This month’s issue of The Spectrum has a lot of spaceflight and Mars-related pieces, from Zubrin, Musk, Kim Stanley Robinson and others.
For You Kollecters Of Kitsch
Behold: the Hummel Space Telescope.
The New Funemployed
Iowahawk does investigative journalism as only he can:
Melissa Browning, 34, is another funemployed L.A. single who has found new meaning in prostitution. After losing her job as a program coordinator for a non-profit Feng Shui education group in late March, Browning decided to go on a three-week interstate highway trek through the truckstops of central Arkansas with two friends, earning up to $30 per night while sleeping in tent-like yurts.
“I used to be so absorbed in the details of work, but prostitution has allowed me to come out of my shell,” Browning said. “Now it’s just so much easier for me approach new people, in idling semis, at 2 am. It’s just gives you such a positive pro-active outlook. I guess that’s why it’s called pro-stitution.”
Joining the world’s oldest profession has also given Browning the chance to reflect and contemplate. “Do we work to live or do we live to work? Do I have life goals that are not work goals?” asks Browning. “I guess what I’d really like to know is, who bogarted my meth?”
Both Martinez and Browning discovered that they like themselves better when they’re being consumed by hunger rather than their jobs.
“This is the best version of me,” Martinez said, adding that despite a distended belly and massive hair and tooth loss, she feels “completely healthy,” relaxed and focused.
“I used to talk a lot about living a ‘greener lifestyle,’ and now I’m finally doing it,” she said. “I’ve given up my car and I’m spending almost all of my time outdoors, surrounded by the beauty and insects of nature. And when I haven’t eaten in 4 or 5 days, I can look up into the sun and see angels. It’s very spiritual.”…
…After losing his job as ObamaSticker.com’s director of halo design, Smalley said he purchased a laptop and began gambling his 401k on internet poker from his parent’s couch, “which my dad doesn’t understand.”
“Everytime I lose a hand, my dad looks at me nervously and asks how much money I have left, or if I’m planning to eat him,” said Smalley. “I mean, come on, it’ll be at least 4 or 5 weeks before I get that desperate.”
And of course, they should be grateful to The One for their new opportunities:
“Recession is a great opportuning for people to get outside, enjoy a sunny park bench, and have fun,” said Robert Lester, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Business. “And President Obama is making that kind of fun possible for more and more people every day.”…
…For many younger people, Dwight said, work is less central to their lives. According to her surveys, more and more young people are saying they are willing to trade off a high pay, high pressure job for one with flexible schedules and a lot of vacation time. “The new Admistration has been very responsive to that — just look at all the millions of new jobs with zero salaries and 52 week vacations,” said Dwight, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado.
Happy days are here again.
Moving Day
Some thoughts on solar-system engineering:
One idea out there is to change the orbit of a good-sized asteroid or comet — about 100 kilometers in diameter — so that it swings by one of the inner planets and then back out to, say, Jupiter. As the cosmic tow truck passes our target planet, it uses its gravitational attraction to tug the planet in the desired direction, then hurtles back to slingshot around Jupiter, picking up more energy in the process. Repeat a few thousand times with a few score asteroids and there you go: Mars in your backyard.
This technique has been proposed as a way to drag Earth away from the ever-brightening sun that otherwise will eventually snuff out life on our planet. It has some downsides, though. One is that each time the asteroid comes by it’ll exert a tidal force ten times greater than the moon’s, wreaking havoc on the oceans and weather. Another is that some Poindexter on the relocation team is bound to make a unit conversion error along the way, and when the asteroid slams into the Earth — well, that’ll be a real pisser. Luckily, we don’t need to worry about things like that if we’re moving Mars or Venus: if we make one planet go boom, we’ve still got a spare.
Once we get the planet where we want it, though, we’ve still got our hands full. However bad the environment on Earth is, Venus’s is worse. Atmospheric pressure is roughly 92 times ours, the planet has no free oxygen or water to speak of, and the surface temp is hot enough to melt lead. Mars has an extremely thin atmosphere but its temperature, while chilly, isn’t so bad, and it’ll get warmer when it’s closer to the sun. That alone might cause enough melting at the Martian poles to release ice-bound CO2 and create a greenhouse effect. If not, we can always try focusing the sun’s rays with orbital mirrors or crashing (smaller) asteroids into the ice.
