hundreds or
thousands a day, like airline operations, with
consequent price reductions due to economies of scale and moving
all components of the transportation system down the technological
learning curve.
Competition-driven decreases in launch cost, compounded by
partially- or fully-reusable launchers, is already dramatically
decreasing the cost of getting to space.
A common metric of launch cost is the price to
launch one kilogram into low Earth orbit. This remained
stubbornly close to US$10,000/kg from the 1960s until the entry
of SpaceX's Falcon 9 into the market in 2010. Purely by the
more efficient design and operations of a profit-driven private
firm as opposed to a cost-plus government contractor, the first
version of the Falcon 9 cut launch costs to around US$6,000/kg.
By reusing the first stage of the Falcon 9 (which costs around
three times as much as the expendable second stage), this
was cut by another factor of two, to US$3,000/kg. The much larger
fully reusable Super Heavy/Starship is projected to reduce launch cost (if its
entire payload capacity can be used on every flight, which
probably isn't the way to bet) to the vicinity of US$250/kg,
and if the craft can be flown frequently, say
once
a day, as somebody or other envisioned more than a
quarter century ago, amortising fixed costs over a much larger
number of launches could reduce cost per kilogram by another
factor of ten, to something like US$25/kg.
Such cost reductions are an epochal change in the space
business. Ever since the first Earth satellites, launch costs
have dominated the industry and driven all other aspects of
spacecraft design. If you're paying US$10,000 per kilogram to
put your satellite in orbit, it makes sense to spend large sums
of money not only on reducing its mass, but also making it
extremely reliable, since launching a replacement would be so
hideously expensive (and with flight rates so low, could result
in a delay of a year or more before a launch opportunity became
available). But with a hundred-fold or more reduction in launch
cost and flights to orbit operating weekly or daily, satellites
need no longer be built like precision watches, but rather
industrial gear like that installed in telecom facilities on the
ground. The entire cost structure is slashed across the board,
and space becomes an arena accessible for a wide variety of
commercial and industrial activities where its unique
characteristics, such as access to free, uninterrupted solar
power, high vacuum, and weightlessness are an advantage.
But if humanity is truly to expand beyond the Earth, launching
satellites that go around and around the Earth providing
services to those on its surface is just the start. People must
begin to homestead in space: first hundreds, then thousands, and
eventually millions and more living, working, building, raising
families, with no more connection to the Earth than immigrants
to the New World in the 1800s had to the old country in Europe
or Asia. Where will they be living, and what will they be
doing?
In order to think about the human future in the solar system,
the first thing you need to do is recalibrate how you think
about the Earth and its neighbours orbiting the Sun. Many
people think of space as something like Antarctica: barren,
difficult and expensive to reach, unforgiving, and while
useful for some forms of scientific research, no place you'd
want to set up industry or build communities where humans would
spend their entire lives. But space is nothing like that.
Ninety-nine percent or more of the matter and energy
resources of the solar system—the raw material for human
prosperity—are found not on the Earth, but rather
elsewhere in the solar system, and they are free for the taking
by whoever gets there first and figures out how to exploit them.
Energy costs are a major input to most economic activity on the
Earth, and wars are regularly fought over access to scarce
energy resources on the home planet. But in space, at the
distance Earth orbits the Sun, 1.36 kilowatts of free
solar power are available for every square metre of collector
you set up. And, unlike on the Earth's surface, that power
is available 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and will
continue to flow for billions of years into the future.
Settling space will require using the resources available in
space, not just energy but material. Trying to make a space-based
economy work by launching everything from Earth is
futile and foredoomed. Regardless of how much you reduce
launch costs (even with exotic technologies which may not even be
possible given the properties of materials, such as space
elevators or launch loops), the vast majority of the mass
needed by a space-based civilisation will be dumb bulk materials,
not high-tech products such as microchips. Water; hydrogen
and oxygen for rocket fuel (which are easily made from water
using electricity from solar power); aluminium, titanium, and
steel for structural components; glass and silicon; rocks and
minerals for agriculture and bulk mass for radiation shielding;
these will account for the overwhelming majority of the mass of
any settlement in space, whether in Earth orbit, on the Moon or
Mars, asteroid mining camps, or habitats in orbit around the
Sun. People and low-mass, high-value added material such as
electronics, scientific instruments, and the like will launch
from the Earth, but their destinations will be built in space
from materials found there.
Why? As with most things in space, it comes down to
delta-v
(pronounced delta-vee), the change in velocity needed to get from
one location to another. This, not distance, determines the
cost of transportation in space. The Earth's mass creates a
deep gravity well which requires around 9.8 km/sec of
delta-v to get from the surface to low Earth orbit.
It is providing this boost which makes launching payloads from
the Earth so expensive. If you want to get to geostationary
Earth orbit, where most communication satellites operate,
you need another 3.8 km/sec, for a total of 13.6 km/sec
launching from the Earth. By comparison, delivering a payload
from the surface of the Moon to geostationary Earth orbit
requires only 4 km/sec, which can be provided by a simple
single-stage rocket. Delivering material from lunar orbit
(placed there, for example, by a solar powered electromagnetic
mass driver
on the lunar surface) to geostationary orbit needs just 2.4
km/sec. Given that just about all of the materials from which
geostationary satellites are built are available on the Moon
(if you exploit free solar power to extract and refine them),
it's clear a mature spacefaring economy will not be launching
them from the Earth, and will create large numbers of jobs on
the Moon, in lunar orbit, and in ferrying cargos among
various destinations in Earth-Moon space.
The author surveys the resources available on the Moon, Mars,
near-Earth and main belt asteroids, and, looking farther
into the future, the outer solar system where, once humans have
mastered controlled nuclear fusion, sufficient
Helium-3 is
available for the taking to power a solar system wide human
civilisation of trillions of people for billions of years and,
eventually, the interstellar ships they will use to expand out
into the galaxy. Detailed plans are presented for near-term
human missions to the Moon and Mars, both achievable within the
decade of the 2020s, which will begin the process of surveying
the resources available there and building the infrastructure
for permanent settlement. These mission plans, unlike those of
NASA, do not rely on paper rockets which have yet to fly,
costly expendable boosters, or detours to “gateways”
and other diversions which seem a prime example of (to
paraphrase the author in chapter 14), “doing things in order
to spend money as opposed to spending money in order to do
things.”
