Tim's Thoughtful Spot

Video Del Fuego, Part LII

2012-02-10T17:27:00.005-06:00

I used to love building model airplanes, right up to the point when I didn't. I'm not exactly sure how that happened. Mostly, I think I just lost the patience for detail work and painting. So basically, I was out of the modelling hobby before I discovered the various kinds of radio-controlled flying models.

That's probably for the best. If I'd discovered that this sort of thing was available, I'd have never gotten any productive work done. Ever.

The ingenuity of the truly dedicated hobbyist is astounding. It's hard to believe some of the things they've come up with. There are flyable models of just about every aircraft you've ever heard of. They can get pretty big. Especially since there's no way to make a small flyable model of a B-36:

And while you can make a smaller flying model of a Spitfire, some things are easier when you go big:

But you haven't seen anything yet ... Back in the day, they used to sell radio-controlled models of "jets", which were models that kind of looked like jets, with propellers on the front. Not very interesting. So naturally, someone figured out how to make a really small jet engine. And behold:

Actually that one sounds like a ducted fan, as opposed to a real jet. But never fear, those do exist.

The problem with real jet engines? When things go wrong, they can get really explodey, really fast. Which is why just about everyone carries a fire extinguisher:

But what if that's not enough to slake your need for speed? Scale modelers like Steve Eves take it to the next level, with a flying 1/10 scale model of a Saturn V. (Yes, that Saturn V.)

Which leads us to these guys, who built a rocket of their own design, and punched it up to 121,000 feet.

Which just about defies description. Bear in mind, this is what our hobbyists do. On their own time. For fun. Now, imagine what our professionals could do, given clear direction...

National Engineers Week is February 19th through the 25th. Remember, if you can read this, thank a teacher; but if you're reading this on a computer, thank an engineer.

One Of These Days, Alice...

2012-01-29T08:58:00.003-06:00

Recently, Newt Gingrich caused a stir in the run-up to the Florida GOP primary by suggesting that, by 2020, a Gingrich Administration would set up a permanent base on the Moon. Leaving aside the question of whether or not it's a good idea ... Actually, never mind, that's a good discussion to have. There are several good reasons why we want to do that, eventually. But there are several equally good reasons that there's just no way in Hell we're going to get there from here by 2020.

One reason is radio astronomy. The biggest problem with radio astronomy is interference. We use radio for everything. We use it to talk to each other, to share pictures and music, to share information. We use it to find out how far airplanes are from one another, and to keep passenger airplanes from running into mountains. Our power lines leak radio frequency energy, even though we'd really rather they didn't. All of this makes radio astronomy, the science of exploring the universe by analyzing the radio frequency radiation coming at us from deep space, a very tricky discipline indeed. Wouldn't it be nice, if you could put a radio telescope somewhere that was shielded from all of Earth's radio frequency output?

Another reason is clean energy, albeit indirectly. If you were to put farms of solar power panels in geosynchronous orbit, you could beam clean energy down from space 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Building them is a fairly tall order, and it would be cheaper to haul the building materials up from the Moon than it would be to haul them up from the Earth.

You're free to disagree with me on this, of course, but I'm convinced that an outpost on the Moon is a good idea for our long-term future, not just as a nation but as a species. But it's vitally important that we do it right. And there's just no way to do it right in only nine or ten years. Let's make a quick outline of what needs to be done in order to get there from here.

First, you need a mature transportation infrastructure. The longest pole in this tent is efficient, reusable transportation to and from low Earth orbit for both crew and cargo. You're going to be moving a lot of cargo both up and down, so you need to be able to do it cheaply, and on a reliable, dependable schedule. You also need to be able to develop the technology for in-space refueling, so that you can store fuel and supplies at an orbital supply depot. You'd also like to have really efficient engines for space propulsion, so that you can be as miserly with that fuel as possible. Finally, you will need to develop closed-loop life support, so that your base can be as self-sufficient as possible. Now, where have we heard this before? (Hold on to that thought. We'll come back to it later.)

Given all of that, here's how you'd need to proceed:

(1) Stockpile some fuel and supplies in low Earth orbit.
(2) At the same time, haul up some parts, and assemble a couple of cislunar freighters.
(3) Load the freighters with fuel, supplies, and parts.
(4) Once they arrive in Lunar orbit, they will assemble a second fuel and supply depot.
(5) Once back in Earth orbit, load the freighters with fuel, supplies, parts, and a couple of lunar landers.
(6) Once back in Lunar orbit, the landers will take the parts down to the surface, and begin construction.

This way, you have a sustainable supply chain to keep the project going for as long as you need to. And there's no way to do this in only ten years. Oh sure, if we already had all of the enabling technologies, we could make it happen. But we don't. And therein lies the problem. Some of us learned the wrong lessons from Project Apollo.

Project Apollo left us with an awesome legacy. Six flags and twelve sets of footprints stand in eternal testimony to what we can do as a nation when we plant our feet, fix our eyes on the ball, and swing for the fences. But it also leaves a false impression that we can do anything -- literally anything -- with only nine years' notice. And that's not necessarily true.

We have a lot of hard work to do before we're ready to undertake the challenge of building a permanent outpost on the Moon. We've barely begun that work. If we undertake the "Flexible Path" option outlined in 2009's Augustine Commission report, we will have done the lion's share of the preparation by 2020. Then, and only then, can we realistically undertake the task.

Anyone who tells you different is either lying, crazy, or just delusional. Although in Gingrich's case, it may well be all of the above.

Election 2012: The Winter Of Our Discontent

2012-01-27T17:52:00.002-06:00

OK, now we've had one caucus and two elections, and we've had three different candidates win them so far. It's been a wild ride so far, and there's no indication that things will settle down anytime soon. So, let's brush off our crystal ball, and see what it portends. As always, our numbers are courtesy of Intrade, and are current as of this Friday afternoon.

Democratic Party: Seriously, I need to stop doing this. But I am an engineer, and it offends me to leave anything out. Still: all of the important filing dates have passed, and no one worth mentioning has stepped up to try to unseat Barack Obama within his own party. Also, despite the pundits constantly trying to whip up a controversy, Obama's not going to dump Joe Biden as his Vice-Presidential nominee. It's going to be Obama/Biden for the Democrats this fall, unless a crate of bricks falls on either or both. (Which ain't gonna happen.) So I'm not even going to bother looking the numbers up. This one's a lock.

Republican Party: This has truly been a spectacle to behold. Three races, three different winners, with Florida on deck next week. This isn't over yet, not by a long shot. Still, Vegas does have one clear favorite.

Mitt Romney, 86.2%: His polls have been up and down more than a speed freak on a jet-powered pogo stick, but the wagering public still thinks very highly of Romney's chances to win the nomination. But I wonder if he's overpriced at this early date in the process. After all, he does have several serious problems as a candidate. For one, he seems very out of touch economically with the average Republican voter. For another, as I've said before, Obamacare is Romneycare with the serial numbers filed off. And, here's the thing that's really going to hurt him in the South, a lot of evangelical Christians aren't entirely convinced that Mormons are Christians. So, until the campaign swings through several Southern states, it's early days yet to anoint Romney as the inevitable nominee. All that said, he's got funding and organization, and plenty of it. Those will help him out. Especially since one or more of his opponents are liable to have spectacular melt-downs in coming months.

Newt Gingrich, 5.2%: Speaking of melt-downs ... Newt is fueled by emotion, primarily rage. Rage is a useful servant but a perilous master. More than that, without a friendly audience to bounce off of, his debating style is significantly hampered. He got a big bounce off his South Carolina win, and will probably get a significant bounce out of his next Southern win. It'll come. He's got a strong base of support down South. It looks like he's the winner of the "not-Romney" primary, although there are still a few minor contenders for that crown. But I don't think he'll win the nomination. Conservatives like him somewhat, but he's disorganized, prone to rage, and has a propensity for spouting off weird ideas. And speaking of weird ideas...

Ron Paul, 3.0%: Some die-hards are still plugging for the old guy. He had a brief surge a while back. But we all know that the NFL will open an expansion team in Ulan Bator before Dr. Paul comes within shouting distance of the nomination. Which is probably just as well: some of his ideas, like abolishing the Federal Reserve and going back on the Gold Standard, are just plain nuts.

Rick Santorum, 2.5%: After Iowa, I had predicted that Santorum would be the go-to candidate for the social conservatives. This ... hasn't quite turned out to be the case. Santorum looks like he's skipping Florida entirely, and is taking the weekend off. That's probably a prelude to punching out of the campaign entirely, if he fails to find traction in the Bible Belt. He'll probably stick around for Super Tuesday, but may not last much longer than that.

The Rest: No one else is above 1%. Since our last check, we've lost Rick Perry, who endorsed Newt Gingrich. Perry goes back home to Texas, where he pretends to run the state while Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst does all the heavy lifting. In two years' time, we'll see if Rick Perry runs for another term as Governor or not. And in four years' time, we'll see if he reloads for another go at the brass ring in 2016. He just might. He's got four years to undo the damage this goat-rope of a campaign has done. Don't underestimate this man: his political skills are first-rate, he just wasn't ready for the national stage. He will be ready next time.

And the winner is... Intrade gives the Democrats the edge, 53.7% versus 44.3% for the Republicans. The economy is starting to look up, just a little, which makes it harder for a challenger to unseat an incumbent.

Bonus Feature! Our man Newt has big ideas. One of those big ideas is to award a prize for building a Moonbase. Normally, I'd be all over that like a cheap suit, but I don't think we can get there from here just right now. But, just so you can see what sort of swinging pad Newt has in mind, here's a fine bit of television from the 1970s. It's got Barbara Bain in a jumpsuit, so it can't be all bad.

Remember, kids, vote early, and vote often!

Election 2012: Raucous Caucus

2012-01-06T19:26:00.002-06:00

Well, that was certainly interesting.

The first official results of the 2012 election are in, and the first blood has been drawn. As it turns out, not even Iowa would vote for someone with Marty Feldman eyes, and thus endeth the Bachmann campaign. Incidentally, this is why I'm an engineer by trade, and not a professional pundit: I really thought her ground game and virtual "hometown" status would have meant more. But instead, she becomes an object lesson, along with Trump, Perry, Cain and Gingrich in the deadly peril of peaking too soon.

You know who didn't peak too soon, at least for Iowa? Rick Santorum. His was the great good fortune to rise in the polls just as Gingrich was sinking. His wave crested at precisely the right moment, and he rode it to a second-place finish, just behind Romney. The interesting thing is that each of the top three finishers represents one of the GOP's three major blocs, who aren't always on speaking terms with one another.

Back in 1980, there were also three blocs, just not the same three. You had the "old guard" Republicsns, you had the social conservatives, and you had the anti-Communists. There was some overlap. Enough, in fact, that Ronald Reagan was able to forge a durable alliance amongst them that lasted for ... well, long enough that the label "anti-Communist" would become dated. We recently celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Soviet Union's demise.

Today, the first two blocs are still there, broadly speaking. The third has changed. Some call them libertarians, but I'm not sure I'd agree with that label. But as I said, the top three finishers in Iowa each tapped into one of those constituencies: Romney is the choice of the Old Guard, Santorum is the current flavor-of-the-month for the social conservatives, and Ron Paul has galvanized the libertarians.

But even more so than thirty years ago, the three factions aren't necessarily on speaking terms. There isn't as much overlap as there once was. Which means that this race is, among other things, a struggle for control of the party. To wit: which faction, or coalition of factions, is in charge?

Iowa settled nothing, but it exposed an interesting question. The lead, and the eventual nominee, will provide the answer. If Romney is the nominee, it means that the Old Guard has reasserted its authority, or at a minimum that it has forged a coalition, most likely with the social conservatives. If it's Santorum, or even Perry, it means that the social conservatives have seized control. A Ron Paul candidacy would mean the libertarians are in charge, but come on, we all know that Satan will drive to work in a snowplow before that happens.

The next few contests won't clarify much. I do expect that we'll see clear leaders emerge for each faction. We will also probably see a down-select to a two-way race by March ... Which is another way of saying, one of the three factions will basically be edged out.

One way or another, we'll find out what these Republicans are made of.

Remember, vote early, and vote often!

Video Del Fuego, Part LI

2011-12-30T19:25:00.003-06:00

I saw this on Andrew Sullivan's site, and it was just too good to keep.

I have two dogs of my own, a Chiweenie (Dachshund/Chihuahua mix) and an Australian Shepherd (who we think is also part Labrador). I don't have any movies of them, although Duke (the Aussie) does periodically try to help me with my typing.

And I had some more serious ideas knocking around in my head, but none of them are jelling worth a damn just right now. So, more puppies:

These guys are just adorable. They'd hate it down here, though... We used to have a Sheltie/Husky mix, who we'd have to shave down to a "crew cut" in the summertime. She loved it when it got cold. And snowy. It's a damn shame she didn't live long enough to see last February's snowfall.

Speaking of snow:

Watching puppies did teach me something profound. I now know why God created us. Paradoxically, there's one thing that an omniscient being can never know, except vicariously. And that's the thrill of discovery.

Have a safe and happy New Year, everyone!

Video Del Fuego, Part L

2011-12-23T20:35:00.002-06:00

Christmas time is upon us again, which gives us a chance to enjoy some fine music and fine memories. For me, no Christmas is quite complete without the music of Vince Guaraldi. For some reason, embedding has been disabled for this piece, but it's still well worth a listen.

Earl Three has a remix of that piece -- "Christmas is Coming" -- and it's pretty nice, too:

Another Christmas piece I'm fond of is "Christmas Wrapping" by The Waitresses:

And the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's rendition of Carol of the Bells:

And, lastly, a Christmas memory from 43 years ago:

As we close out another year, and look to a new one, I'd like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Cheers!

Techniwockle Confoogalities

2011-12-16T22:38:00.003-06:00

It's crunch time at the day gig. I should come up for air in a week or so.

Election 2012 Preview: Handicapping the Primaries, Part IV

2011-12-02T18:06:00.003-06:00

One month and one day from today, the Iowa caucuses mark the official kickoff of the 2012 election season. The race has been going full-tilt for about six months now, but this will be the first time that actual voters will be able to weigh in on who they think should contest the Presidency in November, 2012. The time for prognosticating will be mostly over, and we'll actually have real results to chew on. So, for the last time before the voting starts, let's see how the wagering community sees it. (As before, all data from Intrade, current as of Friday afternoon.)

Democratic Party: I'm only including this because I'm a stickler for completeness. By now, it ought to be blindingly obvious that the Obama/Biden ticket will be up for re-election in November.

Barack Obama, 93.5%: In this case, "blindingly obvious" doesn't quite amount to 100% just yet. But that's because you have a few adventurous folks, who are taking a long-odds flier on...

Hillary Clinton, 6.1%: Can't blame 'em. At that price, you'll make over ten for one, if it happens. Which it won't. As I've said earlier, eligible sitting Presidents who want the job never lose renomination. It just doesn't happen.

Joe Biden, 0.6%: Now there's a long shot for you. But sorry, that's money you'll never see again. See above.

Republican Party: And here's where things start to get interesting. We've had several candidates surge, and crash, in succession. First Trump, then Bachmann, then Perry, then Cain. Now ... well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Mitt Romney, 48.2%: Romney has held a fairly steady lead, but his lead is eroding. In the early debates, he really did look like the only adult in the room. Unfortunately, he also looks uncannily like a collaboration between MIT's artificial intelligence lab and their cybernetics department. That is, he looks like a human, talks like a human, but doesn't quite pull off the imitation convincingly. On top of that, a fairly sizable chunk of the Republican electorate has serious misgivings about his religion. This is, and isn't, a head-scratcher for me. On the one hand, I've had Mormon neighbors, and you just won't find any better. On the other, I've talked to Baptists who are convinced that Mormons aren't Christians. In this case, ultimately, the latter will trump the former. Maybe Romney can overcome this, but probably not.

Newt Gingrich, 36.0%: And here we have the "not-Romney" flavor of the month. This honestly surprised me. As late as July, Gingrich was down to 1%, and I'd counted him DOA. With my trusty 20-20 hindsight, I can see that he's taking a few cues from the John McCain playbook, who was similarly left for dead in the summer of 2007. Gingrich is a lot of things, stupid isn't one of them. Dude's got an earned doctorate in history. He wasn't quite good enough to earn tenure, which is why he entered politics, but he's no dullard. He's a thoroughly bad man, but not a dumb one. And he's cresting at just about the perfect time. A win or place in Iowa and/or New Hampshire, plus a win in South Carolina, sets him up nicely for February and March.

John Huntsman, 5.8%: This is about where he started back in March. He's been lower, and he's been higher, but his campaign really hasn't gotten a whole lot of traction. But I'm convinced that he's really positioning himself for 2016. Oh, he'd take the 2012 nomination if it came his way. But look at what he's saying. He's positioning himself as the man who was right, when the rest of the candidates had gone stone barking mad. Look for him to check out fairly early, and resurface sometime in 2014.

Ron Paul, 4.5%: Ron Paul, on the other hand, will give up the race when they strip it from his cold, dead hands. He'll tell you that he wants to be President. And he's probably sincere in that. But, part of the point is that the campaign trail is a bully pulpit for issues near and dear to his heart. And that's fine. I'll drink a toast to his health. I don't agree with him on most things, but society needs its professional heretics.

Rick Perry, 2.3%: Oh, dear. The voting age has been 18 since I started elementary school. He's had plenty of time to learn that little fact. But, evidently, not enough time. If the governorship of Texas were a real job, I'd be concerned. But it's not, so we're OK. Consider Governor Perry to be the comedy relief for this campaign season.

Michelle Bachmann, 1.4%: Bachmann is up about half a point from mid-October. I still think she might get a bit of a spike out of a strong showing in Iowa, which is still a non-trivial possibility. But no one outside of Iowa will vote for someone with Marty Feldman eyes. So, she'll probably punch out before March.

Herman Cain, 0.6%: By the time you read this, he will probably have withdrawn. I was sure that his candidacy would come unglued when the campaign swung into the South. I had no idea it would come unglued because of his ... vigorous extracirricular activities. Seems like there's one every year, doesn't it? And it's an equal-opportunity failing, too; it was Edwards last time around. Take a note, gentlemen: there are problems you will never have, if you stay faithful.

And the winner is... By party, the Democrats are ahead 50.9% to 46.5%. By individual, Barack Obama leads the pack at 50.8%. Two factors weigh somewhat in his favor. One, unemployment is on the way down. It's still not good, but it's below 9% for the first time in a long while. Going into the summer, the things to look for are unemployment rate, gas prices, and the general tenor of the foreign situation. While they don't look great, they're trending OK so far. Plus, Intrade is showing a 30% probability that some damn fool like Trump or Palin will mount a third-party bid. This probability goes up if Romney ends up with the Republican nomination.

As I've said before, I'd still put a couple of bucks on Obama/Biden for the win. The odds are tightening up, but if you can find any takers, go for it.

The primary season starts in earnest on January 3, 2012. Vote early, and vote often!

The Future Is ...

2011-11-25T19:47:00.002-06:00

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed." -- William Gibson

I've said before that predictions aren't something I ought to do very often, because I normally don't do them very well. And when we're talking about things like who's going to win an upcoming election, or which players will do well this season, that's a good rule of thumb. But today, I'm going to talk about technological trends. The future holds both wonders and horrors, and most of both are already with us in some form or another. Specifically, I'm going to be talking about the implications of a piece of modern technology that many of us already carry with us on a daily basis: smart phones.

This is part of what Gibson was talking about: the future is already here, it's just not uniformly distributed. The modern cellular telephone is still called a telephone, when in reality it's a palm-sized computer that has a telephone function. It can also send and receive text messages, e-mail, and function as a web browser. It can hold a small library of books, movies, and music. And it can function as a calculator, stopwatch, camera for both still and moving images. And a map. Never forget the map. We are raising a generation that has no clear idea of what it means to be involuntarily lost. In their mental universe, we've always been able to reach up into space and pull down our exact location.

However, that's just a drop in the bucket. The bottleneck, the thing that keeps these devices from being more pervasive than they already are, is the interface. There's a limit to what can be done with a few square inches of screen space.

We are about to transcend those limits. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are designing an optical display that can fit within a contact lens. This means that future smartphones will be able to paint their displays directly upon your field of vision. The implications of this are immense.

You've heard of "virtual reality." This isn't it. This is something I've heard called "augmented reality." It's your world, with more information. That's both a good thing, and a bad thing. First, the good.

Right off, let's take a look at that turn-by-turn navigation feature that you hardly ever use while you're driving. Augmented Reality makes this far more useful. Instead of a tiny map that you cannot use safely while driving, you get a green line pasted on your field of view, telling you in no uncertain terms where you need to turn in order to get where it is you want to go. Merely asking, "How do I get home from here?" results in a path popping out in front of you, leading the way. And since you'll probably be able to use your fingers as a pointer, you can frame questions about anything you can point at. Asking "What is that?" can tell you anything from what species of bird that is, to what kind of airplane, to where that specific flight came from and where it's going. (Most UFO sightings will be disposed of within seconds.) You'll be able to see weather alerts, if you want to. It's already just about true that any of us with an internet connection can find the answer to just about any question whose answer is known, in the future that answer is available by voice query, and can be immediately displayed in front of your eyes, anytime, day or night.

But, it's not without disadvantages.

A horrifying new dimension of message spam opens up, when a hacker can hijack your visual display to force you to see anything they want you to see. Going by the contents of my spam bucket, most of this will be advertising for products you shouldn't mention in a family publication. Some of it will consist of more innocuous advertisements, say, a blurb about coffee when you walk past a Starbuck's. Others will be pranks played on you by ... friends. And we all have at least one friend like that, with a wildly inappropriate sense of humor. Worst of all, closing your eyes may not even block it out, depending on exactly how these things work. Personal data security will be of paramount importance, unless you like the idea of being bombarded with horrifying images on a fairly constant basis.

Further, an entirely new etiquette will have to be developed to account for this. We're already heading down that road, establishing when it is and isn't appropriate to use cell phones. However, things change when you no longer have to be looking at the device to interact with it. The guy who looks like he's politely paying attention may be doing nothing of the sort. He might be watching Casablanca. He might be playing Call of Duty. Unless you can tap the data stream, you have no way of knowing. I have no idea how we'll sort that out. But we'll have to figure it out once we get there.

And we will get there. The advantages so far outweigh the drawbacks that we won't be able to avoid it. There are parts I'm really looking forward to, and parts that I'm dreading, but on the whole it's a huge opportunity. Opportunity for what, we just don't know yet.

But it'll be fun to find out.

Video Del Fuego, Part XLIX

2011-11-18T19:59:00.002-06:00

On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students (possibly with the backing of the revolutionary government, possibly not) took over the United States Embassy in Tehran. The Americans were held hostage for 444 days, until January 20, 1981. During their captivity, there were at least two plans made for a rescue. One is well known, the other less so.

The one that just about everyone's heard of is Operation Eagle Claw. Eagle Claw was a complex operation, involving eight RH-53 helicopters and four C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, three of which were carrying fuel for the return trip. It required close cooperation between elements from the Army, Navy, and Air Force. It also required a bit of luck with weather. The close cooperation worked tolerably well enough. The weather ... didn't. Eagle Claw ended in disaster when one of the helicopters collided with one of the tankers while they were preparing to abort the mission anyway, because they didn't have enough mechanically-fit helicopters to complete the mission.

But that wasn't the end of the matter. They had one more trick up their sleeve. One of the problems with Operation Eagle Claw was that it relied on too much coordination. They decided to simplify matters by using only one aircraft, staging the mission out of the continental United States, using multiple in-air re-fuelings on the way to Iran, and meeting up with a nearby aircraft carrier. The aircraft they chose was a C-130 Hercules, and they would land inside a soccer stadium close by the American Embassy.

"Now hold on a second," I hear you saying. "You can't actually do that." Well, not with a stock C-130, you can't. But this one? It's been modified. Ladies and gentlemen, behold Operation Credible Sport:

Yes, someone looked at a C-130 airframe and said, "You know what this thing needs? Rockets. A whole bunch of rockets." One set of rockets to soak up the high rate of descent. Another set of rockets to slow the beast down once you're on the deck. And a third set of rockets, to kick your butt back up skyward when it's time to leave. Oh yeah, this would have gotten the job done.

Except that, on the last test flight, some damn fool hit the switches out of sequence. Believe it or not, everyone made it out of there. With that much explodium on board, you'd better believe they had a fire truck close by.

But for that, the hostages might have been home by early November. As it was, on November 2, the Iranian parliament accepted an Algerian mediation plan, and a few days after that, Jimmy Carter lost his re-election bid. The plan was shelved after that.

And by the way: landing a C-130 on a carrier was the least crazy part of this plan. It had been done before, in 1963.

Sesquicentennial, Part XVIII: Foreign Affairs

2011-11-11T15:55:00.002-06:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

In the modern era, we're accustomed to fast-moving, quick-paced conflicts. The interval between the initial invasion of Iraq and the fall of Baghdad in 2003 could be measured in weeks. The interval between the beginnings of unrest in Libya and the death of Quaddafi could be measured in only months. This, you have to understand, is a fairly new development, especially in American military history. Specifically, it was a response to what happened in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. One of our take-aways from that conflict is that we wouldn't have time to gear up for any future conflict ... and the new watch-words became "come as you are" and "win the first fight." We appear to have more or less learned the lesson.

But in 1861, we were still over a century away from that revelation. The fall of 1861 moved very, very slowly. This was a deliberate pause on both sides. One of the things clear to everyone after the Battle of Bull Run was that no one was really ready for any of this. Everyone needed time to raise, equip, and train fresh troops. A whole lot of fresh troops.

The Union wasn't having a tremendously difficult time doing any of this. To raise and outfit an army, you need a supply of manpower, ready cash to buy weapons and ammunition, more ready cash to expend ammunition in training, and skilled men to lead and direct the training of your new troops. The Union ran down its list: Manpower? Check. Cash? Check. More cash? Check. Skilled men? Well, sort of. But still check.

The Union was beginning to shake out its pre-War old guard. Some of the retirements, if somewhat unfair, were also necessary. Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, the Army's commanding general, was an old man, and not in the best of health to begin with. If he were younger and more vigorous, he'd probably be the man for the job; but young and vigorous he most assuredly was not. His retirement was expected, and surprised no one. As his replacement, Lincoln selected the brightest of his rising stars: General George McClellan. His earlier success was one of the few bright spots for the Union so far. And if there's anything a former railroad engineer knew, it was organization. And it does have to be said: that fall and that winter, General McClellan molded the broken, dispirited soldiers that slouched around Washington into a tight, disciplined unit: the Army of the Potomac. And he strengthened the defenses surrounding Washington to the point that the Federal capital was now the most heavily-fortified city on Earth. Whatever else you may have to say about General McClellan, you must give him credit for laying the groundwork and forging the tools. He was, in many ways, a perfectly splendid officer.

Down South, a similar story was playing out. The Confederates had the same four needs for army-building. And they ran down the same checklist: Manpower? Check ... for now. Cash? Check, with the same proviso. More cash? Well, we may have to get back to you on that one. Skilled men? Oh yes, plenty! But, without arms and ammunition, what can they do?

The Union blockade was beginning to pinch the Confederacy's coffers. They had virtually no native industry of their own. They knew this going in. Their big plan all along was to gain enough support abroad, from foreign merchants who needed their cotton, so that they could use a powerful foreign fleet to force the Union blockade aside. At which point, they could buy all the arms they needed from the English and French. But ... that consummation was still a long, long way from being concluded.

England, you see, wasn't exactly eager to leap into a military alliance with the Confederacy.

Oh, there's one reason why they might. It'd poke a sharp stick in the Yankees' eyes, and no mistake. London might well be up for that. But, there were two issues lurking in the background that cloud those waters. First, as we said before, war with the Union would mean war with the US Navy. It's a war England would probably win, but it would cost. England wasn't eager to pay that cost. And secondly, the Confederacy was explicitly a slave power. There was an organization in London, the Anti-Slavery Society, headed by a German immigrant named Albert. Ordinarily that would have meant little. But, since Albert's wife was Victoria, by Grace of God Queen of England, Scotland, and all the rest; it mattered a great deal indeed. What the Sovereign wants, the Sovereign tends to get; and Prime Minister Palmerston was going to have to have an outstanding reason if he was going to go before her and ask her to support a slave-holding Power.

The Union damn near gave it to him.

William Yancey, the current Confederate representative in London, was sick and unable to fulfill his duties. So, President Davis had to appoint a couple of replacements: John Slidell of Louisiana and James Mason of Georgia. Their job was to get as much support, official and unofficial, as they possibly could. A direct ship to England couldn't be had, so they made their way out to where they could catch a ship for England. Originally, they made for the Bahamas, but they'd missed an England-bound ship by mere days. Then they heard that an English mail ship would be leaving Cuba soon. So, they sailed for Cuba, and got a ride on the RMS Trent. At that point, they thought they were safely England-bound.

It's more or less at this point that the USS San Jacinto intervenes, and stops the Trent for a cargo inspection. And by "cargo", I mean Messrs. Mason and Slidell, since the captain of the San Jacinto had heard while he was laid up in Cuba following an Atlantic patrol that two Confederate ministers were England-bound on the Trent. (Did anyone bother keeping secrets back then?)

Now, strictly speaking, Captain Wilkes had no legal right to stop the Trent. This seizure was a violation of international law. But, Captain Wilkes took it upon himself to detain the Trent and its passengers, so as to disrupt the Confederacy's diplomatic efforts. It apparently escaped Captain Wilkes' calculations that such an action might well enrage England, and provoke them to enter the War on the Confederacy's side.

This mess would take several months to unwind, over the winter of 1861-1862. Several times, things looked like they might flare up into open war. But, owing to skillful diplomacy by President Lincoln and his ambassador in London, Charles F. Adams, no such war took place. England did embark on a naval construction program. They did strengthen their garrison in Canada. But, after an admission of wrongdoing that wasn't really an admission, Mason and Slidell were released from custody and allowed to board a Royal Navy ship in Provincetown, Massachusetts. So, Captain Wilkes merely delayed the two men for six months or so.

