Tuesday 29 October 2013

Air Date:

October 29, 2013

Photo, above: The StarTram orbital launch system would transport passengers and cargo into space in a magnetic levitation (maglev) train. Getting into space is one of the harder tasks to be taken on by humanity. The present cost of inserting a kilogram (2.2 lb) of cargo by rocket into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is about US$10,000. A manned launch to LEO costs about $100,000 per kilogram of passenger. But who says we have to reach orbit by means of rocket propulsion alone? Instead, imagine sitting back in a comfortable magnetic levitation (maglev) train and taking a train ride into orbit. See Hour Two, Charles Pellegrino, author and explorer; James Powell, inventor & author; George Maise, aeronautical engineer & author, in re: StarTram: maglev.

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Co-hosts: Larry Kudlow, The Kudlow Report, CNBC; and Cumulus Media radio. Charles Pellegrino, adventurer, inventor and author.

Hour One

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 1, Block A: Larry Kudlow, The Kudlow Report, CNBC; and Cumulus Media radio, in re: Dems will go for a tax hike and the GOP will negiotiate for benefit? ACA datahub connects all agencies and states and insurance firms and the VA, et al., to ACA site and actual enrollment. Most important: imagine that you’re fully signed up and enrolled; if the datahub doesn’t transfer your information, you're not signed up. Tonight, same as a few days ago, whole ACA site is down because Verizon's subsidiary temporarily ceased functioning. [Francis Rose, a week ago: I had a hard time with my carrier, whose name rhymes with Verizon.] LK: Countries that spend less grow more; countries that spend more grow less. In 2014, the arithmetic is the Senate.

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 1, Block B: Bill Whalen, Hoover Institution & Sacramento Bee, in re: Are Republicans dealing with a ‘Gotham Theory’ in California?

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 1, Block C: Lanhee J. Chen, Hoover & Bloomberg View, in re: Let’s Fight Obamacare by Getting Out of the Way Flawed law: just the technical problems; rather, the entire policy gamut, the structure. Techie stuff is fixable; the underlying structure is not.

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 1, Block D: Scott Gottlieb, MD, in re: "ObamaCare's Technology Mess: At least a half dozen state exchanges won't offer full online enrollment thanks to unresolved software problems" and ""Obamacare Faces a 'Death Spiral' -- but It Turns on the Declining Participation of Health Plans, Not Just Rising Premiums"

Hour Two

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 2, Block A: Charles Pellegrino, author and explorer; James Powell, inventor & author; George Maise, aeronautical engineer & author, in re: StarTram: maglev. (1 of 4) A train htat can be launched into Earthorbit.

Gen 1 and Gen 2. Low orbit: 500 km above Earth. Gen 1: acceleration tube is followed by posting a vacuum tube along a mountain, upward slope at 15 degrees or so; lets the tube exit at much lower pressure than sea level so aerodynamic forces on vehicle will be mitigated. Mountains in Alaska, Russia, Peru, China – a vacuum tube up a mountain, 15,000 to 25,000 feet. A rocket can cost $10,000/lb to lift; with maglev, $30/lb.

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1. Maglev: what it is, how it works for launch.

2. Bright Future, what can be done with capabilities for solar system, Earth orbit, Moon and mars; far planetoids.

3. Weaponization

4. Interstellar: relativistic travel, relativistic weapons

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StarTram: The New Race to Space by James Powell, George Maise, and Charles Pellegrino

James R. Powell invented the superconducting maglev concept in the 1960s with a colleague, Gordon Danby, also at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which was subsequently developed into modern maglev trains. Later, Powell co-founded StarTram, Inc. with Dr. George Maise, an aerospace engineer who previously was at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1974 to 1997 with particular expertise including reentry heating and hypersonic vehicle design

Dr. George Maise is a mechanical/aeronautical engineer with many years of experience in industry and in research laboratories. He holds a Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences from Princeton University and B.S. (Honors) from University of California, Berkley. His major areas of expertise are fluid mechanics and heat transfer, particularly as related to air-breathing and rocket propulsion, rarefied gas dynamics, re-entry heating, nuclear reactor thermal/hydraulics, and electrostatic probes for plasma diagnostics.

