Republicans Believe Obama Key To Winning Senate Majority In 2012

By Susan Duclos

The Politico has a three-page piece out explaining how Obama is a "drag on Senate Democrats." Republicans believe that Obama, himself, is key to winning the Senate majority. (Page 2)

Yet Senate Republicans believe that Obama remains the key to winning the majority. They mention Obama early and often in fundaising pitches and TV ads, and when a Democratic incumbent or challenger skips an Obama visit to their state — as both Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill and former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine did recently — Republicans make sure to portray the president as toxic for Democrats.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that if Obama’s approval numbers stay low, in-cycle Senate Democrats will keep their distance from Obama and his policies.

With the latest polling by Gallup showing Obama job performance approval at a new low for his 11th quarter and that those low numbers are "weak from a historical perspective," Republicans might just be on the track in their perceptions.

Implications

President Obama's most recent quarter in office was his worst to date, and these lower levels of public support could put his re-election chances in peril unless things start to improve in the next few months. Currently, voters say they are more likely to vote for "the Republican candidate" than for Obama for president in 2012, though Obama has generally looked stronger when matched against actual Republican candidates like Mitt Romney or Rick Perry.

Americans' satisfaction with the direction of the country remains at historically low levels, and Americans clearly identify the economy and unemployment as the most important problems facing the United States. Thus, a second Obama term likely hinges on whether there are signs of economic progress in the coming months.

Via the same Politico article linked above, Democrats are betting the farm on Obama's reelection chances getting better once a Republican nominee has been chosen.

“Things will get better for Obama when there is a [GOP] nominee,” said another Democratic insider. “He will be able to show a stark contrast on a bunch of issues, like Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure [spending], jobs [and] taxes. It won’t just be a referendum on Obama, and that will help a lot of Democrats.”

I disagree with this point and find absolutely no predictive value in head to head match up polls yet and I do not believe there will be any predictive value until one Republican candidate is nominated and the party supporters, conservative Independents and/or Independents that have turned against Obama, have one specific GOP candidate to unite behind.

Sure, there will be supporters of other candidates that will refuse to unite behind a candidate they originally were not supportive of but the majority of conservatives will coalesce in support of the eventual nominee in order to remove Barack Obama from the White House in the 2012 presidential election.

I said the other day and I will repeat it here, any GOP nominee will have Obama's own record, now that he has one, to beat him over the head with.

Obama will have to defend his own statement that after 3 years he will own the economy and if it is not better he would be a one term president. (Youtube video of Obama saying it)

Obama will have to defend passing the trillion dollar Obamacare with no Republican support and against the majority of Americans who were opposed to the bill as a whole.

Obama will have to defend the 20 tax increases associated with Obamacare, many of which do not go into effect until after the 2012 election.

Obama will have to defend a $787 plus billion stimulus package that resulted in unemployment being 9 percent or higher during most of his term if not all of it. (The US Unemployment Rate - 1948 to 2010)

Obama will have to defend committing troops to Libya and now Uganda without congressional authority.

Obama will have to defend his massive bailouts. Obama will have to defend his historically high 2011 deficit.

Obama will have to defend the Fast and Furious scandal and the Solyndra scandal.

That is just a portion of Obama's own record and any GOP nominee will be able to exploit each of those weaknesses.

Each of these points can also be used against Senate Democrats when linking them relentlessly to Obama in the 2012 Senate elections.

There are 23 Democratic Senate seats in play and only 10 Republican seats.

Democrats now hold the majority in the Senate with 51 seats, Republicans hold 47 and there are two Independents who generally caucus with Democrats.

The chances of Republicans taking control of the Senate are very good given the high disapproval of Barack Obama and the enthusiasm gap between Republican supporters and Democratic supporters, favoring Republicans with two-thirds of all registered Republicans saying they are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting next year, compared to less than half of all Democrats. Added to that Rasmussen finds, in their generic congressional ballot that "The GOP holds a three-point advantage over Democrats for the week ending Sunday, October 16. "

The farther Barack Obama falls in the polls, the heavier of a drag he becomes on vulnerable Senate Democrats, which is perhaps the reason they are attempting to distance themselves from him.

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This Is Why Space Settlement Is Important

It's the end of civilization.. or so some would have us believe. If they don't get their wish, they intend to take it.. by force. Humanity going into space isn't about leaving them behind, but wouldn't it be nice?