In the end, very little changed. The Confederacy wasn't going to get the recognition it wanted, not yet anyway. But, they did win one key concession from the British: recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent party. While this meant nothing as far as Her Majesty's Government was concerned, it meant that Confederate ships could use British ports to re-provision, and they could contract with private suppliers for arms and munitions.

Half a loaf was better than none. The Confederacy would have as much arms as it could buy and smuggle through the Union blockade. That would allow them to field an army. For how long, no one knew yet. President Davis hoped it would be long enough.

It's About Time

2011-11-04T18:37:00.003-05:00

A while back, a group of physicists at CERN reported a remarkable result: they had observed a beam of neutrinos traveling faster than light. Which, near as we can tell, ought to be impossible. They are currently attempting to repeat their experiment to verify their results, and are also looking into possible measurement errors.

One recent rebuttal was interesting. They claim that, if they really were moving faster than light, they ought to have shed energy in the form of specific particles, which the CERN experiment did not detect.

Another theory holds that something that's moving faster than light is also moving backwards in time. Leading to the physicists' joke: "We don't serve faster-than-light neutrinos here," said the barman. A neutrino walks into the bar. I'm not sure I buy the theory, but then again, I pretty much hate time travel in all its forms.

Another competing theory caught my attention: the neutrinos only seemed to be traveling faster than light, because the laboratory used GPS satellites as a time reference. Since the satellites were also moving with respect to the experiment, that motion also has to be accounted for, leading to a margin of error that almost exactly covers the gap.

"Now, wait one second," I can hear you saying. "GPS satellites are used to find where you are. What do clocks have to do with it?" Everything, my friend. Everything. The clock is by far the most important thing a GPS satellite carries. It's the key to the whole process.

You see, one of the things we think we know about the Universe is that light always moves at the same speed. We're fairly sure about that. At least, we haven't been able to design an experiment to disprove that fact. So, if you have two clocks, and Clock A broadcasts a time signal to Clock B, then the difference between Clock A's time at arrival and the received time from Clock B tells you the instantaneous distance between the two clocks. With me so far?

Now, each of the GPS satellites is continually broadcasting two pieces of information: an identifier, and a time signal. The identifier tells you which satellite it is, and that information plus your current time should tell you where that satellite ought to be. So, once your GPS receiver gets a signal from Satellite A, it compares the broadcast time with the current system time, and computes a distance. Using that distance, and the satellite's position, it figuratively draws a circle on the globe. You're somewhere on that circle.

That's not enough. So, it looks for a second signal. If it can find Satellite B, it compares Satellite B's broadcast time with the current system time, converts that into a distance, and draws another circle on the globe. Now, those two circles intersect in at most two places. So, you're at one, or the other. You still don't know which.

Well, that doesn't really work, either. So, you need a third signal. Now, it looks for Satellite C, and does the same thing. It compares times, finds a distance, draws a third circle ... and now, if the Earth were a perfect sphere, all three circles would meet in harmony in one and only one place. But the Earth isn't a perfect sphere. It's not a perfect anything. It's awfully damned lumpy. So...

So it looks for a fourth signal. Once it finds Satellite D, it goes through the same process. And basically, it finds the point where all four circles more or less meet up. And hey presto, you know where you're at. And, if you have a relatively new unit, it'll also tell you that you need to take the next exit to get to your Aunt Sally's house. Oh, and you need to pick up a loaf of bread and some eggs while you're at it.

But, mad scientists being the innovative chaps that they are, they found a new and interesting "off-label" use for GPS technology. Why worry about synchronizing your clocks if the U.S. Department of Defense has already gone to the trouble of synchronizing one for you? Well, now we think we know a good reason: because it's whizzing around the planet at 17,500 miles per hour, that's why. And if you don't take that into account, weird things might happen.

Although the jury's still out. Weird things might still be happening. We won't know until the re-test is over. Measurements talk, and we just don't have enough of 'em yet.

Still, we should know something in six months or so. Keep your fingers crossed.

What Might Have Been, Part III

2011-10-28T18:33:00.004-05:00

Forty years ago, when they were drawing up the plans for the Space Transportation System, the original plans called for a flight rate of about fifty times per year. About the most we ever managed on a consistent basis was six. Something doesn't quite add up, here. What went wrong?

Well, one thing that went wrong is that there was never enough traffic to justify a fifty-per-year sortie rate. And another thing that went wrong is that it takes about three to four months to turn an orbiter around for re-flight. Early turn-around estimates were wildly optimistic. Now, we could have achieved a fifty-per-year sortie rate. But we would have needed more orbiters. With each orbiter flying at most four times per year, you need at least fifteen orbiters to keep the flight rate up.

The additional expense of those orbiters probably isn't as much as you're thinking. A large part of a Shuttle's price tag came from the fact that we had to amortize the entire RDT&E budget over five units. Six, if you count Enterprise. Similarly, part of the reason that a Bugatti Veyron cost $2 million and a Toyota Camry costs $20 thousand is that only 200 Bugatti Veryons were ever built, and there are about 5 million Camrys out there. Once you build the factory and tooling, the marginal cost of each additional unit isn't astronomical; and if you build enough of them, you get better at it, and the efficiency begins to show in the unit cost.

Which still begs the question: you don't need such a high sortie rate, unless you're moving a lot of cargo upstairs. Which is what went wrong with my teaser from back in May. Without such cargo volume, why pursue the matter any further?

For a couple of reasons. First, it keeps my mind occupied when I'm on the treadmill. And second, counterfactual scenarios sometimes provide a glimpse into why things in the real world turned out the way they did. So, without further ado, we're going to board the bus for Crazytown. Don't worry, we've got return tickets.

First, we go back to the year 1969. The lynchpin of the Soviet answer to Project Apollo was Sergei Korolev's giant N-1 rocket. It was about as big, about as powerful, could lift about as much stuff into space ... and it had 30 engines in its first stage. As I've mentioned before, Korolev had spent the last ten or fifteen years in a pissing match with Chelomei and also with Glushko, who was the engine expert. Korolev had to use less powerful engines, which meant that he had to use a lot of them. The first flight of the N-1 was in February of 1969, and by "flight" I mean "explosion". Getting thirty engines to play nicely together is not exactly an easy feat.

Between 1969 and 1972, three more test flights took place. The N-1 program was not officially cancelled until 1974. The Soviet Union never did land a man on the moon, but it wasn't for lack of effort. At cancellation, two N-1 rockets were still ready for test flights.

Which brings up a very interesting question, and the springboard for our counterfactual exercise: Why, five years after they'd already lost the Moon Race, were they still working on a Moon rocket?

The most likely answer is simply inertia. Soviet programs tended not to be cancelled until someone with authority looked at it and said, "Why are we still doing this?" And sometimes not even then. Voskhod 3, for instance was never officially cancelled. The spacecraft stayed in a shed, kept ready, even as Soyuz 1 was being prepared for flight.

The more entertaining answer is that the Soviets were planning a propaganda coup, by the establishment of a permanent Lunar base. There were some plans drawn up to this effect, which is another reason why the plug wasn't pulled right away when Apollo 11 was successful. Part of the reason that the project was cancelled in 1974 is that none of the tests had been successful. But the truth is, each one got a little bit closer. The fifth test flight might well have done the trick, had there ever been one.

Now, in this scenario, it's 1976. Two successful test flights prove the design, and more rockets are built. While America celebrates its Bicentennial, giant Soviet rockets are delivering payloads to a rapidly-growing Soviet base on the Moon.

What I'm trying to sell here is a scenario where Reagan, as part of his defense build -up, buys a whole bunch of Shuttles, and plays catch-up in a Moonbase race. The problem with this scenario is that it requires everyone to go crazy, in the same way, all at once.

And, at the end of the day, I just can't buy it. No part of this is plausible.

The Soviet Union cancelled the N-1 in 1974 because at that point, it was a white elephant with no useful purpose. Even if it worked, it wasn't going to do anything especially useful for them. They had decided to focus on a long-duration spaceflight program, and score their propaganda points that way. It worked, after a fashion. To this day, all of the duration records are held by Russians, except only longest flight by a woman. The point is, they had found a way to make their case at an acceptable cost in time and materials.

And for us, as I've said several times, we've proven by trial and error that the American public is willing to spend about 0.5% to 1.0% of the Federal budget on NASA, to include all of its aeronautical research programs. There was never a political case to be made for a giant program involving a moonbase in the 1980s or 1990s. Which meant that the "design" sortie rate for the Shuttle was a moot point. Part of the reason it only flew four to six times a year is that there was only enough traffic to keep it busy four to six times a year. And even so, look at the other side of the record books: the people with six or seven missions to their credit? Only two Russians on that list. The Shuttle put more human beings into orbit than any other spacecraft. That's not an achievement to sneeze at.

As we turn the page on this fine project, and as we look back at the other things we might have done in its stead, I have to say that we probably did about as well as we could have. We lost fourteen fine people. But we gained an immeasurable amount of knowledge. Only time will tell if that was a good trade. All I know is, the people who made that sacrifice believed so.

I hope -- and I also believe -- they were right.

Video Del Fuego, Part XLVIII

2011-10-21T22:18:00.002-05:00

When Space-X recently announced their proposed Falcon Heavy rocket, one of the selling points they touted was extreme engine-out reliability. This comes from the fact that, at liftoff, the three core stages have 27 Merlin rocket engines between them. This got me to thinking. Specifically, it got me to thinking of an earlier rocket, that also had a fair number of first-stage engines.

The Soviet entry into the Moon Race, their equivalent of the Saturn V, was the N-1. The N-1 was a giant beast of a rocket, with thirty engines. I had always called that first stage a plumbers' nightmare, because of the complicated piping that I associated with so many engines firing simultaneously. It occurs that, perhaps, I was being unfair to Mr. Korolev.

And another curious thing: the last test flight of the Soviet Moon rocket was in 1974. Five years after the first American landing, and nearly two years after the last. If they'd given up on going to the Moon, then what in the world were they doing still trying to perfect a rocket for doing just that?

Therein, perhaps, lay a curious tale. In history as it actually happened, all four N-1 test flights ended more or less like this:

But what if they hadn't? What if they'd gotten all the kinks worked out? From everything I've read, they came close. One more test might have done the trick.

Maybe not next time, but soon, I'll take up the question of what might have happened next.

Election 2012 Preview: Handicapping the Primaries, Part III

2011-10-14T16:46:00.003-05:00

Well, as I said before, prognostication is probably something I shouldn't do. My record is rather less than perfect. Still, it's fun, so I'm going to have another shot at it. Quite a lot has happened, and a few people have dropped out since the last time we looked at the race. It's still a long way to the conventions, but we've got a pretty good idea of who won't be in the running.

Democratic Party: Again, this entry is for completeness' sake only. Ralph Nader's pot-stirring notwithstanding, incumbent Presidents who still want the job always win re-nomination. Incumbency is a powerful advantage. You'd have to be a fool to throw that aside. Granted, the Democrats almost did in 1980, but it's not 1980. For the same reason, we won't see any movement on the VP side of the ticket, either. The last President who was re-elected after switching running mates was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 ... and let's be honest here, Roosevelt could have had a burlesque dancer for a running mate, and he still would have won. That was a special case. These days, such a shift would be a huge display of weakness. So, no change here, it's Obama/Biden once again for Team Blue, unless one or both of them gets run over by a combine harvester in the meantime.

Republican Party: Oh dear, where do I begin? Let's just do this by the numbers (according to Intrade, current as of Friday afternoon):

Mitt Romney, 67%: He's managing a difficult dance extraordinarily well. As I said earlier, one of the biggest problems that he faces is that Obamacare is Romneycare with the serial numbers filed off, and everyone knows this. He had to find a way to credibly run against something he basically invented ... and so far, he's actually doing exactly that. An amazing feat, really. The basic thing to understand about the Romney campaign at this point is that he's not playing to win so much as he's playing to not lose. His selling points are competence and business acumen. Those are just about his only cards, and so far, he's playing them very well. He doesn't lead many polls, though, because his other problem may well be his Achilles' heel. He's a Mormon, stumping before a heavily evangelical Christian electorate. That's going to cost him. Will it cost him enough to turf him from the campaign again? Maybe, but only maybe. He still out-polls all other potential Republican contenders against President Obama. Electability may win out over religious prejudice.

Rick Perry, 11%: I've listened to Rick Perry several times in GOP Gubernatorial Debates here in Texas, and I have to ask: Who is this man, and what has he done with the real Rick Perry? Oh, I never expected him to be a debating all-star. But I never expected him to crater this horribly. Nevertheless, he'll make a strong run this coming Spring, once the campaign heads down South. This is going to be a two-way race, between Mitt Romney and "not Mitt Romney", whoever the hell that ends up being. Rick Perry still has a fighting chance to be "not Mitt Romney". But he's going to have to fight off several contenders for that slot, including Mitt Romney. (This is going to be a really weird year.)

Herman Cain, 9%: Fitting, since his signature tax plan is called "9-9-9". John Huntsman was right about that, by the way; it does sound like a pizza price. (And a pretty good one, at that.) Herman Cain leads the polls at the moment in the contentious race for "not Mitt Romney", but he's going to peak and stall pretty soon. He's ... how do I say this without sounding crass? Let's just say that his campaign will do a Titanic once the campaign goes down South. You can guess the reason.

And no one else is above 5%. This includes Huntsman and Gingrich (2%), Michelle Bachmann (1%), and Sarah Palin (under 1%). Sarah Palin has bailed out of the running for the Republican nomination, but this may not be the last we've seen of her this year. The interesting thing about the way Intrade works is that her chances will never drop to zero, even though she's dropped out. There are a number of poor slobs who bought Palin shares when they were at 7%, and didn't have to good sense to sell while the selling was good. They're stuck.

I still think Bachmann would be a good, if risky buy. She's liable to do quite well in Iowa, maybe even pulling a win. In that case, I'd expect a spike, and if you bought in at 1%, you could do quite well. But, as I say, it's risky. Bachmann may well have peaked already. She's been on a slump since debate season started. Still, if she were to climb back towards double digits, a buck or two could get you a night at the movies. (I think. I'm still not sure any real money changes hands, here.)

Palin is an interesting case. I see a scenario where she could be back in the running. Let's say that Romney does win the nomination. Let's further say that the Tea Party finds that unacceptable, and revolts. Who would be the standard-bearer for a third-party challenge? I don't see Rick Perry doing that. I don't see John Huntsman doing that. Both of them could reload for the 2016 GOP nomination, unless they burn their bridges with a third-party run. But Palin, who's already burnt her fair share of bridges, would certainly be game.

In any case, the battle for the Republican nomination will be a two-way scrum between Romney and Perry, barring a major breakout by another candidate. And the field is essentially fixed, there will be no new candidacies at this point. Either one could win. Romney's long-term position looks pretty good, and he's frankly the strongest candidate the Republicans could get out of this field. If they're smart, he's the one they'll run.

If they're not smart, or if there's a Tea Party revolt and a third-party run, we might well see the curious sight of a President, holding a bag full of 9% unemployment and lousy economy, winning re-election anyway because the opposition is either divided or too horrifying to contemplate.

I'd say stranger things have happened, except that I'm not sure that's true. As I said, this is going to be a really weird election year.

Moneyball

2011-10-01T18:08:00.004-05:00

My wife and I recently went to see the film Moneyball. I'm not a huge fan of baseball, but I had heard about the concept that the Oakland A's used to build a very good team on a shoestring budget. It was a very good film. I say that not because it sparked a latent interest in baseball, but because it got me to thinking about a few other things. To wit: what, precisely, will the United States do with its manned spaceflight program now that the Shuttles are going off to various museums and exhibits around the country?

I know, last time we talked about this, I promised a peek into a scenario where they might actually have reached the Shuttle's original advertised sortie rate of one flight per week. I got to thinking about it, though, and that requires a detour into Crazytown that I'm not quite ready for yet. I'll get around to that sooner rather than later, just not today.

So, we're stuck with the basic question of what to do next. And then, on the way home from the theater, it struck me. The problem all along is that we've been trying to field a New York Yankees program on an Oakland Athletics budget. And that's worked out about as well as anyone ought to expect it to. The main problem is that, ever since 1968, the long-range plans have all assumed massive budget increases that just won't happen.

It's time for a new paradigm. Taking a cue from Moneyball, I'm going to identify a couple of over-valued and under-valued "players" whose status needs to be re-evaluated. In no particular order:

(1) Heavy Lift: The question has to be asked -- do we really need a dedicated heavy lift booster? Do we need to re-create a Saturn V class rocket? I used to think so, but I've changed my mind. Dedicated heavy lift rockets are problematic at best from an economic point of view. They only make sense if you have a lot of heavy payloads going up on a fairly consistent schedule. If you only use them once or twice a year, the unit cost becomes hideous. You build and use at most ten or twenty in a decade, which means that you have to spread the cost of the factory and tooling over at most ten or twenty flights. This alone massively inflates the cost of a project that uses heavy lift. Which, in turn, makes the up-front "sticker shock" so harsh that the project never climbs up out of the planning stage. The Constellation program is only the most recent example of this. So, in our new paradigm, screw heavy lift. We're going to figure out a way to get by without it. And, with a few key enabling technologies, we can do just that.

(2) Closed-Loop Life Support: Part of the rationale for heavy lift is that interplanetary manned spacecraft need to be huge. If you have to carry all of your consumables (food, air, water) as cargo, you have to have about 30 kilograms of supplies for each crew, each day. That's just about a ton per crew per month. A minimum-energy trajectory to Mars takes nine months, and it can take as long as a year for the return launch window to open. So, at thirty months duration, we're talking 30 tons of food, water, and oxygen for each crew member. That's 120 tons for a crew of four. The largest part of that figure is water. If you can figure out how to recycle the water, you can cut that figure down drastically. Freeze-dried food and oxygen come to a little more than 1 kilogram per day. You would need a week or two of reserve water supply, but you could cut 120 tons down to less than ten. Savings like this cascade through the entire system.

(3) High-Efficiency Propulsion: Another part of the rationale for heavy lift is the fact that interplanetary spacecraft need so much fuel, not just for Earth escape, but for returning to Earth later on. Obviously, if you have more fuel-efficient engines, you don't have to haul as much fuel along with you. Taken together, these last two items make the spacecraft design much lighter. And since weight lifted into orbit is a big part of your cost, this makes the program as a whole more affordable.

(4) In-Space Refueling: That's all well and good, of course, but if you still have to lift the fully-fueled spacecraft into orbit all at once, you still need a heavy lift booster. That's where our last enabling technology comes in. If you develop the techniques for transferring fuel in orbit, you don't have to lift the whole thing all at once. You can lift the crew cabin first, then the fuel tanks, then the engines, then the fuel. And, once the ship returns from its first flight, it can be refurbished, refueled, and used again.

(5) Reusable Launch Vehicles: That's all nice, but we still have the problem of being able to get into low Earth orbit economically. Re-use is fairly important, if you want to get costs down. Operational simplicity is also important, of course, but you really want to be able to use expensively-machined components like engines more than once before dunking them into the ocean. Fortunately, we've run into a spot of luck on this score:

It's not completely reusable. But, if it works, enough components can be reused to bring operating costs down substantially. Also, the Falcon 9 core is the key ingredient for:

(Honest, I don't work for these guys. I just like their work.)

Bearing all of this in mind, where do I think we should go from here? Mainly, I think it's not really NASA's job to build a new rocket. Rockets, we've got. Good ones. What we need is for them to work on (2) through (4) above. If you've been paying attention, this is the "flexible path" option outlined in last year's Augustine Committee report. These goals ought to be achievable on a fairly modest budget. With those three things in hand, they can leverage private industry's work, and carry off an awesome program of exploration for a very reasonable price. And isn't that what we're paying them for?

Moving Violations

2011-09-23T20:34:00.003-05:00

There's an old physics joke: 186,000 mi/s. It's not just a good idea. It's the law.

If this week's announced results prove out, they may just have to issue speeding citations to the staff at CERN, in Switzerland. To summarize, a neutrino experiment appeared to result in speeds 20 parts per million above the speed of light in a vacuum.

That ... is damn weird. It calls into question some fairly fundamental assumptions we've made about how we think the Universe works. By fairly fundamental, I mean some of them go back a couple of hundred years. Allow me to explain.

There's a fairly simple thought experiment we can run through to demonstrate why we think nothing can go faster than light. It relies on just three basic assumptions, that I will list below:

1) There is no universally-preferred frame of reference. A slightly less fancy way to put that is that there's no such thing as absolute motion. Motion only makes sense if you can measure it relative to something else. A corollary to this is that, if you're out in the middle of nowhere and have few or no reference points, you can't tell the difference between sitting still and moving at a uniform speed in a straight line. This is called Galilean invariance.

2) Light moves at the same speed in all inertial frames of reference. Another way of saying that is that light always moves at the same speed in a given medium, no matter where or how you measure it. This is one of the cornerstones of the Special Theory of Relativity.

3) All particles that have zero rest mass, like photons, are constrained to move at the speed of light, and only at the speed of light. They cannot accelerate or decelerate, but they can gain or lose energy in frequency.

Now, bearing those three assumptions in mind, let's imagine two spaceships out in intergalactic space. They're far enough away from any other points of reference that they can't really measure their motion all that well against them, so their only points of reference are each other. Which means, they have no real way of telling if they're at rest, or moving. For all they know, they're sitting still while the other ship zips past them. Now, let's also assume that one of the ship is charged up with several million volts, so that when they pass close enough, a spark jumps between the two ships. We won't say anything about how fast they're moving relative to one another. The speed can be arbitrarily high.

From the first ship, what you see is that you're sitting still, then this other ship zips by, and then FLASH! You're at the center of an expanding shell of photons. The situation looks the same from the other ship -- you're sitting still, zoom, FLASH! You're also at the center of an expanding shell of photons.

Again, the speeds of the ships haven't been specified. It doesn't matter how fast they think they're moving, because no matter which way you slice it, a wave-front of photons is racing out ahead of you. The only logical conclusion is that both ships must be moving slower than the speed of light.

That's all well and good. But now we have, at least potentially, a very sticky problem.

If this recent experiment is correct, if the Swiss scientists haven't made any errors, then one or more of the three basic assumptions above must be wrong.

The implications of this...

On one hand, it staggers the mind. Such fundamental notions about the Universe just don't fall every day. But on the other hand, this only involves such high energies that most of us will never see any kind of difference. And on the other other hand, I'm really only certain about three things anyway[1], so it won't bother me too much if the Swiss scientists are right or wrong. And even if they're right, it'll take quite some time for them to figure out exactly which of the above assumptions are wrong, and in what way. It'll be interesting to watch the commotion no matter how it turns out.

Still. That's going to be one hell of a speeding ticket, and I'm glad I don't have to pay.

[1] Conservation of Mass, Conservation of Momentum, and Conservation of Energy. As far as I'm concerned, everything else is open for speculation.

Ten Years.

2011-09-11T09:35:00.004-05:00

The relentless fury of the August sun has retreated. I believe I've said elsewhere that Autumn in Texas is usually a time when God apologizes for leaving the oven on Broil for a few months, and the apology takes the form of cool mornings and warm sunshine. Ten years ago today, it was almost exactly the same kind of morning. But with a difference.

That Tuesday morning began for me like any other: I was at my job, wrestling with a pile of code that was stubbornly refusing to do what it was supposed to be doing. The company I was working for had a piece of the FAA's Free Flight Phase 1 project. The specific piece I was working on was the adaptation of pFAST (Passive Final Approach Spacing Tool) to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. It was hard sledding, but that's a tale for another day. After a couple of hours, I'd reached an impasse, and decided to check the news as a bit of a break.

That was as much productive work as I, or anyone else in my office, got done that day.

The news that an airplane had collided with one of the towers didn't really register yet. I thought it was an accident. Something like that had happened once before, back in the '40s, when a B-17 hit the Empire State Building. How something like that happened with modern navigation equipment, though, was a mystery. Then, the second airplane hit, and all doubt was gone.

Once could have been an accident. Twice? No, twice meant it was deliberate action. And what's more, I knew who was responsible. I'd been following the story for years. I remembered the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Khobar Towers. I remembered his 1998 fatwa against Americans, and the attack against the USS Cole. This was his way of finishing the job. A cold fury gripped my heart. They must be made to pay. And I was not alone in that sentiment.

Five years ago, the memory still stung with the ache of unfinished business.

Today, the memory still stings. But at least there is some closure, some completion.

The architect of those attacks is in custody and will never again be a free man, and the man who gave the order is part of the marine food chain. Both lived long enough to see their ideology utterly discredited. The crowds that mobbed Tahrir Square, the citizen-soldiers who liberated Libya inch by inch, they had no use at all for the theocratic state Osama bin Laden championed. The throngs who overthrew one-time strongmen from the Atlantic coast to the Arabian peninsula weren't chanting his name, or that of his movement. Rather, they wanted democracy and self-determination. They had weighed his ideas in the balance, and found them wanting. Bin Laden did not die in glory, but in defeat and despair.

And for our part? On this anniversary, when we look back and reflect on the very real pain and loss of that day, we can look forward as well. When we think of those who lost lives and loved ones that day, we can take solace in the fact that they have been avenged. When we think of the lives and loved ones lost in the wars, we can take comfort in the fact that they did not die totally in vain. From the Maghreb to the Hindu Kush, people have a chance at freedom and self-determination that they have not had in many years, if ever. Some of those stories will end in success. Some will not end so happily. But the ends of those stories will not be written in English, by an American author. Those stories will be written by the people who live them, as is right and proper.

And for our part, our story will also go on. We have our full share of problems. But on the whole, I wouldn't trade them for anyone else's on this Earth.

May God be with you all, and may God continue to bless the United States of America.

Sesquicentennial, Part XVII: Man in Motion

2011-09-09T20:30:00.007-05:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

Only a year earlier, he was the picture of abject failure. Virtually nothing he had turned his hand to resulted in success. He was the husband of a devoted wife, and the father of adoring children, and exactly that much was right with his world. He was a miserable figure, shuffling to and from the only job he could find, a clerk in his father's store. At thirty-eight years of age, Ulysses Grant had hit rock bottom.

His fortunes hadn't always looked so grim. His father, Jesse Grant, was well-regarded though not spectacularly wealthy. Born Hiram Ulysses Grant, he was mistakenly nominated to West Point under the name Ulysses S. Grant. He raised no complaint: he'd secretly dreaded having to go by the initials H.U.G., knowing that would mean no end of ribbing from his classmates. He was an indifferent student, graduating 21st out of 39, with two notable exceptions. He was an outstanding horseman, and he was exceptionally talented in mathematics.

Grant didn't actually want to be a career soldier. Oh, he had no qualms about the job, it's just that what he really wanted was to be a professor of mathematics. And that's what almost happened. He wanted the job, West Point wanted him back as an instructor, but this was 1843, and trouble was brewing down on the border with Mexico. Lieutenant Grant would be a soldier, after all.

As a quartermaster, if he were so inclined, he might have seen no action at all. But that wasn't his style. Twice, he was brevetted for bravery, at Molino del Rey and at Chapultepec. This, despite the fact that he was deeply opposed to the war itself. He thought it terribly unjust, and would later write, "I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day, regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation."

After the war, Grant remained in the Army. As a result of the Mexican War, the United States had acquired an immense amount of territory, and soldiers would be required to guarantee its safety. Grant's duties were to be as a quartermaster at a succession of forts on the west coast. It was more or less at this point that we'd see a facet of Grant's character that would resurface several times in the future. Grant, in the face of action, was a capable and diligent soldier. Grant, faced with the tedium of garrison duty, did not handle boredom well. It's not known for sure whether or not Grant ever drank on duty, but his commander believed that he had. Grant was given an ultimatum: resign, or face court-martial. He resigned.

For several years, Grant tried to make a go of it as a farmer, on a plot of land his family owned outside of St. Louis, Missouri. But Grant was a poor businessman. After four years, he had to give up farming, and spent a couple of years as a bill collector in St. Louis. This didn't work out, either; and after a string of failed ventures, he was forced to accept a job as a clerk in his father's leather goods store. This is where we find him in late 1860 and early 1861: a broken man, shuffling between his home and his father's store.

His luck began to change in April. After Fort Sumter was attacked, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the Rebellion. As it happened, soldiering was something Grant was quite familiar with ... And so it was that Grant helped to recruit a company of volunteers, and accompanied said unit to the state capital at Springfield. This company seemed to be more well-drilled and disciplined than most volunteers, so Governor Richard Yates offered Grant a position to recruit and train new troops. Grant accepted -- this wasn't the field command that he was looking for, but it beat working in his father's store. Besides, if he did a good enough job, perhaps someone would notice.

Someone did notice. Grant's enthusiasm, energy, and efficiency made an impression not only on his soldiers, but on Governor Yates. In June, the Governor promoted Grant to Colonel, and gave him the Twenty-first Illinois volunteer regiment, a particularly unruly regiment of volunteers. Within a few months, they weren't quite so unruly anymore. It's not that Grant was a harsh disciplinarian, or a martinet. He wasn't. But he kept his men busy with drill, attended to their needs diligently, and as is so often the case, his soldiers responded positively to such treatment. This turn-around caught the eye of Major General John Fremont, who'd known Grant by reputation from the Mexican War. He'd been appointed by Lincoln as commander in the West, and Fremont needed someone to take charge of a deteriorating situation in the District of Cairo. Fremont saw Grant as "a man of dogged persistance, and iron will," and tapped him for the post.

What a difference a year makes. From the depths of failure in September 1860, Grant had risen to command of a regiment of volunteers in September 1861. This change of fortunes affected Grant's entire demeanor. He began to walk with a bold, confident step. He was immensely confident of his abilities, but at the same time, kept a fairly solid grasp on the limits of the possible. These two qualities seldom meet in one person.

General Fremont had given Grant orders to venture out and meet the Confederate forces at Belmont. Grant immediately began making the necessary preparations. Soon, he would march out to meet the enemy.

