All posts by Andrew Case

Alvin to be Retired

Via a story on NPR’s All Things Considered (last story on the page: audio link) the intrepid research submarine Alvin is going to be replaced with a larger sub capable of deeper dives and longer stays at depth.

Alvin is a truly storied scientific instrument, one of those few machines that almost singlehandedly revolutionize a scientific field. I’m looking forward to seeing what her successor will do.

This post isn’t entirely about the excellence of Alvin – I also have a little bit of an axe to grind. Let me point out that, in this day of submarine ROVs with ever increasing capabilities, the thing that oceanographers and deep ocean biologists want is a machine that will enable them to go in person into the depths. A dive in the new sub will take up to ten hours, cramped up in a space about the size of the interior of a VW beetle, with all manner of projections and angles to increase the discomfort. Internal temperatures during a dive hover in the neighborhood of zero celsius, and if something goes seriously wrong, you die. Much better to send a machine, don’t you think? But no: the people best equipped to make the judgement, the people who will be trading sitting in front of a computer in a climate controlled room, sipping fresh brewed coffee for a cramped, cold, dangerous machine that will put them right next to what they want to study – they choose the sub. Why? because you simply do better science on site than you can remotely, and it’s going to be that way for the foreseeable future. The lessons for space exploration should be obvious. I’m looking at you, Bob Park.

Dismounting my hobbyhorse and returning to Alvin, there’s an interesting story in the book Water Baby. When Alvin was under construction three pressure spheres were made and tested. The best (no. 2) was used on the sub, and sphere no. 1 was to be tested to destruction. The test vessel was a large oil filled tank which could be pressurized to simulate dives to various depths. The 40,000 pound lid of the vessel screwed into place on top. The crush test of sphere no. 1 was also going to be the first test of the pressure tank above 4000 psi. From the book:

At 4300 psi there was an explosion. In the next second the engineers calculated the probable trajectory of the tank’s lid, concluding that 40,000 pounds of steel were headed for the tin roof above them. They ran, all of them headed at once to the only other door at the far end of the building. “I remember the instantaneous transport of myself, like a Tibetan monk using the mind to will myself out of that building” Walsh said.
[…]
The super tank looked oddly untouched and its 40,000 pound lid, undamaged, was in place. The deadman was broken and its 40 foot cable was gone. When they removed the cover, they saw that the shrapnel had come from the upper threaded portion of the tank. The lid had shot up at least 40 feet and dropped back onto the tank, driving it about three feet deeper into the ground.

In the tank sat sacrificial sphere no. 1 undamaged.

The test tank failed at a pressure equivalent to 9600 feet, testing the sphere judged to be of the lowest quality.

Space Law

The Christian Science Monitor has an article up on space law (pointer from Michael Wallis). Most of it is the usual stuff that many readers will be familiar with, and they miss the most important contemporary development in law and space, namely HR3752, which will make major changes in how spaceflight is regulated in the USA.

There’s the usual fluff like this:

“Outer space is a province of all mankind,” says Sylvia Ospina, a member of the board of directors at the International Institute of Space Law. “There is not, and should not be, any privatization of outer space. It is a common thing that should belong to all.”

Which is unfortunately a view that has significant traction even within spacefaring nations. I’m quite sympathetic to concerns that a land grab by spacefaring nations would leave huge chunks of the solar system in the hands of a few countries, effectively excluding most of mankind from the opportunities available offworld. The solution is simply to require actual working of resources in order to stake a claim, not to declare everything to be owned by the UN. In effect whichever body makes the laws regarding extraterrestrial resources is laying claim to the bodies in question, but there’s a substantial difference between a claim which only becomes active when a body is being worked and a claim which effectively forbids working a body without explicit permission.

It’s important for the long term future that we work out a method of assigning ownership and jurisdiction for extraterrestrial bodies that is widely accepted as fair. The alternative is to plant the seeds of future conflicts like the range wars which marred Americas westward expansion.

