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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   26905 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Reading an article on why Britain should settle Antarctica from Palladium got me thinking: are there any major, visionary projects happening at the moment that have a plausible chance of success?

I'm still hopeful for SpaceX to at least make operations on the moon more feasible, though I'm skeptical of making a real go at Mars colonization, especially as Elon's star has fallen so far recently.

China seems a likely contender, but I don't know what they have going on. I know that AGI is the thing on everyone's mind, but I'm thinking more about a physical, non-software based major visionary project that's happening in the physical world.

To quote some from the article:

These apparently radical measures will look less radical by the year, but would nevertheless represent a dramatic break from the Westminster status quo. Declining nations can resort to many sensible technocratic reforms that are easy to explain, but they find it hard to come up with compelling political or bureaucratic motives for those reforms. That can only be done with national visions—visions that are not only suited to the capabilities a country could realistically develop, but also a congruent continuation of its history, or at least the best of its history. We can see that these two conditions have been fulfilled with nearly every successful national founding or refounding. Britain’s overlooked Antarctic legacy, and the vast frozen territory it still retains, then, offer us the opportunity for such a vision.

If such a project is pursued with enough vigor, it will make Britain’s claim to Antarctica inarguable. It is easy to draw peremptory lines on an empty map, but it is much harder and more admirable to people that map and to rescue its land from barrenness. For a stagnant or declining nation, it is easy to find this or that technocratic intervention that can solve this or that economic, social, or political issue. What is more difficult is finding a vision that gives the nation reason to carry out such reforms. These visions must be inspiring, but they must also be within reach. Most importantly, they must match the legacy and history of the country.

This is culture war because, well, the decline of nations is extremely political, and from my view the Trumpian Right, for all it's many and varied flaws, is the only party at least nominally pursuing a future vision of greatness, instead of simply ignoring or managing a decline.

Also, this is a very sassy quote from the article I loved:

This unworldly modern Britain is hardly the “perfidious Albion” depicted in the propaganda of its 19th century geopolitical rivals. Not wholly unflatteringly, contemporary Russian state media still portrays the country as the shadowy orchestrator of coups and death squads. A truer depiction, though, is that of the “cash-poor, asset-rich elderly woman who has somehow inherited a portfolio of scattered, high-value properties she doesn’t know what to do with.”

I think megalomaniacal projects are inherently collectivist, a National Pride thing. You can do that when you have some particular mixes of populism and optimistic technocracy, perhaps; or when you're an authoritarian quasi-fascist (by modern standards) state that doesn't feel the need to pander to felt mundane needs of the electorate and is able to sell random infrastructure as a cause for celebration. Britain these days sounds more like it might do a mega-housing project for immigrants, or a renovation of state surveillance grid. That can be sold as visionary, too.

So speaking of China, yeah they've got that in droves. What @roystgnr said about rocketry (I am more optimistic, their currently tested designs are innately better than Falcon 9 and may allow rapid scaling beyond Starships, though this might take 5+ years). They have started to assemble a distributed orbital supercomputer (again, bottlenecked by lift capacity). There's preliminary research into using Lunar lava tubes for habitats, with the goal of eventual settlement of the Moon once they have the means to deliver nontrivial mass. What @RandomRanger said about the big dam; for datacenters, I like that they have a project of national «public compute» grid to basically commoditize GPU cycles like electricity and tap water . They have this Great Green Wall project, planting a Germany-sized forest to arrest the spread of Gobi desert. They've done another one in Xinjiang already. Mostly it's trivial things at vast scale – like installing thousands of high-current EV chargers, solar everywhere etc. There's a lot going on.

I think Britain would be very much improved by something mundane like that instead of flashy awe-inspiring megaprojects. It impressed me today to find that this July, China has increased residential power consumption by 18% versus July of previous year. «Between 2019 and 2025, residential power consumption in the month of July rose by 138%». I can't readily find the equivalent stats for Britain, but energy use per capita has declined by 14% in the same period; incidentally China has overtaken the UK on per capita total energy use in 2019-2020 (you can click your way to apples-to-apples comparison). The decline in energy use is a very clear sign of British involution, and it wouldn't take that much, logistically speaking, to reverse – Brits are still rich enough, and they're small enough, to procure gas (Trump rejoices), and maybe some Rolls-Royce reactors, and reduce costs and raise quality of life. AC in the summer and ample heating in the winter would do wonders to make the island less dreadful.

I am more optimistic, their currently tested designs are innately better than Falcon 9

Citation needed? I would say "currently in testing", but "tested" suggests they've made it to orbit, and AFAIK there are no non-expendable Chinese designs that have reached orbit so far. And even if you consider hop tests and engine tests to be "tested", everything seriously in the works there is basically working off the Falcon 9 playbook.

"Gravity-2 aims to operate at a similar price per kilogram as the SpaceX Falcon 9", which is about what you'd expect from a lineup that looks like someone was frantically cribbing from SpaceX. (which is mostly the right thing for them to do, to be clear; it beats the hell out of Europe's response to SpaceX)

The Hyperbola-3 hasn't had any prices announced yet but it also looks more like "cribbing from Falcon" than "innately better", except for the choice of a methalox rather than kerolox engine.

Deep Blue Aerospace is at the advanced cribbing stage, surpassing its competitors' infographics of not-Falcon-9 and not-Falcon-Heavy rockets by putting a not-Starship rocket at the end.

Pallas-1 gets us back to not-Falcon-9 and not-Falcon-Heavy territory.

The obsession with Falcon Heavy clones is IMHO a bad sign for some of these companies. Even SpaceX admits that Falcon Heavy wasn't worth the trouble in hindsight, and there was a point where if they hadn't already accepted Air Force contracts for it (or if Gwynne Shotwell hadn't talked Musk into staying on the feds' good side) they'd have probably canceled it entirely. The original rationale behind it was that they didn't think Falcon 9 would be nearly as powerful as it was, but after some engine improvements and tank stretching and propellant subcooling the F9 got pushed into the FH weight class, and FH got pushed out into a weight class where (with its small fairing) it will never have enough payloads to pay back the investment.

I don't know much about Tianlong-3. I'd give the company points for being the first Chinese startup to put a liquid-fueled rocket in orbit, but then take away a quarter of those points for being the first to launch a rocket stage unintentionally, to fly for miles out of control before impact, when a test fire stand broke.

