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Back To LA

I got in, and was going to follow up on some of the comments from the most recent post, but I have to come up with an emergency Fox column instead, so I’ll just note that the Arab News, of all publications, actually had a gracious editorial about our tragic loss.

The immediate lesson remains, however, that this is a tragedy for everyone, not just the United States, India and Israel. We have all lost in this disaster. A technological challenge has been thrown down and once again, a warning given that in the unforgiving region of space, nothing can be taken for granted. The solutions may be a long time coming.

They will come. The struggle to conquer the space will go on. All that we can hope for is that, when the battle is won, the knowledge gained in the process will add to human happiness, not to human misery.

Credit where credit’s due, and thanks to them.

More posting tomorrow, as there’s much to discuss.

Space, Technology and Society

History Repeats

I know very little about what happened (even less than many of you, probably), because I just got up and heard the news. I got a phone call this morning from a friend on the east coast.

Like Challenger, this was not a survivable accident. There is no escape system in the Shuttle, for sound engineering reasons.

First my condolences to the friends and family of the crew, and to the nation of Israel, which has suffered so much during the past few years. It has to be a tremendous blow.

I hate to talk about good news/bad news in a situation like this, but let’s just say that it could have been worse.

In the “it could have been worse” category, of all the vehicles to use, Columbia was the least valuable, because it was the oldest in the fleet, and the heaviest. For this reason, it was rarely used for ISS missions, because its payload capability was much less (which is why it was being used for this non-ISS mission).

Also, at least the mission was completed before it happened.

Because it was the oldest bird, if it happened as a result of a simple structural failure (e.g., keel or spar), that would have been the most likely vehicle to which it would occur. On the other hand, that would only explain it if it were a consequence of age. If it’s cycle fatigue, I’d have to go look it up, but I don’t know if Columbia had more flights under its belt than the rest of the fleet.

WARNING: RAMPANT SPECULATION AHEAD

Here are the possibilities off the top of my head.

Terrorism: possible, but unlikely. If it were, it was a result of sabatoge–not being shot down. It would be difficult for us to take out such a target under those conditions (though the missile defense system under test could probably do it). No one else has such a capability, as far as I know. If it were sabatoge, it could have been something done to the vehicle before it left the ground, either a pressure-sensitive detonation (e.g., something that arms itself when it goes into vacuum, and then goes off when it senses atmospheric pressure again). This seems too sophisticated for Al Qaeda. It could also be simply sawing through the wing spar before the flight, because most of the stress on that member occurs during entry.

Failure of TPS: It could be that it lost some tiles during ascent–sometimes ice falls off the ET during launch, and it could have taken some out in a critical area, perhaps along the leading edge of the wings. Since this flight didn’t go to ISS, no one would have necessarily seen the damage from outside the Shuttle. This would result in burnthrough of a wing, which would quickly propagate through and then tear it off, after which the vehicle would break up from aerodynamic pressure.

I just heard the CNN announcer say that the airframe was “certified” for a hundred missions. Certification is not really the right word. “Designed to meet the requirement of” would be more accurate. Certification would imply that we had sufficient experience with such things to know that it was really capable of that, and we simply don’t.

Next theory, as I already mentioned would be structural failure due to age or cycles. I think that the primary structure is aluminum (though the spar and keel may be titanium–I don’t recall for sure). I wouldn’t think that this is a likely failure, but it’s certainly possible.

The last one I can think of (other than alien attack), would be a loss of the attitude control system (either the flight computers, or an RCS valve stuck open, or an actuator problem on a control surface) which would result in a bad orientation, which again could cause aerodynamic breakup.

OK, one more. Somehow the hypergolics in the OMS/RCS system mixed and caused an explosion.

All of these seem unlikely, but it’s probably one of them.

What does it mean for the program?

Like Challenger, it was not just a crew that “looked like America” (two women, one african american) but it also had the Israeli astronaut on board, which will have some resonance with the war.

Instead of happening just before the State of the Union, it occured three days after. It also occured two days before NASA’s budget plans were to be announced, including a replacement, or at least backup, for the Shuttle.

