Joe Biden says he was inspired to run for president in 2020 because he heard Donald Trump call neo-Nazis and white supremacists "very fine people." That's been debunked over and over, but he's never going…

Happy Tuesday! Today’s Brew is quite a ride … on a Harley, no less. We’ll have more on the first night of the Democratic National Convention later today in Al’s Afternoon Tea. But for starters…

Washington —  Federal Reserve officials have said they're increasingly confident that they've nearly tamed inflation. Now, it's the health of the job market that's starting to draw their concern.…

Washington —  Federal Reserve officials have said they're increasingly confident that they've nearly tamed inflation. Now, it's the health of the job market that's starting to draw their concern.…

As the Democratic National Convention kicked off last night, a pretty funny new trope hit Twitter: Drunk Kamala Harris. Look, it's not hard to see why people would think that Harris tips back a few…

Readers, Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.…

Cost is a major driving factor in the development of space exploration missions. Any new technology or trick that could lower the cost of a mission makes it much more appealing for mission planners. Therefore, much of NASA’s research goes into those technologies that enable cheaper missions. For example, a few years ago, NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) supported a project by Michael VanWoerkom of ExoTerra Resource to develop a lander mission that could support a sample return from Europa. Let’s examine what made that mission different from other Europa mission architectures. The Nano Icy Moons Propellant Harvester (NIMPH) mission relies on three main advancements for one significant result: a 10x reduction in the overall mission cost. That reduced cost comes mainly from a single fact—the mission’s weight has dropped below the threshold where it can be launched by an Atlas V rather than the SLS, as similar missions would require. The mission cost estimated for an SLS-launched Europa lander was around $5 billion, making it prohibitively expensive for NASA or any other agency without significant sacrifices to other missions. ExoTerra estimates that, by using several weight-reducing technologies, they could bring the mission price tag down to $500 million—a much more reasonable sum to garner support from one of the government space programs. Video describing the mission concept.Credit – NASA 360 YouTube Channel Three different technologies would enable this weight and cost to drop. First would be the solar electric propulsion (SEP) system initially designed for use on DART. The second would be a micro in-situ resource utilization (µISRU) system, and the third would be a power-beaming system between the lander and an orbiter. Let’s first look at the overall mission architecture to understand how each contributes. In NIMPH, a combined orbiter lander will use an Atlas V rocket to get into Earth orbit. Then, a solar electric propulsion system (SEP) was initially designed for use on the DART asteroid redirect test. Although it was not used during the DART mission, the NEXT ion thruster was part of the spacecraft that launched, and, despite suffering from some technical challenges, it could have allowed the spacecraft to reach its destination. A similar, lightweight SEP system could get NIMPH to the Jupiter system, but it could also get the sample back to Earth after the lander collected it. Just how the lander can get that sample back off the icy moon is the focus of the next major technological step – the µISRU system. NIMPH’s architecture would require using the local ice as a propellant. A lander would literally sublimate the ice under its feet, suck up the resultant water vapor, electrolyze it to split it into oxygen and hydrogen, and then liquefy it to store it for use in getting a 1 kg ice core sample back into orbit. Fraser discusses the missions planned for Jupiter’s system in the near future. To do all of this requires power, though, and a lander with a radioisotope thermal generator or similar commonly used power generation system would be prohibitively heavy. So, why not utilize the massive solar array required for the SEP system and beam some of that power down to the lander? That is the concept behind the power beaming system, estimated to produce around 2 kW of power in the Jovian system, about 1.8  kW of which could be beamed directly to a lander.  After the core has been collected and safely launched back into space using a specially designed LOx-LH2 engine that uses the water collected by the µISRU system, the lander meets up with the orbiter. The SEP system kicks back on and delivers the lander back to Earth orbit, where it once again detaches and rides back to Earth’s surface inside a standard reentry module. There are some nuances to this entire mission architecture. For example, the SEP system wouldn’t work at full capacity in the Jovian system, so a much smaller LOx / Methane propulsion system is needed to maneuver the orbiter into position. Additionally, the lander would likely have to leave its legs embedded in the Europan ice, as the sublimation process it uses to collect fuel would likely embed them in place.  Budgetary constraints are always a consideration in deep space exploration, as Fraser discusses in this video. Plenty of development work on all these systems must be completed before any such mission is ready for launch. And most likely, some of the need for the scientific understanding would be met by the Europa Clipper mission set to launch later this year for $4.25 billion – not far off the 10x times expense that was the original impetus for the more capable NIMPH mission design. And while NIMPH did receive a Phase II NIAC grant, it hasn’t been selected for further development as far as we have found. So, as of now, this novel combination of mass-saving technologies will not be delivering an icy Europan sample any time soon – but maybe someday it will. Learn More:ExoTerra Resource / Michael VanWoerkom – Nano Icy Moons Propellant Harvester Final ReportUT – Europa Might Not Be Able to Support Life in its OceansUT – We Might Find Life Just Under the Surface on EuropaUT – Europa Clipper Could Help Discover if Jupiter’s Moon is Habitable Lead Image:Depiction of the NIMPH mission architecture.Credit – Michael VanWoerkom The post A Europan Lander Could Return an Ice Core For A Fraction of the Cost of Europa Clipper appeared first on Universe Today.

