Space Travel for Dummies: Hands-On Tutorial

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For those of you who care to download and configure some software, we can do a bit of a walk-through of a trip into orbit.

[NOTE: There are newer versions of Orbiter and its add-ons available. The new version of Orbiter is available here, and a selection of add-ons are available here.]

First, you want to download Orbiter from here. Orbiter, for those of you who don't know, is a freeware spaceflight simulator. It's fairly realistic, and if you're into that sort of masochism, it can be as realistic as you want it to be.

There are some add-ons we want, from Dan's Orbiter Page. Scroll down a bit, and click on the icons for Orbiter Sound and Delta Glider III. Basic Orbiter has no sound, and sound is a neat thing to have. As for DGIII, well, it has a couple of features the basic Delta Glider lacks. First, you can use the config tool to change up the paint job if you want. Second, and more importantly, it has an auto-pilot function. This makes life so much easier. I can hand-fly an ascent to orbit, but not to an accurate orbit. I can get into space, but if you're relying on me for an accurate rendezvous, you're SOL. With the autopilot, we have a fighting chance.

Now, let's fly.

From the start-up screen, you'll want to select the DeltaGliderIII folder, and Earth Scenery, and from that, the ascent from KSC to ISS. We aren't actually going to attempt a rendezvous, but we'll use that profile as a starting point.

When you get to the cockpit, use the left arrow key to go over to the orbit display. You'll see a grey circle, a green ellipse, and a bunch of numbers down the left-hand side. The grey circle is the Earth's surface, the green ellipse is your trajectory, and the numbers describe various things about your orbit. You won't need any of the numbers for this tutorial, so you don't have to worry about them unless you want to. The pictures on this display tell the story. If you're really interested, I'll have some definitions at the end of the post. One thing you'll want to do, though: punch the key on the upper right side of the panel. It'll change the reference of the display to ship-centered.

Now, hold down the right arrow key to get to the other display. Hit "SEL" to get the list of displays available. Take a look at what's available, but where you eventually want to end up is the Map display. It'll show your ground track, and the ground track of a selected target, if available.

Now that we've got that settled, let's program the autopilot. On your keyboard, type P903S43, then Enter. This loads the ascent autopilot, and then puts it into standby mode. You can activate it by hitting the "E" key. You don't want to do that just yet.

Now, if you hit F8, you get the HUD view. This is the view I like to fly from.

Hitting F1 toggles the external view. From here, you can hold down the right mouse button, and find an external view that you like the looks of. You can also use the scroll button, if you have one, to zoom in and out.

We're done setting up. It's time to light off our engines and get underway.

From the cockpit view, hold down the key and the <+> key on the keypad. Release both keys after full thrust is achieved. Now comes the trickiest part of the whole flight. If you've gotten the sound files in, this will be pretty easy. You'll hear a voice say, "80 knots." Don't do anything yet. Then, he'll say "V1." You still don't want to do anything. But stay on your toes. Shortly after V1, you'll be going fast enough to take off. The cue for that is when he says, "Rotate." The number keypad serves as a joystick. <2> pulls back, <8> pushes forward, <4> and <6> roll left and right. When you get the rotation signal, use <2> to pull back, but not to more than a 20 degree climb. Once you've left ground, tap "G" to raise your landing gear. Then, you can tap "E" to engage the autopilot. Once that's done, you can sit back and enjoy the ride.

This takes us to about T +30 seconds, referring from the time we started our engines.

The autopilot isn't particularly aggressive. It takes about forty seconds to turn to a 43-degree heading, and level the wings. Once it does that, it starts pulling up into a steep climb, a pitch attitude of 65 degrees. It reaches that attitude about two minutes into the flight. Remember, to get into orbit you have to do two things: gain altitude, and gain speed. Generally speaking, you gain altitude first, to get out of the thick, dense air near the surface.

While you're doing this, you'll probably notice that the green ellipse on the left display isn't changing much. Gaining altitude doesn't change that situation very much. Your trajectory is still what we call a degenerate ellipse. If the ground weren't in the way, your path would go straight down to the center of the Earth. This will change in a few minutes, though.

At about T +200 seconds, three minutes and change, the autopilot begins to rein in the climb. You've hit about 100 kilometers in altitude, so you can begin to bend over sideways to build up speed. But you don't do it all at once. It's more efficient to execute a "gravity turn": you turn a slight bit off of your climb, and let gravity pull your path towards the horizontal. It's a neat trick, but it only works if you have little to no air resistance.

But look over at your left-hand display. Now, the orbit begins to fill out. It changes from a degenerate ellipse to a normal ellipse. As you gain speed, you gain energy, and this is expressed as a bigger orbit.

Now, look to your right. The map display shows your ground track mostly in pink. That's the "underground" portion of your trajectory. If you ever try to shoot a Moon landing, that'll come in handy. Where the green trace ends, that's where your path intersects the surface. (If you spend a bit of time learning how to use these displays, there's little to no actual cipherin' involved in flying this thing. Which is a good thing, becuase most rocket jockeys aren't mathematicians.)