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 2, Block B: Charles Pellegrino, author and explorer; James Powell, inventor & author; George Maise, aeronautical engineer & author, in re: StarTram: maglev. (2 of 4)

Gen 2: run cables along the ground, many thousands of amperes; if the currents are in opposite directions wires are pushed apart; if the same direction, pulled together. Can thereby levitate a hefty tube at 2km above the Earth. Intending to send huge cargo up, then eventually thousands of people using chemical rockets. Lots of private enterprise working on taking humans to low-Earth orbit. If we're gong to do asteroid mining, will have to come from space. We can launch - beaming power from one Hawaiian island to another. Can put satellite power up by StarTram, beam it back for less than the present cost of coal-powered energy. Note: tube wd have to be levitated; ground acceleration (from zero to orbital speed) needs to be longer in order to reduce the G-force to [something physically tolerable]. Fighter pilots can survive 7Gs – wd be 470 km long.

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 2, Block C: Charles Pellegrino, author and explorer; James Powell, inventor & author; George Maise, aeronautical engineer & author, in re: StarTram: maglev. (3 of 4) Gen 1 could be up and operating in five years. Gen 1: tube runs up the side of a mountain; Gen 2: . Chinese are working on a project, BackTrain? to carry passengers rapidly from city to city: a maglev train in an evacuated tube; ergo, no theoretical speed limit. They’ve chosen 1,000kph (622mph) – which they call "close to liftoff speed." Liftoff speed: 12 km/sec to escape from the Earth. A vacuum tube that can go up to orbital velocity, you have almost everything you need. This looks like what Stalin thought Korolyev was bringing him in the 1940s – " a starship bomber." Recall USAF rods from God – a 6-ton tungsten telephone pole in orbit; can de-orbit toward anywhere on Earth. Could be launched with StarTram. All they’ve revealed is that they're working n a "civilian" program named BackTrain. One not-fully-dvped technology: at mountain top, air pressure is lower than sea level but not zero – maybe 20% of sea level. When the tube opens, air can rush into the tube; need to have a way to keep it out. Dangers of StarTram: I hope humans don't start a weapons race with this; but one factor would happen if they did: if one country starts to build systems such as rods from God, then other countries can distribute trillions of pieces of chaff to destroy them – which would cut humanity off from space for thousands of years.

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 2, Block D: Charles Pellegrino, author and explorer; James Powell, inventor & author; George Maise, aeronautical engineer & author, in re: StarTram: maglev. (4 of 4) Nuclear-powered ram-jet – heat from fission in the enclosed power plant. In Jovian atmosphere, can run it or years with hardly any attention. The atmosphere is the propellant! To Alpha Centauri. Valkyrie engine: a magnetic pusher-plate at the front of the ship, a magnetic sail or kite that pulls the other component on a string; proton-triggered fusion? Cd get to 5% of the speed of light. In that case, 100 years to get to Alpha Centauri. Pellet fusion of d-helium 3. With antiprotons through an accelerator . . . 50 to 70 years from now, a robot craft. With StarTram, can put an infinite amount of material up.

Hour Three

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 3, Block A: Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index, and Francis Rose, Federal News Radio, in re: Carney and Val's very bad day. NBC's report: site later scrubbed; then returned, edited ("Now you see it, now you don’t."). Obama headed to Boston to ride Romneycare's coattails? ACA site architecture is so bad there's no repair.

• Obamacare website chief refuses eight times to tell Congress how many have been able to sign up: 'We'll have that information available in mid-November'Marilyn Tavenner provided few answers in a House Ways and Means Committee hearing Tuesday

• 'We have a system that's working,' she boasted

• Obamacare website isn't verifying applicants' eligibility for subsidies; instead, is reminding them that they risk perjury charges by lying

• The one-year delay of the employer mandate means the IRS won't know until 2016 if people told the truth about 2014 subsidies

• 'You've had nearly four years to get it ready,' sniped one congressman. 'Why should the American people believe you now?'

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 3, Block B: Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index, and Francis Rose, Federal News Radio, in re: the architecture is what they lay out to show how it'll look: the integrator does this. Take a scoop out f a thousand-piece puzzle, and then another, then another, and try to put them together. Not designed to work. Each question you answer –name, SS no, etc – has to go through the hub – from different sources, formats. Supposed to occur live while you're sitting there, which is tricky. Rare for IT to cut across all this – imagine Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, and everybody having to integrate it to pull data. Complex. Maybe a hundred times more complicated than normal. (The Cardinals' plane didn't take off for Boston because of a glitch?) Woman today deliberately denied Congress info – Marilyn Tavenner at CMS. Answered every question in a similar way: when officials go before Congress, they issue the answers they’ve been handed. "I can give you the numbers in mid-November" – what? IT rolls numbers out by the second. We don’t know anything about the applicants.

