Month: December 2015 (Page 1 of 2)

In case you missed it: Be sure to catch the final part of Tim Urban’s aforementioned series on Elon Musk and SpaceX.

(Tim also has a post about December 21^st’s SpaceX launch and historic first-stage landing success — which I didn’t realize he’d helped host the webcast for. Nice to see him expanding to other media; I wish him much well-earned success!)

It happened while I was packing for a far less ambitious trip last night. As soon as I saw the news on my Twitter feed, I found the video and watched it again and again on my iPhone — beaming with elated joy.

At 32 minutes, 25 seconds into this SpaceX webcast, you can see their Falcon 9 first stage descend under control and land vertically, after successfully boosting its satellite delivery vehicle to an altitude of about 72km. The spectacular landing of the first stage is truly science fiction made reality, by dedicated and tireless effort and discipline of execution:

Tremendous congratulations are due to those at SpaceX who made this happen — made it look deceptively easy, even. The opening of a new frontier, with possibilities we can only as yet dimly imagine, will be made possible by advances such as this.

Here’s a low-altitude aerial view of just the first-stage landing:

The future we seek requires a philosophy of achievement, responsibility, and individuality, and a loose governing framework that stays off our backs and ceases to siphon precious resources:

Ah, the things we believed we could do, before certain people taught us how to hate ourselves and distrust our grand ambitions.

I, too, grew up with this optimistic view of the future, and I refuse to cede it to the myopic vision and small bitterness of others:

Flashback: Bill Whittle articulated clearly after the Jihadist assault on Charlie Hebdo, what the subsequent Jihadist atrocities in Paris and San Bernardino further demonstrated — and what Germany’s Angela Merkel, Australia’s John Howard, and Spain’s Jose Maria Anzar have themselves ceded. (See also here.) Multiculturalism’s anti-assimilationist streak, when combined with a militantly political religion of conquest, produces unassimilated populations that end up violently hostile to their naive and increasingly disarmed host cultures. “Tolerance” of such hostility is not noble; it is nothing short of suicide.

Sunni Muslim Raheel Raza makes the case for serious concern about Islamic Jihadist violence more effectively than I can, in this must-see video:

(via @RyanMauro)