The fleet will certainly be grounded until they determine what happened, just as occurred in the Challenger situation. Hopefully it won’t be for almost three years. If it is, the ISS is in big trouble, and it means more money off to Russia to keep the station alive with Protons and Soyuz. The current crew can get back in the Soyuz that’s up there now. They will either do that, or stay up longer, and be resupplied by the Russians.

The entire NASA budget is now in a cocked hat, because we don’t know what the implications are until we know what happened. But it could mean an acceleration of the Orbital Space Plane program (I sincerely hope not, because I believe that this is entirely the wrong direction for the nation, and in fact a step backwards). What I hope that it means is an opportunity for some new and innovative ideas–not techically, but programmatically.

Once again, it demonstrates the fragility of our space transportation infrastructure, and the continuing folly of relying on a single means of getting people into space, and doing it so seldom. Until we increase our activity levels by orders of magnitude, we will continue to operate every flight as an experiment, and we will continue to spend hundreds of millions per flight, and we will continue to find it difficult to justify what we’re doing. We need to open up our thinking to radically new ways, both technically and institutionally, of approaching this new frontier.

Anyway, it’s a good opportunity to sit back and take stock of why the hell we have a manned space program, what we’re trying to accomplish, and what’s the best way to accomplish it, something that we haven’t done in forty years. For that reason, while the loss of the crew and their scientific results is indeed a tragedy, some good may ultimately come out of it.

I’m driving back down to LA today, but I’ll have some more thoughts this evening or tomorrow, particularly as more details emerge.

[Quick update before I leave, about 9:25 AM]

Someone in the comments section asks if the vehicle will be replaced. No, that’s not really possible-much of the tooling to build it is gone. It would cost many billions, and take years, and it’s not really needed at the current paltry flight rate. Assuming that they have confidence to fly again after they determine the cause, they’ll continue to operate with the three-vehicle fleet, until we come up with a more rational way of getting people into space, whatever that turns out to be. Unfortunately, because it’s a government program, I fear that the replacement(s) won’t necessarily be more rational…

[One more update at 9:49 AM PST]

Dale Amon has posted on this as well. To correct a couple of statements regarding me, however–I’m arriving in LA tonite–I’m leaving San Bruno this morning, and driving down.

And I never worked on the Shuttle directly. I worked for Rockwell, but in Downey, not Palmdale, and on advanced programs and Shuttle evolution, but not on the main Shuttle program itself.

[OK, one one more before hitting the road, at 10 AM]

Donald Sensing says in the comments:

I have read and respected this blog as long as I’ve been blogging. But today, Rand, I am sorry to say you blew it: “. . . but let’s just say that it could have been worse” and etc.

I just don’t give care about all that. This kind of “analysis” is not relevant at this point. It doesn’t matter. This is a human tragedy in which seven brave men and women violently died.

The social context of these deaths, and the publicly spectacular manner of their deaths, raise the tragedy beyond the personal to a different level. This sad event is a “meta-event,” whose significance is not quantitative (seven dead) but qualitative, striking close to the core of certain aspects of the American national identity. So it does not matter that Columbia was the oldest, or that its mission was completed (and the mission’s cost money wasn’t wasted) and all the rest. At least, it does not matter now, and it may not ever matter, even to NASA. The human scale of the tragedy far outweighs the technical scale.

Donald, thanks for the comments, but with all due respect, I disagree, and that kind of attitude is exactly why the manned space program has been such a disaster for so long. As long as we elevate the humans over the hardware, and emotions over rational discussion, we will never make significant progress in this frontier.

People die on frontiers, (and even in non-frontiers–more died in traffic accidents in the past twenty-four hours than have died in space since we first started going there) and if we can’t accept that, then we have no damned business being there.

I’ll expand on that in a post later this weekend. In fact, it may be the subject of a (perhaps coldhearted, to some) Fox column.

Media Criticism

Glossary

For those who, like me, seem to be watching coverage of the Iraq situation as reported by people from a bizarro dimension, in which they speak a language very similar to English, but with subtle and confusing differences, I think that I’ve finally broken the code, and have thus put together a little translation guide for the rest of us.

“allies“:

Nations that we either defeated or liberated six decades ago, and then paid to rebuild half a century ago, and continued to pay for their defense through the Cold War, which has been over for more than a decade, who now feel that they are thereby entitled to obstruct or dictate our foreign policy, which is driven by our own self defense, in the furtherance of the business interests of their corrupt governments and the brutal dictators that they cynically coddle.