Maybe LandSpace is the best bet here? 4 successful Zhuque-2 launches with 2 failures, VTVL and relight tests with Zhuque-3, using methalox now and working on full-flow methalox upgrades. There's no hint of Starship-scale plans in their future, but they're at least setting up to have Starship-quality institutional experience.

But I think what's impressive about the Chinese effort isn't any single rocket design, it's the sheer volume of these efforts. All but one of those companies has already reached orbit, albeit with smaller and less-ambitious designs than what they're working on now. Two of them have reached orbit with liquid-fueled stages. Even if most of them fail or come up with something mediocre, they're actually trying and achieving impressive things quicky. In the US, after SpaceX, our best efforts are probably Blue Origin (made it to orbit after only 25 years!), RocketLab (the Electron would have been impressive if they'd got reusability working, and I'm hopeful for Neutron), Stoke (still just doing hop tests, but actually trying out a potentially better-than-Falcon-9 idea), and maybe Firefly (with no impressive launch vehicle plans, but they made orbit).

and may allow rapid scaling beyond Starships, though this might take 5+ years

Even in the "I made a PowerPoint!" dreams of (the 4th redesign of) the Long March 9, a rocket scaling to Starship is supposed to be not flying before the 2040s.

I do mostly mean LandSpace with Zhuque-2/3, and Space Epoch's Yuanxingzhe-1. Yes, I assume that these designs will be almost fully preserved in product version. They are better than Falcon-9 in that F9 is pretty old, and they're copying Starship as well. Methalox, steel body, more robust build (F9 diameter was limited by stupid American railroad/highway standard). This has the potential for rapid reusability and mass production. And you don't need to scale to Starship if you can scale to dozens of vehicles instead. I've heard that LandSpace may get facilities currently involved in metalworking for military aviation.

Long March 9,

I am completely jaded about the Long March program and it isn't factoring into my estimates. Robin Li was wise to insist on liberalizing the space market to enable those private efforts, they will determine Chinese ceiling.

Regarding the orbital supercomputer, isn't that inexplicable if it's not military? Why would you need real-time processing, can't you eventually send the data to Earth?

The only scenario I can imagine where it'd make sense to do processing in space is if you need to track aircraft in flight, ship wakes or something urgent. Maybe it's on the other side of the world to your ground stations and neutrals won't let you use their equipment... Maybe you're being jammed and you need to send only short packets of data through. The cost of spacelaunch, radiators and bespoke equipment surely make processing in space uncompetitive compared to a data centre on Earth if its for civilian purposes right?

I don't see much military use either, all that data will necessarily be related to Earth and they have a decent communication network as is. It might be an initial experiment for actual off-world datacenters, and also for processing signals collected by satellites themselves.

But offworld datacentres are a really dumb idea at present tech, why would you want a massive drama getting to the servers to replace something if it breaks? Why would you want them to be hundreds, thousands of kilometres from eachother instead of networked all right next to eachother? Why would you spend rockets on them?

Starlink satellites have good enough bandwidth and Huawei has plenty of networking talent. It seems like they'd be better off sending that data to earth than processing it in space.

Space-solar isn't that cheap, China has plenty of cheap power. I just don't see it getting funded unless it's for guiding missiles over the horizon, something to do with ECM or signals intelligence that demands very low latency and orbital compute.

are there any major, visionary projects happening at the moment that have a plausible chance of success?

You could argue that doubling the population of Africans by 2050 to over 2.5 billion people is a visionary project. Bill Gates’ malaria nets and Mr. Beast’s wells may help add a hundred million more Nigerians and Congolese to the global population. That way they can occupy Seoul, Tokyo, Stockholm, and Minneapolis when the native populations there die out due to unaffordable housing and cultural nihilism. That’s a level of human engineering never before attempted, quite visionary.

China has started on Biggest Dam (60 GW peak capacity, or about an entire UK's worth of annual electricity production if it works out): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medog_Hydropower_Station

thinking more about a physical, non-software based major visionary project that's happening in the physical world.

Why? The AI buildout is way bigger than anything else that's remotely feasible in the near-term. I'm a fan of nuclear fusion and nuclear generally, I think it'd be great to mine asteroids. Setting up largescale underwater mines would be cool. Doing something in Antarctica would also be good. Anything besides more welfare programs or endlessly increasing health costs, I'd welcome a big investment in anti-aging.

But I also have a sense of scale, AI is the front-page story even if people feel a bit tired of it. People talk about arcologies and they build data centres. The hyperscalers are spending about $200-300 billion on data centres annually. That's about one Apollo program every single year. The Medog hydro station is supposed to cost a mere $137 billion over 8 years. Even with a 3x blowout that's peanuts compared to AI. Microsoft alone is spending more than that.

What could be more visionary than bringing alien minds into existence? Elon made his fame as a hard-sciences guy with rockets, cars, tunnels but he's moved over into AI because of how important it is.

Come on, are Brits really going to pack up shop and go not to the North of England, not to the Welsh countryside or the highlands of Scotland or even the Falkland Islands... but Antarctica? Infamously uninhabitable Antarctica, with a kilometre of ice covering anything important, with seasonal accessibility, icebergs, vast distances to anywhere else? It's not like there's an asteroid's worth of minerals there.

Vision must be matched by cost-efficiency and prospective gains if it's to be anything but a pipe-dream. The cost of AI development is enormous but the potential gains are staggering. The cost of space colonization is perhaps slightly smaller but the gains aren't so great. While Western civilization underinvests in R&D and capital generally, it should be directed at the most high-leverage targets first.

I would count the Line in Saudi Arabia. Many people write it off as another prince’s embarrassing vanity project, but I think it’s the first serious attempt to construct an arcology. A type of semi self contained megastructure that you will probably be hearing a lot about in the near future.

The Line in Saudi Arabia

It's under review and construction has scaled back, due to financial issues.

Saudi Arabia is reassessing the scope and timeline of its $500-billion NEOM initiative, according to Bloomberg and CNBC, with officials reportedly reviewing key components of The Line in response to deepening financial strain across the kingdom’s Vision 2030 infrastructure program. The move comes amid mounting vendor arrears and a liquidity crunch that has prompted an urgent reallocation of energy-sector capital and personnel.

According to sources cited by CNBC, planners have frozen development on large portions of The Line, NEOM’s flagship linear city concept, and slashed active construction manpower by 35% since April. The labor cutback reflects a broader slowdown as fiscal priorities shift away from breakneck expansion and toward cash preservation.