In September 1861, few knew the name Ulysses S. Grant. This was about to change.

Video Del Fuego, Part XLVII

2011-08-26T20:46:00.002-05:00

The 1950s were a fine time to be an aeronautical engineer. There was so much new ground to be covered. There were so many new ideas to try. Many of those ideas were pretty weird, and there are plenty of perfectly good reasons we don't try them anymore, but no one knew those reasons ... yet. And there was only one way to find out. Which made that era, from approximately 1940 to 1960, such a rewarding time to work at places like Convair, Lockheed, Bell, or North American.

Some of the ideas to come out of that era shaped the way we still build airplanes to this day. Others, not so much. Some really peculiar aircraft parted company with their shadows in those years. For example, did you hear the one about the supersonic seaplane?

This beautiful craft was a contemporary of Convair's other delta-wing fighters, the F-102 and F-106, adapted to take off and land on the open ocean. The basic problem was this: the Navy wanted a supersonic fighter for fleet defense. But, there were serious doubts about being able to launch and recover supersonic fighters from aircraft carriers. So, Convair came up with the idea of adapting the Delta Dart with skids, so that it could take off and land at sea. The F2Y was a stunningly beautiful aircraft, and to this day is the only seaplane to break the sound barrier. That said, landing a delta-wing aircraft on water without hurting yourself is damn hard. They never built more than the one F2Y prototype.

Now, the Navy's designation F2Y leads to a question. Pre-1962, the Navy system for aircraft designation was first, a letter or letters for the mission; second, a series number; and third, a letter for the manufacturer. The numeral "1" was usually omitted. So, the Grumman F4F Wildcat was the fourth Navy fighter built by the Grumman corporation. And the Convair F2Y would have been the second Navy fighter built by Convair. What was the first, you ask?

Hoo boy ... Here was another solution to the problem of basing aircraft on ships. The Convair XFY was to be a VTOL fighter that could take off and land on any ship, meaning that any task force at all could have fighter support, even without a flat-top present. Lockheed also had an entry in this category, the XFV, but it never actually achieved full transition from vertical to horizontal flight, and never flew without a protective undercarriage. The Pogo managed several such transitions. The concept had a serious flaw, though. Imagine, for a moment, trying to land this thing on the fantail of a frigate, pitching and heaving in the middle of the ocean.

Yeah. No one else thought it was a good idea, either. You have to love a flight test report that ends, "We think it highly inadvisable to land this airplane."

We can look back and laugh now, but still ... this would have been a fine time to be a staff engineer at Convair. They got to work on some incredible stuff. For every crazy idea that didn't work, they had one or two that did. Designs that were cutting-edge when conceived were sometimes obsolete by the time they entered production. It was a wild, crazy time, and I'm kind of sorry to have missed it.

Election 2012 Preview: Handicapping the Primaries, Part II

2011-08-12T20:21:00.004-05:00

Now that football season is underway, it's just about time for the Presidential primary season to being in earnest. Just about everyone who's going to participate in next year's Republican primary has declared their candidacy. And, of course, we already know who the Democratic nominee will be. (You get three guesses. The first two don't count.) With all that said, we're going to dust off our crystal ball, and do some more prognosticating. (All figures from intrade.com, current as of Friday night.)

(Prognostication is something I probably shouldn't do. My record is somewhat less than stellar. I'm on record predicting Donovan McNabb to give the Eagles good reason to regret trading him to the Redskins, after all, and we all know how that turned out. Anyway...)

Democratic Party

I'm only doing this for completeness' sake. It's all over bar the shouting. As I said before, in the modern era, sitting Presidents just don't get turfed for re-nomination. And also in the modern era, they just don't go for a re-do on their running mates, either. So, I'm not even going to bother looking up the numbers. It's Obama/Biden for Team Blue in 2012, unless one or both of them get run over by a bus or something. (Which ain't gonna happen.)

Republican Party

And the Republican race is about to get fun. In the list to follow, one person wasn't even on it back in March, and ... well, let's just get to it.

Rick Perry, 32% -- And, surging out of nowhere, the Governor of Texas is in the lead, at least according to Vegas. He should officially declare his candidacy tomorrow in South Carolina. This is a development that should surprise no one. He spent a good bit of time last year denying he'd seek the Presidency. But it takes an extraordinarily humble man to resist that clarion call, and successful politicians are very seldom humble. He'd already become the longest-serving Governor in Texas' history. What else was there for him to do, but to go for the brass ring? And in a very real sense, his presence sucks all the oxygen out of the tent for everyone else. With his executive experience, his popularity with the Tea Party, and his skill in political skullduggery, he steals damn near everyone's trump cards. The man's got a clear path to the nomination, provided he doesn't do anything utterly stupid.

Mitt Romney, 29% -- Romney still clings stubbornly to second place. As well he should: he's been laying the groundwork for 2012 ever since the dust settled from 2008. But nothing important has changed. The big millstone around his neck is still the fact that ObamaCare is RomneyCare with the serial numbers filed off. He's going to have to find a way to run away from that without looking ridiculous. This feat is probably beyond him. He'll do all right in the Northeast. But once the race swings into the South and West ... well, let's just say Perry's got him bore-sighted.

Sarah Palin, 7% -- Yes, no one else is even out of single digits. Frankly, Palin has waited too long to get into the race. Michele Bachmann has already garnered much of her Tea Party base, and Rick Perry has already stolen most of that thunder. There might be room for two Tea Party candidates in the primary. No way is there room for three. Thanks for playing, Ms. Palin, your consolation prize is a Fox News gig.

Ron Paul, 6% -- Ron Paul will hang on until the bloody, bitter end. He hasn't a ghost of a chance of winning the nomination, but as long as he gets a bully pulpit, he'll use it to air his ideas. He's quite mad, of course, but I respect his persistence.

Michele Bachmann, 5% -- Given that Bachmann will probably win Iowa, I'm surprised to find her this low on the list. I'm going to kick myself for not buying a handful of Bachmann shares now, and unloading them right after the Iowa caucuses. I could turn a tidy profit. Still, she won't last. She's got Iowa, Romney's got New Hampshire, but after the race heads South, it's all Perry all day. (Seriously, I don't see how that dude loses, unless he shoots himself in the foot.)

Tim Pawlenty, 5% -- And sinking like a stone. I don't see how he recovers from the evisceration he got in last night's GOP debate. Stone barking mad Bachmann may be, but she was all over Pawlenty like a cheap suit. This just ain't Tim's year.

Others -- Not much to say. Newt's toast, but we knew that, even if no one's actually told him yet. He's still got a 1% share, for some inexplicable reason. Other than that, I see a whole bunch of names with zeroes by them. To a first approximation, this is probably going to be a three-way race initially: Perry, Romney, and Bachmann. Then, there'll be a down-select to Perry and Romney, and I expect Perry to win the nomination. They're laying down a 32% chance that the VP nominee will be Marco Rubio, but that's no more than a wild guess. As we all know, the VP pick comes down to who wins the nomination, and what sort of VP they want. We don't have enough information to go on yet to make a reasonable prediction.

And The Winner Is...

Currently, the betting line is 51%-47% in favor of the Democratic candidate, if you go by party. On the individuals list, Barack Obama leads with 49%, the nearest competitor being Rick Perry at 17%. It's going to be a tougher sell next year unless the economy improves, but if the Republicans go full-bore extremist, that might scare enough independents back into Obama's column. It'll be an interesting election season next summer and fall. But, I still think it favors the incumbent. Obama/Biden for the win is still worth a buck or two.

Remember, kids, vote early, and vote often!

For Want Of A Nail

2011-07-29T21:36:00.003-05:00

I have a fascination with the last irretrievable moment. In every accident, in every major event, there's almost always a definable moment where disaster could have been averted. If only key people had had one key piece of information, if only they'd made one decision differently, everything could have been different.

There was one such moment during the last tragic mission of Columbia. If the manager in charge had pushed for satellite images of the shuttle's underside, the extent of the damage might have been known, and it might have been possible to mount a rescue effort. There's a lot of mights involved ... but we also might have gotten those seven people back alive. And we might be seeing one now, in Washington. But that's not the one I'm talking about today.

On the first of June, 2009, Air France Flight 447 disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean. Its automatic systems had blurted out signals of danger, and then, silence. At the time, I had speculated about what might have gone wrong. Speculation was all it amounted to. Without the flight data recorders, no one would ever know the truth of the matter, and the data recorders were buried under eleven thousand feet of ocean. I fully expected no one would ever see them again.

I vastly underestimated the tenacity of France's Bureau of Investigation and Analysis. In May 2010, they had narrowed the location down to a five by five kilometer area. That gave them a small enough zone to allow a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to make a more detailed search. In April of this year, they found the wreckage, and with it not only the flight data recorder, but also the cockpit voice recorder. If that wasn't amazing enough, they were able to recover all of the data from both devices. Truly, this was astounding work, and my hat's off to them.

Now, after sifting through the reams of data available to them, the BEA has issued some preliminary reports. It turns out that some of my initial speculations were right, some less so.

The data clearly tells us that the pitot probes had iced over, corrupting the data going into the air data computers. This meant that the data feeding the primary flight displays weren't any good. What's not clear to me yet is exactly what happened next. They don't say if an updraft lifted the nose of the aircraft, or if the ice on the aircraft caused it to slow to a dangerously low speed. I'm guessing the latter, because they say that the crew pulled the nose of the aircraft up, which they probably wouldn't have done if the aircraft was already nose-high. The main point is, the aircraft was already on the verge of a stall, and lifting the nose made a bad problem worse. The aircraft then simply fell out of the sky.

The preliminary report released today says that it's basically a pilot training problem. Pilots typically have little to no training flying an aircraft manually at that speed and altitude, and therefore have little intuition on how they should recover from a situation like this. The BEA recommendation is to add this condition to the pilot training syllabus.

After thinking about it a bit, I have a few observations of my own.

1) Standby instruments rarely get the respect they deserve. Ideally, your cockpit scan should include your standby instruments, especially in a glass-cockpit airplane. If your air data computers are hosed for whatever reason, your standby instruments may still have good information on what your airplane's doing. If your standby instruments don't agree with your primary displays, you've got a problem. Exactly what kind of problem you won't know, but at least you can start looking. This particular failure cascade seems to indicate that the crew were still flying by the primary displays, up to the point where they no longer had any aerodynamic control. Respect your ISIS, ladies and gents, that's what it's there for.

2) Airbus makes an exceptionally sturdy fuselage. Really, this could apply to any modern composite-structure fuselage. They're absurdly strong. From the initial reports, I expected that the aircraft would have broken up in midair from aerodynamic stresses. A mostly aluminum structure probably would have. But from the wreckage, we know that it was intact when it hit the water. It was doing some pretty serious gyrations on the way down, and didn't come apart. That's solid construction.

3) These days, we can find damn near anything, damn near anywhere. I was sure those recorders were gone forever. Fish food, if there are any fish that live two miles down. Apparently, modern sonar is as good as a searchlight. I don't know exactly how those French submarines were able to narrow the field down as close as they did, and for obvious reasons they're not telling. But it's clear that if they want something found on the ocean floor, it can be found. And that wasn't a guarantee ten, or even five years ago.

4) There's a good reason for all this, besides morbid curiosity. The reason people like me pick disasters apart like this isn't that we're morbid toads. We may be, but that's beside the point. We want to know what happened, and how it happened, so we can stop it from happening next time. If that's even possible. The important lesson to come out of all this is that we've uncovered a gap in pilot training. We have the means at our disposal to close that gap. Thirty minutes of simulator time a year, and a pilot will have "experienced" this situation with enough fidelity that he or she will know what to do if the real thing ever happens. The next time this happens we'll probably never hear about it. The passengers will experience a bout of worse than normal turbulence, the pilots will experience five minutes of bowel-freezing terror, but the airplane will arrive at its scheduled destination. We'd have not known this, if we'd let it alone. Poking and prodding is part of our job. Our duty. Not always the most pleasant part, but an essential part nonetheless.

It's not much consolation for the people who lost loved ones two years ago, but this knowledge, painfully gained, may allow us to save the next one. That's certainly worth something.

Dedicated to the memory of Dr. Don Seath, my first professor in Aerospace Engineering, who passed away in May from pancreatic cancer. You taught me well.

Sesquicentennial, Part XVI: First Clash

2011-07-22T18:15:00.005-05:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

There is a misconception common to all belligerent parties in virtually ever war that has occurred in human history. It is a misconception so common that the catchphrases associated with it are almost impossible to link to a particular conflict. "Our boys will be home before the leaves fall." "They'll be home before Christmas." While the second can at least be placed confidently after the reign of Constantine the Great, the former has probably been said in every human language that has ever existed.

For one, while it's true that at a war's outset both sides believe that they will win, one side must be wrong. For another, at a war's outset, each side usually believes -- mistakenly -- that the other side is made up of ineffectual pushovers that can't stand the heat. For recent examples, you need only look to the phrases "Mother of all battles" and "Shock and Awe" for prominent cases on both sides. The same was true a century and a half ago. The same was true throughout recorded history. Truly, some things never change.

The fever produced by the simultaneous forces of a fervent belief in victory coupled with a fixed belief in the other side's inherent cowardice caused the major papers of the North to temporarily push Lincoln away from the plan drafted by his army commander, Lieutenant General Winfield Scott. Scott, you remember, had proposed to first surround the Confederacy, then cut it in half. This would take years, but would be the surest way to bring the Confederacy to defeat. No one was balking at the "sure defeat" part, it was the "it would take years" clause that had them dismayed. With such a fine army encamped, and with such a pusillanimous foe, how could our fine boys but win glorious, prompt victory?

In such passions are horrifying disasters born.

The Army of Northeastern Virginia had come into being out of the various companies, brigades, and divisions that had been assembled from the troops gathered to defend Washington, immediately after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April, 1861. President Lincoln appointed Brigadier General Irvin McDowell as its commander. General McDowell was under immense pressure from the Northern press to go out and do something. President Lincoln was, as well. McDowell initially resisted such pressure, sure that his men weren't yet ready for such action. McDowell was well-suited to make such a judgement, having been an instructor of tactics at West Point. It was an objection swept aside by Lincoln: "You are green, it is true, but they are green also; you are all green alike." So, on July 16, General McDowell left Washington with the largest army that had yet been assembled on the North American continent, with the assignment to go out, find the enemy, and engage him closely. Their initial objective was a rail junction at Manassas, Virginia.

The rail junction was held by a much smaller Confederate force under Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard, of whom we've heard already. In a coincidence that would become commonplace in the years to follow, Beauregard and McDowell had been classmates at West Point. Beauregard, initially, only commanded 20,000 men against McDowell's 30,000. But one of the advantages of sitting on a rail junction? Reinforcements can ride in as soon as you know you need them. Beauregard held all the crossings of the Bull Run, so while McDowell searched for ways to outflank his old classmate, Beauregard sent dispatches by telegraph calling for extra men.

They almost didn't arrive in time. McDowell held Beauregard's attention with part of his force, while he sent 20,000 men in a flanking move to threaten Beauregard's left flank. They forced a crossing at Stone House, and all that stood between them and Beauregard's rear was a single reduced brigade of Confederate infantry. If the orders had been given and received properly, this might well have been the end of it. But they weren't: the Union brigade that had been intended to lead the attack held up to wait for further orders, and the brigade that had been intended to feint in support found itself out in front all alone. Meanwhile, fresh reinforcements arrived, and Beauregard was able to plug the hole, and the battle was properly joined.

In their defense, flanking maneuvers are very complex, and require very close coordination and communication to pull off, even today. In an era when orders had to be delivered by hand, it required well-trained officers and well-drilled troops to have a realistic chance of doing it at all. At this point, the Union had few of either. For while Lincoln was right, and the Confederacy had this problem also, the Confederate President had guessed right, and had put his best men and best troops on the line between Washington and Richmond, expecting that is where the heaviest blow would fall, first.

I've mentioned this hidden advantage before. It's not so much that the Confederacy had better officers, or better soldiers. It's that, having no previously-existing officer corps to placate, Davis could put his most able men in the most crucial commands. It's no mere coincidence that Beauregard was present at both Fort Sumter and at Bull Run.

The Confederates had another crucial advantage in this battle: interior lines of communication. The battle lines between two armies usually curve, the commander who sits on the inside of the curve has a shorter distance through which he has to move men and orders, which makes controlling the battle much easier.

The sum total of all of this is that, while McDowell initially enjoyed significant advantages in manpower and position, his inexperienced subordinates could not make enough use of those advantages to penetrate the Confederate lines. They certainly tried hard enough. And it was a near-run thing even so. During the battle, the Union artillery commander moved two of his guns to the far end of his line, hoping to fire from enfilade into the Confederate army. At about three in the afternoon, these two guns were overrun by the 33rd Virginia. The 33rd Virginia wore blue uniforms, and the Confederate Stars-and-Bars banner had horizontal stripes that, from a distance, looked almost like the Stars-and-Stripes used by the Union. Orders to fire on the captured guns were countermanded by an officer who mistook the Virginians for Union forces. The Virginians turned the guns on the Federals, marking the turn of the tide. McDowell had lost the initiative, and with the arrival of Confederate reinforcements he had lost the manpower advantage as well. He was forced to order a retreat.

The retreat began well enough, but the order of march was bungled by inexperienced officers. An overturned artillery wagon caught fire, sparking a retreat into a rout. Men who had been marching in good order suddenly turned and ran headlong towards their rear. They were joined by the wealthy citizens of Washington, who had turned out with picnic baskets to watch the glorious display. Retreating troops found the roads jammed with carriages.

One Union officer managed to distinguish himself in the humiliating rout: William Tecumseh Sherman was grazed in the knee and shoulder while leading his men against the enemy, and managed to keep his men in better order during the retreat than most. His superiors would remember this, later.

When he saw the enemy in headlong retreat, President Davis urged his commanders to pursue the enemy closely. But, now that the were on the offensive rather than the defensive, Beauregard discovered to his dismay that inexperience is a knife that cuts both ways. The day's fighting had left his men very disorganized, and it took quite some time to get them sorted back into their proper units again. Beauregard elected not to pursue. McDowell was initially afraid of a Confederate counterattack on Washington, but was able to employ aerial reconnaissance (Professor Lowe's balloon Enterprise) to verify that no such concentration of Confederate forces was happening. Both armies withdrew from the field.

The reaction on both sides could be fairly characterized as shock. The Northerners were shocked when their much-anticipated glorious victory had turned into an ignominious rout. The Southerners were shocked to discover that the Yankees would put up a vigorous fight, after all. Both sides came to the sudden realization that this would be a long war, far longer than many had anticipated. It was now clear that victory would come with a staggeringly high price tag. And it was equally clear that defeat would carry a price still higher. And, above all, one thing was now known with crystal clarity:

The only men who'd be home before the leaves fell would be the maimed and the dead.

Video Del Fuego, Part XLVI

2011-07-08T10:45:00.003-05:00

Atlantis took to the skies today for the last time, closing the books on thirty years of Space Shuttle launches from Kennedy Space Center. For the sixth time, we've seen the last launch of an American spacecraft series. As a salute to NASA's fifty-year history of manned spaceflight, here they are: the swan songs.

First: Gus Grissom on America's second spaceflight, Liberty Bell 7, the last flight of the Mercury-Redstone series.

Second: The last flight of the Mercury program, Gordon Cooper aboard Faith 7.

Third: Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin on Gemini XII.

Fourth: Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and Ronald Evans on Apollo 17. On this December day in 1972, some say the sun rose twice...

Fifth: That wasn't the end for Apollo, though. Apollo spacecraft would fly four more times, on Saturn IB rockets. The last one would fly in July 1975, carrying Thomas Stafford, Deke Slayton, and Vance Brand on a rendezvous with Alexei Leonov and Valery Kubasov during the Apollo-Soyuz mission.

Sixth: The next "last one" wouldn't come for another thirty-six years. Today, Atlantis flew into orbit for the last time, carrying Chris Ferguson, Douglas Hurley, Sandra Magnus, and Rex Walheim towards the International Space Station.

As of this writing (11AM Friday) no videos of the launch had been posted to YouTube yet. So, the roll-out will have to stand in for now.

(Addendum, 10Jul11: NASA TV comes through.)

Which spacecraft will be number seven? That isn't yet clear. What is perfectly clear, though, is that there will be one. Despite the problems we're facing, America isn't prepared to give up on this enterprise just yet. Besides, I've got a sneaking suspicion that we've already seen lucky number seven's prototype...

And the journey continues!

Video Del Fuego, Part XLV

2011-06-24T20:43:00.002-05:00

I've been unavoidably detained by my paying gig, but I should be back to something like a normal schedule shortly. In the meantime, there are a couple of May/June 50th Anniversaries worth noting.

Frank Sinatra once said, "Miles Davis never wasted a note, boy, or a word on a fool." He was right. Roughly fifty years ago this summer, Miles Davis released Kind of Blue. And every note is exactly where it should be.

Fifty years later, artists all over are still covering it:

Also about fifty years ago, not quite a month after Yuri Gagarin's first orbital flight, Alan Shepard became the first American to enter space with the flight of Freedom 7. The Atlas rocket that would eventually take Mercury into orbit wasn't quite ready yet (it had an unfortunate tendency to try to burn all of its fuel at the same time) so the first couple of flights used the smaller Redstone missile.

So far as I'm aware, no one's ever attempted a "cover" version of Mercury, which is probably for the best.

Sesquicentennial, Part XV: Tell Me How This Thing Works

2011-06-03T19:05:00.004-05:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

The month of April and May in 1861 were a very confused -- and confusing -- time. No one was entirely sure what was happening on the ground in some of the border states, least of all the poor folks that lived there.

Take Missouri for example. Missouri's pro-Secession Governor, Claiborne Jackson, called a convention after the initial rush of seceding slave states to consider joining the Confederacy. The convention so convened voted quite convincingly against secession. The Governor wasn't happy with that answer, but there wasn't much he could do about it. Then, after Fort Sumter, the Governor rejected President Lincoln's call for volunteers. Not only that, but after a secessionist mob seized the U.S. Arsenal in Liberty, Missouri, Governor Jackson called out the state militia and put secessionist officers in charge. Then, Captain Nathaniel Lyon of the U.S. Army captured a fair number of said secessionist militia at Camp Jackson ... and all Hell broke loose.

The secessionists failed to make much headway in Missouri, but Governor Jackson got away, with a "government-in-exile" of sorts. Technically, I suppose you could say that Missouri belonged both to the Union and the Confederacy. It was a God-awful mess all around. It was like this all through the border states, particularly in Missouri, parts of Tennessee, and in the northwestern part of Virginia. There was fighting between ardent pro-secessionists, and equally ardent Unionists, but quite often it wasn't really about Secession or Union. All politics is local, after all, and there were a lot of cases where the crisis gave people a semi-legitimate reason to do something they might have wanted to do for decades...

"What's that? That damn wheelbarrow-stealing bastard Jenkins is a secessionist? Well, I reckon that makes me a UNION MAN! Come on boys, get yer squirrel guns!"

Later on, they'd tell their grandchildren about their ardor for liberty and Union, but if they were being honest with themselves, a lot of it in those confused early days was good old-fashioned score-settling. And some of that score-settling wouldn't end for years after the war was officially over...

But not all of the fighting was unorganized. There were a few men who were working according to a plan. Major General George McClellan was one such man. He had the command of the Department of the Ohio, headquartered in Cincinnati. McClellan was a West Point man, and had been generally successful at everything he did. Among other things, he had re-written the Army's cavalry manual, invented a new saddle, and surveyed several railroad routes. He had actually resigned from the Army in 1857 to work for the Illinois Central Railroad. He had also worked for the Ohio and Missouri railroad, so he knew well the importance of the railroad to keeping an army well-supplied. With Virginia seceded, part of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was now in enemy territory. This was a state of affairs that could not be allowed to continue. Also, McClellan had good reason to believe that this part of Virginia was of a strongly pro-Union sentiment, and he could count on considerable local support.

McClellan ordered Colonel Benjamin Kelley to take his troops south, and secure the line of the B&O Railroad. This area of Virginia was only lightly defended, being that no one really expected a major attack here. There's a pretty good reason for that. Northwestern Virginia was a rough, hilly place. It's hard to move men and supplies. The Confederates holding this ground were at the end of a fairly long supply chain, while Col. Kelley would be fairly close to his base. And, if he could seize and hold the railroad, resupply would be fairly simple.

The Battle of Phillipi was a fairly small affair, all told. Some called it the "Phillipi Races", because the Confederates didn't do a whole lot of fighting, and did a lot more running. They were outflanked, outnumbered, and badly outgunned. Only four Union men were killed out of about two thousand, while the Confederates lost 26 of about 800 defenders.

At the time it was dismissed as inconsequential. But there were two important facts about this skirmish. For one, it was the first engagement between regular Federal and regular Confederate forces in an open pitched battle. And for another, it marked the beginning of the long, slow campaign that would proceed down the Ohio river to the Mississippi, and then from the Gulf of Mexico northward, meeting somewhere in the middle. The Union controlled the railroads along the Ohio River, and this would never be seriously threatened by the Confederacy, although they would attempt raids throughout the rest of the war.

The Union was beginning to execute its grand strategy. Would the Confederacy ever have an answer?

What Might Have Been, Part II

2011-05-23T21:11:00.003-05:00

Last time, we looked at some alternate post-Apollo scenarios, with an eye towards leveraging technology that the American taxpayer had already bought and paid for. After discarding more and longer Moon missions as expensive and impractical, we settled on basing the 1970s manned space program around two long-duration space habitats: the S-IVB based Dry Workshop, and the S-IVB based Wet Workshop.

Which begs the question: why are we doing this, anyway?

Mainly, if you want to tackle manned interplanetary spaceflight at some point, you have to address the question of whether or not a human being can stay alive, healthy, and sane after spending between 400 and 600 days in free-fall. There are a lot of ways to simulate the effects of free-fall on a human body. But there's only one way to find out for sure what free-fall does to you. And the key unanswered question pretty much to this day is still this -- can we deliver a crew to Mars that's fit to work once they get there? This series of missions is intended to answer that question.

Now that we've decided that we can afford to do this, and that this is something we actually want to do ... what does the schedule look like? More to the point, what kind of operational tempo can be kept up? As it turns out, the industrial plant at Kennedy Space Center was sized for a pretty heavy workload. There were two Saturn launch pads that were in the original plans, Pad 39C and Pad 39D, that were never actually built. The VAB could have kept all four busy. To get an idea of what kind of tempo KSC would have been capable of, let's look at the schedule that was maintained from December 1972 to December 1973:

December 6, 1972: Apollo 17 (Saturn V)
May 14, 1973: Skylab 1 (Saturn V)
May 25, 1973: Skylab 2 (Saturn IB)
July 28, 1973: Skylab 3 (Saturn IB)
November 16, 1973: Skylab 4 (Saturn IB)

So, in any one calendar year, KSC could support two Saturn V flights, and three Saturn IB flights. Which means that a single Saturn V flight plus three Saturn IB flights are easily within reach. That will form the basis of our alternative schedule.

Little would have been different in the flight schedule, at least up until February 1974, when Skylab 4 returned to Earth. The Wet Workshop R&D cycle would have been running in parallel with Skylab's, and would probably have had flight-ready hardware by early- to mid-1974. The Wet Workshop concept would require a few development test flights before it could be trusted with a long-duration mission. There were no such worries with Skylab, since it could be launched all in one lump. But with the Wet Workshop, first you had to prove that you could actually vent the liquid hydrogen tank and fill it with breathable air. Then, you had to prove that you could erect living quarters inside it, and use it. After that, it's a matter of qualifying the habitat for stays of three months, six months, then a year or longer. Possibly by the fifth flight, you could be ready for your most ambitious missions. With that in mind, let's take a look at what could happen by 1981.

1974:
* WWD-1 (Saturn IB): First development flight for the Wet Workshop. After orbital insertion, the crew performs a transposition and docking maneuver, and vents the LH2 tank. In principle, this should work, and then the crew pressurizes the tank with breathing air, and spends about a day fitting out the interior of the tank as living and working space. This first development mission lasts about 30 days. As a small bonus, after undocking from the workshop, the crew chases down and docks with Skylab, boosting it up into a higher orbit. After a 10-day stay at the old station, they return to Earth.
* Skylab B (Saturn V): Bet you didn't know that the Smithsonian exhibit was actually a flight-ready backup. Under this revised plan, the Air and Space museum loses one of its more interesting conversation pieces.
* Skylab B-1 (Saturn IB): First crew to occupy Skylab B. Three-month mission.
* Skylab B-2 (Saturn IB): Second crew to occupy Skylab B. Three-month mission. The intent, more or less, is to try to have Skylab B occupied continuously for as long as its consumables hold out. My guess is that Skylab B will have a design lifetime of two years, from mid-1974 to mid-1976.

1975:
* WWD-2 (Saturn V): This is the second development flight for the Wet Workshop. It involves both a more energetic trajectory, and a slightly more ambitious goal. This three-month mission inserts a S-IVB lab module into lunar orbit. Yes, it's actually possible to use a more-or-less stock Saturn V to put an empty S-IVB stage in orbit around the Moon. There was a McDonnell-Douglas design study in 1970 that worked out some of the details. Plus, I've flown this profile in Orbiter, so I know it's doable.
* Skylab B-3 (Saturn IB): Third crew to occupy Skylab B.
* Skylab B-4 (Saturn IB): Fourth crew to occupy Skylab B. It's more or less at this point that a Soyuz crew pulls alongside, docks, and spends about a week on board conducting joint experiments.
* Skylab B-5 (Saturn IB): Fifth crew to occupy Skylab B.

