Far-Out Honeymoon

Earlier today, the second regularly-scheduled Dragon cargo delivery mission blasted off from Florida. Everything went normally, right up to just after the Dragon spacecraft separated from the second stage.



I cocked an eyebrow when I heard "abort passive" on the flight controller loop, because that couldn't have meant anything good. And it didn't: it meant that they were having trouble bringing the maneuvering thrusters on-line. Not permanent trouble, fortunately; they got things ironed out after a few hours. They got the solar panels deployed, and are on course for rendezvous on Sunday, only a day later than originally planned.

Which once again goes to show that this is a damned complicated business. You've got about a bazillion moving parts, just about every one of which has to work, or you're out of luck.

I say this just to introduce the weirdest idea I've heard of in quite some time: a proposal by Dennis Tito to send a married couple on a trip to Mars and back, leaving in 2018. I'm trying to decide if it's utterly insane or not.

It's possible, even if only just barely so. The proposed Falcon Heavy booster could put a Dragon spacecraft, a crew of two, and an inflatable habitat on an Earth-escape trajectory. And the math works out for the trajectory. As long as you get your trans-Mars burn done just right, you'll hit that sweet spot behind Mars that will swing you right back towards Earth. So yeah, the tools are there...

...except that we're still not entirely sure that we can keep two people alive, healthy, and sane for the 501 days it would take to get them back to Earth. It probably bears mentioning that once you've cast your Earth-escape stage away, you're committed for the whole trip. There's no way to abort if something goes wrong. It also bears mentioning that the longest single mission to date has only been 437 days and change. We can be fairly sure that the crew will survive microgravity for that long. We're far less sure about solar flares, or cosmic rays.

But how else are we going to know if people can survive deep space, unless we try? Ultimately, that's what makes this worth trying. Yes, there's a risk that we won't get them back. They're perfectly aware of that. This project will have plenty of volunteers, even so. The chance to be one of the two fastest humans alive, the chance to be the first to Mars, there are many who will consider that a prize worth the risk.

I won't be one of them. First, being cooped up for that long in a Kevlar balloon would drive me nuts. And second, your close-up view of Mars? It's going to be pitch-black. You'll see the sunlit side on your way in, and on your way out, but your flyby will be in total darkness.

Still, it may be worth a try, if they can raise the cash to make it happen.

A Fine And Enviable Madness

(mostly reposted from February, 2010)


"... it was, in fact, a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm." -- from The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

I love my job. I love the alchemy that takes the stuff of daydreams, and spins it into hard, tangible reality. What we have dreamed, we have done; generations of men dreamed of flight, and dreamed of touching the stars ... and when you look up tonight, you'll see airplanes drifting across the sky in exactly the way that a hundred tons of aluminum shouldn't, and five of our spacecraft are sailing out into interstellar space. Generations of physicians dreamed of a world without disease ... and in one singular case, the dream was realized. I've been vaccinated for smallpox, but most people younger than me haven't.

This is National Engineers' Week. We celebrate it during the week of George Washington's birthday, in honor of our first President's first career as a surveyor. The mechanic arts as they were called then were recognized early to be key to both our prosperity and our security. Whenever America has faced a steep challenge, her engineers have always answered, and delivered the goods.

It's a profession that could easily lead to a swelled head, if Nature wasn't always there to take us down a notch or three as required. We rarely enjoy the "luxury" of hiding our mistakes. An unscrupulous doctor might hide their mistakes in the morgue, and an incompetent lawyer's mistakes vanish into the prison system. But an engineer's mistakes? They tend to come unglued with a loud enough BANG to make the evening news. We never have to look far for accountability, it always comes looking for us.

There are two ways to deal with that kind of responsibility. Some find it too heavy. The rest of us accept the responsibility, and the challenge. We enjoy knowing that our work counts for something. We don't dread the possibility of highly-visible failure; that motivates us to make our work as clean and error-free as we know how. The challenge -- the satisfaction of having done a difficult job well -- is a large part of what gets us out of bed most mornings.

It can be a crazy life sometimes. Schedules get very unpredictable, close to delivery time. But on the whole I wouldn't have it any other way. It truly is "a fine and enviable madness."

