ken

Via James Nicoll, the number that causes the cost of orbital flight to, well, skyrocket.

For a SSTO boosteer using LH2 fuel and LO2 oxidizer, 92% of the take-off weight will be fuel. That leaves 8% for the rocket and everything else in it.

That’s a steep climb. Every single pound of anything brought on board means the ship needs to also accomodate almost 12 more pounds of fuel. And of course it does that by having a bigger, and therefore heavier, fuel tank, and thus needing to accomodate even more fuel.

You can save some fuel (and thus needed fuel capacity) by ditching parts of your ship as soon as they’re no longer needed to get you the rest of the way to orbit rather than bring them the whole way up, but those bits need to be replaced if you want to make another trip.

Add to that the fact that the structural strength needed to stand up to several g’s at takeoff and thousands of degrees of frictional heat at reentry, and complete self-contained ecosystems and/or consumable oxygen, water and food all tend to be kind of heavy, and what you’ve got is an assurance that anything you ride to orbit is going to be massive and expensive.

And it’s never going to get much better. We’re never going to get a better fuel for leaving Earth, not in our present society.

Don’t we already have something better than chemical fuel?

Of course not, and we never will. Our fearless leaders, and their licensed friends in the nuclear industry, have much better fuel to work with, but you can be sure that we will never get our hands on it without major political changes. The problem is that anything that’s good for making a rocket go is also good for blasting stuff on Earth. Getting propellant to shoot out of the back of the rocket involves lots of heat applied to that propellant, causing pressure to get really high and forcing lots of propellant out of the rocket nozzle at high speed. Getting buildings to fall down involves lots of heat applied to a bomb casing, causing pressure to get really high and forcing lots of hot air and hot bomb casing parts and hot bomb explosive parts to go flying at high speeds to knock down, melt, shred, and otherwise ruin whatever they encounter before their energy dissipates.

Lots of heat is also a good way to ruin water treatment plants, bridges, railroads, and other things that people for miles around depend on to keep them supplied with the necessities of life.

This leads democratic governments and tyrants alike to enact laws requiring the unwashed masses to keep their mitts off of anything that can release significantly more energy per pound or more energy per liter than gasoline. So we’re stuck with the chemical fuels, and it’s only the government and their heavily restricted set of license holders that get to play with the good stuff. And we all know how efficiently they bring down costs over time.

So what can be done?

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If you can take it or leave it, and they outlaw it, you’re mostly going to leave it. Unless it’s clear you’re going to get away with it, and no one will find out you did it, and even then you’ll think twice about it.

If you’re hooked, however, you’ll keep taking the risk until you get caught. And you’ll take other risks to keep from getting caught, since getting caught not only involves punishment (bad) but the authorities forcibly preventing you from doing whatever you’re hooked on (slightly worse than a large asteroid strike). You’ll take other risks to replace the supply lines the authorities keep cutting off. Generally, you’ll do a lot of things that seem really stupid and crazy to people who aren’t hooked and rank life, health, liberty, duty, and self-respect higher than your vice. Odds are you were always willing to do crazy and stupid things to feel good in the short term; it just never proved necessary to put quite so much of your stupidity and craziness on display before the authorities went and outlawed your favorite short-term joy.

And the authorities will catch people who persist in whatever it is they’ve outlawed, and they’ll notice that the people they catch keep showing up with records of doing crazy and stupid things. They’ll reach the conclusion that it’s a damn good thing our legislators outlawed it, because just look at what it does to people. And they’ll notice that the murder rate has gone up lately, and a lot of the perpetrators and victims are involved in this forbidden activity (because there’s money in it and because, of course, they tend to be crazy and stupid enough to continue an unhealthy habit that’s been outlawed), and of course the only thing that we can do to Protect Our Families and maintain Law and Order is to increase the penalties and step up enforcement.

This will convince the more reasonable and intelligent of the addicts to do what it takes to quit, or at least to come up with better ways to not get caught, and they don’t come to the attention of the authorities anymore. The authorities then declare the problem is Getting Worse because the addicts they catch have gotten crazier and stupider. And the murder rate is still outrageously high. And the crazier and stupider addicts have gotten hold of something even worse than the evil stuff that originally motivated the whole effort. (Because, if you’re taking more risk and paying more to get it, you want something with more of a kick to it to compensate, and the risk you’re willing to tolerate in the process goes up with the risk you’re already taking in the first place).

It’s about this time that some people look at the situation, notice that the present legislation together with its enhancements has not produced any actual improvements, and suggest dropping the whole thing and letting idiots suffer in peace. This advice was actually followed in 1933, followed by an impressive decline in the overall homicide rate. But sometimes, reason does not prevail, the sampling bias is ignored, and the authorities gasp in horror and exclaim “Are you crazy? Look at what it does to people! And it keeps getting worse! If we didn’t outlaw it, everybody would end up hooked on it! There wouldn’t be enough non-addicts left to keep society going! The barbarian mindless hordes would overrun and destroy society within hours!” All without pausing to wonder whether the people that they’re hauling in now, the people stupid and crazy enough to start and continue a self-destructive habit in the face of draconian penalties and ever more stringent enforcement, are in fact a representative sample of the public at large.