1976:
* WWD-3 (Saturn V): This is the third Wet Workshop development mission. It will be launched on a trajectory that will place the S-IVB lab module into an orbit 23,500 miles above the Earth, at an inclination of 28 degrees. This is almost, but not quite, like a geostationary satellite orbit. Instead of remaining stationary over the same point on Earth's surface, it will trace out a figure-8 between 28 degrees North and 28 degrees South. There was a proposal to fly the mission such that the figure-8 is anchored over Europe and Africa. Over the course of six months, seasonal change can be observed in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. This is a tricky mark to hit from a piloting standpoint, but it's well within the Saturn V's capability.
* Skylab B-5 (Saturn IB): Sixth and last crew to occupy Skylab B.
* Skylab C (Saturn V): Third Dry Workshop station. This one is built with some resupply capability in mind. I expect this model will last for about three, maybe four years.
* Skylab C-1 (Saturn IB): First crew to occupy Skylab C.
* Skylab C-2 (Saturn IB): Second crew to occupy Skylab C.

1977:
* WWD-4 (Saturn V): Fourth Wet Workshop development flight. The mission profile is similar to WWD-3, but with a duration of at least one year. One possible wrinkle is that, instead of a fixed figure-8, the station is placed either slightly above or slightly below synchronous altitude. Then, instead of a perfectly-fixed figure-8, the figure-8 wanders eastward or westward with time. I found this out by accident, when I tried to nail a perfectly-fixed figure-8 and failed. There's some possible value in this: you get long loiter times over a region, but over the course of the whole mission you could cover the entire Earth, at least between 28 North and 28 South. With the successful conclusion of this mission, the Wet Workshop is considered proven for longer-duration missions.
* Skylab C-3 (Saturn IB): Third crew to occupy Skylab C.
* Skylab C-4 (Saturn IB): Fourth crew to occupy Skylab C.
* Skylab C-5 (Saturn IB): Fifth crew to occupy Skylab C.

1978:
* Skylab C-6 (Saturn IB): Sixth crew to occupy Skylab C.
* Skylab C-7 (Saturn IB): Seventh crew to occupy Skylab C.
* Skylab C-8 (Saturn IB): Eighth crew to occupy Skylab C.
* Manned Venus Flyby: And here's the payoff for having developed the Wet Workshop capability. As mentioned previously, you don't need to stay in Earth orbit exclusively. Once you've proven the technology, you can go strut your funky stuff across the Solar System ... within reason.

The dates are wildly optimistic, though ... starting from 1968, there's no way, no way at all, that this mission would be ready for launch by October 1973.

1977 and beyond:
* Skylab C-9, C-10, C-11, C-12: These are the last missions to Skylab C. Skylab D will probably fly in 1978, and will be used into the 1980s.
* Manned Mars Flyby: The other obvious target, accessible within a reasonable time frame.
* Manned Asteroid Flyby: This is contingent on finding a suitable target. Eros would be a good candidate. Or Icarus. It's just a matter of finding one or two that come close enough to make a flyby worthwhile.

And, The Downside...

Every option taken carries with it an opportunity cost. For example, having decided to build the Space Shuttle, we closed the door on getting the most out of our investment in the technology built for Project Apollo. This program is no exception. Having decided on a more ambitious manned program in the 1970s, the development work that would have led to the Shuttle is never accomplished. Which means that some of the Shuttle's unique advantages are not available in the 1980s. Such as:

No Hubble Space Telescope. Honestly, I could stop here. If you had to pick one single instrument that has revolutionized our knowledge of the Universe more than any other in the last 25 years, you'd have to pick Hubble, hands down. No Shuttle means no Hubble. That means no Hubble Deep Field. And none of the stunning images we've become accustomed to. Hubble was a key instrument in the observations of Supernova 1987A, and of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts on Jupiter. And if that weren't enough all by itself...

Fewer Scientists In Space. The Shuttle can carry seven people at a time, only two of whom have to be pilots. Apollo could only carry three, two of whom were pilots. This, the fact that the Shuttle can carry up to five scientists at a time, made things like the Spacelab module possible. Now, after thirty years of Shuttle flights, I think it's probably safe to say that most of the people who've flown in space have been scientists or engineers; this would not have been the case otherwise.

So, as glorious as this alternate program would have been, I have to say that it's just as well that we didn't. Maybe this really is the best of all possible worlds.

Next in this series: Once upon a time, it was thought that Space Shuttles would fly fairly often, as many as fifty flights a year for the whole fleet. What would have to have happened to make that possible?

What Might Have Been, Part I

2011-05-14T20:46:00.002-05:00

We are currently counting down to the last flight of the Space Shuttle program. Just over thirty years ago, Columbia roared into the Florida sky for the first time; late this year or early next year, Atlantis will be the last to touch down on Runway 33.

Others will write about what the end of this program means. I may be one of them. But not today. Instead, I want to spend some time imagining what else might have been. Today, we're setting the Way-Back Machine to 1968, and take a quick peek at NASA's post-Apollo plans.

By 1968, it was fairly clear that they would probably take a swing at the first Moon landing sometime in 1969. Having hit the mark that President Kennedy set for them in 1961, they needed another goal to keep as many of their staff gainfully employed as possible. They had already been working on a set of post-Apollo options under the label Apollo Applications Program, but were also working on much more ambitious plans. What they presented to the Nixon Administration in 1969 was an ambitious, integrated program that included a reusable space shuttle, nuclear space tugs, a space station, and a manned mission to Mars by 1986.

That's not the might-have-been I want to look at. Going down that road requires you to imagine that Congress would be willing to fund NASA at its peak levels for another ten or fifteen years. That was never going to happen. But what might have happened is that a more modest program could have been proposed: one that built on technology that the American taxpayer had already bought and paid for. The question before us is, what could be done with a second production run of Saturn boosters and Apollo spacecraft? Further, what can be done with a fairly modest investment in additional spacecraft research and development?

Some of this ground had already been covered by the Apollo Applications Program design studies. For our purposes, though, only two pieces of AAP will be of interest to us: the Wet Workshop space station, and the Dry Workshop space station. While a lot of AAP's focus was on extending Apollo lunar technology towards building a semi-permanent or permanent base, the additional R&D funding to make that happen probably wouldn't be forthcoming. But there are practical considerations to contend with as well. As it turns out, three days is about as long as the A7L space suit could last in the lunar environment. By the end of the Apollo 17 moonwalks, the joints in Cernan's and Schmitt's suits were beginning to seize up from the moon dust. It just wasn't realistic to expect this suit to stand up to a full week of daily use, much less a month or more. This is a problem that could be cracked, given enough research focus; but the funding required to solve that problem just isn't forthcoming in the time frame we're talking about. So, as a practical consideration, we're going to restrict our consideration to things we can do without having to contend with dust.

This is the problem that AAP was faced with. With landings taken off the table, what's left? The only thing left is long-duration space flight. Which is why this alternative program centers on two different space station platforms: the Wet Workshop, and the Dry Workshop. Each one has its own strong points, and its own drawbacks.

The key advantage of the Dry Workshop is the reason why it's the one we actually built and flew in the Skylab program: it's a far better, and far more well-equipped research platform. More than one crew can use it. And you don't have to worry about packaging anything to withstand exposure to cryogenic propellants during launch. But the drawback to a Dry Workshop is that you can only put it in one place: in low orbit around Earth.

When you're talking about a Wet Workshop, the term "space station" may be a bit of a misnomer. You're using the liquid hydrogen tank of the spent S-IVB stage as living space for your crew, but the spent S-IVB stage isn't necessarily in low Earth orbit. There are any number of mission profiles. It's possible to put an empty S-IVB stage in orbit around the Moon, for example, giving the crew a place to stay while they spend a month or two doing detailed observations from lunar orbit. Or, it's possible to put an empty S-IVB stage in an inclined 24-hour period orbit, where it will trace out a figure-8 on a globe, giving you the opportunity to make observations of the same region of Earth over an extended period of time. The most ambitious mission profiles involve interplanetary fly-by trajectories to Mars or Venus. You can't carry as much equipment as you could with a Dry Workshop. But, the equipment can be more closely tailored to the specific mission at hand. It's a marvelously flexible concept.

We know that such a thing would have been possible. But would it have been affordable? Probably so: between 1968 and 1981, about $30 billion was spent on STS research and development. The marginal costs for a Saturn V launch were $185 million in 1969, and $55 million for a Saturn IB in 1972. A second production run of Saturn V boosters, 15 units, would run $2.775 billion; and a second production run of 30 Saturn IB boosters would run $1.650 billion. Skylab cost $2.2 billion, so we can guess that the wet workshop would cost at least as much. Call it $5 billion, for R&D for the first unit of each, and $500 million per unit thereafter. Fiscally, it looks doable.

Next time, we'll attempt to unpack the schedule, to see how much might have been done in the 1970s. And we'll also take a look at the downside: what we'd have given up on by going down this road.

Video Del Fuego, Part XLIV

2011-05-13T18:02:00.003-05:00

or, Blogger Ate My Homework

Some sort of techniwockle confoogality at Blogger seems to have eaten the draft I was working on. So, until I figure out what to do about that, enjoy this track from They Might Be Giants.

Better Late Than Never

2011-05-02T17:57:00.004-05:00

Well, I had intended to go on hiatus for a few weeks, but for obvious reasons, this won't wait.

Six years ago, give or take a few months, I wrote:

"To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, you can stand on a hill in eastern Afghanistan and look west, and with just the right kind of eyes, you can see the high-water mark where Islamofascism's wave crested, and fell back. In a weird way, I'm glad we didn't put paid to him at Tora Bora. I'm glad he's survived to witness these moments. He will die, eventually, with the searing knowledge of his utter DEFEAT burned indelibly into his synapses. Yes, this, too, is justice."

This was in the optimistic blush of a brief wave of elections and promises of elections that swept the Middle East in late 2004 and early 2005. I was, to say the least, overly optimistic. But I still agree with the broad outlines of what I had written.

Osama bin Laden is dead. He was killed not by an anonymous missile strike, but by a SEAL team that had been infiltrated into his compound. And while I'm happy he's no longer breathing our air, I'm just as happy that he saw Tahrir Square before he checked out. He died not in glory, but in defeat. Now, some quick observations.

One: As I often say when these things happen, there's an extent to which this changes nothing. Bin Laden was in direct operational control of Jack and Squat, and Jack left town a few years ago. He kept in touch by courier, which proved to be his downfall, but how much detailed planning can you really do that way? We still have the Taliban to deal with in Afghanistan, and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to deal with, led by Anwar al-Amriki in Yemen. Or so it's thought. So, the plate's still pretty full.

Two: On the other hand, this does change a lot. Bin Laden was an important symbol of the movement. He was the one man that everyone in the movement looked up to and respected. He was, unquestionably, The Big Cheese. And don't forget the detritus that was taken from his compound upon his demise. Al-Qaeda in Iraq pretty much folded up like a cheap tent once Abu Musab al-Zarqawi got his ticket punched. Everyone bin Laden was in direct contact with has to be sweating bullets right about now. If they go to ground now they might be able to break contact and stay a step ahead of pursuit. Or, they might not. They won't know until a SEAL team shows up at the door yelling "CANDYGRAM!"

Three: And that's also an important point, all by itself. Ten years ago, the CIA didn't speak to the special-ops community well, if they even spoke at all. Now, they work together fairly seamlessly. It's taken a decade to do it, but the CIA has returned to its OSS roots, and rediscovered the old-school arts of human intelligence. And they've also added a few new wrinkles, such as teaching commandos police forensics techniques. These things take time to work, when they can work at all. It may take years to finally get that last piece of the puzzle. But a sufficiently patient and dedicated investigator can crack the coldest of cold cases, if they get the right resources to do so.

Four: Pakistan has some 'splainin' to do. Like, just how was he able to hide in plain sight like this, just outside of their capital city? Mind you, the Pakistani ambassador had a good point. Two words: Whitey Bulger. That said, the point still stands that Pakistan's intelligence agency basically set up the Taliban, back in the day. There's been a long-standing suspicion that the ISI had been tipping off Taliban and Al-Qaeda targets when raids had been planned. They weren't trusted with the information on this raid until it had already happened. There's a serious conversation that has to happen between our governments, and it ought to happen soon.

Five: While this doesn't destroy Al-Qaeda, or even come close to it, Al-Qaeda is essentially irrelevant. The sweeping changes seen this spring in the Arab world have basically left them behind. You see, for all his faults, George Bush got one thing right: they key problem in the Arab world could be traced to a lack of self-determination. Al-Qaeda's answer to that was to re-institute the Caliphate, under a strict system of Islamic law. But this spring's demonstrators want no part of that program. They want democratic government, laws that mean something, and protection for their civil rights. The upcoming Arab generation is grabbing hold of self-determination with both hands, and are winning for themselves the honor and the self-respect that come with it. They have no need of Al-Qaeda. It probably won't die, but it'll persist more as a criminal syndicate than as a political movement.

Six: This ought to put paid to the ridiculous notion that President Barack Obama is some sort of pacifist, who won't even use military action as a last resort. It also ought to put paid to the equally ridiculous notion that President Obama is a closet Muslim that will shy from spilling a fellow-traveler's blood. And while Trump was having a fit about Obama's birth certificate, Obama was busily planning a surprise bullet fiesta for Osama bin Laden. This man will take care of business when it's necessary. You doubt this at your peril.

Seven: It's far too early to tell where this all ends up. I do believe that a wave of change is sweeping that part of the world, and that there's not a single government over there that will escape unscathed. Not all of the movements will succeed. Some will fail to fulfill their early promise. Some of them, maybe even most, will succeed at least partially. And a few will succeed brilliantly. And the world will be a better, safer place for it. There's still some excitement to come, but at least there's more hope in the air than there's been in many, many years.

Eight: And lastly, what effect will this have on next year's elections? Probably not much. A year and a half is an eternity in politics, and besides, the economic conditions next summer will have a far more profound effect. What this unquestionably does is give Obama one more positive point to hit regarding his record in office. And possibly most telling, it's a foreign policy point. It's ludicrous now to campaign against him as being soft on terrorism. Not that it'll stop them from trying. I'm just saying, it won't work. If next year is as incumbent-friendly as I'm beginning to suspect, it'll just make them look pitiful.

OK, now back to my regularly-scheduled vacation. See y'all in two weeks, give or take.

Video Del Fuego, Part XLIII

2011-04-29T22:27:00.004-05:00

I will be on a short hiatus for a couple of weeks, as my wife and I celebrate our tenth anniversary. I'll be back sometime in the middle of May. Until then, a "late hit" on Easter, in the form of a conversation between the Pope and Michelangelo. Now, it's well-known that da Vinci painted "The Last Supper". Some speculate that this is because His Holiness had some ... artistic conflicts with Michelangelo.

Sesquicentennial, Part XIV: Grand Strategy

2011-04-22T18:01:00.004-05:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

With the secession of the border states, the battle lines were ... not quite drawn. The first few months of fighting were very, very confused. For one, especially in places like Kentucky and Missouri, it wasn't immediately clear which territory belonged to whom. And for another, both sides were not entirely sure how they were going to go about this. Everyone hoped that some kind of compromise could be reached, that some kind of deal could be struck, so very little actual planning had taken place if the worst came to pass.

Well, the worst had come to pass. Now what?

The Confederacy

Jefferson Davis was an 1828 graduate of West Point. He had served with distinction as a colonel of volunteers during the Mexican War, and had been Secretary of War under President Pierce. During the war that began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Jefferson Davis was, for all intents and purposes, his own Secretary of War. I say this mainly to draw your attention to one salient fact: Davis knew, Davis had to have known, that the Confederacy was punching out of its weight class. In every category that was measurable or quantifiable, the Confederacy lagged behind the Union. They had fewer men, they had fewer industries, they had fewer miles of railroad track. If it became a war of attrition, there was no possible result but defeat. President Davis was a man well-versed in military affairs, so none of this would have come as any sort of surprise or shock. So, from the very beginning, the Confederacy looked for salvation across the Atlantic.

The "King Cotton" strategy rested upon the reliance of European, and particularly British industries on Southern-produced cotton. Just as Southern plantations supplied the industrial mills in the North, they also supplied similar mills in England's industrial towns. Let the Union blockade as it will, if the might of the Royal Navy could be enlisted to keep the South's ports open, well, they'd be kept open. The might of the Royal Navy on the open seas was beyond question. From the very beginning, the Confederates had sent commissioners to London to seek recognition from the British crown. On the one hand, many Englishmen would find it quite pleasant to poke the Yanks in the eye with a sharp stick. But, there were two major strokes against such action. One, without question it'd mean war with the United States, carrying with it the loss of American grain exports, the probable loss of a great deal of English merchant shipping, and the possible loss of Canada to invasion. And for another ... England had abolished slavery in 1833. Much of the English public would find it disquieting at best to ally openly with an avowedly pro-slavery power. That all said, English merchants would have no qualms at all about doing business with Southern gentlemen. The South would receive small amounts of arms, and a few specially-built commerce raiders, from such contacts with the British.

No one else in Europe cared all that much. France was interested in propping up the government of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, and Emperor Maximilian was somewhat friendly to the Confederacy. The most important port for the Confederacy, then, would not be Norfolk or Charleston, it would be Vera Cruz, which the Union wouldn't blockade.

The Union

Lieutenant General Winfield Scott had been in uniform longer than anyone in American history, before or since. While President Abraham Lincoln was General Scott's commander-in-chief, Lincoln yet had much to learn about military strategy. Lincoln was rectifying that situation as fast as he could, by reading everything the Library of Congress had on the subject, but in the early months of the war he would lean heavily on General Scott's experience. And, in General Scott's opinion, one thing mattered above all else: supplies. Napoleon once said that an army marches on its stomach, and he was mostly correct. For most of history an army could pretty much live off the land. But a modern army, in addition to food, also needed powder and ammunition and rifles and cannon, all of which could only be made in a few specialized places. Then, all of that materiel had to be shipped from its point of manufacture, to where the army happened to be. General Scott saw the keys to victory as first ensuring that the Union army could stay well-supplied, and secondly denying the same to the rebels. Thus could the rebel army be starved out, rather than battered into submission. The Union would no doubt win a war of pure attrition, but the cost was horrifying to contemplate.

For the first, to ensure Union lines of supply, it was vital that the Union retain control of the Ohio river valley, and of the railroads that ran along its banks. This, among other reasons, was why it was so important for the Union to retain possession of Kentucky. With both banks of the Ohio river secure, the Union had a safe line of communication and supply between its western and eastern areas. This was essential, if the Union was to be able to use its advantages in men, manufacturing, and transportation to its fullest.

For the second, to disrupt the Confederacy's supply lines, the first element of General Scott's plan would be a Union naval blockade of Confederate ports. This would have two effects. First, the Confederacy would be unable to realize large shipments of military equipment from abroad, nor would they be able to engage in foreign trade. Second, the Confederacy would be forced to draw down its reserves of hard currency for those foreign transactions they could complete even in the face of a blockade. The next element of General Scott's plan would be to drive a Union army down the Mississippi river to cut the Confederacy in two. To an excellent approximation, the Mississippi river was the Confederacy's transportation infrastructure. Much of the rail network that the South had was focused on getting agricultural products to ports on the Mississippi. If the Union controlled the river, it would be very difficult for the Confederacy to keep its soldiers sufficiently supplied with food and ammunition. This would take a heavy toll on the Confederacy's ability to make war, and would facilitate the Union's victory, at a minimum cost in blood and treasure.

General Scott's plan was not immediately adopted. It was not popular with the political leadership, since it assumed a long war lasting years, not months. Virtually everyone, on both sides, assumed that the war would consist of a short campaign and a quick victory. And both sides were assembling the force that they were sure would win the coming battle. Spirits were high, and morale was excellent; visions of glorious deeds danced in young mens' heads.

Except for those that had read their history books.

Sesquicentennial, Part XIII: Second Secession

2011-04-12T20:51:00.001-05:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

[Ed. Note: For another anniversary in 1961, look here. And for another anniversary in 1981, look here.]

On the 9th of April, 1861, a small flotilla stood to sea from New York harbor, bound for Fort Sumter. They should get there in two or three days, with several days to spare before Major Anderson's supplies run out. There was even a rumor that the reinforcements were bound for Fort Pickens in Florida. This would have been an admirable deception operation except ...

Except that President Lincoln had sent a message to Governor Pickens of South Carolina informing him of his intent to resupply Fort Sumter. I guess operational security had not been invented yet.

On the other hand, there was a good reason why Lincoln would have done this. In his inaugural address, he had sworn to hold all Federal properties and territories. He was publicly stating his legal right -- indeed, his legal duty -- to feed his men. And, he was thrusting a choice on the Secessionist Governor: Will it be peace, or will it be war? The choice is yours.

Also, this time Major Anderson would not be caught by surprise. This time, the Secretary of War sent Major Anderson a message to expect relief. This time, they would be ready and waiting. So, unfortunately, would General Beauregard.

Upon receiving Lincoln's message, Governor Pickens contacted General Beauregard. Their mutual decision was to kick that matter upstairs to the Confederate government. Jefferson Davis instructed General Beauregard to demand the immediate surrender of the fort, and if that was refused, to reduce the fort before reinforcements could arrive. Davis knew -- Davis had to have known -- that he was choosing war.

Meanwhile, Fox's flotilla arrived at their rendezvous point off of Charleston Harbor. Well, most of it, anyway. As it turned out, some orders had gotten mixed up, and one of the troop ships really did head out to Fort Pickens. Ah well, adopt, adapt, and evolve: Fox still had plenty of time to load some small boats to sneak some supplies into the fort. Except, that is, for the fact that heavy seas made the operation of transferring supplies from his ships to the smaller boats between difficult and impossible.

It is more or less at this point that Beauregard's ultimatum was delivered to Major Anderson. Major Anderson replied that, unless he received supplies by the fifteenth, he would have been starved out in any case. But he hedged: if he did get some resupply, he would contnue to resist. The Confederates would not accept this reply. They told Major Anderson that in one hour, they would open fire. This was at 3:20 AM, on the 12th of April. At 4:30 AM, the bombardment began.

Almost immediately, Fort Sumter's hidden flaw was revealed. The fort's walls were very thick, and built of strong brick. The Confederate artillery might take years to batter them down. But they were built to withstand naval artillery, firing on a flat trajectory; Fort Sumter was never intended to face high-angle plunging fire. Of all the guns bearing on Fort Sumter, the most deadly were the mortars and the heavy Columbiads. And the most dangerous ammunition they used weren't explosive shells, but heated shot.

While the exterior of the fort was brick, the interior buildings were all wood. When hit by heated shot, they tended to catch fire. And, as the day wore on, the fires got closer and closer to the powder magazine. The weather, the same weather that was hampering Fox's attempts to load his boats, bought Major Anderson some time; a rain shower late in the day on the 12th extinguished the fires burning within the fort. But this was, at best, a temporary reprieve. The beleagured Union garrison fought on for another day. At 2PM on the 13th, low on ammunition and with fires burning out of control, and with his men hungry and exhausted, Major Anderson was satisfied that they had defended their post with honor. They had fought a day and a half, and had endured over three thousand Confederate rounds without losing a man. And in the end, the specific terms offered to Anderson were that he evacuate the fort, not surrender. The distinction was an important one in Anderson's eyes. Fox's flotilla, originally intended to reinforce the garrison, instead facilitated its withdrawal.

Now, there could be no doubt that the seceded States were in open rebellion against the Federal Government. When he heard of the fall of Fort Sumter, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers from the still-loyal States to recapture lost Federal properties in the South.

Reaction was, as they say, mixed. Lincoln got his 75,000 volunteers, and then some. But the border states, who had been content to sit on the fence, now had to jump. Virginia was the first, passing an ordinance of secession on April 17th. Then, Arkansas and Tennessee followed suit, seceding on May 6th and May 7th, respectively. Which put North Carolina in a bit of a bind. North Carolina didn't particularly want to secede. But, with Tennessee's secession, they were surrounded by seceded States. If they declined to secede, they would probably be promptly invaded by the Confederacy. If they seceded, they'd eventually be invaded by the Union, but it would take the Union a while to get there. North Carolina seceded on May 20th.

Now, Confederate apologists will tell you that this second secession was about States' Rights, and this defense is actually marginally better than when used the first time around. Each of these four States elected not to secede in the first flush of passion. They only acted now, upon Lincoln promising military action against the Southern States. But this is essentially rubbish. The second secession would not be necessary without the first, and we've already established beyond any possible doubt that the first secession was entirely about slavery. That was their first, last, and only reason. With that, I think the point is made, and I shall not belabor it any longer.

The other three border States, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, stayed in the Union. Once Virginia tipped, Lincoln knew that he absolutely, positively must retain these three, by any means necessary. Maryland, obviously, since if Maryland seceded it'd be over. The District of Columbia, and the Government with it, would be surrounded. Kentucky and Missouri were important, because of the access to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers that they granted. The reasons why this is so important will be discussed later. Lieutenant General Scott was old, and sick, and looking for a successor; but he had a plan.

The next few months would be a very confused time. But two things were clear. What had been one nation was now two. And there would be a war to determine whether or not that state of affairs would persist. Further, some were afraid that this war would be long, and bloody.

They would be right.

T+50: Poyekhali!

2011-04-12T11:24:00.002-05:00

[Ed. Note: Another anniversary from 1861 is here. And another anniversary from 1981 is here.]

Fifty years ago...

By April 12, 1961, only fifteen successful launches into orbit had been made. Today, the Soviet Union would attempt to make that total sixteen. They would also up the ante by putting a human being on top of the rocket. The Americans were planning to do much the same thing, of course. But, for reasons I've discussed earlier, they would be too late to claim the honor of being first.

(Actually, it's a slightly different problem. The orbital phase of Mercury was paced by the availability of the Atlas booster, which wasn't quite ready for prime time yet.)

It is interesting to compare and contrast the Mercury and Vostok capsules. Each vehicle shows basic design traits that would carry down into their descendents. The Mercury capsule was designed to sit snugly on top of a Redstone or Atlas missile. It was a streamlined, conical shape, and served as its own fairing for getting through the atmosphere. Space and mass were at an absolute premium, so the capsule barely had enough room for its pilot. It was sometimes said that you didn't climb into a Mercury capsule, so much as you wore it.

The Russians weren't quite so tight on mass constraints, since they had more powerful rockets at their disposal. But, they didn't bother to streamline their capsule at all. It might have never occurred to them to do so. "It's a spaceship," they'd probably say. "It operates in vacuum. Why in the world would you bother to streamline it? Just put a fairing over it for the first few minutes, and it's all good." This design trend would continue with the Soyuz capsule, still in use.

It's also interesting to compare and contrast astronaut selection and training techniques. Many of the training methods were similar, insofar as no one knew precisely what to expect. They wanted to select men who would cope well with the unexpected. The similarity ended there, though. The Americans decided to start with experienced test pilots, since they were already in excellent physical condition, and had proven their ability to cope with ... unusual working environments. You knew the men you picked could handle themselves in a crisis. The ones who couldn't, didn't last long as test pilots.

The Russians went another route entirely. They started with young, physically robust military pilots; then they trained them to be cosmonauts. Their main concern was whether or not a man could endure space flight at all. Famously, the manual controls on Vostok were behind a locked panel. This wasn't because the Russians didn't trust their pilots to land where they were told to. It was because the engineers weren't sure that, after hours in free-fall, a man would still have the faculties necessary to control the spacecraft. It was a safety feature. As it happens, the locks would only be used for the first flight, after which they were decided unnecessary. The original plan called for the codes to be radioed up to the cosmonaut if they were needed. "But, what if the radio goes out?" Well, they put the codes in an envelope that the cosmonaut could open when directed. The cosmonaut detachment commander, Nikolai Kamanin, thought that was a stupid idea. He decided that he'd give his man the code before launch, and trust him not to use it unless it was an emergency.

Two men were training for that first flight. One was Gherman Titov, an Air Force pilot who excelled at gymnastics. The other was Yuri Gagarin, another Air Force pilot, slightly older and slightly more experienced than Titov. The decision on who would fly was not made until the morning of the mission. Gagarin was chosen, partly because he was older and seen as more stable, a steady man who would not panic.

At about 7AM local time, Gagarin was bolted into the Vostok capsule. This brings up another difference between Vostok and Mercury: Vostok had no escape tower. It was not believed to be necessary, since the pilot was already equipped with an ejection seat. They couldn't make a parachute big enough to slow down the capsule enough for a survivable landing, so they decided that the pilot would punch out and land on his own parachute. This would serve double-duty as the pilot's emergency escape if anything should go wrong with the launch.

Gagarin was calm as they worked their way through the pre-launch checklist. Then, at seven past nine local time, the final count began.

Less than ten minutes later, Vostok 1 was in orbit. It would be another 25 minutes before ground control had gathered enough data to be certain that it was a stable orbit. Not that it mattered much at this point. Stable or not, Vostok 1 was committed. The only large engine left was the one intended to de-orbit the spacecraft before re-entry.

Vostok had a beautifully-ingenious device for orienting the spacecraft prior to deorbit. Orientation is crucial. You have to have the spacecraft's engine pointing in exactly the right direction, else you waste thrust. Assuming a circular orbit, all you need to do is make sure you're level, and pointed backwards. The Vzor device did this, with a window and some mirrors. The mirrors reflected the horizon such that it was visible all around the window's edge. So, if you were oriented level, you saw the horizon all around the edge of the window. Then, you look at the clouds rolling past the window. If they're going from the bottom straight to the top, bingo! Otherwise, you slew around in yaw until they line up.

Gagarin didn't have to do any of this by hand, though. The automatic systems worked quite well, and were perfectly able to line up and execute the de-orbit burn without direct intervention. But, there was one small problem. One of the pyro bolts had failed, and the re-entry capsule was still connected to the service module by a bundle of cables. The two halves began re-entry above Egypt, and Gagarin began to experience wild gyrations. He didn't mention this to ground control, for two reasons. One, he didn't think he was in serious trouble. And two, what could they do about it anyway? It's not like they could send up bolt-cutters.

As it happens, Gagarin's instincts were spot-on. The cable burned in two, and re-entry proceeded normally. At seven kilometers altitude, the hatch was released, and Gagarin punched out. He landed under his own parachute, and greeted the two startled farmers who met him with a request for a telephone to call Moscow.

Only an hour and a half had passed, but the world would be forever different. Man had taken his first halting steps into the Universe.

