Photo, left: MR. AND MRS. NIXON IN CHINA, FEBRUARY 1972.
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-hosts: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com. Dr. David M. Livingston, The Space Show.
 
Hour One
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 1, Block A:  Arthur Waldron, Lauder Professor of International Relations, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, in re: recall years ago the Sino-Soviet split; now see happy pix of the two in military, economic and geopolitical spheres.  Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting: the split began in 1958 when the Chinese scared h Soviets by asking Moscow to threaten nuclear war with the US.  Note that n o country in the world models itself on Russia not China (Not even Byelorus nor North Korea). No bloc of friends, enemies internally and externally, crises around the world Each sees the other as useful as a foil and economically; and the fact that they're both kind of hard-line dictatorships reassures them.  An affair of the mind, not of the heart.  Their alliance bedevils the US (cheers them), and they can bedevil each other: Russia cares about the Stans while China is oozing in.   Vladivistok is critical, as is Kamchatka.  Note that Russia's influence once extended much farther south, to the gulf next to Beijing.  In the Middle East or the Pacific, however, the future is not clear. Europe? The Brits have gone far out on a limb to support China, and Russia wants to break up NATO – Europe is like an animal in a zoo, kids poke it and it won't move, but eventually something will happend and it'll have to move - maybe events in the Middle East.   Contradictory  points in the replations, but whenever they meet they cook up a scheme not in US interst. They're meeting right now – discussing eternity. http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/14/china-russia-ties-in-focus-as-shanghai-cooperation-organization-kicks-off.html  ;  http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-12/17/c_134928157.htm
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 1, Block B:  Charles Burton, Brock University, in re: http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/miss-world-canada-disappointed-after-china-bars-her-from-pageant-final-1.2707423   Miss World Canada was barred from participating in the Miss World contest in China: Anastasia Lin was denied a visa, was born in China, moved to Vancouver, and now speaks on human rights.  She speaks about Falun Dafa – and those practitioners have been gravely persecuted in China, including apparently having live young people be drugged, set on a gurney, and having their organs removed for resale – lungs, heat, liver, kidneys.  Cost for lungs plus heart: said to be $150,00o US.   Miss Lim has done a lot of good for Falun Dafa's image by speaking worldwide, including to the US Congress.  China is trying to use its position as pageant host to impose its views on the world. It's not an honest broker, does not accept international norms. Let us think of this when we consider hosting organs in China. Next year: will be held in North Korea; Canada will send Miss Lin again.  Falun Gong (Falun Dafa) are active around the world and appear on Parliament Hill in Canada. Publish newspapers for free, have a TV station, and do films. Also Chinese New Year shows. They continuously embarrass Beijing.
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 1, Block C: Hotel Mars, episode n; Dr David M Livingston, The Space show, in re: Space X, the success of the year.  Spectacular return; launch:  engines burn, excellent mission, then overshadowed by the amazing return: flew back to an abandoned part of Cape Canaveral, landed elegantly.  There's the rocket, Tom Corbett-style, standing vertical on a fin, ready to launch again. Everyone is astonished. One of my top disappointments for 2015 – although Blue Origins did make it to the 100 km level and returned, but other suborbital seems not to advance.  Virgin and XCore. New Horizons: a glimpse of Pluto we've never seen before! Pix still coming back with topography – things he scientists never expected to see; and the fact that after nine years it's still working in that hostile space environment – top of my best list for 2015.  Dawn: went into orbit around Ceres – mysterious bright spots.  Maybe humans should visit.  May be a buried ocean, and/or organics.  Rosetta – and Philae, dutifully calling home; now it's in eternity. Japanese Venus probe: lost, then one little battery-run motor?  Navigated using station-keeping thrusters, inched it along for five years to insert it into orbit around Venus. Hats off to the Japanese! The Japanese Space Agency gets the record for the Little Rocket that Could. Indian Mars probe on methane in the atmosphere – extraordinary. A lot of players coming to the table; impressively, these guys figure it out and keep the missions going. Mind-boggling.  Curiosity still climbing Gale Crater. Tom Corbett is vindicated by Elon Musk.