At about six minutes into the flight, the autopilot has brought the pitch attitude to zero. It's all about the speed, now. The magic number is about 7,700 meters per second. You're not near that yet, but you're getting closer all the time. The ellipse on the left-hand display is growing visibly.

Now is a good time to do a bit of sight-seeing. Again, F1 toggles between inside and outside views. You can look back at Florida, and south to the Bahamas. The scenery is pretty good.

At about nine minutes, the autopilot will do something that might surprise you at first. You're getting close to your target altitude, so the autopilot pitches down to soak up excess vertical speed. Don't worry about it if that happens. It means you're almost done.

And then, at T +580 seconds, the engines shut down, the autopilot terminates, and you're in a stable circular orbit.

As I've said earlier, this is the easy part. Landing is much, much trickier ...

DEFINITIONS:

Here are some definitions of some of the terms on the Orbit display. I haven't defined all of them, just some of the more important ones.

SMa: Semi-major axis. This is one-half of the total distance, end-to-end, of the long side of the orbital ellipse.

SMi: Semi-minor axis. This is one-half of the total distance of the short side of the orbital ellipse. This is almost never used except to compute the eccentricity.

PeD: Periapsis Distance. The Periapsis is the point of closest approach to the Earth's center. If it's less than the Earth's radius (6,378.137 km) then your trajectory intersects the Earth's surface at some point. If unprepared for said intersection, you're going to have a bad day.

ApD: Apoapsis Distance. The Apoapsis is the highest point on an orbit.

Rad: Radius. This is your current distance from the center of the Earth.

Ecc: Eccentricity. This is a number, 0 to 1, describing how flat your ellipse is. Zero describes a circle, one describes either a degenerate ellipse or a parabola.

T: Total orbital period in seconds. This is how long it will take to go around and come back to your starting point. For a low circular Earth orbit, it's about an hour and a half, give or take.

PeT: Time to periapsis. This is how long you have to go to reach periapsis. It's important for timing orbital maneuvers: if you want to raise your apoapsis, you need to do your burn at periapsis.

ApT: Time to apoapsis. This is how long you have to go to reach apoapsis. It's the same deal: if you want to change your periapsis, you have to do the burn at apoapsis.

Vel: Current velocity. 'Nuff said.

Space Travel for Dummies, Part 4

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Now, we come to the really hard part. It's worth mentioning that while nobody has actually ever died IN space, a total of nineteen have cashed in their chips going and coming. Breaking that down, it's seven on the way out, twelve on the way back. It's a very, very tricky thing to do, and it's easy to find yourself well and truly up the river without a paddle.

There's an odd little factoid about the first Space Shuttle mission that I find amusing. Both John Young and Bob Crippen were wired with medical sensors, recording heart rate and other parameters. Crippen, the rookie, recorded his highest heart rate during the launch. He wasn't too excited about re-entry and landing. Young, the veteran, took launch in stride. His pucker factor soared to its heights during re-entry. Obviously, he knew something Crippen didn't.

In short, it's the launch problem in reverse. You need to lose 18,000 MPH of speed and a couple of hundred miles of altitude without getting anything important broken, bent, or burned.

Easy to say, harder to do.

The first part is the easy part: you need to adjust your orbit so that the low part dips back down into the atmosphere. It doesn't take all that much fuel. You tap your maneuvering thrusters for about a minute or so, firing the jets out in front, soaking up a little of your orbital speed. Then, you start to descend. If there were no atmosphere present, your lowest approach would be about fifty miles up. But, there are a few billion air molecules standing in your way...

The basic idea is that you use friction and pressure drag to slow your vehicle down to a more manageable velocity, so that you don't have to use fuel to do the job. The problem is that your vehicle can only stand so much deceleration stress and thermal heating. There's a fairly narrow corridor, expressed as an altitude-versus-speed plot, that you can safely fly in. Too high, and you don't get enough deceleration, and skip back out into space. Too low, and it's a race between thermal stress and G-loading. One of them's gonna kill you, it's just a question of which one gets there first.

It's vitally important to keep control all the way through re-entry. Early ballistic capsules maintained control by putting the ship into a slow roll during re-entry. Kind of like a quarterback's spiral, only slower. More modern versions add active, computer-controlled guidance for extra control. Winged vehicles like the Shuttle can use their aerodynamic control surfaces once the dynamic pressure gets high enough. But if you lose control before you get down below Mach 1, you're in for a whole world of hurt. Vladimir Komarov found this out the hard way on Soyuz 1, when his capsule began spinning too fast. The parachute lines snarled up when they were deployed, and the Soviets were saved the trouble of cremation. They didn't find many pieces bigger than a soda can after the capsule struck the ground.