(You can recreate this for yourself, with Orbiter 2010, as demonstrated in the clip above. It's a fascinating experience.)

T+30: Hail, Columbia

2011-04-12T10:32:00.002-05:00

[Ed. Note: Another anniversary from 1861 is here. And another anniversary from 1961 is here.]

Thirty years ago...

There's high-stakes testing, and then there's high-stakes testing.

In principle, there's nothing particularly wrong with all-up tests. It had worked pretty well in the Apollo program. In a traditional test program, you would have tested each stage individually, before trying to stack them all together. The problem was, if NASA had done that, they would never have met the goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. So, to save time, they tested all three stages of the Saturn V rocket together. Twice the rocket flew unmanned, and it performed well enough that managers felt confident that they could put men on top of it for Apollo 8.

This philosophy was carried forward into the Space Shuttle program, with one additional twist. When the Space Shuttle flew into orbit on April 12, 1981, that would be the first time it flew into space. Its first flight would also be its first manned flight. For reasons known only to its designers, the Shuttle simply could not be flown automated. Oh, it could do just about everything by itself, with only one key exception.

The landing gear handle? It had to be pulled by hand.

So, on that April day in 1981, two men rode up the elevator to participate in one of the highest-risk test flights ever attempted.

Fittingly, the commander was the most experienced astronaut then on NASA's payroll. John Young had been selected as part of Group 2 in 1962. Prior to that, he had set time-to-climb records as a Navy test pilot as part of the F-4 Phantom II test program. He flew with Gus Grissom on the first flight of the Gemini spacecraft, and flew again as commander of Gemini 10. He would also fly twice in Apollo, first as Command Module Pilot on Apollo 10, then as Commander of Apollo 16. He had flown three different kinds of spacecraft, and had experienced five liftoffs and five landings (having had two of each on Apollo 16, obviously).

Young's co-pilot for this mission was a rookie astronaut, Robert Crippen. A rookie, maybe, but not a youngster, nor an inexperienced pilot. He had initially been selected as an astronaut in 1966, for the Department of Defense Manned Orbital Laboratory program. MOL was, to all intents and purposes, a manned reconnaissance satellite. Many of the details are still secret, but it's generally agreed that the cameras for the MOL were recycled into the unmanned KH-11 satellite. When the MOL program was cancelled in 1969, six of the MOL astronauts were recruited by NASA. So, why was a rookie flying the right-hand seat on the first flight? Simple: NASA needed experienced astronauts, and there was only one way to make them. The first four flights would be commanded by Apollo-era veterans: Young, Engle, Lousma, and Mattingly. Of the four, Engle had not flown in Earth orbit, but had flown the X-15 high and fast enough to make him the most experienced hypersonic glider pilot they had. Each of the four would be paired up with a "new guy", to give them experience so that they could enter the rotation as fully qualified commanders. The first four of these would be Crippen, Truly, Fullerton, and Hartsfield.

So, on that day, NASA's most experienced astronaut and its most promising rookie strapped into the cockpit of Columbia, and waited. Young's heart rate wasn't exceptionally high. He'd done this before, he knew the drill, this wasn't anything that worried him too much. Besides, if anything went wrong, that's what the black-and-yellow candy-striped handle was there for, right? Crippen's heart rate was somewhat higher. This was all new for him, something he'd eagerly anticipated for fifteen years now. (The large number of astronauts selected in the late 1960s, combined with the collapse of post-Apollo programs, led to some very lengthy waits.)

Finally, at almost exactly 6AM local time, the final count commenced.

Once they were shed of those oversized Roman candles, the rest was easy. Columbia made it into orbit for a two-day shakedown flight. There were a few unsettling things they found as they inspected the exterior of the ship: during launch, some of the protective tiles had come loose of the OMS pods. The really scary thing was ... did any come loose underneath? Because that was the only thing between Columbia and the searing heat of re-entry. Well, on the 14th of April, they'd find out. Now that they were in orbit, there was only one way home. They would have to fire the OMS rockets long enough to bring their orbital path down into the atmosphere. Then, John Young would have to fly the ship through re-entry, and land it on the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Now, the biometrical data was reversed. Crippen was excited, but not terribly so. Young, on the other hand, was concerned. This was something he'd never done before. This was something no one had ever done before.

There were no guarantees they'd make it. A large crowd waited, hoping to greet them.

Of course, Columbia made it back, and made a perfect landing on April 14th. John Young would go on to command one more Space Shuttle flight, and since then, only eight people have equaled his record of six launches from Earth, and only two have surpassed it. Robert Crippen went on to command three more Space Shuttle missions, but none on Columbia.

Columbia herself would go on to fly into orbit 27 more times. Sadly, on her 28th and last mission, she would not land.

It Could Be Worse

2011-04-08T19:01:00.002-05:00

[Editor's Note: I realized a couple of weeks ago that April 12th would be a trifecta of anniversaries, and I didn't want to give any one of them short shrift. But in the meantime, I've come across a fragment of a possibly apocryphal transcript of a conversation between Houston and the Space Station.]

"Mission Control to ISS ... Cathy? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you and Ron have been furloughed. And, since you're not authorized to use Federal property while on furlough ... um ... well, could you and Ron step outside for a bit while Congress sorts this mess out? What was that? AND the horse I rode in on?"

Video Del Fuego, Part XLII

2011-04-01T17:28:00.003-05:00

And now for something completely different ... and, I have to say, something that I'm not entirely sure is for real. But it looks awesome. I leave it up to you to judge. Chessboxing: is this a real sport, or an elaborate hoax?

It's almost enough to make me want to take up boxing. But then I remember that I'm only 5'6". So, I'm usually giving up a couple of inches of reach, which is not a fun place to be. I'd have to be murderously good at chess ... which I'm not. Oh, well.

I can see you looking at the date on the calendar. And I don't blame you. I think this is for real, but until I see it with my own eyes, I'll always wonder ... but to an extent, I don't care. If it's a hoax, at least it's an entertaining one.

Sesquicentennial, Part XII: Two Presidents

2011-03-24T06:09:00.004-05:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

Abraham Lincoln was now President of a truncated United States, and probably wondering why he ever wanted the job in the first place. Initially, Lincoln had decided to deal with secession by pretending that it was essentially irrelevant. But that wouldn't hold water for long.

In his inaugural address, he tried to assuage fears of precipitous action by stating as plainly as possible that he had every intention of enforcing the laws as written, and no intention of interfering with the institution of slavery. As odious as he personally found it, that was a can of worms he didn't want to open straight away. And he promised that there would be no use of force in the South ... but at the same time, he said that the Federal government would "hold, occupy, and possess the property and places" to which the Federal government held clear title.

The half-ton gorilla that had been sitting patiently in the parlor, that the Southern gentlemen had studiously ignored during their secession deliberations, was now displayed in full view for everyone to see. This had been the main point of contention ever since Major Anderson pulled stakes at Fort Moultrie and relocated to the more defensible Fort Sumter, out in Charleston's harbor. The Southern states were making a claim to political independence, but at the same time, they had to deal with the fact that, contractually and legally, the Federal government owned substantial properties within their claimed jurisdiction. They could never be truly "free" until those rights of ownership had been properly addressed.

Jefferson Davis knew this. From the very first, he had authorized commissioners to go to Washington to negotiate with the Federal government. Their goal was to barter for an acceptable price that the Southern states could pay that would satisfy the Federals, and allow them to depart in peace. Buchanan had listened politely, but made no commitment one way or the other. In this case, his inaction was justified. He felt that he had no right to make any decision at this point that would bind his successor to a policy he might not agree with. When the Presidency was handed over on March 4th, the Lincoln White House wouldn't even recognize them in any way. Their letters were met with a stony silence.

Lincoln was operating under the assumption that Major Anderson at Fort Sumter had laid in a sufficient store of supplies to last a prolonged siege. Perhaps he thought that the January mission had been successful. This was a major flaw in the Presidential transitions of the time: there was no official contact between the outgoing and incoming Presidents on matters of policy. Buchanan's people weren't on speaking terms with Lincoln's, and virtually nothing was passed down. It wasn't until after Lincoln had delivered his address that he learned about Fort Sumter's actual supply situation, which was pretty grim.

April 15, 1861. That was the date on which the supplies at Fort Sumter would run out. Beyond that date, Major Anderson could no longer feed his men. If they were not resupplied by that date, they would be forced to surrender the garrison shortly thereafter, or starve. Once again, the thoughts turned to a resupply mission.

General Scott was against the idea, even though the first resupply mission was undertaken at his urging. He knew who had taken command of the Southern forces massing against Fort Sumter, a Louisiana-born officer named P.G.T. Beauregard. Ironically, Beauregard's instructor at West Point had been Robert Anderson, who was commanding the Union garrison on which Beauregard's guns were trained. And Beauregard was an outstanding student. He was, in fact, probably the best military engineer that the Confederacy had.

Once again, this points out a fact that I had mentioned earlier: not having an entrenched Army bureaucracy, the Confederacy could immediately assign its best men to the most crucial assignments. They needed a crackerjack artilleryman commanding the works squaring off against Fort Sumter, not some buffoon who scarcely knew which was the business end of a cannon. And they had one in Beauregard. President Davis sent him to Charleston straight away, with a General's commission, to take command of the harbor's defense.

Scott knew this, and knew that Beauregard had been drilling his men for months now, waiting for the exact kind of operation Lincoln was now contemplating. The moment Beauregard's men spotted them, they'd blast ten kinds of Hell out of any Union resuppliers. On the other hand, Gustavus Fox, one of Lincoln's new advisors and an old, experienced Navy man, was certain he could slip into the harbor unnoticed, and resupply the garrison by night without Beauregard being any the wiser. Lincoln approved this plan, and Fox began assembling the men and supplies he would need for the expedition. His ships would stand to sea by April 9th, and should arrive with several days to spare.

Meanwhile, all eyes were on Charleston. Major Anderson watched the Confederate guns, and his own dwindling supplies. General Beauregard watched Fort Sumter, and the seaward horizon for any sign of Union ships. Everyone else watched, and listened ... for the bark of the guns couldn't be far away now.

The fort's fate would be decided, one way or the other, in a few weeks.

Video Del Fuego, Part XLII

2011-03-18T14:44:00.003-05:00

In all of the excitement of the last week, one event has gone mostly unreported. The MESSENGER spacecraft has just entered orbit around the planet Mercury. This is significant, because in terms of required energy, this is about as hard as sending a probe out into interstellar space. As a result, we know almost nothing about the innermost planet. This is going to change once MESSENGER begins its survey mission on April 4.

We have now placed orbiters around every planet out to Saturn, and have currently operating probes at each of those except for Jupiter, Galileo having completed its mission back in 2003.

Congratulations to the MESSENGER navigation team on a job well done so far. Now, we get to see what Mercury's been hiding all these years.

Election 2012 Preview: Handicapping the Primaries

2011-03-11T15:32:00.002-06:00

It's really too early for most of us to start thinking about the 2012 Presidential election. But for those who are planning on running for that office, if you're starting to think about it just now, you're already too late. The serious contenders have already begun to lay the groundwork for their local campaigns in key early states, and have begun to line up fundraisers, so that they have a nice, full war chest to begin the campaign season this summer. As always, there will be a number of parties that will contend for the office of President of the United States, but protestations of Greens and Libertarians aside, there are really only two parties worthy of serious consideration at this point: the Democrats and the Republicans. I've taken the liberty of gleaning the lists at Intrade, to get a sneak peek at what the early betting line looks like. (The numbers were current as of late afternoon on March 7th.)

The Democrats: Do we really have to have this conversation? In the modern term-limit era, only two sitting, eligible Presidents have not chosen to seek re-election: Truman and Johnson. And in that same era, only two Presidents saw a serious primary challenger for the nomination: Ford and Carter. The bottom line is that the Democratic nomination belongs to Barack Obama if he should want it, and all indications are, he does. The betting line bears this out:

President
Barack Obama: 89.5%
Hillary Clinton: 5.2%
Joe Biden: 4.0%

Vice President
Joe Biden: 90.0%
Hillary Clinton: 7.5%

Basically, no one unseats a sitting President who wants re-election. I wouldn't be so bold as to say it's outright impossible, but it's never happened yet. I'm inclined to say that barring some pretty spectacular events, it's not going to happen next year, either. I'm saying that partly because I think that's the reasonable way to bet, and partly because I really don't want to see the kinds of spectacularly horrifying events that would force it to happen. Also, an interesting point to note is that the last President to boot a VP for a re-election bid was FDR, who did it twice, and had three Vice-Presidents during his terms in office. It's a pretty solid lock that the Democrats are going to give the Obama/Biden ticket another whirl.

The Republicans: The Republican field is a far, far more interesting bunch. No one wants to commit. More to the point, no one wants to be the first to commit. Even more to the point, no one wants to commit before they know what Sarah Palin has in mind. Which is kind of funny, because ... well, see below:

Mitt Romney: 25.3%

Mitt Romney has a plurality of shares right now, and he's going to run a strong campaign. He'll do quite well in the early races. But he's got a couple of serious problems. First, ObamaCare is RomneyCare with the serial numbers filed off. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it's liable to be electric death with the Republican base. Second, he's a Mormon. And that's going to be a huge issue as the campaign rolls into the Bible Belt.

Tim Pawlenty: 13.5%

Tim Pawlenty does fairly well among Republicans who've heard of him. He's going to be fighting for name recognition amongst a fairly well-known field. His best option may well to be to sit this one out, and wait for 2016.

Mitch Daniels: 12.0%

Mitch Daniels is going to be vying with Romney for the mantle of the "establishment" candidate in this race. But this may not be the establishment's year, and Daniels may also be better served just sitting this one out.

Mike Huckabee: 9.4%

Mike Huckabee is well-liked amongst evangelical Republican voters, which is why he surprised everyone with early wins in the 2008 primaries. The "Oh, Hell No" reaction that kicked him out of the 2008 race may not happen again in 2012. Then again, it might. Huckabee's been courting the Tea Party vote, and we'll see over the course of this Fall and next Spring how well he's succeeded.

Sarah Palin: 7.0%

Sarah Palin either runs strongly in or leads a lot of early polls, and the conventional wisdom is that the race is hers to lose. And she may be just the woman for that job. She's got the star power and the charisma to mount a serious run at the nomination. But, can she put together a competent, effective team to get the job done? My feeling is that she's her own worst enemy. Her opponents' best strategy might be to attack her by not attacking, and thereby let her demolish herself.

Newt Gingrich: 6.2%

Newt Gingrich may well be the best-known of all potential candidates ... which is at once both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. You know the "sweet spot"? Newt's in the place farthest away from it as far as name recognition goes: no one especially likes him, and a lot of people hate him like metastasized cancer. Expect his candidacy to hit the wall early and burst into flames.

John Huntsman: 5.6%

John Huntsman would also be well advised to sit this one out, although experience with a national campaign might be of value. His association with the current Administration cannot but be a disadvantage amongst the hard-core Right, and they're the ones who'll show up for the primaries and caucuses.

Michelle Bachmann: 4.0%

Michelle Bachmann is one of the darlings of the Tea Party movement, and may well be their favorite, provided that Sarah Palin isn't also in the room. She may also be quite mad. The good news here is that she probably still thinks of Balaclava as a glorious victory, and will probably do the political equivalent, and charge upslope at a prepared artillery battery. We can only hope.

Haley Barbour: 3.3%

Haley Barbour is deader than last week's fried chicken. No real chance.

Donald Trump: 3.1%

Donald Trump, if he should run, will mount an immensely entertaining campaign for a month or two, until he realizes there's no money to be made in it.

Chris Christie: 3.1%

Chris Christie is on the Intrade lists, but does he really want the job?

And The Winner...

Generic Democratic Nominee: 63.1%
Generic Republican Nominee: 35.0%

Individuals

Barack Obama: 61.1%
Mitt Romney: 11.3%
Mitch Daniels: 5.0%
Mike Huckabee: 5.0%
Tim Pawlenty: 4.6%
Sarah Palin: 3.0%

Next year looks like it's going to be an incumbent's year. Employment will probably be up (it's trending upwards already), the stock market is doing well, and provided that the foreign situation doesn't go straight to pot, people will be feeling relatively safe. This is an environment that allows a current office-holder to sell his record, and one that makes a challenger's job that much harder. If you look back on the first-term Presidents who've failed to win a second term, you see one or more common factors: a bruising challenge for the nomination, a sour economy, or a bad situation abroad. I don't see any of those happening in the next eighteen months.

Bottom line: if you have any friends willing to take the bet, Obama/Biden '12 for the win is probably worth a buck or two.

Video Del Fuego, Part XLI

2011-03-04T12:40:00.003-06:00

As it turns out, rocket science is actually pretty hard. Consider the recent launch failure at Vandenberg. The Taurus XL rocket is a direct descendant of the Pegasus launcher, which had always been fairly reliable. But for some inexplicable reason, they're having problems with fairing separation lately, with three of the last four launches having been failures.

Back in the day, a fairing separation failure wouldn't necessarily mean the vehicle wouldn't reach orbit. But operating margins were a lot more generous back then. Nowadays, if you have a hundred extra pounds hanging off the second stage, that's the difference between reaching orbit, and getting an up-close view of the South Pacific.

In any case, that prompted me to look for some pictures of launch failures. Why? No real reason. Except that the videos are pretty cool. But my search was sidetracked pretty quick, when I found about this guy who built a one-tenth scale model of a Saturn V. Yes, that's thirty feet tall, and yes, that's a flying model.

Here's a video of the rocket under construction:

I don't want to say that our professionals are overrated (mostly because I'm one of them), but I'm thinking maybe we ought to let our amateurs have a go at it for a while.

Sesquicentennial, Part XI: A New Nation?

2011-02-25T17:41:00.003-06:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

By early February of 1861, seven states had seceded from the Union: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Six of them would meet in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4 to draft a provisional governing document for their new confederation. Delegates from Texas, which had only approved its secession on February 1, would not attend this meeting.

Now, time was short and the task was huge, so the assembled delegates in Montgomery decided to take a bit of a short-cut: most of them were more or less happy with the Constitution of the United States, so after a very brief discussion it was decided to use that as a basis. The delegates made a handful of quick changes, such as giving the President a line-item veto and changing a few procedural matters, and on February 8 the freshly-completed document was ratified unanimously by all delegates present. The next matter on the agenda was the choice of a provisional President to lead their new nation.

The debates became rather heated. Georgia was the most populous state then in the Confederacy, and could easily be expected to sway the convention to select a Georgian as President. However, Georgia's ambitions were thwarted when a well-respected Senator from Mississippi's name was thrown in the ring. He was a West Point man, had seen honorable service in the war with Mexico, and had been Secretary of War in a previous administration. The only problem was, he didn't particularly want the job. He had, in fact, argued against secession when Mississippi's legislature had taken up the issue. But he eventually came around, and came to believe that duty demanded that he take the office that was offered. And so, on February 18, Jefferson Davis took the oath of office, and became the acting President of the Confederate States of America.

Now, the Confederacy took up the job of drafting a formal, permanent Constitution to take the place of the hastily-drawn provisional document. Again, it would be mostly based upon the United States Constitution that they had previously lived under, but with a few key differences.

J. J. McCullough has gone through an exhaustive line-by-line comparison of the CSA Constitution versus the USA Constitution, as it existed in 1861, and it's a quite interesting read, if also quite lengthy. Apart from the purely cosmetic changes -- substituting "Confederate States" for "United States" for example, or the "modernized" use of language -- there were several important differences.

One is that the Confederate Constitution specifically bans the government from interfering in the institution of slavery. I don't really want to belabor this point, but so many people insist on believing that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. To believe that, you have to ignore virtually everything written about secession by the men who were there and actively supporting it. You'd have to ignore the very laws they wrote, to engrave the institution in stone, at the heart of their Republic. There can be no mistake: when these men wrote, in Section 9 Paragraph 4, "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed," they were very much in earnest about it. This was why they left the Union, full stop.

Another ... is that Southerners had, and still have, a weird idea about public works projects. They didn't like them. At all. This is another thing that's readily visible from the Tale of the Tape. In the North, you have the Erie Canal. You have miles upon miles of railroads. You have a web of commerce veining the land, from the sea inland. In the South ... you have rivers. Navigable rivers. And a scant handful of railroad lines. And, Southerners liked it that way. Anyway, they wrote it into their Constitution that it would be outright illegal for the Confederate government to do that sort of thing. (It's still kind of this way. There are probably more toll roads and bridges in Dallas and Tarrant County than in all of, say, Minnesota.)

The delegates to the framing of the Confederate Constitution wanted a governing document that would guarantee the supremacy of the States over the Confederate government. And the Confederate Constitution would give it to them, good and hard. Time would tell how well, or how poorly that would work.

In the meantime, a train had pulled into the station up in Washington. Abraham Lincoln had arrived, to prepare for his inauguration on the fourth day of March. He would assume leadership of a Union riven by secession. But there were still a few who held out hope that it need not end in bloodshed. But only a few. Most could see the powder train burning steadily, and all eyes were turned not upon Montgomery or Washington, but on Charleston harbor. Major Anderson and a hundred-odd Union troops still held firm at Fort Sumter.

But supplies were beginning to run low. Something had to give.

Video Del Fuego, Part XL

2011-02-18T19:53:00.003-06:00

In honor of National Engineers Week (February 20-26), here's what happens when someone with more mechanical skills than sense gets his hands on a VW Beetle and a surplus Sea Knight gas turbine engine.

How Did Sputnik Happen?

2011-02-04T19:18:00.002-06:00

On October 4, 1957, the United States received a rude shock. The Soviet Union, a nation that had been thought of as technologically backward, had beaten us to putting an artificial satellite in Earth orbit. As the simple satellite soared overhead, emitting a radio ping, Americans below were asking themselves, "How did this happen?" They called for massive increases in funding for science and engineering education, and for massive increases in military spending, fearful that they had somehow fallen behind.

They were both right and wrong. The Soviet Union had achieved a clear advantage in long-range missiles. What wasn't obvious at the time was that they were forced to seek that advantage, due to a fundamental disadvantage that was at least two decades in the making. It was a disadvantage born of the fundamental qualities of both nations involved, and of the fundamental qualities of specific individuals working for them.

Back in 1935, the United States and the Soviet Union were both planning for war, but not against each other. And they were equipping for different wars entirely: the Soviet Union only envisioned wars against enemies they could reach entirely by land, and the United States only envisioned large-scale wars against enemies that they would have to reach by sea or by air. Soviet weapon development focused on armored vehicles and artillery; American weapon development featured heavy warships and long-range bombers. It was to this end that, on August 8, 1934, the Army Air Corps issued a request for a long-range bomber to reinforce the air forces at Hawaii, Panama, and Alaska. This bomber would become the B-17 Flying Fortress.

The Soviets more or less ignored long-range bombers as being irrelevant to their needs. They had designed and built a four-engine bomber, the Pe-8, but only built 93 of them. As an operational consideration, they judged bombers to be inferior to artillery, at least as far as their needs were concerned.

The events of the European Theater of WWII would cause them to re-evaluate this position. German industry was being relentlessly hammered, both by RAF Bomber Command at night, and by the U.S. 8th Air Force by day. As the Soviet armies advanced westward, they saw for themselves the effects of this bombardment. And then, in August of 1945, a new weapon appeared on the scene that changed everything.

The United States had the ultimate weapon, and the means with which to deliver it. By 1949, the Soviet Union also had this ultimate weapon -- but still lacked a reliable means with which to deliver it. They wanted -- they needed -- a bomber like the Boeing B-29 that could deliver an atomic bomb, but didn't yet have one. They wanted -- they needed -- a bomber with intercontinental range, like the Convair B-36, but didn't have that, either.

Desperation, as it often does, drove them to transcendence.

Another new weapon made its first appearance in the closing days of WWII: the long-range ballistic missile. The United States was able to secure Wernher von Braun and most of his engineering team, but the Soviets were able to capture a fair number of scientists, engineers, and technicians who couldn't run West fast enough. They were able to give critical advice on the finer points of liquid-fuel engines, boot-strapping the work of the Soviets' own home-grown experts, Korolev and Glushko.

The American missile program never had that kind of feverish priority. Von Braun had work from the Army to keep him busy, most of the time; but still he had plenty of time on his hands to fool around with things that, strictly speaking, weren't in his portfolio. His famous series for Collier's comes to mind, beautifully illustrated by Chesley Bonestell. For one, America always had the means to deliver nuclear weapons on target, as demonstrated in August 1945. And for another ... American missiles didn't need to be all that big.

Which brings us to the other disadvantage ... American warheads were smaller.

The exact details are still stamped excruciatingly secret, but Edward Teller had figured out a way to shoehorn atomic weapons into improbably small and light packages. That meant that for the same yield, an American warhead was lighter and more compact than its Soviet counterpart. This meant that, to throw it a similar distance, the American warhead needed a much smaller rocket than did the Soviet one. So, the Soviets were forced to build huge rockets, first because they lacked any meaningful strategic bomber capability, and second because their warheads were huge, heavy behemoths.

These disadvantages, paradoxically, turned into advantages in the early years of the Space Race. Their bigger, more powerful rockets made it far easier for them to loft spacecraft into Earth orbit. That advantage would win them several early firsts: in 1957, the first artificial satellite; in 1961, the first man in orbit; in 1964, the first multi-man orbital spacecraft; and in 1965 the first spacewalk.

The glory days didn't last. They hit a run of bad luck, starting in 1967, with the loss of Vladimir Komarov on Soyuz 1. The humiliation continued in 1968, when they were forced to watch as spectators as an American crew made the first circumnavigation of the Moon, and was made complete in 1969 with the successful landing and return of Apollo 11.

But in another sense, Korolev got the last laugh, after all. Its rivals are all long since retired. The B-29 and B-36 only survive in museums, the American Atlas V only shares a name with its predecessor, but the R-7 variants still soldier on, carrying astronauts and cosmonauts to the International Space Station.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXXIX

2011-02-04T07:28:00.001-06:00

Granted, it's not a true, free-flying jetpack, but it'll do. It'll do.

MSRP is a low, low $139,500. Get one now, while supplies last!

In Memoriam

2011-01-27T11:47:00.003-06:00

High Flight

(Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee, No. 412 Squadron RCAF, KIA 12/11/1941)

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

In respectful memory of:

Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White II, Roger Chaffee: Apollo 1, 1/27/1967

Vladimir Komarov: Soyuz 1, 4/23/1967

Major Michael J. Adams, USAF: X-15 Flight #191, 11/15/1967

Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, Viktor Patsayev: Soyuz 11/Salyut 1, 6/30/1971

Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Ron McNair, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis: Challenger, 1/28/1986

Rick Husband, William McCool, Dave Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark, Ilan Ramon: Columbia, 2/1/2003

Requiem aeternam donum est, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Sesquicentennial, Part X: Secession Winter

2011-01-21T17:00:00.003-06:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

In hindsight, it's fairly plain that Scott's plan to relieve Fort Sumter would have been too little, too late, even if it were possible to have put the plan into action immediately. Secretary of War Floyd had seen to that, having denuded the Southern harbor forts of men and materiel in the year before. It's a pity, because for once, Buchanan had been stirred to prompt action. In the first week of January, it was enacted just as Scott had said; a US Navy warship escorted the civilian steamship Star of the West down to Charleston, loaded with men and supplies to relieve the garrison at Fort Sumter. The mission was laid on with as much secrecy as could have been expected. It was, unfortunately, so secret that Major Anderson didn't know they were coming. As the ships entered the harbor, they were fired upon by cadets from The Citadel who were manning the guns of the landward harbor forts. Major Anderson could have supported the ships with suppressive fire, except that he had been drilling his men, and his guns were loaded with the wrong ammunition. He could only watch in frustration as the ships withdrew from the harbor.

In quick succession, almost as if in reaction, Southern states began adopting resolutions of secession. On the 9th, Mississippi. Then a day later, Florida, and a day after that, Alabama. Then on the 18th, Georgia. Louisiana and Texas would follow shortly, the latter under the protest of her governor, Sam Houston. Sam Houston argued strenuously against secession. No one could accuse him of animus against his state -- were it not for Houston's leadership at San Jacinto, there might not even be a Texas -- but passions ran too high for him to counter. Houston resigned rather than sign the instrument of secession.

Meanwhile, one last gasp at compromise had been made, this time by Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden. Crittenden proposed that the Missouri Compormise line be made permanent, and slavery allowed in perpetuity south of it. It was basically a non-starter; given that there was maybe ten square miles of decent agricultural land in the territories south of said line. Excepting California, which as we mentioned earlier, had entered the Union as a free state.

The positions had now hardened beyond a point of no return. The states that had bolted the Union were now dead-set on forming themselves into a new nation of their own.

As an independent nation, the Southerners would have many disadvantages, and only one clear advantage.

This is what I was getting at earlier with the Tale of the Tape: the Southern states faced a severe shortfall in terms of population, in terms of railroad and transportation capacity, and in terms of manufacturing capability.

Population: The states that would eventually become the Union held 21.6 million free, less than half a million slaves. The rest of the states together held five million free, with three million slaves. Of those five million, only about half were male; and not all of those were of military age, and not all of those could be spared for duty. On the face of it they were outnumbered four to one, and when you cut out the people left behind to guard and supervise the slave population, it was probably more like five or six to one.

Transportation: The transportation picture didn't look so dire, with the North having twice as many rail miles as the South, but that figure belied the picture. Northern rail lines would commonly go all the way through a town, allowing unimpeded access. Southern rail lines would commonly stop at the edge of a town, requiring a labor gang to unload a train and haul the cargo across town. Goods and cargo could not flow as smoothly. Not a problem in peacetime, especially where bulk goods are concerned; but it could become a crippling problem in wartime where every hour can count.

Manufacturing: New England alone equaled the output of all Southern states. What more need be said? The South could not produce its own munitions, heavy guns, or finished goods of any sort. They pinned their entire hope on being supplied with munitions from abroad.

All that said, the South still had one key advantage, one that would last a few years before the rest could catch up with them. They had no standing army.

Say what?