Yes but they are still working on it and it could be expanded later.

but I think it’s the first serious attempt to construct an arcology

Is the Kowloon Walled City not "serious"?

I was supposed to be hearing a lot about arcologies in the near future since at least 1993. I don't know that there's much call for anything self-contained, since the megaprojects of the 1960s that promised housing, retail, and office space all without leaving the building mostly went out of business when they discovered that people like going outside from time to time.

Pfft.. If your megastructure isn't large enough to have its own microclimate and cloud formation, it doesn't count.

I blame the fact that, unfortunately, real estate prices aren't high enough to encourage that kind of vertical growth, and probably NIMBYism. Most of the world's ills can be blamed on the latter, so what's one more?

Pfft.. If your megastructure isn't large enough to have its own microclimate and cloud formation, it doesn't count.

NASA swears the Vehicle Assembly Building doesn't form its own clouds. But the version of that story I originally heard isn't that it formed its own clouds, but that it did so before they put in a ginormous air conditioner to prevent it.

Britain should settle Antarctica

I think civil war is actually more likely.

I think civil war is actually more likely.

Perfect! That’s how you get a constant supply of enthusiastic colonists to settle the wretched frontier.

I’d say suicide-by-Antarctica is a lot more trouble than suicide-at-home…but this is the UK we’re talking about.

Going on ill-fated Antarctic expeditions is exactly the kind of long-lost British passtime that could reutite civic pride.

I'm still hopeful for SpaceX to at least make operations on the moon more feasible, though I'm skeptical of making a real go at Mars colonization, especially as Elon's star has fallen so far recently.

Starship isn't really made for the moon either. Their best bet is high-throughput LEO transport, but I don't think they'll get it to work for that either.

It's a bit off topic, but I doubt there'll be a better place to post it any time soon. I had a bet about Starship going to orbit with two other posters. It was driving me crazy because I couldn't find it for the life of me, and I was starting to think I got pulled into the Berenstien universe, but I finally managed to find the relevant comments, so I thought I'll post them as a reminder, and to make future reference easier:

Great timing on the tag, it looks like they made orbit tonight. https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1960179929204596907

Thanks for the bet, I have to admit I was sweating a bit by launch 10. Happy to discuss but as I understand it landing in a stable orbit was the main bet.

What? They weren't even attempting to reach orbit with this one.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-10

Starship completed a full-duration ascent burn and achieved its planned velocity, successfully putting it on a suborbital trajectory.

Ahh ok clearly I am confused on what orbit means. So you want a stable orbit? Idk I don't think spaceships would ever try to get in a completely stable orbit since they're coming down, no?

ETA: Happy to pay the bet if I'm just wrong here, of course.

In practice there's no such thing as a completely stable orbit - we spend like 3 tons a year of propelllant reboosting the International Space Station, and if we ever stopped its orbit would just keep decaying, faster and faster, until it reentered the atmosphere a year and a half or so later.

But you want to release satellites either into their final orbit (which you want to be stable for years or decades) or into an initial "parking" orbit they can gradually raise themselves (so you want it to even initially be stable for weeks or months). So the upper stage of a spacecraft will enter this mostly-stable orbit to release its satellites. From there, ideally you do a deorbit burn to control where you reenter, but either way you tend to have a small light aluminum upper stage that just burns up on reentry.

All the Starship tests have targeted "suborbital, but just barely" orbits like the one in test 10, aimed to reenter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean without any further maneuvering. From a performance perspective there's not much difference between this and a full orbit, but from a safety perspective the difference is huge, because the Starship is huge.

If they're on a suborbital trajectory that's going to hit atmosphere over the middle of nowhere, then at that point even if the vehicle isn't controllable (which happened on the 3rd and 9th tests) or the engines can't relight in space (which hasn't happened, but they've only tested that twice now) it's still not a danger - even if it can't reenter safely, it'll still break up where nobody can be hurt. If they're on an orbital trajectory, they're not an immediate danger to anybody, but there's no such thing as a completely stable orbit, and the instability of an orbit depends on "space weather" that expands and contracts the upper atmosphere somewhat unpredictably, and so basically anywhere with a latitude as close to the equator as Boca Chica or closer would become a possible target.

China has at least one large rocket stage that basically plays Russian Roulette this way, but an untargeted Starship reentry would be even worse - the Long March 5B stage has at least been designed to use lighter materials that won't survive reentry very well, but Starship is steel and heat shield tiles designed for just the opposite, and it's 100 tons of them instead of 20. So they're not going to even try to get into orbit until they're very confident they can get out of it again.

Rockets (that fly up to deploy satellites) tend to accelerate until they reach their desired altitude, which should be well outside the atmosphere, then accelerate again to stabilize their orbit. Stable usually means that no point of their orbital trajectory is low enough to be subject to significant atmospheric drag, so that the spaceship in question can remain on its (ciruclar or elliptic) trajectory indefinitely. Then they deploy their payload, which will continue on that orbital path. Reusable spaceships then accelerate again, this time in reverse, to deliberately reduce their orbital velocity and cause their trajectory to dip back into the atmosphere, where drag will slow them down so they can land safely.

Let me know if that made any sense.

accelerate until they reach their desired altitude, which should be well outside the atmosphere, then accelerate again to stabilize their orbit

Ooh, we just talked about this, kinda!

It would be correct to say "hefting its payload, the rocket accelerated to orbit", because the "gain altitude" part and the "gain horizontal speed" part of a launch trajectory aren't two separate parts. A launch vehicle generally starts angling a little bit away from vertical almost immediately as it leaves the pad, and a launch to low orbit usually doesn't reach its final altitude until at or after the point it turns off its engines. There's a slight break earlier, in between the acceleration phases from different rocket stages, but not much of a break and not much change in direction before vs after.

It's mostly just geosynchronous satellites that have a distinct separate "now we're high enough and we start accelerating again horizontally" phase, but even geosynchronous transfer orbits are stable (and faster than low earth orbits, all horizontally, at perigee) so the final phase is called "circularizing" the orbit, not stabilizing it.

Given that I have a million hours in Kerbal Space Program (ESA hire me already!), I already knew all this and then some, but I wanted to keep it as simple as possible while still getting across what a stable orbit even is and how it relates to getting spaceships back down to Earth.

Still, thanks for the added detail!

