They may be skipping small portions of the post-print qual. Or more likely, they're just more confident that the pieces being created are of a certain level of quality. It's a hype-y statement but they're probably trying to highlight that they're doing some sort of software-defined quals.
I don't think you're reasoning is actually sound here.
Nasa doesn't have the capability today, but that does not mean that the capabilities that they are building for tomorrow are "batshit Insanity". This is a very silly take.
Building capability is not insanity. Expecting to land people on the moon in 18 months when you don’t have half the components already available for testing, however, is. Read the article. It’s long, but worth a read.
We are going to The moon for two reasons. First, we want to set up a more permanent base. Nasa refers to this as "we're here to stay"
The second reason we are going to the moon so that we can put the first person of color and the first woman on the moon. That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose.
Only time will tell if either of these two missions were actually worth it.
One more point
> Early on, SLS designers made the catastrophic decision to reuse Shuttle hardware, which is like using Fabergé eggs to save money on an omelette.
SLS designers did not make the decision to use shuttle hardware per se. SLS was explicitly designed and funded to use that hardware. One of the original purposes of Artemis, before the other two purposes that we see in the media were even decided upon, was to make use of shuttle hardware.
Which is the explanation for some of the paradoxes rasied in the article.
SLS was foisted on NASA by politicians. The design of Artemis seems set to take advantage of that political will to fund the private development of the next stage of space flight by pretending that funding supports a role for SLS instead of making it completely obsolete.
And what if China gets there first? How exactly would that benefit them, in a geopolitical sense?
Sorry, but if I have the choice of wasting that much resources just so I can brag about it a bit sooner than my opponent, or watch my opponent do so, while I use said resources more productively, I know what to do.
> And what if China gets there first? How exactly would that benefit them, in a geopolitical sense?
If China gets there first, the enormous amount of international credibility and resulting soft power that they will gain internationally, at the US's expense, will be immense and will be worth the resources they spend several times over.
> the enormous amount of international credibility and resulting soft power
You know what is giving China soft power? Funding projects around all of Africa.
You know what is not giving western countries soft power? Burning Billions on Space Programs that serve zero purpose and could achieve more with much less investments, if we just continued sending robots.
Again, I know where I would allocate my resources if I had a hand in this game.
I'm not a geopolitics expert, and I assume you're not either, so I'll just say what I feel. As an European, deep down my unconscious mental picture of the situation here is probably this: USA is a geopolitical and economic power, China is a far away country that assembles parts and devices for western companies. This mental picture is wrong and hilariously oversimplified (I know rationally that it's wrong), but this is the stereotype I've absorbed from my society.
If both counties actively tried to win, and China managed to build a Moon base before the US that would probably make a huge blow to that (subconscious) mental picture.
that's because the US and the rest of the west pretty much decided after 1990 that history had ended, even as their societies crumbled from the costs of the cold war.
the example of china's rise and eventual dominance disturbs that narrative but doesn't demolish it entirely. sinking a US carrier or building a moon base before white countries do would be concrete examples that they can't explain away.
> that would probably make a huge blow to that (subconscious) mental picture.
And?
Okay, so let's say this happens, and now some people think: "Wow China is more powerful in space than the US!".
What is the real world impact of this? Did Chinas army just get 10x more powerful? Does the CPP now own the moon? Did Chinas [economic challenges][1] suddenly disappear? Did their [demographic issues][2] suddenly improve?
No, of course not.
The only real world impact of this: China would now be faced with the choice between blowing billions upon billions of dollars anually for what is essentially a vanity project with little to no ROI, or find a way to abandon it quitely without too much public fanfare. And of course, the whole thing is constantly only one malfunctioning airlock away, from turning into a pile of dead astronauts and a complete PR desaster.
So please tell me, and you are completely right, I am not a geopolitics expert, in terms I can understand, what the specific and tangible benefits of building a Moon-/Mars-Base/NewMannedSpaceStation/etc. are supposed to be, in terms of geopolitics.
And sure, I can see some change to mental images, and yeah, that might e.g. attract some business that would otherwise be somewhere else, or make the odd contract negotiations go smoother. But at the end of the day, these advantages, such as they are, would still need to offset the pricetag of the whole show, and I don't believe they would.