Hymn of Breaking Strain

by Rudyard Kipling

THE careful text-books measure
(Let all who build beware!)
The load, the shock, the pressure
Material can bear.
So, when the buckled girder
Lets down the grinding span,
The blame of loss, or murder,
Is laid upon the man.
Not on the Stuff - the Man!

But in our daily dealing
With stone and steel, we find
The Gods have no such feeling
Of justice toward mankind.
To no set gauge they make us -
For no laid course prepare -
And presently o'ertake us
With loads we cannot bear:
Too merciless to bear.

The prudent text-books give it
In tables at the end
The stress that shears a rivet
Or makes a tie-bar bend -
What traffic wrecks macadam -
What concrete should endure -
But we, poor Sons of Adam
Have no such literature,
To warn us or make sure!

We hold all Earth to plunder -
All Time and Space as well -
Too wonder-stale to wonder
At each new miracle;
Till, in the mid-illusion
Of Godhead 'neath our hand,
Falls multiple confusion
On all we did or planned -
The mighty works we planned.

We only of Creation
(Oh, luckier bridge and rail)
Abide the twin damnation -
To fail and know we fail.
Yet we - by which sole token
We know we once were Gods -
Take shame in being broken
However great the odds -
The burden of the Odds.

Oh, veiled and secret Power
Whose paths we seek in vain,
Be with us in our hour
Of overthrow and pain;
That we - by which sure token
We know Thy ways are true -
In spite of being broken,
Because of being broken
May rise up and build anew
Stand up and build anew.

Iranian Stealth Fighter

One of the news stories you've seen making the rounds this week is that Iran claims to have built a stealth fighter. I say "claims to have" because...



... that's about fifteen different kinds of wrong, for an airplane where you expect the number of landings to be approximately equal to the number of takeoffs.

First, no way in Hell are those supersonic inlets. They're too small, for a start, and very badly placed. There's no evidence of ramps for compressing the inbound supersonic airflow. And sitting up there? That's a guarantee that you'll stall the engine at a high angle of attack. At which point, the pilot will have to pull the loud handle, and get the heck out of Dodge.

Second, where's the nozzle? Inside the fuselage? Holy crap, that's a really stupid place to put it. If this beast allegedly has an afterburner, you'll only get to use it once. Because, just like after he would after stalling the engine after pulling a high-pitch turn, he'll have to pull the loud handle, and...

Third, where's the radar? That nose is nowhere near big enough to carry anything like a useful military radar. If you go up against an adversary who really does have a proper go-to-war radar, you're going to have a very bad day, because he's going to see you before you see him. Which means that he's going to get the first shot. At which point, you'll have to pull ... well, you get the idea.

And the instrument panel ... no, that doesn't look real either.

Now the wings, I'm fairly sure those wings could keep it airborne. Nice to see they got something right.

No, this isn't a stealth fighter. It's not even a mockup of a stealth fighter. It's an elaborate hoax. To what end, I can't imagine, because exactly no one in our defense establishment is taking this seriously. I mean, people were worried about the Chinese stealth fighter a few years ago. More worried than it deserved, true enough, but at least they're flying an actual prototype.

Nobody should be worrying about this stupid thing. Except, that is, for Iranian test pilots.

Sesquicentennial, Part XXIII: The Hinge

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

After you read about a few of them, Civil War battles begin to display a depressing sameness to them. One side, we'll call them the Defenders, get to the scene of a battle first. Then, the Attackers show up and try to dislodge them. They usually try flanking attacks first, and when those don't work they go right up the middle. The usual result: appalling casualties on both sides, but most especially for the Attacker. So the battles themselves aren't all that interesting.

Ah, but between the battles ... that's the meat of the matter. And it's not always the movements of armies and reassignments of officers that are of most interest. What really counts in a long war, especially in the modern age, is how well you can keep your troops resupplied. From the beginning, the plan that General Scott laid out for the war was one of ensuring the Union's ability to move men and supplies, while slowly denying the rebels the same. By early 1863, that strategy was beginning to show some fruit. The Union had blockaded all of the Confederacy's ports, severely hampering its ability to conduct trade. To all intents and purposes, aside from a handful of blockade runners, Confederate trade had to go through Mexican ports, then wind their way north and then eastward. Which brings us to one of Jeff Davis' most serious problems.