I don’t see a calculation of what would happen to Venus’ surface temp if it were farther out. Most terraforming plans of either planet don’t generally include moving them to a better location, but it’s worth thinking about — it is, after all, the first three rules of real estate.
Stop Calling The BNP “Far Right”
So says Daniel Hannan, who is one of the few British politicians who seems to be a genuine classical liberal. While the “right” won in Europe yesterday (and isn’t it interesting that socialism is on the decline over there at the same time it’s on the rapid increase on this side of the pond?), the minor victory of the British National Party is not part of it. Like their Nazi namesakes in Germany in the thirties, they are fascists, and leftists. As Hannan notes, the press insists on calling them “right wing” not to make them look bad, but to make the true right wing look bad.
[Update early afternoon]
I wonder to what degree yesterday’s elections in Europe are a harbinger for November, 2010? I think it depends a lot on how non-stupid the Republicans can be. So there’s an excellent opportunity for a missed opportunity.
[Update a few minutes later]
Daniel Hannan’s prediction about the voters soon having their say came true. Gordon Brown is indeed the devalued prime minister of a devalued government.
Guantanamo
…as a state-sponsored madrasah:
if we think it probable or possible that a man would only mutate into such a monster after undergoing the Guantanamo experience, then I can suggest one reason why that might be. Nothing prepared me for the way in which the authorities at the camp have allowed the most extreme religious cultists among the inmates to be the organizers of the prisoners’ daily routine. Suppose that you were a secular or unfanatical person caught in the net by mistake; you would still find yourself being compelled to pray five times a day (the guards are not permitted to interrupt), to have a Quran in your cell, and to eat food prepared to halal (or Sharia) standards. I suppose you could ask to abstain, but, in such a case, I wouldn’t much fancy your chances. The officers in charge were so pleased by this ability to show off their extreme broad-mindedness in respect of Islam that they looked almost hurt when I asked how they justified the use of taxpayers’ money to create an institution dedicated to the fervent practice of the most extreme version of just one religion. To the huge list of reasons to close down Guantanamo, add this: It’s a state-sponsored madrasah.
Of course, I don’t think that’s an excuse to shut down Gitmo, but it is an excuse to rethink our “tolerance” of the totalitarian ideology with which we’re at war, but won’t admit it. I can only shake my head at the insanity of those who thought that the Bush administration was too hard on radical Islam. Would we handing out copies of Mein Kampf to German POWs during the war (ignoring the fact, of course, that these are not POWs but illegal combatants)?
And more on the president’s naivety and historical ignorance:
The same near-masochistic insistence on taking the extreme as the norm was also present in Obama’s smoothly delivered speech in the Egyptian capital. Some of what he said was well-intentioned if ill-informed. The United States should not have overthrown the elected government of Iran in 1953, but when it did so, it used bribed mullahs and ayatollahs to whip up anti-Communist sentiment against a secular regime. The John Adams administration in the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli did indeed proclaim that the United States had no quarrel with Islam as such (and, even more important, that the United States itself was in no sense a Christian nation), but the treaty failed to stop the Barbary states from invoking the Quran as permission to kidnap and enslave travelers on the high seas, and thus Thomas Jefferson was later compelled to send a fleet and the Marines to put down the trade. One hopes that Obama does not prefer Adams to Jefferson in this regard.
Any person with the smallest pretense to cultural literacy knows that there is no such place or thing as “the Muslim world,” or, rather, that it consists of many places and many things. (It is precisely the aim of the jihadists to bring it all under one rulership preparatory to making Islam the world’s only religion.) But Obama said nothing about the schism between Sunni and Shiites, or about the argument over Sufism, or about Ahmadi and Ismaili forms of worship and practice. All this was conceded to the umma: the highly ideological notion that a person is first and foremost defined by their adherence to a religion and that all concepts of citizenship and rights take second place to this theocratic diktat. Nothing could be more reactionary.
That would be too politically inconvenient to mention.
Congress’ Plans For Our Health
This looks like an incipient disaster.
“Saved Or Created”
Fictional job numbers from the administration? I’m shocked. Of course, if we had a press corps that was a watchdog, instead of a lapdog, they wouldn’t continue to get away with this sophistry.