Politics Joe Biden, Trump Casualty The president’s late-night turn shows the party is done with him—and human politicians altogether. The theme of the Democratic National Convention’s first night was “Democrats Donald Trump has vanquished.” The night’s keynotes were delivered by two of them. Hillary Clinton, the nominee who fell to Trump in 2016, gave a rousing, passionate prime-time address. She’s out for vengeance, however vicarious it must be. Madam Secretary will never be Madam President, but she thirsts to see Kamala Harris do what she could not and stop Trump. Yet Trump also knows a thing or two about revenge, and he’s already requited himself against the only opponent ever to beat him. That was Joe Biden, whose career Trump brought to a prompt end after their first—and only—in-person rematch on June 27 this year. Yes, Trump defeated Biden—not just on that fateful night, when Biden’s wounds were mostly self-inflicted, but in the following weeks when Trump’s advantage over Biden became so commanding that the incumbent president was forced out of the race.  Not since 1968, when the tag team of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy Sr. deterred Lyndon Baines Johnson from seeking re-election, had a sitting president been beaten like this, before the general election even began. And while Johnson’s heart might not have been set on his seeking a second term, Biden’s very much was. Trump destroyed his dream. The Joe Biden who addressed the convention last night was already a ghost, one fated to haunt the White House until January 20. He’s an angry, impotent spirit. Heedless of his naked hypocrisy, he linked Trump to neo-Nazis in one breath and insisted in the next that he had been a president for all Americans, “demonizing no one.” On the contrary, he demonized Republicans relentlessly, not just last night but throughout his administration. “Democracy has prevailed, democracy has delivered, and now democracy must be preserved!” he shouted—after he, the democratically chosen nominee of the Democratic Party’s voters, handed the nomination over to a replacement who had never won so much as a single presidential primary.  Biden’s age and anger have been hard to distinguish for a long time, to be sure. Even in 2020 he was unable to speak with emotional inflection—instead, he would have to shout or lower his voice almost to a whisper to convey effect. Four years later, Biden’s powers of expression aren’t improved. His remarks were full of the fills and asides that plug the gaps where his thoughts should have been—not just little ones like “Listen…” and “Folks…” but repeated variations on “No, I’m serious, think about it, not a joke…” The speech was a chopped-up, 45-minute montage of Biden’s stump declamations. Perhaps he wanted to enjoy shouting them out one last time. The contrast between Clinton and Biden was pitiful, but revealing. She’s 76 years old herself, but Clinton remains vigorous and sharp, if not exactly easy on the ears. She was better last night, in fact, than she ever was in 2016. So why had Biden made it to the Oval Office when she didn’t? Even four years ago, he was hardly fit for the job—a fact concealed only by the pandemic conditions in which the 2020 election took place. But for Democrats seeking the White House, less is more. The ideal Democratic candidate in the 21st century wouldn’t be a human being at all, but a Shepard Fairey poster. Barack Obama was more than that, yet Obama the politician was never as appealing as Obama the religious icon; that is why he bucked the trend of reelected presidents and actually won fewer votes the second time around, when he had a record to defend in 2012, than he had received in 2008. That earlier, imaginary Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize eight months after his inauguration, at which time he had achieved practically nothing for the cause of peace. That didn’t matter—what mattered was the way the judges wanted to see him. Clinton couldn’t be reduced to a feel-good