And then there's Columbia, which gamely tried to fly along missing its left wing for a little bit. A piece of icy foam tore a hole in its heat shield during launch, which let super-hot gases inside to romp and play with the aluminum wing structure during re-entry. It sagged, melted, and eventually let go. Parts were found in six or seven states.

Not that those are the only problems to be had. Soyuz 11 ran into a bit of trouble on its way back from Salyut 1. Russia very nearly scored another first on us. And it must be said, they did have the first space station. We, on the other hand, had the first space station crew who were able to brag about it afterwards. You see, a cabin purge valve had become stuck open during re-entry. It let all of the air out of the capsule, and the crew weren't wearing space suits. The predictable thing happened.

Coming down onto an airless world is just as exciting, but in a different way. Because there's no air, you have to burn enough fuel to do the deed. It's a more predictable process, since you can cipher out beforehand how much gas you need to bring along. They nearly got caught short the first time. Neil Armstrong landed on fumes. But they got better, and more precise, with each successive landing. It's interesting to note that while the computer was in control during most of powered descent, every final approach was flown by hand. No one trusted the guidance well enough that far down. Having had the chance to work with the algorithm, I can't blame them. It has an evil tendency to bend over sideways and burn for the horizon when the time-to-go gets short.

We seem to have lost a bit of the knack, though. The Mars Polar Lander had a senior moment during landing, and cut the engines about a hundred feet off the deck. Back to the drawing board...

Everyone says space is a dangerous place. That's rubbish. Getting there? Dangerous. Coming back? Really dangerous. Being there? Mostly harmless. Well, except for the time the oxygen converter caught fire, or when they rammed themselves with a cargo tug, or when the toilet stopped working... But those are stories for another day.

Space Travel for Dummies, Part 3

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If you've been following along, by now you know the basics of how to get into orbit in the first place, and how to move around in Earth orbit once you get there. Which will do as far as things like going to the space station or putting a new satellite up go, but sometimes you'd like to step a bit further out. It's not all that much different than what we've already been talking about. You know the old saying, "What goes up, must come down?" Well, it's not always true.

If you throw something hard enough, it won't be coming back.

Let's revisit our good friend Superman up on Mount Everest. He still has a few baseballs left, and intends to put them to good use.

If you remember, last time he threw the ball a little harder than he had to in order to achieve a circular orbit, and put it into an elliptical orbit. If he puts more muscle into the throw, he can get it to sail higher and higher into the sky. The orbits get bigger and bigger, and they take longer and longer to get back to their starting point. Starting from 90 minutes, the orbit times extend to two hours, three hours, six hours, and longer. Then, you start measuring the orbits in days, not hours. They blast up to ten, twenty, a hundred thousand miles high. Eventually, he starts going home after he throws, coming back a couple of days later for the catch.

He's got one ball left.

He winds this one waaaaaaaaay back, and lets it go. It leaves his hand at over 36,000 miles per hour. If he weren't Superman, the shock wave would knock him down. Then, he packs up his stuff and goes home. He's done.

This one, you see, isn't coming back to Earth. Ever.

Here's what's happening: Gravity loses strength at the square of the distance from Earth. But, gravity can only drain your speed away at a linear rate. Most of the time, that's enough. It saps all of your vertical speed and pulls you right back. But if you're going fast enough, gravity can't suck speed away quickly enough, and no matter how far away you get you've always got a little speed left over.

So, that last ball Superman threw will sail across the Solar System forever. It's in a permanent Solar orbit, and probably won't ever come back to Earth.

This is an important principle, because that's what lets us leave Earth and strut our funky stuff across the Solar System. While gravity extends everywhere, it's not infinitely powerful, and can be overcome with enough effort. Sometimes, you even get to cheat a little bit and make gravity work for you.

That's the essence of what they call the gravity assist or "slingshot" maneuver. It's a way that you can get a speed boost and direction change for free, if you line everything up just right.

Ordinarily, changing speed and direction takes energy. And the only practical tool we have right now for doing that is a chemical rocket. Which means you have to bring along fuel to do it. Since you have to bring along fuel, you have to bring along fuel tanks, and that drives up the ship's weight.

That's bad. As the current NASA administrator, Mike Griffin, once wrote: "Spacecraft, like turkeys, are bought by the pound."

But, sometimes, you get to pull one over on Mother Nature. Here's how it works:

Imagine a skater, carrying a grapnel hook on a bungie line. He wants to round the corner, but doesn't want to expend the effort to turn his skates. So, he throws out his line, hooks a pole, and swings around.

By timing your approach and direction just right, you can swing around a planet just like the skater swung around the light pole.

As you fall in, coming from behind and below, you speed up as the planet pulls you in. As you speed away, the planet's gravity isn't able to suck your speed away quickly enough to get it all back. Basically, you've stolen a tiny bit of the planet's orbital momentum, and used it to speed up and change the direction of your orbit.

We've gotten pretty good at this. Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, all of them went through numerous slingshot encounters to achieve their missions.