Thanks for letting me sperg out on the added detail! I suspected you might know it already, but it's surprising how counter-intuitive it is.

As a kid 30-something years ago I wrote an orbital dynamics simulator (in QBasic, with Explicit Euler time stepping, with nothing but circle sizes to indicate z-dimension position and nothing but animation to indicate velocity; I won a science contest award but I cringe to think back on it), and one of the features I added was user-controllable rockets. Keys to control orientation, another for acceleration, others for speeding/slowing/pausing time. I'd ask people to get from a lower circular orbit to a higher one, and basically everybody I asked would try the same strategy: turn the rocket vertical (perpendicular to its current direction of motion), thrust, then turn horizontal again on the theory that that's what they'd need to do after they'd accomplished "up".

To be fair, at the same time I was struggling to understand why porkchop plots all have those gaps in the middle, and I didn't finally get that until long long afterward, when I first had to make an interplanetary plane change in KSP.

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I mean, you even said "stable orbit" in the post above.

The "coming down" part is actually optional, and most of ships so far have been working without it, that's why reusability is such hype - you make them come back. Even Falcon 9 leaves it's upper stage up there.

OTOH, reaching orbit is mandatory. If you want to launch a satellite, you first have your ship reach the desired orbit, then you deploy the satellite. If you don't do it like that, they'll just come back crashing down. Only then do you start thinking about making the ship come back.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure they could reach orbit if the wanted to. Keeping the engines alight, after you get as far as they did, is the easy part. If my bet was with Elon Musk himself, he'd probably put one in orbit just to prove a point, but luckily for me they probably won't attempt it until they're reasonably sure they got everything right. Which means that you might be sweating for a while yet, and if you win, it might be a lot closer than you expected.

Yeah I may have been confused in making the bet, as @roystgnr mentioned above it seems they may never go “to orbit” and instead do suborbital velocities.

Starship was stable enough to release a dummy payload so I’m assuming that’s as far as they’ll go! Not trying to weasel out of the bet here just genuinely above my pay grade, hah.

Oh, no, they're definitely trying to go to orbit. Basically every use case they have requires it. Starlink satellites use low-acceleration argon ion thrusters to change their orbit after a launch, but they have to start from a low parking orbit that won't decay for weeks or months. (One time a series of solar storms reduced that to "days" and actually brought down a batch of satellites.) Starting from an orbit that reenters within 45 minutes is out of the question. Artemis missions and Mars missions have to refuel in Low Earth Orbit, and that again requires weeks or months of orbital stability, at a minimum, for the propellant depot Starship. These barely-suborbital flights are the best way to test everything, but even barely-suborbital is not suitable for an operational launch.

Their problem is that they're trying to get to orbit with a ridiculously huge payload (which is requiring redesign after redesign to make things more powerful and/or lighter) and then get back from orbit in good enough shape to reuse (which will require redesigns to make things more robust and thus potentially heavier), and so even when they have successful tests (the last version-1 flights, 4 through 6, were awesome) that doesn't guarantee that a major redesign will still be successful (the first version-2 flights, 7 through 9, were awful, and they had one v2 that didn't even make it to flight).

[Edit, to sum up the problem in one sentence: They can't safely go to orbit until they can safely go to orbit, and it's hard to both achieve and verify "safely" with a design that's still a rapidly moving target.]

My guess is that they'll go for a full orbit in the same flight that they attempt their first ship catch, which Musk claims will be 13 if everything goes right with 12 (the first v3 launch). They've got one last v2 launch for flight 11, and if they had a NASA milestone for orbit then I think they'd try to check that box then, but they don't (the next milestone is for ship-to-ship docking and propellant transfer, requiring two launches to orbit) so 11 will probably be another "fix stuff that broke or wore too badly on the previous flight and pick new spots to weaken to see what else they can push to the breaking point" suborbital like 10 was.

If everything goes right with flights 11 and 12 then 13 would probably be around December. I wouldn't bet on that, since even Elon is suggesting that they might end up waiting until 14 or 15 for a catch. And if the first v3 flights are as much of a regression as the first v2 flights were then the catch+orbit attempt would be flight 16 and wouldn't be until next summer. Even that would still win you your bet with months to spare, but the implications for the already-implausible Artemis 3 timeline would be awful.

Their problem is that they're trying to get to orbit with a ridiculously huge payload

What's your take on it's performance so far, in that regard? It seems to have taken quite a bit of time for it to pick up speed during launch, just with 16 tonnes of the dummy payload. It's hard to imagine it taking off with double that, let alone the 100 tonnes they're targeting.

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then 13 would probably be around December.

I just ran across an Eric Berger article from this morning which agrees that 13 would be "probably the first orbital flight" but predicts a much longer delay before the first v3, putting flight 12 "in early 2026", which would push 13 to something like March. He says to take this "very notional" "informed guesswork and reporting" "with a pinch of salt" but his guess is probably far more accurate than mine.

Yeah I may have been confused in making the bet, as @roystgnr mentioned above it seems they may never go “to orbit” and instead do suborbital velocities.

No.... Roystgnr was making a rather nuanced point, I assure you SpaceX is planning to send Starship to a proper orbit. They literally say this during the stream from the last test flight, when they were testing the engine relight (around T:+37 minutes, I think). It's just that they're not confident it's safe to do so yet.

Starship was stable enough to release a dummy payload so I’m assuming that’s as far as they’ll go!

That makes no sense. They want to use it to launch satellites. To do so, they need it to go to orbit. The dummy payload was there to test if their deployment mechanism works, and to see how well the ship performs under actual load, but on the current trajectory, it either burned up in the atmosphere, or crashed into the ocean right after the Starship.

Not trying to weasel out of the bet here just genuinely above my pay grade, hah.

I am kinda starting to feel bad for getting you sucked into this. We can downgrade it to a gentlemen's bet, if you want. Honestly, all I wanted was for Elon stans to plant some flags, and tell me what future achievement I should exoect from him, if he's such a genius.

No way man I’m all in on this bet. We’re DOING IT. If it doesn’t go to orbit you’ll get your donation.

Dont worry my friend I can afford the $100 and I’m happy to bet. This is my first online bet and it’s quite fun.

Interesting bets. 100 tons to LEO is aggressive, do you know where we're at now?

Also for the one with @TheDag, hasn't Starship already reached orbit like, earlier this year?

Every flight so far was suborbital. There was one where people were saying they could have gone to orbit with it, by chose not to.