> You know what is giving China soft power? Funding projects around all of Africa.
I don't disagree.
Are you suggesting that China will be satisfied with merely the amount of soft power that they are gaining from funding infrastructure projects in Africa and will not seek additional soft power through other routes?
I would assert that between the amount of soft power gained, and more, the amount of soft power lost by their rivals (the US), if China had the capability to create a moon base it would be entirely worthwhile for them to do so.
Thus, if the US wishes to prevent that loss of its own soft power, then it needs to beat China to the moon base.
> Are you suggesting that China will be satisfied with merely the amount of soft power that they are gaining from funding infrastructure projects in Africa and will not seek additional soft power through other routes?
No, I am not.
I am, however, suggesting that the amount of soft power gained through bragging rights along the lines of "We did it! We did it! We managed to to the same thing the US did in the 60s! And we only had to light a huge pile of money on fire to do it!!!" is kinda negligible when compared to, say, having direct financial influence in many developing countries, or having a couple additional aircraft carriers.
And sure, they could do both, but resources are finite. Every dollar pumped into a, technically unnecessary, moon base is a dollar less they can invest elsewhere.
Maybe weapons? Certainly you could hit speeds that would nullify any kind of missile defense, though MIRVs already accomplish that anyway.
Depending on where you established infrastructure on the moon, it might be pretty easy to conceal the things you're doing in space. You won't see anything launched from the other side, and anything leaving the moon is going to fall towards Earth, so may be difficult to detect (e.g. no heat signature).
The moon is also a pretty decent staging ground for the rest of the solar system, so getting there late means ceding any potential resource or technological advantages that being first might have attained.
There's also a slim possibility that there are things that can only be manufactured in low or zero gravity.
I think the last two reasons aren't a great justification, but anything that materially impacts geopolitics on Earth, as weapons systems and spying do, probably are if you think there's a credible threat that your adversary is capable of them. And that's probably a big part of why the US stopped going to the moon. The cost and risks didn't stack up when the US already had a pretty compelling technological lead, better intel, and the USSR never signalled that it was serious about going there.
China are serious, though, and the way they've vertically integrated the world's manufacturing base means they actually have a lead on the US in a number of areas. That's probably why there's suddenly a lot more urgency and credibility about claims of wanting to go back.
> Depending on where you established infrastructure on the moon, it might be pretty easy to conceal the things you're doing in space.
No it wouldn't be, because there is zero chance in hell of everyone else on Earth not realizing whats going on, if someone were suddenly busy launching all that machinery, building materials and weapons towards the Moon, not to mention hundreds of personnel with all their space suits, provisions, water, shelters, space poop collectors, etc.
Hiding something is pretty pointless, if the process of getting whatever it is to wherever it is hidden, is announced to the entire planet by shooting it into the sky on roaring pillars of fire.
> The moon is also a pretty decent staging ground for the rest of the solar system
The rest of what now?
There is Earth. There is the Moon. There is Mars. This is all the places in the solar system a human could, in theory, visit without immediately dying horribly. Maybe Phobos. Maybe.
The other planets are off limits: Mercury is worse than literal Hell. Venus is a hypercorrosive hothouse. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would instantly crush everything in their deep gravity envelopes, and most of their moons are highly radioactive hellholes. Not to mention that everything beyond Mars is not even theoretically reachable with a manned spacecraft as of right now.
So, that leaves Mars. A freeze-dried, irradiated, airless, toxic rock desert covered in microabrasive regolith, with too low gravity, no magnetic field to speak off, no available Nitrogen, and no resources that aren't found in abundance on Earth. And before anyone says "Land": May I present the [Gobi Desert][1], a 1.295 Million square kilometers large rock desert, smack in the middle of Asia. And while it is largely a cold, barren rock desert, it is still a paradise compared to Mars.
And even so, the Moon offers ZERO advantage as a "staging ground" for Missions to Mars, because, there is nothing on the Moon to be staged. Every kg of stuff that would be "staged" there, has to be first launched from Earth, so all a Moon Base does, is add another launch to an already costly equation.