This is an optimistic and hopeful view of the future, one in
which the human adventure which began when our ancestors left
Africa to explore and settle the far reaches of their home
planet continues outward into its neighbourhood around the
Sun and eventually to the stars. In contrast to the grim
Malthusian vision of mountebanks selling nostrums like a
“Green New Deal”, which would have humans huddled
on an increasingly crowded planet, shivering in the cold and
dark when the Sun and wind did not cooperate, docile and
bowed to their enlightened betters who instruct them how to
reduce their expectations and hopes for the future again and
again as they wait for the asteroid impact to put an end
to their misery, Zubrin sketches millions of diverse human
(and eventually post-human, evolving in different directions)
societies, exploring and filling niches on a grand scale that dwarfs
that of the Earth, inventing, building, experimenting, stumbling,
and then creating ever greater things just as humans have for
millennia. This is a future not just worth dreaming of, but
working to make a reality. We have the enormous privilege
of living in the time when, with imagination, courage, the
willingness to take risks and to discard the poisonous doctrines
of those who preach “sustainability” but whose
policies always end in resource wars and genocide, we can
actually make it happen and see the first steps taken in our
lifetimes.
Here is an
interview with the author
about the topics discussed in the book.
This is a one hour and forty-two minute
interview
(audio only) from “The Space Show” which goes
into the book in detail.
- Witzke, Dawn, ed. Planetary: Earth. Narara, NSW, Australia: Superversive Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-925645-24-8.
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This is the fourth book in the publisher's Planetary
Anthology series. Each volume contain stories set on,
or figuring in the plot, the named planet. Previous collections
have featured Mercury, Venus, and Mars. This installment
contains stories related in some way to Earth, although in
several none of the action occurs on that planet.
Back the day (1930s through 1980s) monthly science fiction
magazines were a major venue for the genre and the primary
path for aspiring authors to break into print. Sold on
newsstands for the price of a few comic books, they were the
way generations of young readers (including this one) discovered
the limitless universe of science fiction. A typical issue
might contain five or six short stories, a longer piece
(novella or novelette), and a multi-month serialisation of
a novel, usually by an established author known to the
readers. For example, Frank Herbert's
Dune
was serialised in two long runs in
Analog
in 1963 and 1965 before its hardcover publication in 1965. In
addition, there were often book reviews, a column about
science fact (Fantasy and Science Fiction published
a monthly science column by Isaac Asimov which ran from 1958 until
shortly before his death in 1992—a total of 399 in all), a
lively letters to the editor section, and an editorial. All
of the major science fiction monthlies welcomed unsolicited
manuscripts from unpublished authors, and each issue was likely
to contain one or two stories from the
“slush pile”
which the editor decided made the cut for the magazine. Most
of the outstanding authors of the era broke into the field this
way, and some editors such as John W. Campbell of Astounding
(later Analog) invested much time and effort in
mentoring promising talents and developing them into a reliable
stable of writers to fill the pages of their magazines.
By the 1990s, monthly science fiction magazines were in decline,
and the explosion of science fiction novel publication had
reduced the market for short fiction. By the year 2000, only
three remained in the U.S., and their circulations continued to
erode. Various attempts to revive a medium for short fiction
have been tried, including Web magazines. This collection is
an example of another genre: the original anthology. While most
anthologies published in book form in the heyday of the
magazines had previously been published in the magazines (authors
usually only sold the magazine “first North American serial
rights” and retained the right to subsequently sell the
story to the publisher of an anthology), original anthologies
contain never-before-published stories, usually collected
around a theme such as the planet Earth here.
I got this book (I say “got” as opposed to “bought”
because the Kindle edition is free to
Kindle Unlimited subscribers and I “borrowed” it as
one of the ten titles I can check out for reading at a given time)
because it contained the short story, “The Hidden Conquest”,
by Hans G. Schantz, author of the superb Hidden Truth series
of novels
(1, 2, 3), which was
said to be a revealing prequel to the story in the books. It is,
and it is excellent, although you probably won't appreciate how
much of a reveal it is unless you've read the books, especially
2018's The Brave and the Bold.
The rest of the stories are…uneven: about what you'd
expect from a science fiction magazine in the 1950s or '60s.
Some are gimmick stories, others are shoot-em-up action tales,
while still others are just disappointing and probably should
have remained in the slush pile or returned to their authors
with a note attached to the rejection slip offering a few
suggestions and encouragement to try again. Copy editing is
sloppy, complete with a sprinkling of idiot
“its/it's” plus the obligatory “pulled hard on
the reigns” “miniscule”, and
take your “breathe” away.
But hey, if you got it from Kindle Unlimited, you can hardly say
you didn't get your money's worth, and you're perfectly free to
borrow it, read the Hans Schantz story, and return it same day.
I would not pay the US$4 to buy the Kindle edition outright,
and fifteen bucks for a paperback is right out.
- Hanson, Victor Davis. The Case for Trump. New York: Basic Books, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5416-7354-0.
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The election of Donald Trump as U.S. president in November 2016
was a singular event in the history of the country. Never
before had anybody been elected to that office without any prior
experience in either public office or the military. Trump,
although running as a Republican, had no long-term affiliation
with the party and had cultivated no support within its
establishment, elected officials, or the traditional donors who
support its candidates. He turned his back on the insider
consultants and “experts” who had advised GOP
candidate after candidate in their “defeat with
dignity” at the hands of a ruthless Democrat party willing
to burn any bridge to win. From well before he declared his
candidacy he established a direct channel to a mass audience,
bypassing media gatekeepers via Twitter and frequent
appearances in all forms of media, who found him a reliable
boost to their audience and clicks. He was willing to jettison
the mumbling points of the cultured Beltway club and grab
“third rail” issues of which they dared not speak such as
mass immigration, predatory trade practices, futile foreign
wars, and the exporting of jobs from the U.S. heartland to
low-wage sweatshops overseas.
He entered a free-for-all primary campaign as one of seventeen
major candidates, including present and former governors, senators,
and other well-spoken and distinguished rivals and, one by one,
knocked them out, despite resolute and sometimes dishonest
bias by the media hosting debates, often through “verbal
kill shots” which made his opponents the target of mockery
and pinned sobriquets on them (“low energy Jeb”, “little
Marco”, “lyin' Ted”) they couldn't shake. His
campaign organisation, if one can dignify it with the term, was
completely chaotic and his fund raising nothing like the finely-honed
machines of establishment favourites like Jeb Bush, and yet his
antics resulted in his getting billions of dollars worth of free
media coverage even on outlets who detested and mocked him.
