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.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Nation Of Villeins

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Thoughts on our current state from Michael Auslin:

…in relations with the federal government, we are increasingly seen and treated as serfs, with no protections save what the lord at the time deigns to give us. The courts have long acted as a type of lord, arbitrarily decreeing what our freedoms should be; now they are joined by an activist president and his minions. The apparatus of the state towers over the representatives of the people, half of whom currently support the ever-encompassing grasp of government, the other half being too fractured and outmaneuvered to champion the rights of individuals (and usually reversed when a president of a different party is in power). Rather than legally passed legislation, it is executive order that more and more determines the nature of the interaction between villein citizens and the government. Let us be clear (to use a phrase currently in vogue), when the state gets to determine what counts as a religious organization, and when it determines what that organization must do, then we are not free men, but serfs to an increasingly confident master. That is the nub of the HHS-mandate ruling.

As he says, it may be time for a new Magna Carta.

Science And Society, Social Commentary

Second Breakfast

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…and second sleep? This is fascinating.

I often do wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. I generally do after an hour or two, but it means I don’t get enough sleep the second time, because I have to get up for work. Who knew that this was natural? The problem is that you really have to get to bed early in order to do it, because it means you need ten consecutive hours to get your sleep instead of eight. I found this interesting, too, and completely unsurprising:

…the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

“Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied,” he says.

So doctors are as ignorant about the science of sleep as they are about nutrition.

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.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!