Category Archives: Business

Business, Political Commentary, Space

Neil Armstrong Speaks

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Neil Armstrong is the keynote speaker at the suborbital conference, which has just started in Palo Alto. I’ll be live blogging his speech. Alan Stern is introing him, describing him as a pioneer in suborbital spaceflight with the X-15.

[Standing ovation]

Thanks for the warm welcome, and appreciate the opportunity to describe suborbital flight generations back. As a boy was an admirer of great aircraft designers, and in recent decades, Burt Rutan has earned a place on that list. Burt occasionally ribs the government for spending hundred of millions to attain same altitude as he did with SS1. Back in his day the hot aerodynamics field was transonic flight. Transonic wind tunnels were unreliable with shock waves bouncing off the walls giving poor results. Interest grew in a special aircraft for investigating transonics, a purely research airplane. Research aircraft weren’t new — the Wrights’ first plane was one, but the government did do it until the forties, when they started the X series with the X-1 (first to break the sound barrier in level flight) in 1947. Other aircraft were tailless, swept-wing, delta wing, etc. These led to the Century-series fighters.

(Navy) Skyrocket in particular taught us a lot in the early fifties, setting altitude records and first aircraft to reach Mach 2. Air Force decided to recapture record, and achieved it with Mach 2.44, but lost the aircraft with pilot recovery. X-2 was made of stainless steel, first flight in 1955, new speed record of almost Mach 3, and new altitude record of over 130,000 feet. Final flight hit exceeded Mach 3, losing both aircraft and pilot, due to flying into region of steadily decreasing stability, due to high altitudes where conventional aircraft controls were ineffective. Hydrogen peroxide thrusters were added to the X-1B, which Armstrong flew, but it was retired due to fatigue cracks with limited RCS control results.

Then came Sputnik, and the NACA became NASA. NACA, Navy and Air Force had decided earlier in the decade that they needed a faster airplane capable of higher altitude. Heat could be handled by hot, insulated, or cooled or ablatively cooled structure. Highest temperatures could be handled by nickel alloys. New research aircraft would be hot structure and fly to highest operating temperature of those metals, which was about Mach 7, which was audacious, because no aircraft had flown past Mach 2 without going unstable. So that was the X-15, whose purpose was to fly fast and hot, not to fly high. But an aircraft that could reach those kind of speeds would have enough energy to achieve a hundred miles altitude, though that wasn’t the goal. But since it could do it, the NACA decided to utilize a peroxide RCS system, testing it first in the NF-104, which Armstrong flew to 90,000 feet, where the aerosurfaces were completely ineffective. Used yaw motion induced by spinning turbines to do control tests.

X-15 designed to hold one human and enough propellant to get to Mach 7. X-15 had 22-foot wing with low aspect ratio and no ailerons. Roll control by differential elevators. High-Mach directional stability provided by upper and lower fins which were both flying rudders. Lower tail was jettisoned for landing, and if it didn’t jettison, Joe Walker said it would be the “fastest plow in the world.”

Rocket engine was 57,000 lbf thrust, with anhydrous ammonia and LOX. In first flight some parts got to 1500 deg F, cherry red. Velocities and altitudes above the atmosphere used an inertial measurement unit, doing analog single integrations (digital far too slow then to do real-time position and velocity). Did a lot of research, including flow studies, astronomy, heat transfer, etc. Had a remarkable record. Three aircraft, many tens of flights over a period of years. Showing a short film of a mission profile while taking questions.

Q: What does he think about commercial/government collaboration?

A: NACA’s job was to “investigate problems of flight and potential solutions,” which they did, making results available to industry in general, and was very successful for aviation. We’re in a new environment now with different objectives, participants and goals. Certainly in the suborbital area a lot of things to be done. Has been absent for four decades since the end of the X-15 program, a lot of work to be done and a lot of opportunity. Hope that some of the approaches now being provide will be profitable and useful.

Q (Alan Stern): Did you foresee the kind of commercialism and tourism applications fifty years ago that we’re starting to see today?

A: We had a lot of vision, and thought we were making a roadmap for people to follow, and whether they did or not was up to them. We weren’t any better at looking ahead than anyone else.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The President’s Energy Speech

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The five biggest whoppers. And those are just the biggest ones.

[Update a couple minutes later]

“We’re focused on production.”

Fact: While production is up under Obama, this has nothing to do with his policies, but is the result of permits and private industry efforts that began long before Obama occupied the White House.

Obama has chosen almost always to limit production. He canceled leases on federal lands in Utah, suspended them in Montana, delayed them in Colorado and Utah, and canceled lease sales off the Virginia coast.

His administration also has been slow-walking permits in the Gulf of Mexico, approving far fewer while stretching out review times, according to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permit Index. The Energy Dept. says Gulf oil output will be down 17% by the end of 2013, compared with the start of 2011. Swift Energy President Bruce Vincent is right to say Obama has “done nothing but restrict access and delay permitting.”

And this is worthy of comment:

Obama said in his speech that Americans aren’t stupid. He’s right about that, which is why most are giving his energy policy a thumbs down.