One by one, he picked off his primary opponents and handily won
the Republican presidential nomination. This unleashed a
phenomenon the likes of which had not been seen since the
Goldwater insurgency of 1964, but far more virulent. Pillars of
the Republican establishment and Conservatism, Inc. were on
the verge of cardiac arrest, advancing fantasy scenarios to deny
the nomination to its winner, publishing issues of their money-losing
and subscription-shedding little magazines dedicated to opposing
the choice of the party's voters, and promoting insurgencies such
as the candidacy of
Egg McMuffin, whose
bona fides as a man of the
people were evidenced by his earlier stints with the CIA and
Goldman Sachs.
Predictions that post-nomination, Trump would become “more
presidential” were quickly falsified as the chaos compounded,
the tweets came faster and funnier, and the mass rallies became
ever more frequent and raucous. One thing that was obvious to
anybody looking dispassionately at what was going on, without the
boiling blood of hatred and disdain of the New York-Washington
establishment, was that the candidate was having the time of his
life and so were the people who attended the rallies. But still,
all of the wise men of the coastal corridor knew what must happen.
On the eve of the general election, polls put the probability of a
Trump victory somewhere between 1 and 15 percent. The outlier
was Nate Silver, who went out on a limb and went all the way up
to 29% chance of Trump's winning to the scorn of his fellow
“progressives” and pollsters.
And yet, Trump won, and handily. Yes, he lost the popular vote,
but that was simply due to the urban coastal vote for which
he could not contend and wisely made no attempt to
attract, knowing such an effort would be futile and a waste of
his scarce resources (estimates are his campaign spent around
half that of Clinton's). This book by classicist, military
historian, professor, and fifth-generation California farmer
Victor Davis Hanson is an in-depth examination of, in the
words of the defeated candidate, “what happened”.
There is a great deal of wisdom here.
First of all, a warning to the prospective reader. If you read
Dr Hanson's columns regularly, you probably won't find a lot
here that's new. This book is not one of those that's obviously
Frankenstitched together from previously published columns, but
in assembling their content into chapters focussing on various
themes, there's been a lot of cut and paste, if not literally at
the level of words, at least in terms of ideas. There is value
in seeing it all presented in one package, but be prepared to
say, from time to time, “Haven't I've read this
before?”
That caveat lector aside, this
is a brilliant analysis of the Trump phenomenon. Hanson argues
persuasively that it is very unlikely any of the other
Republican contenders for the nomination could have won the
general election. None of them were talking about the issues
which resonated with the erstwhile “Reagan Democrat”
voters who put Trump over the top in the so-called “blue
wall” states, and it is doubtful any of them would have
ignored their Beltway consultants and campaigned vigorously
in states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania which
were key to Trump's victory. Given that the Republican defeat
which would likely have been the result of a Bush (again?),
Rubio, or Cruz candidacy would have put the Clinton crime family
back in power and likely tipped the Supreme Court toward the
slaver agenda for a generation, that alone should give pause to
“never Trump” Republicans.
How will it all end? Nobody knows, but Hanson provides a variety
of perspectives drawn from everything from the Byzantine emperor
Justinian's battle against the deep state to the archetype of
the rough-edged outsider brought in to do what the more
civilised can't or won't—the tragic hero from Greek drama
to Hollywood westerns. What is certain is that none of what
Trump is attempting, whether it ends in success or failure, would
be happening if any of his primary opponents or the Democrat
in the general election had prevailed.
I believe that Victor Davis Hanson is one of those rare people who
have what I call the “Orwell gift”. Like George Orwell,
he has the ability to look at the facts, evaluate them, and draw
conclusions without any preconceived notions or filtering through
an ideology. What is certain is that with the election of Donald Trump
in 2016 the U.S. dodged a bullet. Whether that election will be seen
as a turning point which reversed the decades-long slide toward
tyranny by the administrative state, destruction of the middle class,
replacement of the electorate by imported voters dependent upon
the state, erosion of political and economic sovereignty in
favour of undemocratic global governance, and the eventual financial
and moral bankruptcy which are the inevitable result of all of these, or
just a pause before the deluge, is yet to be seen. Hanson's book is
an excellent, dispassionate, well-reasoned, and thoroughly documented
view of where things stand today.
- Wood, Fenton. Five Million Watts. Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2019. ASIN B07R6X973N.
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This is the second short novel/novella (123 pages) in the author's
Yankee Republic series. I described the first,
Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves
(May 2019), as “utterly charming”, and this
sequel turns it all the way up to “enchanting”. As
with the first book, you're reading along thinking this is a
somewhat nerdy young adult story, then something happens or is
mentioned in passing and suddenly, “Whoa—I didn't
see that coming!”, and you realise the Yankee
Republic is a strange and enchanted place, and that, as
in the work of Philip K. Dick, there is a lot more going on than
you suspected, and much more to be discovered in future
adventures.
This tale begins several years after the events of the first
book. Philo Hergenschmidt (the only character from
Pirates to appear here) has grown up, graduated
from Virginia Tech, and after a series of jobs keeping
antiquated equipment at rural radio stations on the
air, arrives in the Republic's storied metropolis
of Iburakon to seek opportunity, adventure, and who
knows what else. (If you're curious where the name
of the city came from,
here's
a hint, but be aware it may be a minor spoiler.)
Things get weird from the very start
when he stops at an information kiosk and encounters
a disembodied mechanical head who says it has a message
for him. The message is just an address, and when he
goes there he meets a very curious character who goes
by a variety of names ranging from Viridios to Mr Green,
surrounded by a collection of keyboard instruments including
electronic synthesisers with strange designs.
Viridios suggests Philo aim for the very top and seek employment
at legendary AM station 2XG, a broadcasting pioneer that went on
the air in 1921, before broadcasting was regulated, and which in
1936 increased its power to five million watts. When other
stations' maximum power was restricted to 50,000 watts, 2XG was
grandfathered and allowed to continue to operate at 100 times
more, enough to cover the continent far beyond the borders of
the Yankee Republic into the mysterious lands of the West.