“going it alone“:

Meaning 1: Taking action in concert with numerous European and Middle-Eastern nations, and others around the globe, but without France and Germany.

Meaning 2: Using the coalition from (1) to enforce numerous UN Security Council resolutions, including one that was passed within the past three months, which was supposed to be final, without going back to the Security Council, hat in hand, to get yet another “final” resolution.

“let the inspections continue“:

Allow more time for a few dozen people to literally cluelessly wander around a country hundreds of thousands of square miles in area, searching for things that the Iraqi government has no intention of letting them find, and are hidden in private homes, or mosques, or presidential “palaces” (some of which are themselves the size of typical western cities), or in caves that we don’t even know exist, or that are moved just prior to the threat of an actual search in any of these areas, in order to continue to delay military action in the slim hope that some other means of delay can be found while this one continues, or that the weather will get too hot, or that W is so dumb that he will eventually forget why he’s doing this, or choke on a pretzel, this time for good, all in order to put off forever the day that we actually remove Saddam Hussein from power.

“making war on the innocent Iraqi people“:

Removing a malign tyrant who, along with his vile offspring, has been torturing, starving and murdering the Iraqi people for decades, often for no reason other than his own perverse pleasure, and thus thereby finally giving them peace. To fully satisfy the definition, he must be removed while we spend vast amounts of money on precision munitions to minimize collateral casualties to the Iraqi people, even to the extent of risking higher casualties to our own forces to do so.

“rush to war“:

Waiting a dozen years after Saddam signed an agreement to relinquish his weapons of mass destruction; waiting almost half a decade after he threw out the arms inspection teams who were there to see that he carried out his commitment; waiting a year and a half after being attacked by Middle Eastern forces that woke us up to the possibility of our vulnerability to people who have been threatening us for years; waiting over a year after declaring Iraq one of the nations that constitute a danger to the planet; carefully crafting and passing yet another UN Security Council resolution reiterating all the previous ones, with the stated intent of being a final one; waiting two months after the submission of a declaration in response to that supposedly final resolution that was 12,000 pages of non-responsiveness, before actually taking any significant military action to see that Saddam’s capability to attack his neighbors and our own nation is eliminated through military force.

“smoking gun“:

The level of evidence that will justify removing Saddam Hussein by military force. This one is very precisely defined.

It is a photograph of Saddam Hussein, standing next to fifty-gallon barrels clearly labeled “Anthrax, “Tabun, “Sarin,” “VX,” “Phosgene,” and “Smallpox Virus,” along with a suitcase marked “Danger: ACME Suitcase Nuke–Stand Well Back Before Detonating,” next to a geiger counter with meter pegged. One of Saddam’s hands is evilly twirling his mustache a la Snidely Whiplash, and the other arm is around the shoulder of a hale and hearty Osama bin Laden, who is in turn holding up a clearly-identifiable copy of last Sunday’s New York Times.

The picture must be taken by an objective, prize-winning photographer, such as Robert Fisk. No satellite imagery or CIA evidence is acceptable, since such a photo could be easily faked, and its provenance would thus be highly suspect.

I hope that this guide will help make more sense out of the speeches from politicians and commentary by clueless pundits and reporters that you’ll continue to hear over the next few weeks.

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The Mighty Saddam

We continue to hear warnings of the woes that may betide us if we depose Saddam. The funny thing is that they assume that he is actually capable of carrying this out.

After the Gulf War in 1991, analysts were criticized for predicting levels of resistance and casualties that didn’t come. But many say the situation would be different in a war today – in part because Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would be more desperate.

Yes, no matter how many times they’re proven wrong, the next situation is always “different.” But is it?

If the United States goes to war, it will be because Bush believes Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, specifically chemical and biological weapons. It would follow that Saddam would use those weapons to fight back. Saddam doesn’t have missiles that could reach the United States.

But as he demonstrated in 1991 by firing 39 Scud missiles at Israel, he considers Israel a surrogate target. Those Scuds had only conventional warheads, and Washington managed to dissuade Israel from retaliating.