A lot of space geeks look forward to a future in which the high frontier contains libertarian utopias and so forth. Chances are good that some of the earliest settlers offworld will be going with the explicit intention of founding new societies with new ways of living together. This requires ownership of the resources on which the new colonies are founded. The flipside of this is that it is virtually certain that some of the new societies will have much more in common with Jim Jones’ People’s Temple than they will with Heinlein’s visions of the high frontier. You and I may be comfortable with that, but the folks back home are unlikely to be willing to sit back and do nothing as images are beamed back from the lunar farside of human rights violations on a grand scale. If there isn’t already a regulatory framework in place which has international credibility before that happens, there will be one after, and it will not be favorable to the free frontier mentality.

No law at all on the high frontier is not a realistic option. The sooner we realize that the sooner we can work to make sure that what law there is stems from rational understanding of economics and human nature. The two main things to watch out for are statist overreaching (with homilies about “the common heritage of all mankind”) and corporate entrenchment in the regulations so that only megacorporations can plausibly be players. This second possibility is much more worrisome to me than the first, since I think most people are blind to the ways in which large corporations game the regulations to exclude competitors and create comfortable oligopolies for themselves. One example of how this could be done is simply by requiring a single large up-front lump sum payment to get into the game. The Dinocorps can afford to pay, but the little guy cannot. This sort of thing is relatively straightforward to arrange under the guise of either environmental protection or worker safety.

Cable TV Regulation

Via Technology Review, and article on the technical objections to a la carte cable service. Turns out the complaints by Comcast and Time Warner that it’s technically difficult are flat out BS. Surprise!

You’d think that the cable companies would stand to benefit by going to an a la carte model – I know I’d be much more likely to get cable if I could pick and choose, and pay for only those channels I’m interested in. Also, by letting customers pick channels for themselves the cable companies would have a much better read on what their viewers are interested in, which would help pitch advertising better.

I dislike government telling businesses how to run their operations, so I oppose forcing cable companies to go to an a la carte model. The fact that the media megacorps feel the need to shade the truth about the costs is interesting, though. Much more worthy of government intervention to my mind is the simple fact that media megaconglomerates exist. Concentrations of power are a threat to liberty regardless of whether they are governmental or private. Concentrations of power within the media are particularly dangerous, because they can shape our perceptions of the world. If there’s any area where heavy handed intervention in the marketplace is justified, it’s in breaking up media conglomerates.

Incidentally, I realize there’s a widespread view within the blogosphere that blogs represent a revolution in information accessability that make old media irrelevant. This is such a dumb notion that I have a hard time figuring out how to address it without insulting the reader’s intelligence. Blogs are a new, parallel information source (with a godawful signal/noise ratio), which offers access only to people who actively seek it out. Suffice to say the number of people reading blogs for information which challenges their preconceptions is small. If blogs become people’s primary information source about the world, the US will fragment into tiny groups of people whose worldviews are so different that meaningful communication between them is effectively impossible. We’re headed that way now, so maybe I should just stop worrying about it.

Hibernation

Over on Nature online there’s an article on inducing hibernation in humans, with applications to space travel. Long story short, it’s at least a decade away, and there are lots of unknowns. The first thing that springs to mind for me when I think about this is that before hibernation is applied to something like a Mars mission they’ll have to send some poor sap up to ISS and leave him passed out cold up there for 9 months, just to be sure there’s no unforeseen problems due to hibernation in microgravity. In practice the experimental subject would probably have to spend at least a couple of weeks up there prior to hibernating and also a month or so after coming out, so it wouldn’t be as bad as just flying up, going to sleep and then coming straight back. Still, being a mission specialist whose task is a nine month nap is a little shy of the image of the Right Stuff.

Uncertainty, Global Warming, and public policy

Another item in the latest Industrial Physicist is a piece on understanding the uncertainties in global warming models, and the public policy implications of those uncertainties. It’s well worth a read if you care about global warming in particular or science and public policy in general.

One of the hardest things about ensuring that public policy is based on sound science is that sound science inherently involves uncertainties. Politicians like yes or no answers, but science only gives really reliable answers in the very long term, far longer than the relevant political timescales. In order to make policy based on sound science, politicians have to take uncertainty into account, and allow for the possibility that the policies may need to be adjusted as new information becomes available.