Edit:

100 tons to LEO is aggressive

Wait, which one was that? My interpretation of all the bets is achieving orbit during a test flight, no cargo. Self_made_human's predictions include a safe landing.

I am happy to award you Bayes points for (likely) being right in our discussion. I could have sworn that we had a monetary bet myself, but I had looked for it a while back and didn't find anything. If even my 90% CI is unmet, can I interest you in a $10 giftcard from Amazon or equivalent? That would be from me to you, no need to pay if I'm right.

I hope that SpaceX finally figures out a single solid Starship configuration and flies it, but to their credit, they're consistently pushing the envelope and have the money to burn/blow up. I don't think anyone else would be crazy enough to imagine catching skyscrapers with chopsticks, and pull that off too.

even my 90% CI is unmet, can I interest you in a $10 giftcard from Amazon or equivalent? That would be from me to you, no need to pay if I'm right.

That's a very nice gesture, but it feels a bit unfair when it's one-sided.

I don't think anyone else would be crazy enough to imagine catching skyscrapers with chopsticks, and pull that off too.

That, admittedly, was pretty damn cool. Luckily for me no one was soliciting bets on that one, because honestly, I thought thr idea is absurd, and would have walked right into taking the "not gonna happen" side

But that aside, it's the recovery of the second stage that is more likely to do them in. They're not even doing it for the Falcon 9, Starship is probably exponentoally more difficult.

I thought thr idea is absurd, and would have walked right into taking the "not gonna happen" side

I thought Musk was making a joke. If I fight the Absurdity Heuristic hard enough I can see how much sense it makes, but until they started mounting the tower arms I still thought maybe it was a joke.

They're not even doing it for the Falcon 9, Starship is probably exponentoally more difficult.

Counterintuitively, no. You'd think that "bigger is harder" in engineering as a general rule, but there are exceptions. The control problem that lets Falcon 9 land within meters and Starship get caught within centimeters is one. Surviving atmospheric entry is another - it helps to be as big and "fluffy" (high surface area to mass ratio) as possible, so you start decelerating sooner and slow down higher and peak at a lower heat flux. Size also lets Starship get away with using steel - previous steel rocket stages needed to be "balloon tanks", pressure-stabilized because of their thinness, but Starship is so huge that even "thin" relative to that is thick enough to worry less about buckling, and they get far more thermal resilience "for free".

But that aside, it's the recovery of the second stage that is more likely to do them in.

Reuse is; recovery they could definitely do. They've already managed to bring three ships to a soft powered splashdown (albeit just barely, that first time) after atmospheric entry, despite one of the three being a "let's try stripping the heat shield way down and see what breaks first" test. I can't imagine any of those were in shape to launch again (or would have been even if they were caught rather than splashed down), but being able to do even a brief short main engine relight right on cue for the splashdown is a pretty good step in the right direction.

The biggest catch is that, even if they technically manage upper stage reuse, they need cheap reuse, with at least a few flights per ship, to make this worth all the effort. Space-Shuttle-style "if we go over everything with a microscope then we can launch this again next year" won't cut it.

In terms of Artemis, though, what's most likely to do them in is the schedule. They're not going to make 2027 for Artemis 3, and if they don't even get an unmanned lunar landing test by then, Congress is fickle enough to put HLS Starship (or the whole Artemis program) in the waste bin next to Constellation.

Reuse is; recovery they could definitely do.

Poor choice of words on my part, but I don't think anyone suspected I meant that it's the fishing out of the melted slab of metal that's going to be a challenge.

In terms of Artemis, though, what's most likely to do them in is the schedule. They're not going to make 2027 for Artemis 3,

I'm rather bemused at the idea of giving so much shit to Bezos for being "glacial" while blaming SpaceX issues on "the schedule" that they were free to pick up, leave, or negotiate. It's not even that they're making steady progress and the fickle Congress will be cutting them off, just as they were reach the final milestone. Starship wasn't in orbit yet, it's going to be a long way to even demonstrate ship-to-ship refueling, let alone doing it over a dozen time in order to get it to the moon.

Somehow you replied to yourself on a completely different topic, as far as I can see?

Oh, thanks for the heads-up!

Starship isn't really made for the moon either.

The last couple years have had several notable tipped landers (more the norm than the exception, almost). That SpaceX plans on landing something that enormous and tall on the moon directly seems to be asking for trouble. It lacks robust mechanisms for lots of things (the LEM had a separate ascent engine partially because of concerns about the descent engine getting damaged on landing --- and a ladder), and honestly the Starship HLS and Artemis mission plans look like something a kindergarten class drew up: single sourcing not one, but two novel heavy lift launch vehicles (see Akin's Law 39, twice over). Build a permanent space station because you'll need to resupply (Gateway), then dock a single-sourced comically large lander that doesn't really need resupply anyway.

The LEM descent engine was aimed straight down and was only around ten feet above the soil its exhaust kicked up when the contact probe cut it off. The HLS Starship's current solution (though Musk still wants to try direct Raptor landings eventually) is to do its final descent with mid-body RCS-sized engines, a hundred feet up and angled outward. There's still the possibility of plume recirculation from those kicking a chunk of regolith in a bad direction, but even if something hits a main engine they only need one out of three still working at that point.

It's still crazy to only do a single unmanned landing+ascent test before putting people on it, though. We're not racing the Soviets this time, we can afford to "lose" the race to China, and the combination of "SpaceX has pretty great software for precision vertical landings of rockets without a human pilot" with "SpaceX will be landing on unprepared soil for the first time and often takes a few tries to get a new solution right" really suggests we wait a little longer before adding humans.

Technically we're not single-sourcing the lander anymore; Blue Moon is supposed to be ready in time for Artemis V circa 2030. In theory they're launching an unmanned test of the smaller Mk1 version of it next year. I wouldn't be surprised if the schedules slip further, though, whether or not the slippage is "Elon time" bad.

Nice job getting people to commit to specific predictions. Even though it's super awkward, this is my favorite norm of the rationalist community, because you don't realize how reluctant people are to make specific, testable predictions until working out the terms of the bet forces them to.

It will be interesting to see whether you win all of them or not, and personally I have updated a bit towards your view of Musk and his companies being more grounded than I thought.

Even though it's super awkward, this is my favorite norm of the rationalist community, because you don't realize how reluctant people are to make specific, testable predictions until working out the terms of the bet forces them to.

