Consumer confidence is up, for the second week in a row.

Consumer confidence is up, for the second week in a row.

Consumer confidence is up, for the second week in a row.

Jim Oberg emails:

ALERT: Tomorrow may be ‘Eureka Day’ — the solution to the Columbia catastrophe.

At a one-hour briefing this morning by Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) member Scott Hubbard, the results of last week’s air-gun-fired foam impact test were summarized.

Basically, the investigators were astonished at the amount of damage when a fiberglass panel was used as a target, and they expect a better-than-even chance that tomorrow, using an actual shuttle leading edge panel (‘RCC’), they will break a hole in it.

The test will take place, weather permitting, in San Antonio. If the impact is as powerful as expected — like getting hit with a 500-mph basketball is how Hubbard described it — the ‘missing link’ in the causal chain that doomed Columbia Feb 1 may finally be on hand.

The experiment was surprising, Hubbard said, because the investigators (and NASA, which never even thought to perform such a test in the 25 years before this disaster) didn’t appreciate how an entire mechanism of thermal protection hardware bolted together could flex and vibrate under the impact, suffering much more stress than just one piece of the system held firmly in place on a test stand. This ‘missing link’ has frustrated investigators for months.

Last week’s test was using fiberglass, to verify the aiming of the air-gun. tomorrow’s test will use an actual RCC panel from a flown shuttle. The RCC material is stiffer than fiberglass but four times weaker. If a piece breaks loose, it could be the explanation for the mystery orbiting object that was tracked falling away from the shuttle in orbit.

If a piece breaks loose tomorrow, ‘pieces will fall INTO place’ on the investigation.

The full presentation and dramatic photos are now on-line.

Further impact tests are planned through the end of June, but if the impact tomorrow shatters the leading edge panel, it will be THE most important day since the spaceship and crew were lost, more than four months ago.

So they may finally have the smoking gun. It’s been pretty clear for weeks what happened. What remains unclear is what we do about it.

Susanna Cornett has a lengthy and thoughtful post on the interaction between blogs and the professional media.

The LA Times has an article today about dissension within the ranks of the astronauts over whether or not the Shuttle should have a crew escape system (registration required).

“We can’t afford to lose another crew,” said former chief astronaut Robert “Hoot” Gibson, who attended Tuesday’s meeting. “We have to put in place an escape system. The young astronauts say we don’t need it, but we shouldn’t listen to them.”

Yeah, what do those stupid youngsters know? Well Hoot, maybe they know something that you apparently don’t–we can’t afford a crew escape system, at least one that’s practical and useful. The Shuttle in its current form simply cannot accommodate one, despite the fact that it probably can’t be made much more reliable than it is (yet another reason to retire it). Entire fleets of new vehicles could be built for the costs of trying to knit this sow’s ear into a silk purse (at least if done by the private sector).

Indeed, astronauts are divided on the issue. Some have said crews deserve a fighting chance to survive, given the frailties of the space shuttle. But other astronauts have rejected the idea, saying they accept the high risk and that placing an escape system into existing orbiters is not practical or affordable. Putting too high a premium on their safety could kill the space program, some worry.

They should worry. Charles Bolden and Norm Thagard have it right:

“The reason we don’t have a crew escape system is that it has been thoroughly assessed and the people who did the assessment said it wouldn’t work,” Bolden said. “We need to educate the public that the astronaut business is dangerous work.”

Norm Thagard, associate dean of Florida State University’s School of Engineering and a former astronaut, agreed with Bolden that the costs would be prohibitive and the benefits uncertain. Thagard, who once flew combat missions over North Vietnam, said, “Historically, it was acceptable that astronauts could die too. I wonder what kind of a world we live in if the public can no longer accept that kind of risk.”

But some don’t want to accept reality.

Rhea Seddon, a medical doctor in Tennessee and veteran of three shuttle flights, said she remains open-minded about the need for an ejection system.

“Some people say we have to suck it up and we have to take our losses,” Seddon said. “I am not sure everybody is real comfortable with that approach.”

If you’re not comfortable with that approach Rhea, you can go get another job. You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, and there are many people waiting in line to take your place if you don’t like the odds now.

The ego of some of these people just infuriates me. They’re stuck in the sixties, when people actually cared about the space program, because we were in a death struggle with communism. They think they’re irreplaceable, but don’t think through the consequences of losing another third of the orbiter fleet, which would be much more devastating to the program.

There are some other dirty secrets revealed in this article.