> No it wouldn't be, because there is zero chance in hell of everyone else on Earth not realizing whats going on, if someone were suddenly busy launching all that machinery, building materials and weapons towards the Moon, not to mention hundreds of personnel with all their space suits, provisions, water, shelters, space poop collectors, etc.
We're talking about a permanent manned presence on the moon. If I have that and you don't, you can watch me launch from Earth all you like. I can build a launch facility on the side of the moon that you can't see without circumnavigating it, and I can conduct launches from it that you don't know about. To go to the extreme, I could launch nukes on ballistic trajectories that you would be blind to.
> And even so, the Moon offers ZERO advantage as a "staging ground" for Missions to Mars, because, there is nothing on the Moon to be staged. Every kg of stuff that would be "staged" there, has to be first launched from Earth, so all a Moon Base does, is add another launch to an already costly equation.
This is the kind of confidently ignorant response that is thankfully not too common on hackernews.
The moon has zero atmosphere, a trivial escape velocity, and is a huge mass that can be built on, within Earth's gravity well. Using a mass driver to launch from the moon around the Earth means you would need to carry less propellant on board your spacecraft, because in the best case scenario, you only need to carry the fuel to slow you down. Launching from Earth, you need X + Y fuel, where X gets you the delta-V to get to your destination from Earth, and Y is the fuel required to slow you down and land. Launching from the moon you need U + V, where U is the fuel that gets you to the moon, and V is the fuel you need to slow you down, because you don't need to launch from the moon using propellant. If X > U, launching from the moon is better. The faster you want to go, the more things tip in favor of launching from the moon, because you can keep adding stages and front-loading energy into your launch in a way that is impossible on Earth. Shit, if you launch around the Earth you can even regain some of the energy you put towards getting to the moon in the first place, because the Earth's gravity field accelerates you, and your propellant has potential energy as well as chemical energy (i.e. do an Oberth maneuver).
I'm well aware of the realities of the other bodies in the solar system. That doesn't mean we'll never want to go to any of them. If we do, going to the moon first makes a lot of sense.
If China gets there first, they will accomplish half of the above stated number two reason, reproduced below.
> The second reason we are going to the moon so that we can put the first person of color and the first woman on the moon. That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose.
The moon has trillions of dollars in water, helium, and metals (rare earth, titanium, etc). It's an f'ing goldmine and controlling said resource will be something hostile authoritarian regimes (China) would seek out. There's simply no excuse that the US should be this bad at making a system to reach the moon. The Chinese have committed insane sins and dropped massive amounts of space hardware on the earth (luckily it landed in the ocean). We should be dunking on them but instead we've got this buffoonery?
I have never found any math that made trip to the moon for materials even remotely wortwhile, by like orders of magnitude, not just today with today's technology, but for any foreseeable future we can meaningfully discuss. Water in particular is an unfortunate one to start with, given its abundance and ease of extraction on earth, vs absolutely positively ridiculous efforts to obtain them from the moon. But everything else from metals to obscurely valuable versions of Helium, seems to fall apart as soon as we go from "Look! Up there in the sky! Minerals!!!1", to "let's do a back-of-the-napkin math along any of the materials, science, energy, or money axis"
I enjoy using traditional cold-war bogey-men to scare ignorant politicians into accidentally sponsoring real science as much as any other person, I do, but... as long as we're not actually buying into that sillyness, right?.... right?
you should read the book delta v. The only time lunar mining makes sense is when there is a cislunar orbit economy. The delta v required to put things in orbit from the moon is a fraction of that of earth. So, if you have a vibrant manufacturing enviroment in space (Semi conductors, and other deposition methods) which space is more suited for, then the moon becomes a better place to source your materials from.
> So, if you have a vibrant manufacturing enviroment in space
And how does this "vibrant manufacturing environment" get into space? How is it supplied with personnel, food, water, spare parts, etc.?
Let's just focus on one component, shall we? The Moon only has 1/6th of Earths gravity, but to get stuff away from the Moon still requires a launch. That launch requires fuel. There is no fuel source on the Moon, so even if we had production facilities there, there are no high energy raw materials for them to process.