Theodore Dalrymple, who is remarkably free of illusions about just how stupid and crazy people can be, makes this sort of error in arguing against drug legalization. He uses the following anecdote to try to cast doubt on the notion that most people are not stupid and crazy enough to start destroying their irreplacable brains with drugs if the law permitted them to:

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If we all agreed what “pork” was, there wouldn’t be any of it in the budget. The “pork-busting” idea needs to be backed up by its backers with specifics on what should be cut and why.

With the National Budget Simulation, one can specify exactly where cutting should be – and see what the outcome is.

It’s a static model, but it’s a good starting point.

As one who thinks that taxes are plenty high enough, on the rich as well as on everyone else, and that budgetary problems should be solved by budget cutting, it’s time to go to work.

Here’s my first cut, which actually yields a $347.47 billion surplus:

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For what?

Well, anything.

How about bird flu? Lots of generally sane people seem to think it’s only a matter of time.

If you survive the initial impact of whatever-it-is (and you probably will), your biggest problem is going to be simple – broken supply lines.

Which means that, regardless of the threat, the biggest part of your preparedness plan is going to be stockpiling stuff. Food and water. More water (the stuff takes up quite a bit of space… and when the plumbing stops, don’t forget about the stockpile sitting in your water heater). Medicine (although stockpiling real medicine might involve bending some bloody useless laws, assuming it lasts long enough to be worth the trouble). A generator and fuel, if something you depend on (such as insulin) must be refrigerated. Ammunition (unless you know how to make arrows, and own or can construct a bow). Fuel for heating if you live someplace that gets too cold. Et cetera.

It’d be great if they’d let you stock a respirator and other nifty devices to help you live through an actual infection with bird flu or some other nasty germ, but only doctors get to have real medical equipment. Of course, during a disaster, there won’t be nearly enough doctors to go around. (Hell, there aren’t enough doctors to go around now… that’s a big part of the “health care crisis” people keep yammering about.) And the vaccine, if the powers-that-be manage to create one, will be given out on their terms, not yours. So your best bet during a pandemic is going to be to stay the hell away from everybody and live off of your stockpiled supplies.

If you’re ready to live like a hermit for a while, you’ll probably not be unlucky enough to catch the dread disease before it becomes widely known. (Unless we really do have a government crazy enough to keep a pandemic a secret until everyone catches it, like the one in The Stand. But I seriously doubt we’ll see that government anytime soon.)

If you start now, when nothing special seems about to happen (unless you live around southeast Texas or southwest Louisiana), there’s not much of a limit to the eventual size of your stash, other than the amount of storage you have to work with. You’ll want to-go kits, too, in case your home becomes acutely unhealthy and you’ve managed to lay hands on a means of transport that can actually go places on that dreaded day. Bikes (one per person, of course) might end up being your only viable means of transport, although the cargo capacity is low. Still, if the disaster is localized, it could be a way to get someplace that’s still civilized. And if the disaster is a localized one that you can see coming for a day or two, and you’ve elected to live in an area known to be prone to such a disaster without a car, and you think it’s unhealthy or undignified to wait for your fearless leaders to send you a bus, it’s a way to get out of the disaster’s path. (You won’t be in much danger from speeding cars along the evacuation route!) In any event, it’s still a good way to get someplace farther than the gas in your tank can carry you if it turns out you won’t be able to get more.

And finally, don’t listen to this bullshit. There’s plenty you can do individually to prepare for the day when you’ll have to stay the hell away from everybody for a while and everyone is trying to stay the hell away from you, and the more people that actually prepare and are able to do it as needed, the more of us will end up living through it. Whatever “it” turns out to be. And your political pressure should really be aimed at relaxing or eliminating any laws that stand in the way of your individual preparations – that’s a lot easier for a variety of people to judge and evaluate and agree on than whether the folks at the CDC are cooking up the right vaccine, and whether they have the facilities in place to make enough of it, and the right infrastructure to distribute it, or whether the President is a moron who’s deliberately crippling the CDC because he doesn’t believe in government and would really rather that the poor die off so they can’t bitch when he gives what’s rightfully theirs to his rich buddies.

Crappy Administrations will keep happening (regardless of your politics, you’ll agree they’ve happened several times in the past 30 years). But if you can rely on yourself, at least you’ll know you’re relying on the one person that unquestionably has your best interests at heart.

Even today, after thousands suffered on live TV for want of water and other supplies (along with security), it’s a sign of “confusion” in the Administration that it appointed as head of FEMA the man who mentioned that a stockpile of emergency supplies, including but not limited to duct tape, would be a useful thing to have if disaster struck.

Apparently, the idea of having individuals prepare themselves to be cut off from civilization for a few days, and even to be able to reduce their exposure to airborne nastiness, is too ridiculous to even consider. Combine that with the criticism the Federal Government received for its “slow” response to a problem that wouldn’t have existed if the non-evacuating population had recourse to such a stockpile along with competent security forces, and you see the underlying premise:

People cannot be expected to take care of themsleves in any significant way. People who are allowed to vote cannot be expected to stockpile food and water in any amount; if they go without in a disaster, it’s some government’s fault. (And if they go without because a state government turned the stuff away, it’s the Federal government’s fault for not bringing replacement supplies faster).

Of course this continues an old pattern. A new medicine has unexpected side effects? We can’t rely on the idiots out there to catch on to the idea that new medicines might have unforeseen side effects – we’ve got to keep it out of their hands for several years, and then let them have it only with a permission slip from their doctor. All under the direction of Federal regulators, the only people in the country capable of learning from other people’s experience.