[Update a few minutes later]
“Drop dead, American business:”
So the question is, why does Obama advocate a policy that so flies in the face of everything that economists have learned? How could Obama possibly say, as he did last month, that he wants “to see our companies remain the most competitive in the world. But the way to make sure that happens is not to reward our companies for moving jobs off our shores or transferring profits to overseas tax havens?” Further, how could Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner call a practice that top scholarship has shown increases wages and employment in the U.S. “indefensible?”
I have to admit I am at a loss. Maybe it is good politics to bash American corporations, and Obama isn’t really serious about making this change happen. But if the change is enacted, and domestic corporate taxes aren’t reduced to offset the big tax hike, the result will be a flight from the U.S. that rivals in scale the greatest avian arctic migrations.
As I said yesterday, it’s Munchausen By Proxy. By keeping the economy permanently sick, they hope to entrench their power, as FDR did.
[Update early afternoon]
Cue the laughter. It’s pretty sad when Chinese students are a lot more business savvy, and understand basic economics better than our own home-grown press. Or the US Secretary of the Treasury…
Constellation Problems, Continued
“Rocketman” has thoughts related to yesterday’s post, here, and more details on last week’s Ames meeting:
First up for review was the preferred solution of a single plane attenuation system. It was believed to be the lightest weight band-aid available for the already overweight and underperforming stick. Architectural changes made to the segmented spaghetti-like stack have made it stiffer. That had the unfortunate side-effect of sending increased loads up to the crew compartment. Those loads are even higher than the seat-of-the-pants requirements loosened by fiat (and loosey-goosey analysis) from the accepted Gemini era 0.25 g peak to almost three times that value (0.7 g).
Scratch the goateed one’s favorite solution.
I know it’s popular and easy for some who don’t understand physics and engineering to say, “well we had problems on program X, and we managed to solve them,” without understanding that there are some technical problems that simply have no solution, regardless of how much time and money is put into them. Sometimes, all the potential solutions simply introduce new problems, or make the old ones worse, and you end up chasing your tail and failing to get the design to close. I don’t know if the Ares thrust-oscillation problem falls in that category, but the possibility cannot be excluded, and so far, it’s looking that way. And when that happens, the only solution is to go back to the drawing board, and start with a different concept.
A good engineer will recognize such problems early, and not waste too much time and money trying to solve them. As Einstein once said, a clever man will solve a problem — a wise man will avoid it. We had, and still have, at least for now, people running NASA’s human spaceflight development program who (as the Brits would say) are too clever by half.
Rocketman also thinks that the writing is on the wall:
All hailed and praised the rocket scientist with more degrees than fingers on our right hands. As the Kool-Aid flowed, we reveled in the plans to renew the minions’ skills for building cathedrals to the sky. We marveled at the safety numbers that flew out of the supercomputers. And we ignored the mounting number of little things that were “normal for a development program.” The steroids flowed, the oscillations increased, and the dollars disappeared.
Fast forward five years with nothing to show for the investments made so far. “Wait a little longer,” they say. “We’re getting our arms around this.” And the congressfolk from Florida push for more money to shower over the falls. And the Senator from Alabama holds up any investments in commercial opportunities so that his precious voters will hold on to their jobs.
But it is already too late. Indeed, the seal on the codex has been broken. All the President’s men do not carry rose colored glasses around with them. They see the forest for the trees.
Clark Lindsey has a summary of a Space News editorial by Bob Bigelow, that would appear to be explaining what should have been obvious to the Senator from Huntsville (who is also the Senator from Decatur, so I continue to be baffled why he doesn’t want to ramp up EELV production).
/– Talks about the overruns in Constellation
/– “Constellation appears to be yet another ill-conceived NASA boondoggle suffering from all too familiar runaway costs.”
/– Talks about the serious technical problems with Ares/Orion
/– Criticizes the reduction of Orion from 6 to 4 passengers.
/– Gives a vigorous defense of the accomplishments of SpaceX and its potential to provide low cost launch access.
/– Says Shelby made an error in ignoring the commercial access capabilities of the Atlas V, which is produced in Alabama.
/– “Bigelow Aerospace has studied human-rating of the Atlas 5 and found the concept to be both viable and economically attractive.”
/– The high reliability of the Atlas V undercuts Shelby’s comments about commercial launchers.
/– “Commercial crew transport, as demonstrated by SpaceX’s dramatic progress and the existing Atlas 5 launcher, represents a viable, affordable, and robust path forward.”
