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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   2726 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'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:

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.

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