And Then There Was One

The second American to orbit the Earth, Scott Carpenter, died yesterday of complications from a recent stroke. And so it becomes that the oldest Mercury astronaut, John Glenn, is the last one left.

Scott Carpenter took what we might call an unusual road to his 1959 appointment. While he was a graduate of the Navy's Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, he came to it as a pilot of P2V patrol planes, not of high-performance jet fighters. But a test pilot is a test pilot, someone figured, and he was in extraordinarily good physical condition.

It's tempting to say that his unusual path played into the difficulties experienced during the Aurora 7 mission, specifically the late retrofire and the resulting 250-mile overshoot of the landing zone, but that's probably unfair to Carpenter. Scratch "probably", I think it is unfair. Granted, the same kinds of control system problems happened on Gordon Cooper's flight, if not in a more severe form, and Cooper landed closer to the primary recovery ship than anyone else did. But, Carpenter's flight plan was jam-packed with experiments and tests, which may well have distracted his attention from other matters. If you look, you will no doubt notice that the last two missions had a vastly reduced experiment load, possibly for this very reason.

Nevertheless, Chris Kraft reportedly said that Carpenter would never fly for him again. And, he never did. Kraft's opinion might have had something to do with it, but a medically-grounding injury suffered in a 1963 motorcycle accident probably had a lot to do with it as well. Surgeries in 1964 and 1967 were unsuccessful, leading to Carpenter's resignation from NASA in 1967.

Not that he was done with exploration. Carpenter participated in several of the Navy's underwater research programs, spending 28 days underwater on SEALAB II, and serving as a director for SEALAB III.

Fair winds and following seas, Commander Carpenter.

Sesquicentennial, Part XXXII: Chickamauga

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

"Of a truth, the gods do not give the same man everything: you know how to gain a victory, Hannibal, but you do not know how to make use of it." -- Maharbal

In fairness to most commanders in the first two years of active fighting in the Civil War, the levels of casualties were so far above what any of them had come to expect that no one knew how to handle them. No one knew how to tell an army that had just suffered over ten thousand casualties to follow up a hard-fought victory with a vigorous pursuit. So it was that even though the Confederacy reeled from the one-two punch of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, so also the Federal army reeled from the effort expended. So, the following months were spent on a go-slow basis, while the victors consolidated, and decided what to do next. In the East, the answer was, "not much". There would be a few inconclusive skirmishes, but no major movements for the remainder of the year. The East was so quiet, in fact, that President Davis was able to detach some forces from the Army of Northern Virginia under General Longstreet to go help out with the deteriorating situation in the West.

In the West, Grant was looking for a doorway into the heart of the Confederacy. Part One of the Anaconda Plan was complete: the Confederacy was cut in two and utterly isolated. Next ... well, the original plan was to sit tight and let them starve. That didn't sit right with Grant. What he really wanted was to put an army on the South's doorstep. Chattanooga seemed a likely place to do just that.

He sent General Rosecrans out to do the deed. To his credit, Rosecrans didn't try to charge right up the middle. He began shelling the city on August 21st, but that was mostly to keep the Confederate commander, General Bragg, from realizing what he was really up to: putting a large number of Federal troops across the river, off to the southwest. By the time Bragg caught wise, he was already well and truly screwed. To his credit, Bragg decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and abandoned the city. Thus ended the Second Battle of Chattanooga. There were casualties, although no one's entirely sure how many. Probably not a whole lot, on either side.

Rosecrans decided that he might as well strike while the iron was hot. He was probably never going to get as good a chance to pursue and destroy Bragg's army as he had right at this moment, having just recently run his army out of Chattanooga.

It was more or less at this point that Bragg's reinforcements showed up.

This presented Bragg, and the Confederacy, with what was (for them) a very unusual situation: they had a numerical advantage over a Federal army. I'm not sure it had ever happened before, or would ever happen since. One of the implications of the Tale of the Tape was always that the Union had men and to spare, while the Confederacy would always have manpower problems. But here, thanks to President Davis' temporary detachment of Longstreet, Bragg had the upper hand, if only temporarily. He had a narrow window of opportunity within which to exploit that advantage.

At Chickamauga, he'd have his chance.