Yep.

I think its less awkward when its actually a norm, but sometimes it does get used as a backhanded way to 'beat' someone by claiming "hah, you don't actually believe [thing] unless you put money on it!" Sometimes there's just too much uncertainty or the terms are inherently poorly-defined, even if the belief is tightly-held.

But that said, man, when you know there's some status hanging in the balance (i.e. if you 'lose' a few bets people might keep using that to undermine your arguments in the future), even if you're perfectly calibrated (i.e. you win your 50% bets 50% of the time) a couple losses in a row can make you feel like you're losing face.

Prediction markets offer a decent alternative because it makes the situation less directly adversarial. I would kill for there to be a way to publish your own positions in a way that others can verify and take positions 'against' yours, without it locking both of you into "one must win, the other must lose" proposition.

I think its less awkward when its actually a norm, but sometimes it does get used as a backhanded way to 'beat' someone by claiming "hah, you don't actually believe [thing] unless you put money on it!"

I understand the reluctance to put money on the table, but it doesn't have to be this way, gentlemen's bets are a thing as well. The feeling of losing face might be a bigger issue, but I think one can learn not to take it thay way.

even if you're perfectly calibrated

Meh, I'm kind of sour on the rationalist idea of calibration. Too easy to game by making predictions about things that no one cares about, and are easier to gauge.

Too easy to game by making predictions about things that no one cares about, and are easier to gauge.

You know, this is a valid point. "my calibration is perfect when it comes to predicting coin flips, dice rolls, and card turns!"

That's the benefit to a somewhat adversarial system, you're forced to actually pick something that someone reasonably disagrees with you about and cares enough about to take on some risk. so it must be more meaningful.

but I think one can learn not to take it thay way.

I'm pretty close to that. I'm actually getting a little flippant about tossing out bets, even if I'm not too interested in the topic.

I actually made 50 bucks on Kalshi yesterday betting that Starship wouldn't launch, on the logic that if it didn't launch, I would be sad, and money would cheer me up some.

Boom is reasonably likely (2:1 odds) to get commercialized supersonic passenger transport by 2040. I think that will seem like a mere evolutionary change (plane go faster) but, if it succeeds and scales, will be transformative.

Given that Concorde was not close to being transformative, I think Boom would need to be 10x better than Concorde to be transformative with >50% probability, and they seem to be going for 2x.

Concorde wasn't transformative because it never scaled.

My claim is that merely achieving "equal to Concorde but consistently adds at least a handful of new routes every year" is transformative, even if it's not any better or cheaper. And they are already notionally aiming for $7000 tickets, which is 1/2 the inflation-adjusted price of Concorde.

Or maybe the other way around: Concorde wasn't transformative because they only built 14 of them and only served 3 airports, which was downstream of the fact that the thing could barely fly and bled[1] money.

And they are already notionally aiming for $7000 tickets, which is 1/2 the inflation-adjusted price of Concorde.

That is what I mean by a 2x improvement. Slightly less than half the inflation-adjusted price, for a marginally worse product (Mach 1.7 vs Mach 2.0). Still a niche product for rich people - the marketing spin is that the fare is competitive with business class, but airlines don't sell many full-fare business class tickets at the moment* - the average fare actually paid needs to go up a lot relative to subsonic business class for the economics to work out.

* As well as the usual discounted fares, the big volume business travel customers (mostly banks and consultancies) all have negotiated rebate schemes which means that the revenue to the airline is less than the face value of the ticket.

Sure. So 1/2 the price of Concorde but connects all the major cities of the world at Mach 1.7 instead of the 0.85 of a 777?

It only connects all the major cities of the world if

  • It can fly supersonic over land. At the moment the discussions between Boom and the Trump admin are on the basis that they will only be able to fly supersonic over CONUS if the boom doesn't reach the ground, which means slowing down to Mach 1.3 and increased fuel consumption. The politics of Concorde was that countries that didn't build it were disinclined to be generous about letting it fly in their airspace, and Boom will face the same problem with countries that are not the USA.
  • They release a plane with long enough range for trans-Pacific routes. (Overture has a planned range of 4250nm and LAX-Tokyo is 4768)
  • The economics of an all-business class service (which requires 80% occupancy, mostly at full-fare, to break even) work out on enough routes. Apart from a long history of failed all-premium operations, the big problem they face here is the lower supersonic premium on eastbound flights - a 4-hour supersonic TATL is too short to work as a night flight but doing it as a daytime flight means that you lose 5/6 hours work time to the time change. A flat bed on a subsonic night flight offers a lot of people a better value proposition for their $3500. Concorde had to sell cheap eastbound tickets as a bucket list experience to fill the plane.

Right now the only city pair which has supported an all-premium flight sustainably is London-NYC*, and it currently doesn't. The British Airways Babybus is a pretty direct comparator to what Boom would be offering (all-premium service marketed to full-fare business travellers that offered significant time savings by running from London City and pre-clearing US immigration while refueling in Shannon), and the economics was marginal. (It was cancelled during the pandemic and never reinstated). As well as the problems selling enough full-fare business class tickets to keep the plane flying, there is the issue that most of the airports that might welcome an all-premium flight are slot-constrained, and a 777 makes more money out of the slot than a small all-premium flight.

You need fat point-to-point routes to make Boom work, which are long enough for supersonic flight to be worth it, short enough to be within range, and mostly over water. On day 1 that means the premium trans-Atlantic city pairs only. Business travellers won't use a less-than-daily service, and the whole point of flying supersonic is lost if you end up with a layover when a non-stop subsonic flight was available.

It's a great product (assuming they can actually build the Symphony engine, which I rate as a 70% shot) and if they do sell a $7000 LHR-JFK return I will probably fly it. But "Concorde at a third to half the price" gets you regular supersonic service on 10-20 city pairs vs 1 - not a transformation of the airline industry similar to the 707 or the 747. Boom are not proposing to change the physics of supersonic flight or the economics of the airline industry.

* London-NYC is comfortably the busiest long-haul city pair, with about 40% more seats than London-Dubai in 2nd place (overflies densely-populated Europe so probably not supersonic-friendly) and almost double number 3(Paris-NYC). Number 4 is London-LA (out of Overture range if they have to slow down over land) and number 5 is Singapore-Melbourne (dependent on Australian government permission to make sonic booms over the Outback). Tokyo-Singapore and Seoul-Singapore would be perfect supersonic routes if they were fat enough to support daily service, which appears to be marginal.