/– Talks about the many launch vehicle project failures at NASA.
/– “Moreover, to hear a Republican senator espouse the virtues of a bloated, costly government program over innovative commercial concepts is so paradoxical that it requires no further comment from me.”
Hey, since when did Republicans care about business, or markets? Not when it doesn’t suit their parochial political interests, for sure.
Norm Augustine and his panel have quite the challenge ahead of them.
More Constellation Problems
No one who has been following the program will be shocked to learn that the major, fundamental design issues continue, and that they aren’t just “teething pains” of a new program. Despite a lot of happy talk from Griffin and Cook and Hanley over the past few months, thrust oscillation remains a serious problem for the Ares I first stage:
According to a NASA blog, the engineers are still looking at putting a series of passive dampers at the bottom of the rocket and a series of spring-like brackets in the middle to soak up the vibrations like shock absorbers.
Originally the brackets, called a dual plane C-spring isolator system, were too heavy to incorporate into the overall design. An updated version uses titanium, which is as strong as steel but lighter.
However, the fixes are not easy and engineers have yet to settle on a solution. According to NASA officials who attended the meeting, the shaking problem is more difficult to combat than originally thought as each solid rocket burns slightly differently.
You don’t say. That means that a passive solution won’t work, unless they can predict prior to flight exactly what the characteristics will be for each SRB (a longer way of saying…it won’t work). They’ll have to have an active approach that can actually measure the vibrations in real time and try to compensate for them. My solution? Bag the solid first stage. Here’s one that will save even more money. Bag Ares I.
And all is not well at the pointy end of the rocket, either:
An Air Force memo obtained by Todd Halvorson of Florida Today indicates that military safety officials are worried that NASA’s Orion capsule and its crew might not survive an emergency escape off an exploding Ares I rocket.
As I understand it, the concern is that the launch abort system is sized to accelerate away from an exploding upper stage, and to outrun an out-of-control first stage, but not from the flack created by the massive explosion of an SRB. Parenthetically (without the parentheses) it should be noted that one of the ways that NASA put its thumb on the scales when it compared Ares to EELV was to assume that the same LAS would be used in both cases, but the latter has a much more benign failure environment, and could get by with a much lighter LAS, so dinging the EELV for lacking the performance to lift an unnecessary weight was stacking the deck against it.
Anyway, how likely is it that the first stage will explode? Well, I find this sadly amusing:
…the article also has Hanley pooh-poohing the Air Force’s concerns, saying that “supercomputer analyses” will prove that the Ares I rocket is a fine vehicle and Orion’s launch abort system will be able to save the crew in the event disaster strikes.
They have top men looking at it. Who?
Top. Men.
Here’s my question. If they know the results of the “supercomputer analyses” before they have performed them, why are they bothering to perform them? Couldn’t they save some money and just skip them?
Florida Today quotes Hanley saying that the statistical probability of an Ares I first-stage failure is remote. He pinpointed it at 1 in 3,000 to 1 in 3,500.
Gotta love that verb, “pinpointed.”
You know, those were the kinds of numbers that they were claiming for Shuttle, right up until around January 27th, 1986. They got some new data the next day, though, that significantly altered the estimates going forward…
So, once again, show us the numbers, Jeff. Show us your work.
It’s hard to know from this brief news story, so I don’t even know what he means by “failure.” Does he mean spontaneously explode without warning? Well, it’s not unheard of for solid rocket motors to do just that, though it has never occurred in the Shuttle program. But I suspect that what the Air Force is concerned about is a different kind of failure — a guidance failure that requires the Range Safety Officer to destroy the vehicle so that it doesn’t hit any uninvolved areas (e.g., Daytona). And considering that an SRB has never had to do guidance without help from a partner on the other side of the tanks and the SSME gimbals, that’s a non-trivial concern. And when the stage is destroyed (by setting off a linear charge along its length) it could create explosive debris that the LAS may not outrun. I assume that’s the Air Force’s (probably supported by an analysis from Aerospace) concern.
Of course, this all raises the question of whether or not we should even have a launch abort system, as I’ve discussed previously, with further thoughts here. Of course, the whole problem goes back to NASA’s “cargo-cult” engineering approach to Constellation, in which they think that if they just go back and do things the way the Apollo gods did, except “on steroids,” they’ll once again have a successful program.