I've said before that the Confederacy had a fundamental problem: they could raise an army, or they could equip it. There wasn't any good way for them to do both. But I've never yet explained what I meant by that. If we go back here, we can see that the Confederacy really has no manufacturing to speak of. Their original plan was to rely on the power of "King Cotton" to bring Europe, specifically Britain, to come to their aid. Cotton would flow out, and arms would flow in, protected by the Royal Navy. By 1863, it had become painfully obvious that this wasn't going to happen. The Emancipation Proclamation had sunk just about the last nail in the coffin of that strategy. Now, the Confederacy would have to provide just about all of the arms and supplies that their armies in the field would use. Which they could do, if virtually all of their skilled work force weren't already in uniform.

Here, we see one of the fundamental disadvantages of a slave society. In the Union, unskilled workers formed an immense pool of manpower from which soldiers may be drawn. When the draft was instituted it was massively unpopular, to the point of riots in some cities, but the Union Army generally met its manpower goals. In the Confederacy, the vast majority of their unskilled labor pool was ambulatory property. If armed, they'd still be ambulatory, but would no longer be property. Nat Turner showed them what generally happened when you put hot lead and cold steel in a slave's hands. So, the Confederate Army would have to poach from the skilled labor force ... who were sorely needed to run the factories, foundries, and all of the other things that kept the war machine running.

Jeff Davis, then, was on the horns of a dilemma: he had to both raise and equip an army, but only had resources to do one of those well. He decided to take a third option: equip them, and then let them figure out the supply thing on their own.

Napoleon famously said that an army marches on its stomach. His opponent Wellington never said as much, but it's plain from his memoirs that he agreed. Upon reading them, one of his friends remarked that it seemed to him "that your chief business in India was to procure rice and bullocks." "And so it was," replied Wellington, "for if I had rice and bullocks I had men, and if I had men, I knew I could beat the enemy." Wellington's memoirs went into exhaustive detail about his logistical affairs. From his memoirs, we know that one of his cavalry regiments required some 25 tons worth of supplies for three days' action, and about 250 mules with which to haul them. (That's 246 mules to carry the supplies, and four more to carry the hay with which to feed the mules.)

In his honor, I call 25 tons a "Wellington": the amount of food and ammunition to keep a regiment in fighting trim for three days. The Union was usually able to provide a full Wellington for its troops in the field. The Confederacy was usually doing well to supply about half that, with the Rebel troops scrounging the rest as best they could. And that's with the Confederacy being able to move goods in and out of the country via Mexico.

Which brings us back to the hinge: Vicksburg. It was the last stronghold the Confederacy still held on the Mississippi. With Vicksburg, they still have a lifeline to the outside world. Without it, the Union owns the Mississippi from its headwaters to the Gulf, and the Confederacy is cut in two. Everyone knew that Vicksburg was Grant's next objective. Discovering Grant's plans for getting to Vicksburg was a major target of Confederate spies. They would be frustrated in their desires to discover Grant's plans, mainly because Grant himself had no idea how he was going to get there. The approaches from the Mississippi, where the Union generally enjoyed unquestioned naval superiority, were too well-guarded by guns on the bluffs. The city itself was ringed with fortifications. And outside of those were swamps, generally considered impassable.

Generally, that is. But Ulysses S. Grant wasn't going to take that for a final answer. One way or another, come Hell or high water, he was going to have Vicksburg. He'd spend most of the winter and spring figuring out how to get there, but he wasn't about to let anything get in his way.

He'd come too far to give up now.

Ten Years

Ten years ago, I was sleeping late on a Saturday morning, when I was awakened by a loud sound outside. I had no idea what it was. As soon as I turned on a TV, I found out:



I'm an alumnus of the University of Texas at Arlington. Our Master of Science program in Aerospace Engineering boasts two graduates who've flown in space, and I've met both of them. One is Robert Stewart, and the other was Kalpana Chawla.

And I find that I really can't say anything else about it. This one hurt.

Godspeed, Columbia.

The Very Sorry Song

Partially,  I suppose I was never expecting a voluntary admission. An involuntary admission, yes, compelled under oath when subpoenaed for Johan Bruyneel's arbitration hearing, sometime this year. And it's entirely possible that what's happened over the last two nights was prompted by a desire to get out in front of that.

