I don’t know where Iowahawk finds these things. I barely remember Makaniak myself.
All posts by Rand Simberg
Half A Century Of American Spaceflight
I’ll have a piece up on this myself later in the week (the anniversary is actually Thursday), but John Noble Wilford has some thoughts on the past fifty years since Explorer I.
A Florida Voting Report
From Patricia:
I voted in the middle of the day, when lines were short at my polling location, in the assembly room of a neighborhood Catholic church. At the beginning of the sidewalk to the polling place, I was met by a woman who asked me if I wanted to participate in an exit poll. Being the suspicious person that I am, I declined, noting that she was sitting close to people with Obama and Clinton campaign signs. Not accepting my decline, she asked again, telling me in a serious tone that my participation would allow them to assure that the voting machines were working correctly. I laughed, and declined again and continued walking toward the polling place passing by the exit-poll table set up in the shade of the building, manned by three or four nicely dressed men. I was met just outside the door to the polling place by an official in a vest who asked to see my voter registration card, which I showed him. After looking at the card, he directed me to the table right inside the door.
Once inside, I could see that other tables were set up for other precincts voting at this location. I went to my precinct table right inside the door as directed and found about five people in the line in front of me. The table was set up with signs designating alphabetical groupings and women in chairs on the other side of the table to look up voter names in printouts of registered voters matching the alphabetical groupings. Apparently, all the people in front of me had last names in the same alphabetical grouping as mine. There were no people in front of the other alphabetical groupings. And they were all problem voters. None of them had voter registration cards, or knew what precinct they were from, but nevertheless ended up at my precinct table. One by one their names were looked up in the one copy of S-Z and not found. After a few irrelevant questions from the women behind the tables: Are you married? Did your husband vote here? Did you move? Are you sure you are registered? These generally provoked irritated responses from them. After wasting time thusly, they were then sent to another table where a man with a computer would help them.
I finally got to the front of the line, but since the S-Z printout was in use, I had to wait a bit longer for my name to be found in it. Finally, my name was found in the S-Z printout. I signed on the appropriate line in the printout and, after the woman behind the desk scrutinized my sloppy signature for a match with my registration card, she gave me my ballot and sent me to the voting booths. Immediately available for my use were at least ten booths. Since the process of signing in created such a delay, getting a ballot and the amount of time to vote was short, due to only a couple of items on the ballot, and no lines had formed to use them. The bottleneck was clearly the sign-in process, not the number of machines.
Voting took me only a few seconds on the new touch-screen voting machine. I returned my ballot and received my “I Voted” stamp. Pleased with myself for exercising my voting rights in this wonderful democracy, wadding up my stamp, I walked past the exit-poll table where several poor schmucks who had agreed to take the exit poll were filling out paperwork, surrounded by three or four men ready to answer questions, or ask them, I really don’t know.
Ah, democracy, how confusing for those who don’t know what precinct they live in, or bother to change their address on their voter registration, or read their mail when they get their card, or believe campaign workers who assure them that voting machines are working correctly.
Remember, this is from the heart of “hanging chad country.”
The Ground Shifts In Redmond
Photoshop is running in Linux. If they can work out the last incompatibility bugs in Open Office, we’ll start to reach a tipping point, given the unhappiness with Vista.
[Tuesday evening update]
More bad news for Microsoft. Firefox has reached 30% market penetration in Europe.
This Is Just…Wrong
Radar Breakthrough
This looks like a pretty slick technology:
Lockheed for the first time has been testing a digital beam array to locate and track live targets–in this case, commercial and military aircraft coming in and out of the Philadelphia area. “The hard part was how we combined all the data … to form the individual beams,” Scott Smith, program manager for the radar system at Lockheed, tells PM. Commercially available high-speed digital electronics and advanced signal processors have become advanced enough to allow this data processing to occur, and that in turn has enabled digital beamforming to become practical for use outside a lab.
It will be helpful for ATC, but it has obvious military applications:
Digital beamforming radars will likely find their first homes on ships that track missile threats to U.S. fleets. Those threats will come from ballistic launches hundreds of miles away or from high-speed missiles launched from submarines or warplanes. The Russian government has been busy selling sea-skimming, antiship missiles to China that are designed to overwhelm the U.S. fleet’s radars, so the ability to track multiple, fast-moving threats could become vital in the Taiwan Straits. But a digitized phased array radar can handle many incoming signals at once, and should be able to discern real threats from bits of metal or shaped decoy balloons.So somewhere a Chinese admiral is frowning at Lockheed’s news, and a Taiwanese general is smirking.