Yes, in a perverse way, that was an advantage. You see, in the Union, you had a sharp division between Regular officers and volunteer or militia officers, with the Regular officers having all the important commands in the early phases of the War. Some of those regulars were good. Some, not so good. A few couldn't find their own hindquarters with both hands, a map, and a compass. Some of their best officers were actually in militia or volunteer units, and it would take years for them to rise to positions of power and influence. The South did not have this problem, and could put their most able men in key positions right away. This gave them a crucial leadership advantage in the early stage of the conflict.

The lines were drawn, and just about everyone knew it was going to come to grief. Now, it was all a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Chinese Stealth Fighter

2011-01-07T15:22:00.006-06:00

The wires are abuzz this week with new pictures of what is supposed to be China's answer to the F-22 Raptor. After taking a critical look at the pictures, I am somewhat less than worried, although I understand how a casual viewer might be alarmed.

For purposes of comparison, here's a picture of the F-22 Raptor. The first example, a YF-22, first flew in September of 1990; and the first F-22 squadron came on-line for duty in December of 2005.

At first glance, this looks scarily similar:

There are, however, a few key differences, as well as a few important details to point out.

(1) The first is, of course, the time delay between the first flight of a new prototype and the IOC date of the first operational squadron. For the F-22 Raptor, that was just over fifteen years, from 9/1990 to 12/2005. Now, I have no reason to believe that the Chinese engineers are total idiots, but at the same time neither do I have reason to believe that they're supermen. I don't see them paring too many years off that figure. So, if we're to believe that the first flight was fairly recent, IOC can be no sooner than 2020-2025. By which time, we'll have ... well, I'll save that point for later.

(2) The second is that, while the fuselage sure looks like it's got a nice low-observable shape, the devil's in the details. For one, the shape is only half the story, there. Do they also use the right radar-absorbing materials in the skin? And, taking a closer look at the front view, we see a huge potential problem:

I count four under-wing hardpoints. External carriage of weapons and/or fuel tanks pretty much destroys any stealthing advantage your fuselage shape gives you. Unless this aircraft has provisions for internal weapon carriage, they lose the stealth part of the battle pretty horribly. (Caveat: those may not be hardpoints, but may instead by housings for control actuators. Even so, those 90-degree corners make nice little echo boxes that render the sloping fuselage moot.)

(3) The third point is readily apparent from a rear-view shot:

Oh, dear. Fixed axisymmetric nozzles. No thrust vectoring for you! Thrust vectoring is damned useful to have. Not having it, and then getting into a turn-and-burn fight with an airplane that does, is going to suck.

(4) The fourth problem is something I once heard described as the Montana Syndrome, after the Montana-class battleship. The Montana-class battleship was supposed to be the U.S. Navy's answer to the Japanese super-heavies Yamato and Musashi. It wasn't. Yamato and Musashi both got their tickets punched by the Grumman Avenger and the Curtiss Helldiver, and the Japanese sailors never once saw the American carriers that did them in. The few hulls of the Montana class that had been laid down were never completed. The battleship was an idea whose time had come and gone. I'm fairly convinced that the manned tactical fighter is headed down the same road. So far as I'm concerned, the Chinese are welcome to spend as much money as they like on last year's model. By the time this sees service in squadron quantity, air combat will have changed almost beyond recognition, and the skies may well be dominated by laser weapons and unmanned combat aircraft.

In short: panic is unwarranted. Calls for extending the production run of the F-22, likewise. This fighter doesn't look as good as what we're already fielding in the first place, and it's the wrong answer to an almost outdated question, anyway. We've already got a solid lead in UCAV technology. Extending that lead is fairly easy, provided we don't let ourselves get goaded into reprising last century's best technology.

Sesquicentennial, Part IX: A Point Of No Return?

2010-12-30T07:00:00.004-06:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

Officers, as we've already discussed, do not take an oath to follow orders. They hold their commission from the President, they are sworn to defend the Constitution, and they can (and are) sacked if they flout authority. Direct orders are given great weight in their thought. But, absent orders, American soldiers have been known to draw up their own as they see fit. It's a trait that bedeviled Soviet military planners, one of whom wrote: "The difficulty in countering American military doctrine is that their officers do not feel compelled to follow it." It was just as true in 1860 as in 1980.

Major Robert Anderson woke up to one hell of a problem on Christmas Day, 1860. He had command of fewer than 100 soldiers, and held the responsibility to defend Federal property in the harbor of Charleston. Charleston, you will remember, now held itself no longer part of the Union. Four days had passed since the declaration of December 20th, and no orders had come from Washington as to what to do about it. What he needed were reinforcements, and soon. But the Secretary of War, John Floyd, was dead-set against it. Big surprise there, he said sarcastically ... Floyd's sympathies were quite plainly with the secessionists, as his deployment orders the previous summer hinted. What Floyd really wanted, but dared not commit to paper, was for Major Anderson to pack up and head North.

Major Anderson packed up, all right. On the night of the 26th, Major Anderson spiked the guns at Fort Moultrie, gathered up his garrison, and lit out for Fort Sumter. His reasoning was simple, and militarily very sound. Fort Moultrie could not be held against a determined assault, not with only 100 men. And certainly not against a landward assault. Being a harbor fort, it was never built with landward defenses. Fort Sumter, on the other hand, was surrounded by water, and very much defensible. Given provisions and ammunition, 100 men could hold Fort Sumter for months. Maybe even indefinitely, if reinforcements and provisions could be had promptly.

He had no orders from Washington to do this. But neither did he have orders to yield up his garrison unfought. In the absence of orders either way, Major Anderson took the action he deemed best, and sought out the most defensible position he could find.

Secretary Floyd was not amused. The news arrived at Washington as fast as a telegraph wire could carry it, and by nightfall on the 27th Floyd had issued a stern telegram to Major Anderson demanding explanation: Intelligence has reached here this morning that you have abandoned Fort Moultrie, spiked your guns, burned the carriages, and gone to Fort Sumter. It is not believed, because there is no order for any such movement. Explain the meaning.

Major Anderson, outnumbered easily 100-to-1, was even less amused, and his reply showed it: Answer – the telegram is correct. I abandoned Fort Moultrie because I was certain that if attacked my men must have been sacrificed and the command of the harbor lost. I spiked the guns and destroyed the carriages to keep the guns from being used against us. If attacked, the garrison would never have surrendered without a fight. Unwritten, but obviously implied: You idiot.

Now, this message traffic went directly from Secretary Floyd to Major Anderson, cutting out the man who was at least nominally Major Anderson's commanding officer, Lieutenant General Winfield Scott. At age 74, General Scott was hardly amused by anything anymore, but these shenanigans annoyed him no end. It was clear to Scott that the harbor forts, being Federal property, must be defended. He was old, and ill, and tired; but nonetheless he had a duty to perform. On the morning of December 30, a Sunday, he dictated a hasty note to President Buchanan.

Lieutenant General Scott begs the President of the United States to pardon the irregularity of this communication.

It is Sunday; the weather is bad, and General Scott is not well enough to go to church. But matters of the highest national importance seem to forbid a moment’s delay, and if misled by zeal, he hopes the President’s forgiveness.

...

Will the President permit General Scott, without reference to the War Department and otherwise, as secretly as possible, to send two hundred and fifty recruits from New York Harbor to re-enforce Fort Sumter, together with some extra muskets of rifles, ammunition, and subsistence stores?

It is hoped that a sloop of war and a cutter may be ordered for the same purpose as early as to-morrow.

General Scott will wait upon the President at any moment he may be called for.

The President’s most obedient servant,

WINFIELD SCOTT

These reinforcements, if done promptly, would have given Major Anderson a force of battalion strength with which to hold Fort Sumter, and provisions to last a prolonged siege. The South Carolina militia will not yet have fortified the harbor against reinforcement. Prompt action could save the fort.

Prompt action ... wasn't Buchanan's strong suit.

Nevertheless, one Union major's spontaneous act made it Federal policy that Federal property would be defended with force of arms if need be. Neither Floyd nor Buchanan could gainsay that at this point. Looking back, it seems clear that this was the point of no return. Each side had staked a position from which they would not back down. There would be no negotiation, there would be no settlement, and now it was perfectly clear where the conflagration would begin. The only remaining question was, when?

Sesquicentennial, Part VIII: The Dam Breaks

2010-12-24T12:58:00.005-06:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

The delegates to the Convention in South Carolina held their first meetings on December 17, as scheduled. The vote for secession was 169-0 in favor. They announced the result, and consequently seceded from the Union, on December 20. Three documents resulted from this Convention. The first was the Ordinance of Secession itself, the legal document that severed the connection between South Carolina and the Union. The second was a missive directed towards the other slaveholding States, imploring them to do likewise. The third, issued on December 24, was titled the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, and was intended to explain to the world at large why they did what they did. I reproduce the document here, in its entirety.

The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

And now the State of South Carolina having resumed her separate and equal place among nations, deems it due to herself, to the remaining United States of America, and to the nations of the world, that she should declare the immediate causes which have led to this act.

In the year 1765, that portion of the British Empire embracing Great Britain, undertook to make laws for the government of that portion composed of the thirteen American Colonies. A struggle for the right of self-government ensued, which resulted, on the 4th of July, 1776, in a Declaration, by the Colonies, "that they are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do."

They further solemnly declared that whenever any "form of government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government." Deeming the Government of Great Britain to have become destructive of these ends, they declared that the Colonies "are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved."

In pursuance of this Declaration of Independence, each of the thirteen States proceeded to exercise its separate sovereignty; adopted for itself a Constitution, and appointed officers for the administration of government in all its departments-- Legislative, Executive and Judicial. For purposes of defense, they united their arms and their counsels; and, in 1778, they entered into a League known as the Articles of Confederation, whereby they agreed to entrust the administration of their external relations to a common agent, known as the Congress of the United States, expressly declaring, in the first Article "that each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right which is not, by this Confederation, expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled."

Under this Confederation the war of the Revolution was carried on, and on the 3rd of September, 1783, the contest ended, and a definite Treaty was signed by Great Britain, in which she acknowledged the independence of the Colonies in the following terms: "ARTICLE 1-- His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that he treats with them as such; and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof."

Thus were established the two great principles asserted by the Colonies, namely: the right of a State to govern itself; and the right of a people to abolish a Government when it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted. And concurrent with the establishment of these principles, was the fact, that each Colony became and was recognized by the mother Country a FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATE.

In 1787, Deputies were appointed by the States to revise the Articles of Confederation, and on 17th September, 1787, these Deputies recommended for the adoption of the States, the Articles of Union, known as the Constitution of the United States.

The parties to whom this Constitution was submitted, were the several sovereign States; they were to agree or disagree, and when nine of them agreed the compact was to take effect among those concurring; and the General Government, as the common agent, was then invested with their authority.

If only nine of the thirteen States had concurred, the other four would have remained as they then were-- separate, sovereign States, independent of any of the provisions of the Constitution. In fact, two of the States did not accede to the Constitution until long after it had gone into operation among the other eleven; and during that interval, they each exercised the functions of an independent nation.

By this Constitution, certain duties were imposed upon the several States, and the exercise of certain of their powers was restrained, which necessarily implied their continued existence as sovereign States. But to remove all doubt, an amendment was added, which declared that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people. On the 23d May , 1788, South Carolina, by a Convention of her People, passed an Ordinance assenting to this Constitution, and afterwards altered her own Constitution, to conform herself to the obligations she had undertaken.

Thus was established, by compact between the States, a Government with definite objects and powers, limited to the express words of the grant. This limitation left the whole remaining mass of power subject to the clause reserving it to the States or to the people, and rendered unnecessary any specification of reserved rights.

We hold that the Government thus established is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence; and we hold further, that the mode of its formation subjects it to a third fundamental principle, namely: the law of compact. We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.

In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.

The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.

The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

The ends for which the Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.

Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of more erroneous religious belief.

We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.

Adopted December 24, 1860

Some points to ponder:

(1) There can be absolutely no doubt at this juncture that the primary motivation for South Carolina's secession from the Union had damn-all to do with tariff policy, and everything to do with the continuance of the institution of slavery. The word "tariff" appears nowhere in this statement. The notion of "states' rights" are only significant as they pertain to the right to own other human beings. The one hundred and sixty nine delegates who approved this document meant precisely what they said here, and they spent easily two-thirds of the document detailing their grievances against the Northern states and their anti-slavery campaigns. The excuses of tariff policy and states' rights came later, after the Confederacy had gone down to defeat, after-the-fact justifications for starting the bloodiest war in American history. The real reasons are here in black and white, for everyone to see.

(2) That said, it's important not to absolve the North of all guilt here. If slavery was profitable, if it was sufficiently valuable for the South to risk war, it was because the North made it so. Northern mills ran on free labor, true enough, but the cotton feed-stock with which they worked was picked and ginned by slave labor. It's true that Northerners had become sick of the institution, and wished for its end, but it's also true that it enriched them almost as much as it had the Southern planters.

(3) With South Carolina's action, the dam had burst, but not yet completely. Initially, only six more states of the deep South would follow suit: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Each would adopt Declarations closely similar to that issued by South Carolina. But the border states, where slavery was still legal, held their hand and would not yet commit. The status of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas had yet to be determined. Some held out the hope that the breach was not yet fatal, and may yet be mended.

(4) Now that South Carolina has asserted its independence, the half-ton gorilla patiently sitting in their parlor that the one hundred sixty nine delegates had studiously ignored was the fact that the Federal Government owned clear legal title to significant properties within their claimed jurisdiction. How would they handle the transfer of said properties, and how would they handle the compensation of the Federal Government for the loss of its property? Furthermore, what was Major Anderson, the commanding officer of Union forces in South Carolina, going to do about this new state of affairs? By South Carolina's definition, he was now a foreign occupier; but he had no orders to treat them as the legitimate possessors of Federal property. He would receive no orders to that effect. He'd receive precious few orders of any sort. He was, in a very real sense, on his own.

Whether he realized it or not, Major Anderson had just become the most important man in the country. Much would hinge on how he handled the next few months.

Sesquicentennial, Interlude: The Long Recall

2010-12-18T18:26:00.003-06:00

There's a new entry in the "real-time" look back at the Civil War, this one from The American Interest, called The Long Recall. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.) Along with Disunion from the New York Times, it'll provide another perspective on the unfolding crisis.

It's always good to see more entries in this area, and there's always room for more.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXXVIII

2010-12-13T19:06:00.002-06:00

There's a heck of a winter storm that's been giving the People's Elbow to the Midwest for the last week or so. Being a life-long Texan, I haven't had much personal experience with this "snow" of which Northerners speak. But water, even frozen water, is deceptively heavy, and its weight rarely gets the respect it truly deserves. Hardly anyone will believe you if you tell them that water weighs a metric ton per cubic meter, but that's the truth. Even so, some fore-sighted soul who works at the Metrodome in Minneapolis had the presence of mind to have the internal cameras turned on and recording when this happened:

As impressive as this footage is, it's not all about the spectacle. This video is pure gold for the engineers whose job it will be to design and build the replacement. Knowing precisely how the failure cascade progressed will tell them exactly where the existing structure came up short. In turn, that will tell them what needs to be made stronger for the new one. Given good information, repeat failures tend to be rare in engineering. Once repaired, and especially once upgraded, I'd be amazed if the roof failed in this same way again.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXXVII

2010-12-08T18:40:00.002-06:00

Say what you want to about Elon Musk, he can sure build a rocket:

This second flight of the Falcon 9 rocket carried the first fully-functional prototype of the Dragon spacecraft into orbit. It's also the first time that a private company has actually brought anything back from orbit. After circling the Earth twice, the Dragon spacecraft executed a de-orbit burn, and splashed down in the Pacific, about 500 miles off the coast of Mexico. The next demonstration flight is scheduled for April, which may involve an unmanned rendezvous with the Space Station. Cargo deliveries will follow within a year.

Falcon 9 is now two-for-two. And at the end of today's play, the score stands at Dragon 1, Orion 0. Which means that this isn't very far off:

Sesquicentennial, Part VII: Where Were They?

2010-12-06T18:47:00.003-06:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

One hundred fifty years ago, delegates in South Carolina were on their way to Columbia, where the legislature had voted to assemble a Convention for the purpose of considering secession from the Union in response to the election of a Republican to the Presidency. The result of this convention was almost a foregone conclusion. The only questions remaining were when, how, and codifying the reasons why. Elsewhere in the country, other men went about their daily duties, some rather ordinary, some already extraordinary. Although some of them were rather obscure at the time, we would come to know them very well indeed in the months and years to come.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it. -- Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln spent the winter of 1860 at his home in Springfield, preparing for his Presidency to being on March 4 of the following year. Much of his time was consumed dealing with office-seekers, a task that would take up much of his time until he actually assumed the Presidency. The President-Elect not only had to assemble a team with which to govern, he also faced the prospect of governing vast territories that had no wish to be governed, at least not by him. This would be the last winter he would ever spend at his home.

One of the fruitful sources, as I hold it, of the errors which prevail in our country, is the theory that this is a government of one people; that the government of the United States was formed by a mass; and therefore it is taken that all are responsible for the institutions and policies of each. The government of the United States is a compact between the sovereign members who formed it; and if there be one feature common to all the colonies planted upon the shores of America, it was the steady assertion of, and uncompromising desire for, community independence. -- Jefferson Davis

Jefferson Davis was a United States Senator from Mississippi. He argued forcefully for the rights of the several States against those of the Federal government. Ironically, that winter, he also argued against Mississippi's secession from the Union. But like so many others of his class and time, where Mississippi went, he would follow.

He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it. -- Col. Theodore Lyman, describing Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant was a West Point man, and had a creditable record of service in the Mexican War, but had fallen on hard times. After a string of failed business ventures, he was working as an assistant in his father's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois. Somewhat ironically, considering his later life, he was a supporter of Stephen Douglas in the 1860 election.

I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union. -- Robert E. Lee

Robert E. Lee was second in his class at West Point, and was enjoying a promising career as one of the U.S. Army's rising stars. He had served with distinction in the Corps of Engineers, and had been Superintendent of West Point. In the winter of 1860 Lee was in Texas, but was planning to report to Washington for reassignment.

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it… Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail. -- William Tecumseh Sherman

William Tecumseh Sherman was also a West Point man, but was assigned to administrative duties in California during the Mexican War. His lack of combat experience, and the lack of future opportunity that implied, led to his decision to resign his commission in 1853. He went through a series of jobs without much success, but found a position that fit his character when he was appointed superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary in 1859. Many of his colleagues at this southern institution were quite openly pro-secession ... and most learned not to mention this around Sherman. Very little of what was to come came as a surprise to him.

The course of events is so rapidly hastening forward that the emergency may soon arise when you may be called upon to decide the momentous question whether you possess the power by force of arms to compel a State to remain in the Union. I should feel myself recreant to my duty were I not to express an opinion on this important subject. -- James Buchanan

It is grimly amusing that Buchanan would use the words "recreant to my duty" in a non-ironic sense. Nominally speaking, in the winter of 1860, James Buchanan was the President of the United States. Practically speaking, he was an empty suit. He believed that secession was illegal -- but he also believed he had no legal powers to do anything about it. This, quite frankly, baffles me. If something is illegal, does that not imply that there is a law? And does the Chief Executive not have, by definition, the authority -- no, the duty -- to enforce law? But no, James Buchanan would fiddle while America burned. Mark this well: Buchanan wasn't a bad President because he made bad decisions. Buchanan was a bad President because, at the most critical juncture of the nation's history, he made no decisions.

His waffling would cost his countrymen dearly.

The conventioneers were set to meet in Columbia, South Carolina, on December 17th, 1860.

All Alone In The Night

2010-12-03T16:52:00.002-06:00

I pity doctoral candidates in liberal arts fields. Completing a Ph.D. in anything requires a dissertation, and that dissertation must be an original contribution to the state of the art. For a budding literature scholar, that's a fairly daunting prospect. There's a limit to how thin you can slice Shakespeare without getting patently silly. I admire the ingenuity it takes to do that well. On the other hand, for a scientist or engineer, it's easy. Just pick a question no one's figured out yet. No shortage of those. Even if you don't answer it, you can eliminate a few blind alleys.

So ... having been a doctoral candidate, I tend to wonder about unanswered questions. Metaphysically speaking, the biggest question still on Science's plate is, "Are we alone?" People have wondered about this for ages, but Frank Drake was the first to take up the search in earnest, at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia in 1960. In 1961, the National Academy of Sciences asked Drake to convene a meeting on the subject. In his preparations for that meeting, Drake came up with a formula to estimate the number of civilizations we might expect to talk to:

N = R* x Fp x Ne x Fl x Fi x Fc x L

where:

N = number of civilization in the Galaxy with which communications might be possible
R* = Rate of star formation
Fp = Fraction of stars that have planets
Ne = Average number of planets that can support life per star with planets
Fl = Fraction of Ne that go on to develop life
Fi = Fraction of the above that develop intelligence
Fc = Fraction that go on to develop radio, and announce their existence
L = Lifetime of that civilization

Drake originally estimated N to be equal to 10. But most of the numbers Drake used were wild, if educated, guesses. A lot of those numbers are still wild guesses. But, we know a lot more about extrasolar planets now than we did then ... Missions like Kepler and COROT have begun to hit paydirt.

In particular, there's evidence to suggest that the nearby star Gliese 581 has a planet, Gliese 581g, that could have liquid water on its surface. It's at the right distance from its parent star, it's about the right size. Someone might just be living there. But the real point is, we now have a lower bound of sorts for the frequency of vaguely Earthlike planets: 1 in 500. Knowing that, we can have a go at recranking the numbers.

R*: The current best estimates are that seven stars are formed in our Galaxy every year.

Fp: Scientific opinion has gone back and forth on this like you wouldn't believe. At one point, I was about to make my dissertation topic a numerical study on the stability of hypothetical planetary orbits in binary star systems. At the time, many people thought that binary star systems couldn't have planets at all. Now, we've discovered several extrasolar planets in such systems. Drake originally estimated this fraction to be about one-half. Evidence suggests it's somewhere between 40% and 60%, with one-third being a fairly confident lower bound. So, going with 0.5 seems a safe enough bet.

Ne: Here's where our newest information comes in: out of eight known planets in our own solar system, and 505 known elsewhere, there is one known Earthlike world (Earth, obviously) and one suspected (Gliese 581g). So, according to our best information available, we can guess this number to be about 0.04.

Fl: Once it was thought that life was abundant in the cosmos. Then it was thought that life was rare. Now we're swinging back the other way. Everywhere we have found liquid water, nutrients, and an energy source, we've found life. Extremes of temperature don't matter. Acidity doesn't matter, neither does alkalinity. Presence or absence of salt, ditto. We've even discovered a microbe that can substitute arsenic for phosphorus. I'm fairly convinced this is as near to 1 as makes no difference.

Fi: This, on the other hand, is a trickier question. Single-cell life is probably ubiquitous. It arose on Earth almost the moment conditions allowed it. Multi-cell organisms, on the other hand ... The Rare Earth hypothesis isn't anything like proven, but I do find its reasoning fairly sound. The leap from single-cell to multi-cell life is the one big step that you probably ought not take for granted. It might require finicky conditions that are rare, or it might be easy. We just don't know. But, once you cross that barrier, evolution does tend to favor complex organisms. That complexity tends to give a creature a richer toolbox for dealing with its world. And intelligence, once it arises, is evolution's killer app. Simple life adjusts to its environment by altering its internal chemistry. Complex life adjusts to its environment by changing shape or behavior. Intelligent life adjusts to its environment by building new tools. Drake guessed 0.01, for reasons unknown. I'm going to guess 0.5, because I think that the leap to multi-cell life is the rare part. Once you clear that hurdle, the rest is gravy.

Fc: Now we devolve into hand-waving. We have no idea how to estimate this. Drake guessed 0.01, pretty much by pulling a number out of his hat. From our own history, we know of cultures that just never got around to fiddling with machines. And we also know that writing was only independently invented a handful of times. I think 0.01 might be too low, but I do think that 0.1 might be about right.

L: Marconi's experiments in radio date from approximately 1900, so we know this is at least 110 years. Frank Drake estimated this to be 10,000 years, and more recently Michael Schermer estimated this number at 420 years, based on an analysis of civilizations in our own past. I've been thinking on this myself lately, and I'm wondering if L actually measures what we think it measures. It doesn't necessarily measure how long a civilization lasts. It measures how long they use analog AM or FM signals as their primary means of communication. A civilization won't necessarily "go dark" because they blow themselves up. They'll more likely "go dark" because they move to more tightly-beamed transmissions, digital communications, fiber optics, frequency-hopping, or any of a dozen other similar technologies. Back in 1960, they thought radio was forever. It may instead be a phase civilizations go through. I'm thinking that window of opportunity is two centuries wide, at most.

So:

N = 7 x 0.5 x 0.04 x 1 x 0.5 x 0.1 x 200 = 1.4

If these estimates are valid, it means that we're probably not alone, but we're not likely to find anyone interested in interstellar ham radio anytime real soon.

But we may as well keep looking. It's not like we have anything better to do.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXXVI

2010-11-12T15:04:00.008-06:00

Alan Shepard had a long, hard road between his two space missions. An inner-ear problem kept him grounded for most of the 1960s, until an experimental procedure restored him to flight status in time for Apollo 14. These clips are from a 1998 HBO mini-series, From The Earth To The Moon. If you can grab this on Netflix, the whole thing is well worth a look.

And, an interview with Alan Shepard on the 20th anniversary of the mission:

Election 2010 Postmortem

2010-11-05T17:00:00.005-05:00

The results are in, and they're interesting to say the least. Just like we do every two years, the entire House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate went up for election. As expected, the Democrats lost control of the House. Also as expected, they retained control of the Senate. But neither the victories nor the losses are entirely as they would seem on the surface. And, as a bonus feature, two other odds and ends from the week that I thought would be important.

(1) The Results: Currently, the tally looks something like this:

House of Representatives: 242 Republicans, 193 Democrats
Senate: 47 Republicans, 53 Democrats

Note that I put the Senate's Independents with the party they'd be expected support.

The pre-election predictions under-estimated the Republican gains in the House, and slightly over-estimated gains in the Senate. The main story here, I think, is the continuing lousy economy. We've known since about January that the Democrats would pay a steep price for holding the bag this year, and here's the pay-out. As I've said before, it may not be right or fair, but conditions like this always play against the party in power. The other big story of this election cycle was the heavy involvement of Tea Party activists, which brings us to ...

(2) The Tea Party: The Tea Party both did and did not help the Republicans. Their enthusiasm may well have put a few candidates over the top that otherwise wouldn't have made it. However, if we examine the results using the Electoral Explorer feature, an interesting picture emerges:

Non-Tea-Party House Races: 200 Republicans, 104 Democrats, 2 currently undecided
Tea-Party House Races: 39 Republicans, 83 Democrats, 7 currently undecided

In sum, Republicans not affiliated with the Tea Party won two races for every loss, and Tea Party Republicans lost two races for every win. I don't know precisely what this means, but surely, it's important. My gut feeling is that the contentious nature of Tea Party candidates had a tendency to backfire amongst moderate voters.

Still, it's pretty clear to me that not only did the Tea Party not win the House for the GOP, they may well have cost them the Senate. I think John Boehner may have figured this out. On Wednesday, he did not exactly sound like someone who had routed an opponent and had them on the run. The question is, who else has figured this out? Will the Tea Party activists continue to agitate and demand for ever more extreme candidates? Will they claim this as their victory, and carry this through into 2012?

The next election cycle could prove very interesting, indeed.

(3) A House Divided: And so, we find ourselves once again with a divided government. This is not especially unusual for us. We had such for most of Reagan's two terms, and for most of Clinton's two terms. It wasn't the end of the world then, and it won't be now. What I said before still holds: after a period of such intense change, it may well be a good thing to take a bit of a breather. The Executive and the Legislature will find a way to work together, sort of, if only to keep the government from shutting down altogether. But don't expect any major initiatives. The bad thing about this is that major decisions will probably get kicked down the road, and you can only get away with that for so long.

(4) ...It Must Be A Damn Peculiar Question: Jerry Brown? I didn't know he was still in politics. Either that, or the Terminator's last act before resuming his mission for Skynet was to open a rift to the '70s. Still, this -- even this -- isn't the weirdest thing to happen in California politics. There was a Congressional election from 1948 that merits notice. Republican Congressman Richard Nixon was facing a grueling, bitter contest against the winner of the Democratic primary ... Richard Nixon. Yes, Californians used to be able to register for both primaries. History leaves us no record of the Nixon-Nixon debates, but they must have been quite a show. All kidding aside, I wish Governor Brown all the luck in the world. He'll need it.

(5) A Fire in the Sky: This is just about the last thing you want to see when you look out of an airplane's window:

You've probably heard by now about the Quantas A380 that had to return to Singapore due to an engine fire. The immediate question that rose when I saw this picture was: is there a problem with this engine? This particular A380 uses the Rolls Royce Trent 900 engine, which was developed from the Trent 800 used in the Boeing 777. I had started to wonder about what kind of failure cascade could produce such an accident ... but today, we see this news item about yet another Quantas flight suffering engine trouble, this time a Boeing 747-400. Needless to say, this aircraft does not employ the Trent 900, although I think it does use another Rolls Royce engine. Anyway, I've stopped wondering about possible design flaws. It's probably time for someone to take a nice long look at Quantas' Singapore maintenance shop. [Addendum, 8Nov10: Then again, maybe not. BBC World Service had an item this morning regarding tests Quantas engineers have been running on their A380 fleet. They have identified problems with four of their six aircraft, which works out to one in six of their Trent 900 engines, if I understood it correctly. They haven't identified the specific problem yet, but it appears to be a oil leak of some kind in the turbine section. So, we may be back to my original guess, a problem arising from mating the Trent 500 core to the Trent 800 fan section.]