Actually, it’s not clear that he’s right about that. The fact that he was elected president would seem to be evidence against the proposition.

[Update a few minutes later]

Rising gas prices: all part of Obama’s plan? All you had to do was to listen to what he was saying in the 2008 campaign.

While this position may be slightly unfair to the President (Mr. Chu was not yet in the Administration at the time he made the remarks, so any link between it and administration policy is tenuous), the quote devastatingly reveals just how tone-deaf and myopic white-collar, progressive intellectualism can be. The delusion that jacking up energy prices is part of a “good government” agenda is one of the pieces of insanity that keeps the blue intelligentsia from consolidating its position as a natural governing class.

More surprising here is that Politico is jumping on the bandwagon—although it notes that Chu’s remarks have been detrimental to Obama, the piece laments that the goal of raising gas prices doesn’t get the sympathetic attention it obviously deserves, given the support of numerous “experts.” With thinking like this dominating media and intellectual circles, it’s little wonder that the mainstream media is perceived as elitist and out of touch.

I disagree that the link between Chu’s remark and policy is “tenuous” at all. He was appointed precisely because he believes such nonsense. And in this case at least, the perception is the reality.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Green Movement Jumps The Shark

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Walter Russell Mead:

Between Rajenda Pachauri and Peter Gleick, the international green movement has displayed a penchant for colorful personalities. But the root cause of the green meltdown is not the flawed personalities and eccentric ethical standards some greens display. The problem has been that the greens tried to stick the world with a monstrous and unworkable climate control system through the flawed medium of a global treaty. This project is so expensive, so poorly conceived and, in fact, so naive and unthinking, that greens increasingly felt their only hope to get their agenda adopted involved scare tactics.

Like Dean Acheson addressing the communist menace, they were “clearer than truth.” They stretched evidence, invented catastrophes — vanishing glaciers, disappearing polar bears, waves of force five hurricanes sweeping up the coast, the end of snow — to sell their unsalable dream. Not all greens were this irresponsible, but many prominent spokespersons and journalists working with the movement were; ultimately the mix of an unworkable policy agenda and a climate of hype and hysteria holed the green ship below the waterline.

Of contemporary mass movements, the green movement has been consistently the most alarmist, the least constructive, the most emotional, the least rational, the most intolerant and the most self righteous. What makes it all sad rather than funny is that underneath the hype, the misstatements, the vicious character attacks on anyone who dissented from the orthodoxy of the day, and the dumbest policy ideas since the Kellogg-Briand Pact that aimed to outlaw war, there really are some issues here that require thoughtful study and response.

Unfortunately, we’re not going to get it from people who are reflexively anti-human socialists, such as John Holdren.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Space-Policy Stupidity On Stilts

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Doug Mohney wonders why the Texas congressional delegation seems to have its collective head up its fundament:

Two problems exist for the Congressional delegation from Texas if they continue to push SLS funding at the expense of fully funding NASA Commercial Crew program. First, it would appear that they advocate a policy that has the United States continue to purchase transport to ISS from Russia until SLS is built — rather than “insourcing” the dollars and work to American companies.

Second, if Russia’s spotty track record with the pieces to its manned launch system continues, a Soyuz failure leaving the $100 billion space station unmanned and untended — or worse, deorbited — could have a significant impact on the 15,000 employees employed at Houston’s Johnson Space Flight Center (JSC). If ISS goes down, there’s no need to have a Mission Control Center for its operations or the many other NASA employees and contractors supporting space station operations.

SLS mostly benefits Alabama, Florida and Utah — there is very little in it for Texas, which just makes this all the more stupid.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Space

Don’t Know Much About Launch Technology

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Jonathan Coopersmith says that both Romney and Gingrich get it wrong on space policy. But he’s a little confused himself:

Rockets cost so much because most of their weight is fuel. Usually 1 percent or less of launch weight is the actual payload. Nor are rockets fully reliable. To launch a communications satellite into geosynchronous orbit demands an insurance premium of 10 percent or more for a single one-way trip! Contrast that to the premium for your car insurance.

Yet rockets have launched every satellite and space probe since Sputnik in 1957. The entire space infrastructure, governmental and private, has grown around building and launching rockets. What rockets have not and cannot do is make the cost of reaching orbit low enough that Gingrich’s lunar base could pass Romney’s financial test.

To truly encourage private enterprise in space a radical reduction of the cost to reach orbit must become a national priority. Several promising technologies, such as beamed energy propulsion and space elevators, could reduce the cost of entering space from $10,000 to as low as $100 a pound, radically changing the economics of spaceflight.

Ummmm…no. Rockets don’t cost so much because most of their weight is fuel. As Elon notes, the propellant costs for a Falcon 9 are less than half a percent of the total flight costs, and he expects to be able to get to a hundred dollars a pound of payload with the Falcon Heavy if he can get the flight rate up.

Coopersmith is right that we need to get launch costs down, and it’s probably worth spending some R&D on advanced technologies, but we don’t need them to get to a hundred dollars a pound. All we need are reusable vehicles operating at high flight rates.