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SpaceX rocket landing applauded, but experts say implications TBD; by William Harwood, CBS News.   The successful launch and landing by the first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Monday was a significant step toward achieving reusability and, eventually, lowering launch costs, but turning that success into operational reality poses a significant challenge for company founder Elon Musk, space experts said Tuesday.
From a purely technical perspective, the successful re-entry and powered touchdown of the Falcon 9 stage represented a "ground-breaking accomplishment," said former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. "The ability to examine the stage after it has survived the stresses of flight, to put it through qualification and flight acceptance tests to verify and gain confidence in its condition, is the first step toward economical re-use of the launch vehicle," he said in an email exchange. "Further, the demonstration of supersonic retrograde propulsion -- restarting an engine in supersonic flight and using it to fly back home -- is important to future attempts to land large, heavy payloads on Mars. This was a marvelous flight test, the first step along an important road."
John Logsdon, a noted space historian and founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, agreed, adding that the key to reusability, and lower launch costs, will be quick turnarounds and low refurbishment costs. And that will depend on how the boosters are affected by the stresses of launch, re-entry and landing. The successful landing "could be very significant, and the conditional is because we have to see what's required to refurbish and relaunch this stage," Logsdon said in an interview. "It was an important first step. You can't re-launch until you recover (the hardware). So showing you can recover it is a big deal."
The Falcon 9 rocket blasted off Monday evening from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, making SpaceX's first flight since a catastrophic launch failure last June. The primary goal of the mission was to boost 11 Orbcomm data relay satellites into orbit, which was successfully accomplished within about 20 minutes of liftoff. But SpaceX had two other major objectives. First, the company put an upgraded version of its Falcon 9 to the test for the first time, using cryogenic propellant cooling and "densification" to increase launch thrust. And, of course, the company carried out the first successful landing of a rocket stage used to help boost a payload to orbit.
Musk believes lowering launch costs is critical for the commercial space industry, and that requires recovery, refurbishment and reuse of booster stages. In a post-launch conference call, Musk said the recovered stage will be inspected and used for ground tests but if all goes well, another recovered stage may be re-launched sometime next year.  The key, Logsdon said, is how much work is required to return a used rocket to launch readiness.
"SpaceX has to find out how close to launch ready it is upon return, how much processing are they going to have to do before it's ready to operate in the launch environment again," he said. "And that's an unknown. "I think the business case depends on launching frequently. There has to be costs of refurbishment. I remember seeing Elon in a ceremony once, saying his goal is just to have to pay for the fuel for the second flight. ... But it will be a while before he can do that."
During his conference call Monday night, Musk said a Falcon 9 currently costs about $60 million to build and launch. But propellants only account for about $200,000 of that total. And that, he said, "means that the potential cost reduction over the long term is probably in excess of a factor of 100."  "I think this is quite significant," he said. "I do think it's a revolutionary moment. No one has ever brought a booster, an orbital-class booster, back intact. ... We achieved recovery of the rocket in a mission that actually deployed 11 satellites. I mean, this is a fundamental step change in technology compared to any other rocket that has ever flown."
Wayne Hale, a former space shuttle ascent-entry flight director and post-Columbia program manager, called the successful landing "a very impressive technological achievement."  "Kind of the holy grail is if you can reuse a space vehicle, you then can bring the costs down," he said in an interview. "The trick is going to be in refurbishing. That's where we didn't make the mark in space shuttle, because the refurbishment of the shuttle was so expensive. (The Falcon 9) is a simpler vehicle, we're really just talking the engines, some structure and the plumbing."
But rocket engines are high performance machines with little margin for error and "whether or not this is a really practical thing to save money depends on how much work goes into refurbishing them," he said. "That's kind of the key thing. It could save a lot of money, or wind up like the shuttle and not save anything."  But, he added, "let's applaud the accomplishment. It was a really spectacular technological accomplishment. Whether or not they can make the business case work depends on the next step."