(6) At Last! By great good fortune, someone else has taken up the Sesquicentennial project. Disunion is a new feature over at the New York Times, updating several times a week. This is almost assuredly by chance, but I am simply delighted. Not just because I'm happy not to be doing this alone anymore, but for another set of perspectives. As I've said before, I've got the background to analyze the strategy, tactics, and such; but there are gaps in my education I don't know how to fill. This will be a tremendous resource for those of us interested in peering back a century and a half at our greatest crisis.

In any event, we've come to the end of yet another election season. It was a good one for some, a bad one for others. Either way, there's another one coming in two years' time. That's the great thing about our system. It's never completely, finally over. You always get another chance.

Sesquicentennial, Part VI: Election 1860

2010-10-29T18:05:00.006-05:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

One hundred fifty years ago, our ancestors were going to the polls during an election season far more contentious than the current one could ever dream of being, Glenn Beck's histrionics to the contrary. The four-way scrum that was the campaign of 1860 was coming to a close. But here's the odd thing: even though on paper we see four campaigns vying for the Presidency, only in a handful of cases were all four competing head-to-head. Because of the sectional nature of the parties in this election, it came down to two-way, or at most three-way races, depending on where you were. This election featured another novelty: two technologies were coming of age that would, between them, change the way elections were conducted forever.

But first, the contestants.

We've already covered the fratricidal Democratic convention of 1860, that produced two nominees for President: Stephen Douglas and John Breckenridge, representing the Northern and Southern wings of the party, respectively. And we've already covered the Republican convention of 1860, where the "dark horse" candidacy of Abraham Lincoln sprang from out of nowhere to seize the nomination. The fourth party in the fray was the Constitutional Union party, whose motto was "The Constitution As It Was, And The Union As It Was." They were the part of status-quo compromise, and they nominated John Bell from Tennessee as their candidate for President.

The Constitutional Union party was an interesting outfit. Basically, their goal wasn't to get John Bell elected President so much as it was to gain enough electoral votes that none of the other candidates could secure a clear majority of the Electoral College. In short, they were running as spoilers, but spoilers with a purpose. Their real goal was to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where they hoped cooler heads might prevail. It was an interesting theory.

Three of the four candidates ran a more or less traditional campaign for the day. Their candidates stayed home, while their men in each state went on the stump to give speeches. Lincoln stayed in Illinois for the most part. Breckenridge, as Buchanan's Vice President, stayed in Washington. Bell stayed at home in Tennessee. Stephen Douglas, however, did no such thing. Douglas hit the rails.

Of all the campaigns, the Northern wing of the Democratic party was the only one to mount a truly national campaign, and Douglas went out on the stump himself, trying to gather support. Ten years prior, this would never have been possible; but now, enough rail lines had been built to connect most of the country's major cities. Now, a candidate actually could canvass the length and breadth of the land. It was a grueling ordeal for Douglas, but he could at least claim to be the first to have done it. For the rest, Bell concentrated his efforts on the border states between North and South, while Breckenridge and Lincoln concentrated on the South and the North, respectively. So, in the North, you generally had a two-way race between Lincoln and Douglas, with a few old Whigs backing Bell. In the South, you had a two-way race between Douglas and Breckenridge, with (again) a few old whigs pulling for Bell. Only in the middle did you have a no-holds-barred full-contact four-way brawl. And, the funny thing was, the border states wanted none of it.

On November 6, 1860, the people went to the polls to decide the matter. And here is where the other new technology came into play. In years prior, it might take months to know who won an election. This is why the Electoral College doesn't even meet until two months after the election. They had to allow enough time for the votes to reach the county seats to be counted. Then they had to wait for the votes to reach the State capitals to be counted. Then the votes had to make it to Washington ... But that had all changed. With the telegraph, news could cross the land as fast as a spark could race down the wire. Mind you, the official tally would still take time to collate and send in; but an unofficial count would serve just as well to let you know how it's going to shake out. By and large, at least in the major cities, when their morning papers were delivered on November 7, citizens knew who had won.

The distribution of votes was interesting, and showed pretty clearly how people were thinking. Douglas only won two states, New Jersey and Missouri. In Missouri, his popular sovereignty platform resonated. But no one else was interested. Bell's Constitutional Union party won in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. This makes sense, when you realize that the Constitutional Union party was the choice for people who wanted to avoid war at all costs. The border states knew all too well who'd be hosting that party. Lincoln took every state north of Bell's winnings except only Maryland, and he also took Oregon and California. Breckenridge took the rest.

When the dust cleared, Lincoln took the lead, with 180 electoral votes. Breckenridge won only 72, Bell had taken 39, with Douglas winning 12.

The Fire-Eaters' worst fears had come to life. Come March 4 of 1861, Abraham Lincoln would be sworn in as the sixteenth President of the United States. In each of the Southern states, calls went out for a state convention, to consider bills of secession. The conventions would convene towards the middle of November, and tender their results sometime in December.

The match had now been lit and dropped. The fuse was burning.

Election 2010: You Fail Civics Forever

2010-10-22T18:05:00.003-05:00

Over at the site TV Tropes, you'll find a whole mess of stuff. Nominally, at least, it's about storytelling tropes. It's ended up containing that, and a whole lot more. Some of my favorite lists on the site are along the lines of "You Fail (blank) Forever", containing examples of epic failures of understanding in such diverse fields as Engineering, Nuclear Physics, History, and Biology.

They do not yet have a You Fail Civics Forever page. They should start one:

How anyone with a functional reading knowledge of the English language can read, "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion" and NOT see a clear separation of Church and State is, quite frankly, beyond me. But that's the Tea Party for you: volkisch religious populists pretending to be libertarians. They're already showing the signs of learning the wrong lessons from November, and November isn't even here yet.

In any case, the election is upon us. It's still eleven days off, but I'm comfortable enough with the tools we have to make a few predictions. Last time, the numbers were pretty solid as far as three weeks out, after all. Courtesy of Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight, and the bettors at Intrade, here are the numbers:

Senate: Democrats keep the Senate, 52-48, 58% chance
House of Representatives: Republicans win control, 230-204, 90% chance

Which means that nothing much is going to get done on the legislative front, unless it's got true, broad bi-partisan appeal. Gridlock is the way to bet, I think. The House Republicans may feel bold enough to play political "chicken" and risk a government shutdown by stalling spending bills. That won't work any better for them than it did for them in the '90s, but they'll probably try anyway.

Still, gridlock isn't the worst thing in the world that could happen. Consider this from a business person's perspective. The last few years have held nothing but upheavals. The rules have been totally re-written in terms of health care coverage, and in rules governing financial markets. While it's true that good and valuable legislation doesn't get passed under gridlock, it's also true that the rules stop changing, and that can be a good thing. It removes uncertainty. It allows you to plan ahead with more confidence and certainty. At least, slightly cynical small-L libertarians like myself tend to see things that way.

And things are primed for a recovery. The news we hear out of Wall Street these days are full of really good earnings reports. You may grind your teeth when you compare this with the pretty lousy job reports ... but remember, this is how it was playing out in the early '90s, too. This is the last step in the economic cycle, right before the recovery and expansion really get moving. All that's needed is a bit of respite from horribly bad news.

And here's where I think that the Tea Party is going to learn the wrong lesson from the election. They think the election is a referendum on Obama's policies, when it's really a referendum on current economic conditions, which still pretty much stink if you're looking for work. And they think that 2012 will be more of the same, when it'll really be a referendum on prevailing economic conditions twenty-four months from now. It's all about the economy. Ideology has nothing to do with it. But ideologues will never, ever understand that. Which is why, come 2012, the Tea Party is liable to run the wrong campaign for the wrong election.

With that in mind, I'll make a long-range prediction for the next election cycle. Come Spring 2012, if unemployment is significantly down, if business is doing well, and if there aren't any horrifying disasters on the foreign front, Obama wins re-election in a cake-walk. If we're still in the doldrums, he gets turfed ignominiously.

Election 2010: Race for Texas Governor

2010-10-15T17:55:00.003-05:00

The race for Governor of Texas is underway, and the loser has to take the job.

I'm joking, of course, but only slightly. Newcomers from other states don't always understand how little the Governorship actually matters here, coming as they do from states where Governors actually wield considerable independent authority. The Governor of Texas is, comparatively, a very weak position. The Lieutenant Governor is the person who actually has the job of presiding over the Legislature, and has considerable powers to influence legislation. The Governor's powers are mostly those of persuasion, and he is therefore largely dependent upon how much cooperation he gets from the independently-elected Lieutenant Governor.

There are three candidates worth mentioning, although in practice only the first two matter. The incumbent, Rick Perry, is running on the Republican ticket. Bill White, the former mayor of Houston, is running on the Democratic ticket. And Kathie Glass, a Houston lawyer, is running on the Libertarian ticket.

Rick Perry has not been an incompetent Governor. This is damning with faint praise, since a circus chimp could probably be trained to do the job. As I've said before, you could probably shave an ape and sew him into a Brooks Brothers suit, then shove him into the Governor's office, and it might be months before anyone noticed. He's done some pretty appalling things, like speaking favorably of secession, and quashing an investigation into the possible innocence of a man on Death Row. It would be a grand thing indeed if he got turfed come November.

Bill White is probably the strongest candidate the Democrats have run for Governor in ... well, quite some time. He's got a solid record as a businessman, and therefore cannot be easily attacked as anti-business. He had a good record as a three-term mayor of Houston, and probably would have been re-elected had he not been term-limited. And the race is a lot closer now than many would have predicted. White is running on Perry's fiscal record as Governor. Arguably, the Governor has damn-all to do with state fiscal policy; we do, after all, have a Comptroller as yet another elected office. Even so, it's been a fairly effective tactic. It's a fairly tight race as of late October. Intrade is giving Perry a 63% chance of victory. It was in the 80s and 90s as of a few months ago.

I know next to nothing about Kathie Glass, except that she's an attorney and a Libertarian. But since Satan will probably drive to work in a snowplow before she gets anywhere close to double-digits, it hardly matters.

The election is on Tuesday, November 2nd. Vote early, and vote often!

Sesquicentennial, Part V: Secession

2010-10-01T18:24:00.006-05:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

By early October of 1860, the four-way race for the Presidency was nearing its close. Several of the Southern states had made it plain that they would secede from the Union if a Republican were elected. Two questions were at the forefront: would they, and could they? For the first, many in the North thought that the pronouncements coming from the cotton states were just election-year bluster. For the other... The Constitution has this to say, explicitly, about the legality of secession:

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the nub of the problem.

The Founders honestly never imagined the question coming up. It was only by union and concerted action that they had wrested their freedom from Britain at all. As small, independent entities they were sure they'd be gobbled up, piecemeal. So, while they were very careful to detail the procedures for new territories joining up, they neglected to consider the possibility that any would bolt the fold, once inside. And for fifty years, near enough, they were right.

The question weighed heavily on peoples' minds that autumn. Is it legal, or not? There are two broad approaches to the question, one Constitutional and one based on contracts, and each one can be argued pro or con.

First, there's the fact that the Constitution has nothing explicit to say on the matter. Most American jurisdictions draw their legal traditions from English Common Law, and as such, unless something is expressly prohibited, it's permissible by default. By this line of reasoning, the fact that it's not specifically prohibited meant that secession was perfectly legal.

But there's another Constitutional argument in play. If you interpret the Preamble as having the force of law, the phrase "to form a more perfect Union" implies an indivisible Union, since an indivisible Union is clearly more perfect than a divisible one. Further, one of the Anti-Federalist arguments against adoption of the Constitution was that such a strong Federal goverment implied a perpetual Union, posing a threat to State sovereignty.

Another argument flows from the nature of contracts. Some contracts can be terminated at will by either party. Some hold that the accession of a State to the Union follows this model, and any State is free to exercise it's sovereign prerogative at any time. But there's a counter-argument here, too; some contracts require both parties' agreement to end, like marriage. Under this interpretation, the accession of a State is an agreement between the State and Congress. Both would have to agree in order to sever their connection.

But an even larger point loomed, that even the most ardent Fire-Eater would be compelled to take notice of. What about the property to which the Federal government held clear title? Customs houses, armories, forts and the like?

No one was thinking about those yet. They should have. They would come to regret this oversight, in months and years to come.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXXV

2010-09-24T20:49:00.003-05:00

The world's smallest stop-motion video (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan):

It's from Aardman, naturally enough, the same fine studio that brought us Wallace and Gromit. And it's pretty awesome.

Election 2010: T-46 Days

2010-09-17T13:14:00.002-05:00

In forty-six days, we'll go to the polls to elect the next Congress -- the entire House of Representatives, and one-third of the Senate. It's liable to be a bad year to be a Democrat. But first, we'll look at the numbers:

Intrade:

Democrats retain control of the Senate: 64.6%
Democrats retain control of the House: 29.0%

Republicans get control of the Senate: 25.4%
Republicans get control of the House: 68.7%

(Interestingly enough, Intrade quotes 15% chance that neither party will control the Senate. I'm fairly sure that outcome isn't even possible.)

FiveThirtyEight:

House Seats Solidly D: 168
House Seats Leaning D: 46
House Seats Tossup: 34
House Seats Leaning R: 19
House Seats Solidly R: 168

Senate Seats Solidly D: 46
Senate Seats Leaning D: 5
Senate Seats Tossup: 9
Senate Seats Leaning R: 5
Senate Seats Solidly R: 36

(Continuing seats are included in the "Solidly" count.)

As it stands today, the Republicans have to run the table in the "toss-up" districts to recapture the House. Which is possible, and I'd say even likely, given the current state of the country.

The main story of this election cycle isn't really the Tea Party, although they've made the most noise. The reason that this year is poison for the Democrats is all about the economy, and that's about the size of it. Just like last time, except that the party in power has changed. The recovery is underway, but has not gathered enough steam yet to make a big difference on Main Street. Therefore, too many people are still out of work or underemployed, and there's a vast reservoir of discontent amongst the electorate. This, more than anything else, is why we're liable to have a new Speaker of the House come January.

What it's not is an indictment of Democrats' support for the health care bill, except tangentially. Obama spent a large amount of time, effort, and political capital to get that bill passed. There is a perception that this took time and effort away from economic matters. Whether the charge is true or not is almost irrelevant, the perception is still there, and it's going to hurt.

What it's also not, is a broader acceptance of the Tea Party and its principles. This is the point that is liable to be very interesting indeed going forward from 2010 into 2012. The Republicans are probably going to recapture the House ... and may well learn the wrong lesson from their victory.

The right lesson to learn would be that the American public wants the economy moving again. What they're not especially interested in is a Congress that's locked in an ideological war with the White House, getting nothing of interest done. That's an outcome that doesn't really do them any good two years down the road. If they take a hard line, they give Obama a free ride to tack towards the center, and a run at re-election as a centrist moderate.

I think it's entirely probable that they will take a hard line. In its current, Tea Party driven form, the GOP has doubled down on the crazy. They'll interpret their win in November as a mandate, and the blow-back will be a harsh surprise to them.

This, of course, assumes that a reasonably strong recovery is underway in two years' time. I think that's the way to bet. If it's not, all bets are off. But if it shakes out the way I expect, the Republicans will pay a stiff price in 2012 for ideological recalcitrance today.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXXIV

2010-09-11T08:48:00.001-05:00

Will the real Terry Jones please stand up?

Who's On First?

2010-09-10T17:11:00.004-05:00

There's an old saying that no plan ever survives contact with reality intact. The crew rotation plan used in Project Apollo is a good object lesson.

The crew rotation was something that had been used throughout the American space program, at least up to the Shuttle. If there was ever a crew rotation for the Shuttle, I've never been able to figure out how it worked. The basic idea is, the backup crew for Mission 1 would be the prime crew three missions later. It gave the pilots a better idea of where they stood, and cut a lot of the drama out of what was already a fairly tense environment. More specifically, for Apollo, the Command Module Pilot would be the Commander of the backup crew three missions later, which means that he would be Commander himself, six missions later.

And it worked. More or less. But, it was a very bumpy road.

By way of illustration, we're going to look at the original prime and backup crews for the first three Apollo missions. We'll skip ahead to mid-1968, since it's pretty obvious how Apollo 1 altered the rotation.

This is how it looked in mid-1968. (Note: the real crew assignments don't completely line up.)

Apollo 7 Prime Crew: Wally Schirra (CDR), Donn Eisele (CMP), Walter Cunningham (LMP)
Apollo 7 Backup Crew: Tom Stafford (CDR), John Young (CMP), Eugene Cernan (LMP)
Apollo 8 Prime Crew: Frank Borman (CDR), Michael Collins (CMP), William Anders (LMP)
Apollo 8 Backup Crew: Neil Armstrong (CDR), Jim Lovell (CMP), Buzz Aldrin (LMP)
Apollo 9 Prime Crew: James McDivitt (CDR), David Scott (CMP), Russell Schweickart (LMP)
Apollo 9 Backup Crew: Charles Conrad (CDR), Richard Gordon (CMP), Alan Bean (LMP)

Now, from the rotation, we can guess the crew assignments for Apollo 10:

Apollo 10 Prime Crew: Tom Stafford (CDR), John Young (CMP), Eugene Cernan (LMP)
Apollo 10 Backup Crew: Donn Eisele (CDR), Walter Cunningham (LMP), Edgar Mitchell (LMP)

It's a nice theory ... except that this is what really happened:

Apollo 10 Prime Crew: Tom Stafford (CDR), John Young (CMP), Eugene Cernan (LMP)
Apollo 10 Backup Crew: Gordon Cooper (CDR), Donn Eisele (CMP), Edgar Mitchell (LMP)

Well, that's nice... What in the world happened here? Apollo 7 happened, that's what. Wally Schirra had a nasty cold for pretty much the entire flight, and was in a foul mood. This carried over into his relationship with Mission Control, and since the Commander sets the tone for his crew, it spilled over into their ability to work with Mission Control as well. It's not well-publicized, but Mission Control does exercise a kind of veto over crew assignments. If Mission Control decides that this is a man they can't work with ... well, that man never flies again. Eisele was being given a rotation as Command Module Pilot, to see if he'd be able to cut it. This was also the case with Cooper. Ordinarily, you'd expect Cooper to draw an early Commander's slot, being the only other Mercury veteran still on flight status. But, Cooper had developed a rather lax attitude towards training during Gemini, and was being given a backup slot to prove himself.

Now, let's look at what we expect Apollo 11 to look like:

Apollo 11 Prime Crew: Neil Armstrong (CDR), Jim Lovell (CMP), Buzz Aldrin (LMP)
Apollo 11 Backup Crew: Michael Collins (CDR), William Anders (CMP), Fred Haise (LMP)

You may be thinking that doesn't look quite right. Here is what really happened:

Apollo 11 Prime Crew: Neil Armstrong (CDR), Michael Collins (CMP), Buzz Aldrin (LMP)
Apollo 11 Backup Crew: Jim Lovell (CDR), William Anders (CMP), Fred Haise (LMP)

Here, it wasn't a performance issue with Collins, it was a medical problem. After the original assignments had been made in 1968, Collins needed shoulder surgery, and had to swap seats with Lovell. Which meant that Collins ended up on the backup crew for all intents and purposes, and thus the prime crew on Apollo 11.

Nothing especially interesting happened to Apollo 12 as far as crew rotations went. But for Apollo 13 and Apollo 14, things got ... interesting.

Apollo 13 was originally going to be Cooper/Eisele/Mitchell, and Apollo 14 was going to be Lovell/Anders/Haise. First off, Bill Anders took a job with the National Space Council, and had to be replaced on the crew of Apollo 14. He was replaced by Ken Mattingly. The crew for Apollo 13 went through an almost complete re-shuffle. Cooper didn't do well enough to impress Deke Slayton, and neither did Eisele, so they both had to be replaced. Eisele was replaced by Stu Roosa. It was more or less at this point that Alan Shepard, another Mercury veteran, returned to flight status after a lengthy medical problem. This was a Godsend for Slayton, who was otherwise going to have a hard time filling that seat ... but Shepard would need extra time to train. So, he swapped the crews for Apollo 13 and Apollo 14. Apollo 13 would be Lovell/Mattingly/Haise, and Apollo 14 would be Shepard/Roosa/Mitchell.

Except, of course, that Mattingly was exposed to German measles a week before flight, and had to be replaced with his backup, Jack Swigert. Although it didn't feel like it on the day, it ended up being a good deal for Mattingly. Apollo 13, as you might remember, wasn't exactly a fun ride.

Now, one last example: let's see if we can figure out the backup crew for Apollo 14:

Apollo 14 Backup Crew: Michael Collins (CDR), Buzz Aldrin (CMP), Joe Engle (LMP)

This would have been the prime crew for Apollo 17. Which, of course, had a completely different crew:

Apollo 17 Prime Crew: Eugene Cernan (CDR), Ron Evans (CMP), Jack Schmitt (LMP)

As it turns out, the post-mission publicity pegged the fun-meters for Collins and Aldrin, and they lit out for greener pastures. Slayton would ordinarily have picked a veteran CMP to promote to Commander ... but there weren't any to be had. The Apollo 9 CMP was already training for Apollo 15, and the Apollo 12 crew was also deep into their new assignments. Conrad and Bean would command the first two Skylab missions. Slayton's crew rotation was now officially in an inverted spin with all engines on fire. So, it developed that Cernan was promoted directly from LMP to CDR, without having had a turn at CMP first. Ron Evans was assigned as the CMP. Engle ... well, he drew short straw after Apollo 18 was cancelled. The LMP for Apollo 18 was to have been Jack Schmitt, a trained geologist. It was considered intolerable that the Apollo program should end without a scientist ever touching the lunar surface. So, Engle got bumped. At the time, he said that the hardest thing about that was having to tell his young son that his Dad wouldn't be going to the Moon.

But he ended up all right. Joe Engle went on to command the second flight of the Space Shuttle, in 1981.

[Personal Note: I actually met Joe Engle in 1986, and got his autograph. It's the only one I own.]

At the end of the day, this points up the fact that history isn't a study of things or even events, but of people. And people ... well, they can be pretty weird. Weird, but always interesting.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXXIII

2010-09-10T17:08:00.002-05:00

This is a really silly song. But in a good way...

Sesquicentennial, Part IV: The Tale of the Tape

2010-08-27T17:38:00.007-05:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

The main advantage to looking back on these events from a century and a half is that so much information is available and indexed. For example, the 1860 Census is available online. The linked report lists, in detail, the number of manufacturers in each State. (For what it's worth, it took the Department of the Interior five years to collate the returns and generate this report.)

And so: we're going to borrow a term from boxing, the Tale of the Tape. We'll stack the disputants up, side by side, by three different figures of merit: population, miles of railroad, and number of manufacturers.

Population by State

(All states and regions listed by {free population}/{slave population})

New England:
Connecticut ........ 460,147/0
Maine .............. 628,279/0
Massachusetts ...... 1,231,066/0
New Hampshire ...... 326,073/0
Rhode Island ....... 174,620/0
Vermont ............ 315,098/0
New England Total: 3,135,283/0

Middle States:
New Jersey ......... 672,017/0
New York ........... 3,880,735/0
Pennsylvania ....... 2,906,215/0
Middle States Total: 7,458,967/0

Middle West:
Illinois ........... 1,711,951/0
Indiana ............ 1,350,428/0
Iowa ............... 674,913/0
Michigan ........... 749,113/0
Minnesota .......... 172,023/0
Ohio ............... 2,339,511/0
Wisconsin .......... 775,881/0
Middle West Total: 7,773,820/0

Far West:
California ......... 379,994/0
Oregon ............. 52,465/0
Far West Total: 432,459/0

Border States:
Delaware ........... 110,418/ 1,798
Dist. of Columbia .. 71,895/ 3,185
Kentucky ........... 930,201/ 225,483
Maryland ........... 599,860/ 87,189
Missouri ........... 1,067,081/ 114,931
Border States Total: 2,779,455/ 432,586

Upper South:
Arkansas ........... 324,335/ 111,115
North Carolina ..... 661,563/ 331,099
Tennessee .......... 834,082/ 275,719
Virginia ........... 1,105,453/ 490,865
Upper South Total: 2,945,433/1,208,798

Lower South:
Alabama ............ 519,121/ 435,080
Florida ............ 78,679/ 61,745
Georgia ............ 505,088/ 462,198
Louisiana .......... 376,276/ 331,726
Mississippi ........ 354,674/ 436,631
South Carolina ..... 301,302/ 402,406
Lower South Total: 2,135,140/2,129,786

Miles of Railroad by State

New England:
Maine .............. 472
New Hampshire ...... 661
Vermont ............ 554
Massachusetts ...... 1,264
Rhode Island ....... 108
Connecticut ........ 601
New England Total: 3,660

Middle States: (note -- source missed NY and NJ)
Pennsylvania ....... 2,598
Delaware ........... 127
Maryland ........... 386
Middle States Total: 3,111

Western States: (note -- source missed MN)
Ohio ............... 2,946
Indiana ............ 2,163
Illinois ........... 2,790
Wisconsin .......... 905
Iowa ............... 655
Missouri ........... 817
Kentucky ........... 534
Western Total: 10,810

Southern States:
Virginia ........... 1,379
North Carolina ..... 937
South Carolina ..... 973
Georgia ............ 1,420
Florida ............ 402
Alabama ............ 743
Mississippi ........ 862
Louisiana .......... 335
Texas .............. 307
Arkansas ........... 38
Tennessee .......... 1,253
Southern Total: 8,649

Manufacturing by Region
New England ........ 20,671
Middle States ...... 53,287
Western States ..... 36,795
Southern States .... 20,631

For the moment, I'll simply leave these numbers up without comment. This is simply a snapshot of the industrial status of the United States in the summer of 1860. This status will become of vital importance later on in the year. We will refer back to this table later on.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXXIII

2010-08-20T19:18:00.003-05:00

It's hard to believe, really, that there are only two flights left for the Space Shuttle program. It's been a long, long road. The program was approved by President Nixon in 1972, and the final design was chosen in 1973. The first test vehicle, Enterprise, was rolled out on September 17, 1976. Its first glide test took place on August 12, 1977. Five Orbiters have flown in space: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. Only three are left. Challenger was lost on the way up, and Columbia on the way down.

Atlantis has already flown its last scheduled flight, it's standing ready as the rescue ship should anything go wrong with the last two flights. Discovery is scheduled to take its last flight on November 1st, with Endeavour closing out the program on February 26, 2011.

For all its problems, it's been a marvelous vehicle. More humans have ridden into space on Space Shuttles than any other vehicle in history. That's a record that won't stand forever. But it may well stand for a couple of decades.

Without further comment, here's Endeavour making a night re-entry and landing at KSC Runway 33.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXXII

2010-08-13T17:46:00.005-05:00

In the beginning, there was Burt Rutan. Burt Rutan knows more about building airplanes than just about any other human alive today. One of his first designs was a kit-built airplane called the VariEze. It was so named because it was easy to build, and easy to fly. It was one of the first airplanes to make extensive use of then-new composite materials. Paradoxically, it really was far easier and cheaper for hobbyists to build airplanes out of styrofoam and fiberglass than out of aluminum. It takes years to learn to weld. You can learn how to lay up fiberglass in a long afternoon.

Time passed.

Then came a company called XCOR Aerospace. They build rocket engines. They looked at an old VariEze and thought, "We can make it better." And so, they did:

This, I think, is just about the smallest rocket-powered airplane you're ever going to see. But it's only the beginning. This was the first prototype for a racing airplane. They intend to build a series of similar craft for their proposed Rocket Racing League. Imagine the Indy 500, fifty yards right overhead.

Yes, there's a reason they do these things out in the Mojave Desert.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXXI

2010-08-06T19:52:00.002-05:00

Some days, it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.

French missile technology is, on the whole, quite good. In fact, the survivors of the HMS Sheffield would say it's just a little bit too good. But the ERYX Anti-Tank Guided Missile is known to be something of a stinker.

I'm sure those guys all got out OK. ATGMs have to fly a certain distance downrange before the fuze will arm. The state of their laundry, on the other hand...

Sesquicentennial, Part III: The Past is Prologue

2010-07-30T17:37:00.012-05:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

How did it come to this? How did it get so bad that the signs became so big that even a blind man could see them? The Election of 1860 had shaped up into a four-way scrum that was probably going to tear the country apart no matter who won. Only one and two generations before, their fathers and grandfathers had fought side-by-side against the British; now, they were practically baying for one another's blood. How did it get so bad, so fast?

There was a fundamental problem baked into the Constitution at its inception in 1787. Everyone knew what it was, but no one wanted to tackle the problem straight away. The coming storm would be the price of procrastination. But to understand the problem, and how it shaped the development of the United States during the first half of the 19th Century, we have to dig back a lot farther than that.

The first thing to understand is that passage from the Old World to the New wasn't exactly free. The ships involved in setting up the first colonies back in the 1600s represented the pinnacle of the day's technology. They might well have been dropped off in the wilderness with nothing but the clothes on their backs, but they rode there in the Space Shuttles of their day.

Not all of them could afford the fare for the trip. Actually, only about one in five could. The rest partook of an arrangement called indentured servitude.

Being an indentured servant wasn't any fun, but there was an end to it. Once you fulfilled your contract, usually three to seven years' labor, you were free to go about whatever business you could find. There was always new land to be broken up for farming.

Initially, this was how all of the North American colonies were populated. But, in parallel with this, another system of unfree labor was taking shape. In the labor-intensive tobacco plantations of Virginia, and also in Spanish Florida, farmers began to import Africans as slaves. Soon, these plantations stopped using indentured servants entirely, for several reasons. For one, no one in his right mind would sign an indenture contract to go hustle tobacco in Virginia, or (God help you) the Carolinas, when he could go to New England instead. There were few takers at any price, so the planters eventually stopped asking. For another, it takes a while to teach a new hand how the job is done, and that training is lost when the indenturee completes his contract.

So, even by the time of the Revolution, the northern and southern sections of the country had a markedly different composition. The North was a region of smaller farms, tradesmen, and craftsmen; a diverse economy based on manufacturing and trade. The South was dominated by wealthy planters who owned large plantations, and their economy lived or died by the export of their cash crop. The North was trending towards increasing egalitarianism, while the South was trending towards an entrenched aristocracy.

