October 14 2024

FLASH…Europa Clipper set to launch today on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket…

Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Awarded to Authors of ‘Why Nations Fail,’ Former IMF Chief Economist

1. US Deploys Missile Defense System, 100 Troops to Israel
2. The Age of Depopulation
3. SpaceX Achieves Major Milestone with Starship Test Flight
4. Trump Gains Ground with Black and Hispanic Voters
5. U.S. Submarine Fleet in Crisis
10/14/1947 Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier

See the new Ad Astra Podcast! Released on Apple and Spotify around 10a CST.

Editors note: We’re still waiting on Israel’s retaliatory strike on Iran. It will come and when it does, we’ll cover it.

FLASH…Europa Clipper set to launch today on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket…

Embarking on six-year journey to Jupiter to study ocean moon’s, Europa, habitability

Article Source: NYT

Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Awarded to Authors of ‘Why Nations Fail,’ Former IMF Chief Economist

The work of the three economists is based on the history of colonialism, and the different ways in which national experiences have affected institutions, such as the protection of property rights or the way in which political decisions are made. Their broadest conclusion is that democracies are better at delivering prosperity over the long term, although they acknowledge that authoritarian governments can be effective at exploiting existing resources, such as raw materials or workers. However, authoritarian forms of government typically fail to innovate, which is a strength of democracies.

Article Source: WSJ

1. US Deploys Missile Defense System, 100 Troops to Israel

A. Deployment  

The United States is sending an advanced missile defense system to Israel, along with about 100 American troops to operate it, the Pentagon announced on Sunday. It is the first deployment of U.S. forces to Israel since the Hamas-led attacks there on Oct. 7, 2023. President Biden directed Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, and its crew, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement on Sunday.  

B. US Spends $23 Billion on Military Aid to Israel  

In just one year, the U.S. has spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel and related U.S. operations in the region (through September 30). 2 This was true, even before the U.S. expanded its presence in the region in late September/ early October 2024 in events too recent to be included in this report.

Article Source: NYT, Brown University

2. The Age of Depopulation

A. Foreign Affairs, 10/10/24  

Although few yet see it coming, humans are about to enter a new era of history. Call it “the age of depopulation.” For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, the planetary population will decline. But whereas the last implosion was caused by a deadly disease borne by fleas, the coming one will be entirely due to choices made by people. With birthrates plummeting, more and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation, one that will eventually encompass the whole planet. What lies ahead is a world made up of shrinking and aging societies. Net mortality—when a society experiences more deaths than births—will likewise become the new norm. Driven by an unrelenting collapse in fertility, family structures and living arrangements heretofore imagined only in science fiction novels will become commonplace, unremarkable features of everyday life. Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation. Overall global numbers last declined about 700 years ago, in the wake of the bubonic plague that tore through much of Eurasia. In the following seven centuries, the world’s population surged almost 20-fold. And just over the past century, the human population has quadrupled. The last global depopulation was reversed by procreative power once the Black Death ran its course. This time around, a dearth of procreative power is the cause of humanity’s dwindling numbers, a first in the history of the species. A revolutionary force drives the impending depopulation: a worldwide reduction in the desire for children. So far, government attempts to incentivize childbearing have failed to bring fertility rates back to replacement levels. Future government policy, regardless of its ambition, will not stave off depopulation. The shrinking of the world’s population is all but inevitable. Societies will have fewer workers, entrepreneurs, and innovators—and more people dependent on care and assistance. The problems this dynamic raises, however, are not necessarily tantamount to a catastrophe. Depopulation is not a grave sentence; rather, it is a difficult new context, one in which countries can still find ways to thrive. Governments must prepare their societies now to meet the social and economic challenges of an aging and depopulating world. 

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT  

B. New York Times, 10/13/24  

Can the Government Get People to Have More Babies?   

C. Wall Street Journal, 10/14/24  

Worldwide Efforts to Reverse the Baby Shortage Are Falling Flat

Article Source: Foreign Affairs, NYT, WSJ

3. SpaceX Achieves Major Milestone with Starship Test Flight

A. SpaceX successfully caught a rocket booster mid-air with mechanical arms 

SpaceX pulled off a feat of technical wizardry on Sunday, not only flying a 233-foot rocket booster back to its launch site, but also catching it out of the air with two giant mechanical arms. It occurred during the fifth test flight of the Starship rocket and was a huge step forward for the ambitions of SpaceX and its founder, Elon Musk, which include one day transporting people to Mars. In the more immediate future, NASA is paying SpaceX $4 billion to use Starship to take astronauts to the surface of the moon during two upcoming missions in its Artemis program. Mr. Musk’s company, in addition to having built and flown the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, has also demonstrated a key technology needed to make the vehicle completely reusable and able to fly again and again quickly, more like a jetliner than a rocket.