Rosecrans had come south out of Chattanooga, across the Tennessee River, looking for Bragg's army. Skirmishers met on September 18th, and the main forces clashed on the 19th. The details of the first day's fighting aren't especially important. It's the same story that's become so dreadfully familiar: the first force on the field stakes out a defensive position, the second attempts to overcome it, and fails with appalling casualties. We've seen it so many times before that it scarcely merits mention. No, the interesting things happened on the second day.

Because on the second day, the Union blundered.

The dispositions of the Union's right flank were mishandled, leaving several gaps in the lines. Longstreet was in command of the Confederate left, immediately opposite, and remembering Gettysburg, asked himself, "Now where have I seen this before?" Remembering Dan Sickles and the goat-rope all in and around the Devil's Den, Longstreet may well have said to himself, "Oh no, you don't. Not again. Not this time." Here, the ground wasn't playing tricks on his lines of sight. Here, he could see plainly was was before him. Here, he'd make those damn Yankees pay.

The Union right flank folded up like a cheap suit. Rosecrans himself folded up with it, utterly demoralized. That might have been the beginning of a disastrous rout, except for the fact that the Union right was able to redeploy and reform so as to form a new right flank. General George Thomas was able to take command of what was left of the Army of the Cumberland, organize a defense, and hold his position until nightfall, when he was able to withdraw and rejoin the retreating troops. This skillful rear-guard action earned Thomas the name, "Rock of Chickamauga." With Rosecrans so totally demoralized, and discredited, Thomas would now assume command of the Army of the Cumberland.

Now, Bragg had a choice. The choice was, pursue Rosecrans and try to beat him back to Chattanooga, or reorganize his army. He chose the latter. Some have vilified him for that. I'm beginning to wonder if that's fair. Bragg would have had some pretty serious problems trying to pursue Rosecrans. For one, he charged into the battle so fast that his troops left their supply wagons behind. For another, Rosecrans had retreated across the Tennessee River, which was now an obstacle for Bragg, and Bragg had no pontoon bridges. Or boats, for that matter; Rosecrans' men took them all. All that was left for Bragg to do was to lay siege to Chattanooga. He did still enjoy a numerical advantage, after all.

It wouldn't last:

Gen. Thomas -- 
Hold Chattanooga at all hazards. I will be there as soon as possible.
                                                                           -- Gen. Grant

This telegram was all Thomas needed to see. Grant was coming. With him, enough and more than enough manpower to break Bragg's siege. He'd hang on until Judgment Day, or until he starved, whichever came first ... although he expected Grant to arrive well before either of those happened.

Grant would not disappoint.

Video Del Fuego, Part LXIII

Welcome to today's "Swords into Plowshares" installment of this feature, where we look at a few cases of former weapons given new leases on life.

It's fairly obvious, if you think about it. When you've written the requirements for a long-range artillery missile, you've also written most of the requirements for a satellite launch vehicle. That sort of works both ways, which is why everyone gets antsy when North Korea tries to enter the satellite launching arena, because exactly no one believes that Kim Jong-Un is trying to muscle in on Arianespace's market share. But while the list of would-be satellite launchers that have become successful weapons is somewhere between short and empty, the list of weapons that have gone on to a second life as satellite launchers is very long.

For the United States, it's a list that begins with our very first military missiles.

First, the Atlas. You may remember that a version of Atlas was used during the orbital phase of Project Mercury. What you may not have heard is that old, decommissioned Atlas-F ICBMs were refurbished by the Air Force, and used to launch spy satellites during the '60s, '70s, and beyond. The last of the "stage-and-a-half" Atlas rockets flew in 2004.

The next ICBM the U.S. deployed, the Titan, was also recycled for launch duty. Again, it played a role in the American manned space program as the launch vehicle for Project Gemini. And like Atlas, once the missiles were decommissioned in the '80s, they found new life as workhorses in the Air Force satellite program. One such missile sent the Clementine space probe on its way to the Moon in 1994, another was used to launch the NOAA-M weather satellite in 2002.