progressive symbol, not given her votes on the Iraq War or her association with her husband’s neoliberal administration. So she faced a serious challenge for the 2016 nomination from Bernie Sanders. And while she couldn’t win the true love of the socialist left, she also struck Middle American voters as culturally elitist, especially after she wrote off millions of them as a “basket of deplorables.” She was too woke for the hardhats, but not woke enough to fully satisfy her party’s left wing, which expressed its reservations over her economics by backing Bernie. In 2020, Democratic hopefuls like Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris upped the ante of identity politics, but not enough to break Bernie’s economic hold on the activist left. So the party’s grandees tried the opposite strategy—they threw their support behind an old white Irish-American Catholic from what was once the moderate wing of the party. JFK would make a good Shepard Fairey poster, and that’s what Biden would have to be. He was old—too old for the office, as was already apparent to critics back then—but he could serve as one last symbol of what the Democratic Party used to be. That was all the more convenient in a virtual campaign against Donald Trump, whose Republican populism had taken the middle ground that Democrats had vacated.  The stratagem succeeded—in getting an incompetent elected president. But once elected, and once he had to face Trump in a fully real rather than virtual campaign, Biden couldn’t hide his incapacities any longer. He ceased to be a symbol once the reality couldn’t be ignored. And that meant the strategy that had put him in the Oval Office needed someone else to become the poster. With Bernie beaten, it was now safe to try Harris, promoting her as the second coming of Obama, with “hope” giving way to “joy.” The fact that the real Harris is anything but a joy to work with, as the unhappy experiences of so many of former staffers attest, need not matter, any more than Biden’s decrepitude mattered in 2020. The aim is to win—governing is an afterthought. (This isn’t the case with the GOP and Trump, by the way: Republican grandees persist in thinking that some hypothetical generic candidate could be doing better than the Donald. Yet Republicans voters chose Trump, freely and fairly, first in 2016 and again this year, because they believe in what he stands for and will do if he’s in office. There’s plenty of symbolism attached to Trump—much of it distracting, or worse—but he fundamentally represents a new approach to government. Democrats like Biden actually acknowledge this, in their own polemical way, when they hype him as a threat to “democracy,” by which they actually mean rule by a progressive elite regardless of which party is nominally in power. That elite can rule as long as someone like Trump doesn’t come along and use politics to assail its position in the institutions that shape education and culture.) Hillary Clinton is just woke enough to remain relevant to the 2024 party, and her invocations of glass ceilings and Geraldine Ferraro are marching music to the ears of the feminists who increasingly make up the 21st-century core of the party. Biden, on the other hand, is someone whose remarks can be put off until nearly 11:30 pm Eastern time. He may be president, but he only represents the past. Biden has been used and discarded. And he knows it, of course. “All this talk about how I’m angry at all those people who said I should step down, that’s not true,” he said at 12:07 am. The words belie the sentiment—“all this talk,” “all those people”; all this smoke, all this fire. Biden’s ablaze, even if, for the sake of his family, he can’t afford to say so. Their interests demand he keep the peace with the party that betrayed him—the party that allowed Donald Trump to beat him before the first ballot was cast. The post Joe Biden, Trump Casualty appeared first on The American Conservative.

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