And that's about it for basic orbital maneuvers. Once you escape Earth orbit, getting to and from another planet in the Solar System works just the same as getting to and from something in Earth orbit. You burn in the direction of travel to gain energy and go farther out, and you burn against the direction of travel to lose energy and go in.

Which brings us to a trick question. Remember this: you can amaze your friends at parties, because almost no one ever gets the right answer the first time.

Here's the problem: you've got a package of dangerous waste that you want to be rid of forever. You've got two options. One, drop it into the Sun, and two, send it into interstellar space.

Which one is easier?

Sending it into interstellar space, of course.

This stunned me the first time I heard it, but the numbers absolutely work out.

Earth's orbital velocity is about 30 kilometers per second. As a rule of thumb, escape velocity is about one and a half times orbital velocity. So, once you've escaped Earth, you have to gain about another 15 km/sec to achieve Solar escape velocity.

But to drop something straight down, you have to shed ALL of your orbital velocity. So, to drop something into the Sun means you have to find a way to shed a full 30 km/sec.

It's a hard fact to swallow, but I assure you, it's true.

Next time: How the heck to we get back home?

Space Travel for Dummies, Part 2

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"East takes you out. Out takes you west. West takes you in. In takes you east."
-- Larry Niven, The Integral Trees


Once the main engines shut down, things get quiet. Not completely quiet. That would be bad. There's a constant hum and rattle of pumps pumping and motors whirring, but if that ever stops, breathing is liable to become just a little bit difficult. But the rumble of the main engines has stopped, which means that you've reached a stable orbit.

Now what?

Last time we took a look at how you get into orbit in the first place. Now, we're going to look at what you can do once you get there. It's not enough just to get into space. You need to know how to get around, so that you can go where you want to go, not just bore holes in the sky.

Let's rejoin Superman back on Mount Everest, where he just caught a baseball that he threw all the way around the world. What do you think would happen if he threw it just a little bit harder? There's only one way to find out ... He pulls another ball back, this one farther still, and lets it rip. Just like the other ball, it never touches the ground, but unlike the other ball, its path takes it not on a level path around the world, but slightly upwards. By the time it reaches Brazil, it's several miles higher than the first ball's path. But, it starts to fall closer to Earth after that. About two hours later, Superman catches it when it comes back.

Now, what's going on, here? In a word, it's all about energy. Neglecting atmospheric friction, the energy of an object in orbit is constant. If we start with an object in low Earth orbit, and give it just a slight kick so that it goes a little faster, its orbit is no longer a circle, it's an ellipse. The low point on the ellipse touches the original circular orbit. The high point on the ellipse sticks out just a little bit.

Consider the opening quote from The Integral Trees. It's a pretty good description of how basic orbital maneuvering works. Going East -- adding speed to your trajectory -- takes you Out -- farther away from Earth. Going Out takes you West -- as you climb up, you trade speed for altitude, and end up going a bit slower. If you left another spaceship back in your original orbit, if you look down, you'll see it pass under you. Going West -- taking speed away from your trajectory -- takes you In, or closer to Earth. This works the opposite way: you take a little bit of energy away from your orbit, and start to lose altitude. But now you're trading altitude for speed, and you'll pass anything you left in your original orbit. Which brings us -- you guessed it -- to the last bit: "In takes you East."

These facts are the foundation of the art of orbital rendezvous. You don't catch up to another spaceship by burning your engines constantly until you match position. No, what you do is enter a higher or lower orbit, and wait. At just the right time, you make an orbital adjustment burn, and match trajectory with your target. The actual math is a lot more complicated than that, but that's the general idea. You spend most of your time in space waiting for the right time to make these maneuvers.

The other thing is, you're not always in the same orbital plane as the spaceship you want to dock with. The way you want to handle this is to make sure you launch into the right orbital plane to begin with. That's why you hear about "launch windows" all the time. It's possible to change your orbital plane once you get into space, but plane change maneuvers drink fuel like nobody's business. You never want to do one unless you have to. It's always easier to make sure you get the plane right the first time around. But if you do have to, the way you change the plane of your orbit is that you fire your rocket at right angles to your current direction of travel. That is, instead of firing ahead or behind, you fire your rocket sideways.

In any case, now that we've gotten ourselves into space, we know how to move around and get where we want. Next time, we'll talk about going a little farther out: to the Moon, and beyond.

Fear and Loathing at Wal-Mart

There's been a trend afoot at major retailers for quite some time now, and it really torques me off.

I really, really hate being treated like a crook.

At first it was the CDs. I don't think there was ever a time when they weren't packaged in such a way as to prevent use by their legitimate owners. That, at least, has gotten a bit better. Back in the day they used this industrial-strength Kryptonite stick-um that would never, ever come off the case. These days at least you can get the goo off. But it still takes two or three minutes of dedicated, painstaking effort to open the damned thing. All because the retailers are convinced that everyone entering their store is just aching to exercise a bit of five-finger discount.