So where does the fuel come from? How about the only place in the solar system we know where we can make rocket fuel: EARTH!
So every liter of rocket fuel used to power launches to supply raw materials to a "cislunar orbit economy", first has to be transported to the moon by launching it from Earths gravity well.
So, where is the gain in efficiency exactly?
Also, where would this "cislunar orbit economy" find a market? The vast majority of people are here, on Earth. So even if there was a way to supply such an economy with raw materials (and energy, and personnel, and so on), the products would still need to be transported to Earth, adding a huge additional cost to everything manufactured. How is this supposed to compete with products made on earth exactly?
Hydrogen and oxygen can be made from water, and methane can be made from regolith and water.
>where would this "cislunar orbit economy" find a market?
The uniform distribution of microgravity lends itself to advanced manufacturing methods that cost hundreds if not billions of dollars to replicate here on earth. soooo many of earths manufacturing methods use very expensive means of creating the vacuum that is required, that is provided free in space.
Semiconductors. Turns out here on earth the machines costs hundreds of millions of dollars to etch a wafer because of the use of various technologies to create vacums, control for foreign material, and ensure the micro etches "Stay" and the material "goes". There is a wide discussion, and multiple tests conducted on the ISS that has confirmed this. So, space may be the only way to build next-gen semi conductor tech to get us below 2nm, and a much higher yield, with much cheaper equipment. With the cost of a launch at ~100m on a falcon, the launch would be cheaper than the equipment they are sending up.
ZBLAN fiber optics,
growing protein crystals,
Electron Beam Physical Vapor Deposition,
Regolith refining,
are all done better in space. And they will be cheaper in space, and on the moon and mars. They will be more expensive on earth due to the large gravity well.
Judging by [this][1], good luck trying to find adequate supplies of water on the Moon.
> methane can be made from regolith and water.
Again, good luck with that, because as shown [here][2], the amount of carbon in the lunar soil is, shall we say, not great. And since we are already talking about an immensely energy intensive process here, breaking down rocks in a smelter to get at tiny amounts of Carbon, may not be a very good solution.
So to have a chance at an adequate supply of CO_2 for the Sabbatier Process, you'd have to mine cold-trapped carbon dioxide. Which [may exist][3], or it might not. If it exists, it exists in the coldest regions of the moon, aka. places where you have no access to the only available energy source (Solar). Good luck hauling dry ice across the Moon to the base, especially since it will cease to be a solid the closer the transport comes to the processing plant.
And this process btw. requires HUGE amounts of energy, equipment, machinery and storage infrastructure. [This video][4] gives you a good idea of how difficult making CH_4/LOX fuel with ISRU using the Sabbatier process is ... on Mars, where you can actually pull CO_2 from the thin atmosphere, and likely have more water available.
So in summary:
1. No, we cannot just make the fuel on the Moon
2. Even if we could, it would likely end up being comparatively easier to just ship it there from Earth
3. Even ignoring all that, good luck making the amounts required to keep industrial-scale launches of materials happen
> control for foreign material
If you want to have a real challenge regarding keeping foreign material out, then try manufacturing things in an environment that is filled with hyperstatic, completely dry, microabrasive, pulverized regolith, and having to build clean rooms in an environment with the kind of temperature differentials experienced between the lunar day/night cycle, or worse, in space.
Also, if a clean room fails here on Earth, it's a huge headache for everyone to recover it. If an airlock fails on the Moon, people die, and the production facility gets destroyed by explosive decompression.
> And they will be cheaper in space, and on the moon and mars.
No, they won't, because again: These materials, even if they actually benefited from being produced off-world (and that's a big IF) will only be of any use here on Earth. There won't be any self-sustaining colonies in outer space, or on the Moon, or on Mars. There won't be sprawling industrial sites. We'll be lucky if we can keep a small crew of Astronauts alive on another Planet or the Moon for a few Months until they can get back and start the recovery process after having their bodies wrecked by Microgravity for a prolonged period of time.
So the only market for ANYTHING produced "up there", is "down here", and this, again, is where the prohibitive transportation costs come in and make the whole discussion moot.