Not only does 2XG broadcast with enormous power, it was
also permitted to retain its original 15 kHz bandwidth,
allowing high-fidelity broadcasting and even, since the
1950s, stereo (for compatible receivers). However, in order
to retain its rights to the frequency and power, the
station was required to stay on the air continuously,
with any outage longer than 24 hours forfeiting its rights
to hungry competitors.
The engineers who maintained this unique equipment were a
breed apart, the pinnacle of broadcast engineering. Philo
manages to secure a job as a junior technician, which means
he'll never get near the high power RF gear or antenna (all
of which are one-off custom), but sets to work on routine
maintenance of studio gear and patching up ancient tube gear
when it breaks down. Meanwhile, he continues to visit
Viridios and imbibe his tales of 2XG and the legendary
Zaros the Electromage who designed its transmitter, the
operation of which nobody completely understands today.
As he hears tales of the Old Religion, the gods of the spring
and grain, and the time of the last ice age, Philo concludes
Viridios is either the most magnificent liar he has ever
encountered or—something else again.
Climate change is inexorably closing in on Iburakon. Each
year is colder than the last, the growing season is shrinking,
and it seems inevitable that before long the glaciers will
resume their march from the north. Viridios is convinced that
the only hope lies in music, performing a work rooted
in that (very) Old Time Religion which caused a riot in its
only public performance decades before, broadcast with the power
of 2XG and performed with breakthrough electronic music
instruments of his own devising.
Viridios is very odd, but also persuasive, and he has a history
with 2XG. The concert is scheduled, and Philo sets to work
restoring long-forgotten equipment from the station's
basement and building new instruments to Viridios'
specifications. It is a race against time, as the worst
winter storm in memory threatens 2XG and forces Philo
to confront one of his deepest fears.
Working on a project on the side, Philo discovers what
may be the salvation of 2XG, but also as he looks deeper,
possibly the door to a new universe. Once again, we have
a satisfying, heroic, and imaginative story, suitable
for readers of all ages, that leaves you hungry for more.
At present, only a Kindle edition is
available. The book is not available under the Kindle Unlimited
free rental programme, but is inexpensive to buy. Those eagerly
awaiting the next opportunity to visit the Yankee Republic will
look forward to the publication of volume 3, The Tower of
the Bear, in October, 2019.
- Manto, Cindy Donze. Michoud Assembly Facility. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2014. ISBN 978-1-5316-6969-0.
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In March, 1763, King Louis XV of France made a land grant
of 140 square kilometres to Gilbert Antoine St Maxent,
the richest man in Louisiana Territory and commander of
the militia. The grant required St Maxent to build a road
across the swampy property, develop a plantation, and
reserve all the trees in forested areas for the use of the
French navy. When the Spanish took over the territory
five years later, St Maxent changed his first names
to “Gilberto Antonio” and retained title to
the sprawling estate. In the decades that followed, the
property changed hands and nations several times, eventually,
now part of the United States, being purchased by another
French immigrant, Antoine Michoud, who had left France
after the fall of Napoleon, who his father had served as an
official.
Michoud rapidly established himself as a prosperous businessman
in bustling New Orleans, and after purchasing the large tract
of land set about buying pieces which had been sold off by
previous owners, re-assembling most of the original French
land grant into one of the largest private land holdings in
the United States. The property was mostly used as a sugar
plantation, although territory and rights were ceded over the
years for construction of a lighthouse, railroads, and
telegraph and telephone lines. Much of the land remained
undeveloped, and like other parts of southern Louisiana was
a swamp or, as they now say, “wetlands”.
The land remained in the Michoud family until 1910, when it
was sold in its entirety for US$410,000 in cash
(around US$11 million today)
to a developer who promptly defaulted, leading to another
series of changes of ownership and dodgy plans for the
land, which most people continued to refer to as the
Michoud Tract. At the start of World War II, the U.S.
government bought a large parcel, initially
intended for construction of Liberty ships. Those plans
quickly fell through, but eventually a huge plant was
erected on the site which, starting in 1943, began to
manufacture components for cargo aircraft, lifeboats,
and components which were used in the Manhattan Project's
isotope separation plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
At the end of the war, the plant was declared surplus
but, a few years later, with the outbreak of the Korean War,
it was re-purposed to manufacture engines for Army tanks.
It continued in that role until 1954 when it was placed on
standby and, in 1958, once again declared surplus. There
things stood until mid-1961 when NASA, charged by the
new Kennedy administration to “put a man on the
Moon” was faced with the need to build rockets in
sizes and quantities never before imagined, and to do
so on a tight schedule, racing against the Soviet Union.
In June, 1961, Wernher von Braun, director of the NASA
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama,
responsible for designing and building those giant boosters,
visited the then-idle Michoud Ordnance Plant and declared
it ideal for NASA's requirements. It had 43 acres (17 hectares)
under one roof, the air conditioning required for precision
work in the Louisiana climate, and was ready to occupy. Most
critically, it was located adjacent to navigable waters which
would allow the enormous rocket stages, far too big to be
shipped by road, rail, or air, to be transported on barges to and
from Huntsville for testing and Cape Canaveral in Florida
to be launched.
In September 1961 NASA officially took over the facility,
renaming it “Michoud Operations”, to be managed by
NASA Marshall as the manufacturing site for the rockets they
designed. Work quickly got underway to set up manufacturing of
the first stage of the
Saturn I and
1B rockets and prepare to
build the much larger
first stage
of the Saturn V Moon rocket.
Before long, new buildings dedicated to assembly and test of the
new rockets, occupied both by NASA and its contractors, began to
spring up around the original plant. In 1965, the installation
was renamed the Michoud Assembly Facility, which name it bears
to this day.
With the end of the Apollo program, it looked like Michoud
might once again be headed for white elephant status, but
the design selected for the Space Shuttle included a very
large
External Tank
comparable in size to the first
stage of the Saturn V which would be discarded on every
flight. Michoud's fabrication and assembly facilities, and
its access to shipping by barge were ideal for this
component of the Shuttle, and a total of 135 tanks built
at Michoud were launched on Shuttle missions between 1981
and 2011.