Buy a clue, dolts. Not everyone is a thief.

The latest offense was, I suppose, at least partly my fault. Naive rube that I am, I dropped $20 on a new watch at Wally World without bringing along my Gerber Multi-Plier, acetylene torch, and other assorted cutting tools.

I remember a time when you could buy a watch, take it out of the box, and you were done. Not so. No, now the damned thing is secured to its packaging with not one, not two, but THREE nylon straps. Nosiree, no one's walking away with one of these babies without a fight!

But what of the poor consumer who just wants a way not to be late for something important? There's nothing for it but to use your teeth and car keys in ways that neither God nor General Motors really intended.

Now, I don't object to a bit of active loss prevention here and there. They've got a right to get their fair due for their merchandise, and I've known one or two people in my time who'd steal for sport, to say nothing of necessity. But surely, in the modern day, there are less offensive ways of doing it? Some way that won't actively diminish my enjoyment of the product?

In my more optimistic moments, I envision a day when store security can rely on RFID tags on all their merchandise. If you try to walk off with something, it'll cry out for help all by itself. You won't have to watch the merchandise. It'll watch itself.

In my more pessimistic moments, though, I imagine that the damned sadists LIKE doing this to me. They ENJOY your pain. "Welcome to Wal-Mart, shopper. This head-vise is a preventive security measure that we only extend to our most valued customers." "Oh, that boot to the groin was just a courtesy detail." "Molten sand enema? Anyone?"

On-line shopping looks better and better all the time. At least that way, I can be sure to have all my tools at hand when I have to open the damned box.

Space Travel for Dummies, Part 1

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For years now, I've threatened to write a book on space travel, but have never made the time to do the deed. There's a niche to be had, for a book somewhere between kids' picture-books and professional-level textbooks. I have a couple dozen pages of notes, somewhere. Provided that they haven't been thrown away in a cleaning binge.

Anyhow, it probably ain't gonna happen. So, I'm going to do the next best thing. I'll collect those thoughts here, in a series of posts. I'm not sure how many posts it'll be.

First off, let's talk about falling. Not just any kind of falling. This is falling with panache, daring, and style. Any fool can fall and hit the ground, but it takes great skill to fall ... and miss.

Imagine, if you will, Superman standing on the summit of Mount Everest with a pile of baseballs. Let's say that he picks one up and throws it. It flies eastward a bit, before smacking into the peak next door. He decides that was a pitiful effort, picks up another, and heaves it a bit harder. It flies over the next mountain, and lands somewhere in eastern Nepal. We can't see it from where we stand. It's gone a bit around the curve of the Earth. Still not satisfied, he picks up another ball and throws it with more force. This time, it plinks into the Pacific, somewhere north of the Phillippines. He keeps repeating the process, dunking the next ball off the cost of Ecuador, and then skipping it across the ground somewhere in Brazil. Then, at last, he pulls one back and lets it go ... and it never quite touches the ground. It screams through the sky, twenty-five times faster than sound, always falling but never hitting anything, until, about 90 minutes later, Supes turns around, and THWACK! He neatly traps it in his catcher's mitt.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is called an orbit.

It doesn't matter what's doing the orbiting, or what it's shaped like. It could be a baseball, a '57 Buick, an Orange Julius stand, or the Eiffel Tower. If you can drag it a couple hundred miles straight up, then set it moving sideways at 18,000 miles per hour, it will circle the Earth indefinitely.

The other thing to notice is that the Earth's gravity is still in full force. There's no such thing as Zero-G in Earth orbit. We sometimes use the word, but it's sloppy. Better to say "free-fall", because that's what's really happening. Something that's in orbit around the Earth is falling all the time. But it's going so fast, that the ground curves away before it can hit. Yes, it is possible to fall and miss the ground. All you need to pull that trick off is a bit of speed.

The next question is, how do you do it?

Well, remember, there are two things you have to do. First, you have to lift it up outside of Earth's atmosphere. Second, you have to accelerate it to orbital speed. It's pretty tough to do both at the same time. It's incredibly tough to try to do it with only one set of engines.

It ought to be fairly obvious that the "lift" job needs a really powerful, high-thrust engine. It's not as obvious what the "accelerate" job needs. For that, we'll have to look at two equations:

[1] V2 - V1 = Ve * EXP (M1/M2)

V2 and V1 are the final and initial speeds, respectively. Ve is the exhaust speed of the rocket, and M1 and M2 are the initial and final weights of the rocket. The other equation is:

[2] P = Ve * T

P is the power produced by the rocket engine, and T is the thrust.

Now, here's the sad and sorry fact: for chemical rocket engines, P is pretty much fixed. Energetic chemical reactions all produce about the same power level. There's not a whole lot of difference there. Where they are different is in how fast the exhaust moves. An engine with fast-moving exhaust gives us a better top speed. We see that from [1] above. But, looking at [2], we see that when Ve is big, and P is fixed, then T has to be smaller. Going the other way, if we want lots of T, we have to live with less Ve, and not as much speed.