Joan Johnson-Freese, a space policy analyst and professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, was less circumspect, calling the landing "a very big deal."  "Washington is pretty much littered with space transportation studies that say the only way that space is going to open up as a regular development area is through reusability," she told CBS News. "It's taken us 50 years to get there, but I think we're a step closer now."  In her view, the political cost of failure prevents governments from taking on high-risk space projects.
"The only entity that can take this kind of risk is probably a private company," she said. "The space transportation field, I think, has been moribund because no government has (been able) to take the kind of risk needed to make this kind of really exceptional push forward."  Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos also is developing reusable rockets. His company, Blue Origin, successfully launched and recovered a sub-orbital New Shepard rocket during a test flight last month.
Blue Origin plans to use the rocket to boost passengers out of the atmosphere for brief forays in weightlessness before the New Shepard crew capsule returns to Earth by parachute. The booster, like the Falcon 9 first stage, is designed to make a tail first, powered descent to touchdown for refurbishment and reuse.  Blue Origin also plans to build a rocket manufacturing facility near Cape Canaveral and to develop a much more powerful orbital rocket to launch satellites and, eventually, people.  The presumed "space race" between the two billionaires has triggered widespread chatter in social media circles even though the rockets currently in operation or development are not in competition.
After the successful New Shepard test flight, Musk tweeted his congratulations, but went out of his way to point out that Bezos' rocket was strictly sub-orbital and did not have to endure the same stresses as a Falcon 9 first stage returning from an orbital mission. "Jeff maybe unaware SpaceX suborbital VTOL (vertical take off and landing) flight began 2013," Musk tweeted. "Orbital water landing 2014. Orbital land landing next."  After the Falcon 9's successful landing Monday, Bezos tweeted "Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon's suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!"
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 1, Block D:  Commissioner Edwin Fountain, WorldWarICentennial.org, in re:  the drive to build a new WWI museum in Washington; compare how bloody that was compared to more recent US conflicts.  This year is the centennial of the beginning; yet there's no collective national memory in the form of a monument in Washington to the Expeditionary Force.  This one to be ready in November 2018.  Not on the Mall, but in Pershing Park (John J Pershing was commander of American Expeditionary Forces).  When you walk or drive by right now, see not much: earth and berms surround three sides, but also need to make it more inviting to passers-by.  We have five finalists in the international design competition, got 350 submissions, reviewed by a jury of historians and experts; site is open for public comments.  Congress approved this but it's an unfunded mandate: need to raise $40 million by November 2017 to break ground.  . . . The Twentieth Century was a sequence of massacres and violence, whose harbinger was World War I and the failure of Versailles.
 
Hour Two
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 2, Block A: James Holmes, professor of strategy, Naval War College and surface warfare officer, in re: Senkakus and Ryukus: US has a stronger alliance with Japan than with perhaps any others except NATO Article V.  China has just ramped up pressure on both South and East China Seas simultaneously. Mao Tse-tung spoke of taking on all his enemies at once; haven’t seen this for a while, but Xi Jinping admires Mao.  "Prediction is tough, esp about the future"—Yogi Berra.   China has sent ships to challenge Japanese vessels at Ryukus.  China keeps saying it'll never fire the first shot, but now repeatedly sends its ships to paces they should not be. "Strategic defense" = provoking an incident – grabbing htisngs - than fighting "to protect its own interests."  Ryukyus include Okinawa – very important; Chinese state media urge its govt to lay a formal sovereignty claim to Okinawa! In the Nineteenth Century the kingdom of the Ryukyus paid tribute to China and Japan, letting each think it owned ht islands. These islands block Chinese egress into the Western Pacific. Tetchy.  Note that Japan is starting to fortify these islands; were relatively undefended before, so this is s setback to China, which would have to take the islands at great cost.  Anti-access: anti-ship missiles, air missiles; issuing a threat in response to Chinese threats to Japan, Philippines, US, et al.  Sōryū-class sub (best diesel sub in the world), Japan has gone from 16 to 22 boats, may sell to Australia and possibly US.  Taiwan needs subs:  political matter. I'd love to see all nations up and down that region have a combined fleet all with the same specs. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-military-china-exclusive-idUSKBN0U107220151218
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 2, Block B: Charles Ortel, managing director of the research firm Newport Value Partners, in re: the effect of the Fed's interest rate hike on the Chinese economy. HIBOR (Hong Kong Interbank Offering rate) went from 2 to 9.45% in a week. Something is wrong.  Banks holding too many RMB – stairway to Hades.  US rates went down from 1981, now are poised to go the other way, but currently are about 25 bps; the overnight rate is what the most sophisticated borrowers use.  Seems that 2016 could be a year of reckoning. Our globally interconnected world, connections expanding rapidly made possible by low interest rates; way too much debt in the global system, will have to have a realignment. Coordinated effort coming, or epic pain?  China borrowed tons of dollars, smuggled them into China, converted them to RMB and made post of money. Now, unwinding carry trades is rough.  Watch for: similar moves – historical relation of overnight to 10-yr interest rates used to be 90% (overnight was 90% of the 10-yr) but for several years in the US it's been 5%.  Check Ch forex reserves, plus Bloomberg numbers plus net sales of the Chinese financial system. 
