Is a New Space Weapon Race Heating Up?
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology
Moon May Have More Water Than Believed
http://www.msnbc.msn.com
Strange Hole-Punch Clouds Explained
http://www.wired.com
Boeing’s Biggest Airliner Ever Hits Key Milestones
http://www.wired.com
Add comment September 4th, 2010
The Obama administration recently pulled the plug on NASA’s Space Shuttle replacement plan, commonly referred to as the Constellation Program (CxP). This was a half baked concept hatched by the Bush administration a couple of years ago. CxP is also something I’ve been a critic of since its inception. However, now that the program has been mercifully euthanized, I do feel a tinge of sadness seeing all the great hardware headed to the scrap heap. Again, this is just another example of the old Bush administration’s mind-boggling ineptitude. CxP really lacked innovation from the start, which would have been critical for sustained momentum. To the casual observer, the program seemed quaint. It was often dubbed “Apollo on steroids” by Bush officials, which didn’t help the wow factor either. But what really sank the program was ballooning cost. Bush sold the program as an economical replacement to the current Space Shuttle; however overruns quickly started to spiral out of control once the project was under way. Before I go any further, I should point out what CxP actual consisted of:
The Ares I rocket was designed to carry the Orion capsule into orbit while the Ares V was intended to carry the Altair and EDS. The Ares I had already been successfully tested by the time the program was canceled, but many of the other CxP components were still being developed when everything got axed. So how will NASA get our astronauts into orbit once the shuttle is retired? For the short term, NASA will have to rely on Russia for rides into orbit. Of course the hope is Elon Musk’s SpaceX will eventually be ready to put their Dragon crew capsule and Falcon rocket into service, but as I’ve written before on this blog, I’m skeptical SpaceX will ever be able to pull this off. It’s too bad we can salvage the Orion component of the program and develop that to completion. I think if we modify the Delta IV Heavy rocket in parallel to a scaled down Orion program, we would have a decent shuttle replacement. Of course with Federal deficits being what they are these days, my predictions are NASA will not have a manned space in five years simply because all the options, including using private firms, will simply be too expensive.
Add comment February 18th, 2010
As the current swine flu outbreak moves closer to a full-blown pandemic, now seems like a good time to reflect upon a forgotten chapter in modern history: the flu pandemic of 1918. While often referred to as the Spanish Influenza or The Great Influenza, the origins of the 1918 H1N1 flu strain are not fully known, but some have theorized it originated in Kansas. The 1918 outbreak was especially deadly as pandemics go, killing anywhere from 20 to 50 million worldwide. It spread quickly, partly because of the First World War and all the soldiers moving en mass between and across continents. The 1918 flu also had a high infection rate — around 50 percent — and the symptoms were severe, caused by something called a cytokine storm, where too many immune cells are activated in a single place causing a positive feedback loop (basically an overreaction of the body’s immune system). This is why the 1918 pandemic was so deadly for the young and healthy. The current swine flu is eerily similar, striking down the young folks rather than the elderly.
What made the 1918 pandemic so startling was the speed to fatality, the seasonal disconnect (summer and fall instead of winter), and the fact that healthy individuals were more likely to died from infection. Another oddity of this strain of flu was the severity of symptoms. One of the first signs of illness was an usual blue tint to the victims face. Death would often come quickly after massive amounts of fluid built up the victim’s lungs, causing them to drown. Others still suffered from violent diarrhea, resulting in fatal blood loss. All and all, the 1918 flu rivaled such modern day viruses like Ebola in general nastiness.
One of the major differences between the 1918 and the 2009 pandemic is governmental response. In 1918, governments around the world took few steps to warn citizens. In the US, the feds downplayed the threat because people were already stressed about our entry into WWI. Few actions, like isolating the infected, were taken to minimize the spread. In fact some steps the government took actually exacerbated the problem — like the massive army recruitment drives bring thousands of young, healthy men together. The 1918 outbreak is also referred to as the forgotten pandemic by historians, since few Americans have any knowledge of it. This has often been attributed to the fact that a disproportionate number of victims were young adults and because of the rapid spread. The pandemic was also overshadowed by WWI and the horrors that war produced.
The American Experience | Influenza 1918
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/influenza
Add comment May 1st, 2009
It’s 1979 and the sky is falling. Well actually, standing out on the playground during recess, I’m watching and waiting for the United States’ first space station to come streaking into the atmosphere. Long the butt jokes, the reality is Skylab provided a wealth of scientific knowledge. Skylab’s birth can be traced all the way back to the late ‘50s when Wernher von Braun floated the idea of reusing rocket boosters as space stations. The concept involved filling a rocket’s upper stage with propellant and once it reached orbit, any remaining fuel would be vented into space leaving a (theoretically) habitable interior. But NASA didn’t really become interested in von Braun’s idea until they found out the Air Force was designing their own space station, the Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL), in the mid ‘60s. The MOL was a strange and highly classified beast based around the Gemini space capsule and Titan II rocket. Compared to von Braun’s elegantly engineered design, the MOL looked hacked together. Air Force astronauts would have to awkwardly squeeze themselves through a small airlock at the back of the Gemini capsule into the slender MOL cylinder that would serve as the living and workspace for the duration of a surveillance mission.
