The Superfluity of Purgatory

This article is a refutation of Jerry Walls\u27s model of Purgatory, based on God\u27s respect of our free will and the necessity of morally significant choices. Additionally, it will show how Walls\u27s positing of a temporal Purgatory as a means of sanctification through cooperation with God is unnecessary for the Christian in light of our earthly life and God\u27s perfect justice and omnipotence. Finally, it will speculate as to the effects of an instantaneous purification and how it fits more clearly with traditional doctrine

Laser Communications Relay Demonstration: Introduction for Experimenters

This document provides guidance to individuals or groups considering proposing an experiment for the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) Experiment Program. For the purposes of this document, the term experiment refers to both experiments and demonstrations. The documents goals are: (1) to introduce potential experimenters to the LCRD mission, its purpose, and its system architecture; (2) to help them understand the types of experiments that are possible using LCRD; and (3) to provide an overview of the experiment proposal process and explain how and where to obtain further information about making a proposal

Government policy towards multi-national corporations

We analyze an environment with asymmetric information where a country tries to attract a multi-national corporation. The country can use both taxes and grants to meet its objective of maximizing net revenues. We show that when the country has private information it can often convey it via its choice of a tax-grant pair. When the tax rates are unbounded the country is able to extract the full surplus. The existence of an upper bound can in some cases reduce the payoff to a stronger country.Foreign Direct Investment

Government policy towards multi-national corporations

We analyze an environment with asymmetric information where a country tries to attract a multi-national corporation. The country can use both taxes and grants to meet its objective of maximizing net revenues. We show that when the country has private information it can often convey it via its choice of a tax-grant pair. When the tax rates are unbounded the country is able to extract the full surplus. The existence of an upper bound can in some cases reduce the payoff to a stronger country

Next-Generation NASA Earth-Orbiting Relay Satellites: Fusing Optical and Microwave Communications

NASA is currently considering architectures and concepts for the generation of relay satellites that will replace the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) constellation, which has been flying since 1983. TDRS-M, the last of the second TDRS generation, launched in August 2017, extending the life of the TDRS constellation beyond 2030. However, opportunities exist to re-engineer the concepts of geosynchronous Earth relay satellites. The needs of the relay satellite customers have changed dramatically over the last 34 years since the first TDRS launch. There is a demand for greater bandwidth as the availability of the traditional RF spectrum for space communications diminishes and the demand for ground station access grows. The next generation of NASA relay satellites will provide for operations that have factored in these new constraints. In this paper, we describe a heterogeneous constellation of geosynchronous relay satellites employing optical and RF communications. The new constellation will enable new optical communications services formed by user-to-space relay, space relay-to-space relay and space relay-to-ground links. It will build upon the experience from the Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration from 2013 and the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration to be launched in 2019.Simultaneous to establishment of the optical communications space segment, spacecraft in the TDRS constellation will be replaced with RF relay satellites with targeted subsets of the TDRS capabilities. This disaggregation of the TDRS service model will allow for flexibility in replenishing the needs of legacy users as well as addition of new capabilities for future users. It will also permit the U.S. government access to launch capabilities such as rideshare and to hosted payloads that were not previously available.In this paper, we also explore how the next generation of Earth relay satellites provides a significant boost in the opportunities for commercial providers to the communications space segment. For optical communications, the backbone of this effort is adoption of commercial technologies from the terrestrial high-bandwidth telecommunications industry into optical payloads. For RF communications, the explosion of software-defined radio, high-speed digital signal processing technologies and networking from areas such as 5G multicarrier will be important. Future commercial providers will not be limited to a small set of large aerospace companies. Ultimately, entirely government-owned and -operated satellite communications will phase out and make way for commercial business models that satisfy NASA's satellite communications requirements. The competition being provided by new entrants in the space communications business may result in a future in which all NASA communications needs can be satisfied commercially

Simultaneous and comparable numerical indicators of international, national and local collaboration practices in English-medium astrophysics research papers

Introduction. We report an investigation on collaboration practices in research papers published in the most prestigious English-medium astrophysics journals. Method. We propose an evaluation method based on three numerical indicators to study and compare, in absolute terms, three different types of collaboration (international, national and local) and authors' mobility on the basis of co-authorship. Analysis. We analysed 300 randomly selected research papers in three different time periods and used the student's t-test to determine whether the paired two-sample differences observed were statistically significant or not. Results. International collaboration is more common than national and local collaboration. International, national and local authors' mobility and intra-national collaboration do not seriously affect the indicators of the principal levels of collaboration. International collaboration and authors' mobility are more relevant for authors publishing in European journals, whereas national and intra-national collaboration and national mobility are more important for authors publishing in US journals. Conclusions. We explain the observed differences and patterns in terms of the specific scope of each journal and the socio-economic and political situation in both geographic contexts (Europe and the USA). Our study provides a global picture of collaboration practices in astrophysics and its possible application to many other sciences and fields would undoubtedly help bring into focus the really big issues for overall research management and policy