The next ICBM to be deployed, the Minuteman, hasn't been taken out of service yet. Its alleged replacement, the Peacekeeper, has been withdrawn. Depending on who you talk to, the Peacekeeper was taken out of service because of cuts mandated by treaty, or because the Air Force wasn't happy with its range. Maybe a little of both? Either way, its engines became available for Orbital Sciences Corporation to fool around with. Some Peacekeeper first stages were used in their Taurus launcher. But then, they got the idea to just use the whole darn thing, which was the beginning of the Minotaur. Last week, a Minotaur was used to send the LADEE probe on its way to the Moon.

Solid rockets don't waste a whole lot of time getting off the ground, do they?

Of all the missiles I just mentioned, only the Minotaur is still in service. Sort of. There's still an Atlas flying, the Atlas V, but it only shares a name with its progenitor. The American-built airframe uses a Russian-built RD-180 engine in its first stage.

The world is a weird place. If you were to ask an average American circa 1812 who our nation's strongest ally would be two hundred years hence, he'll pick anyone but the British, and he'd be wrong. And if you were to ask a Convair engineer in 1963 whose engines his Atlas rocket would be using in fifty years, he'd pick anyone but the Russians, and he'd also be wrong.

It's an interesting exercise in humility: just imagine what we're going to be wrong about, in fifty years' time?

When All Else Fails...

Statistically speaking, flying is the safest way to travel. As we proceed with today's subject, that's well worth remembering. But we all know that statistics are mostly about lying with figures, and that airplanes do fail ... leading to an obvious question. Let's say the worst has happened, and the lovely balance of forces keeping you aloft has suddenly turned ugly. Now what?

The answer to that question has varied considerably throughout the years.

The earliest answer was, well, find the softest thing in your line of sight and try to run into it as slowly and gently as possible. That "solution" was equally unpopular both among pilots and owners of haystacks, so the search was on for a better idea. They didn't have to look far.

Surprisingly, the parachute was invented very early, indeed. The modern parachute was invented by a Frenchman, Louis-Sebastien Lenormand, in 1783. If the year sounds familiar, it should; the first hot-air balloons were also invented around the same time, and necessity drove balloonists to find a ... slower descent should something unexpected happen. Despite this, it took several years after the invention of the airplane before parachutes were successfully adapted to the new machine. This is partly because an airplane's cockpit affords far less room than does a balloon's gondola. Eventually, the mechanics for packing a parachute within a pack worn on the back were worked out. Within ten years, aviators had a more-or-less reliable way to part company with a misbehaving aircraft, and live to brag about it afterwards. They're still the cornerstone of all escape mechanisms. But only the cornerstone. As aircraft flew higher and faster, the parachute would need a little help.

The problem that you face bailing out of a high-speed jet is simply this: you're not strong enough to overcome the blast of air howling outside the cockpit. You may find the solution either obvious or counter-intuitive, depending on how naturally you look to explosives as the answer to all your problems. Basically, if you're not strong enough to leap clear, you light off a solid rocket motor under your seat and let chemistry take it from there.

SCIENCE!

The early models ... didn't work so well. But they got better. Early seats had a minimum "safe" altitude, while modern seats can be used from an airplane sitting still on the ground, if necessary. (I'll admit, I'm having a hard time imagining when it'd be necessary to punch out of an aircraft sitting still on a runway. But I digress.)

This arrangement works well, up to a point. That point would be somewhere north of Mach 1, when the hammer-blows from the oncoming supersonic airstream can deliver a lethal beat-down to a man whose only protection is a flight suit. And that's to say nothing of the problems posed by the lack of oxygen at extreme altitudes. Three different methods have been proposed for dealing with this problem.

When drawing up what would eventually become the F-111, engineers at General Dynamics decided that since throwing a flight-suited man into a supersonic aistream was the problem, they just wouldn't do that. If getting him out of the cockpit was the problem, they figured they'd let him take the cockpit with him. In case of emergency, the F-111's crew cabin would separate from the rest of the aircraft, and descend under its own parachute. Once on the ground, the pilots could just walk out.

It works much better than it looks.

A similar escape pod was originally planned for the B-1A supersonic bomber, but when it was re-designed into the B-1B, the supersonic dash requirement was removed, and it was decided that ordinary ejection seats would serve just as well. While escape pods work quite well, they're very heavy, and thus very expensive.