With my most humble apologies to Jeff Greason.

As a follow up I posted this over at kuro5hin.

Cancelled Crew Transportation Systems

EML1 Buildup

Today's space launch market is used to place satellites - commercial, scientific and military - into orbit, with the majority going to the geostationary orbit. In all such cases, the launch vehicle does not perform the final maneuver to circularize the orbit. The satellite is dropped off and circularizes its own orbit using on-board propellant. This is a significant delta-v change of about 1.6 km/s, and the remaining fuel is used to maintain the orbit, usually for 25 years or more.

Launch to Geostationary Transfer Orbit, circularize using on-board propellant. This is the standard model for how satellites are deployed into space. It is a mature process which has served us well for decades. However, when planning an exploration architecture, it has always been treated as irrelevant.

Here is a list of some current (and one near future) launch vehicles, their listed throw mass to GTO and the calculated mass that can be placed into the first Earth-Moon Lagrange point using a 312 second specific impulse storable propellant thruster (GTO to EML1 delta-v is 1.27 km/s).

Launch vehicle	Mass to GTO	Mass to EML1
Falcon 9	4680 kg	3090 kg
H-IIB 304	8000 kg	5282 kg
Long March 3B/E	5500 kg	3632 kg
Proton	6360 kg	4199 kg
Atlas V 551	8700 kg	5745 kg
Ariane 5ECA	10050 kg	6636 kg
Delta IV-H	12980 kg	8571 kg
Falcon Heavy	19000 kg	12546 kg

What should be obvious is that there is quite a healthy international stable of launch vehicle providers, and they're all geared up for sending payloads to GTO. What is perhaps not obvious is that by going from GTO to EML1 I am seriously cheating myself. I don't mind because throwing to a lunar transfer orbit is something all of these vehicles can also do and, in all cases, the subsequent transfer to EML1 will be less than a transfer from GTO. As such, we can accept the numbers above as accurate, even if they are overly conservative.

So what does this mean? Suppose we want to land a payload on the surface of the Moon. One option is to simply pick the biggest one of these rockets and fly it directly to lunar orbit and start our descent. The total delta-v for such a mission is likely to be about 3.2 km/s, which means we can land a maximum of 6676 kg.

Suppose, instead, we fly to EML1 and pick up fuel. The table above indicates we can put a maximum of 12546 kg to EML1, and the delta-v from EML1 to the lunar surface is 2.52 km/s, so we need 16043 kg of fuel to make the trip. Because we're using storable propellants, this can be delivered over a long time using whichever provider offers the best price, or over a short time by engaging as many providers as become available.

Although this is just a rough analysis, it shows that we can land twice as big payloads by building up EML1 with propellant, without the need for any new launch vehicles, new technologies or even new ways of doing business, and we could start doing it right now.

Dreaming About NASA Mismanagement

There's so many things packed up in this clip. For a start, the House isn't trying to cut the James Web Space Telescope (JWST) because "we don't have the money" or to save money or for any budgetary reason what-so-ever. The House is trying to cut JWST because the Government Accountability Office reported that NASA, and the contractor, have been mismanaging this program. They reported this three different times and required reports on what NASA was going to do about it - NASA didn't provide those reports. The House even said that the reason they were looking to cut JWST was to send a message that ignoring oversight will not be tolerated.

Does that mean the JWST isn't important? No.. no-one is saying that. Everyone agrees that JWST is important and that it will give results of significant scientific discoveries should it ever be completed and launched.. but when will that be? Within a two week period - after the House suggested cutting the budget - the program managers said 2020 or 2018 - neither answer was given in writing. Both answers were contingent upon an increase in their budget.. there's a word we use for declining to increase the budget of mismanaged projects: smart.

So is that the end of JWST? In the minds of NASA-can-do-no-wrong advocates, yes. They immediately declare that you're just not throwing enough money at the problem. It goes something like this: Oh, Hubble was massively overbudget and even broken when it launched. If we hadn't thrown more money at the problem we wouldn't even know about [insert discovery of cosmic significance here].

