Yesterday (Monday the 25th) was out due to ~30mph winds, and today looks pretty miserably overcast so far, but there seems to be some hope and intention of Starship SN9 doing a 12.5km test-flight sometime this week. LabPadre’s “Nerdle Cam” remains a good place to check in on things. This is expected to be a retry of December’s SN8 launch, controlled free-fall, and landing attempt, with remedies for SN8’s tank under-pressure hopefully lending the possibility of a successful landing this time. I’m greatly looking forward to the attempt!
UPDATE: Looks like today’s (Tuesday) entertainment was a tank pressure test, which SN9 passed, according to Elon Musk. Also per Elon, completion of an FAA review appears to be one of the necessary conditions the SN9 flight test is now waiting on.
Wednesday launch attempt appears unlikely, given lack of scheduled road closures, and winds gusting up to 38mph. Thursday or Friday attempt, perhaps?
In the wake of the tremendously exciting SN8 test last month, Starship SN9 is on the pad and it’s looking like we may see a static fire test as early as today (LabPadre’s Launch Pad Cam has live coverage) and a 12.5km altitude test and landing attempt, with that launch possibly as early as Friday.
SN10 meanwhile received its nosecone and is waiting in the wings to be next up, with SN11 also under construction and not that far behind.
SpaceX’s rapid-iteration process has been truly impressive and inspiring to behold, particularly with regard to Starship prototyping and testing. Such a stark contrast to the customarily slow pace of NASA-contractor partnerships. It gives me greatly enjoyed reason to hope that we’ll see successful colonization of other worlds in the near future.
Update: Looks like we got an SN9 test-fire! I wonder if the brief duration was as planned. (This side-by-side comparison seems to indicate comparable duration to SN8 Static Fire #3, so my guess is that all went as intended.) Looking forward to further developments.
Contemplating the promised benefits of “seasteading” usually leaves me hung up on seemingly hard unsolved problems such as defense, but I have to admit the arguably outlandish idea offers more immediate practical potential for competitive governance and decentralization in support of individual sovereignty than colonizing much more hostile, distant, and hard- and expensive-to-reach worlds beyond Earth. This video makes an interesting pitch worth considering, that proposes development of seasteads as both a worthwhile end in itself and a potentially helpful equatorial stepping stone on our way to the heavens and colonizing [and perhaps eventually seasteading on] other worlds.
Seasteading does appear to offer a key advantage over territory-based governance: the potential for rapid reconfigurability. If you don’t like your land-based government, you can usually move elsewhere, but doing so is a high-inertia process that may involve selling your home, buying or renting another, possibly needing to apply to change citizenship, and moving your possessions a long distance. This inertia and the time and costs involved sets a high threshold for what people are willing to put up with, inhibiting salutary feedback loops and giving power to incrementalism. In theory at least, seasteaders can move and establish new voluntary associations at will and with much greater ease than people with land-based ties. There’s enough in that to make the idea worth giving further thought, and it will probably make a good topic to delve into in a future episode of The No Fear Pioneer. In seeking new frontiers to advance to, it certainly makes sense to consider as wide a variety of viable possibilities as we reasonably can.
A happy discovery on the “Terran Space Academy” YouTube channel I just stumbled upon and subscribed to: “Starship the Next Generation” offers some concrete predictions and calculations regarding a possible lunar-launched, next-generation SpaceX Starship. Titanium construction (locally sourced) + larger volume + weak lunar gravity would mean much better payload to propellant ratio to Mars, and elimination of the need to add fuel in-orbit before departure as will be necessary when launching from Earth. This isn’t official info from SpaceX, and there’s some estimating by proportions and specs of existing hydrolox engines, but the calculations and possible uses of materials suggested offer some interesting food for thought.
Of particular interest: the prospect of moving payload from 10.5% of weight (in the currently prototyped “Generation One” Starships designed to launch from Earth) to closer to 23% (in the imagined, much larger but titanium-based “Generation Two” Starships designed to launch from the Moon), with payload capacity growing substantially from 150t to approximately 1,385t (a 9x increase!). Propellant would meanwhile drop from 84% of launch mass to around 75%.
Among the tech info, I enjoyed this cultural insight: “Here in space, you will be judged not by what you have but by what you can do — the knowledge you have, the skills you contribute, will determine your status here.”
I hope and expect that will prove largely true. Among the many potential benefits of pursuing life on new frontiers, the opportunity to build a culture of practical competence is one of the more exciting to me.
Interesting competition with big relevance to off-Earth food production and our ability to thrive in new places:
Design, build, and test an autonomous system that can support plant growth without human intervention. Develop a smart system that might include sensors, cameras, and automated controllers for lighting, watering, and air circulation within a 50 cm cubic growing environment. Plant seeds of one or more of the predetermined plant varieties by hand, and grow them without any further human interaction over a 30 day period.