Expect the usual suspects, any minute, to claim that it is “destabilizing” (a phrase they use any time the US comes up with a better way to defend itself).
Space And Nanotechnology
Thoughts on space tourism, “shooting down” errant satellites, and gray goo, in a podcast with Instapundit.
False Lessons
Many false lessons have been learned from the Shuttle program in general, and from the Challenger loss particularly. Chair Force Engineer explains:
NASA management’s most enduring lesson from Challenger is the flawed mantra of “Crew must be kept separate from cargo.” While such flawed logic is enough to trick Congress into funding the development of two very different launchers, it doesn’t always hold true. If a launcher can be made safe enough for a human crew, there’s no reason why it can’t be trusted with carrying a reasonable amount of cargo at the same time.
Yes, that’s one of the more illogical ones. He has more.
Six Months Later
Still no answer:
“I can tell you for certain that, when we do determine the cause, that it will be published so that it can’t happen to others,” Rutan said. “But we don’t know yet what caused the detonation.”
This seems to me a serious setback. If I were them, I’d be talking to XCOR and others, and doing a vehicle redesign to accommodate a different (liquid, not hybrid) engine. They have been overhyping the safety of hybrids for too long on this program, and the fact that they killed three men and wounded three more is going to have an effect on the perception of the engine’s safety, even if it was not something that could rationally be expected in flight. As long as they don’t know what happened, they can’t move forward. They’re sort of in the same position as NASA, dealing with an unknown risk, but betting on the come, and hoping that they’ll have it figured out in a year or so, in time to start flight tests under rocket propulsion. But as I said, hope is not a plan.
Ares Woes Ongoing
Av Week has a fairly detailed technical description of the thrust oscillation problem:
“Conservative” calculations of the potential frequency and amplitude of a thrust oscillation that could occur in the first stage as it nears burnout, and of the way that vibration links to the rest of the vehicle, suggest that it could set up a resonance that would damage critical components and harm the crew (AW&ST Dec. 10, 2007, p. 60).
A thrust-oscillation “focus team,” convened in November 2007, has since calculated that the problem may not be as severe as it appeared earlier in the fall. But the work continues under a looming March deadline, set so designers on both the launch vehicle and Orion can start work in earnest on mitigating the effect, if necessary, before preliminary design review (PDR) at the end of the summer.
“That gives us a good view of the problem with what we see as how big the risk is, [along with] what are the right mitigation strategies for any residual risk left, so that going into PDR we have a good handle on it and we’re designing for it,” says Garry Lyles, an experienced launch vehicle engineer at Marshall who heads the focus team. “You’re not waiting downstream of the [PDR] to start designing your system to accommodate the oscillation.”
Emphasis mine. If it “may not be,” it also “may be.” This goes beyond risk (which is quantifiable), into uncertainty, which by definition is not, and that’s an unhappy place for an engineer to be. They continue with the “may not be” language.
…the focus team has since calculated that the problem may not be as severe as originally feared. Nominally the oscillation frequency of a five-segment booster is 12 Hz. (compared with 15 Hz. for the four-segment version). But after that it gets complicated. Translating RSRM ground-test data into accurate forcing function figures and the stack’s response to that force is extremely difficult, particularly since the upper-stage and Orion designs remain immature and oscillation data are based on ground tests.
They can do flight tests on a Shuttle SRB, but that still won’t tell them how a five-segment motor will behave (though it will give them better data with which to model it). But as it notes, there’s no way to model the dynamic structural behavior of the stack, because they don’t have enough fidelity in the design. They are risking going into a program, spending billions more, without certain knowledge that they’ll have a viable system until they’re well along in the development, at which point they might find out that they have to essentially start over from scratch.
…if the problem doesn’t go away with more data and more refined calculations, or can’t be fixed with propellant redesign, then isolation pads and other mechanical fixes probably will add weight to the overall vehicle. Making it work could eat into the weight margins held at various levels of the Ares I and Orion programs (AW&ST Dec. 10, 2007, p. 52).
Although the problem isn’t fully understood, none of the NASA engineers involved in solving it sees it as a show-stopper.
“I hope this is the worst we’ve got to deal with,” says NASA Administrator Michael Griffin.
Well, apparently, they’re not allowed to see it as a show stopper. People get fired for pointing out that the emperor is naked.
As Dr. Laura says, hope has no power, Mike. It is not a plan. And there are numerous other solutions.