It's also possible that there's some genuine regret in there, too.

The big news, of course, is Lance Armstrong admitting using banned drugs in his campaign to win the Tour de France an unprecedented seven times in a row. One one hand the news doesn't exactly surprise, since it merely confirms what we already knew from last August's USADA decision. But it's one thing to see the facts, and another entirely to see the man himself own up to them.

For myself, I don't feel as if I needed to hear an apology. And I didn't hear exactly what I wanted to hear, although to be fair, that wasn't the right venue for what I wanted to hear anyway. As I've said before, what needs to come out is exactly how it was done. He needs to supply names and detailed information to the relevant authorities, so that it can be made completely clear how he was able to evade the testing protocols for so long and so well. I think it's telling that so many of his former teammates ran afoul of drug tests after leaving his team. That's why I'm looking forward to the Bruyneel hearings, since that's where the rest of the story is liable to break: how his teams were able to subvert the testing process. That's the mojo that former Postal/Discovery riders failed to bring along to their next teams, and it showed. And that was never Lance's department.

For what it's worth, I really do think that he rode clean those last two years, 2009 and 2010. It was clear that he wasn't the same rider he was, before his first retirement. I'd chalked it up to age and being out of the saddle for three years, but lack of "juice" might have had something to do with it, too. And I think he's genuinely sorry, at least to this extent: he had to explain it to his kids. If you have kids of your own, you'll understand. There are few humiliations quite as excruciating as having to explain a failing to your own child. I can only imagine how it must have stung to explain having lived a lie for decades.

On the subject of apologies ... I owe one, to the extent that I touted the legend. I bought it, hook, line, and sinker. Later on, I began to look at it more critically, but at first I was a true believer. I failed to follow my training, and examine all the evidence. I do regret that.

All that said, I still love the sport. It's a magnificent display of human fortitude. There's nothing else quite like it. And it's all the better now, with better, more accurate tests far more diligently applied, both in and out of competition. That's the one silver lining in the storm clouds, that what we learn in the months to come will strengthen the hand of the referees against the cheaters. That will give those of us who watch an assurance that what we're seeing is real, not artificial.

It'll take time. It won't all happen at once. But the sport will be cleaner and stronger for it. And if Lance Armstrong has a road to redemption, it must lie along that path, exposing the dark secrets long hidden. Only time will tell if he has the courage to walk it.

Video Del Fuego, Part LVIII

Last time, I mentioned the progress SpaceX had made, not only in the first private spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station, but in their drive to become the first private company to fly astronauts to and from Earth orbit. All that said, the Falcon 9 is still an expendable rocket, meaning that they have to drop the spent stages into the ocean when they're finished with them. That's changing, though; Elon Musk's goal is for the Falcon 9 to become fully reusable.

They're getting a little closer to that goal.

This rig is a prototype for what will eventually become a fully reusable Falcon 9 first stage. After that, they intend to make the second stage reusable as well.

The importance of this is hard to over-estimate. Space travel is expensive only because it's so expensive to reach low Earth orbit. In terms of energy, once you're in Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System. If we can make that leg of the trip fairly economical, there's no limit to what we can do.

Besides, that looks like one hell of a ride.

Thirteen for '13

I don't do New Year's Resolutions. I haven't in quite some time. I've found that making up an enormous To-Do list of improvements all at once tends to set me up for failure. It's much better to make those improvements as I notice that they're needed, no matter what the calendar says. That said, the beginning of the year is a good time to take stock, and try to figure out where we're headed.

With that in mind, here are thirteen predictions and observations. Not all of them are for 2013. But they're all things that I expect, and fairly soon.

One: Soon, our cars will more or less drive themselves. It's already happening on a small scale. Where it gets interesting is when it starts to happen on a larger scale. What will happen, when thousands, even millions of self-driving cars hit the roads for morning rush hour? The obvious answer is that the car computers should be talking to each other, so that they can collectively de-conflict one another's routing. Centralized routing would work, in principle. But it would be dependent on a centralized processing system, and network, and the associated infrastructure. It would be far more efficient, and far more robust, if each vehicle were to be in contact with the few dozen or so in its immediate vicinity. That would be enough to co-ordinate lane changes, mergers, and getting on and off a freeway. That information would then automatically cascade up and down the roadway, because each car would be in contact with a different dozen or so, meaning that as traffic becomes congested, a car that's just now leaving the owner's driveway knows to plot a different path to the office that day. Best of all, there's no one point of failure that can be exploited or attacked. It's going to take some time to debug the system until it works properly, but I'm confident something like this will be in place before I retire.