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 2, Block C: Jerry Hendrix, Center for a New American Security, senior Fellow & Director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program, in re:  South China Sea, East China Sea, First Island Chain. (1 of 2)
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 2, Block D: Jerry Hendrix, Center for a New American Security, senior Fellow & Director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program, in re:  South China Sea, East China Sea, First Island Chain. (2 of 2) David and Goliath: small nations in the Western Pacific have trouble confronting the emerging Goliath; I emphasized Philippines in my essay: has 1,100 miles of islands, and an alliance with the US.  Let's take a page from the relations the US built in the Middle East with Israel and Egypt after Camp David: pay the Philippines $1 billion a year.  For the amount of investment, get a tremendous return -  get dollars on the pennies. Give them littoral combat ships, high-speed vessels, a squadron of F167Hornets (fly from aircraft carriers); bring Filipino pilots to the US to train, then have them land on and operate on the US carrier when it visits Philippines. That'd put China on a back foot. . . .  We could also do this with other actors in the region, incl Vietnam.The US continues to stand on, China will have to give way, If it doesn't, there will be a collision, probably not at a time of China's choosing. (2 of 2)
 
Hour Three
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 3, Block A: Monica Crowley, Washington Examiner & Fox, in re: Obama's Fire Sale Foreign Policy ... he has been doing) on capping his tenure with a bonanza of foreign-policy achievements. / WaPo Editorial: Iran Is Exploiting Obama's 'Feckless' Foreign Policy - Guy Benson / Marco Rubio Exposes the Shallowness of Obama's Foreign Policy (1 of 4)
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 3, Block B: Monica Crowley, Washington Examiner & Fox,  in re: Clinton Seizes on Trump’s Remarks to Galvanize Women While Republican candidates tread carefully to avoid antagonizing Donald J. Trump’s supporters, for Hillary Clinton, hitting hard appears relatively risk-free. (2 of 4)
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 3, Block C: Monica Crowley, Washington Examiner & Fox (3 of 4)
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 3, Block D: Monica Crowley, Washington Examiner & Fox (4 of 4)
 
Hour Four
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 4, Block A: Vladyslav V. Vyazovskiy, NEUROSCIENCE,  in re: Mapping the birth of the sleep connectome   / http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6263/909.full?sid=1c8379a8-11f2-49... (1 of 2)
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 4, Block B: Vladyslav V. Vyazovskiy, NEUROSCIENCE,  in re: Mapping the birth of the sleep connectome   / http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6263/909.full?sid=1c8379a8-11f2-49... (2 of 2)
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 4, Block C: Jim Rutenberg, NYT, in re:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/magazine/block-the-vote.html?_r=0
Wednesday   23 December 2015  / Hour 4, Block D: Ken Croswell, Scientific American, in re:  A surprising discovery:  www.scientificamerican.com/article/super-spiral-galaxies-amaze-astronomers/ .