I get the direction that the video was going on... but all it did in my mind was prove that it was completely possible. 5k solarpanels, two full football fields or 17 small nuclear reactors is all that is required for the process? I would have thought it'd be more.
I get what you're saying... it will be hard... for sure... Is it possible in the timeframes being discussed? probably not. Is it an endevor for our generation to embark on? yes. It's the greatest adventure ever written, and yeah... it's gunna suck for all people involved. It's a hostile wasteland.
With that out of the way... I think the video you linked tells the story dishonestly. The deltav required to get from mars, nor to the moon back to the ISS, is no where near refilling a full tank. Without a retro burn, it would require around 1/8th of the deltaV.
Secondly, you can send 10, 20 starships before, or each cycle and spin up. No one is saying that the very first time you send people they will use Insitu 100%. Maybe they bring the hydrogen, or the carbon dioxide and try and get a plant going. Or they can send all the fuel required beforehand. Once they have some kind of more permanant presence, they can slowly ramp up and take a more and more of the process on.
Not all these projects need to be solved at once. With 100T carrying capacity of each starship, all the youtube video convinced me of that it will take around 30-40 starships... which isn't that wild.
I would be more interested in what you think about the more advanced manufacturing, despite all the problems and infrastructure required?
No, that is only the panels required just to generate the electricity for the process.
This does not include, among other things: cabling, scaffolds, mountings, inverters, electronics, any batteries to cover operation during the night, any machinery required for mining, transportation, and building, nor building materials, piping, storage tanks, the actual sabbatier reactor chambers, insultation, duct tape, spare parts, tools, engineers, food, water, oxygen, space suits, vehicles, or toilet paper.
And keep in mind that for the sake of simplicity, [this assumes almost total conversion of energy][1] already, aka. almost losslessly converting the electricity harvested to chemical energy in the fuel, which of course doesn't happen in chemistry. It also ignores a whole lot of other stuff, outlined shortly after the timestamp linked.
And all that is to refill a single ship over the course of 500 days. Not a fleet. Not regular starts to support industry-scale transport logistics. One. Single. Ship. Over the course of 500 days
And we are, again, just talking about fuel production here. An industry also needs spare parts, personnel, tools, replacement machinery, building materials. The people working there need food, water, oxygen, toilet paper, ...
You know what else an industry needs? Waste disposal. We cannot just dump metal shavings, etc. into space: Because we are talking about orbiting platforms or something similar here, so these waste products would then become hyper-velocity projectiles ripping everything to shreds. So there needs to be a plan for that as well, which again involves all the same problems.
Another thing it needs: Energy. The video outlines how difficult it is to support even a single, scope-limited industrial process in a place where we cannot just connect to the electric grid or access large natural gas reservoirs. Solar panels are nice, but processes like smelting materials, welding, metalworking, anything that requires high temperatures? Good luck trying to cover that with solar.
And again another thing: Heat dispersal. Ever wondered why the ISS has so many fins? Many of those are not solar panels, they are heat-exchangers. And they just have to account for the body heat of a small group of people and their equipment. Try to imagine what an industrial facility would need, just in terms of that.
Yeah, so all in all, I guess that we won't support a "cis-lunar-orbit" industry any time soon. While in theory possible (as in, nothing so far violates any laws of physics), it simply isn't practical, and the cost of anything, from setting it up to maintaining it, would be prohibitive.
> I would be more interested in what you think about the more advanced manufacturing, despite all the problems and infrastructure required?
First I'd need to see tangible demonstrations that "having zero gravity" confers an advantage in the first place.
What do I mean by that? Simple: Does zero gravity enable certain processes, that cannot be replicated on Earth, and is the cost of setting up such facilities, vs. developing alternatives that work here, where we have materials, labour, air, etc. available really worth it.
Because "greatest adventure" sounds wonderful and all that, but when the term "industry" enters the discussion, we have to talk about efficiency, expedience and ROI.
The only way mining and refining on the moon makes any sense is if you're building stuff to be used on the moon in your lunar colonies, and that's a long way off.
This sounds completely insane to me. Are people worried that China is going to mine out the moon before the US gets there? You're talking about trillions of tons of material, it won't be the limiting factor in your lifetime. And this assumes that lunar mining/refining is even practical.