Two: What's more, those cars will probably be electric. An important threshold was crossed last year that you might have missed if you weren't paying attention. The Motor Trend Car of the Year for 2012? The Tesla S, an electric sedan. Hybrids have won a permanent place in the automotive market now, where they were a novelty only five years ago. All-electic cars will soon follow suit. The big problem has always been the batteries: how to get enough of them, how to hold enough power for a decent range. The technology has gotten steadily better, though, and as more of them are recognized as simply being good cars to own, public acceptance will come. Because although gasoline is a convenient energy-storage medium, no one really loves it. An economical, reliable electric car with decent range will be welcomed, once it's available.

Three: Which leads us to the third point, going all-electric offers a significant set of challenges. I've written at length about this before, so I won't belabor the point again. But there are some encouraging signs out there. The Navy has been quiet about progress on the Polywell project, but what has been released seems to indicate that things are going about as well as they expected. To wit: the results match the theory, and the Navy has continued to supply funding so that the work can continue. There are good things happening in superconductivity research as well, although nothing that would make the headlines. Also, solar panels are getting cheaper all the time. Again, this isn't anything that I expect to break this year, but all the pieces are coming together. We'll have the tools we need, by the time we desperately need them.

Four: We will find an Earth-like extrasolar planet, and soon. At least we will, given a sufficiently generous definition of Earth-like. I'm going to define the term as a rocky planet, within a habitable zone, with mass and surface gravity within plus or minus 10% of our own. Within my professional lifetime so far, we've come from not even being sure that binary stars could even have planets, to finding planets in the star system next door. The techniques get better by the year. Instruments get more sensitive, capable of peering farther and farther into the cosmos, and also of finding smaller and smaller things nearby. We now think that the Milky Way Galaxy holds at least 100 million planets. Given that we also think that the Milky Way holds between 100 and 400 million stars, we now think that planets are at least as numerous as stars. I've written about the Drake Equation before, and I see little reason to revise ... much. I'm starting to wonder if the fraction Fp might be much closer to 1 than it is to my old guess of 0.5. If so ... then we might be able to find a pen pal out there, after all. (Since, by my estimates, N goes from 1.4 to 2.8 if Fp goes from 0.5 to 1.)

Five: 3-D Printing, coming to a corner mall near you! Again, this isn't something I expect for 2013, but I do expect distributed manufacturing to be part of the Next Big Thing. Consider: a shoe company that doesn't have to have factories, or warehouses, or any of that stuff, because the stores themselves have a 3-D printer that makes the shoes as the customers order them. They don't have to ship shoes, they ship raw materials and design patterns. They could undercut Nike and Reebok by 50%, and still make higher profits. Just about any retailer that deals in a line of relatively simple products could take advantage of this technology to radically streamline their logistical chain. To say nothing of the corner auto parts store, who can make weird parts to order, when the customer needs it. Need a water pump for a '53 Studebaker? Sure, pal, but it'll take us an hour or two to print one up...

Six: Two words: Google Glasses. Augmented Reality is coming, with all the benefits and horrors that will entail. But this is really only the next step on the road we've walked as a species ever since we started using fire, a quarter of a million years ago. We shape our tools, then our tools shape us, in an endless recursion.

Seven: Last year, we saw humans plumb the depths of the oceans, and the upper limits of the skies. The most awesome thing about this is that these efforts weren't sponsored by governments, but by private citizens. Don't misunderstand me, I'm no anti-government fanatic, but I think it's just incredible, and a beautiful thing, that the technology of exploration is becoming so democratized. And this isn't the end, not by a long shot. Last year, we saw a privately-financed spacecraft rendezvous with the space station, and begin routine cargo deliveries. This year, the deliveries continue. Next year, or the year after? Seats, man. We're that much closer to being able to buy a ticket. And how great is that?