…the shuttle is mostly flown by computers already and the few manual flight duties performed by pilots, such as the final landing approach and space docking, could also be automated. The only reason pilot astronauts have any role in flying the shuttle is that they exercise enormous clout within NASA.

“They don’t call them the astronaut mafia for nothing,” Nelson said.

Not surprisingly, astronauts have rejected Nelson’s idea.

In this case, the astronauts are right, in the sense that the escape system being proposed doesn’t make any economic sense, but this shows the tension between spacecraft engineers and astronauts that goes all the way back to the early sixties, and the umbrage that test pilots took at being “spam in a can.”

The problem is that Shuttle, despite its airplane-like appearance, was designed based on a heritage of transportation-by-munitions that came out of Apollo. It cannot be redesigned to be either safe, cheap or reliable. A truly piloted vehicle will be a new vehicle, from the ground up (and no, that doesn’t mean Orbital Space Plane). Private enterprise is finally working on the problem, no thanks to NASA, or the government in general.

But if we want to simply continue the farcical and costly charade that is our “manned spaceflight program,” Shuttle is good enough, just as it has been for twenty plus years, and NASA will never have trouble finding people to fly it as long as it flies, with or without a pointless and outrageously expensive bandaid solution of a “crew escape system.”

After all, it’s clear that no one in a position to make policy really cares that much about affordable or routine, or even safe access to space, as long as the money flows into the right congressional districts and countries, and the Shuttle (and the space station) have both proven to be world beaters when it comes to that.

Bill Whittle has the most pathetic excuse for ignoring his blog that I’ve ever read.

A Nevada brothel is offering free s3x to returning Iraq veterans. So far, several men, and three women, have taken them up on it.

I’m not sure I want to know…

Anyway, I hope they don’t wear out the hard-working women, as they did in Perth.

I’m going to be interviewed by Dr. David Livingston this evening on The Space Show, from 7-8:15 PM PDT.

It’s only broadcast in Seattle, but you can listen on line here. Check it out, and find out what I’m going to say. I’m curious, too…

[Update on Thursday]

You can find a link to the archived interview here. You’ll need a media player.

According to this UPI column, the CIA thinks that Saddam is alive, and being moved from one safe house in Baghdad to another.

I don’t know whether it’s true or not (it’s certainly not implausible), but what I found interesting was this:

According to U.S. intelligence officials, Saddam and his entourage simply move in with a private family. Members of the family, including children, are taken as hostages so that no other family member will be tempted to inform on Saddam’s whereabouts.

These sources said that when Saddam is ready to move to another safe house, the hostages are returned and the family is paid as much as $50,000 for the temporary use of their home.

Now Saddam and his family are notorious for their brutality, so to actually return the hostages seems a little out of character. But from a game theory standpoint, it makes perfect sense.

There’s a classic game theory construct called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. From the link:

Tanya and Cinque have been arrested for robbing the Hibernia Savings Bank and placed in separate isolation cells. Both care much more about their personal freedom than about the welfare of their accomplice. A clever prosecutor makes the following offer to each. “You may choose to confess or remain silent. If you confess and your accomplice remains silent I will drop all charges against you and use your testimony to ensure that your accomplice does serious time. Likewise, if your accomplice confesses while you remain silent, they will go free while you do the time. If you both confess I get two convictions, but I’ll see to it that you both get early parole. If you both remain silent, I’ll have to settle for token sentences on firearms possession charges. If you wish to confess, you must leave a note with the jailer before my return tomorrow morning.”

Note that for both prisoners they are incentivized to confess, with either an outcome of going free (if the other doesn’t), or getting early parole. The worst case is to not confess and get screwed by your partner in crime.

The interesting thing about the game is that if, as in this case, it’s only played once, there’s no point in cooperation–there’s no way to punish your partner for screwing you over. But if it’s a repeated game, where you’ll be interacting with that person in the future, it become in your interest to cooperate, rather than defect, because mutual cooperation offers the best value for both. This is the basis for much of Robert Axelrod’s work in computer simulations, to mimic the evolution of cooperation as a useful characteristic of organisms.

So how does this apply to Saddam? Not in the structure of the dilemma itself, but in the fact that he has to now take into account future interactions in a way that he’s never had to in the past.

When he was in power, he could use and abuse people as he pleased, with no apparent consequences. Now, on the run, he’s vulnerable. It might please him to just murder the hostages when he’s done with them, and stiff the family for the money, but if he does so, and word gets out, the next home he tries to take over won’t cooperate, since there’s nothing to gain by doing so.

When he was the state, he didn’t have to behave honorably. Now that he’s in somewhat of a state of anarchy, on a more equal footing with the populace, he must.