I do expect that if they can get the noise level down, Mach 1.7 over land will be achievable. Granted this is more of a political than engineering question. On range, yeah, that is a sore spot. Hopefully a LR version gets to 5500nm which unlocks most of the transpacific.

The economics will be interesting. I'm not sure daily service is a must as you can freely mix-and-match supersonic and subsonic travel. Heck, you could run the thing purely westbound (LHR->JFK->LAX/SFO->ICN/HND->DXB->LHR) with the understanding that your biz travelers are taking a lie-flat on their eastbound legs. All-premium has been a losing proposition (RIP midwest) but that seems like a capacity thing right?

That said, you've convinced me to adjust my optimism a bit downwards, at least in the medium (say, 2035/2040) timeframe.

I think we agree now. Overture isn't going to be transformative. If Concerto has another 20% better fuel efficiency per seat mile, a 5500nm range, and a low-boom design that allows Mach 1.7 flight over sparsely populated land areas (particularly most of CONUS and the Australian outback) then that probably would be transformative. But all of those are fighting basic physics - with the possible exception of the range they are not going to happen based on simple incremental improvements.

I like the idea of flying half the Overtures on a westbound RTW route, although you need to add a Singapore stop between Tokyo and Dubai (HND->DXB crosses too much densely populated land, including China which is not going to allow supersonic overflight by Americans, whereas HND->SGP is over water and SGP->DXB is over water if you do a small detour round India - also HND-SGP and SGP-DXB have better economics than HND->DXB). It also doesn't work with current airline business models.

One way I could see it being transformative is if it puts more pressure on cities to finally improve their airport infrastructure.

Right now, it usually takes at least an hour to check in, clear security, and get to your gate. But it's highly random, so most people try to get there at least 2 hours before the flight. Even more if you're at a busy airport and trying to do something complicated.

Then on top of that, most airports are far from the city and most cities don't have very fast transit options to get there. Typically an hour to get to the airport, could be more if you're coming from far away.

Repeat again on the other side, especially for an international flight... 1 hour to get out of the airport, 1 hour to get back into the city. Minimum.

Flying from NYC to London takes about 7 hours. That's annoying, but becomes much worse then you add in around 5 hours of extra time to get from your home to the plane, and then the plane to your real destination. 12 hours, plus the jet lag and stress of travel basically kills an entire day.

Right now, we put up with all the extra waiting because there's just not enough pressure to make it better. 5 hours of waiting seems reasonable compared to 7 hours on the plane. And rich people can avoid some of that anyway by using private planes. But if Boom can get that down to 3.5 hours on a plane, I think there'd be a lot more pressure on cities to improve the overall airport experience. It's not impossible, it wasn't all that long ago that people could just drive right up to the gate and step on the plane with minimal security. We still need security of course, but we could automate a lot of it, and add valet parking and better public transit.

Combine all of that? Let's say the current model is 12 hours total from NYC to London. Boom + Better Infrastructure could get it down to 6 hours total. That really is a pretty change. It would make it a lot more practical to go to a meeting in both cities on the same day. Or work in one for the week and commute home for the weekend. Still a long trip, but only half of what it is now.

The UK's claim to a slice of Antarctica is worth about as much as if they claimed a crater of the moon instead.

Nobody wants to live in Antarctica. I would rather raise kids on a container ship.

This means that the normal process of the rule-based international order, where local polities organize however they like and get recognized as states (which is already flimsy in the case of Greenland with its 0.028 persons per square kilometer) will not have a good solution to this.

The traditional solution to solve conflicting territorial claims is, of course, war. Happily, Antarctica, being south of the Tropic of Cancer, is far outside NATO territory. So if the Brits want to wage war against China or Argentina in some god-forsaken desert of ice and desolation, let them.

Alternatively, the nations of Earth might jointly decide to exploit the resources of Antarctica, but in that case I would expect a reshuffling of territories. China is not going to accept that it does not get a slice based on some claims frozen by a treaty 60 years ago. Nor is the US, certainly not under 47.

Nobody wants to live in Antarctica. I would rather raise kids on a container ship.

Wikipedia indicates that British Antartica is only a little colder than Greenland, and actually warmer than Nunavut and Siberia. So it really isn't the most outlandish place to live, assuming that services are available.

The parts of Siberia that people actually live in(a non-negligible number of them), are much warmer than Antarctica. They have trees, and you can swim in the water.

Are people moving to Nunavut? Neither the traditional nor the modern Nunavut subsistence strategy is likely to be allowed by the British(they’re opposed when Japan does it) in Antarctica, nor is it very appealing to outsiders. Greenland, likewise, is a wasteland of severe alcoholism and doesn’t seem to generate any ROI for Denmark. The Inuit may be fine people, but they’re not taking to modernity very well. You’ll notice that the European colonies in the warmest parts of Greenland failed.

assuming that services are available

Kinda the main stumbling block, tho, innit?

I mean, if, as the article suggests, sufficient quantities of valuable natural resources are found, every incentive will be there to make those services available. It's probably not going to be that much harder than building remote North Sea wells or setting up shop in Siberia.

You mind unfiltering the comment you’re replying to?

Oh dear. It's fixed now.

China seems a likely contender, but I don't know what they have going on.

In space, China's performance these days (whether measured by launches or satellites put in orbit or upmass) beats out the entire rest of the world (excepting SpaceX) combined. SpaceX outdoes them by somewhere between 200% and 900% depending on how you measure, though whether that means "the West is fine" or just "the West got really lucky" is less quantifiable. China's shooting for their first manned lunar landing around 2030, which doesn't seem likely but does seem possible; if Blue Origin continues to move glacially (though they've reached orbit now, good for them) and if Starship continues to have teething problems (the v2 ships have been tragedies so far, though catching two boosters and reusing one already was impressive) then China might beat Artemis 3 (still supposedly 2027? that is not going to happen).

China's current lunar plans are basically Apollo-style "flag and footprints" missions, vs US designs that ought to be more sustainably affordable and carry more cargo (or "much more", if Starship gets working smoothly), but China has 3 companies with Falcon-9-scale partially reusable launch vehicles currently in testing, which puts them way ahead of most of the competition. China's Starship-scale fully reusable plans are currently at the "Powerpoint slides of what we say we'll do in the 2030s" stage, so may never happen, but even that feels like a step up from e.g. the UK (current motto: "The sun will never stop setting on the British Empire") or continental Europe (also armed with 2030s-target Powerpoint slides, but for a mere Falcon 9 competitor).