But, because we have two different jobs to do, we need both kinds. Look at the Shuttle, for example. The solid rocket boosters aren't too terribly efficient, but they're absolutely swimming in thrust. When they light off, the Shuttle leaps off the pad with force and authority; as long as those SRBs are burning, you're going somewhere. When they're done, the Shuttle's main engines take over. They're not super-powerful, but they're about as efficient as chemical rockets get. Now that the heavy lifting's done, they can bend over sideways and start building up some speed.

Just about every modern rocket system uses the same scheme. The Ariane 5 uses parallel staging like the Shuttle, with solid boosters flanking a hydrogen/oxygen core stage. Others, like Russia's Soyuz rockets, use clusters of kerosene rockets to do the lifting, before handing over to a more efficient upper stage for orbital insertion. There was a proposal in the '50s to use balloons to take a rocket up out of the dense layers of the atmosphere, and shoot it into space from there. It was never tried, so far as I know. It wasn't a bad idea, and might have worked. Other proposals use a large 747-type plane as a mother ship, carrying a rocket plane piggy-back to 40,000 feet or so, before the rocket plane separates and flies into space. Also not a bad idea, but there are some kinks to work out.

That will do for an introduction. Next time, we'll figure out how to get around in space once we actually get there.

Victory, Part Deux

Tigerhawk has been doing some thinking about victory, too, but deeper.

I'd have liked to have been able to write that. It's an excellent analysis of what victory in the wider war is all about.

Iraq, for us, is only a campaign in the wider war on Islamism. That's an important point to remember. It does us no good to win in Iraq if we lose everywhere else.

However: the war in Iraq gives us a couple of opportunities to exercise a bit of geopolitical ju-jitsu. I'm shooting from the hip, here, but I'll try to stay on point.

One: Tigerhawk's spot on about the importance of discrediting Al-Qaeda. You can't kill an idea, but you can ruin it's worth and vitality by exposing its true nature. We have to reveal it as the busted, worthless thing that it truly is. So, what do we have to put up against it? Freedom, and self-determination. An Iraq that is governed by a regime regularly held accountable to its citizens is a powerful counter-example to the jihadist death-cult.

Two: There's another element that I don't think has been explicitly stated yet. In the aftermath of September 11, one of the challenges raised was the difficulty of engaging Al-Qaeda in open combat. They're an organization, not a government. They have no territory. Nothing to defend. They can melt into the background, whenever they choose.

But, take note of what's happened in the last couple of years. By drawing a line in the sand in Iraq, we've forced Al-Qaeda to adopt that land as their own, forcing them to come out to fight and die for it. We've forced them to forfeit one of their key strategic advantages. They do manage to serve up some unpleasant surprises from time to time, but we've managed to serve up a few of our own. After September 11, they were seen in the popular Arab press as invisible, invincible heroes. Unseen, untraceable, going where they will to perpetrate Jihad. But now? The hatred grows with every bombing of Iraqi citizens. The jihadists can't fight the Americans toe to toe, you see. The best they can manage is to pick off one or two, here or there, but they pay dearly when they do that. The Americans can fight back. Schools, mosques, and police stations are much softer targets.

They aren't melting into the background so well, anymore.

Me, I don't mind that Zarqawi slipped through our fingers last year. He's doing a fine job for us right where he's at. His murder spree is costing them more and more Arab and Muslim support by the day, if not by the hour.

I think it's still a bit early to declare that we've passed a tipping point. Things can still go completely FUBAR in Iraq. But, we're miles and miles ahead of where we were in early 2004. We're even miles and miles ahead of where we were, this time last year. More and more, Iraqis are coming to believe in this new government they've created. They won't fight for an occupier. But they will stand up and fight for their own flag, their own people, their own laws. There's an increasing sense that it is truly theirs, now.

Soon. It'll be soon. Al-Qaeda's credibility runs out like the sands in an hourglass. Their political capital's spent, their monetary captial, likewise. Their top leaders are on the run, and have to be lucky every day for the rest of their lives. We only have to be lucky once.

We do have to keep our eye on the prize, though. It's never too late to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

What Will Victory Look Like?

It's a fair question. And, it's one that we all ought to ponder very thoughtfully. We are going to come to some sort of decision point sometime in 2006, most likely. It's a question that's closely tied to another one, namely, "What are our objectives?" That's the better question to ask.

Our basic, number-one objective was to put paid to Hussein's Baath Party regime in Iraq. That was the easy part. The hard part is figuring out how to replace it.

The way I see it, that comes down to three or four things. Two of them require our assistance. The other two require that we get out of the way.

The two things that we need to help with are:

(1) Standing up a new government, and
(2) Standing up a new army, police, and security apparatus.