>First, we want to set up a more permanent base. Nasa refers to this as "we're here to stay"
Perhaps I've not been following Artemis closely enough, but it doesn't seem to have anything actually in progress that would directly connect to the "permanent base" idea, beyond "Well, we need to go to the moon if we want a permanent base there". But that's sort-of like saying, "Well, I need to enroll in a university if I want a PhD".
> Only time will tell if either of these two missions were actually worth it.
No time required, we already know the answer: neither of these two goals is worth the enormeous pile of resources burned to achive it.
1. A permanent human presence on the moon serves what purpose exactly that Robots cannot do? If we want to set up shop there: Why not send robots and an automatic laboratory-repair-bay? It's the moon, we can even remote control the damn things with only 2 seconds latency! What excatly are humans supposed to do there, that robots cannot?
2. Go ask women in underpaid care work and people of color in underserved communities, what they think would benefit them, and the general sense of equality, more: Hundreds of billions of dollars poured into improving social services like adequate pensions for carework, childcare, better supervision programs against discrimination in the workplace, better educational systems, etc. OR hundreds of billions of dollars burned by space-billionaires to let some old politician say "We did it!" at a press conference?
People who get miffed at putting women and poc in space also don't want to spend more on social services, though, so its kind of a false dichotomy. It's not like if we could somehow convince the powers that be to cancel the space program they would put it all into education, jobs programs and basic income.
Money isn't burned when spent on space programs. resources, e.g. fuels are, but money is spent, it stays down here on Earth, employing people, boosting corporate profits (and therefore pension funds and other things which invest in them), employing people (who maybe women and people of colour).
You could make the same argument about any government spending program, no matter how wasteful it is. The money always goes into the economy. The question is how to get the most useful output from that spending.
"hundreds of billions of dollars burned by space-billionaires" is what I was replying to. It would be more serious if the "burning resources" in the original comment's first paragraph meant fossil fuels, for example. Non-renewable things. Their second paragraph clarifies that they mean money (and not even taxpayer's money in their comment), which isn't burned.
> "The question is how to get the most useful output from that spending."
That is a question, not the thing I was replying to.
Possibly, but it's not unique to SLS. People were jesting twenty years ago about the purpose of the Space Shuttle being just a vehicle to get to and from the ISS. And the purpose of the ISS? So that the Space Shuttle would have somewhere to go.
> And the purpose of the ISS? So that the Space Shuttle would have somewhere to go.
I don’t think this is accurate. ISS was conceived almost 10 years after the Shuttle started launching, and the U.S. obviously had space station ambitions even before the Shuttle was on the drawing board (Skylab).
Additionally the Soviets did the exact same, with Mir being launched prior to the Buran’s first test flight — heck Salyut 1 was launched in 1971.
ISS stems from Space Station Freedom[1], which itself has its roots in the the Space Transportation System's space station component[2]. The Space Shuttle was a part of the Space Transportation System and the only part to receive funding and see development.
Again, the Challenger disaster was 12 years prior to the launch of the first ISS module. ISS missions only flew 37 times, out of 135 total missions for the Shuttle.
I first heard the saying I think sometime around the loss of Colombia. Maybe before, maybe after. By the return to flight, it was most certainly more true than false. By that time the shuttles performed very few non-ISS flights. I think that Atlantis flew a service mission to Hubble, other than that I can't think of any other shuttle flights that didn't go to the space station.
Columbia was heavier than the other orbiters, so she was flying the non-ISS missions from about '98 until her demise. After that US satellites were launched on disposable, unmanned rockets like the Deltas and Atlas.
I'd like to see us put the first ventriloquist on the moon, with a miniature spacesuit for their little buddy. "That's one small step for dummy-kind--", "Who ya callin' small ya big dummy!" This is why we go to space.
So long as they do a gag where the dummy's suit is depressurised and he continues to protest but now silently, then I'm all for it. If Man is truly to live along the stars then vaudeville humour shall be part of it
"With the Artemis campaign, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before."
