Video Del Fuego, Part XLII

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

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

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?

--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

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?

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

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

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

--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

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.