Scramjets

There’s a fairly in depth look at scramjets in the latest edition of The Industrial Physicist. It’s got enough meat on it to be worth reading, though I have a visceral dislike of scramjets. It’s nothing to do with the technical merits – it’s just that they are yet another technology that’s constantly being held out as the technical breakthrough needed to bring down launch costs. Someday I suspect scramjet powered vehicles (at least missiles) will be practical. In the meantime they are a kind of interesting technology that’s worth understanding just for curiousity’s sake.

Incidentally, I’m not singling out scramjets here – space elevators also trigger my “here we go again” reaction. Ditto electromagnetic accelerators.

Who is Jeff Bezos?

Fast Company has an article on Jeff Bezos, famous as the founder of Blue Origin – apparently he’s also been involved in some wacky scheme to sell stuff on the Internet. Who Knew?

Anyway, the article has some of the usual business ‘zine puff piece aspect to it, but it’s fairly in depth, so worth a read if you’d like to get a sense of the man. He comes off fairly well, even allowing for the reporter’s need to be nice in order to maintain access. I’m encouraged that he’ll push Blue Origin towards a successful business model, and he seems willing to spend real money up front before seeing returns, which is probably a necessity in the suborbital launch services industry.

The two really deep pocketed players in the industry are Bezos and Allen. Of the two I suspect that Bezos has the better approach to business (based on little information, unfortunately). The article suggests that his business orientation places a premium on customer service, which I’d always thought was sort of the obvious thing to do until I started paying attention to the way many businesses actually work.

Syntactic metal foams

Here’s an interesting article on syntactic metal foams, with a brief mention of RLV applications. As materials continue to improve SSTO becomes more and more achievable. It’s still not trivial, but it certainly seems within reach for vehicles that aren’t loaded up with pet hobbyhorses like lifting reentry or linear aerospikes.

Too cheap to meter

DOE has decided to scrap plans for FIRE, which was originally intended to serve as an alternative to the International Thermonuclear Energy Experiment (ITER, later changed to ‘Iter’). This is a bad thing for reasons too numerous to list. For one thing, it puts all the fusion eggs in one basket. For another, that basket is internationalized, so that every election, every economic shift, every change of national priorities, in every one of the major participating nations will threaten the experiment.

The original recommendation from the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee was that if there had not been a decision to proceed with Iter by the end of July 2004, then work should move ahead on FIRE. Unfortunately the Bush administration decided that Iter was a good idea, for reasons which are still not clear to me – I suspect the desire to do a little international fence-mending had something to do with it. Anyway, with Iter rejoined (the US had dropped out in 1998), FIRE is superfluous, at least if you assume Iter is going to meet its program goals, which I seriously doubt (at least, assuming that staying under budget is one of them). FIRE has been criticized for relying on pedestrian technologies like copper magnets instead of superconductors, but that’s a feature, not a bug. FIRE is a much smaller and less ambitious experiment than Iter, and it’s firmly in the hands of the US. Both things increase the prospects of success – the lower ambition makes the technical aspects more likely to succeed, and the single government funding source makes the political aspects less likely to force major redesigns partway through.

Given my druthers I wouldn’t fund either Iter or FIRE, preferring to put money into a basket of alternative confinement concepts, and try novel things like prizes. Kerry has made energy independence a major platform plank, so if he wins there may be additional funding for fusion, but Iter is going to suck up a lot of that, and any project which runs alongside Iter will almost certainly get killed as soon as there is a funding crunch. I like the energy independence platform plank: it seems obvious to me that reducing our dependence on oil from the mideast increases the range of options for dealing with militant Islam. In particular, getting to the point where the Saudis no longer have any ability to affect the US economy seems quite desirable, since their official national religion is extremist Islam – how anyone could possibly consider them to be our allies is beyond me, but that’s a post for another day.

The upshot of this latest development is that commercially viable fusion energy has receded still further into the future. Under a Kerry administration it would most likely get a little closer, but not by much, and not cheaply.