The two things that we more or less need to stay out of the way for are:

(3) Re-constituting Iraqi civil society, and
(4) Re-constituting the Iraqi economy.

The next year is critical time for (1) and (2) above. The worst of the heavy lifting is done on that score, though. Now, it's all about follow-through. The good news is that the Iraqi people have taken to parliamentary politics like ducks to water. They're very enthusiastic about it, and participation has grown in each of this year's elections. The Sunnis, who were holding out only a year ago, have begun to participate in earnest. That, to me, looks as though a critical mass of that population has acquiesced to the new way of things, and does not hold out much hope for a return to their former privileged position.

The critical things to look for in the coming year have to do with how the new Parliament takes care of business. Are the Sunni parties sufficiently included that they feel like they're getting their money's worth? Do things devolve into sectarian knife-fights, or can they find at least a few areas of broad nationalist consensus? This year was all about just getting a political process started in the first place. That's been done. This next year is all about keeping the ball rolling.

Largely, our involvement in that process is done. We can tick off item (1) on our list as accomplished. It's the responsibility of the Iraqi people to manage it, now.

Now, as far as security goes ... There's still work to do. But again, the heavy lifting has been accomplished. It can still be a violent and dangerous place, but over the last year, Iraqi forces have borne more and more of the load. Increasingly, Iraqi security has an Iraqi face. Mind you, the Iraqi forces that are taking over security aren't as good as the American forces they're replacing, but they don't have to be. They only have to be better than their opponents, who have a pretty lousy sense of grand strategy and public relations. To those who question that assessment, just look at the recent record. They discover that suicide bombings aren't necessarily well-received by their own press corps. Their response? More suicide bombings. They ain't the sharpest tools in the shed, folks. They're ideologically fixated on tactics that aren't working, and most likely won't work in the future, either.

So, number (2) looks like it's going fairly well.

The third and fourth items are important, but they are things that will largely take care of themselves if the security environment is something within shouting distance of reasonable. Given good government and safety, people will sort out things like soccer leagues and business plans for themselves. We don't need to fiddle around with that, and will sow much ill-will if we try.

So: as far as we're concerned, the victory conditions are as follows. First, a stable, self-sustaining government that is accountable to its citizenry. Second, an army and police force that is capable of both defending Iraq's borders and keeping the peace within them.

Now, just to clarify for those who ride the short bus: "keep the peace" does not mean "eliminate all violence." That's an unreasonable expectation. There will always be violent criminals to deal with. But we're reaching a point where the insurgency will be just that: an assortment of violent criminals. A syndicate that must be crushed, not ennobled by false attributions of political legitimacy. But, the fact that some of them are still running about cannot be taken as a sign of failure. If they begin to gain popular support, yes, that's a major failure. But so long as the government continues to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the people, and the security forces gain strength, then all indicators are moving in the right direction. Given that, you can't lose so long as you keep your nerve.

So far, so good. We've made real progress in 2005, and have condiderable momentum going forward into 2006. So, what will victory look like?

Purple fingers. Saddam having to answer to a court of law. Free citizens voting their conscience, not their fears. People all over the Middle East looking to Iraq and asking, "Why not here?"

We're not there yet, but I can see it from here. That's more than I could say a year ago.

Never A Fair Fight

"If we go to war tomorrow, the Raptor will go with us."

-- General Ronald E. Keys, USAF

Yes, sports fans, the 27th Fighter Squadron, 1st Fighter Wing is now open for business. The F-22A Raptor has achieved Initial Operational Capability as of today, December 15, 2005. That means that the next time the USAF has to go abroad to spread joy and good cheer amongst our enemies, the Raptor rides shotgun. Anyone who tries to come up and play will pay, and pay dearly, for the privilege.

That sound you just heard was every Chinese, North Korean, Iranian and Syrian military aviator soiling their flight suits in unison.

My brother and I had an argument a long time ago, about whether it was better to have invisibility or super-speed. At the time, I thought being invisible was better.

I was wrong. The correct answer to the question, "Invisibility or super-speed?" is, of course, "Yes."

You really want both. And boy, does the Raptor deliver!

Let's start with stealth. It's not quite invisibility, but it'll do until something better comes along. The F-22A has about the same radar cross-section as a BB, maybe a bit less. It's also designed to minimize its infra-red signature. But mostly, it's built to avoid radar detection. It's also got an advanced suite of defensive electronics, but by current doctrine, the preferred method is to rely on passive detection avoidance.

This is a key advantage. You can't hit what you can't see. And if it can enter the battle area undetected, the first indication that the enemy has that all isn't as it ought to be is when things start blowing up. Then it's a bit late to start searching for the responsible party.

