Ends and Odds

Since there's no particular order to what to write about, there's no particular reason to say odds and ends rather than ends and odds.   

About Liberty's Torch blog 

The first one is a bit  of administrative trivia.  Recently, and I'm thinking two weeks ago, I went to Liberty's Torch, the domain of Francis W. Porretto, and my browser couldn't connect.  I tried a couple of times during the day, then a couple of days, and it couldn't connect.  Then it acted normally.  For a day or maybe two.  I was going to post a comment over there asking what's up but figured there wasn't much of a chance there'd be something going on that they didn't know about ("they" = Francis and whoever else helps run the place).  Then it disappeared again. 

This Wednesday, I did a search (Duck Duck Go is the search engine I use most) to see if there was any news in the last week about Liberty's Torch.  That was when I found that Francis and all seem to have moved to an old Blogger (Google) site, Bastion of Liberty.  I've changed the link to the blog in the right sidebar.  It looks rather low key or low interest; there are posts on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday (as in yesterday: 8/8).  

Yes, Francis is a writer and advertises his various books, none of which I've ever bought, but he's a good guy, and a good writer.  He's also a fellow technogeek, although I'm all but positive he's in completely different fields than mine.  I don't recall a single time he wrote on the tech topics I regularly do, but I read him regularly.  Unless it's just not an interesting subject to me.

More About "Nukes on the Moon!"

The day after my post talking about the news on building a nuclear reactor power source on the moon, in which my main point was that nuclear power for planetary exploration has been in the "to do list" for a long, long time, the daily email from Payload added to the story with something I didn't have a link to in my own blog but fit the idea perfectly.  In "NASA Wants To Hit the Accelerator On Lunar Atomics" they talk about a current program that's under half the size of what NASA is asking for now. 

NASA was pursuing a plan to put nuclear power on the Moon long before Trump took office. In 2022, NASA hired contractors Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, and IX—a joint venture of Intuitive Machines and X-energy—to design 40kw reactors for the Moon. A plan to solicit final designs was expected this year, but now energy will turn toward the new reactor concept. 

“We’re really glad to see that this directive came out,” Lockheed VP Kevin Au, who leads the company’s lunar business, told Payload. “The United States has been investing in and working on nuclear space capabilities since the 50s, [but] we haven’t flown anything since 1965.”

Note that this 2022 contract was for a 40kW reactor while the one being talked about now is 100 kW.  That means more than twice as much heat being created in the reactor and heat is the big engineering problem.  Most of the nuclear power here on the surface is water cooled - built on rivers, or with access to the oceans or other large water sources.  How do we cool computers?  Fans, moving air, but sometimes circulating refrigerants (like Freon).  The temperature exchange with the air, coolant or whatever is critical.  I wonder if compressed air could create a good cooling medium on the moon?  

Lockheed VP Kevin Au, who leads the company’s lunar business, has a good observation:

“We’re really glad to see that this directive came out,” ... Au told Payload. “The United States has been investing in and working on nuclear space capabilities since the 50s, [but] we haven’t flown anything since 1965.” 

Remember the Firefly Aerospace IPO?

It went well for them.  Shares in Firefly (FLY) began trading at $70 on the NASDAQ stock exchange midday Thursday, jumping from their offering price of $45, The Wall Street Journal reports. The company sold more than 19 million shares in the listing, raising $868 million. 

Edit 8/10/25 at 8:00 PM:  Earlier in the day an anonymous commenter posted a link to Francis Porretto's blog on Cold Fury.  After checking it, I decided to correct the new link in the right side bar to the Cold Fury site.