That seems like a side effect more than an explicit purpose. Down below is more to the point:
> WHY WE’RE GOING TO THE MOON
> We’re going back to the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and inspiration for a new generation of explorers: the Artemis Generation. While maintaining American leadership in exploration, we will build a global alliance and explore deep space for the benefit of all.
The idea of stealth is tested every day. When missions are planned the capability of the aircraft determines what missions is can fly. A stealth aircraft can factually fly closer to an enemy's AA system without being detected.
It is, and quite well. And it is effective. But to make the really deep investment cost effective, it needs to be in the ninety percentile effective, and where we're sitting, right now, in the EW and sensor environment we're currently in, it's likely to be less than that, as low as a 40%. You can see this in the mobilizations we've seen to date. We try to keep them away from China close EW coverage, for good reason. You'll note Israel hasn't mobed the F-35I variant against anyone besides Gaza[0]. Again, for good reason.
Now, please let me be clear. If I am in the pilot seat, and I have a forty percent lower chance of being blown into flash-fried gibbets, I will be overjoyed. I will be blissful. The technologies are super cool, and, in spite of what could be called a rocky development path, they came out the other side with what looks like a usable platform, maybe even an excellent one. But, big picture, if I have a platform that costs a hundred times more[1], and it improves my rates from 5:1 to 9.2:1, taken on the whole . . that was not an optimal use of treasure and materiel. If it was flown out in 2009? Yeah, probably 20:1 exchange rates. It's not 2009 . . there's been a LOT of tech movement (hence the importance of Block 4).
The bitch of it is, I'm not even complaining against stealth all that much. I'm mostly bitching about the program management, not measuring spares, not checking if a widget worked yet before signing it off. Cheap stealth can be had, especially nowadays. And when it goes below a much lower cost threshold, it's even worth it - look at the NSM, after all, cheap stealth is incredibly deadly on a cruise missile or anything that needs to get in the enemy's face, that needs to close the range. But I'll be surprised if the cost of the 35 turns out to be worth it, as cool as it might be.
Eh, but who knows? Prominent defense talky talky type people have said that you're a fool for having opinions about the 35. So I'll just sit here being a fool, when it undoubtedly spanks the entire mainland PLAN/AF and we fly back home with geostrategic supremacy balanced on a whole squadron of fifty-foot erections. That would be grand - I would be a fool for any length of time to make that happen.
[0] Maybe Beirut, maybe maybe Iraq, although in the second instance there's a question as to who they were actually shooting at. But Gaza for sure - third parties saw that one. None of those are even in the same continent as a peer competitor air defense.
[1] Yes yes yes I know full rate production assuming 1000 units the flyaway cost per unit F35 is super duper ultra Costco cheap, 35m or whatever they're claiming now, but I'm talking "whole program" costs. Even using the Costco metaphor, buying the forty pound sack of tomatoes might be real cheap per tomato, but I'm only using two of those tomatoes - in the end I spend forty bucks for two tomatoes. I got some opinions about the whole concept of "flyaway cost", but that's another conversation.
The difference is that in 1948, the other side couldn't do anything about it even if it wanted to.
The other difference is that literally everything has changed in the past 76 years. But sure, maybe if we dig up Truman, Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao, and Churchill, and put them and their cabinets back in charge, it might work out.
"Root for" someone means to cheer for someone or look forward to someone's success. You root for sports teams, your kid to do well on their test, or for your candidate to win an election.
Barrack in British English can mean to jeer or boo someone. That's the opposite of root. I've never heard the word barrack used like this in America.
Consequences for my own inaction play an incredibly important motivational role for me. I don't get motivated by sunshine and rainbows, I personally get motivated by consequences.
So it's great that we can provide people 6 doses of narcan and act like they're big strong adults who are down on their luck, but it's incredibly harmful to pretend that this is the only possible solution to motivating behavior.
It's not very far fetched to detonate a nuke in space. The Russians can already do this without developing a brand new weapons platform.
The idea has been around a long time. This was the plot of CoD MW2 If someone nuked above the US and knocked out our grid it would be the most cost effective attack you can possibly think of.
I can think of a few extremely good reasons to go "Deathcon 3" against military satellites. For example, if the enemy derives more benefits from space than you do.