Another group of engineers at General Dynamics, then called Convair, worked on a slightly different solution. Instead of ejecting the entire cabin, perhaps an enclosure that covered only the ejection seat would serve? This was the system they worked out for the B-58 supersonic bomber. Each of the three ejection seats had a clamshell door overhead. In the event of emergency, the shell would snap shut, protecting the crewman from the supersonic blast of air just outside.

This also works a lot better than it looks.

The capsules even had a set of controls, so that the pilot could attempt to keep the aircraft under control while his crew punched out. It wasn't a bad idea, but it does impose a weight penalty above and beyond ordinary ejection seats.

And then you had Kelly Johnson at Lockheed, who wasn't having any of that "enclosure" nonsense.

Because enclosures are for sissies.

No, when they built the A-12 and its follow-on SR-71 Blackbird, they'd put their crew in a full space suit, and have them sit in ordinary ejection seats. The suit would take the abuse of a Mach-3 aerodynamic beat-down, and also provide insulation and breathing air while the crew descended towards Earth. The few times its had to be used, it worked fine. The one time they lost a man post-ejection, it was due to drowning, not anything that happened at altitude. The thing Johnson liked best about this arrangement is that the weight penalty was almost negligible, being that they had to put the pilots in pressure suits anyway due to the aircraft's operating altitude.

And then, we come to the final frontier. The same question remains: what do you do when your spaceship quits on you, and you're still up in orbit? Take heart, my friend, for the engineers at General Electric have you covered! Or don't, because their brainchild, MOOSE, has been called "the single most terrifying form of transport ever devised by man." Basically, when things go cubist, you bring a suitcase-sized thing outside with you and open it up. You strap it on your back, then pull a cord to fill a cone-shaped shell with foam. Then, you use a hand-held gas gun to point yourself in more or less the right direction, before you light off a retro-rocket for re-entry. Then you spend the next half-hour desperately praying that you didn't forget to carry the one, because if you got any of that sequence wrong, your butt was gonna roast like a Thanksgiving turkey.

What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

No one especially liked this plan. Not NASA, not the Air Force, not anyone involved with sending astronauts into space. Once it was clear that no one was buying, GE basically shelved the whole idea.

Again, I'd like to remind you that flying is still the safest way to travel. Unless, of course, your trip involves supersonic flight or a voyage through outer space, in which case you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

What Is The Measure Of A Planet?

A few days ago, on August 15th, NASA released the news that their efforts to keep the planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft operational just weren't going to work. Of course, that depends on what level of "operational" you're talking about. It can send and receive messages from Mission Control just fine. Its solar panels are providing plenty of electricity. Its sensors are fully functional. But it's only got two control gyros left, one less than it needs to do the super-accurate pointing it really needs to do in order to see the tiny wiggles that betray a planet around a sun tens to hundreds of light-years away.

They're open to suggestions for other uses. If you've got a notion about how to use the last two gyros in concert with its thrusters to point it accurately, and with stability, they'd love to hear from you.

Kepler, to date, has found 134 fully-confirmed planets orbiting 75 different stars, along with 3,277 unconfirmed candidates. Not a bad haul for four years' work.

If only we had a good, universal definition of what a planet actually is.

Once upon a time, a good way to start a bar fight at any astronomers' convention would be to throw out the question, "Is Pluto a planet?" Did I say "once upon a time?" It's still a fairly contentious topic, seven years after the IAU formally demoted Pluto to "dwarf planet" status.

The current definition states that a planet is:

1) In orbit around the Sun,

2) Has sufficient mass to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape), and

3) Has "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit.

I've had seven years to think it over, and I'm not sure I like the third part. No, scratch that, I'm sure I don't like it. My beef with this definition is that it's not universal enough to be of real use. How do we know any of the 940 confirmed exo-planets discovered by all means at our disposal are real, genuine, bona fide planets?

Well, I suppose we could add a fourth qualification. If it's detectable from at least ten light-years away, it ought to be good, right? Well, not really. That definition relies on how good your telescopes are. So that really doesn't work, either.