Eight: I think it's worth mentioning that Elon Musk is responsible for two of the items on this list: the Tesla S sedan, and the Dragon spacecraft. Pay attention to this man. He's building a big chunk of the future.

Nine: The Great Gatsby is coming to the big screen. I'm conflicted ... On the one hand, did we ever need a Gatsby movie? But on the other, if done right (and this one looks like it might be), it could be great. (No pun intended.)

Ten: The Dallas Cowboys won't get any better until they get a new General Manager. Being that the current GM, Jerry Jones, is probably not going to be fired by the owner (also Jerry Jones), the odds of that are the same as the number of R's in "Fat Chance".

Eleven: And yes, it's going to suck to have to face RGIII twice a year for the next ten to fifteen years.

Twelve: The fallout from the Lance Armstrong scandal has been impressive, but the story's not over yet. His former boss, Johan Bruyneel, was also charged in the same matter, but has elected to go forward with arbitration. His case will be heard sometime this year. It will be very interesting to see how that turns out. Lance got all the publicity, but Bruyneel was central to the whole thing. He was the one who knew how to dupe the testers. We know who, what, when, where and why, but we don't yet know how. And that will be a crucial fact to have, going forward.

Thirteen: It's way too early to start handicapping 2016, but let's start throwing some names out there anyway. Hillary Clinton has the inside lane to the candidacy, if she should want another run at it. I don't see a challenger of sufficient stature to make a real contest of it, unless Joe Biden should want a go at it as well. On the Republican side, a lot of the big guns that sat out last time will probably start testing the waters over the next year and a half. We'll also see some newcomers throw down for it, as well. The "It's His Turn" rule says that the nomination is Santorum's to lose, but the fierce desperation of having lost two in a row does seem to change the rules. And of course, a great deal depends on what goes down over the next two years. It'll be interesting to watch them begin jockeying for position.

Happy New Year, everyone!

The World Will NOT End Next Week

I've talked about this once before, but it bears repeating: the world will NOT end next week. December 21st will come and go, like all the other December 21sts have, and while something unusual or noteworthy might happen, most of us will be around for the 22nd.

Some people will try to tell you about the "freakish" accuracy of the Mayan calendar. And yes, while the Mayan calendar was very accurate, such accuracy isn't actually all that unusual. You see, calendars serve two important purposes for the cultures that use them. They tell you when you need to plant, and when you need to harvest. Cultures who screw that up tend to exit the History Highway via the "Mass Starvation" off-ramp, and no one ever hears from them again. So, of course every culture we have physical artifacts for had pretty accurate calendars. It's rather like being surprised that everyone at a Drive-In Theater arrived in cars.

But you need not take my word for it. Observe:



All that said, next Friday is a perfect day for a sing-along:

RIP, Dave Brubeck

If your music collection doesn't include any jazz, it's incomplete. I get that it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it's one of the handful of genuinely American art forms. Modern American music, by any recognizable definition of the term, rests on a foundation that consists of country music, blues, and jazz. I bring this up because we lost one of the greats of jazz music this last week. Dave Brubeck passed away this last Wednesday at the age of 91. It's hard to overstate his impact on American music in the latter 20th Century.

I was about to say that the Dave Brubeck Quartet has finally been re-united in the hereafter, but that's not entirely correct. While it's true that Paul Desmond and Joe Morello have both passed on, Eugene Wright is still with us. It's worth mentioning that Brubeck cancelled several concerts, and even a television appearance, when stage managers of the late 1950s and early 1960s resisted the idea of an integrated quartet appearing together onstage.

To get some notion of how long a shadow he's cast, here's the Quartet performing Take Five in 1966:



And here's Al Jarreau performing Take Five in 1976:



And George Benson in 1986:



And Grover Washington, Jr. in 1992:



And Axis Mundi, in 2007:


Now to be fair, Paul Desmond wrote Take Five. And it was never intended as a stand-alone hit, it was meant to be a lead-in for a Joe Morello drum solo. (During which the other band members could, you know...) But fifty, nearly sixty years later, musicians still find it a rewarding piece to play, and audiences still love it.

The good news, insofar as there is any, is that his sons are carrying on the legacy.



That's Dan Brubeck on drums, and Chris Brubeck on saxophone, in the Brubeck Brothers Quartet. Performers come and go, but the show must go on.