The retirement of the Space Shuttle once again put the future
of Michoud in doubt. It was originally tapped to build
the core stage of the
Constellation
program's
Ares V booster,
which was similar in size and construction to the Shuttle
External Tank. The cancellation of Constellation in 2010
brought that to a halt, but then Congress and NASA rode to the
rescue with the absurd-as-a-rocket but
excellent-as-a-jobs-program
Space
Launch System (SLS), whose centre core stage also resembles
the External Tank and Ares V. SLS first stage fabrication is
presently underway at Michoud. Perhaps when the
schedule-slipping, bugget-busting SLS is retired after a few
flights (if, in fact, it ever flies at all), bringing to a close
the era of giant taxpayer-funded throwaway rockets, the Michoud
facility can be repurposed to more productive endeavours.
This book is largely a history of Michoud in photos and
captions, with text introducing chapters on each phase of the
facility's history. All of the photos are in black and white,
and are well-reproduced. In the Kindle edition many can be
expanded to show more detail. There are a number of
copy-editing and factual errors in the text and captions, but
not too many to distract or mislead the reader. The
unidentified “visitors” shown touring the Michoud
facility in July 1967 (chapter 3, Kindle location 392) are
actually the
Apollo 7 crew,
Walter Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham,
who would fly on a Michoud-built Saturn 1B in October
1968.
For a book of just 130 pages, most of which are black and white
photographs, the hardcover is hideously expensive (US$29 at this
writing). The Kindle edition is still
pricey (US$13 list price), but may be read for free by Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
- Wright, Tom and Bradley Hope. Billion Dollar Whale. New York: Hachette Books, 2018. ISBN 978-0-316-43650-2.
-
Low Taek Jho, who westernised his name to “Jho Low”,
which I will use henceforth, was the son of a wealthy family
in Penang, Malaysia. The family's fortune had been founded
by Low's grandfather who had immigrated to the then British
colony of Malaya from China and founded a garment manufacturing
company which Low's father had continued to build and recently
sold for a sum of around US$ 15 million. The Low family were
among the wealthiest in Malaysia and wanted the best for
their son. For the last two years of his high school education,
Jho was sent to the Harrow School, a prestigious private British
boarding school whose alumni include seven British Prime
Ministers including Winston Churchill and Robert Peel, and
“foreign students” including Jawaharlal Nehru and
King Hussein of Jordan. At Harrow, he would meet classmates
whose families' wealth was in the billions, and his ambition
to join their ranks was fired.
After graduating from Harrow, Low decided the career he wished to
pursue would be better served by a U.S. business education than
the traditional Cambridge or Oxford path chosen by many Harrovians
and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School
undergraduate program. Previous Wharton graduates include Warren
Buffett, Walter Annenberg, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump. Low
majored in finance, but mostly saw Wharton as a way to make
connections. Wharton was a school of choice for the sons of
Gulf princes and billionaires, and Low leveraged his connections,
while still an undergraduate, into meetings in the Gulf with
figures such as Yousef Al Otaiba, foreign policy adviser
to the sheikhs running the United Arab Emirates. Otaiba, in
turn, introduced him to Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, who
ran a fund called Mubadala Development, which was on the
cutting edge of the sovereign wealth fund business.
Since the 1950s resource-rich countries, in particular the
petro-states of the Gulf, had set up sovereign wealth funds
to invest the surplus earnings from sales of their oil.
The idea was to replace the natural wealth which was being
extracted and sold with financial assets that would generate
income, appreciate over time, and serve as the basis of their
economies when the oil finally ran out. By the early 2000s,
the total funds under management by sovereign wealth funds
were US$3.5 trillion, comparable to the annual gross domestic
product of Germany. Sovereign wealth funds were originally
run in a very conservative manner, taking few
risks—“gentlemen prefer bonds”—but
since the inflation and currency crises of the 1970s had
turned to more aggressive strategies to protect their assets
from the ravages of Western money printing and financial
shenanigans.
While some sovereign wealth funds, for example Norway's (with
around US$1 trillion in assets the largest in the world)
are models of transparency and prudent (albeit often politically
correct) investing, others, including some in the Gulf states,
are accountable only to autocratic ruler(s) and have
been suspected as acting as personal slush funds. On the
other hand, managers of Gulf funds must be aware that bad
investment decisions may not only cost them their jobs but
their heads.
Mubadala was a new kind of sovereign wealth fund. Rather than
a conservative steward of assets for future generations, it was
run more like a leveraged Wall Street hedge fund: borrowing
on global markets, investing in complex transactions, and
aiming to develop the industries which would sustain the
local economy when the oil inevitably ran out. Jho Low saw
Al Mubarak, not yet thirty years old, making billion dollar
deals on almost his sole discretion, playing a role on the
global stage, driving the development of Abu Dhabi's economy, and
being handsomely compensated for his efforts. That's the game
Low wanted to be in, and he started working toward it.
Before graduating from Wharton, he set up a British Virgin
Islands company he named the “Wynton Group”, which
stood for his goal to “win tons” of money. After
graduation in 2005 he began to pitch the contacts he'd made
through students at Harrow and Wharton on deals he'd identified
in Malaysia, acting as an independent development agency. He
put together a series of real estate deals, bringing money from
his Gulf contacts and persuading other investors that large
sovereign funds were on-board by making token investments from
offshore companies he'd created whose names mimicked those of
well-known funds. This is a trick he would continue to use in
the years to come.
Still, he kept his eye on the goal: a sovereign wealth fund,
based in Malaysia, that he could use for his own ends.
In April 2009 Najib Razak became Malaysia's prime
minister. Low had been cultivating a relationship with
Najib since he met him through his stepson years before in
London. Now it was time to cash in. Najib needed money to
shore up his fragile political position and Low was ready to
pitch him how to get it.
Shortly after taking office, Najib announced the formation of
the 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or
1MDB,
a sovereign wealth fund aimed at promoting foreign direct
investment in projects to develop the economy of Malaysia
and benefit all of its ethnic communities: those of Malay,
Chinese, and Indian ancestry (hence “1Malaysia”).
Although Jho Low had no official position with the fund, he
was the one who promoted it, sold Najib on it, and took the
lead in raising its capital, both from his contacts in the Gulf
and, leveraging that money, in the international debt markets with
the assistance of the flexible ethics and unquenchable greed of
Goldman Sachs and its ambitious go-getters in Asia.