The contest has high school, college, and professional entry categories. Submissions are due by February 3, 2020.Your ideas could help shape and facilitate the future of space settlement!
With major social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter showing an increasing enthusiasm for suppressing content and publishers they don’t like (whether by invisibly “shadow-banning” posts, silently culling follower lists, demanding post retractions, de-platforming users outright, or footnoting posts with disclaimers) we seem to be approaching the potential end of an era — or so many of us hope, at least. What the next era might look like, we’re still figuring out, but it sure feels like a good time for freedom of speech to be cherished and championed again.
Back in the day, we had the free frontier of the Internet and its very decentralized array of offerings — forums, websites, blogs, comment sections, and all that. We used tools like RSS/Atom feed aggregators to help wrangle it all into a firehose we could more comfortably drink from (the old-school version of “following” sites and authors). We still have those things, of course, but our focus has moved away from them and toward Big Social. Seduce by greater effectiveness at connecting with others and getting substantially more eyes on our posts, we went all in and moved from a largely decentralized world to one that entrusted our ability to publish to a small handful of companies. With their growth came power over our freedom of expression that we failed to be adequately concerned about, leading to where we find ourselves today — in many ways stifled, suppressed, and distrustful of “Big Social”, and wondering where to go next. It’s an important issue if you feel, as I do, that living under conditions where you aren’t free to speak your mind isn’t living.
In looking around for good alternatives, we find both centralized and decentralized alternatives to choose from, raising some interesting dilemmas. Sites such as Parler and Gab.com have promised to remain steadfast in support of free speech, and to the extent they can be trusted to do so may provide viable drop-in alternatives to Twitter. I’m reasonably optimistic about their commitment to freedom of expression, and have been trying both out (I’m @kulak on Parler, @kulak76 on Gab.com), but having seen the pitfalls of centralized social media, one can’t help but wonder whether sites such as these will eventually succumb to the same pressures to suppress and censor. (I hope not, and I give Parler and Gab much benefit of the doubt, but the concern is hard to escape.) Gab allows for setting up your own self-hosted alternatives to Gab.com, and in that sense doesn’t quite qualify as a “centralized” service, though in practice it will be interesting to see whether alternative Gab sites end up being widely used or even necessary. (If they prove largely unnecessary, that’s a good sign for Gab.com having kept its free-speech promise.)
We can also look to the publishing, reading, and communication tools that have served us in the past: self-hosted blogs like this one, and feed aggregator apps and sites (I used NetNewsWire for years and have been using Feedly lately). While ability to connect with large numbers of readers is likely to be no better than it was before (I’m very interested in ways we might be able to surpass those limits), hosting our own content at least gives us much greater control over our own publishing. If others really don’t like you, they can put pressure on your hosting provider, but if we get to the point where hosting providers are widely bullied into de-platforming customers the world will really be in trouble. As failsafe measures go, the ability to move your site to another host remains a pretty solid safeguard.
This isn’t necessarily an either-or proposition, of course. One can use social media sites together with self-publishing, leveraging posts on the former to help promote your work on the latter, for example. That’s been a key part of how I’ve used Twitter, Parler, and Gab, and I expect will continue to be. Publishing longer-form work here has intrinsic value to me because it’s helped me work through thoughts and develop ideas, so I’ll likely continue to do it regardless, but having my writing reach a more substantial number of people who find value in those ideas would certainly be an appreciated improvement.
Yet another set of alternatives exists in networking sites with focused purposes. BillWhittle.com is one example whose thriving I’ve been glad to be a part of. Ricochet is another that I’ve used in the past. These sites give users ways to publish to and communicate with one another, while firewalling member content to keep comment sections troll-free and enjoyable. They aren’t places to publish for broader public consumption, but they serve a related and very worthwhile purpose to those looking to publish and connect.
One thing I think we’d be wise to do, in weighing our options, is to refrain from underestimating the appeal of centralized social media sites. There are good reasons why the dynamics have worked out well for them, and our effectiveness at developing alternatives will rely on understanding, appreciating, and accounting for their attractiveness to large numbers of users. They include the value of familiarity and name recognition, the network effect, and the convenience of having a single (or a few) centralized service(s) for connecting with the people whose posts interest us. If we want to succeed in developing decentralized alternatives to Big Social, we’d be wise to find alternative ways to satisfy the same wants and needs. This is a subject that’s been very much on my mind, and I expect I’ll continue to think about it quite a bit. We have diverse options and numerous possibilities available to us (some perhaps as yet undreamt of), and it’s going to be an interesting challenge to figure out how to most effectively develop and make use of them.
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