If the missiles carried chemical or biological warheads this time, and if they caused serious damage, Washington’s job would be much harder. Some say major casualties would force Israel to retaliate by firing a nuclear weapon at Baghdad.

“If Saddam was able to kill 50 Israelis – no. Five hundred – probably not. Fifty thousand – done deal,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent military policy think tank.

Note the subject of the sentence. It’s not “the Iraqi military,” or the “nation of Iraq.” It’s “he” has the missiles, and “Saddam” will kill Israelis.

The writer has personalized it to Saddam. It is written as though he carries the missiles around in his back pocket, or keeps them in his bedroom, constantly in his sight, as though he will personally fill the warheads with poison gas, fuel the missiles, lay in the target coordinates, and push the button to launch them with their deadly cargo.

Is this just a meaningless nitpick about rhetoric and terminology? Not at all.

If reality corresponded to the actual words in this article, then it would indeed be a major concern, but the reality is that, in fact, Saddam cannot launch missiles, or employ chemical warfare against our troops or Israel. He can only order others to do so.

He has to do so in the hope that his orders will be obeyed. Moreover, he has to do this in the face of the additional fact that we have been blanketing Iraq with leaflets and radio messages to the effect that if anyone carries out Saddam’s orders along these lines, they will share his fate, but that if they refuse to, they will be spared, and perhaps even rewarded.

The issue is not the level of Saddam’s desperation, but the desperation and motivation of those who would have to carry out his dictates, with the knowledge that regardless of what they do, the US is going to prevail. Saddam may know that his fate is sealed, and not care what happens to his country after he’s gone, but when most below him know that their fate will depend on their actions, he can have no confidence that they will follow his orders.

In that sense, Iraq will be very much like Afghanistan. Once it was generally realized that the Taliban’s days were numbered, with ongoing and increasing American military pressure, and that the number was a small one, the number became even smaller, because anyone with half a brain decided to join up with the winning side. The Iraqi people, even the ones who man the missiles, are not stupid. They know what happened to anyone who opposed the US a dozen years ago, and because of the leaflet campaign, they know that the Americans will be even more determined this time. Given a choice between surrender to an enemy that showed mercy to those surrendering the last time, and committing a war crime, most will make the right choice.

For this reason, the fears here are overblown. Does that mean that it won’t happen? Of course not–just that the risk is much less than stated here. It’s possible that Saddam will take his top lieutenants, the ones who will be in the dock with him in any war crimes trial, and are just as “desperate,” and use them to enforce his commands. But I don’t know if there are enough of them to make this work, or that they will be smart enough to know if the missiles are being armed properly, or aimed properly by those carrying out orders at gunpoint.

But my main point is that articles like this would be more useful to the public if they were more nuanced, and make the same points that I just did here, instead of simplistically saying things like “Saddam will kill Israelis.”

Saddam may want to kill Israelis, but the day that Saddam’s wishes become reality are rapidly coming to an end.

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Unilateralism

Saddam Hussein has been in unending defiance of the United Nations since shortly after he invaded Kuwait. As part of a negotiated end to hostilities, he agreed to give up his ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. For over a decade, he has misled, lied, dissembled, distracted, evaded, and otherwise avoided meeting his reponsibilities under that agreement, all while running one of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet.

Last fall, the United Nations, with the acquiescence of France, Germany, Greece and Russia, gave him one final chance to meet his obligations and disarm. He has been in, and continues to be, in material breach of that commitment, in myriad ways, well documented elsewhere. He continues to, in the British phrase, “cock a snoop” at the United Nations.

So why, in defiance of the United Nations and the world, do France, Germany, Russia and Greece continue to help him delay and give him more time to achieve his foul ends?

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Prometheus: Giver of Fire

Okay, so the President didn’t announce the new space nuclear power initiative in the State of the Union address.

He didn’t mention space at all, except in the national-security context of missile defense, and even then it was only implied–the word itself wasn’t used.

Of course, I covered my bases–I didn’t say he would, just that he might. It’s not surprising, because having heard the speech, I’m not sure that such an announcement would have fit in politically–there’s not a major constituency for such things in the country, and after pleasing some of the environmental community with the hydrogen-car initiative, he probably didn’t want to alienate the significant segment of it that’s vehemently and irrationally anti-nuclear power in any form.