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 3, Block C: Mona Charen, NRO, in re: THE GOP

Obamacare’s Disillusioned How to appeal to the white working class. The only ay for Republicans to win is to increase their share of the white vote. They’re hostile to Wall Street, free trade, very big companies; skeptical of GOP.

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 3, Block D: Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: Sierra Nevada provides an update on the condition of its Dream Chaser test vehicle after this weekend’s glide flight and bad landing. SNC has not yet decided whether to repair the Dream Chaser test craft, which does not use the same landing gear the orbital vehicle would use. Investigating what went wrong will take “a couple of weeks,” Sirangelo estimated. He said the vehicle, which is now in a hangar in Mojave, Calif., was “fully intact” after the crash. “The pressure vessel was completely pristine, the computers are still working, there was no damage to the crew cabin or flight systems,” Sirangelo said. “I went inside it myself and it was perfectly fine. There was some damage from skidding.

“We learned everything we wanted to on this test, and learned more than we expected to learn,” Sirangelo said. “We believe we’ve got most of the data we need [but] I can’t honestly say, I just don’t know yet. It’s not going to affect our schedule in the long term [but] It might affect whether we do another free flight test this year or next year. We’re still assessing that.” The company also claims that the flight met the requirements of a $15 million NASA milestone payment, since the goals of the flight were to test the vehicle’s flight capabilities, not its landing gear. (The failed landing gear used will not be the gear used on the final flight vehicle.) They have scheduled a press conference for tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Why governments can't do it A government official today unwittingly revealed a fundamental and unpleasant truth about how governments: operate. In an interview today, the head of India’s space agency denied that his country is in a space race with anyone. Mr. Radhakrishnan, Secretary in the Department of Space and Chairman of Space Commission, said each country — whether it’s India, the US, Russia or China — had their own priorities. “There is no race with anybody. If you look at anybody, they have their own direction. So, I don’t find a place for race with somebody. But I would say we are always on race with ourselves to excel in areas that we have chalked out for ourselves,” he told PTI here in an interview. How typical. By denying the reality of the competition that India is part of Mr. Radhakrishnan illustrates for me and everyone once again the basic reason all government efforts eventually fail. Read More

Hour Four

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 4, Block A: Rich Lowry, NRO, in re: Goodbye to Existing Plans, by Romesh Ponnuru & Rich Lowry Obamacare was sold on a false premise. The bad ideas behind the shutdown.

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 4, Block B: Theo Meyer, ProPublica, in re: coastal rebuilding, outdated flood maps that dictate the premiums 5.5 million Americans pay for flood insurance, and how FEMA has failed to set up a council to advise on climate change issues despite being mandated by law to do so.

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 4, Block C: Michael Ledeen, FDD, in re: It's Not Just About Syria. The Saudis Are Direct Targets of Iranian Operations There's no reason to be surprised at the Saudis' dramatic dissing of the United States in recent days and weeks. And it's not just because the United States has backed away from direct involvement in the Syrian war, or the upbeat remarks from the White House about talks with Tehran's new government officials. It has at least as much to do with the Saudis' ongoing conflict with Iran -- involving very real attacks on Saudi sites and officials -- as with our recent about-faces and signs of weakness with regard to Syria and the Iranian nuclear program.

Tuesday 29 October 2013 / Hour 4, Block D: Reza Kahlili, author, A Time to Betray, in re:

Kerry: US won't succumb to fear tactics of those who oppose Iran diplomacy . . . In the past months the prime minister {Netanyahu of Israel] has been portrayed as leading a solitary campaign to increase economic pressure on Iran precisely at a time when the international community is disposed to refrain from further financial penalties as a good will gesture to help improve the chances of a negotiated solution. On Sunday Netanyahu defended that characterization, even as he explained he does not believe it is reflective of reality.

“This [halting Iran’s nuclear program] is vital and important for the security of Israel and, in my view, the peace of the world. Then certainly we are willing to stand alone in the face of world opinion or changing fashion,” Netanyahu said. “But in fact we are not alone because most, if not all, leaders, those with whom I have spoken, agree with us." . . .

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Music

Hour 1: Snow White & the Huntsman. Robin Hood.

Hour 2: Brake.

Hour 3: Lincoln. Sin City. Red Dawn.

Hour 4: Ides of March. Red Dawn. Black Hawk Down.