Low's pitch to the prime minister, either explicit or nod-nod,
wink-wink, went well beyond high-minded goals such as developing
the economy, bringing all ethnic groups together, and
creating opportunity. In short, what “corporate social
responsibility” really meant was using the fund as Najib's
personal piggy bank, funded by naïve foreign investors,
to reward his political allies and buy votes, shutting out the
opposition. Low told Najib that at the price of aligning his
policies with those of his benefactors in the Gulf, he could
keep the gravy train running and ensure his tenure in office
for the foreseeable future.
But what was in it for Low, apart from commissions, finder's fees,
and the satisfaction of benefitting his native land? Well,
rather more, actually. No sooner did the money hit the accounts
of 1MDB than Low set up a series of sham transactions with
deceptively-named companies to spirit the money out of the
fund and put it into his own pockets. And now it gets a little
bit weird for this scribbler. At the centre of all of this
skulduggery was a private Swiss bank named BSI. This was
my bank. I mean, I didn't own the bank (thank Bob!),
but I'd been doing business there (or with its predecessors,
before various mergers and acquisitions) since before Jho
Low was born. In my dealings with them there were the soul of
probity and beyond reproach, but you never know what's going
on in the other side of the office, or especially in its branch
office in the Wild East of Singapore. Part of the
continuo to this financial
farce is the battles between BSI's compliance people who
kept saying, “Wait, this doesn't make any sense.” and
the transaction side people looking at the commissions to be
earned for moving the money from who-knows-where to who-knows-whom.
But, back to the main story.
Ultimately, Low's looting pipeline worked, and he spirited away
most of the proceeds of the initial funding of 1MDB into his own
accounts or those he controlled. There is a powerful lesson
here, as applicable to security of computer systems or access to
physical infrastructure as financial assets. Try to chisel a
few pennies from your credit card company and you'll be nailed.
Fudge a little on your tax return, and it's hard time, serf.
But when you play at the billion dollar level, the system was
almost completely undefended against an amoral grifter who was
bent not on a subtle and creative form of looting in the Bernie
Madoff or Enron mold, but simply brazenly picking the pockets of
a massive fund through childishly obvious means such as
deceptively named offshore shell corporations, shuffling money
among accounts in a modern-day version of check kiting, and
appealing to banks' hunger for transaction fees over their
ethical obligations to their owners and other customers.
Nobody knows how much Jho Low looted from 1MBD in this and
subsequent transactions. Estimates of the total money spirited
out of 1MDB range as high as US$4.5 billion, and Low's
profligate spending alone as he was riding high may account for
a substantial fraction of that.
Much of the book is an account of Low's lifestyle when he was
riding high. He was not only utterly amoral when it came to
bilking investors, leaving the poor of Malaysia on the hook, but
seemingly incapable of looking beyond the next party, gambling
spree, or debt repayment. It's like he always thought there'd
be a greater fool to fleece, and that there was no degree of
wretched excess in his spending which would invite the question
“How did he earn this money?”
I'm not going to dwell upon this. It's boring. Stylish criminals
whose lifestyles are as suave as their crimes are elegant. Grifters
who blow money on down-market parties with gutter rappers and
supermarket tabloid celebrities aren't. In a marvelous example
of meta-irony, Low funded a Hollywood movie production company
which made the film
The
Wolf of Wall Street,
about a cynical grifter like Low himself.
And now comes the part where I tell you how it all came
undone, everybody got their just deserts, and the egregious
perpetrators are languishing behind bars. Sorry, not this time,
or at least not yet.
Jho Low escaped pursuit on his luxury super-yacht and now is
reputed to be living in China, travelling freely and living off
his ill-gotten gains. The “People's Republic” seems
quite hospitable to those who loot the people of its neighbours
(assuming they adequately grease the palms of its rulers).
Goldman Sachs suffered no sanctions as a result of its complicity
in the 1MDB funding and the appropriation of funds.
BSI lost its Swiss banking licence, but was acquired by another
bank and most of its employees, except for a few involved in
dealing with Low, kept their jobs. (My account was transferred to
the successor bank with no problems. They never disclosed the
reason for the acquisition.)
This book, by the two Wall Street Journal reporters who
untangled what may be the largest one-man financial heist in
human history, provides a look inside the deeply corrupt world of
paper money finance at its highest levels, and is an illustration
of the extent to which people are disinclined to ask obvious questions
like “Where is the money coming from?” while the
good times are rolling. What is striking is how banal the whole
affair is. Jho Low's talents would have made him a great success
in legitimate development finance, but instead he managed
to steal billions, ultimately from mostly poor people in his
native land, and blow the money on wild parties, shallow
celebrities, ostentatious real estate, cars, and yachts, and
binges of high-stakes gambling in skeevy casinos. The
collapse of the whole tawdry business reflects poorly on
institutions like multinational investment banks, large accounting
and auditing firms, financial regulators, Swiss banks, and the
whole “sustainable development” racket in the third
world. Jho Low, a crook through and through, looked at these
supposedly august institutions and recognised them as kindred
spirits and then figured out transparently simple ways to
use them to steal billions. He got away with it, and they are
still telling governments, corporations, and investors how
to manage their affairs and, inexplicably, being taken seriously
and handsomely compensated for their “expertise”.
- Kroese, Robert. The Voyage of the Iron Dragon. Grand Rapids MI: St. Culain Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-7982-3431-0.
-
This is the third and final volume in the Iron Dragon trilogy
which began with The Dream of the Iron
Dragon (August 2018) and
continued in The Dawn of the Iron Dragon
(May 2019). When reading a series of books I've discovered,
I usually space them out to enjoy them over time, but the second book
of this trilogy left its characters in such a dire pickle I just
couldn't wait to see how the author managed to wrap up the story in
just one more book and dove right in to the concluding volume. It
is a satisfying end to the saga, albeit in some places seeming
rushed compared to the more deliberate development of the story and
characters in the first two books.
First of all, this note. Despite being published in three
books, this is one huge, sprawling story which stretches over
more than a thousand pages, decades of time, and locations as
far-flung as Constantinople, Iceland, the Caribbean, and North
America, and in addition to their cultures, we have human
spacefarers from the future, Vikings, and an alien race called
the Cho-ta'an bent on exterminating humans from the galaxy. You
should read the three books in order: Dream,
Dawn, and Voyage. If you start in the
middle, despite the second and third volumes' having a brief
summary of the story so far, you'll be completely lost as to who
the characters are, what they're trying to do, and how they
ended up pursuing the desperate and seemingly impossible task in
which they are engaged (building an Earth-orbital manned
spacecraft in the middle ages while leaving no historical traces
of their activity which later generations of humans might find).