Here's the real problem, which caused the IAU to write the definition the way they did: using only (1) and (2) above would give us an enormous -- and possibly ever-expanding -- number of planets. Unwieldy lists aren't good or useful for anyone. So there had to be a third discriminant. The orbital mechanics weenies -- and I was one, part-time, back in grad school -- crafted the requirement to "clear the neighborhood", and called the problem solved.

My issue with the definition as written is that you can't apply that rule over interstellar distances. You just don't have enough information. There's no way, even in principle, to make your observations so precise. But you still need a third rule, so that the list can't grow without limit. There's gotta be a way to draw a metaphorical line, saying "You must be this tall to be a planet."

There are two ways to draw that line, by mass, or by radius. Or use both, allowing the candidate to qualify by one or the other. The nice thing about this discriminant is that it's universal. It doesn't depend on how the object moves, it depends on what the object is. You can apply it here, or around Alpha Centauri, or Epsilon Eridani. It works equally well everywhere.

And I don't especially care where you draw the line. I give not a rip if Pluto is above or below the cut-off. Set the limit at Pluto's size plus five percent, or minus five percent, I'm good with either one.

All I want is a rule that I can use wherever my attention wanders. And it wanders pretty damned wide.

Video Del Fuego, Part LXII

Being an island nation at war is a decidedly mixed bag. On the one hand, islands tend to be somewhat defensible. Invading an island is exactly no one's idea of a fun time. But on the other hand, doing that whole wartime thing requires a whole bunch of stuff that's not always easy to find on an island. Therefore, it has to come from somewhere else. If you enemy has even an ounce of sense, they're going to try to keep you from getting it. So, now what?

This was the question running through the mind of Geoffrey de Havilland in the spring of 1938. At that point, a blind man could see the storm clouds gathering. De Havilland realized that being able to build an airplane with non-strategic materials would be of considerable advantage, not just to him personally, but to Britain. When he did a more detailed study, he realized that while wood had poor torsional characteristics, its strength-to-weight ratio was just as good as steel or aluminum. That came as a bit of a surprise. The projected performance also came as something of a surprise. When he turned the crank again, the equation he came up with looked something like this:

(2 Rolls-Royce Merlin Engines) + (Lightweight wooden structure) = Bat Outta Hell.

This two-engine light bomber would be faster than anything the Germans had, either flying or on the drawing board, outside of anything sporting either a jet or rocket engine. It took two years to refine the design, but by early 1940, what de Havilland was offering was something the Royal Air Force was very interested in having. Thus, the first prototype of the de Havilland Mosquito flew for the first time on the 25th of November.

While the Mosquito was originally sold as a light bomber, it also found use as a photo recon bird, a day or night fighter, a pathfinder for heavier bombers, a torpedo bomber, and even as a transport. It had three defining characteristics. First, it was fast. It could do better than 400 miles per hour, a speed matched or surpassed among prop aircraft only by the P-38 Lightning, the F4U Corsair, and the F8F Bearcat; none of which were in the Luftwaffe inventory. Second, it had legs. It could fly 1,500 miles with a full weapons load. A single Mosquito could, and sometimes did, make a solo raid on Berlin, just to make the point that it could. The Luftwaffe chief was not amused:

"In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that?" -- Hermann Goering, c. 1943

The third thing ... It's often said that the Germans didn't have radar. That's not quite true. They knew all about it, and even used it themselves. But detecting a wooden plane with primitive radar? Yeah, good luck with that. At night, a well-flown Mosquito may as well have been invisible.

It was a beautiful, remarkable airplane, but the ravages of time are not kind to even well-tended wood. Not many are left today. But amazingly enough, one of them has been restored to flyable condition.



KA114 was built by de Havilland Canada in 1945, and was shipped to New Zealand for restoration in 2012. If you're alert, and lucky, you might be able to see it come to an airshow near you.



Man, there's nothing like the sound of a Merlin or two at full throttle. That symphony never gets old.

Rush To Judgement

For the most part, I studiously ignore talk radio in virtually all its forms. Virtually, I say; sports talk radio is pretty entertaining when done well. But news talk radio? Mostly useless.