The MOL program ended up on the chopping block in 1969 when high quality spy satellites imagery made a manned orbital spy station redundant. But with the election of Richard Nixon and the elimination of the last couple of Apollo moon missions, von Braun’s space station idea was fast tracked. NASA now had surplus Apollo and Saturn equipment on hand, so designing and implementing a space station was much easier than it had been in the mid ‘60s. Because NASA had extra Saturn V rockets lying around, there was no need to fill a station full of fuel to get it into orbit – payload weight restrictions were now pretty flexible and designers could think big. And they did, calling on Raymond Loewy to assist in the design. The resulting space station was positively spacious with separated living and working spaces.
Skylab was launched into orbit in 1973. Unfortunately, there were immediate technical problems. A sun shield failed to deploy and the one of the solar “wings” didn’t extend. This presented to serious issues: 1. without the sunshield, the station’s interior would become dangerously hot 2. without the second set of solar panels, the station would not have adequate power. The first crew of astronauts to visit Skylab had the daunting task of making repairs during risky spacewalks. But after much effort, the damage was fixed and the station was ready to be occupied.
A total of three mission to Skylab took place (include the first one to make repairs). Astronauts faced a grueling science schedule, studying everything from microgravity to the corona of the sun. This brutal schedule lead to a revolt among the astronauts, who often had little time to even eat meals due to the regimented work routine ground controllers kept them on. Fed up with being worked like dogs, the astronauts stopped performing science experiments until NASA cut back on the number of assigned tasks. Of course this was an important lesson – later missions to Russia’s MIR and the International Space Station would have downtime built into the mission schedules to help maintain a healthy work environment in space.
So why did Skylab fall from the sky in 1979? When the station was originally conceived, there was the assumption that the United States would have a space shuttle to service it. And the space shuttle was designed and built to service a space station, which needs refueling for its thrusters from time to time to remain in orbit. The great irony of Skylab is the shuttle didn’t fly until 1981, two years after the space station fell from orbit due to neglect. But Skylab laid the foundation for future NASA missions to MIR in the ’90s and the ISS today - even though little credit is given to this forgotten first space station.
1 comment October 20th, 2008
After posting recently about early Soviets efforts to put the first satellite in space, I dug up an old article in Wired magazine about SpaceX, the company founded by PayPal wunderkind Elon Musk. My take on SpaceX, in light of their three consecutive failed launches of the Falcon 1 rocket, is that Musk could have taken his 100 million to Vegas and had better luck. I’m of the opinion that putting payloads into space is not a viable way to make a buck and should be left to governments — who have much deeper pockets and a higher tolerance for failure. Just look at Orbital Science. They’ve been in the game since 1982 and have yet to lead a revolution in commercial spaceflight. Sure, they have finally developed quasi reliable launch systems like the Pegasus and the Minotaur, but it has taken 25 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to get to this point. SpaceX intends to be ready to offer an alternative to NASA’s Space Shuttle, which is set to etire in 2010, with its larger Falcon 9 rocket. That’s insanely ambitious, considering SpaceX has yet to prove they can even get the cremated remains of ‘Scotty’ from Star Trek into orbit.
Of course there have been many eccentric rich men who have gambled large sums of money on hair brained schemes. Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose comes to mind. Really, starting your own dotcom venture is vastly different from developing a profitable method for putting people and cargo into space. Of course SpaceX might be our only hope for getting into space three years from now when our contract with Russia ends. The Bush administration has done their part in souring the West’s relationship with Russia by insisting on putting missiles in Poland, a move that might bite us in the ass if Russia decides they want to cut-off access to their Soyuz and Progress space vehicles. We’re trying to develop the Orion spacecraft, but it seems to be stalled at the moment due to poor leadership and other issues I’ve talked about here on this blog. We might be left begging China for a ride into space, but we’ve already borrowed billions of dollars from them so I don’t know how willing they would be to extend us even more credit. The prospect of pinning our space hopes on a 37-year-old internet entrepreneur is really depressing. I just hope SpaceX proves everyone wrong and delivers what they say they’re going to deliver.