B. Video: SpaceX Starship's Successful Catch   

Video link

Article Source: NYT, @futurejurvetson

4. Trump Gains Ground with Black and Hispanic Voters

In 2016, Donald J. Trump became the Republican nominee and ultimately won the presidency after calling many Mexican immigrants rapists and falsely claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Eight years later, the polls suggest that he might well return to the White House by faring better among Black and Hispanic voters combined than any Republican presidential nominee since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Like our other surveys this cycle, the polls find Mr. Trump faring unusually well for a Republican among Black and Hispanic voters. Overall, Kamala Harris is ahead, 78 percent to 15 percent, among Black voters, and she’s leading, 56-37, among Hispanic voters. Almost any way we can measure it, Mr. Trump is running as well or better among Black and Hispanic voters as any Republican in recent memory. In 2020, Joe Biden’s Black support was 92 percent among major-party voters; his Hispanic support was 63 percent, according to Times estimates.  

Article Source: NYT

5. U.S. Submarine Fleet in Crisis

With the potential for a hot war with China looming over America’s strategic future, the minds of U.S. defense planners increasingly turn with calm confidence to the Navy’s submarine force. Submarines—quiet, stealthy, and loaded with lethal combinations of mis­siles, torpedoes, and mines—can penetrate deep into the Pacific’s first and second island chains, negating Chinese investments in so-called anti-access/area denial weapons. These Chinese systems, long-range ballistic and cruise missiles as well as manned bombers and fight­ers, were purposely designed to negate America’s power projection forces—its Navy carriers and Air Force attack aircraft—rendering them irrelevant in the opening weeks of any future Pacific war over Taiwan. If a Chinese invasion force is to be defeated, then, most Western strategists and force planners believe that the burden will fall upon the shoulders of submariners (pronounced sub-mar-een-ers, and they will correct you). Unfortunately, the U.S. submarine force is poorly postured to meet this challenge. Across my career as a naval officer, entering as an ensign in 1988 and retiring as a captain in 2014, and then as a consultant to both government and industry since, I have watched the American submarine fleet fall precipitously from its Cold War high of 140 nuclear-powered “boats” to less than half that number, sixty-seven boats, today. More­over, of the current sixty-seven nuclear submarines, only forty-nine fall into the hunter-killer “fast attack” classification. The Navy and its shipbuilding partners have struggled in the post-Covid economy to ramp up submarine production despite rising strategic threats. The Defense Department announced recently that it would procure only one new fast-attack submarine in the fiscal year 2025 budget. Additionally, of the submarine force already in commission, sixteen of those forty-nine boats—or nearly a third of the Navy’s premier offensive force—are in drydocks or tied to piers, lacking required dive certifications. These submarines cannot get underway due to a three-year maintenance backlog in the U.S. Navy. The bottom line is that the American submarine force, the “point of the spear” of American power, upon which so many military plans depend, is unprepared to meet the current threat environment, and there are no quick fixes.

Article Source: American Affairs

10/14/1947 Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier

Sources

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/science/nasa-prepares-europa-clipper-launch-to-study-an-ocean-moons-habitability.html

2. https://www.wsj.com/economy/global/nobel-for-economics-awarded-to-daron-acemoglu-simon-johnson-james-robinson-8ae2c3c2?mod=hp_lead_pos3

3. A https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/13/us/politics/us-missile-defense-iran-israel.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
B https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2023/2024/Costs%20of%20War_US%20Support%20Since%20Oct%207%20FINAL%20v2.pdf

4. A https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/age-depopulation-surviving-world-gone-gray-nicholas-eberstadt
B https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/13/world/asia/birth-rate-fertility-policy-japan.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
C https://www.wsj.com/world/birthrate-children-fertility-europe-perks-family-04aa13a0?mod=hp_lead_pos7

5. A https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/13/science/space-starship-launch-landing.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
B https://x.com/futurejurvetson/status/1845464187935289568?s=46&t=nVb-5uC_WM3Cp0R0dGiqHQ

6. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/13/upshot/trump-black-hispanic-voters-harris.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/13/us/politics/latinos-trump-harris-poll.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

7. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/05/sunk-at-the-pier-crisis-in-the-american-submarine-industrial-base/