I'm not going to go into why it's useless just right now. Suffice it to say that if it bleeds, it leads, and most media outlets try to lead you along by a steady diet of fear and/or outrage. I don't need anyone to tell me what I should be outraged about. What I need is someone to tell me what's actually happening out there. Outrage, I can work out on my own. (Or not. Unfocused outrage is also mostly useless.)

Anyway, my main point is that I mostly ignore what Rush Limbaugh has to say. Not because he's a conservative, but because his day job is to be a loudmouth schnook, and I already have as many of those in my life as I need.

Unfortunately, that means that when he does say something worth paying attention to, I usually miss it.

But even then, he often misses the point, like when he compared the Republican Party to Apple earlier this week. His point, near as I can understand it, is that just like mainstream tech bloggers often hate Apple, mainstream media hates the Republican Party.

What Rush doesn't actually get is why a lot of tech geeks hate Apple. The two words that explain everything aren't "media bias", but "vertical integration".

The reasons why Apple products have such a reputation for working so well, and the reasons why they're often so expensive, and the reasons why their competitors often end up with such a higher market share are all tied together in that one phrase. "Vertical integration" means that Apple owns it all. They control the entire user experience from cradle to grave. They build the hardware. They develop the operating system. They rule the APIs with an iron fist. If your app doesn't pass muster, it ain't going on their online store, no way, no how. And if it doesn't come from their app store, it isn't going on your phone. Computers are another thing entirely ... but the same broad principles apply.

Now, for the average Joe who wouldn't know a terabyte from a trombone, this is probably a good thing. With most Apple products, the rule of thumb is that something is either intuitive or otherwise immediately obvious, or it's just outright impossible. Which means if doing the obvious thing doesn't work, well, you don't have to waste time fiddling with it. That app just won't do that function, friend. Find another one.

But there's a breed of alpha-geek power-user out there for whom that's an enraging travesty. And a disproportionate fraction of them blog, or vlog, or post to YouTube, or otherwise make their outrage known.

Pictured: RAAAAAAAAAAGE!!!!

My point is that they don't hate on Apple because it's cool to hate on Apple ... although there's probably a bit of that going around, too. But that's beside the point. The point is that they rage against Apple's iron-fisted control over all things Apple, and are bellowing YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME! at The Man.

Vertical Integration ... doesn't exactly describe the Republican Party. Maybe it did, once upon a time. But their establishment -- their equivalent of Steve Jobs and his top software architects -- lost control of the party's message a while back, and are scrambling like mad to keep pace with the Tea Party fanatics who are mostly in charge these days. What's vertically integrated in GOP-land these days? Not the message -- the loon with the biggest megaphone owns it, whoever that happens to be on a particular day. Not the legislative agenda. And definitely not the nomination process.

No, if there's a tech company that the GOP resembles, it's ColecoVision.

Pictured: the reason WHY you've never heard of ColecoVision.

Hint: they made REALLY BAD computers.

It's ... not a path I'd recommend emulating. But it appears to be the one they've chosen.

Assorted Stuff

Once again, we're in the that part of Summer where God turns the oven on broil and goes off to tend to other business for a while. The unrelenting fury of Mean Ol' Mister Sun does tend to sap my ability for deep thinking, but even so, I do notice a few things going on.

1) Sharknado. It's a movie about a tornado full of sharks. But it was always advertised as a movie about a tornado full of sharks. If you tuned into a movie called Sharknado expecting anything else, you have no right to your disappointment. Understand, I'm not saying it was a good film by any reasonable standard of the term. But lots of bad movies have been made, like, let's say, Battlefield Earth or Zardoz. (Oh God, Zardoz.)

Pictured: Sean Connery wearing a mustache, a diaper, and an expression saying "I quit James Bond for this?!?"

But they were just ordinarily bad. Sharknado, at least, has the potential to be legendarily bad. But that's beside the point. If you tuned in for the world premiere, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

2) Sikorsky Prize Won. There were two prizes awaiting the first man-powered aircraft: the Kremer prize for the first man-powered heavier-than-air vehicle, and the Sikorsky prize for the first man-powered rotary-wing aircraft. The Kremer prize was won in 1977 by Paul MacCready's Gossamer Condor. The Sikorsky prize proved to be a much tougher nut to crack ... until now. The AeroVelo team, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, designed and built an enormous contraption that, nonetheless ... well, you have to see this to believe it.