Add comment August 15th, 2008
Unlike mid-century American rocket celebrity Wernher von Braun, the brains behind the Soviet space program was a mysterious figure simply referred to as the “Chief Designer”. The mystery man was actually Ukrainian born Sergei Korolev, a political prisoner during Stalin’s Great Purge of the late ’30s. It is remarkable Korolev ever had the opportunity to design rockets, let alone dream up his masterpiece the R-7, since he nearly died in the Siberian prison system known as the Gulag Archipelago. Although trained as an aircraft designer with several gliders under his belt, Korolev’s real skill was planning – and his visionary passion for space travel. While Korolev didn’t posses von Braun’s technical aptitude, he could identify and execute a good idea. And by scouring the technical journals of the west, picking the brains of Soviet rocket experts, and sifting through the remnants of the Nazi V-2 program, Korolev was able to devise a rocket that was years ahead of anything the west was developing. This rocket was called the R-7 Semyorka and its descendents are still in use to this day, transporting people and cargo to the International Space Station.
What made the R-7 Semyorka so revolutionary was its use of technology considered by the west as impractical – like steering motors instead of control vanes and separate strap-on rocket boosters. Like von Braun, Korolev also recognized one of the major shortcomings of the V-2 design was the use of internal fuel tanks, which added additional weight. Instead, the R-7 used the body of the rocket as a fuel tank, increasing the amount of fuel that could be carried and reducing the overall weight of the rocket.
But all of the revolutionary design features also translated into a difficult testing phase for the R-7. The whole world saw the launch pad failures of von Braun’s Redstone rocket, but nobody outside of the Soviet top leadership circle knew about the frighteningly high R-7 failure rate. Many of the misfires were eventually traced back to small issues, like improper wiring or forgotten parts – not design flaws. Once the vodka rations were cut back and more stringent quality control enforced, the program started to look promising. After hearing the American’s planned to orbit a satellite by 1957, Korolev lobbied the Soviet leadership for a chance to beat the Yanks. Up to this point, the R-7 had been designed as an ICBM, but work now commenced to modify the design to deliver a satellite into orbit. The satellite, called PS-1 or Sputnik 1, was a simple affair consisting only of a basic 1-watt radio transmitter producing the famous Sputnik “beep”. But despite its small stature, Sputnik made history by being the first man made object to reach orbit around the earth.
The reliability of R-7 allowed for a number of other firsts, like the first space dog, the first object to travel to the moon, and of course the first human into space. All these firsts took a toll on Korolev though, as he increasingly felt like he needed to constantly sing for his supper. Unlike the United States, where all space related activities were coordinated by one agency, NASA, the Soviets funded a multitude of competing programs. Money was often allocated on the basis of political connections rather than technical merits. Korolev was famous for being difficult and independent, which hurt his funding prospects going into the ‘60s. After hearing Kennedy’s speech about putting an American on the moon by the end of the decade, Korolev began to plan for a Soviet program that would do the same. Unfortunately, he had a hard time securing support for engine design and was unable to develop a rocket that would match von Braun’s Saturn V and its mighty F-1 engines. Korolev died in 1966 of a heart attack and the Soviet moon mission died a couple of years later from neglect and lack of funding. But the R-7 lives on in its various incarnations, still rocketing people and payloads into the heavens.
Vostok-1 Launch (first human in space)
http://www.youtube.com
1 comment August 6th, 2008
There are a few things the United States still kicks ass at…like tacos at 2:00 AM and interplanetary exploration. The recent touchdown of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander proves the US is still all that when it comes to conducting amazing science on other planets. This is almost enough to make me overlook the fact NASA tried to suppress global warming data from this planet at the behest of the Bush administration. And I’m also excited about the follow-on Mars projects waiting in the wings. One of the most significant is the Mars Science Laboratory, which is a wheeled rover like the still wandering Spirit and Opportunity. What makes the MSL so special is its size; 2,040 pounds, and its power source, which is nuclear – giving the rover more science capibility than its predecessors.
With all the fuss about Mars over the last couple of years, I’ve become fascinated with the idea of a one way/ one astronaut mission to the red planet. This is something that has been advocated by a few lonely scientists and dreamers, but has never gained traction with the stuffed shirts at NASA. I’m not talking about a suicide mission here; I’m talking about a long term exploration project where the solo explorer might not come back. I’m not suggesting we would just send someone to Mars with the expectation they would conduct science for a couple of weeks and then curl up and die. Rather we would continue to send supplies for as long as they lived (and maybe they could come back to Earth with a future group of explorers).
In the history of humankind there have been many solo adventurers and explorers who took incredible risks to discover new worlds or accomplish things we collectively thought impossible. There was Charles Lindberg, who crossed the Atlantic by himself in a single engine plane, for example. But NASA has become so risk adverse I doubt they would ever go for a single person Mars mission. It’s such a strange disconnect in a society of risk takers. Americans are proud of our crazies – whether it’s those guys from Jackass or NASCAR drivers. Surely going alone to Mars is safer than a drunken weekend with Steve-O?