That doesn’t mean that the space nuclear power program isn’t happening, of course. It’s now expected (and I’ve got much higher confidence in this prediction than the State of the Union address) that it will be announced on Monday (February 3), if not by the president, then by NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, with the unveiling of the proposed federal budget.

So what does it mean for our future in space?

I’ve become famous (or notorious) in the space community for declaring that the Emperor at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has no clothes–that we don’t need new space technology. To the degree that I proclaim that, it is with regard to earth-to-orbit transportation. I stand by that position, with the proviso that new technology can help, but it’s enhancing, not enabling, when it comes to dramatically reducing the costs of getting into space.

But as the late great science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, famously wrote, once you’re in orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere. And getting the rest of the distance, sans new technology, is indeed a challenge.

Yes, the Moon is just a few days away with chemical propulsion, and we can similarly get to Mars, and the asteroids by combining oxidizer with fuel, but the scheduled opportunities to get there are driven by the implacable rule of orbital mechanics, and always involve many months, and the outer planets are always years away, for man or machine. To get around these constraints, we do indeed need new technology.

And on most parts of the earth’s moon, night is not just a little longer than the duration of a human sleep period. It lasts for over two weeks. Solar power is not an option, unless you can store the energy to get through the long absence of the sun. It can be done, but it in turn involves other technologies, of batteries or capacitors or the pumping of currently non-existent water in non-existent reservoirs, that are even more unattainable than nuclear power, with which we have decades of experience.

Or imagine an asteroid on a course intersecting with the earth–one that could devastate human civilization when it hits in a few years. It is still far away, and too far from the sun to use solar power to do anything useful to change its course.

Space nuclear power can solve all of these problems.

It is compact, it is well understood (by the relevant technologists), it can be employed with safety, and it is more than ample for the requirements. That NASA hasn’t been investing in it over the past couple decades was due not to the lack of need for it, but because of politics and bureaucratic fear of objections by the ignorant but noisy purveyors of hysteria.

There are (at least) two types of nuclear power for space applications. One has been used for years, and is the cause of NASA’s previous hesitance to advance the technology, due to uninformed protests against it in the past. This is called radioisotope thermal generation (RTG), in which a decaying amount of radioactive material (generally plutonium) emits heat to create a small amount of electricity via a thermocouple. This is the means by which we’ve powered the electronics of all of our spacecraft to the outer planets (i.e., Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus) without which we wouldn’t have gathered the spectacular pictures and knowledge over the past three decades, despite the technofantasies of the anti-nuke crowd.

But the limited capabilities of RTGs, while useful to provide electrical power for the electronics of our previous limited space endeavors, will not be adequate for the applications described above. For those, we will need robust, high-power systems: to melt the frigid ice of the Moon and comets into life-giving water: to take that same water and convert it to steam for propulsion and power: to power the plasma ships that will make trips to other planets and planetary bodies a matter of weeks, rather than months or years, at schedules of our choosing; to break the chemical bonds of lunar silicates and stony iron asteroids to build a new industrial age off our home planet.

Such systems mean actual nuclear reactors in space, something that the Russians have had, but we have not. Unfortunately, when the Russians did it, it was as the Soviet Union, a totalitarian dictatorship whose consideration for things like safety was…imperfect.

Even without ignorant anti-nuclear hysteria, actual past entries of working Soviet nuclear reactors into the atmosphere and on the heads of unsuspecting earthly inhabitants hasn’t aided the cause of nuclear space systems. Nonetheless, this technology is absolutely necessary, it can be done safely, and NASA’s biggest challenge will not be in developing it, or even in developing it safely (though this is obviously essential as well) but in proving to the skeptics (at least the ones that matter) that they can, will and have done so.

Regardless of NASA’s frustrating lack of progress on the earth-to-orbit front, this is a critical technology that must be developed in parallel with efforts, both public and private, to make it more affordable to get off the planet where it will be useful. If they start now, perhaps by the time it’s ready for use, we’ll be ready to use it.

Dual Tragedies

In addition to Tuesday’s anniversary of the Challenger disaster seventeen years ago, Monday saw the thirty-sixth anniversary of the loss of the crew of Apollo 1. Take a moment and remember the pioneers who died to expand life into the universe.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!