That was the situation as of 1787. Each side had its doubts about the other, but both needed each other in the face of the external enemy, the British. This state of affairs lasted to about 1820. Then, the knives started to come out.

It was all about the balance of power in the Senate. For the South, it was vital to maintain if not a majority, then at least a parity of power in the Senate. This would allow them enough seats in the upper house to block any Constitutional changes that would affect the institution of slavery. They were keen, very keen, on inducting new States into the Union that would permit slavery, and thereby keep parity. They were content to go one-for-one with the North on this. That is where the Missouri Compromise came from. Basically, this was the disposition of the new territories purchased for the Union by President Jefferson. The State of Missouri would be admitted as a slave-holding State. Slavery would be allowed in unincorporated territory south of parallel 36°30' north latitude, and forbidden in territories to the north.

Many observers hailed the Missouri Compromise as a triumph of negotiation. Not everyone was satisfied. Thomas Jefferson foresaw doom when he wrote to a friend that "this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror." He was right, because the Missouri Compromise Line basically sealed the deal, but it would be another generation before that fact became clear.

The next crisis would involve the Mexican-American War of 1848. In 1836, Texas fought a successful revolution against Mexico, and became an independent republic. But Texas was saddled with a massive debt that was becoming impossible to pay. So, Texas decided discretion was the better part of valor, and petitioned the United States Congress for entry to the Union in 1845. Congress accepted their offer, since Texas brought a nice chunk of land along with them ... except, of course, that they didn't necessarily have clear title to the land on offer. Mexico begged to differ. Mexico probably had a valid point, but the tips of General Taylor's soldiers' bayonets were pointier still, and carried the day. Mexico lost not only the disputed land that Texas had claimed, but everything between that and the Pacific as well.

On the one hand, people across the United States rubbed their hands together: "Oh boy! More land!" But on the other hand ... "Oh crap! NOW what do we do? How do we divide this mess up?" It took a couple of years to sort everything out. The basic shape of the deal was that the Missouri Compromise line would be extended to the Pacific. South of 36°30', slavery OK; north, forbidden. But a funny thing happened on the way to the bargaining table...

In 1849, a curious mineral find in California changed everything. Yes, sports fans, there's gold in them thar hills! Men flocked to California to get in on this action. Enough, in fact, to allow a shrewd group of Californians to petition the Union for Statehood. In an ordinary year they'd have been ignored. But they had gold, and plenty of it, and then just like now, cash talked.

And California entered the Union as a state forbidding slavery.

That sound you just heard was an echo of the wail of frustration from the South when they looked at this map:

Just like that, they'd been outflanked.

This was when the desperation began to flourish. This was when the really crazy things began to percolate. Like the Knights of the Golden Circle, for example; or the plans to invade Cuba and Central America to gain new slave-friendly territory to incorporate as States. This was the older, now-disused meaning of the word filibuster, as applied by one William Walker. Nothing came of any of this ... but any educated Southerner who could read a map knew they were doomed.

And that was ... a problem.

By 1860, there were four million slaves in the United States, collectively worth $3.5 billion. Yes, that's "billion" with a B, and yes, that's 1860. That's equivalent to $75 billion today: roughly the same amount of money (in 2010 dollars) that we spent to put a man on the Moon. Slaves were the single largest capital asset in the entire United States economy. Ahead of the railroads. Ahead of the factories.

Chew on that number for a second, and you'll know why they weren't giving up without a fight. The cause they fought for was evil, but by and large these were not irrational men.

Between 1850 and 1860, positions did nothing but harden. The North knew it held the trump cards, and knew time was on its side. Abolitionists became progressively more vocal and more strident. The South knew that, eventually, they'd be forced to forfeit a gigantic financial asset. Things almost came to a head in 1856, the first year a Republican candidate ran for President. James Buchanan, a Democrat, was elected on the premise that he'd be able to hold the Union together.

It would not come to light until a year later, but Buchanan's Secretary of War, John Floyd, was issuing some ... innovative orders to the Army. He had ordered 115,000 muskets and rifles shipped to Southern armories, and heavy ordinance shipped to depots at Galveston Harbor in Texas and Ship Island in Mississippi. He also saw to it that units posted in the South had, shall we say, sympathetic commanders.

The powder keg and fuse had been set. All it wanted was a match. The Presidential election was only three months away.

L'Roi C'Est Mort, Vive L'Roi

2010-07-23T14:14:00.005-05:00

"No king rules forever, my son." -- King Terenas Menethil II

For seven consecutive years, Lance Armstrong was able to avoid major trouble. He had assembled a team around him that had some of the world's best cyclists, and he had the experience to avoid problems before they cropped up. But still, seven Tours without a major crash or major mechanical problem is an astonishing run of luck. Even allowing for the fact that much of the time luck results from preparation, staying that good for that long was a singular achievement.

This year, his luck appears to have run out. By the end of the first week, Armstrong's attempt to win an eighth Tour de France was essentially over, after a disastrous series of crashes. Crashes that, five years ago, he'd have danced around almost effortlessly. But five years of age have robbed him of the quickness he once had: the crashes left him bandaged, hurt, and tens of minutes out of contention. It's not a complete loss. He's stayed in, and it looks as if his Radio Shack squad might capture the overall team classification.

Still, it's clear: the crown must now pass to a new generation.

This year, it's a hard-fought race between two exceptional young men. One has won the race twice before: Alberto Contador, who holds the lead by a scant eight seconds. The gentleman on his left in the photo above is in second place going into Saturday's time trial: Andy Schleck. They are almost perfectly evenly matched. Contador has an edge in experience, and has won the last four Grand Tours he's entered. Schleck has strength, endurance, and an increasing amount of poise and confidence. If I were betting ... well, I wouldn't. I honestly have no idea who's going to be stronger tomorrow.

But I do think that Alberto Contador is the dominant cyclist of his generation. The crown is his, if he can ride hard enough to keep it. He's probably good enough to earn another two or three to follow, though that remains to be seen.

L'Roi c'est mort. Vive l'Roi!

Space Travel for Dummies, Part 7: Case Study, Part 2

2010-07-16T17:24:00.003-05:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

Last time, we took up the plight of the wayward Galaxy 15 satellite, and started looking into how we'd go about building what amounts to a space-going garbage truck. Someone's going to have to build one eventually. We may as well see how hard it's going to be. We got a good start on that last time, by figuring out we would need a delta-V (DV) budget of 20,086 meters per second to accomplish the stated mission.

This is directly related to the amount of fuel you have to burn to get from here to there and back again. About a hundred years ago, Konstantin Tsiolkovskii became interested in the mathematics of space travel, and got to work figuring out how to compute the performance of a space-going rocket. The equation he derived was:

(DV) = (Ve) * ln ( Mi / Mf )

where (DV) is the velocity change of the rocket, (Ve) is the exhaust velocity, (Mi) is the initial vehicle mass, and (Mf) is the vehicle mass at burnout. In some texts, you'll see the ratio (Mi/Mf) written as (R). The exhaust velocity (Ve) is a function of the rocket engine you're using. Depending on who you talk to and how they're feeling that day, you'll hear this equation called either the Rocket Equation or Tsiolkovskii's Equation.

This gives us enough information to compute the ratio of the initial mass to the burnout mass of the rocket, which isn't quite enough information for us to estimate a takeoff gross weight for the rocket. The burnout mass of the rocket will consist of two different kinds of things: things that have a fixed mass, and things whose mass can "float". Things that have a fixed mass are your crew, your payload, the life support system, things like that. You know how much they weigh, and that's independent of how big or small the rocket ends up being. Things that can "float" are everything else: structure, engines, plumbing. Eventually, you have to nail hard numbers down for everything, of course; but you have to start somewhere.

Now, we can expand the mass ratio computation a little bit to reflect this:

(Mi/Mf) = ( Me + Mp + MP ) / ( Me + MP )

where (Me) is the empty or dead weight, (Mp) is the mass of propellant, and (MP) is the payload mass. Here, "payload" means anything whose mass is fixed. So, if it's a multistage rocket, the "payload" is the entire upper stage.

This leaves us with a small problem: if we know values for (MP) and (DV), we still don't know what either (Me) or (Mp) are. That is, we have one equation and two unknowns. In order to go any further, we have to make an assumption about (Me). There are a few different approaches, but the easiest is to assume that (Me) is some fraction of the total stage weight. For this example, we are going to use a fraction of 0.1. This is an exceedingly optimistic value, but will serve to illustrate the point. Substituting:

(Mi/Mf) = ( Mp + 0.9 * MP ) / ( 0.1 * Mp + 0.9 * MP )

Given (DV) and (MP), we can solve for (Mp), and then we can compute the overall vehicle mass.

For this example, the fixed-mass items are:

(1) Crew cabin: 3,000 kilograms
(2) Payload: 8,000 kilograms (one satellite up, one satellite down)

So, MP = 11,000 kilograms, at least on Earth return.

GUESS 1: We're going to try to use a single stage to do the job. I basically know this won't work, but we'll try it anyway. Using DV=20,086 and MP=11,000, we throw the numbers in and ... we get a negative number for gross weight. Well, that just tells us you can't get there from here. (It's a standard engineering sanity check -- when your equations return nonsense, you've either made an arithmetic error, or you've assumed something to be possible that really isn't.)

GUESS 2: Now, we'll try a two-stage vehicle, one to put the stack into orbit, the second to get us the rest of the way there and back. This works out to approximately DV=10,000 for each stage. For the second stage, we get an initial weight of ... another negative number. So that won't work, either.

GUESS 3: We're up to three stages now. Splitting our DV up three ways gives us about 7,000 to cover with each stage. For the third stage, we get ... hey, it's a positive integer! Third stage weighs in at 134 tons. Second stage, 1,637 tons. Which gives us a grand total of 19,971 tons gross weight at liftoff.

At this point, I would like to observe that the Saturn V rocket tipped the scales at 6.5 million pounds on the pad, or 3,250 tons. It is the largest object known to have flown under its own power. So, our garbage truck tips the scales at about six times the weight of the biggest thing that's ever flown in the entire history of forever.

Yeah, that sucker ain't never gonna get built. Even I'm not that crazy.

We're giving up on this concept at three stages. Theoretically, there's no reason we couldn't go to four or even five stages; and the gross weight would probably come down some more. But there are two problems. One, you reach a point of diminishing returns. You don't realize enough mass reduction to make the additional complexity worthwhile. Another is operationally-driven. With three stages, each stage is recoverable and reusable, at least in principle. With a fourth stage, you're just about committed to leaving at least some hardware "out there", which kind of defeats the purpose of the vehicle.

Well, that stinks. But we're not quite done, yet.

Let's think about what it is we really need to do. We need to get to and from low earth orbit. Then we need to get to and from geosynchronous orbit. There's no law that says the same vehicle has to do both.

So: we have two different vehicles. One is robotic, and runs from LEO to GEO. The other has a crew, and flies from the ground into orbit. They meet at a depot, where the shuttle drops off fuel and upward-bound satellites, and the truck refuels and takes fresh satellites up, bringing expended satellites back for disposal. Further, since the truck never needs to come back to Earth, it doesn't need a high-thrust engine, so we can use lower-thrust but higher-efficiency engines.

Let's take a first pass at RoboTruck: it carries 10,000 kg worth of fixed-mass items, and uses electric engines with an exhaust velocity of approximately 20,000 m/s. To get to GEO and back, it needs a total DV capacity of 10,000 m/s. Putting those numbers into our above equation gives us a total RoboTruck weight of right at 18 tons. Quite reasonable.

Now, our ground-to-orbit ship needs to be able to carry either a full RoboTruck, or a satellite plus some amount of fuel. Let's say, 20 tons total. It needs a DV capacity of 10,000 m/s. Putting this into our equations yields a third-stage mass of 54 tons, second-stage total mass of 115 tons, and total pad weight of 389 tons.

This, we can do. It's still fairly hefty, but not so much so that it beggars the imagination. All the bits are recoverable and reusable, so we aren't contributing to the debris problem. And it's conceivable with current technology. On the down side, it's sufficiently expensive that its benefit doesn't justify the cost of actually bending metal to build it.

Which brings up one last question: what's the price point where something like this would be worth building? My guess is that engines would have to be much, much more efficient and powerful. Say, if you were able to build a high-thrust engine that was almost as efficient as an electric rocket ... able to generate exhaust velocities of about 10,000 m/s and still be powerful enough to lift itself. Such a vehicle with three stages would weigh in at only a hundred tons or so, and a single-stage model would "only" tip the scales at 300 tons or thereabouts.

Such engines become a real possibility, once we unlock the secret of controlled nuclear fusion. But that's a story for another day ... we hope.

A Fifth Star?

2010-07-09T16:27:00.005-05:00

I forget precisely where I saw this blurb, but I saw a note this week suggesting the promotion of General David Petraeus to the rank of General of the Army, a rank that hasn't been held by an American officer since the death of Omar Bradley in 1981.

I don't think this will happen, nor do I think it should. Let's review the history of this rank, and see why it was ever awarded in the first place.

In the late 19th and early 20th Century, the nations of Europe began using universal conscription to fill their armies. This was by itself nothing new. What was new was the fact that the men, once discharged, remained in reserve formations that would meet once a year or so to update their rolls. The theory was that, if a war broke out, a nation with a large trained reserve could in very short order have a very large army indeed.

This was one of the few theories of World War I that was borne out in reality. The European armies were huge, on a scale heretofore unseen in history. They were, in fact, so huge as to be unmanageable by an ordinary general officer. It's the basic span of control problem: one man can only effectively manage three to five direct reports. If you add more, he can pretend to manage them, but won't actually do very well. If you have ten million men under arms, that pretty much spells out for you how many echelons of command you need. You cannot run a war with a committee of ten four-star generals, you have to put one in charge. Therefore, they all found it necessary to appoint Field Marshals, officers superior in grade to every other general officer, who could then assemble a command staff to run things. The system seemed to work tolerably.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Congress was presented with a bit of a problem. The man they had tapped to lead the American Expeditionary Force, John J. Pershing, would be junior by definition to his alleged peers in England and France. But America did not have a rank higher than General ... so, Congress made one. John J. Pershing was appointed to the rank General of the Armies, one of only two men to ever have been appointed to that rank. (Three guesses as to who the other was...)

But this was an ad-hoc solution. Pershing was authorized to design a rank insignia for his new post, but never wore more than four stars.

The problem arose again in World War II, for basically the same reason. This time it was worse, since Dwight D. Eisenhower was supposed to be in overall command of the European Theater of Operations. Until late 1944 this wasn't a problem, since Eisenhower was of equal rank with his peers ... but Bernard Montgomery was about to be promoted to Field Marshal.

This ... was a problem. Because, inter-service politics had become rather more complex in the inter-war period.

If Eisenhower were promoted to a new super-grade, the Chief of Staff of the Army, George C. Marshall, would also have to be so promoted. And General MacArthur, the Army commander in the Pacific. And General Arnold, the head of the Army Air Force. And the Navy wasn't about to be left out ... you'd have to advance the Navy men in equivalent positions to equivalent rank.

So, Congress would have to create two new ranks. The Navy rank, Fleet Admiral, was obvious. There was a brief consideration given to naming the Army rank Field Marshal. Field Marshal Eisenhower ... has a nice ring to it. Field Marshal MacArthur. Yes, that might work, too. But then they got to Field Marshal Marshall, and Marshall was not amused. (And who can blame him? Go ahead, try to say it without snickering.) So, the new Army rank was to be called General of the Army.

By the end of 1944, three men were promoted to Fleet Admiral: William D. Leahy, Ernest J. King, and Chester W. Nimitz. Four men were promoted to General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Henry H. Arnold. Two additional appointments were made to that rank, for Fleet Admiral William Halsey and General of the Army Omar Bradley, but none have been appointed since. (It is interesting to note that the most senior five-star officer -- by date of rank -- was a Navy man. The Navy has always been held to be the senior service. Army people don't like to hear that, but there it is...)

(By the way -- Ray Spruance was robbed. He should have gotten Fleet Admiral. But that's beside the point.)

With that said, it should be readily apparent why no new appointments to General of the Army will be made. None of our allies have any serving officers of a rank higher than our full General, so an American General is a peer in all respects to any general officer of an allied service. If the British were to elevate one of their officers serving in the Middle East to Field Marshal, we'd have a legitimate discussion. But since that's vanishingly unlikely, General Petraeus will most likely never hold a rank higher than the one he currently possesses.

Now, if he successfully pulls our fat out of the fire in Afghanistan, it might not be wrong to let him carry a fifth star with him into retirement. I don't think that'd be out of line. It just isn't necessary right now. And that rank, historically, has been all about necessity.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXX

2010-07-02T20:19:00.003-05:00

The incomparable Dave Brubeck had his 89th birthday recently. Most of the performers who were active in the late '50s and early '60s are gone, but he's still active. It's an inspiration, knowing that this man has stayed so active, so long. I only discovered his music about ten years ago, but it's amazing stuff. It's a half-century old, some of it, but it sounds as if it could have been written yesterday.

Here's a performance by the Dave Brubeck Quartet from 1966.

Kicking Our Petroleum Habit

2010-06-25T20:27:00.005-05:00

The mess in the Gulf with the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig highlights once again the costs inherent in our use of petroleum. There is, I think, a broad agreement that we need to quit burning petroleum for energy. As I have said before, that is rather easier said than done. To refresh our memory, here is a graphic provided by the fine folks at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:

One thing is readily apparent: we use energy in three distinct ways. One is for electricity generation, and the major fossil fuel used in that instance is coal, with some contribution from natural gas. Another is for heat generation for home and industry, which splits evenly between petroleum and natural gas. The last is transportation, which is mostly petroleum.

The thing to realize is that if we were to replace all of our non-fossil-fuel energy with other, more sustainable sources, we'd have to generate a hell of a lot more power. The numbers haven't changed much. We will need to generate seventeen times as much energy as we do now to make up the entire shortfall. [UPDATE: Major error -- it's actually more like five or six. See comments.] More to the point, we will have to transition to an all-electric economy.

The question is, how?

Part of the problem comes down to energy storage. It's hard to beat petroleum as an energy storage medium. Petroleum and its distillates are liquid over a large temperature range, which makes them very easy to store, and very easy to move. Replacing petroleum will require us to find energy storage devices that are about as good. Battery technology is getting better all the time, which helps us out some.

Another part of the problem is that significant parts of the economy rely on direct heat, for which petroleum and natural gas are very useful. Ease of storage and movement are important here, but also important is the fact that you can burn hydrocarbons and get large amounts of instant heat. This is important in the steel business for blast furnaces, but it's also important for the Mongolian place down on the corner that uses that big, circular gas-fired grill. Replacing these with electrically-powered devices is possible, but not without a significant capital expense.

Lastly, the largest part of the problem is simply where will we find a five- or six-fold increase in power? Basically, we'll have to find it wherever we can.

Aside from burning things, we have five basic sources of energy here on Planet Earth:

(1) Fusion energy, arriving in the form of radiation from the Sun;
(2) Heat from radioactive decay deep within the Earth;
(3) The angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system;
(4) Nuclear fission, which amounts to making (2) above happen much faster;
(5) Nuclear fusion, which amounts to duplicating (1) above down here on Earth.

I don't like the term "renewable energy." The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells me that no such thing exists. Every time you convert energy from one form to another, you lose a little bit to waste heat, no matter where you get it from. But the term is out there, and there's nothing I can do about it. What renewable energy is all about is tapping into a flow of energy that's there for the taking, whether you use it or not. The Sun is shining down on you anyway, why not use it? (There's even some poetic justice in using sun-power to run your air conditioning.) The wind is blowing anyway, why not use it? The tides will run in and out no matter what we do, so why not put them to work?

One thing to be aware of, though: extracting energy from these systems is liable to have some blow-back. If you extract too much energy from the wind, there could be some knock-on effects on weather patterns, and we just don't know enough about those dynamics yet to predict what could happen. And that's just one example. (The exception is solar power. I can't really think of any down-side to collecting sunlight.)

That said ... renewable energy taps sources (1) through (3) above, and there's a practical upper limit to how much of that we can get. If our experience with oil has taught is anything, it's that no energy source is truly inexhaustible. So, what else do we have to do?

At the risk of repeating myself, I'll point out something readily apparent near the top of the picture above: two-thirds of the electrical power we generate is wasted between the point of generation and the consumer. Presently there's not a whole lot we can do about that. Joule heating scales with current, and high-voltage power lines carry a whole lot of current. But, every year brings a better understanding of superconductivity, and every year the temperature at which this effect can be made to work climbs a little bit. There's also some really promising work on conductive carbon nanotubes. If we were able to re-engineer our power grid such that we cut the resistance of those high-power lines by 80%, that cuts our power loss to only a fifth of what it is today ... which, at a stroke, nearly triples our deliverable power. That cuts a seventeen-fold increase down to only about six-fold: still a formidable amount of power production to build out, but that's an easier task to accomplish.

We will also, at least in the short run, have to make use of nuclear power. It's got its problems to be sure, but those problems are well-understood and manageable. Nuclear power is good for providing large amounts of always-available electrical power, and we'll need large amounts of always-available power if we're going to switch all of our transportation infrastructure over to fully-electric power.

But the holy grail remains controlled nuclear fusion. The reason is simple. We will eventually deplete our supplies of oil, gas, even elements like uranium. But given that hydrogen is the most abundant chemical element in the entire Universe, I'm going to guess that we'll not run short of it for quite a long time, and by "quite a long time" I mean some billions of years. There's a lot of exciting work going on in this area. The next year and a half is liable to tell us which approaches will work, and which ones may not. If things work out like I'm hoping they do, we could have working power plants within fifteen to twenty years.

It's easy to despair, given the constant drum-beat of the news from the Gulf coast. But despair is a sin. The answers to our dilemma are coming together. We just need to hold things together a little bit longer ... then, we can enjoy the spectacle of BP's executives looking on in befuddlement as the world passes them by.

Living well is, after all, the best revenge.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXIX

2010-06-15T20:22:00.006-05:00

Many people look at an empty jar that once held jelly or spaghetti sauce as trash. Others wash the jar out, and re-use it. I've done this myself. Old jars are great for holding spare change, loose screws, and the like. But here's one use I never would have considered:

They suggest wearing goggles. Oh yeah, this project just screams "Safety First!"

Or better yet: don't try this at home. I'm pretty sure this is the sort of thing that voids your homeowner's insurance policy, anyway.

Video Del Fuego, Part XXVIII

2010-06-04T17:16:00.007-05:00

"It's almost a certainty that a man-rated Dragon will taste hard vacuum long before any version of Orion does, and by a margin of not less than eighteen months." -- 7/1/2009

Aaaaand ... stop the clock. My man Elon delivered the goods. Earlier today, the first Falcon 9 booster put a Dragon test capsule into orbit.

I was crossing my fingers up to second stage engine ignition, because if anything's going to go wrong, it'll probably go wrong before then. Everything looked good, though.

One thing to point out: after staging, you'll see the second stage engine's nozzle glowing red. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since this engine is radiatively cooled. Other engines, such as the Space Shuttle's, pass cold fuel and/or oxidizer through pipes in the nozzle for cooling, but this adds weight and complexity to the engine, making it more expensive. Radiative cooling is substantially cheaper, especially for an engine you only plan to use once. You'll also see a smaller engine in the foreground, which can slew back and forth for attitude control.

Another amusing thing about the news coverage: Fox News, of all people, are complaining about a private firm not being as forthcoming with PR info as an agency of the Federal government. Ah, the irony...

Bonus: Here is a link to SpaceX's own highlights video. You get a much better view of staging here than in the live feed.

Space Travel for Dummies, Part 6: Design Case Study

2010-05-24T18:23:00.006-05:00

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

One of our satellites is missing. Sort of. Life might actually be easier if it had gone missing, but it's more like it's suddenly decided that it's done with its current job and wants a new career. Maybe it wants to be a sculptor. Or a dentist. Or just about anything except what it was built to do, which is sit in geosynchronous orbit and relay TV signals. I can't really blame it. If I had to hand off Survivor reruns for a living, I'd go nuts, too.

Galaxy 15 was, for five years, a perfectly unremarkable satellite. A standard product, almost identical to its siblings, it had functioned perfectly for nearly five years before wandering off to stretch its legs. No one really knows why, since it's no longer on speaking terms with ground control. But it's rapidly becoming a menace to navigation. At or around the end of May it's going to come close by the AMC-11 satellite, which is going to have to do some fancy dancing to avoid signal interference. Where Galaxy 15 goes from here is anyone's guess.

What we really need is a garbage truck. Unfortunately, no one seems to have built one yet. Which gives me an idea...

Over the next couple of weeks, we're going to go through a very basic, somewhat simplified vehicle design procedure. I honestly have no idea exactly what we'll end up with. But I expect to end up with something sufficiently detailed that I can "build" and fly it in Orbiter.

The first step is figuring out what kind of performance you'll need. This part isn't terribly difficult, as mathematics goes. Basically, you can figure out how much of a velocity change you need for each maneuver, and then add them all together to get a total performance budget.

To summarize: there are three equations we'll need, and one rule of thumb. Two of them involve the specific mechanical energy (SME) of the spacecraft. The SME is the sum of the spacecraft's kinetic and potential energy, divided by the mass.

(1) (SME) = (V)^2/2 - (MU)/(R)

V is the velocity, R is the distance from the spacecraft to the center of the Earth, and MU is the product of the Earth's mass and the universal gravitational constant. We can express the SME another way as well.

(2) (SME) = - (MU)/(2*A)

The variable A is the semi-major axis of the orbit. It is half of the sum of radius at perigee and the radius at apogee, and for a circular orbit it's equal to the constant radius of that circular orbit. Combining (1) and (2) above gives us three pieces of information: V1, the circular velocity of the parking orbit; V2, the required velocity of the low side of the transfer orbit; V3, the velocity at the high side of the transfer orbit; and V4, the velocity of the higher circular orbit.

It isn't necessarily obvious from (1) and (2) above, but one interesting thing about orbital mechanics is that even though higher-altitude orbits have more energy, the actual orbital velocities are smaller. Remember this, we'll use it later.

The third equation is the Law of Cosines:

(3) (Vc)^2 = (Va)^2 + (Vb)^2 - 2*Va*Vb*cos(G)

Here, Va and Vb are the velocities before and after a plane-change maneuver, G is the angle, and Vc is the required velocity change to go from Va from Vb. Note that if you're going from one circular orbit to another, Va = Vb. Plane-change maneuvers are incredibly expensive in terms of fuel. They are often unavoidable, though.

The rule of thumb I mentioned is that, to a good first approximation, launching into low Earth orbit requires as much fuel as accelerating 10,000 meters per second. Orbital speed is actually about 7,700 m/s, but you burn about 2,300 m/s worth of fuel overcoming gravity and atmospheric drag.

That said, the details of those computations make for tedious reading, so I'll simply present the results.

First, the ground rules. One: the vehicle will launch from, and recover to, Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Two: the vehicle will have a return payload of 8 tons, big enough to handle any current or projected communications satellite. Three: provision will be made for a crew of two, a commander and a pilot.

My first sequence of maneuvers went something like this:

(1) Launch into Low Earth Orbit (LEO): 10,000 m/s
(2) Plane Change into Equatorial Orbit: 3,804 m/s
[Loiter: up to 24 hours]
(3) Boost to Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO): 2,426 m/s
[Time of flight: 5h 16m 30s]
(4) Circularize at Geosynchronous Earth Orbit: 1,465 m/s
[Time on station: up to 13h 27m]
(5) Brake into GTO: 1,465 m/s
[Time of flight: 5h 16m 30s]
(6) Brake into LEO: 2,426 m/s
(7) Plane Change to KSC: 3,804 m/s
[Loiter: up to 24 hours]
(8) De-Orbit: 65 m/s

Total: 26,727 m/s (includes 5% reserve)

Now, the first thing we see here is that the plane change maneuvers eat up a huge part of our velocity budget. This is because the magnitude of a plane change maneuver scales directly with the velocity. They drink gas like nobody's business, which is why you avoid them whenever possible. However ... why am I doing it in a low orbit, when I could be doing it higher up, where the speed is lower? Partly because this first method was the obvious way ... and partly because I'm not sure I trust my ability to actually fly a fancier maneuver. Still, here's how the pros do it:

(1) Launch into LEO: 10,000 m/s
[Loiter: up to 24 hours]
(2) Boost to GTO: 2,426 m/s
[Time of flight: 5h 16m 30s]
(3) Plane Change and Circularize: 2,106 m/s
[Time on station: up to 13h 27m]
(4) Plane Change and Brake to GTO: 2,106 m/s
[Time of flight: 5h 16m 30s]
(5) Brake into LEO: 2,426 m/s
[Loiter: up to 24 hours]
(6) De-Orbit: 65 m/s

Total: 20,086 m/s (includes 5% reserve)

By combining the plane change and circularization at the top of your GTO ellipse, you save a whole 6 kilometers per second. That's huge. That's a tremendous amount of fuel you don't have to plan on hauling along with you. And when most of your weight is fuel, that adds up in a hurry.

Some of the times above are somewhat arbitrary. You're going to spend some time in low earth orbit waiting for the right launch window, and you're going to spend some time on your way back waiting to line up for re-entry. And you may or may not want a rest period in between your outward and inward GTO orbits. So, I'm planning on a nominal mission duration of three days. The absolute minimum would probably be 12 hours, but everything would have to line up perfectly. I'm going to budget a reserve here too, and allow for an extended duration of up to 7 days.

Here's the first fork in the decision tree: do we have a crew on board, or not?

There are good arguments both ways. On the one hand, hauling a crew along means you also have to haul along the stuff to keep them alive for the duration: food, water, oxygen. I was about to mention thermal control as well, but you'd have to do that for your electronics even in an unmanned craft. But an unmanned craft would be much, much lighter for the same mission specs.

But, since the point of this exercise is to design a simulator joyride anyway ... I've opted to include pilots. At least, for now. When we pick this up again next time, we'll see why orbit-capable rockets tend to be pretty big.