“Read the whole thing,” in order. It's worth it.
With the devastating events which concluded the second volume,
the spacemen are faced with an even more daunting challenge than
that in which they were previously engaged, and with far less
confidence of success in their mission of saving humanity in its
war for survival against the Cho-ta'an more than 1500 years in
their future. As this book begins, more than two decades have
passed since the spacemen crashed on Earth. They have patiently
been building up the infrastructure required to build their
rocket, establishing mining, logging, materials processing, and
manufacturing at a far-flung series of camps all linked together
by Viking-built and -crewed oceangoing ships. Just as important
as tools and materials is human capital: the spacemen have had
to set up an ongoing programme to recruit, educate, and train
the scientists, engineers, technicians, drafters, managers, and
tradespeople of all kinds needed for a 20th century aerospace
project, all in a time when only a tiny fraction of the
population is literate, and they have reluctantly made peace
with the Viking way of “recruiting” the people they
need.
The difficulty of all of this is compounded by the need
to operate in absolute secrecy. Experience has taught
the spacemen that, having inadvertently
travelled into Earth's past, history cannot be changed.
Consequently, nothing they do can interfere in any way with
the course of recorded human history because that would
conflict with what actually happened and would therefore
be doomed to failure. And in addition, some Cho-ta'an
who landed on Earth may still be alive and bent on
stopping their project. While they must work technological
miracles to have a slim chance of saving humanity, the Cho-ta'an
need only thwart them in any one of a multitude of ways to
win. Their only hope is to disappear.
The story is one of dogged persistence, ingenuity in the face of
formidable obstacles everywhere; dealing with adversaries as
varied as Viking chieftains, the Vatican, Cho-ta'an aliens, and
native American tribes; epic battles; disheartening setbacks;
and inspiring triumphs. It is a heroic story on a grand scale,
worthy of inclusion among the great epics of science fiction's
earlier golden ages.
When it comes to twentieth century rocket engineering, there are
a number of goofs and misconceptions in the story, almost all of
which could have been remedied without any impact on the plot.
Although they aren't precisely plot spoilers, I'll take them
behind the curtain for space-nerd readers who wish to spot them
for themselves without foreknowledge.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.Despite the minor quibbles in the spoiler section (which do not detract in any way from enjoyment of the tale), this is a rollicking good adventure and satisfying conclusion to the Iron Dragon saga. It seemed to me that the last part of the story was somewhat rushed and could have easily occupied another full book, but the author promised us a trilogy and that's what he delivered, so fair enough. In terms of accomplishing the mission upon which the spacemen and their allies had laboured for half a century, essentially all of the action occurs in the last quarter of this final volume, starting in chapter 44. As usual nothing comes easy, and the project must face a harrowing challenge which might undo everything at the last moment, then confront the cold equations of orbital mechanics. The conclusion is surprising and, while definitively ending this tale, leaves the door open to further adventures set in this universe. This series has been a pure delight from start to finish. It wasn't obvious to this reader at the outset that it would be possible to pull time travel, Vikings, and spaceships together into a story that worked, but the author has managed to do so, while maintaining historical authenticity about a neglected period in European history. It is particularly difficult to craft a time travel yarn in which it is impossible for the characters to change the recorded history of our world, but this is another challenge the author rises to and almost makes it look easy. Independent science fiction is where readers will find the heroes, interesting ideas, and adventure which brought them to science fiction in the first place, and Robert Kroese is establishing himself as a prolific grandmaster of this exciting new golden age. The Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
- In chapter 7, Alma says, “The Titan II rockets used liquid hydrogen for the upper stages, but they used kerosene for the first stage.” This is completely wrong. The Titan II was a two stage rocket and used the same hypergolic propellants (hydrazine fuel and dinitrogen tetroxide oxidiser) in both the first and second stages.
- In chapter 30 it is claimed “While the first stage of a Titan II rocket could be powered by kerosene, the second and third stages needed a fuel with a higher specific impulse in order to reach escape velocity of 25,000 miles per hour.” Oh dear—let's take this point by point. First of all, the first stage of the Titan II was not and could not be powered by kerosene. It was designed for hypergolic fuels, and its turbopumps and lack of an igniter would not work with kerosene. As described below, the earlier Titan I used kerosene, but the Titan II was a major re-design which could not be adapted for kerosene. Second, the second stage of the Titan II used the same hypergolic propellant as the first stage, and this propellant had around the same specific impulse as kerosene and liquid oxygen. Third, the Titan II did not have a third stage at all. It delivered the Gemini spacecraft into orbit using the same two stage configuration as the ballistic missile. The Titan II was later adapted to use a third stage for unmanned space launch missions, but a third stage was never used in Project Gemini. Finally, the mission of the Iron Dragon, like that of the Titan II launching Gemini, was to place its payload in low Earth orbit with a velocity of around 17,500 miles per hour, not escape velocity of 25,000 miles per hour. Escape velocity would fling the payload into orbit around the Sun, not on an intercept course with the target in Earth orbit.
- In chapter 45, it is stated that “Later versions of the Titan II rockets had used hypergolic fuels, simplifying their design.” This is incorrect: the Titan I rocket used liquid oxygen and kerosene (not liquid hydrogen), while the Titan II, a substantially different missile, used hypergolic propellants from inception. Basing the Iron Dragon's design upon the Titan II and then using liquid hydrogen and oxygen makes no sense at all and wouldn't work. Liquid hydrogen is much less dense than the hypergolic fuel used in the Titan II and would require a much larger fuel tank of entirely different design, incorporating insulation which was unnecessary on the Titan II. These changes would ripple all through the design, resulting in an entirely different rocket. In addition, the low density of liquid hydrogen would require an entirely different turbopump design and, not being hypergolic with liquid oxygen, would require a different pre-burner to drive the turbopumps.