Yes, you saw that right. One dude, by himself, pedaled that enormous thing into the sky.

3) Photobombing Saturn. By the time you read this, it's already too late to participate, but someone noticed that one of Cassini's routine photo surveys of Saturn would include the Earth. So, someone at NASA HQ got the idea that everyone should go outside, smile, and wave to make it a proper photobombing. So I did. (I mean, why the heck not?)

4) For Sale: Rocket Engine, Used Once. Earlier, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos financed a salvage mission to try to recover some old discarded Apollo hardware from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Specifically, he was looking for remnants of the Saturn V first stages that were discarded after use, off the Florida coast. They found what they were looking for, but weren't sure what mission they'd come from yet. Well, after some analysis, they can report that yes, they found the engines that sent Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins on their historic voyage aboard Apollo 11. He doesn't intend to sell the engines, of course, but he does want to put them on display somewhere.

5) Zombie Satellite! A while back, the Kepler planet-hunting satellite lost another of its control gyros, leaving it with two left. Three has been considered the minimum number necessary to give the pointing accuracy needed for Kepler to do its job properly. I say "has been considered", because in a week or two, NASA will try a last-ditch effort to find a work-around for this issue. If it's successful, Kepler will continue hunting new planets for a little while longer.

And that's probably a good place to wrap up for now. For all the stuff and nonsense going on, it's worth remembering that we do live in a wondrous, beautiful world.

Wondrous and beautiful, even if it is a world with Zardoz in it.

What the HELL, Boorman?!?

Sesquicentennial, Part XXXI: The Fulcrum of History

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

July 1  --  July 2  --  July 3  --  July 4  --  July 5

"For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago..." -- William Faulkner

The American Civil War is, undeniably, the central event in American history. Well, I say "undeniably", but there may be a few other events that qualify. There's the Revolution, without which there wouldn't be a United States, at least not in its present form. And there's the Second World War, which not only transformed America's role in the world, but was the catalyst for an amazing cascade of changes that would reverberate through the decades to follow. But if you had to pick one event that was the pre-eminent watershed, one event that irrevocably separated what came before from what would come after, then you'd be hard pressed to choose anything but the secession of the Southern states, and the Constitutional crisis that provoked. It's like Shelby Foote once said, before the Civil War, you'd say "the United States are", and after you'd say "the United States is". Before, a collection of States; afterwards, a single, inviolable Union.

And if you had to pick the central event within the central event ... There are a few perfectly defensible candidates, but I'd have to pick the first week of July in 1863. Everything that happened in the previous three years led up to this point, and everything that followed flowed away from it.

You could pick the Emancipation Proclamation. Or the Thirteenth Amendment. But those would have come to naught, if the Union couldn't compel the Confederacy into obedience. And these last four days were the crucial turning point of that contest. Before the one-two punch of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the Confederacy had a shouting chance of holding out long enough for either Europe to intervene, or the North to tire of the effort. Now, although the latter might still be in play, the former was a hope gone forever.

You see, one of the ways that the Confederacy would raise money was by the sale of bonds in European markets. The bonds promised repayment in Confederate cash, once Confederate independence had been won and Confederate cotton was once again available on the world market in bulk. They did a fairly brisk trade, raising desperately-needed hard cash for the war effort.

After the news hit Europe, though ... bond prices crashed, and never recovered. Speculators saw that not only was the Confederacy's biggest army under its best commander seen off, but the Confederacy itself had been cut in two and isolated. No one was touching those instruments with a ten-foot pole after that.

But it's not just that. The character of the conflict has changed. One of those changes, I'll leave for another time. The other change is still fairly significant: the Confederacy has lost the initiative.

This isn't obvious, yet. But the Tale of the Tape was beginning to tell, and hard. Not only that, but the Confederacy's initial advantage in officer quality had finally slipped.

First, supply issues. The South was never able to support a modern field army. Their plan had always been to rely upon foreign support that never actually materialized. They didn't have the industry, or the transportation infrastructure, to keep an army well-stocked with ammunition, or guns, or food and clothing. They did well enough the first two years, but only by running their industrial plant ragged. They were desperately short of tools, and skilled men. And now, totally cut off from foreign trade, the supply problems would only get worse.