Add comment June 8th, 2008
It has probably happened to everyone at some point. Over the course of some ho hum conversation about nothing in particular, a friend or family member has said something that leaves you speechless. This happened to me the other night when I was over at a close friend’s house and the conversation veered toward 9/11. Now this is someone who is highly educated and possesses an opinion I deeply trust, but I couldn’t believe it when they said 9/11 is a big US government conspiracy. We argued for over an hour about all sorts of details, like whether people could make cellphone calls from planes and what temperature steel melts at, but in the end, they just passed along a DVD called Loose Change and pleaded with me to watch it (I haven’t yet).
How does it happen that otherwise smart people get sucked into such nonsense? It’s like those stupid urban myth emails that seem to never stop making the rounds despite being debunked by Snopes over and over again. I read somewhere that 42% of American’s believe the US government was involved in the 9/11 attacks. That’s just sad. I’m certainly no fan of the current administration, but I refused to believe they, or their neocon cronies, staged those terrorist attacks and then subsequently covered them up. And it’s not just a matter of personal feelings either – there exists copious evidences the attacks were carried out by terrorists alone without the help of any government. But for those interested in what those in the so called “Truth Movement” point to as evidence of a government conspiracy, I’ll go over a couple of their major points.
Truth Movement: Flight 93 did not crash in Pennsylvania, rather it landed in Cleveland shortly after the no fly order was issued. Passenger did not make cellphone calls from plane because it’s not possible using current cellular technology. Instead, the phone calls received by loved ones were fake.
Facts: The whole Flight 93 landing in Cleveland myth can be traced back to a retracted news story that was released on 9/11. There is no evidence of any plane with the flight number “93” landing anywhere in the United States on that day. The whole business about cellphones not working on planes has an ounce of truth, since coverage can be spotty, but it doesn’t really matter since many passengers on the plane made calls using those airphones in the seatbacks instead.
Truth Movement: No passenger plane crashed into the Pentagon. Instead, either a military drone crashed into the building or an explosion was intentionally triggered. Furthermore, no evidence of aircraft wreckage was ever found and no eyewitness actually saw a passenger plane hit the building.
Facts: There was lots of wreckage at the crash site (see photo below) including the flight recorder and dozens of firefighters witnessed the burning debris in the minutes after the crash. There were also the human remains of passengers scattered around the crash site. Regarding eyewitness accounts of that day, yes, some people were not sure of what they saw, but there were plenty of other credible witness who clearly observed the passenger jet hitting the building.
Truth Movement: The Twin Towers were not taken down by passenger jets, rather military cargo or refueling planes hit the buildings and explosives were finally used to bring the structures down.
Facts: The Truth Movement likes to point to science on this one, saying aviation fuel burns at a lower temperature than it takes to melt steel. True, but temperatures experienced in a normal house fire are enough to weaken steel that it will warp or buckle. Since the Twin Towers were 90% air, the pancaking collapse makes total sense and only a crackpot structural engineer would claim otherwise. As to the whole claim that military jets were used, I don’t see any evidence of that from any of the news footage I’ve seen.
Well, there is a lot more silliness to the Truth Movement claims, but I’m far too tired to go over all of it. Popular Mechanics offered a good rebuttal. Read it here.
Add comment June 3rd, 2008
Last Sunday, I joined my father at the local IMAX theater located in Portland’s Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) for one of those vertigo inducing films. We were there to see the film Alps, but had to contend with a huge crowd swarming to enter the newest mega exhibit at OMSI, a collection of plastized cadavers. I’m sure most of you have heard about Dr. Gunther von Hagens and his Plastination method that allows for the posing of dead bodies. I heard about it in the late ‘90s and was never really interested in seeing the results. I dissected a shark at OMSI camp when I was a shortie, so I’ve had my fill of anatomy thank you very much. But seeing all those people lined up to see the exhibit surprised me. Is it voyeurism or is it truly an interest in human anatomy? If it’s more of an interest in human anatomy, science may still have a chance with the masses, of which a growing segment is Christian conservatives who askew mainstream science because of its link to the theory of evolution.
Reflecting on this exhibit and its popularity also got me thinking about global warming. I kind of have this sense that more conservatives are coming around to accepting that global warming is human caused compared to just a year ago. But there was one telling incident during the advertising blitz that illustrates just how influential conservative Christian have become even in a liberal place like Portland. An image of a skateboarder was used in an ad for the exhibit, but his, uh, “family jewels” were digitally removed as to not offend those with delicate sensibilities.
1 comment June 12th, 2007
I while back I posted an entry criticizing NASA for decided to go with a Space Shuttle derived launch system for the planned Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) instead of using proven commercial launch vehicles like the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets. Well, the Space Frontier Foundation recommended just that in a white paper released this week. I doubt the higher-ups at NASA really care about even pretending to listen to outside opinions at this point. Too much money earmarked for key conservative friends in Florida and Louisiana to change course.
NASA course correction?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com
1 comment July 25th, 2006
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