- A few sentences later, it is said that “Another difficult but relatively straightforward problem was making the propellant tanks strong enough to be pressurized to 5,000 psi but not so heavy they impeded the rocket's journey to space.” This isn't how tank pressurisation works in liquid fuelled rockets. Tanks are pressurised to increase structural rigidity and provide positive flow into the turbopumps, but pressures are modest. The pressure needed to force propellants into the combustion chamber comes from the boost imparted by the turbopumps, not propellant tank pressurisation. For example, in the Space Shuttle's External Tank, the flight pressure of the liquid hydrogen tank was between 32 and 34 psia, and the liquid oxygen tank 20 to 22 psig, vastly less than “5,000 psi”. A fuel tank capable of withstanding 5,000 psi would be far too heavy to ever get off the ground.
- In chapter 46 we are told, “The Titan II had been adapted from the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile….” This is completely incorrect. In fact, the Titan I was developed as a backup to the Atlas in case the latter missile's innovative technologies such as the pressure-stabilised “balloon tanks” could not be made to work. The Atlas and Titan I were developed in parallel and, when the Atlas went into service first, the Titan I was quickly retired and replaced by the hypergolic fuelled Titan II, which provided more secure basing and rapid response to a launch order than the Atlas.
- In chapter 50, when the Iron Dragon takes off, those viewing it “squinted against the blinding glare”. But liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen (as well as the hypergolic fuels used by the original Titan II) burn with a nearly invisible flame. Liquid oxygen and kerosene produce a brilliant flame, but these propellants were not used in this rocket.
- And finally, it's not a matter of the text, but what's with that cover illustration, anyway? The rocket ascending in the background is clearly modelled on a Soviet/Russian R-7/Soyuz rocket, which is nothing like what the Iron Dragon is supposed to be. While Iron Dragon is described as a two stage rocket burning liquid hydrogen and oxygen, Soyuz is a LOX/kerosene rocket (and the illustration has the characteristic bright flame of those propellants), has four side boosters (clearly visible), and the spacecraft has a visible launch escape tower, which Gemini did not have and was never mentioned in connection with the Iron Dragon.
Spoilers end here. - Yiannopoulos, Milo. Diabolical. New York: Bombardier Books, 2018. ISBN 978-1-64293-163-1.
-
Milo Yiannopoulos has a well-deserved and hard-earned reputation as a
controversialist, inciter of outrage, and offender of all the right
people. His acid wit and mockery of those amply deserving it causes
some to dismiss what he says when he's deadly serious about
something, as he is in this impassioned book about the deep
corruption in the Roman Catholic church and its seeming abandonment
of its historic mission as a bastion of the Christian values
which made the West the West. It is an earnest plea for a new
religious revival, from the bottom up, to rid the Church of
its ageing, social justice indoctrinated hierarchy which, if not
entirely homosexual, has tolerated widespread infiltration of
the priesthood by sexually active homosexual men who have
indulged their attraction to underage (but almost always
post-pubescent) boys, and has been complicit in covering up these scandals
and allowing egregious offenders to escape discipline and
continue their predatory behaviour for many years.
Ever since emerging as a public figure, Yiannopoulos has had a target
on his back. A young, handsome (he may prefer “fabulous”),
literate, well-spoken, quick-witted, funny, flaming homosexual,
Roman Catholic, libertarian-conservative, pro-Brexit, pro-Trump,
prolific author and speaker who can fill auditoriums on
college campuses and simultaneously entertain and educate his audiences,
willing to debate the most vociferous of opponents, and who
has the slaver Left's number and is aware of their vulnerability
just at what they imagined was the moment of triumph, is the stuff
of nightmares to those who count on ignorant legions of dim
followers capable of little more than chanting rhyming slogans
and littering. He had to be silenced, and to a large extent,
he has been. But, like the Terminator, he's back, and he's aiming
higher: for the Vatican.
It was a remarkable judo throw the slavers and their media
accomplices on the left and “respectable right”
used to rid themselves of this turbulent pest. The
virtuosos of victimology managed to use the author's having
been a victim of clerical sexual abuse, and spoken
candidly about it, to effectively de-platform, de-monetise,
disemploy, and silence him in the public sphere by proclaiming
him a defender of pædophilia (which has nothing to do
with the phenomenon he was discussing and of which he was a
victim: homosexual exploitation of post-pubescent boys).
The author devotes a chapter to his personal experience and how
it paralleled that of others. At the same time, he draws a
distinction between what happened to him and the rampant
homosexuality in some seminaries and serial abuse by prelates in
positions of authority and its being condoned and covered up
by the hierarchy. He traces the blame all the way to the
current Pope, whose collectivist and social justice credentials
were apparent to everybody before his selection. Regrettably,
he concludes, Catholics must simply wait for the Pope to die
or retire, while laying the ground for a revival and restoration
of the faith which will drive the choice of his successor.
Other chapters discuss the corrosive influence of so-called
“feminism” on the Church and how it has corrupted
what was once a manly warrior creed that rolled back the
scourge of Islam when it threatened civilisation in Europe
and is needed now more than ever after politicians seemingly
bent on societal suicide have opened the gates to the invaders;
how utterly useless and clueless the legacy media are in
covering anything relating to religion (a New York Times
reporter asked First Things editor Fr Richard
John Neuhaus what he made
of the fact that the newly elected pope was “also”
going to be named the bishop of Rome); and how the rejection
and collapse of Christianity as a pillar of the West risks
its replacement with race as the central identity of the culture.
The final chapter quotes Chesterton
(from Heretics, 1905),
Everything else in the modern world is of Christian origin, even everything that seems most anti-Christian. The French Revolution is of Christian origin. The newspaper is of Christian origin. The anarchists are of Christian origin. Physical science is of Christian origin. The attack on Christianity is of Christian origin. There is one thing, and one thing only, in existence at the present day which can in any sense accurately be said to be of pagan origin, and that is Christianity.
Much more is at stake than one sect (albeit the largest) of Christianity. The infiltration, subversion, and overt attacks on the Roman Catholic church are an assault upon an institution which has been central to Western civilisation for two millennia. If it falls, and it is falling, in large part due to self-inflicted wounds, the forces of darkness will be coming for the smaller targets next. Whatever your religion, or whether you have one or not, collapse of one of the three pillars of our cultural identity is something to worry about and work to prevent. In the author's words, “What few on the political Right have grasped is that the most important component in this trifecta isn't capitalism, or even democracy, but Christianity.” With all three under assault from all sides, this book makes an eloquent argument to secular free marketeers and champions of consensual government not to ignore the cultural substrate which allowed both to emerge and flourish.