Meanwhile, the cosmologists are going around saying that the JWST is "essentially complete" or that "we've already built it". This isn't just the sulk cost fallacy, they actually think the JWST is ready and Congress is pulling the rug out from under them. This isn't the case at all, and not even NASA is making this claim. I've been suggesting that, if this were true, people who really want to see JWST fly should be calling for a firm fixed price contract - where the contractor covers the cost overruns, and NASA has less opportunity to screw things up - which has been proven time and time again to result in projects that are completed on-time and under budget.

Failing to mention any of this, Tyson then goes off into one of his standard rants. Oh, we've stopped dreaming. We don't look up. We've turned inwards. Can you imagine why? Hint: it has something to do with NASA mismanagement.

Back in the 1960s people dreamed of going to the Moon. Guess what? NASA went to the Moon. Was NASA not grossly mismanaged back then too? Of course they were, but they were given the mandate to "waste anything but time" and that is one thing government does well: waste.

What did people dream about in the 1970s? Space settlement. These dreams became plans, that wasn't the problem. All the engineering analysis at the time indicated that NASA could do it, so what happened? The plans called for cheap access to space and that requires the opposite of government: efficiency.

Instead, NASA became a government agency focused on "international cooperation", with first the Shuttle-Mir program and later the International Space Station, and while I'm sure there was plenty of people out there dreaming about more cooperation between nations, it had little to do with looking up.

We've Already Got Propellant Depots

The solution to so many space logistics problems is: use a bigger rocket. Propellant depots allow you to add another solution: use more rockets.

Now, for some reason, many people who are advocates of propellant depots object to just using existing space storable propellants because that would mean you'd need to launch more mass than if you used cryogenic propellants. Well, so what? More launches - that's a good thing!

We don't need technology development to make propellant depots work. They already work.. we already have one in orbit!

Suppose you want to send 100 tons to Mars transfer orbit. You need either 236 tons of storable propellant or 144 tons of cryogenic propellant (and that's being overly generous to cryogenics). Instead of 5 Falcon Heavy launches you now only need 3. So what? How much is that worth?

So, ya know, NASA has selected companies to study storing cryogenic propellants in space.. and that's great. Technology development, in general, is fantastic and it makes things better in the future. Unfortunately I'm already hearing people say "woohoo! Now we'll have propellant depots and we won't have to waste $38 billion on a heavy lift vehicle to no-where!". Well, no. We already have propellant depots and we already don't need heavy lift to go beyond LEO.

There is, however, a few things that we are in desperate need of.... the political will to go, anywhere, on the government side, and an outspoken willingness to go it alone, if necessary, on the commercial side.

All we need is a really long tether!

I've written previously about non-rotating artificial gravity in Earth orbit. After recently watching this stinker I broke out the code I use to figure out gravity gradient effects. Surprisingly, this seems pretty good:

	Altitude	Mass	Gravity
LEO Station	300 km	273 tons	0.999 g
GEO Station	35786 km	30 tons	0.38 g

Of course, this is a much longer tether than in the film.. but hey, Danny Baldwin is in it - he doesn't make good movies. Anyway, the high station could be an ISS-style module with airlock and docking ports for satellite servicing vehicles. The low station would be a true permanently inhabited facility where people can live for years at a time without fear of bone mass deterioration or the other negative effects of zero gravity. To maximize space we may be tempted to use inflatable Bigelow modules, but we have to consider how they will behave in full gravity.

The only sticking point left is radiation. On the LEO station crews have much less exposure to cosmic radiation thanks to the Earth's magnetic field, however they receive just as much from flying through the South Atlantic Anomaly. As a result, radiation on the GEO station would be 2.19 times as high during solar maximum and 6.568 times as high during solar minimum. If that seems confusing, just remember that the Sun's magnetic field provides most of our protection against cosmic radiation, and it does that more at maximum than at minimum.

One solution may be minimagnetospheres but, again, technology developed for zero-g rarely works unmodified in full gravity. The best solution may simply be appropriate mass. The requirement that the low station be 9.1 times more massive than the high station means that both will have to grow simultaneously but getting mass from LEO to GEO is pretty easy when you have a tether joining the two altitudes.

You may be asking: how plausible is this? Or even: isn't this just the Space Elevator? I estimate it is at least two orders of magnitude easier to do than a space elevator and would only require (vast amounts of) existing tether materials. The cost is most likely dominated by launch costs that should be around $800M in a few years time.