But that's not all. The Raptor is also very, very fast. The other key thing about its design is supercruise, which is the ability to cruise at supersonic speeds without going to afterburner. Specifically, it means cruising supersonically on military power. That's an important distinction. Military power is seventy percent of maximum, non-afterburning thrust. At military power, the Raptor is said to be able to fly at Mach 1.5. This is huge, folks. Faster entry to the battle area means being able to spring the attack before it's expected. Faster exit from the battle area means less opportunity for the defense to organize and react. Faster entry to the battle area means that, if your command and control aircraft detects a strike force forming up in enemy airspace, a group of F-22s can be inserted and disrupt the strike force before it gets underway. With speed and stealth, the Raptor has the capability to dominate the battle space.

But that's still not all. The Raptor packs a heck of a lot of computing power. All sensors are integrated, so that the pilot has an easy-to-understand, no-nonsense view of the space around him. And there's data-linking, too, so that what one Raptor pilot knows, they all know. Nobody's sneaking up on one of these.

And yes, there's more. The F-22 has thrust-vectored nozzles. They can swing in unison to boost pitch rate, or in opposite directions to boost roll rate. The Raptor's nose goes where the pilot wants it, not necessarily where Mother Nature wants it.

Not that it makes so much difference. The F-22 boasts a helmet-mounted gunsight, and its AIM-9X Sidewinders have an imaging infrared seeker that can track targets 120 degrees off-boresight. If it comes down to a dogfight, the other pilot is in one hell of a fix. It probably won't come to that, though. The Raptor will start the party beyond visual range, with a volley of AIM-120 radar-guided missiles. The Raptor's radar can track and engage several targets simultaneously. Most of the Raptor's victims will never know what happened.

And to top it off, it can carry the latest precision-guided munitions, and do so in internal bays. No external pylons to disrupt its clean lines.

It's expensive. All that capability does come at a steep price. But we get our money's worth, all right. From the Raptor's cockpit, you own the sky. Name the odds, they don't matter, you're never in a fair fight.

Come on up and play, boys. We dare you.

A Dash of Perspective

Flashback: Friday, 15 December 1990

Dawn would not come for several more hours. At least, not a natural one.

The F-15E Strike Eagle was flying low and fast, heading towards the East German border. But due to the events of the last few days, it had already crossed the FEBA five minutes ago. Their target was the 70th Guards Tank Division's headquarters, thought to be at Fulda, where they gave the 11th Armored Cav the bum's rush last night. They were in for a rude awakening this morning.

Everybody was.

They were approaching their target, fifty feet above the tree-tops, barely under the speed of sound. They carried a single B61 bomb. The plan was to pull up about two miles short into a 60 degree climb, release the bomb, and then punch up the afterburners, trying to put a hilltop between them and Ground Zero.

"Hey Mac," the pilot called, "I think we ought to modify the plan a little. We want to make sure it takes."

"What do you have in mind, Duke?"

"Just lay it down on target. Low pass, use the drag chute."

"Not much of a chance to get away."

Grim laugh. "You thought we were getting away?"

"No. Not really, no."

"OK, then."

Mac armed the bomb. Duke made some final adjustments, bringing the ship right over the Soviet armor formation. Almost involuntarily, Mac's lips peeled back in a Death's-head grin. "Just about everybody I know is already dead," he thought, "but at least I'm gonna take some of these Red bastards with..."

Light. Impossibly bright, ineffably searing, all-destroying light. Then, nothing.

Welcome to my nightmare. Well, not a current nightmare. That one's about fifteen to twenty years old. I haven't had to worry about that one, lately. I just wanted to share the moment with those of you whose memories don't stretch back that far.

We are at war, true. But our enemy does not command ten thousand atomic weapons aimed at our cities. Our enemy does not command five thousand tanks poised to roll across Europe. Our enemy commands a ratty assortment of box-cutters, homemade bombs, and suicidal idiots.

Guys, in the grand scheme of things, this is nothin'.

It's a walk in the park, by comparison with some of the wars we've seen. Why, the British lost 60,000 in the first day alone at the Somme, in WWI. Two thousand is a grim price, to be sure, but we've achieved more for that price than the Brits did in, say, 24 minutes on that first day. Two years in Iraq doesn't even amount to a pre-game show at the Somme.

Sure, we're in a war, and we're being hurt. But for the love of God, man, let's have a sense of perspective! Are we going to run from a scratch, when we've faced down so much worse without a flinch?

And what kind of threat do we face? Maybe, some kind of terror attack. In one or two places. Well, pardon me for not being impressed. The threat I grew up with, you see, was losing ALL -- count 'em, ALL -- of our major cities. And most of the minor ones, too. The city I grew up in would have went up in a patchwork of fireballs, as far as the eye could see. You'll have to excuse me for not quivering in terror at a few random kabooms here and there.

Boys and girls, we've got their number. We're winning. The great thing is not to lose our nerve. If we keep them from getting us to beat ourselves, we're golden. They're still thrashing, but that doesn't mean we don't have our hand on their throat.

Now, it's time to squeeze.

Withdraw? Sure, when we're done. But not a second before.