Second, officer quality. The Union's problem was never that they had poor officers, it's that they had to staff and garrison forts out West, where there wasn't any action to speak of. They also had to placate the long-serving officers in the Regular Army, who were of somewhat uneven quality. The Confederacy, as I've said before, had no such problem, and could immediately put their best men in key spots. Two years pass. These two years have been a particularly brutal sifting process for the Union. Just about anyone who's still alive at this point has, at a minimum, proven that they're not abjectly incompetent ... with a handful of exceptions. And the troops themselves? Hardened, skilled, tested in the fire; they've been weighed in the scales and found worthy. The Confederacy had an early advantage in officer skill and troop morale. But now, they face officers just as skilled, and troops hungry for victory. And there are more of them. That's the other side of the Tale of the Tape, that the Confederacy was always punching above its weight class. They knew that, but were betting that the Union didn't.

Well the Union knows it now. And they're about to spin the vise down and squeeze.

It wouldn't be quick. It wouldn't be easy. But Phase I of the Anaconda plan was now complete. Now it was time for Phase II to begin. And there was blessed little that the Confederacy could do about it.

Sesquicentennial, Part XXX: Vicksburg

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July 1  --  July 2  --  July 3  --  July 4  --  July 5

"God gave us Lincoln and liberty, let us fight for both." -- General Ulysses S. Grant

Sieges aren't fun for anybody.

A siege combines the horrors of an extended campaign with the stultifying boredom of garrison duty. You're either on the firing line, shooting and getting shot at, or you're back in camp, doing a whole lot of nothing. It doesn't especially matter which side of the siege works you're sitting on. Except, that is, for the fact that the besieging force can resupply with food and ammunition. The besieged force, and the unfortunate civilians within the besieged city, have whatever food and stores they managed to lay in before the noose drew shut.

Eventually, it runs out.

That's how sieges have almost always ended. The dramatic version, where the attackers smash down the walls by force and take the castle, almost never happens. The counter-examples are exceptional, like when Alexander the Great seized the then-island city of Tyre. (Incidentally, Alexander's also the reason Tyre is no longer an island, but that's another story.) The usual result, especially in the medieval and early modern period, is that the opposing commanders would meet and fix a date. The date was related to how much food the defenders had. If that date passed without relief for the defenders, then the defending commander would surrender his garrison.

All this is important on this day, July 4, 1863, because General Ulysses S. Grant has been camped out outside of Vicksburg, Mississippi with his army since mid-May. General John Pemberton has been cut off from communications or supply since that date. In theory, a Confederate army could come to break the siege. It's a nice theory. Unfortunately, it depends on an army being available for siege-breaking that President Davis didn't already have busy elsewhere.

Grant didn't take inactivity well. He never did. All of the episodes of his reported drunkenness happened when he was cooped up with nothing better to do than taste-test whiskey. When his army was on the move, Grant had plenty to occupy him; but when it was encamped outside of Vicksburg, he had very few decisions that needed making. The main decision being, when to try another assault on the defensive works?

After a few bloody attempts in May, Grant gave those up as a bad idea. He simply surrounded Vicksburg with big guns, and let his artillerymen do all his talking from then on.

Eventually, Pemberton decided that his soldiers could endure no more. Starvation, and all the diseases associated with starvation, were becoming a real problem. He asked Grant for terms on July 3, 1863. At first, Grant began to issue his standard demand of unconditional surrender ... but then reconsidered, because he had no particular desire to have to feed some 30,000 hungry Confederate prisoners in Union prison camps. Instead, he worked out a parole arrangement, where the Confederate soldiers would go home until "exchanged" with similarly-paroled Union prisoners. This sort of thing was not uncommon up to this point in the war. The final terms were worked out on July 4, when Pemberton surrendered Vickburg to Grant.

Upon hearing of the surrender of Vicksburg, Lincoln exulted, "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea." With the surrender of Vicksburg, the Confederacy was not only cut in two, it was totally isolated from the outside world.

From now on, the Confederate Army's supply problems would only get worse.