I'm skeptical of making a real go at Mars colonization, especially as Elon's star has fallen so far recently.

Starlink is up to 6 million subscribers now, so even if Elon's irrevocably pissed off both parties at this point they've still got enough non-federal revenue to keep going. If he goes full Howard Hughes and starts trying to redesign Starship from birch or something then all bets are off, of course.

Their next Starship flight test (scrubbed yesterday with a ground systems issue) is going to be attempted this evening. No exciting booster catch attempt this time (this flight and the last are trying different angle-of-attack flyback trajectories, to get data and push out the envelope on that, and they don't want to come back near the tower in case they push too far), but it should still be tense. Everybody's waiting on pins and needles to see whether they've fixed the last of the new v2 ship problems or whether Turks and Caicos are about to get another unintended fireworks show.

The difference is that China still believes it’s good and that it is capable and has a right to do things and claim the benefits of having done them. The West probably at least since the 1950s has been browbeaten into being a henpecked househusband hoping that by acting weak it can appease everyone else. Until the West believes in itself like China does, expect no large scale projects.

…hold on. Are you an American?

Hang on, don't tar all the West with that brush. The US actually behaves like an agentic superpower, even if it can be a senile one. The rest of the Anglosphere or Europe? You have a point.

"At 660,000 square miles, the territory is about eight times the size of Great Britain"

Huh! That's interesting. I had no idea the UK had that much territory in Antarctica.

Still, I can't imagine them actually going through with such an ambitious plan, or that all the other countries would stand by and allow them to do it.

For your original question, it seems like Saudi Arabia is still working on the line. I'm not sure it will actually get finished, or whether it'll be any good... but there's a decent chance it will amount to something big.

Well, it is claimed territory. In fact, much of it is also claimed by Argentina and Chile. And China and the US do not have any claims and are unlikely to just play along.

For all practical purposes, the British claim is as valuable as if North Korea claimed half of the Pacific as their territorial waters.

OK yeah. Looking into it more, it sounds the makings for a hilariously old school imperialist land squabble. Going by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Antarctic_Territory: "Only four other countries accept Australia's claim to sovereignty, being New Zealand, the United Kingdom, France, and Norway, all of which have territorial claims in Antarctica and mutually accept each other’s claims"

So it's the British Commonwealth, France, and Norway vs the entire rest of the world!

This is even funnier if you ignore the context of the blurb and assume that "Australia's claim to sovereignty" refers to the actual continent/country of Australia.

17 million people and twice that in kangaroos? Do we have to recognize that as an independent nation-state? I've lived in larger cities! Also, it seems very unfair to give an entire continent to a single country, not Westphalian in the least.

Australia numbers 28 million, thanks to a ridiculous amount of recent immigration.

Also, the continent is mostly worthless. There's plenty of minerals but much of it is basically uninhabitable due to the heat and dryness.

Furthermore, the Antarctic claims are perfectly reasonable, Australia is actually close to the Antarctic and there are a few hundred people in stations down there. What the Russians, Norwegians and Chinese are doing down there is unreasonable, Russia and Norway have plenty of Arctic territory and shouldn't be double-dipping.

Britain already has history of shipping various prisoners and undesirables to inhospitable places in name of expansion. Who knows, history could repeat itself.

History? They're still doing it, just the other way around. Plenty of undesirables coming to the bitter dampness of Albion, including me.

Sure, there can be a weird twist when in let's say 50 years what constitutes an undesirable group can change quite radically. The unpredictability of lebanonization of a country.

hmm, are you suggesting that Britain could ship away all of its undesirable white males to Antarctica...? (just a joke)

But is it a "polar bear hunting" joke?

Unity of people will reinforce any vision that captures it. A deracinated, divided people are capable of following no vision but force.

This is a GPS unit in search of a vehicle. The car broke down a century ago. The UK is now a mirror on the vehicle that is the US empire.

Yeah a shared group identity is pretty crucial. Which do you think are still the most potent in the current era?

There's only two international ones, Islam and globohomo. Everything else is politically captured religion, ethnic division and nationalisms.

You don’t think Islam is riven with a ton of internal ethnic division? Huh that was my impression.

Of course it is. And with competing nationalisms and versions of the religion. Point is, they all happen within Islam. When Europe was "Christendom", they had thousands of heretical sects, competing secular governments, nobles, clerics, etc. They still had some more powerful ideology serving as the tent under which all that was "united". Neither Islam nor globohomo is any different. We're all in globohomo, whether we like it or not in the same way Iran is part of Islam, even though they are hated heretics by the rest of Islam.

I appreciate your framing, sincerely.

What's your take on the other abrahamic "hard" religious groups; Rad Trad catholics / Orthodox "ortho-Bros", and actual zionist and/or messianic Jews?

Pointless ideologically, potentially important demographically. Hard patriarchy is what gets birthrates up.

I also agree with JTarrou - a superordinate political identity like "Christendom" or "Western Civilisation" doesn't need near-universal adherence to matter, just broad popular or broad elite support in the nations it seeks to unite. And political Islam is a functioning superordinate identity group, and the factional splits within it are the main drivers of political violence globally. (Contra Huntington in Clash of Civilisations, the borders of the Islamic world are a lot less bloody than the interior). "Western Civilisation"/"The Free World" remains an important superordinate identity, with globohomo a faction within it. So far we handle our factional conflicts at the ballot box, and everyone except the nuttier fringes of MAGA want to keep it that way.

None of the various religious groups you mention have any desire to be a superordinate identity in this sense. Orthodoxy is in practice a bunch of ethnic churches that hate each other more than they hate outsiders, with the Orthobros being irrelevant. Rad Trads are happy being themselves, and religious Jews explicitly see themselves as a nation state that isn't part of a superordinate group.

These are not Christendom. Christendom is an earthly kingdom(or group of kingdoms/republics) dedicated to expanding Christianity in a generally aligned way. It's possible, but a bit of a stretch, to point to some fringey parts(Francoist Spain, South Vietnam under the Ngo family) of the general US sphere in the cold war as the last vestiges of Christendom. But Christendom today is either dead or limited to Liechtenstein. It is, specifically, a state, operating like a normal state.

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