I’ve uploaded the video from the Kickstarter project to Youtube in the hope of giving it more exposure, with only a little over four days to go. Unfortunately. I can’t come up with any way to steer people to the project from there. I don’t seem to be able to edit the description of the video, and comments don’t allow links.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
High-Speed Rail
Is California the death knell? Let’s hope so, at least for government-subsidized systems. I do think that an LA-Vegas run could make sense.
ObamaCare
…runs into computer trouble. What a shock that a 2000+ page bill that no one read is turning out to be difficult to implement.
Maybe the SCOTUS will fix that in a couple weeks.
Fending Off A Space-Alien Invasion
Does the U.S. have the needed weaponry?
Obviously, it depends on the nature of their technology, but I’d say no.
As long as we avoid becoming a spacefaring civilization (as we have been for decades, de facto, with our insane space policy) we will always be on the defense. We need to be able to take the offensive against a space-borne attack, and we don’t even have proper picket lines up in the solar system, which means that there’s a good chance that by the time we find out about them, they’ll be at our front door, and it will be too late.
I do think that we’re good against zombies, though, at least in the U.S.
[Update late Monday afternoon]
Welcome, Instapundit readers! Just a reminder that as long as we obsess about safety in space, we won’t have a chance against an invasion. We’re over halfway to the fundraising goal, with a little less than half the time remaining.
The Diet Debacle
“Two seemingly benign nutritional maxims are at the root of all dietary evil: A calorie is a calorie, and You are what you eat. Both ideas are now so entrenched in public consciousness that they have become virtually unassailable. As a result, the food industry, aided and abetted by ostensibly well-meaning scientists and politicians, has afflicted humankind with the plague of chronic metabolic disease, which threatens to bankrupt health care worldwide.”
We’ve had the green revolution. Now we need a new revolution in food tech that provides adequate healthy food for the world.
[Update a few minutes later]
“Is this any way to lose weight?” Yes. I’ve been eating like this for a year and a half, and I’ve lost ten pounds (though that wasn’t the goal). Fat doesn’t make you fat. Carbs do.
[Early afternoon update]
A testimonial from Bruce Webster.
What The World Has Been Waiting For
At long last, pot that doesn’t get you high. It’s about damn time.
Paralyzed Rats
But I fear a new generation of bipedal rats.
End Of A Long Travel Day
I’m about to watch fireworks over the Golden Gate. #75thAnniversary #OnePercenter
High-Speed Rail
I’m on the Acela from Union Station to BWI. Free wi-fi, but it’s too short a trip (twenty minutes) to justify getting out the laptop. I’m just going to look out the window and enjoy the fastest train ride I’ve been on since I was in Europe.
[update a few minutes later]
This is the slowest high-speed rail I’ve ever seen. Just north of DC the train came to a complete halt for a couple minutes. It then proceeded at a pace sufficiently leisurely that we were passed by the Orange Line to New Carrolton.
OK, I’m now officially screwed. They just announced that they have an engine problem and are backing up into DC.
Whoops. Now saying that they’ve fixed it. We’re finally accelerating. But we’ve lost several minutes. It’s already nine minutes past scheduled arrival time. I still may not make it.
[update a few minutes later]
On the bus to the airport. It will be tight.
[10:15 EDT update]
I made the flight, with checked luggage. Next stop, Dallas.
For Want Of A Check Valve
My piece on the SpaceX abort is up at Popular Mechanics.
Here’s the bit that got left on the cutting-room floor:
But even as the incident validated the safety of the vehicle, it raises issues about its launch reliability (that is, the ability to launch on schedule). Every rocket design is a compromise of cost, safety and reliability. In the case of the Falcon, it has nine Merlin engines in the first stage because this allows it to use the same engine in both that stage and the upper stage, which only has one (with a larger nozzle for vacuum operation). This saved a great deal in development costs, and provides economies of scale in manufacturing, with a steady production of them 24/7 in the company’s factory in Hawthorne. It also provides a more forgiving design, allowing engines out on ascent, while also allowing the functional capability to “deep throttle” the stage by selectively shutting down engines to maintain gee limits for crew.
But nine engines also means nine times the things that can go wrong and prevent a launch. In fact it’s worse than that. It actually increases the unreliability exponentially. For instance, if the probability of an event like Saturday’s for one engine is one in a thousand, the probability of it not happening on any one of the engines is 0.999 to the ninth power, or .991, which means that there’s about a one in a hundred chance of an abort. If it’s only one in a hundred, that means that there will be an abort every tenth flight or so. And that’s just for Falcon 9. Falcon Heavy will have twenty-seven first-stage engines, which means a probability of abort of almost three in a hundred for a one in a thousand single-engine reliability, and a probability of one in four for one in a hundred.
The company doesn’t have enough experience with this vehicle to know what its true reliability is, but if they continue to have pad aborts, they may decide that they’d like to get bigger, and fewer engines.
But it also raises the issue of the value of a flight-readiness firing (FRF), as SpaceX performed a few days ago, with a hold-down test of the first-stage engines on the launch pad for a few seconds a few days ago, in preparation for this launch. The Space Shuttle also did this each time before the maiden launch of an orbiter, to ensure that all systems were ready to go before the first flight, but it was a reusable vehicle. Max Hunter, developer of the Thor that evolved into the Delta in the sixties, used to say that FRFs caused more problems than they solved, because a clean vehicle from the factory could be damaged or worn in the process, making it less reliable for actual flight. The valve seemed to have worked all right in SpaceX’s FRF, and it’s unclear (though SpaceX may know) whether or not the failure was a result of the FRF (I would bet they’re already reviewing the data to see if they saw any anomalies toward the end of the test, if they haven’t already).
But unlike the Delta, either ancient or modern, the company has a goal of full reusability for the vehicle, including the engines, so it may make sense to do FRF, at least once they start to refly, when they won’t have to do it for every flight. But the incident has no doubt given Mr. Musk and his team quite a bit to think about.
I will be curious to hear what they think the cause of the valve failure was.